August 26, 2023
Carnivorous vegetarians
The Japanese may be the most pragmatic people on the planet. Going all-in on half-of-the-world domination and then losing everything knocked the stuffing out of that sort of zealotry. And unlike the Germans, they decided not to dwell on it.
Well, except when silly westerners try to ratchet up their own virtue signaling by apologizing for beating them.
And unlike the Germans, the ultra-nationalists and their rhetoric aren't banned. Some even get elected to high office. Then there's that whole Yasukuni Shrine business, which prime ministers pretend to be "sensitive" about.
Until the cameras are turned off, that is.
All the paeans to pacifism are pragmatic as well. In a neighborhood full of angry bulls, it's a good idea not run around waving a red flag. But at home, disturb the social order and the kid gloves come off. Japan has the death penalty and uses it.
And they don't pay much real attention to foreigners who complain about such things. Frankly, I think the Japanese government sticks to that whole whale hunting thing (it's for "research," don't you know) because foreigners complain about it.
It's a passive-aggressive way of asserting Japan's sovereignty and national prerogatives.
Japan's eating habits are doing a lot worse to the unagi, but when's the last time you heard anybody campaigning to "Save the eels!"
Which brings us to the subject of another bunch of virtue-signaling westerners that amuse the Japanese when they're not bemusing them: vegetarians. Long story short: the best way to be a vegetarian in Japan is to not ask about the ingredients.
Eryk points out in his This Japanese Life blog that the
A vegetarian lifestyle is tough enough. But a vegan diet is almost impossible to strictly adhere to in Japan. Even in vegetable dishes, the dashi (broth) that is a ubiquitous component of Japanese cuisine almost certainly contains pork or fish.
Laments Anne Lauenroth at GaijinPot, dashi is commonly made from bonito (related to tuna), and it is everywhere,
But as far as Japanese cooks are concerned, dashi doesn't count as "meat," regardless of what it's made from. If you can't see the meat, there isn't any meat. Warns a site called the Vegetarian Resource Group,
Agrees Peter Payne,
He advises sticking to shoujin ryouri, the food traditionally eaten by Buddhist priests. Which could be tough for the typical tourist to arrange alone. So the Inside Japan Tours website "will advise all your accommodation of your dietary needs in advance."
Why? Because it is
Protecting tourists from vegetarian dishes that aren't really is a great example of what Tyler Cowen calls "Markets in Everything."
Granted, I find actual "travel" utterly unappealing as a hobby, let alone a necessity. (Fun to watch on television, though.) But this strikes me as an odd tourism mentality. It's a kind of reverse cultural appropriation: "Don't do as the Roman do."
Then why go to Rome in the first place?
When it comes joining the culinary globetrotting set, I think Phil Rosenthal has the right idea in I'll Have What Phil's Having and Somebody Feed Phil. He travels the world and eats whatever he is served with great élan and with barely a care about where it came from.
After all, all those other people are eating it and they didn't fall down dead. Yet.
Well, except when silly westerners try to ratchet up their own virtue signaling by apologizing for beating them.
And unlike the Germans, the ultra-nationalists and their rhetoric aren't banned. Some even get elected to high office. Then there's that whole Yasukuni Shrine business, which prime ministers pretend to be "sensitive" about.
Until the cameras are turned off, that is.
All the paeans to pacifism are pragmatic as well. In a neighborhood full of angry bulls, it's a good idea not run around waving a red flag. But at home, disturb the social order and the kid gloves come off. Japan has the death penalty and uses it.
And they don't pay much real attention to foreigners who complain about such things. Frankly, I think the Japanese government sticks to that whole whale hunting thing (it's for "research," don't you know) because foreigners complain about it.
It's a passive-aggressive way of asserting Japan's sovereignty and national prerogatives.
Japan's eating habits are doing a lot worse to the unagi, but when's the last time you heard anybody campaigning to "Save the eels!"
 |
| As Homer Simpson would put it: "Mmmm . . . eels." |
Which brings us to the subject of another bunch of virtue-signaling westerners that amuse the Japanese when they're not bemusing them: vegetarians. Long story short: the best way to be a vegetarian in Japan is to not ask about the ingredients.
Eryk points out in his This Japanese Life blog that the
long life expectancy of Japanese people isn't from a vegetarian diet, because none of them are vegetarians. Okinawans are usually singled out—longest life expectancy in the world—but Okinawans actually eat taco rice and chicken.
The same goes for cancer rates. Japan's cancer rates aren't low because they avoid meat. Japan's diet is heavy on meat and soy—tofu, in particular—and soy can lower the risk of certain cancers. But tofu in Japan is usually served alongside meat, not in place of it.
Far from utopian, Japan is one of the least vegetarian-friendly places on Earth.
