The Breaking Time

Bracing for the Storm

"Don't worry, we're all battened down here."

That's my grandmother, assuring me that she and my grandfather are prepared for Hurricane Irene. They're survivors, and weathered worse than this, and with far less warning.

Up the coast, New York is preparing frantically, in part because it's extremely unusual for a hurricane to head straight for it, the way Irene has. But North Carolina is first in its path and in the farm country where I grew up, bracing for storms is old habit.

I grew up accordingly: the northeastern corner of the state sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean like a nose ready for a punch. Hurricanes rolling across the long, flat horizon were a matter of when, not if.

Personally, my family never got the worst of it: our homes stayed intact and we never suffered any injuries, but they made an impression. On the cusp of 17, I waded through flood waters for hours to reach a friend's house. Years earlier, we huddled in the living room while trees fell and the metal roof of a neighboring farm shed flapped like paper.

When hurricanes approached, darting over the weather maps like angry specters, regular life ground to a halt and everyone fell back into old rituals: the thousand steps honed over generations to save lives and calm nerves. We had no monopoly on this: compare how West Coast denizens react to earthquakes. It's human nature.

In less terrifying form, storms were even entertainment. My parents would patiently explain the science behind lightning — both as edification and warning — while we watched distant bolts from our porch, thankful for the temporary gusts of cool air. My sister and I played in fallen trees.

I'm not there now, and on an odd level, it creates a sense of visceral discomfort, because a lot of people I still love are, in South Mills, Elizabeth City, Currituck and Norfolk. Before everything else, I hope they weather this safe and sound. I hope the same thing for everyone in the storm's path.

Storms are also a reminder: for all we plot and plan, there are things beyond our practical control capable of great devastation. Chaotic eras like ours are even more rife with them. From time to time, it's good to take a cue from facing natural disaster.

Keep perspective. Prepare. Stay calm. If hit, get back up. Even storms end.

Poems for Friday: A History Without Suffering

Rainy Streets of London on a Quiet Night, by Eric Magnuson

After blasting Frank Zappa's Trouble Every Day this morning, I settled down and decided that this piece by E.A. Markham was better suited to the times at hand.

In this poem there is no suffering.

It spans hundreds of years and records

no deaths, connecting when it can,

those moments where people are healthy

 

and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter,

maybe a Volume, shorn of violence

consists of an adult reading aimlessly.

This line is the length of a full life

 

smuggled in while no one was plotting

against a neighbour, except in jest.

Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She

is in a drought-fisted field

 

 with a hoe. This is her twelfth year

on the land, and today her back

doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity

and of murder have declared a day’s truce

 

in the Civil War within her. So today,

we can bring Nellie, content with herself,

with the world, into our History.

For a day. In the next generation

 

we find a suitable subject camping

near the border of a divided country:

for a while no one knows how near. For these

few lines she is ours. But how about

 

the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed

body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes;

anticipation of the young, the edited memory

of the rest of us? How about thoughts

 

higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes.

Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes:

they have their own privileged history,

like inherited income beside our husbandry.

 

We bring our History up to date

in a city like London: someone’s just paid

the mortgage, is free of guilt

and not dying of cancer; and going

 

past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline

advertising torture. This is all

recommended reading, but in small doses.

It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.

Who's left in the space race?

An abandoned cosmodrome. Location and photographer unknown. More photos here.

So, Russia's decided to ditch human space travel:

Moscow no longer sees manned spaceflight as its top priority but remains committed to its International Space Station obligations, the head of Russian space agency Roskosmos said on Wednesday.

Russia holds a monopoly on flights to and from the 16-nation station. Soyuz launches from its Baikonur cosmodrome are now the only way to space since the United States retired its 30-year shuttle programme in July.

NASA pays it more than $50 million per flight to send its astronauts to the space outpost.

Roskosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said Russia was spending almost half of its space budget on manned flights and needed to shift focus to more technology-oriented projects. He added however it would stand by its station commitments.

"Unfortunately manned spaceflight accounts for an unjustifiably large part of the budget: It makes up 48 percent," he told reporters at Russia's flagship MAKS airshow near Moscow.

