Crisisville: Recent Episodes
Mitch Stripling
Just about everything related to the coming fire/ice/terrorist/natural apocalypse, including how we might stop it (depending on just how far up our own asses our heads are at the time).
This is a ten minute presentation for a fellowship that I'm applying for. It describes a membership-based social support and discount program to help middle income households achieve reasonable carbon loss based on a personal version of Socolow’s Wedge concept. Let me know what you think!
What should the next podcast be about, oh loyal listeners? I've been thinking about * Apocalypse by Pandemic * Apocalypse by Fire * Apocalypse by Multi-Tasking Vote for one of those or suggest your own in the comments...
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.... We visit the four zones of the frozen ninth level of hell (plus South Park and Dennis Quaid) as we look at how climate change could make things colder, not warmer. Plus stories from a fight on a glacier in Kashmir, and the end of the world a la Kurt Vonnegut. Let's rock the apocalypse, baby! .... With Mitch Stripling.
In the Gulf of Mexico, there are 7,500 square miles where nothing lives. Amberjack and other fish lay dead on the sea floor, their bodies feeding sulfur-oxidizing bacteria that turn the sand black for miles. The water is hypoxic, which means there's not enough dissolved oxygen in it to support marine life. Even beyond that problem, there's a metaphor here, I think. Communities live on a kind of oxygen, which is the social relationships of the people within them. The commitment of those people grows the spirit of the community, makes it more cohesive. This cohesion won't just disappear; it's what put the community together in the first place.
Fragility. That's what the news says. Blizzards made it impossible to deliver coal on China's fragile rail network, so power is out in frozen China. A boat anchor sliced a fragile undersea information pipeline, and the internet drops out in the Middle East. These systems are just like glass or origami, you know? Breathe on them and they just wilt.
Fragility, though, implies that we can bulk it up. That these systems can be strengthened to withstand impacts. Or, to put it another way, that we can make this stuff not be news anymore.
I have two daughters, and when I signed the daddy contract in blood six years ago, it was understood that puberty was a teenage phenomenon. It would along at 13 with fits of giggling, a solid dedication to making my life miserable and an incurable fixation with wild horses. Also, breasts.
But, check that, I've got two years and counting. See, eight years old used to be the medical definition for abnormally early puberty. But now, it's the new normal. Based on several studies, scientists are recommending that the age of abnormal puberty be dropped to 7 for Caucasians, 6 for African-Americans. Eight is the new normal.
Man, I love destroying websites. This thing is my favorite new toy. There's something really satisfying about watching a blimp fly through Ted Kenndey's nose. Or sending meteors into Neil Cavuto, over and over gain.
And it doesn't mean anything right? Because it's just a freakin' website. It's not even graffitti unless I youtubed the destruction.
And, so, I think the iPhone the sign of the apocalypse. The issue is multi-tasking and focus. Focus is a meta-power. It helps to align and lift up other powers, like reason and problem-solving and other powers I would remember if I weren't also texting right now.
So, in honor of last week's New York Times declaration that the number of human cases of Avian Flu (that crazy "global threat") is down, here is the Crisisville list of things that kill more people than H5N1. BTW, bird...
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/07/water_problems/ The most compelling policy point for me is how clear it makes the Great Lakes Region's stance: No water pipeline for Atlanta. Maybe everybody down here really will move back to Detroit when we get thirsty enough. (Folks from...
Here is an 18-minute presentation I put together for the Florida Department of Health on the intersection of smart growth transportation policy and health issues in disaster evacuation. It features some footage from just after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, as well as a discussion of the evacuations in Katrina and Rita (including some audio commentary from Mayor Ray Nagin).
The first podcast! Can increasing pressure on water cause the decline and fall of civilization? Mitch breaks down the history and consequences of water wars through stories and sarcasm over the past few thousand years. Three ghosts visit, a la a dehydrated Dickens.
I thought since one of the signs of the apocalypse had occurred -- cf. Revelations c.23 v. 5 - Yea, verily, at the end of times Mitch Stripling will like a Matchbox Twenty song -- I'd honor it with a regular feature of Crisisville, me breaking down some bit of cultural ephemera about the end of the world.
