luciaphile
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Posts posted by luciaphile
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I guess we get another Cage/Cusack film here soon, IMDB sez there is one where Cusack is a serial killer in Alaska and Cage is the cop on his trail.
Well, you won't have to choose between waxy biceps guy and highstrung guy with the pretty mouth. But I don't think anyone will be seeing that movie. I hope not. I realize I'm on slippery moral footing since I found "Con Air" good, clean fun but I don't understand America's romance with serial killers.
In fact, I am hard pressed to think of anything Americans share, culturally, more than a fondness for serial killers.
There was one where Cusack and a bunch of people are stranded in a storm at a motel, then they start getting bumped off, 10 Little Indians-style. But it turns out they are really the fragmented personalities of a serial killer that are slowly being "integrated" (a psychiatric fraud Hollywood likes).
I at least won't spoiler the title, I don't remember it.
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This is a conversational gambit that has failed for me before, so I know that I'm the only person who remembers the Nicolas Cage/John Cusack vehicle "Con Air" with great fondness. "Con Air" - now that's entertainment!
But I'm partial to movies in which the ragtag band of bad guys or misfits or Little Leaguers have to save the day.
Brad Pitt and his crinkly eyes came to my local theater to promote the zombie movie the other night. I told my friend: "We missed him!" She expressed surprise that I was a Brad Pitt fan. It's true I have not seen his movies particularly, nor am I likely to, but his celebrity hobby is architecture, which is a refreshing change from world peace.
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I noticed that Camp Strake had a Safe Harbor agreement with Fish and Wildlife. This sale would seem to point up the toothlessness of that designation. The site for the new camp by Sam Houston National Forest is probably more interesting, species-wise. Once, the Boy Scouts taking possession of that land would have seemed like a positive development, conservation-wise, but no longer. Quite the reverse.
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I took it that he means the Texas triangle will be the center seat between Canada, the US, and Mexico.
No doubt.
O Canada, how easy it is to forget you and your 35 million people.
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If the axes have shifted to north-south, then the Texas Triangle is in the hot seat for the next few generations.
I don't see what the Dakotas have to do with it. More like Houston is one of a handful of z-axes:
http://www.texastribune.org/2011/03/25/maps-visualize-us-population-growth-by-county/
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The double deck split is north of downtown. The part of I-35 through Austin that is most awful is there: the ditch-like lower deck, with its almost non-existent on ramps and shoulders. These are nearly universally scary the first time you experience them. It is surprising there are not more accidents; I think they tend to bring out vigilance.
So: the thought of creating another tunnel-like situation will not, I think, appeal to most Austin drivers, when the double deck craziness cries out to be reimagined.
The completion of the Waller Creek floodwater diversion has civic leaders looking forward to that area of downtown being rebuilt. They love a fresh start (the follow-through, and long-term upkeep, are not Austin's strong suit). That section of interstate being hard by has thus momentarily drawn their attention.
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Is it still sprawl if hardly anyone came? Is the wisdom of it still obvious? And can it really be said to have been "rooted in a desire to realise lifestyle changes"? Or was it driven by something else?
http://www.businessinsider.com/spain-ghost-towns-satellite-2011-4?op=1
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I like to read books about scientists and engineers, most recently a somewhat (to me) frustratingly-written but interesting story (can't remember title) about the group that coalesced around John von Neumann at Princeton, and the development of the IAS machine.
One takeaway is that we better hope there are still kids out there who like to "tinker," and not virtually.
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An invariant of this thread is that both sides seem to be betting on some aspect of the status quo: some of you that prosperity continues to increase with population, and that America will have a large base of well-educated and entrepreneurial innovators to rise to technological challenges, as it has the past couple hundred years; Slick Vic, in a no less utopian vein, that the particular concerns -- which go under the rubric of liveability, or sometimes sustainability -- of a momentarily influential group of people will have broad appeal in the future outside that small, and relatively shrinking, and actually shrinking, group.
I don't know. But I do know it's nearly atavistic superstition, or else a touching faith in the powers of your elected municipal representatives, to believe that increasing suburban sprawl is a trend to which Houston, Texas could choose to go "counter."
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I'm not familiar with the history of Eisenhower's hopes for it, but as a non-flier I second your exasperation, Slick Vic, with the interstate highway system. It seems improbable this is what he envisioned. The interstates through Tennessee are particularly fatiguing.
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Don't forget that the field has been named for Joe Jamail. It's getting awful crowded in the misty pantheon of longhorn memory, with the WWI dead sharing space with a football coach and a trial lawyer.