A vegetarian lifestyle is tough enough. But a vegan diet is almost impossible to strictly adhere to in Japan. Even in vegetable dishes, the dashi (broth) that is a ubiquitous component of Japanese cuisine almost certainly contains pork or fish.
 |
| The ingredients that go into dashi. |
Laments Anne Lauenroth at GaijinPot, dashi is commonly made from bonito (related to tuna), and it is everywhere,
from sauces, salad dressings and miso soup to udon and soba noodles being boiled in it. Better restaurants pride themselves on making their own dashi, and they will be inclined to cook even their vegetables in this special broth instead of lovely, ordinary water.
But as far as Japanese cooks are concerned, dashi doesn't count as "meat," regardless of what it's made from. If you can't see the meat, there isn't any meat. Warns a site called the Vegetarian Resource Group,
It may be difficult to explain to Japanese people what you cannot have, because the concept of vegetarianism is not widely understood. For example, if you say you are vegetarian, they may offer you beef or chicken soup without meat itself.
Agrees Peter Payne,
One special challenge is being a vegetarian in Japan, since the country generally doesn't understand the lifestyle. One restaurant even advertised "vegetarian" bacon-wrapped asparagus, as if the presence of a vegetable was enough to make it vegetarian.
He advises sticking to shoujin ryouri, the food traditionally eaten by Buddhist priests. Which could be tough for the typical tourist to arrange alone. So the Inside Japan Tours website "will advise all your accommodation of your dietary needs in advance."
Why? Because it is
decidedly more difficult to be a full vegetarian or vegan in Japan due to the ubiquity of fish in the diet. In fact, it is so rare that many restaurants do not offer any vegetarian dishes at all.
Protecting tourists from vegetarian dishes that aren't really is a great example of what Tyler Cowen calls "Markets in Everything."
Granted, I find actual "travel" utterly unappealing as a hobby, let alone a necessity. (Fun to watch on television, though.) But this strikes me as an odd tourism mentality. It's a kind of reverse cultural appropriation: "Don't do as the Roman do."
Then why go to Rome in the first place?
When it comes joining the culinary globetrotting set, I think Phil Rosenthal has the right idea in I'll Have What Phil's Having and Somebody Feed Phil. He travels the world and eats whatever he is served with great élan and with barely a care about where it came from.
After all, all those other people are eating it and they didn't fall down dead. Yet.
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Labels: environmentalism, food, japan, japanese culture, politics, social studies, television
October 19, 2017
Big junk day
Heart-warming movies like Always that take place in the post-war period dependably include a character who is the first in the neighborhood to buy the latest electronic gadget or appliance.
In the first movie, the dad (top right) is the first on the block to buy a B&W television. In the third installment, he's the first on the block to buy a color television (which would have cost the equivalent of several thousand dollars).
The inevitable problem in a country where storage space (like garages) is in very short supply is what to do with the old stuff. The answer: So dai gomi hi (粗大ごみ日) or "Big junk day." It's the day on which large pieces of refuse may be legally discarded in designated areas.
"Big Junk Day" produced a mountain of stuff in the central plaza of the apartment complex where I lived in Osaka. The first scavengers on the scene were the used appliance retailers, a great source for warrantied refurbished appliances on a budget (delivery included!).
If you don't mind crawling through the junk to get at the good stuff, you might come away with a prize. Courtesy of Hiroyuki Kitazawa, here's a more modest dai gomi collection. Cities that don't have a specific day will often haul stuff away for a nominal fee.
Labels: environmentalism, japan, japanese culture, politics
June 15, 2015
Utopia wasn't built in a day
At the heart of every Edenic green dream is an obliviousness to the necessity of time and the demands of scale. A similar flaw shows up in near-future science fiction. Any razzle-dazzle infrastructure predicted to be ubiquitous a quarter-century from now has to be in the permitting process now.
When referencing the Space Race, remember that the chief architect of the Saturn V booster was Wernher von Braun, who'd launched 5200 V-2 liquid-fuel rockets during the 1940s. His designs were in large part based on Robert Goddard's groundbreaking research in the 1920s.
Japan Railways and its predecessors had started buying up rights-of-way for the Shinkansen thirty years before it debuted in 1964 (the war having put the original plans on hold). The route itself followed the centuries-old Tokaido Road.
These things take time. Unlike Jean-Luc Picard, no modern, democratic government can "Make it so" by merely ordering it. Even authoritarian regimes are finding it tough these days to rule by decree.
California is still a democracy. A messy one. The LA Times recently reported: "Finding a route into the Los Angeles Basin for the California bullet train is proving far more difficult than it seemed a year ago, as opposition is surging in wealthy and working-class communities alike."
Phase 1 of California High-Speed Rail project is supposed to be completed by 2029. Chances of Phase 1 getting done on time: zero. Chances of it never being finished: high. Discussing the various obstacles to the routes currently under debate, Steve Sailer concludes:
Even if we could nationalize all the beautiful back yards and ocean front vistas keeping such projects at bay, there's still the problem of actually building the thing. Or as Elon Musk would prefer, a whole bunch of things, explains Will Boisvert in "The Grid Will Not Be Disrupted."