Matchbox Twenty - “How Far We've Come” Sometimes, there's a lot to learn from the way an artist deals with the end of the world. Here, not so much. But it's hard to argue with those drums! I think a big reason why this is such a good tune is that M20's self-hating drummer finally gave it up and switched to rhythm guitar, which let them get a really who's not afraid to pound those skins like they were a cheap, do-it-yourself sex doll.
But what does it have to tell us about the apocalypse? Read on, MacDuff.
One tenet of ecological sustainability (riding the Holling/Gunderson wave) is that we need those damn forest fires. The promote innovation in the system. Without them, the whole eco-system would harden up and eventually collapse entirely. There's an analague there; I...
There are so many Smokey Bear-pandering treatises on the horrors of forest fire. 20,000 bunnies fried; 100,000 acres burned; 4 McMansions brought down by embers. I'm tired of it; I want to look at it from the point of view...
So, in traditional insurgency theory, scholars from O'Neill to Stephen Metz to Ian Beckett have cited two features that distinguish successful insurgencies. First, they have external support from outside nations or groups (like a diaspora). Second, they have a secure base outside their battlespace (like across the border of a neighboring country).
The question is, can global insurgents do away with physical bases through the use of information infrastructure? Can they also do away with external support? Yes and yes.
What do the roadside bombs have in common with cheese in Fedou? Other than semantic associations with a certain nation state? Well, John Robb and the Global Guerrillas set of memes (systems disruption, systempunkt, etc.) have begun a systematic look...
It could just be me, but it seems like one of the key constitutional questions of our time is how to circumscribe military action against non-state actors. That is, how far can the President dive into warfare before before being...
So everybody's talking about making new urban land use policies that use Smart Growth to build community resilience. I don't think you can put new wine into old suburban policy, though, and so it becomes key to describe a new...
By comparing the analogous frameworks of current liberal and postmodern urban policy, I try and sketch out a productive fragmentation that can be used to make coherent urban policies. Yep, the policy may look different--and it will certainly write across multiple sectors (nonprofit, social) in ways that current policy would never dream.
But it is policy, you can benchmark it, and that's what maters to me.
So, do Muslims knock on doors like Jehovah's Witnesses? The answer I've got is No. This is the earliest paper I'm posting, and I can tell it's immature. But it's a useful model for the current situation and I post...
Theory alert on this one. It's a meditation on the Nietzschean concept of drama, and it wrestles with the Apollonian/Dionysian impulses. Break it down like this: How will the world end? In an orgy of violence, or from becoming so...
SciFi (not the channel) keeps trying to teach us how to die; we keep trying to live. But there are real lessons here. How do the stories say that we will create our replacements? What will the consequences be? And, most importantly, will the coming robot apocalypse go over-budget?
Los Angeles in the 1990s, just south of Rodney King and north of O.J., was a town desperately in need of a prophet. South Central was under the thumb of an actual, honest-to-god oppressive regime writ teeny--in the form of the police. You know, the ones that needed a good f*ckin'.
There's a branch of theology called Liberation Theology that deals with practical ways to try and overcome oppressive regimes like that. It had been used in South America, some in Africa, and LA was eerily similar to those situations. All it needed was a liberator.
And the thing is, it almost seemed like Cube was volunteering for the job. Almost. But he never quite made it. And the story of how he never made it, and why it mattered, is the one this paper tells.
So, a directed network is a network in which the connections aren't symmetrical. You click from one page to another and there's not immediately a route back. Like that.
In terms of social phenomena, I think it indicates that you can make relationship connections that it's hard to move back from.
Pair that with this idea: Most people are analysing these networks as if the nodes were actually people. But I think each node is actually the sum of the connections pouring into it. Yes, a person with a given set of qualities occupies it.
But remove that person and those connections are going to start looking for another node to latch onto. In a sense, then, people can move to occupy different nodes in a given relationship systems.
In a terrorist network, for instance, you might start off sympathizing, then supporting, then go operations. At each choide, you occupy nodes deeper and deeper into the network. After each choice, it's damn hard to get back where you were before.
We're human; we break things. Sometimes cheap blue glasses. Sometimes whole human beings, or clusters of them, and the sins pass down through generations. And then those generations are charged with the weighty task of making their own damn hope....
Have you heard the one about how warfare creates executive aggrandizement outside the Consitution? It's a old saw; James Madison told it. Here's my take. I wish we were in a war. Yeah, war leaders consolidate power, but classical warfare...
