What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity

When I was five years old, my two sisters, my parents, and I lived in a canvas tent on the side of a mountain in Western Montana for a month and a half. During that time, and with the help of our extended family, we built most of the cabin that would become our family vacation home. One of my jobs, which I took to with great enthusiasm, was to pound every nail that held the plywood flooring to the log beams on the second story. We barely got the cabin roofed-in in time for my dad to report to his new Army post, and, as I like to say, 40 years later we're still putting the finishing touches on it.

In the course of his career, my dad was an infantry officer, a military attaché, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and an arms-reduction negotiator. At home, he was a wrench. Dude could fix anything.

Up until the time my parents were approaching retirement age, I can hardly recall a "professional" ever working on any of the houses they owned over the years. Dad built walls and sidewalks, installed woodstoves, laid tile, added electrical circuits and plumbing fixtures, fixed furnaces, and, at the cabin, ten years after it was first built, contrived an indoor plumbing system featuring an elaborate pump rig that sent the waste up the mountain to a septic tank. His only training in construction and mechanical work had been summer jobs on the railroad and growing up in a time and place where men didn't own things they couldn't fix. (My mom, a Montana farm kid, is no slouch with a hammer and saw, either.)

When I graduated high school in the suburbs of D.C. and "took a few years off" before going to college, it was easy enough for me to find work on a construction site and start swinging my hammer with the big boys on day one. I had been my dad's apprentice for years, after all. Later, when my friends came home from college over the summer and wanted me to get them jobs on the site, I was shocked to discover that some males grew up never having learned how to build and fix things. I looked on in horror as my foreman taunted my friend who seemed to be driving a nail for the first time in his life: "Aw, c'mon, sister! Why don't you just hit it with your purse?"

Since then, it's been 25 years that I've made part or all of my living as a carpenter and contractor, despite having earned a couple degrees along the way. I love the work, and, let's face it, the pay is much better than my "hobbies" (as my wife calls them) of teaching and writing.

For the past ten years, I haven't worked with a crew, but rather, have been doing smallish remodeling, repair, and improvement jobs that allow me to arrange my schedule around teaching or, more recently, taking care of my kids.

In interacting with my clients, who are, in general, not very handy around the house, I've been fascinated to observe the different strands of tension and awkwardness surrounding the process of ceding control of what was considered, not too long ago, to be the birthright and responsibility of a male homeowner.

When working with female clients, I've rarely noticed any signs of chagrin at having to pay someone to do manual labor. But the expectation that men should be able to perform the traditionally "masculine" work around the house still exists, to some extent, even if the social infrastructure doesn't; and sometimes the discomfort it causes is evident in conversations I have with men who hire me. Even if their own fathers were in the trades, my male clients, especially those who are younger than me, tend not to have worked alongside their dads, much less taken a shop class. They're more likely to have taken AP classes and played sports.

But believe it or not, I'm the last one to judge another man for not being able to hang a door or install crown molding. If he can hold down a job that allows him to pay his mortgage and hire someone to fix his house, I'm duly impressed.

Although I've worked for plenty of men who seem to be perfectly comfortable with the arrangement of using the money they earn with their own skills to pay for someone else's expertise, there are three reactions I've grown familiar with that suggest there's often anxiety about letting another guy do your "man jobs." The first is sheepishness and self-deprecation. I don't know how many times I've had men apologize to me for being inept at home improvements. I reassure them that hanging cabinets and repairing termite damage is not supposed to be encoded in their DNA. I've also been in the position of taking over a project that a man had started and then aborted once he realized he was in over his head. This can be particularly shameful and embarrassing to some guys. While I must admit that part of me sometimes wants to say, "It's okay, little buddy, Daddy's here now," all I have to do is think about the times I have called tech support, near tears, to try and fix something I botched on a computer, and my empathy is restored.

by Andy Hinds, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: ABC

Misato Katsuragi Dreams of the Second Impact, part of the Red Cross Book Eva fan zine.
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New Phone by Facebook to Showcase Its Network

[ed. Sounds more like AOL every day.]

Facebook users post more photos, write more status updates and hit the like button more often from mobile devices than they do from computers. So it was almost inevitable that Facebook would introduce a smartphone that put its social network front and center.