To get down to brass tacks:
For that much money, Boisvert points out, you could build enough AP1000 nuclear power plants to completely decarbonize Germany's electrical supply. Germany presently gets 75 percent of its electrical power from fossil fuel sources. That's measurably higher than the U.S. (67 percent).
France gets eight (8!) percent of its electrical power from fossil fuels. Nuclear accounts for 77 percent.
Before Fukushima, Japan generated 30 percent of its electrical power from nuclear; it's now close to zero, the difference being made up by oil, gas, and coal. Unlike Germany, Japan intends to restart its nuclear plants. Like Germany, in the meantime, it's increasingly relying on coal.
We've been building steam-turbine generators since 1884. They generate terawatts of reliable power and run 24/7 for years. But "the falling price of wind and solar generators has distracted us from the external costs of trying to shape [wind and solar] into an energy source we can count on."
As I said: these things take time. Oh, I can well imagine renewables becoming "affordable" in the near future because of bounteous subsidies (not that India and China care; heck, if I were them, I'd sign any treaty put in front of me and keep burning coal).
Except subsidies don't change the laws of physics. All those wind and photovoltaic farms will require an equally large number of base load power plants (if not nuclear, then burning fossil fuels well into the next century) to mitigate the storage problems. Which we'll merrily pretend don't exist.
The carbon equation won't change one iota, but at the very least we can all feel better about ourselves.
When referencing the Space Race, remember that the chief architect of the Saturn V booster was Wernher von Braun, who'd launched 5200 V-2 liquid-fuel rockets during the 1940s. His designs were in large part based on Robert Goddard's groundbreaking research in the 1920s.
Japan Railways and its predecessors had started buying up rights-of-way for the Shinkansen thirty years before it debuted in 1964 (the war having put the original plans on hold). The route itself followed the centuries-old Tokaido Road.
These things take time. Unlike Jean-Luc Picard, no modern, democratic government can "Make it so" by merely ordering it. Even authoritarian regimes are finding it tough these days to rule by decree.
California is still a democracy. A messy one. The LA Times recently reported: "Finding a route into the Los Angeles Basin for the California bullet train is proving far more difficult than it seemed a year ago, as opposition is surging in wealthy and working-class communities alike."
Phase 1 of California High-Speed Rail project is supposed to be completed by 2029. Chances of Phase 1 getting done on time: zero. Chances of it never being finished: high. Discussing the various obstacles to the routes currently under debate, Steve Sailer concludes:
Theoretically, High Speed Rail could follow the existing tracks west through Simi Valley to Santa Barbara--I've taken the slow train to Santa Barbara. But nobody can conceive of the zillionaires of Santa Barbara allowing High Speed Rail to roar through Montecito, so that idea never comes up.
Even if we could nationalize all the beautiful back yards and ocean front vistas keeping such projects at bay, there's still the problem of actually building the thing. Or as Elon Musk would prefer, a whole bunch of things, explains Will Boisvert in "The Grid Will Not Be Disrupted."
Does all the messianic talk of battery-powered "disruption" and solar triumphalism stack up? Hardly. For all their ballyhooed price reductions, Tesla batteries are still too unreliable and expensive to come even within hyping distance of neither a reliable power supply, nor an off-grid revolution.
To get down to brass tacks:
 |
| (Click to enlarge.) |
For that much money, Boisvert points out, you could build enough AP1000 nuclear power plants to completely decarbonize Germany's electrical supply. Germany presently gets 75 percent of its electrical power from fossil fuel sources. That's measurably higher than the U.S. (67 percent).
France gets eight (8!) percent of its electrical power from fossil fuels. Nuclear accounts for 77 percent.
Before Fukushima, Japan generated 30 percent of its electrical power from nuclear; it's now close to zero, the difference being made up by oil, gas, and coal. Unlike Germany, Japan intends to restart its nuclear plants. Like Germany, in the meantime, it's increasingly relying on coal.
We've been building steam-turbine generators since 1884. They generate terawatts of reliable power and run 24/7 for years. But "the falling price of wind and solar generators has distracted us from the external costs of trying to shape [wind and solar] into an energy source we can count on."
As I said: these things take time. Oh, I can well imagine renewables becoming "affordable" in the near future because of bounteous subsidies (not that India and China care; heck, if I were them, I'd sign any treaty put in front of me and keep burning coal).
Except subsidies don't change the laws of physics. All those wind and photovoltaic farms will require an equally large number of base load power plants (if not nuclear, then burning fossil fuels well into the next century) to mitigate the storage problems. Which we'll merrily pretend don't exist.
The carbon equation won't change one iota, but at the very least we can all feel better about ourselves.
Labels: economics, environmentalism, japan, politics, technology, tohoku earthquake
March 16, 2015
Walk on water
When I was growing up, the space race competed with underwater sea adventures for gorgeous photo spreads in National Geographic (which nobody read for the articles). Jacques Cousteau was as big a star as the astronauts and took prettier pictures.