No, it doesn't mean the end of manned spaceflight entirely, but combined with the end of NASA's shuttle program, it's yet another move in the wrong direction.

So, NASA's bowed out of major human space travel for the foreseeable future, Russia's followed suit. Who does that leave? China? Europe? Weyland-Yutani?

For all the talk that private industry might take over the space race, it doesn't look feasible in the near future. The whole enterprise lacks, so far, the huge returns shareholders generally crave. Long-term planning is not corporate culture's strong suit.

What I'd like to see is an alliance. Instead of looking at expenses and dwindling budgets and going "cut!" space agencies should take a cue the cooperation that's increased since the end of the Cold War. Throw together the reduced space agencies, a few more forward-looking private businesses and some coordinating non-profits with the overall goal of advancing space travel. Split the costs and the potential gains in research and resources. This might even allow rising powers like India, South Africa and Brazil to join in, as they could gain access to existing infrastructure and expertise for an investment, without the huge up-front cost of having to build their own programs. Cash-strapped but infrastructure-rich agencies like NASA and Roskosmos get much-needed funds. Business gets a safer investment, because the odds are better than going solo. The non-profits, especially the scientific ones, get to advance their own goals. Win-win, if it was done right.

Of course, as I observed after the end of the space shuttle program, that solution would require motivation: cultures that viewed space travel as a serious priority. Right now, that's seriously lacking.

Law-less zones: when authority and anarchy shake hands

Just another Pirate Utopia. Photo by Laura K. Gibb.

Some interesting news out of Copenhagen, as the squat of Christiania just won long-sought autonomy:

"'It's not a perfect society, but one of the nice things about being here is that it doesn't have to be," says one resident, who calls himself only Vesinger.

Vesinger delivers his assessment of Christiania with obvious affection. He has lived here with his two little boys for six months, a recent convert to the Christianian way of life.

And it is not hard to see why this tiny enclave just south of Copenhagen's city centre is an attractive location for a family.

Trees and plant life thrive free from human interference and pesticides. It is more racially diverse, culturally open and creatively expressive than your average Danish neighbourhood.

Christiania has been a squat for nearly 40 years, ever since a group of enterprising hippies broke down the fences and set up in the disused military barracks.

And after a recent government ruling, this small society is celebrating its independence as a kind of semi-autonomous region. They call it Freetown Christiania.

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Under the new rules, residents are allowed to buy their land at knock-down prices and the remainder will be put up for rent by the state.

Although this effectively turns a hippy haven into a local council for Ms Larson, it means for the first time they can exist in security as well as peace.

"It will be a new way of living," she says.

"We do not have to worry anymore about whether the government will throw us off our land. Hopefully now that we have won our right to own the land, then we will be able to feel more secure and start to deal with some of the problems that exist here."

Ah, "we won, now what?" the question would-be revolutionaries in every field have to grapple, specifically, Christiania's relatively lawless status has drawn increasingly violent drug dealers:

There have been outbreaks of violence including gun battles on the streets as rival gangs fight for control of Christiania's drugs trade.

On the notorious Pusher Street, skinheads with pitbulls glare menacingly from behind their stalls draped in camouflage netting at anyone who looks like they might be there to do anything other than buy drugs.

Society: never a simple issue.

Christiana's problems aren't new ones either. Back in 2008, I did a brief write-up on the history of the Kowloon Walled City for Coilhouse. Instead of hippie idealism, in that case the lawless zone was founded on a far more mercantile culture, but it faced many of the same problems. As I summed it up then:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

If the problems with the drug gangs keep building, Christiania will probably need police raids, ironically, to keep its ungoverned character. Anarchists, by ideology or default (as in Kowloon) have never been particularly good at handling organized violence. At the same time, while a hell of a lot greener than the urban labyrinth that was Kowloon, many of the other traits seem similar: functionally self-governing, relatively peaceful, ensconced in a niche and free of some of the surrounding society's ills.

This brings up a paradox: in both cases, lawless areas had their lawlessness preserved by, well, the law. So, what does one do with that particular contradiction?