On Thursday, Facebook plans to unveil the first smartphone created to showcase its social network. The phone, made by HTC, uses a version of Google’s Android software, according to two people briefed on the announcement, which will be made at a news conference at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

The software is designed so that some of the core features of the phone, like the camera, will be built around Facebook’s services, according to one of the people, who is a Facebook employee. Both people briefed on Facebook’s plans spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the product before the formal announcement.

Derick Mains, a Facebook spokesman, declined to share details of the event. But he said it would be a “significant mobile-focused announcement.” The invitation sent to members of the news media says, “Come see our new home on Android.”

For Facebook and any other online business that is supported by ads, mobile is a tough puzzle to crack. It is difficult to get people to look at advertisements on smaller screens, where display space is limited, without becoming too intrusive.

Facebook’s business strategy is to persuade people to congregate around its social network as much as possible and eventually show them more ads. That is why, over the last year, Facebook has been revamping its organization to be “mobile first.” Every team at Facebook is involved somehow in its mobile products. And the company has recruited engineers who specialize in mobile phone development, including former Apple employees who worked on the development of the iPhone.

by Brian X. Chen and Nick Bilton, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Valentin Flauraud/Reuters

“Last Stand of the Kusunoki Heroes at Shijo-Nawate” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Great art can often seem quite cloistered, set apart in its cultural loftiness, the stuff of museologists and finicky, Harris-Tweeded connoisseurs. These feelings are often underpinned by the grave monumentality of so many of the wonderful buildings in which much of this art is displayed. We all know it so well, don't we? It helps us to walk tall among those who know just a little less, hem hem.

Not so this triptych of three Japanese woodblock prints from the middle of the 19th century though. What shocks us at first is its vivid feeling of nowness and contemporaneity. It feels hectic, noisy, pullulating with heady violence. Its essential visual rhythms enthral us: that back-and-forth pushing of the three warriors as they fight back against what seem to be near-impossible odds. See how the arrows of the unseen enemies teem leftward in great, swooping, clattering droves as the three pale-faced-almost-unto-death warriors – stare into the ghastly blue pallor of their mask-like faces – push rightward in an ever-more desperate effort to gain ground... Their burdens seem near impossible. The warrior in the vanguard of the three, Wada Shinbei Masatomo, is carrying a couple of decapitated heads – the one we can see so clearly is grinning even in death – swinging them out in front of him in a gesture of defiance. Their leader, Kusunoki Masatsura, the last of the three, pausing momentarily to lean against the corpse of a horse, is labouring under the weight of a dead body sprawled across his back, which may be that of his fallen younger brother. That corpse helps to shield him from the mighty, unstoppable spray of arrows. The central figure is driving forward beneath the inadequate protection of a woefully collapsing battle standard. Only the leader for the day forges ahead, eyes in a kind of trance-like engagement with those of the enemy, as he shakes those heads like a brandished fist. This vivid evocation of a medieval battle – which can be dated very precisely to the year 1348 – almost smacks you in the face. Its cluttered liveliness, its pell-mell fury, its violently raucous disorder, is exhilarating to scrutinise in all its gorgeous decorative intricacy.

Can it really be the year 1851 when this print was made? There is a shocking immediacy about it. We feel that it belongs as much to our culture as to theirs, to these times as to those. We have been plunged into a world of superheroes of the present tricked out in the gorgeous apparel of times past – the warring samurai of ancient Japan. Can that be said of any image painted in England in that year? Here is just one taster of that year. Think back to what was made by William Holman Hunt in 1851: The Light of the World, in which a maudlin Victorian Jesus knocks on the door, lantern in hand, pious gaze looking beseechingly back at us, waiting to be admitted. Hunt's painting draws us back into a world of near-ossified religiosity which seems so culturally remote from us.

Not so Kuniyoshi, for all that he lived more than half a world away. Why does this image seem so vividly alive in the present though? In part, this is not too difficult to explain. The works of the enormously popular printmaker Kuniyoshi – and they had run into thousands of images by the year of his death – fed into manga comics and much else. You could say that so much of what he made formed a part of the great legacy of what developed, closer to our times, into popular cartooning. Such images as these have dispersed – like these shooting arrows – throughout popular culture. They are in the air everywhere. They have also dispersed into such worlds as video-gaming. Even now such a battle scene as this one may be unfolding in your basement. Having said that, popular cartoonists seldom bless us with such fineness of detail. For all that, there is the same spirit of brash and colourful adventure, and the same ferociously simple message: kill or be killed.