As with Stanley Kubrick's space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, everybody knew that we were going to be living in cities at the bottom of the ocean any day now (because, you know, population).
Alas, by the time we made it to the Moon, real space exploration had grown ho-hum (sans white-knuckle disasters like Apollo 13). Living in space turns out to be pretty inconvenient. And mostly good for making cool YouTube videos.
The same goes for living under water. Somewhere along the evolutionary path, we homo sapiens got rid of gills, and good riddance.
But as it turns out, millions of people are living at the bottom of the ocean. The trick, you see, is first to raise the bottom of the ocean to sea level. That makes it a lot easier.
Over the past century, almost one hundred square miles of Tokyo Bay have been "reclaimed." I lived for a year in a housing project on reclaimed land in Osaka Bay, also home to Kansai International Airport, built entirely on a man-made island.
In Japan, it's actually more economically, politically, and environmentally efficient to carve up a mountain and dump it into the ocean than to move in the opposite direction, or push all urban development everywhere down to the water's edge.
The Tohoku earthquake has taken land reclamation in a whole new level. It's been four years since. The rubble has been removed, leaving behind empty fields and vacant lots where towns once stood. The question is how to prevent the "next time."
On 11 March 2011, 250 miles of coastline shifted up to eight feet eastward and dropped over two feet. Most harbor seawalls failed. Entire fishing villages were washed away. Fukushima Daiichi was swamped, its backup generators destroyed.
It soon became obvious that building sea walls able to defend against any possible tsunami was a fool's errand. And if built, the high walls would turn the place into a prison (which remains a problem even with the sea walls that are being built).
As a result, two basic approaches are being taken: 1) relocating retail and residential communities further inland; 2) a combination of sea walls and raising the ground level (click to enlarge).
Following the earthquake, parts of many coastal towns ended up underwater at high tide (and people complain about their mortgages being "underwater"). A good part of what was Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, will rise forty feet.
This once quaint fishing village now looks like a science fiction movie set: a forest of massive conveyor belts moving 20,000 cubic meters of soil a day. If you're looking for "shovel-ready projects," the shovels don't get any bigger than this.
Elaine Kurtenbach describes the government-industry complex that has been churning along now for half a century:
Rikuzentakata won't be going to the mountain; the mountain is coming to Rikuzentakata. Literally.
The Book of Isaiah sums up the process very well:
As with Stanley Kubrick's space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, everybody knew that we were going to be living in cities at the bottom of the ocean any day now (because, you know, population).
 |
| As useless as the ISS (and more dangerous) but at least cheaper. |
Alas, by the time we made it to the Moon, real space exploration had grown ho-hum (sans white-knuckle disasters like Apollo 13). Living in space turns out to be pretty inconvenient. And mostly good for making cool YouTube videos.
The same goes for living under water. Somewhere along the evolutionary path, we homo sapiens got rid of gills, and good riddance.
But as it turns out, millions of people are living at the bottom of the ocean. The trick, you see, is first to raise the bottom of the ocean to sea level. That makes it a lot easier.
Over the past century, almost one hundred square miles of Tokyo Bay have been "reclaimed." I lived for a year in a housing project on reclaimed land in Osaka Bay, also home to Kansai International Airport, built entirely on a man-made island.
In Japan, it's actually more economically, politically, and environmentally efficient to carve up a mountain and dump it into the ocean than to move in the opposite direction, or push all urban development everywhere down to the water's edge.
The Tohoku earthquake has taken land reclamation in a whole new level. It's been four years since. The rubble has been removed, leaving behind empty fields and vacant lots where towns once stood. The question is how to prevent the "next time."
On 11 March 2011, 250 miles of coastline shifted up to eight feet eastward and dropped over two feet. Most harbor seawalls failed. Entire fishing villages were washed away. Fukushima Daiichi was swamped, its backup generators destroyed.
It soon became obvious that building sea walls able to defend against any possible tsunami was a fool's errand. And if built, the high walls would turn the place into a prison (which remains a problem even with the sea walls that are being built).
As a result, two basic approaches are being taken: 1) relocating retail and residential communities further inland; 2) a combination of sea walls and raising the ground level (click to enlarge).
 |
| Moving inland and higher up (courtesy Japan Guide). |
Following the earthquake, parts of many coastal towns ended up underwater at high tide (and people complain about their mortgages being "underwater"). A good part of what was Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, will rise forty feet.
 |
| Another way to stand on higher ground (courtesy Japan Guide). |
This once quaint fishing village now looks like a science fiction movie set: a forest of massive conveyor belts moving 20,000 cubic meters of soil a day. If you're looking for "shovel-ready projects," the shovels don't get any bigger than this.
Elaine Kurtenbach describes the government-industry complex that has been churning along now for half a century:
Pouring concrete for public works is a staple strategy for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its backers in big business and construction, and local officials tend to go along with such plans.