The Ice Age is coming, Ctd.

As an epilogue to the last post on London's riots, I think it's fitting to add this map of London's impoverished areas overlaid with the riots. It handily illustrates both the underlying causes and the stupid tragedy of rioting, as the poor areas see the most destruction.

The furor's mostly died down, and MPs returned from their holidays for a basically pointless debate. Somehow I don't think Prime Minister David Cameron's insistence that the riots were "criminality, pure and simple" is exactly the approach needed to defuse a volatile situation and prompt a frank reassessment of the best way to prevent a repeat. Instead, expect more brutal tactics, more surveillance and more governmental cluelessness.

The Ice Age is coming.

The Ice Age is coming: England in riot

A woman and two children walk through debris while riot police try to contain a large group on a main road in Tottenham on Aug. 6. Leon Neal, Getty Images. From the Boston Globe's chilling photo series.

Britain, or England, at least, is in absolute turmoil, with police overwhelmed by a wave of riots causing terrible destruction. The initial spark for the chaos was the shooting of Mark Duggan by the London police last Thursday.

Ironically enough, for all that immigrants, in Britain as well as here, are often derided as parasitic sources of turmoil, their communities are largely holding the line:

"It was between about nine and 10 at night," said Yilmaz Karagoz, sitting in his coffee shop next to a jeweller's shop that has been shuttered since Sunday when the rioting began and a pharmacy that closed a day after.

"There were a lot of them. We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves." The staff from a local kebab restaurant ran at the attackers, doner knives in their hands. "I don't think they will be coming back," Karagoz said.

Not everything works to suffering, of course. People also used social media to organize cleanup crews.

Picture from Twitter user Andy B

Surviving unrest, in the long run, depends on more people deterring rioters and cleaning up after the carnage than looting.

Rioting is stupid and ugly: about the worst possible way to lash out at poverty or a form of oppression, and it naturally attracts those who simply want blood and loot.

It's also not exactly unheard of in London: the city has a tumultuous enough history that its history of affray has its own Wikipedia page. Then, as now, it's not as spontaneous as authorities (through the centuries) usually assert. Rioting needs fuel — resentment — to flourish. Riots happen for many reasons, but they always happen for reasons.

So, consider the following.

Throughout this year, I've followed the fate of protests — peaceful, by and large — against the sweeping cuts in social services carried out by the current government. The poor will bear the brunt of these cuts, all while there is considerable tax evasion at the highest levels of British society.

At every turn, the police have reacted with violence in attempts to suppress, especially through the notorious kettling tactic, legitimate calls to not dismantle an important part of what makes Britain's society work. 

Remember this?

Not exactly a recipe for domestic tranquility. If that's what English police do in broad daylight, with media and thousands of observers, to peaceful protesters, imagine what they do in impoverished areas when no one's watching. Or, it probably seems to many of the inhabitants, cares.

Add in this contradiction: the same leaders making those cuts, the same ones calling for crackdown and blaming this eruption on the mysterious failing moral fiber of their nation, spent their youth as professional rioters.

Here's a handy directory

Prime Minister David Cameron, London Mayor Boris Johnson and Chancellor George Osborne were all part of the Bullingdon Club, a blue-blooded society dedicated to getting drunk, smashing up wherever they happened to land and harassing whoever they happened to dislike.

What makes this an acceptable tradition versus an unforgivable crime worthy of harsh punishment, apparently, is that they were all born into enough ridiculous wealth to avoid the consequences of their actions. That's the very definition of privilege: their law is not the same law meted out to someone in Tottenham.

Observing that dousing everything around in gasoline is a really, really bad idea does not means one endorses the inevitable fire. To carry the analogy a step further, it doesn't mean not to fight the fire. But it does mean that it's time to realize that one shouldn't turn the surroundings into a firetrap. When endemic poverty and a lifetime of rage meet an oppressively brutal police force, well, the place is ready to go.

My fear, from reactions like the lovely "let's police social media idea" now spreading across the Atlantic is that the initiative is behind trying to create stupidly useless measures to clamp things down even further. A catastrophic approach, and one that simply doesn't work. 

