Caseyland

Tape Measure Tricks (via clusterflock)

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:03:45 -0500

Tape Measure Tricks (via clusterflock)

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:05:18 -0500

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine:

Come on, do it — it’s a new year!

Photo

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:02:00 -0500

1980’s-era Morrissey bobblehead.

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:59:48 -0500

1980’s-era Morrissey bobblehead.

Black Gold : clusterflock

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:18:57 -0500

Black Gold : clusterflock

Sand dunes from space. Via Wired

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:51:00 -0500

Sand dunes from space. Via Wired

Audio

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:00:00 -0500

Audio

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:00:00 -0500

"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international..."

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:59:16 -0500

“The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.”

- Ben Stewart, Greenpeace. via Thom Yorke on Dead Air Space.

More on climate change from www.informationisbeautiful.net

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:32:00 -0500

More on climate change from www.informationisbeautiful.net

Alma

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:54:39 -0500

Alma

Chromolithe lighting

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:19:39 -0500

Chromolithe lighting

Photo

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:45:06 -0500

Audio

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:42:00 -0500

Octopi using coconut shells as tools. Of course, we know they...

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:25:08 -0500

Octopi using coconut shells as tools. Of course, we know they also make use of clotheslines.

Thanks to Clodia for finding this! [download mp3] [download...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:16:00 -0500

Thanks to Clodia for finding this! [download mp3] [download flac]

From her 2009 KCRW performance. [Download] And if anyone has her...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:26:04 -0500

From her 2009 KCRW performance. [Download]

And if anyone has her performance on KCRW in support of Fur & Gold, please let me know!

Portishead - Chase the Tear (for Amnesty International)

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:05:51 -0500

Portishead - Chase the Tear (for Amnesty International)

jonnygarner: pbarry: Is Owning a Dog Worse than Owning an...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:31:00 -0500

jonnygarner:

pbarry:

Is Owning a Dog Worse than Owning an SUV?

This is awesome (thanks for sharing pbarry). Not sure I am swayed tho, I do way more than 10,000km a year in my Honda.

Wow, who would have thought…

"And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous..."

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:24:31 -0500

“

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

”

- Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize remarks — NYT via Clusterflock