Rikuzentakata won't be going to the mountain; the mountain is coming to Rikuzentakata. Literally.
 |
| Making the mountains low (courtesy Japan Guide). |
The Book of Isaiah sums up the process very well:
Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
Labels: economics, environmentalism, geography, geology, japan, science, space, tech history, technology, tohoku earthquake
February 16, 2015
Techno-orientalism
Annie Manion has argued that popular culture, specifically anime, has surpassed business (economic) interests in motivating students to study Japanese. Moreover, popular culture serves as a kind of cultural "loss-leader," encouraging consumption of more "wholesome" fare:
In the conclusion to her master's thesis, Manion describes the reluctance in western academic circles to accept anime as a "legitimate" example of Japanese culture as a reflection of "techno-orientalism," which she defines as a "certain discourse concerning Japan that seems unable to reconcile an image of Japan as traditional with the image of Japan as a modern economic power."
This is a highly useful observation, though the "orientalist" label overly complicates the argument. Rather, the underlying ideology revealed here derives from what I call "neo-creationism," the near-universal idea, especially beloved on the academic left, that there existed a point in time when All Was Good, but from which we have since fallen like Adam and Eve.
Kiku Day sums up this mindset in her review of Lost in Translation (2003):
Or as Milton titled his epic poem on the subject: Paradise Lost.
This belief motivates the Holy Grail-like quest for the Edenic past and Rousseau's Noble Savage (in a primeval rainforest near you). It is as pronounced in environmentalism as it is in orthodox religious movements. It looks back to the past, to a Camelot, when, Douglas Adams writes, "Men were men, women were women and fuzzy blue creatures from Alpha Centuri were fuzzy blue creatures from Alpha Centuri."
Academics who make a career of this nostalgia conveniently find these Edens within their particular academic specialties. And bully for them. There is much value in remembering and preserving the past, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves how lucky we are not to be living there anymore.
But the past is not a This Old House project that can be updated with all the comforts of modern living while preserving the "original" look. The past is the past because our ancestors left it there, and more often than not, good riddance to it.
The added irony is that the modernity seen as so inimical to the past is in fact its best hope of preservation.
Only wealthy, modern, first-world countries can afford to take environmentalism seriously, and can afford to pay people to care about how people were living centuries ago. And can afford to produce (and sit around and watch) shows like Antiques Roadshow (I prefer Salvage Dawgs).
Hence, the place to find the well-preserved artifacts of Chinese history and culture is in one of the world's most technological, post-modern societies is Taiwan, not Mainland China, whose communist government had no use for the past during its many Great Leaps Forward.
Evolution didn't stop when homo sapiens stood up and took a bow. Both speciation and extinction inexorably continue. Culture and language change and evolve with equally remorseless momentum. We know this in our bones even if we deny it with our rhetoric. For if there were indeed a unique and privileged past, we could single it out, pack it off to a museum, and dispense with everything else.
But knowing that there isn't induces a pack-rat mentality that instructs us to scamper around saving everything just in case it might come in useful one day.
The fact is that people who like anime, depending on their exposure to Japanese culture, tend to like many aspects of Japanese culture, from popular to traditional, as well, and develop at some point either the desire to learn Japanese or visit Japan.
In the conclusion to her master's thesis, Manion describes the reluctance in western academic circles to accept anime as a "legitimate" example of Japanese culture as a reflection of "techno-orientalism," which she defines as a "certain discourse concerning Japan that seems unable to reconcile an image of Japan as traditional with the image of Japan as a modern economic power."
There is on the one hand "exotic" Japan, characterized by "aestheticism, eroticism and idealization," and on the other "alien" Japan, which in the past was associated with "a dehumanized martial culture." But now, thanks to the technological advances and economic strength Japan has gained in the last few decades, has come to be associated with technology and business.
Some scholars, such as Alex Kerr and Donald Richie, directly exhibit a techno-orientalist view of Japan, portraying the advent of modernity and/or technology as slowly destroying or replacing traditional Japan. This basic idea permeates the popular understanding of Japan[.]
This is a highly useful observation, though the "orientalist" label overly complicates the argument. Rather, the underlying ideology revealed here derives from what I call "neo-creationism," the near-universal idea, especially beloved on the academic left, that there existed a point in time when All Was Good, but from which we have since fallen like Adam and Eve.
Kiku Day sums up this mindset in her review of Lost in Translation (2003):
[Ancient Japan] is depicted approvingly, though ancient traditions have very little to do with the contemporary Japanese. The "good Japan," according to this director, is Buddhist monks chanting, ancient temples, flower arrangement; meanwhile she portrays contemporary Japanese as ridiculous people who have lost contact with their own culture.
Or as Milton titled his epic poem on the subject: Paradise Lost.
This belief motivates the Holy Grail-like quest for the Edenic past and Rousseau's Noble Savage (in a primeval rainforest near you). It is as pronounced in environmentalism as it is in orthodox religious movements. It looks back to the past, to a Camelot, when, Douglas Adams writes, "Men were men, women were women and fuzzy blue creatures from Alpha Centuri were fuzzy blue creatures from Alpha Centuri."
