From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy. Free PDF. From what might, but shouldn't, be a surprising source.

From the PDF:

"The argument here is that we are already moving from the New Middle Ages to the New Dark Age, and that the challenges of security in an increasingly chaotic environment will be even more formidable than they already are. In terms of wicked problems, the frightening thing is that we have not seen anything yet."

Suppose you are working on a project which the owner hopes will qualify for some sort of LEED rating. Or maybe the owner just wants as green a project as is reasonable.

Which is higher priority? non-toxic such as Mythic Paint? Or recycled such as Metro Paint?

Good problem that we have such choices and ideally we'll soon have a paint with both characteristics.

Starbucks Everywhere .

Hello, my name is Winter, and I have never been a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Nevertheless, since 1997 (the same year Wu-Tang Forever was released) I have been on a personal mission to visit every Starbucks in the world. My original motivation was simply to accomplish something singularly unique. However, since that time, I have discovered many joys in the traveling and the challenge of my mission, and they help keep me going despite the ever-increasing difficulty. Just to be clear, I do have other interests, such as competitive Scrabble and trying to change the world, so please do not presume that Starbucks is my sole interest.(emphaasis added)

From the CBC Archives (video) of 1969Remembering Jane Jacobs. Interesting clip which reminds us that Jane Jacobs was as much or more about economics as about urban design.

Neighbors mourn mural creatures' extinction and also City paints over cherished Phinney mural

Before:

After:

Real reporting would involve interviewing not only City PR home-office types but also the guys who went out and did the destruction. Who are they? How did the orders come down? Why didn't they ask anyone to confirm the task? etc etc What were they thinking?

Here at Pruned

One of the things which excites me about the issue of storm-water runoff is that it looks to me like a problem which actually capable of resolution i.e. there are low-tech and cost-effective methods by which polluted waters from roads and parking lots can be treated and before they reach rivers, lakes and oceans.

The day of judgment.

Since 1839, the world inventory of photographs has been accumulating at an accelerating pace, multiplying into a near infinitude of images, into a resemblance of a Borgesian library. This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead. Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, but the child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its carriage - their lives have run their course, and they are all gone. And yet, frozen in sepia, they appear curiously, busily, oblivious of the fact that they must die - as Susan Sontag put it, "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction ..." (emphasis added)

"This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead."

I've had the same unnerving magnificent idea when looking at an old photograph. Or standing in an old house or at any old place and realizing that real humans had stood there before me. Of course a photo shows real people with real faces, or rather, people who had once been real and who now live only in photos, so it is all the more awesome than a silent place. But places also speak.

A particular landscape in Dubai one warm windy day:

click

The thought came to me that I had been there long ago, several millenia ago, herding sheep or goats. Not at all impossible, in fact, looking at family history. I don't often get such "woo-woo" thoughts. So who knows. It was a pretty place, at any rate..

People Care About How Much Gasoline Costs.

I agree we probably won't see $10/barrel oil.

But consider this: oil has doubled in price in the past year. Has global demand (GNP is a good index, I think) doubled? No way. I don't think we are seeing secular demand create $130/barrel but some sort of bubble & speculation — though do remember than bubbles & speculations are based on fundamentals-gone-bizerk and so there is indeed a general increase in demand for oil which means long-term higher prices. The current oil bubble is based on long-term fear and short-term greed. Its genesis is real — we have some humdinger problems ahead of us — but prices are way ahead of demand.

Of course we in the USA alsopay more because our dollar is weaker — but all bad things come to an end and eventually we will climb out of our hole and the dollar will strengthen, thus effectively lowering oil prices. (I am thinking of a new and even just marginally more-intelligent national leadership. God knows how strong the dollar could become if Obama is elected and turns out to be a really good or even great president. In such case the dollar will rally strongly over the next 3-4 years. Stranger things have happened.)

So, no, I am betting that oil price has peaked for the time being and will head down to the $80 range, which is still a large increase over the $63/barrel it was last year this time. If I knew how to sell oil short, I would.

That's not necessarily good news, of course. Higher oil prices are good in that they promote conservation and search for alternatives Rational national policy would put a floor under oil prices. But good luck there.

I questioned (and I mean that literally — it was a question) Ross Anderson's assertion that we don't know how to clean-up Puget Sound pollution.

Ross answered here:

Over the past, say, 30 years, the consensus as to what's wrong has shifted repeatedly from overfishing to urban sewage to heavy metals to hydroelectric dams to nonpoint pollution from suburban sprawl to ... whatever. Scientists expect this kind of uncertainty; it is the nature of the universe and of the scientific method. But it leaves the rest of us wondering where to focus our limited resources. And it increases the risk that we will spend billions of dollars on the wrong fix.

I don't think that is accurate or comes close to justifying a statement so broad and bold as there is no "scientific consensus as to what exactly is wrong, let alone what to do about it."

If that means that there we don't have complete 100% agreement among all scientists from many disciplines, that may well be true. But I'd like to hear in some detail where they disagree. What are the big scientific questions? What are the opposing perspectives? I hope that some scientists will clarify the matter either here or on Crosscut (which has unfortunately give its implicit endorsement that Anderson's ideas are colorable.)