True. The names probably won't last long.
I had forgotten the field was named for Joe Jamail. The swim center also bears his name. Pennzoil was good to UT.
Trivia: when I was in school the feminists were all up in arms over plans to tear down the "girls'" gym, the Anna Hiss gym, because it was apparently the only building on campus named for a woman, a longtime phys.ed. teacher.
I'd always thought it was torn down, but apparently the womyn angle saved it. I am happy to learn that because it was a nice light-filled space, much more pleasing than dank Gregory Gym.
I read a book about Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers not long ago and learned that Anna Hiss was Alger Hiss's sister.
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I remember when UT decided to change the name of Memorial Stadium to Darrell K Royal - Texas Memorial Stadium (I assume that they originally planned to change it to Royal Stadium, then thought better of it and came up with the current compromise).
It seemed strange to me that a college that had named its stadium for WW1 dead -- with the pointed resonance that has, in that the the kids playing the game will always invoke the dead mostly their same age -- would subordinate the war dead to someone whose achievements lay with the game played in the stadium.
But it's probably for the best, as DKR is so beloved that UT is unlikely to ever attempt another name change, which insulates Longhorn fans from future mortification.
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Sorry, I just can't seem to walk away from this thread. Below article titled "What if we never run out of oil?". It has a good analysis of peak oil theory and its flaws.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/
iivincinco, thanks, that was very clearly written. I kind of skimmed the geopolitical upheaval part (though I have to admit the specter of Japan contesting sovereignty over natural resources caught my attention for some reason). And I was alarmed at how it ended: "Could the breaking of the ice to mine the caged methane cause another catastrophic release of that worst of greenhouse gases like the one that is thought to have produced the Great Extinction between the Permian and the Triassic, which killed off 70% of terrestrial vertebrate and 96% of marine species? Experts say possibly so."
Okay, it didn't. But it did raise one dispiriting issue after another (though not for suburbia and not for anyone's Exxon stock).
Since it was once so commonly thought that we would "get it all," leaving only a negligible unrecoverable amount in the ground, I didn't really grasp the furor over Peak Oil. What does it matter? We're going to burn it. Then "all" turned out to be shale gas and tar sands and unimaginably deep-ocean drilling and so much more than originally thought, and I was given to understand that we would get it as long as it paid to do so.Then in the last couple months methane hydrates suddenly stopped being a footnote.
I'm back to thinking we will get it all, but actively hoping, this time, that we will not.
Most of us react to feats of engineering with awe; I certainly do. It's a rare person who can understand technology -- and also think critically about it. I know someone like that, and I admit I am influenced by him. Richard Muller has been like that for me, as well. I recommend "Energy for Future Presidents," though, being a physicist, he is a partisan of nukes, as all physicists seem to be, and makes big allowances for it that he grants to no other energy source.
I think that's why, reading that article, I was as usual simultaneously impressed with the engineering prowess of the petroleum industry, from such simple beginnings (for familial reasons also, perhaps - father, uncle: petroleum engineers, other uncle drilling company corporate lawyer) but this also ricochets in my head, as that technology and its implications become more and more bewildering and complicated: why did people despise Jimmy Carter for suggesting we put on sweaters? (No one need reply that sheep may cause a catastrophic methane release comparable to ..., &etc - I see it coming.) And where would we be if that hadn't aroused such a backlash? It seemed like conservation and renewables were going to be the next Industrial Revolution, not natural gas. What was particularly un-American about that?
At this point the only relevance of the idea of Peak Oil seems to be, whether we arrive at a global consensus that Peak Oil should be self-imposed; and whether the world's superpower would look beyond the current bonanza to use its waning clout in that direction.
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Thank you for taking the time to find those numbers. To be clear and candid, my interest is habitat loss.
I'm not sure whether you were thinking simply of diminishing fossil fuels, or of greenhouse gas production. If the latter, then electricity consumption, especially coal-powered, is the most important metric; it was eye-opening to me, though, to learn what a close second open cooking fires are:
http://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/august2010/cook-stoves.htm
The last time I was in a Luby's cafeteria, my kid was about fourteen years old, and not small for his age. When it came time to pay, I noticed they hadn't charged me for his dinner. I pointed this out. "Bébés eat free," she said.
"But he's --"
"Bébés eat free," she repeated stonily.
I'm not sure why this popped into my head. I guess it was the thought of 3 billion babies, placing no strain on the environment. Anyway, you went along with my wanting to discuss population today, and that was kind of you.