Academics who make a career of this nostalgia conveniently find these Edens within their particular academic specialties. And bully for them. There is much value in remembering and preserving the past, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves how lucky we are not to be living there anymore.
But the past is not a This Old House project that can be updated with all the comforts of modern living while preserving the "original" look. The past is the past because our ancestors left it there, and more often than not, good riddance to it.
The added irony is that the modernity seen as so inimical to the past is in fact its best hope of preservation.
Only wealthy, modern, first-world countries can afford to take environmentalism seriously, and can afford to pay people to care about how people were living centuries ago. And can afford to produce (and sit around and watch) shows like Antiques Roadshow (I prefer Salvage Dawgs).
Hence, the place to find the well-preserved artifacts of Chinese history and culture is in one of the world's most technological, post-modern societies is Taiwan, not Mainland China, whose communist government had no use for the past during its many Great Leaps Forward.
Evolution didn't stop when homo sapiens stood up and took a bow. Both speciation and extinction inexorably continue. Culture and language change and evolve with equally remorseless momentum. We know this in our bones even if we deny it with our rhetoric. For if there were indeed a unique and privileged past, we could single it out, pack it off to a museum, and dispense with everything else.
But knowing that there isn't induces a pack-rat mentality that instructs us to scamper around saving everything just in case it might come in useful one day.
Labels: anime, environmentalism, history, japan, japanese culture, politics, social studies
November 05, 2012
Much ado
As I've noted before, I'm wary of the apocalyptic mindset. Once the province of the religious right, Matt Ridley recently documented in Wired magazine how it's been thoroughly embraced by the secular left. Doomsday economics is currently all the rage, with "fiscal cliffs" and monetary meltdowns in Europe and Japan, and the like.
In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, archeologists pointed to the numerous stone markers found in the coastal foothills of Japan, warning future generations not to build permanent dwellings below that elevation. Warnings that were forgotten in a generation or two. So much for learning from history. And yet Japan remains with us.
And so we gamely muddle on. As Michael Wood points out in The Story of England, many towns and cities across Europe took centuries to recover their pre-Black Death populations. And yet not only did they do so, but in the process relegated that cataclysmic event to the stuff of entertaining PBS documentaries.
Mother Nature could squash us like bugs. It's our job to scurry out of the way of her big feet like cockroaches. Which we've gotten very good at over the past 10,000 years of human civilization. If nothing else, human beings are the masters of muddling through. The Greeks will, the Japanese will. And so will the American voting public.
Regardless of what happens tomorrow. I'll just be glad when it's over. Though I can't complain too much. One advantage of living in a solidly Republican state like Utah is being spared most of the electioneering hubbub.
Only the newly-created 4th district is a close race, as it includes a big chunk of Salt Lake City and its liberal (!) enclaves. I switch the channel every time an ad from either side comes on the air. I can't imagine what it'd be like to live in a state like Ohio, where the voters are evenly split.
The local punditry has concluded that veteran Jim Matheson erred in switching from the 2nd to the 4th. He expected to run against a bland Republican newbie. Instead, Mia Love currently has even odds of riding Romney's coattails to Washington and becoming the first Republican African-Haitian-American woman in Congress. Change!
In the 3rd district, where I live, Chaffetz is leading his challenger 68 percent to 15 percent. Nobody wastes money campaigning with polls like that, for which I am very grateful.
One of my ideas for saving the Electoral College would be a quasi-parlimentary system that allocated Electoral College votes according to each House district. Winning the House would (usually but not necessarily) win the presidency. Of course, that would turn contests like Utah's 4th into scorched earth battlefields.
So, maybe not. In any case, on November 7th, the proper reaction to whatever happens on November 6th is to shrug and continue muddling through.
In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, archeologists pointed to the numerous stone markers found in the coastal foothills of Japan, warning future generations not to build permanent dwellings below that elevation. Warnings that were forgotten in a generation or two. So much for learning from history. And yet Japan remains with us.
And so we gamely muddle on. As Michael Wood points out in The Story of England, many towns and cities across Europe took centuries to recover their pre-Black Death populations. And yet not only did they do so, but in the process relegated that cataclysmic event to the stuff of entertaining PBS documentaries.
Mother Nature could squash us like bugs. It's our job to scurry out of the way of her big feet like cockroaches. Which we've gotten very good at over the past 10,000 years of human civilization. If nothing else, human beings are the masters of muddling through. The Greeks will, the Japanese will. And so will the American voting public.
Regardless of what happens tomorrow. I'll just be glad when it's over. Though I can't complain too much. One advantage of living in a solidly Republican state like Utah is being spared most of the electioneering hubbub.
Only the newly-created 4th district is a close race, as it includes a big chunk of Salt Lake City and its liberal (!) enclaves. I switch the channel every time an ad from either side comes on the air. I can't imagine what it'd be like to live in a state like Ohio, where the voters are evenly split.