Faulkner said that the young writers of his time only had one question, "When will I be blown up?" At moments of crisis, I fear that something similar happens. We lock up the present into a kind of tunnelvision and...
In all the coverage on climate change, one thing that's getting buried is the idea of precipitation changes. Center latitudes (where much argiculture is) are getting 20% dryer, while Northern Lats are getting wetter. This is dustbowl-level data and, consdering...
So, Indonesia is claiming intellectual property ownership of their H5N1 strain, because of a vaccine development deal they've got going with Baxter. They say they didn't give permission for the Australian Government to use their strain, and it shouldn't have...
Link: RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service. Russia's Emergency Ministry will fly a portable laboratory to the Omsk region in southern Siberia today to analyse oily yellow and orange snow which has covered an area which is home to...
China, 1916. He Long, frustrated by heavy taxation on salt carriers, breaks into the Salt Tax Bureau. He burns the records inside, then distributes the property among the most needy in the province. Sure, he killed a couple of people...
We're at this point in history where two trends are converging. First, there's the ability of ever smaller groups of people to wield ever greater havoc. Second, there are the human-influenced changes in the natural world which are beginning to...
I knew this kid who was allergic to wasps. And one time, we were in a coffeeshop and we saw a wasp on the window--a big red one. I thought he would, like, run or something, but he stared into...
From the File of Hideous Understatement comes this VOA headline: Red Cross Concerned About Civilians in Lebanon It may just be that Pierre Kraehenbueh (the Head of Ops for the ICRC) looks like he's chatting up hookers in Instanbul. Pierre:...
With all the wildness these days, odd that this story would make me write again. From The Telegraph: Oxana is a feral child, one of only about 100 known in the world. The story goes that, when she was three,...
So, no surprise really that Amnesty “singled out the United States for particular criticism over the detention of suspected terrorists at a military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba”. I'm not even going to address whether Guantanamo is ethical, involves torture,...
It's no surprise that hospitals across the developed world are losing beds. Here's an article (from the BBC) that spins it as a good thing. The glorious teaser: People are getting better care despite NHS bed numbers falling by a...
My favorite part of CNN's piece on the implosion of the Nuke tower in Oregon? The spent radioactive fuel rods, which sit above ground, must be moved to a federal repository that hasn't been developed yet. All those fuel rods,...
So, um, not everything sucked in Katrina, right? Well, according to the Senate (when they proposed the FEMA-nator), two groups did well: the Coast Guard and private businesses. Great! Rock on, let's copy those guys. What'd they do, again? The...
Aren't they fricking cute? My cousin has a gator-chicken farm. He raises the chickens, and when they die off before he can sell them, he throws them into a round concrete pit full of hordes of cutie-pie carnivores. When the...
Still, New Orleanians learned a valuable lesson from Katrina: Trust no one and nothing. They're not counting on the levees to hold or the government to rescue them this time. from Time So last year was the year of the...
Laurie Anderson is a seminal latter 20th C. performance artist in that cold, Germanic vibe that startles you just enough to stop you from throttling her from pretension. Kind of Madonna meets Brecht in a dark alley with synthesizers. She...
Mark Kimmett, plans chief for the military, made this statement today. “To defeat this enemy it is far more than simply the military,” said General Kimmett. “It will take a network -- interagency network, international network -- that brings together...
This chick's days are numbered. Beware! Across the globe marches the disease you get from French water! Seriously, what's up with this trend? Last week, a trainer of mine kept saying “Evian flu, Evian flu.” And tonight Lou Dobbs did...
Because he's a drummer. Get it? Upon further reflection, this is a) insenstive b) not so funny and c) probably libelous to the beloved old time folk group Anthrax. But alas, blogs only move forward. Anyway, Vado Diomande, the drum...
I look to Malcolm Gladwell for advice in all things. Except hair care. And the central tenet of his The Tipping Point is that almost inconsequential things can create huge outcomes. This is a key idea that hasn't been fully...
Our Avian Flu tracker pinged both India and France over the past two weeks. In the past few days, the commercial poultry industry in both countries is nearly collapsing as other countries ban their birds. Demand has dropped from 30-50%...
The NYT harkens back to the 9/11 Commission's Report Card as the commission members say this battle over the Dubai ports is just so much smoke up our asses. Well, Tom Kean actually said: “We’re not really debating whether the...