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livincinco, I applaud you for returning the topic to suburbia, from which I had led it astray; but I have to say, my head aches from the idea that you are concerned about increasing consumption in the "developing" countries -- and yet you cite as an example the country that took population seriously, that successfully controlled its population. If its resource use is worrisome to you, what does that augur for the rest? Yet you are certain you are not concerned about "overall population."
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august1948, if you think I'll happily spot you an additional 3 billion people by century's end, then you and I probably will be forever unintelligible to one another; I apologize for not being able to communicate well enough to even try to bridge that gap.
There is no question that population will eventually contract. We are animals after all. "Decline, leading to less pressure on natural resources" is a nice way of putting it. If, however, there is any possibility you have your causes and effects backward, that contraction will not be pretty, and is something that even those with a human-centric viewpoint might wish to see avoided.
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So we will probably never run out of oil, as the cost of extracting it becomes uncompetitive. I have no opinion about suburbia. But I think you are a bit hard on the original poster and his concerns about the world gasoline has enabled. Even if hyperbolic, there is this kernel of truth: gasoline has been a miracle substance, and it seems like nothing on the horizon rivals it for energy storage. (I believe the world is still waiting on the private entrepreneur willing to assume the risks of nuclear power.)
I know that some people genuinely view the future as an interesting free-for-all, and are indifferent to the direction it takes. I don't take issue with that point of view. It is a feature of some of the world's great religions.
For some of us, though, there are things - or places, or simply ideas - worth conserving -- worth "sustaining" -- even if we don't agree on what they are.
I submit that the key sentence in the above excerpt is this:This chart reveals that per capita consumption actually peaked all the way back in 1990, and thus a big part of the growth in total consumption toward that 2005 peak was a result of population growth
Whatever sustainability means to any one of us, population growth renders it moot, makes a mockery, really, of any efforts in that direction.
I am able to remember when it was a subject people discussed -- with no evil intentions -- before it became the one taboo subject, cynically filed under "racism" by people who took great glee in exploiting the confusion of the Left, and stealing a page from their book. The environmental movement has never really recovered.
Interestingly, it was about 1990, the same time we began realizing gains in efficiency again, as we had in the seventies.
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There Will Be Dust when El Paso's very tall, iconic (for once the word is not too strained, I think) smelter chimneys come down in a couple hours:
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No doubt they deserve that consideration, so I'll try to be more scrupulous about dictators' honorifics: I promise on a stack of Juche tracts. But I didn't realize he had achieved "Dear Leader" already ...
... though I wouldn't be surprised. He has not disappointed - he's carried on Daddy's legacy very capably.
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Austin-haters, you have an ally in "Outstanding Leader":
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This live oak in the Columbia Bottomlands took the Texas grand champion title from Goose Island SP's "Big Tree":
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RlTXJ9LWszk/TXqKdlb1I4I/AAAAAAAAE9Q/9qKZ463G4gY/s1600/wen-bigtree-sm.JPG
But I associate water oaks with Buffalo Bayou.
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I expect this is mostly an Austin-bashing bill, and will ultimately be tailored to Austin, but it may affect other cities as well:
http://www.austintreeexperts.com/blog/kolkhorst-anti-tree-bill/
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It's too bad they can't revive the spring.
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I don't know why he put in that bit about "law-abiding." That is not something we generally demand of our guests.
Why is Portland considered a model city?
in Meanwhile, In The Rest of the World...
Posted
In the WSJ profile of Annise Parker, you said: "I'd argue we may be the most libertarian city in America."
So Houston is Mecca for libertarians. It's really that simple. That's why a paleocon like me feels uncomfortable there. Fine.
But Portland: Portland is a product that people have proven they want to pay for. I'm not sure why it draws censure, since libertarians should seemingly be indifferent to what people desire, or the forms it takes. In a world of choice, it is unlikely everyone would want to live in a place like Houston.
Where you see hipsters, I suppose (sorry if I misuse the word "hipster" - it has no meaning for me) I see, beyond the gauzy progressivism, those drawn to Portland attempting to mimic what the very wealthy enjoy. This seems like very typical consumer behavior.
Please note, I said, "very wealthy." So, the lifestyle I'm taking about, though it may be very expensive, has less to do with material excess, than with beautiful surroundings, orderliness, and above all, not too damn many people around.
So, for instance, the sort of place where uber-libertarian Steve Forbes lives: a charming, ultra-restrictive town in New Jersey, where the arrival of a Starbucks was considered an affront, where ag exemptions for pumpkin patches and Christmas tree farms preserve a nice buffer of open space.
Is this a case where libertarians feel people need correcting, because they are guilty of wanting the wrong thing?