Van Jones, dangerous radical

 











Solar Richmond graduates celebrate a successful installation.






You can't make this stuff up. Check out what Van Jones said in this 2007 interview with grist:

We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future -- things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.

All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that's been missing from the conversation. This is a great time to go to the next step and ask, well, who's going to do the work? Who's going to invest in the new technologies? What are ways to get communities wealth, improved health, and expanded job opportunities out of this improved transition?

That's one component: rather than creating job-training pipelines that put these kids at the back of the line for the last century's pollution-based jobs, we need to be creating opportunities for them to be at the front of the line for the new clean and green jobs.

Another piece is to go a step beyond job training and begin to think about reviving the old Civilian Conservation Corps that [Franklin D. Roosevelt] created during the environmental challenges of his day. Now we have a new set of environmental challenges. The national Apollo Alliance and the Campus Climate Challenge have been talking with us about creating what we would call an Energy Corps. It would be like the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, but it would be focused on deploying people to begin retrofitting the U.S. economy, rebooting it based on clean energy.

The moral challenge of the century is this: We need to ensure that there's equal protection for everyone in the face of the perils of this new period, and equal access to the opportunities of this new period.

http://www.grist.org/article/vanjones/

Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009

from the annals of understatement

Today marks the anniversary of the 1934 plebiscite that gave Hitler complete & unchecked power in Germany. From the New York Times report of the balloting:


Throughout the day Storm Troopers stood before each polling place with banners calling on the voters to vote "Yes." Otherwise voters remained unmolested.

year of the Angry Whopper

In January of 2009 Burger King rolled out the Angry Whopper. As far as I know, this is the first time the term "angry" has been used to sell a consumer product on anything close to this scale. Initial reports credited the new menu item with boosting BK's sale receipts, and the Angry Whopper has since been introduced in European and Asian markets.

Some questions. First, how are we meant to feel about this product? (I had one and found it just irritating; the main problem was the "angry sauce" which tasted weirdly sweet) Next, will "angry" be the next word to be ruthlessly cross-purposed by marketers of all sorts of stuff, as "extreme" was a few years ago? And, finally, some head-scratchers: What does the marketing of anger by a company with such a massive media footprint say about the actual phenomenon of anger in our time? Does it mean that anger is so pervasive that it's bleeding into fast food menus? Have marketing psychologists discovered that anger is driving a big chunk of our emotional overeating? Or does the use of the term in this campaign signal that 'angry' could one day join 'deluxe' or 'home-made' as just another ornamental word whose original meaning has been spent?

One of the great things about Mike Judge's Ideocracy was his vision of future fast-food marketing that taps as deep as possible into our reptile-brain emotions, e.g. the Carl's Jr. ad that grunts "Fuck You, I'm Eating". With the Angry Whopper, BK has taken a bold step in that direction.



But more than that, they've given the world a nice metaphor to describe the rancid and prepackaged rage that saturates our political diet this summer. As Glenn Beck loses big name sponsors such as Proctor & Gamble, Best Buy and WalMart, he might want to host a few spots for the Angry Whopper.

Meshugga Beach Party performs "Shmatta Hari" for upcoming doc on surf music

7/5 CNN: great leapfrog fwd pt 2

Another report on green tech in rural China.

7/3 nytimes: great leapfrog fwd?

This is a fine article about the explosion of clean energy tech in China; just a tiny dent in the coal economy, but lots of room for growth.