Why was Kuniyoshi making such images at this time? This is one of many images he created of valiant battles against terrible odds, fought against human beings of other clans, giant carp or grisly spectres. Japan itself – as a country, as a nation, as a preciously bejewelled fragment of cultural identity – was under threat as never before. Its centuries of proud isolation had been breached. Enemies – from Europe and elsewhere – were circling, battering at the gates. This image, you might say, was one of many popular attempts to reassert a proud identity which was currently under threat.

by Michael Glover, The Independent |  Read more:

Last Stand of the Kusunoki Heroes at Shijo-Nawate 1851 (left to right: 38cm x 26.2 cm; 38.2cm x 25.7cm; 38 cm x 25.8 cm) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. British Museum, London

h/t YMFY

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws

In July 15th, 1995, in the quiet Southern California city of Whittier, a 33-year-old black man named Curtis Wilkerson got up from a booth at McDonald's, walked into a nearby mall and, within the space of two hours, turned himself into the unluckiest man on Earth. "I was supposed to be waiting there while my girlfriend was at the beauty salon," he says.

So he waited. And waited. After a while, he paged her. "She was like, 'I need another hour,'" he says. "So I was like, 'Baby, I'm going to the mall.'"

Having grown up with no father and a mother hooked on barbiturates, Wilkerson, who says he still boasts a Reggie Miller jumper, began to spend more time on the streets. After his mother died when he was 16, he fell in with a bad crowd, and in 1981 he served as a lookout in a series of robberies. He was quickly caught and sentenced to six years in prison. After he got out, he found work as a forklift operator, and distanced himself from his old life.

But that day in the mall, something came over him. He wandered from store to store, bought a few things, still shaking his head about his girlfriend's hair appointment. After a while, he drifted into a department store called Mervyn's. Your typical chain store, full of mannequins and dress racks; they're out of business today. Suddenly, a pair of socks caught his eye. He grabbed them and slipped them into a shopping bag.

What kind of socks were they, that they were worth taking the risk?

"They were million-dollar socks with gold on 'em," he says now, laughing almost uncontrollably, as he tells the story 18 years later, from a telephone in a correctional facility in Soledad, California.

Really, they were that special?

"No, they were ordinary white socks," he says, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. "Didn't even have any stripes."

Wilkerson never made it out of the store. At the exit, he was, shall we say, over­enthusiastically apprehended by two security officers. They took him to the store security office, where the guards started to argue with each other over whether or not to call the police. One guard wanted to let him pay for the socks and go, but the other guard was more of a hardass and called the cops, having no idea he was about to write himself a part in one of the most absurd scripts to ever hit Southern California.

Thanks to a brand-new, get-tough-on-crime state law, Wilkerson would soon be sentenced to life in prison for stealing a pair of plain white tube socks worth $2.50.

"No, sir, I was not expecting that one," he says now, laughing darkly. Because Wilkerson had two prior convictions, both dating back to 1981, the shoplifting charge counted as a third strike against him. He was sentenced to 25 years to life, meaning that his first chance for a parole hearing would be in 25 years.

And given that around 80 percent of parole applications are rejected by parole boards, and governors override parole boards in about 50 percent of the instances where parole is granted, it was a near certainty that Wilkerson would never see the outside of a prison again.

The state also fined him $2,500 – restitution for the stolen socks. He works that off by putting in four to five hours a day in the prison cafeteria, for which he gets paid $20 a month, of which the state takes $11. At this rate, he will be in his nineties before he's paid the state off for that one pair of socks.

As for the big question – does he ever wish he could go back in time and wait it out in that McDonald's for another hour, instead of 18 years in the California prison system? – Wilkerson, who has learned to laugh, laughs again.

"Man," he says, "I think about that every single day."

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Joan Miro - The Singer
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Searching for 'Super Bliss' With Bob Thurman

[ed. Thanks, Deb.]

Scott Bergey, # 2166 “Everybody Who’s Anybody” on Flickr
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Can You Have Too Much Solar Energy?

It’s been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn’t been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. Easter is around the corner, and the streets of Berlin are still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when the snow finally melts, it will reveal the glossy black sheen of photovoltaic solar panels glinting from the North Sea to the Bavarian Alps.

Solar panels line Germany’s residential rooftops and top its low-slung barns. They sprout in orderly rows along train tracks and cover hills of coal mine tailings in what used to be East Germany. Old Soviet military bases, too polluted to use for anything else, have been turned into solar installations.