When BBC reporter Alex Hudson asked a protester when the unrest would stop.

"When there's war." Later that night, he was beaten.

The Ice Age is coming.

That old line by the Clash was the only thing I could think about, reading those words: an escalation between ever more-desperate attempts to clamp down on ever-more brutal unrest, any hope for better frozen solid.

London (or any city in the world) has long periods of relative civil peace when most people feel they have personal and political opportunities, combined with a basic degree of responsiveness from their rulers. Take that away, and all it takes is a spark.

Defanged metropoli

London! Culturally vibrant! Economically mighty! Politically impotent! Photo by Jason Hawkes

Cities! Over half of humanity now lives in the damn things. Naturally, the futurists are f'ing beside themselves over the wonders this portends. Why, here's prosperity prophet Richard Florida, writing in The Atlantic about how "giant city-states" will own your future: 

Gradually, our great complexes of cities and suburbs are being knit into mega-regions -- giant city-states that are home to millions upon millions of people and generate billions and in some cases trillions of dollars of economic activity. Driving this is not just our individual choices and preferences but the very logic of economic development. Geographic concentration and clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates powerful economies of scale.

He's got a point, of course, though for additional perspective you should read Nicholas Lemann's (paywalled, sadly) piece on the fight over urban identity. But there's one problem with dubbing this the new age of city-states, namely, the "state" part: most metropoli don't have a huge amount of say in government, often even in their own.

Why, for all their economic and cultural importance, are cities still politically impotent?

The Age of Splinters: More and more countries...

Thousands celebrate South Sudan's independence in Juba. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

On Saturday, South Sudan, after a long struggle, became the world's 193rd nation. While the country has a challenging path ahead, it's certainly an improvement after years of struggle against an oppressive regime.

Their break with Sudan also marks the latest in a decades long trend: nations splintering instead of forming.

Parag Khanna, writing in Foreign Policy, hails the trend:

Because of this wave of self-determination culminating in sovereignty, there are today more autonomous political units in the world than at any time since the Middle Ages of a millennium ago. Within a few decades, we could easily have 300 states in the world. Moreover, we are gradually returning to the medieval world of thousands of multilayered communities ranging from the supranational European Union to the magnetic city-states of the Persian Gulf to the indigenous communities of the Inuit of Canada and Greenland.

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The coming partitions must be performed with a combination of scalpel and ax, soft and hard power. Above all, the world must recognize that these partitions are inevitable. Our reflex is to fear changes on the map out of concern for violence or having to learn the names of new countries. But in an age when any group can acquire the tools of violent resistance, the only alternative to self-determination is perpetual conflict.

Khanna mostly focuses on post-colonial states, admittedly a major part of the trend. In their haste to hack up the world, would-be overlords often drew boundaries with a complete disregard for local factors. So you get Iraq, Sudan, the Congo and plenty of others.

The medieval era ended with momentum moving in the opposite direction: nations encompassed broader identities, then took on colonies to become empires. For awhile, it looked like the whole world would end up under a handful of governments. The zenith — just after World War II — saw a rudimentary international structure in place.

Ironically, even the empires' opponents got in on the act. Communism sought to be the international replacement for nation-states, superseding their own identities into a grander ideology.

Even after it was clear that the UN would never govern the world, the competing power blocs still seemed a trend towards centralization, especially as the European Union started to knit a continent together.

But post-colonial states kept splitting up and the USSR acted like an old-school empire before promptly collapsing like one. It's not confined to the developing world either: the EU doesn't look so hot, nor does Italy.

When did we stop looking at the stars?

Into the wild blue yonder

Last Friday, the space shuttle Atlantis broke Earth's gravity, headed for the international space station. It marked the last space shuttle launch.

While this is not the end of the space program, Atlantis' final journey marks a major point on a long, downward trajectory, not least for the 25,000 workers who will suffer directly from the program's end. These days, the government spends more on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan than on NASA.

Appropriately, today is the 42nd anniversary of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," the classic lament of a doomed astronaut:

Let's not get too altruistic here, either. The space program's heyday came about in large part because Americans and their government viewed it as part of a greater war against the USSR.