The local punditry has concluded that veteran Jim Matheson erred in switching from the 2nd to the 4th. He expected to run against a bland Republican newbie. Instead, Mia Love currently has even odds of riding Romney's coattails to Washington and becoming the first Republican African-Haitian-American woman in Congress. Change!
In the 3rd district, where I live, Chaffetz is leading his challenger 68 percent to 15 percent. Nobody wastes money campaigning with polls like that, for which I am very grateful.
One of my ideas for saving the Electoral College would be a quasi-parlimentary system that allocated Electoral College votes according to each House district. Winning the House would (usually but not necessarily) win the presidency. Of course, that would turn contests like Utah's 4th into scorched earth battlefields.
So, maybe not. In any case, on November 7th, the proper reaction to whatever happens on November 6th is to shrug and continue muddling through.
Labels: annoying stuff, deep thoughts, economics, environmentalism, politics
August 27, 2012
Build it and they won't come
During Japan's real estate bubble (that popped more than decade before the bust on this side of the Pacific, again proving that all we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history), real estate speculators poured millions into one lost cause after another.
Full of faith that dancing Keynesian sugar plum fairies could resurrect any flailing local economy, it was almost as if rat holes were dug so more money could be poured down them. At least the housing bubble in the U.S. resulted in houses getting built that people actually lived in.
Part of the blame can perhaps be traced back to the Joban Hawaiian Center, which opened in 1966 in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture. The wild idea of turning a shuttered mining town into a resort destination was wildly successful and inspired a very cute movie, Hula Girls.
The 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi disasters shut it down for a year, during which time its dancing troupes went on tour. It reopened in February to great fanfare. (In any case, it sure doesn't hurt having a few dozen very attractive hula dancing girls on hand.)
Alas, another tried and true rule of human nature is that exceptions prove the rule that, because they are exceptional, exceptions don't prove anything. Most similarly-inspired swing-for-the-fences attempts since at reviving Japan's withering exurban economies have failed.
Perhaps the craziest rat hole of them all was the Kashiwazaki "Turkish Culture Village." You didn't know that what the world needed was a Turkish Culture Village in the middle of rural Japan? Neither, as it turned out, did the Japanese, who stayed away in droves.
The worst of three bad ideas, the Niigata "Russia Village" and "Gulliver's Kingdom" being the other two (the latter could plausible look good on paper), the Kashiwazaki Turkish Culture Village, as Spike Japan explains in the following beauty of a single sentence paragraph,
Seeing is believing, so I direct you to Spike Japan's two-part illustrated exploration of this economic disaster here and here (and its head-scratching but actual connection to the local nuclear power plant).
And then the next time some well-meaning politician or crony capitalist promises that just a few more billion dollars sucked out of the public purse will "turn this baby around," think back upon these examples.
Full of faith that dancing Keynesian sugar plum fairies could resurrect any flailing local economy, it was almost as if rat holes were dug so more money could be poured down them. At least the housing bubble in the U.S. resulted in houses getting built that people actually lived in.
Part of the blame can perhaps be traced back to the Joban Hawaiian Center, which opened in 1966 in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture. The wild idea of turning a shuttered mining town into a resort destination was wildly successful and inspired a very cute movie, Hula Girls.
The 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi disasters shut it down for a year, during which time its dancing troupes went on tour. It reopened in February to great fanfare. (In any case, it sure doesn't hurt having a few dozen very attractive hula dancing girls on hand.)
Alas, another tried and true rule of human nature is that exceptions prove the rule that, because they are exceptional, exceptions don't prove anything. Most similarly-inspired swing-for-the-fences attempts since at reviving Japan's withering exurban economies have failed.
Perhaps the craziest rat hole of them all was the Kashiwazaki "Turkish Culture Village." You didn't know that what the world needed was a Turkish Culture Village in the middle of rural Japan? Neither, as it turned out, did the Japanese, who stayed away in droves.
The worst of three bad ideas, the Niigata "Russia Village" and "Gulliver's Kingdom" being the other two (the latter could plausible look good on paper), the Kashiwazaki Turkish Culture Village, as Spike Japan explains in the following beauty of a single sentence paragraph,
was a demented brainchild--perhaps the most demented brainchild, although the competition is brutal--of a man fiercely philoprogenitive of demented brainchildren, Ryutaro Omori (1928-2004), the boss of Niigata Chuo Bank, a second-tier regional bank that had only graduated from mutual savings & loan to orthodox bank status in 1989, a man so tone-deaf to the clanging cymbals of the economic orchestra that he failed to hear that the Bubble had burst and, brimful with all the champagne optimism of which our species is so effortlessly capable, decided in the early 1990s to finance not one, but three theme parks, inspired by his Golden Ring concept, in which he pictured a great golden ring laid across the map of central Honshu and in which the theme parks, running in an arc from Niigata in the northwest to Mount Fuji in the southeast, would sparkle like diamonds on a ring.