Twenty-two percent of Germany’s power is generated with renewables. Solar provides close to a quarter of that. The southern German state of Bavaria, population 12.5 million, has three photovoltaic panels per resident, which adds up to more installed solar capacity than in the entire United States.

With a long history of coal mining and heavy industry and the aforementioned winter gloom, Germany is not the country you’d naturally think of as a solar power. And yet a combination of canny regulation and widespread public support for renewables have made Germany an unlikely leader in the global green-power movement—and created a groundswell of small-scale power generation that could upend the dominance of traditional power companies. (...)

You might think Germany would be smug about all its solar success. But, as usual, folks here are full of doubts. Part of the reason solar panels are getting cheaper is competition from China, which is threatening to push more expensive German producers out of business. Last year, German conservatives tried to end solar subsidies entirely, arguing that plummeting prices were encouraging too many people to install solar panels. They said that the subsidies come at the expense of city dwellers without solar-ready roofs, low-income electricity consumers, and investments in other forms of renewable energy. Even environmentalists have begun to grumble about the solar boom, which sucks up half of Germany’s funding for renewables but provides just 20 percent of green power.

The proliferation of privately owned solar has large power companies in Germany worried. For two decades, they’ve been forced to facilitate and finance their competition, helping turn customers into producers. Soon, rooftop solar and other small-scale, locally owned renewables could upset the market for coal and nuclear power.

Here’s why that’s a problem: Renewable energy sources like wind and solar generate power intermittently, dependent on the sun or fickle breezes. Until researchers can find a way to store energy at a large scale, coal and nuclear plants—which can’t simply be switched on and off at will—must be kept running to guarantee a steady stream of electricity when the sun isn’t shining.

by Andrew Curry, Slate |  Read more:

Photo by Michaela Rehle/Reuters

AngryWhistler
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State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

This dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

by David Stockman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Pernice

How the Process Works - An Outsider's Guide to Cherry Point

[ed. I'm back. To celebrate, I'm posting an opinion piece I wrote before I left about a proposed coal export facility planned here in the Pacific Northwest. The project is officially called the Gateway Pacific Terminal, but everyone just refers to it as Cherry Point (the site where the terminal will be built). You can read more about it here. It seems to be a pretty big deal, with exports projected to reach 50 million tons a year, supported by 18 trains a day, each 1.5 miles long, snaking through the cities and countrysides of Washington state. I'm not sure how many readers are interested in the technical details of how the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) works, but these general guidelines could probably be applied to just about any kind of large project, anywhere.]

How The Process Works – An Outsider's Guide to Cherry Pt.

As a recent resident of this beautiful state it didn't take long to notice a significant controversy brewing over development of a proposed coal export facility at Cherry Point. Those 'No Coal' yard signs sprouting everywhere - seemingly competing for the title of state flower - were my first indication that something might be up. Then, last fall, project scoping hearings provided more detail about the project's design giving the public its first opportunity to comment, generating an impressive statewide turnout and much impassioned testimony. Since then, I've spent some time learning what I can but so far haven't formed an opinion one way or another. However, I have noticed that most of the attention to date has focused on the project's potential threats and benefits. I'd like to add another voice to the discussion by offering a perspective on how the process itself might unfold leading up to a final decision.

First, some background. I'm a retired habitat biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. I spent nearly 30 years of my career involved in environmental policy, planning, permitting and coordination on hundreds of large and small-scale development projects throughout Alaska, many of which required National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) determinations and other regulatory reviews. The advice that follows is directed at opponents of the project - not because I identify with their cause, but because I believe a level playing field generally produces the best public policy results. Project advocates are undoubtedly well organized and moving forward with their objectives which should include securing all necessary permits with a minimum of financial commitments, and avoiding legal threats that could result in costly and prolonged litigation. They have the money, the connections, and the motivation. They don't need advice. But if opponents are to be successful in neutralizing some of those advantages they could benefit from having a better understanding of how the process typically works.