Still, NASA's zenith proved something: we can go to space. We can send people to space. The resources exist. The technology is there. Hell, at this point the technology is old.

The only remaining question is: do we want to? When people look out at their society and think "what do I want us to do?" is "go to space, and keep going" on the list?

Not for a long time. People can talk efficiency all they wish, but governments have proven perfectly capable of spending larger sums on far more questionable things (remember all that air conditioning?). The program's death marked a deeper turn.

Partly, the shift came from space travel's birth, tied to the Cold War and '50s hubris. By the era's end, people were, rightly, tired of the damn struggle, and anything associated with it. "Space Oddity" was one early marker, the increasing skepticism of science fiction another.

"Fighting the commies" was never the whole reason, of course. Space exploration had real popular appeal for a long time, tapping into a primal grandeur, combined with humanity's explorational urge. But, forever tied to far-off dividends and the conflict that created it, the whole enterprise proved vulnerable to accusations that the only thing all that money created was "garbage floating in the sky," as Ursula LeGuin's infamously dismissed.

Defenders could even point to more immediate benefits, like the ridiculous amount of more down-to-earth devices spawned by space research. It didn't help. This is the kind of popular argument won in the heart, not the head.

The fact is, the populace at large decided space travel wasn't a priority. It lost its glamour, its war, its money and its support. There were other fears, other dangers. Everything that's followed, from the lack of cutting edge spacecraft to the shuttle's end, is all part of that downward spiral.

So here's the question: we decided to give up on space travel. What did we get instead?

Was it worth it?

Textbook racket attacks fair use

If you quote it, we'll shoot you

A good column by Quinn Norton highlights a fresh outrage:

In their ongoing quest to punch every puppy they can find, rights holders have turned to suing those most rapacious of pirates, professors. Academic publishers are asking a judge in Georgia for an injunction against Georgia State University for a liberal fair-use policy. What these publishers are objecting to is unapproved and unpaid-for book and article excerpts in class materials—essentially quoting and anthologizing. They want everything that can be paid for to be paid for. Specifically, professors couldn't use more than 10 percent or 1,000 words of an in-print book, whichever is less. That's about two pages. And it's campus wide—if I use two pages of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes in my class, no student or teacher can use a third page without paying or getting sued by the publisher of Moral Mazes.

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But that's not what fair use is about. It's a limit to copyright baked into the law. In the act itself, it cites a teacher making copies of classroom materials as a fair use. It's part of the copyright bargain; we grant these rights in exchange for material that improves our society as a whole, not so a group of publishers can get a piece of that mad college student money.

Absurd doesn't even begin to cover it.

Look, it's not like college textbook publishers don't have an extortion racket going on already. Hell, there's even recent legislation trying belatedly to curb the worse excesses.

I was somewhat fortunate: ASU was one of the few universities with a book rental system. While helpful, that didn't stop professors from assigning lots and lots of additional books, preferably expensive new editions. Barely having money for food, buying these was out of the question. I managed to pass my classes by borrowing, copying pages, taking copious notes, having a good memory and spending A LOT of time in the library. I was far from the only student in this situation, and I'll never forget the day when, after complaining about the price, a professor told a number of us to "just ask your parents for more money." Fewer things crystallized more clearly the assumption that education is the domain of the wealthy. This is one more move to worsening that divide.

Turns out xkcd was accurately predicting a terrifying dystopia

There's also a risk here I think rights holders still don't grasp. Ideally, when crafting a law, you want something that satisfies both competing interests: publishers get money, the public gets information. The point of this is while neither party gets completely what they want, they get enough that most people obey the law most of the time.

The increasing tilt towards rights holders is reaching such a ludicrous extreme that eventually people just cease obeying the law, consequences be damned. Determined students and professors will just make the copies anyway. What, are the publishers going to find all of them, much less sue?

The result is the equivalent of legal civil war: the occasional brutally sued defendant, but far more people who simply ignore the law. That this sort of scorched earth tactic never works never seems to stop companies from using it.