So, here are some guidelines:

1. Opponents will always be playing defense. Get used to it. Think of it like a football game. Project advocates are executing a game plan they think will take them to the end zone. It should be assumed they've considered every detail leading up to that result and are working behind the scenes to strengthen their position, with contingency plans in place for known vulnerabilities. It shouldn't be surprising, given the scope of the project, that there are probably well worn paths throughout the hallways of Olympia, and (since China is involved) maybe even the State and Commerce Departments. Along the way they'll probably introduce new plays (project redesigns, mitigation, legislation) that will position themselves to win. The defense can nullify or parry those plays, but in the end success is usually defined as a tied game, 0 - 0. Status quo. Opponents will never win on the strength of a single spectacular play (e.g., some killer issue) but they can anticipate the opposing team's strategy and act accordingly. Which brings us to the next point.

2. No issue is of overriding significance. Every issue has a constituency and there will always be someone or some group that will expect their concerns to be given top priority in the decision-making process. That's not going to happen. There is no moral imperative box that can be checked in a systematic and objective analysis, no a priori standing given to any specific issue. Everything is negotiable or can be mitigated, unless there are conflicts with existing law in which case exceptions may be granted or design modifications required. Everything is on the table until all the final hands are played. The corollary to this is that not all issues are equal. Some are big, some are small; some have direct effects, some indirect; some are easily resolved, some are pernicious; some are simply expressions of individual and community values. It's the NEPA document's responsibility to sort all this out and describe why some issues are more relevant than others, and what can be done about them. There is no issue that takes precedence over all others, except perhaps the financial solvency or commitment of the project's applicant.

3. Bureaucrats are your friends (and your enemies). We could review the standard NEPA process and describe how decisions are supposed to be made - for example, by citing Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) guidelines, relevant case law, etc., but that wouldn't matter much in this discussion. A bullet-proof process is a basic expectation grounded in law. So, if you don't want to be sued or have your project consigned to some interminable administrative purgatory, the smartest thing to do if you're a project proponent or agency tasked with preparing the NEPA document is to get the facts right and let the chips fall where they may. This includes doing all the necessary science, economic analyses, social surveys, and other technical reviews that provide the best information possible so that the process itself is unassailable. If it isn't, the lawyers will let you know.

Nevertheless, behind this 'process' there are other ways in which the outcome of the final decision can be decided, not necessarily related to the information at hand. Bureaucrats aren't robots. Like everyone else they have personal opinions and professional motivations that can influence the way data are weighted and presented and how mitigation measures are developed (the NEPA analyses have been sub-contracted out to consultants, CH2M Hill, which adds another layer of opacity to the process, while the State has it's own State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) review, which can sometimes result in tension between state and federal interests). As a practical matter, an effective strategy would include finding out who's doing what, who their supervisors are, and try to develop working relationships with as many people as possible so that, at a minimum, information sharing can occur as the process unfolds (caveat: the breadth and quality of that information can vary widely depending upon the personnel involved and the relationships one develops). Sometimes it's the only way to get a sense of what's going on behind the scenes if you want to affect a beneficial outcome. It also helps if you can provide something in return, like critical information that analysts may not have at their disposal (something lobbyists do to great effect).

4. Mitigation. Mitigation measures lurk at the heart of every NEPA analyisis. From an agency standpoint, they are the most important factor affecting a project's viability (political considerations aside). It's the tool regulators use to respond to various issues after all analyses have been digested, and the mechanism by which legal requirements are enforced (since mitigation measures ultimately end up as stipulations in project permits). If there are any differences between state and federal perspectives, this is where they'll likely be worked out. The process of developing mitigation measures also represents a time when interactions between agencies and the applicant are usually the most contentious, every mitigation measure representing an additional cost to the project's bottom line (along with potential legal exposure should later actions be found not to be in compliance)

Now, think a moment about who will be attending those mitigation meetings when these requirements are being hashed out (meetings which are usually iterative, distributed, and rarely, if ever, open to the public): you'll have the agencies, the applicant, occasionally consultants (from either side), and perhaps a lawyer or two. That's it. That's why it's so important to find out what's going on with the Draft EIS as it is being developed, and why opponents will always be playing defense.

5. Expect political meddling. What can you say about politicians (in polite company, anyway). They're motivated by mysterious forces: constituent issues, donor dollars, astroturfing campaigns, media controversies, petitions, public perceptions, and any number of other things. All I know is, based on my experience, one should always expect political meddling. The bigger the project, the more the meddling; although it usually never takes the form of a direct attack since that would be too alienating to opposing supporters and potential donors (and political collegues, if they are forced to choose sides). Instead what you're more likely to see are bills that nibble around the edges, limiting or expanding options that directly or indirectly affect a project's feasibility: transportation corridor improvements, modified zoning or land use designations, limited or expanded municipal and state authorities, that kind of thing. Also, expect behind the scenes manuervering to include old fashioned horse trading on pet issues, and budgetary threats to agencies that are perceived not to be on board with the game plan (see item #3). An effective strategy is to develop relationships with key politcal staff that are inclined toward your positions and use them to keep abreast of what's going on, in the process building trust and potentially influencing support. Again, it always helps to provide something in return – campaign assistance, community council coordination, help with voter initiatives, grassroots organizing, etc.

6. A final decision will be based on public policy. What is public policy? Basically, it's the sum total of all issues, expectations, influences, and politics that are brought to bear over the course of the analysis. It's also a reflection of the character of a state – it's history, it's economy, it's leadership, and it's vision. In other words, it's a balancing act. It's the biggest and most subjective element in the entire review process. The Administrator of the lead federal agency assigned to the task of developing the NEPA documents will eventually render a Final Record of Decision (ROD) based upon all relevant information, including a review of mitigation measures to avoid, ameliorate, rehabilitate, restore or replace values that are likely to be impacted, but the true fate of the project will have been decided long before in numerous regulatory skirmishes and behind the scenes manuevering. Despite the fact that the ROD is a federal document, the State of Washington will decide whether the project gets a green light or not because it has permits of its own to issue, and is conducting a concurrent SEPA review. That's both good and bad. Good in the sense that the people most affected by any decision will ultimately decide it's fate, bad because state politicians are notoriously short sighted and overly beholden to parochial and/or corrosive influences that have nothing to do with good public policy (I'm using my experience in Alaska here; who knows, maybe Washington's politicians posses the wisdom of the original founding fathers). And remember, state employees preparing the SEPA documents are accountable to those politicians. I can say from experience that I've never seen a large project die as a result of technical issues. It always comes down to economics or politics, usually both.

The fact that the proposed Cherry Point facility is an important component of a larger network of connected interests that begin with large mining operations in Wyoming and Montana, which then feed into large transportation and shipping conglomerates, which then impact a number of northwestern state communities and local economies, and ultimately contribute to China's national energy and security objectives, means that political pressures are likely to be high. Because of this, project opponents might consider doing everything they can to coordinate with national environmental groups, lobby Congress and their legislators, develop grassroots and media campaigns, and encourage a national dialog similar to what we see with issues like the Keystone XL pipeline and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which, as an aside, are both proxies for larger issues: global climate change, and the legitimacy of Wilderness designations, respectively). I know I didn't hear about Cherry Point until I got here, which tells you either how clueless I am or how low it currently flies under the national radar.

Finally, I'd only add one other thing and that is: success doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. Sometimes the best public policy ends not in a tie, but with each side extracting enough concessions so that what's left is something beneficial to both the economy and the larger environment. It is possible. Just remember the old saying: it's not a problem, it's an opportunity.

by markk

Photo: Dept. of Ecology, State of Washington

A Note to Readers

I'll be traveling for about a week so check out the archives.

Ana Zanic, Blue Sun
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I Grew Up in the Future

When I went home for the 2007 holidays, in my last year of college, my mom’s new favorite phrase was ‘mobile social networking’. It was a big thing in Asia and Africa, she told me, in the throes of writing a several-hundred-page market report.

What is it supposed to be? I asked, getting the milk out of the fridge and making myself some muesli.

Well, she said, you joined a social network on your phone, and then you could express opinions about things. You could send something to your friends, and they would say if they liked it or they didn’t like it — on their phones.

That sounds really stupid, I said.

But, as I don’t think I need to stress, the idea turned out to have legs. In my defence, the first iPhone was still six months away. And though I was one of the first few million users of Facebook, the ‘Like’ button wouldn’t come along for years.

The future arrived much earlier in our house than anywhere else because my mother is an emerging technologies consultant. Her career has included stints as a circus horse groom, a tropical agronomist in Mauritania, and a desktop publisher. But for most of my life she has lived by her unusual ability to see beyond the glitchy demos of new tech to the faint outlines of another reality, just over the horizon. She takes these trembling hatchlings of ideas by the elbow, murmurs reassurances, and runs as fast as she can into the unknown.

When the web and I were both young, in the mid-1990s (with 10,000 pages and a third-grade education to our respective names), video conferencing was my mom’s thing. We had our county’s first T1 fibre-optic line thanks to her, and I grew up in a house full of webcams, shuddering and starting with pictures of strangers in Hong Kong, New York and the Netherlands, to whom I’d have to wave when I got home from school. Later on, when I bought a webcam for the first time, I could not believe you had to pay for them — I thought of them as a readily available natural resource, spilling out from cardboard boxes under beds.

My mother worked with companies who wanted to develop software and hardware for video conferencing, and she wrote reports about the state of the market, which, at that point, was a slender stream of early adopters. Internet connections were so slight, and the hardware so bulky and expensive, that it was slow going — tech start-ups launched with fanfare and sank within months, unable to stay afloat on the ethereal promise of everyone, everywhere, seeing each other talk. The promise, too, of never having to travel for business was not as appealing as the start-ups thought it would be.

But my mom is a futurist, that peculiar subclass of optimists who believe they can see the day after tomorrow coming. In the 1990s, she ordered pens customised with her consultancy name and the slogan: ‘Remember when we could only hear each other?’ Years later, when an unopened box of them surfaced in her office, she laughed and laughed. It would be another several years before Skype with video brought the rest of the world up to speed with her pens.

And by that point, she’d moved on.

by Veronique Greenwood, Aeon | Read more:
Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features

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Under The Ice, Scalamandré.
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Unfit for Work

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

For the past six months, I've been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I've been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it. Here's what I found.

In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.

Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.

"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench.
"I have high blood pressure," the man said.
"So do I," the judge said. "What else?"
"I have diabetes."
"So do I."

There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not. (...)

People don't seem to be faking this pain, but it gets confusing. I have back pain. My editor has a herniated disc, and he works harder than anyone I know. There must be millions of people with asthma and diabetes who go to work every day. Who gets to decide whether, say, back pain makes someone disabled?

As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment -- back pain, mental illness -- are among the fastest growing causes of disability.

by Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR | Read more:

Image: Brinson Banks for NPR

What Coke Contains

The Vons grocery store two miles from my home in Los Angeles, California sells 12 cans of Coca-Cola for $6.59 — 54 cents each. The tool chain that created this simple product is incomprehensibly complex.

Each can originated in a small town of 4,000 people on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra. Pinjarra is the site of the world’s largest bauxite mine. Bauxite is surface mined — basically scraped and dug from the top of the ground. The bauxite is crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxide, which separates it into aluminum hydroxide and waste material called red mud. The aluminum hydroxide is cooled, then heated to over a thousand degrees celsius in a kiln, where it becomes aluminum oxide, or alumina. The alumina is dissolved in a molten substance called cryolite, a rare mineral first discovered in Greenland, and turned into pure aluminum using electricity in a process called electrolysis. The pure aluminum sinks to the bottom of the molten cryolite, is drained off and placed in a mold. It cools into the shape of a long cylindrical bar. The bar is transported west again, to the Port of Bunbury, and loaded onto a container ship bound for — in the case of Coke for sale in Los Angeles — Long Beach.

The bar is transported to Downey, California, where it is rolled flat in a rolling mill, and turned into aluminum sheets. The sheets are punched into circles and shaped into a cup by a mechanical process called drawing and ironing — this not only makes the can but also thins the aluminum. The transition from flat circle to something that resembles a can takes about a fifth of a second. The outside of the can is decorated using a base layer of urethane acrylate, then up to seven layers of colored acrylic paint and varnish that is cured using ultra violet light, and the inside of the can is painted too — with a complex chemical called a comestible polymeric coating that prevents any of the aluminum getting into the soda. So far, this vast tool chain has only produced an empty, open can with no lid. The next step is to fill it.

Coca-Cola is made from a syrup produced by the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta. The main ingredient in the formula used in the United States is a sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup 55, so named because it is 55 per cent fructose or “fruit sugar” and 42 per cent glucose or “simple sugar” — the same ratio of fructose to glucose as natural honey. HFCS is made by grinding wet corn until it becomes cornstarch. The cornstarch is mixed with an enzyme secreted by a rod-shaped bacterium called Bacillus and an enzyme secreted by a mold called Aspergillus. This process creates the glucose. A third enzyme, also derived from bacteria, is then used to turn some of the glucose into fructose.

The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (created by heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace) and processing it to remove arsenic.

by Kevin Ashton, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited, h/t YMFY

Xenz. Spatuletail 2
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