Seeing is believing, so I direct you to Spike Japan's two-part illustrated exploration of this economic disaster here and here (and its head-scratching but actual connection to the local nuclear power plant).
And then the next time some well-meaning politician or crony capitalist promises that just a few more billion dollars sucked out of the public purse will "turn this baby around," think back upon these examples.
Labels: economics, environmentalism, japan, politics
August 23, 2012
Havahart
My previous post raises the question of why we had a bunch of live animal traps sitting around the house. Specifically, these were Havahart traps, and I see that the basic design has changed little over the past four decades or so.
Our suburban street in upstate New York abutted several acres of swampy forest, undeveloped because of the high water table. I've always thought it'd be amusing--as a "performance art" sort of thing--to campaign to have the EPA label it a "wetlands."
Then again, I'm old enough to remember when a "wetlands" was a mosquito hazard responsible people filled in and turned into something useful.
Anyway, I thought it'd be cool to "domesticate" the critters scurrying around our little patch of wilderness. It took one frantic squirrel racing through the house to learn that wild animals are not cute and cuddly like in Disney cartoons.
Trap one in a small, enclosed area and it basically wants to rip your face off. Thinking back on it now, I'm a little surprised I didn't lose any digits or catch rabies while on that particular learning curve.
The traps were next employed when some of my brother's white mice escaped. Considering the curious ways many of them croaked, I'm convinced the pet store picked them up cheap from a defunct pharmaceutical project.
Though this wasn't a Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH caper (great book). Somebody left the top off the converted aquarium.
A perfect job for a predatory cat, but Cat #1 couldn't have cared less. It was like asking Hemingway to shoot ducks in a pond. This cat preferred to catch animals in the wild and proudly deposit the gory trophies on the front porch.
Incidentally, Cat #2 couldn't be bothered to even chase wild things. It eventually ended up in the bishop's barn. Our bishop was a true, exurbia-dwelling gentleman farmer who kept a couple of cows and chickens and the like.
The bishop's attitude towards cats was the same as Rudyard Kipling's: "If you don't work you die." Cat #2 sized up the options and recovered its Darwinian instincts pretty darn fast.
After that, the traps came to the rescue of General Electric. Then the squirrels and chipmunks burrowing into my father's vegetable garden were targeted (following Cat #1's demise). I recall the blueberry bushes being a favorite attraction.
They didn't get the liquid nitrogen treatment. Rather, we'd carry them to the other side of the woods and let them go, hoping they didn't have a good sense of direction.
Then again, I'm old enough to remember when a "wetlands" was a mosquito hazard responsible people filled in and turned into something useful.
Anyway, I thought it'd be cool to "domesticate" the critters scurrying around our little patch of wilderness. It took one frantic squirrel racing through the house to learn that wild animals are not cute and cuddly like in Disney cartoons.
Trap one in a small, enclosed area and it basically wants to rip your face off. Thinking back on it now, I'm a little surprised I didn't lose any digits or catch rabies while on that particular learning curve.
The traps were next employed when some of my brother's white mice escaped. Considering the curious ways many of them croaked, I'm convinced the pet store picked them up cheap from a defunct pharmaceutical project.
Though this wasn't a Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH caper (great book). Somebody left the top off the converted aquarium.
A perfect job for a predatory cat, but Cat #1 couldn't have cared less. It was like asking Hemingway to shoot ducks in a pond. This cat preferred to catch animals in the wild and proudly deposit the gory trophies on the front porch.
Incidentally, Cat #2 couldn't be bothered to even chase wild things. It eventually ended up in the bishop's barn. Our bishop was a true, exurbia-dwelling gentleman farmer who kept a couple of cows and chickens and the like.
The bishop's attitude towards cats was the same as Rudyard Kipling's: "If you don't work you die." Cat #2 sized up the options and recovered its Darwinian instincts pretty darn fast.
After that, the traps came to the rescue of General Electric. Then the squirrels and chipmunks burrowing into my father's vegetable garden were targeted (following Cat #1's demise). I recall the blueberry bushes being a favorite attraction.
They didn't get the liquid nitrogen treatment. Rather, we'd carry them to the other side of the woods and let them go, hoping they didn't have a good sense of direction.
Labels: autobiography, cats, environmentalism, science
April 09, 2012
Revenge of the trees
As a recent NHK documentary pointed out, one of the ironies of modern Japan is that it's more heavily forested now than at any time in the past 400 years, despite having four times the population density of California.
A burst of castle building during the Warring States period of the late 16th century, and the fuel and construction demands of oil-starved Japan during and after WWII, led to widespread deforestation and destructive hillside erosion.
The Tokugawa shogunate launched reclamation efforts in the 17th century, and significantly pruned the number of allowed castles. Similar programs following the devastation of WWII met with remarkable success.
Then foreign lumber imports priced domestic producers out of the market. Now untended tree farms, mostly comprised of Japanese cedar, are the problem.
The unharvested trees crowd out themselves and other species, causing the erosion they were supposed to prevent. The whole country is allergic to cedar pollen, which descends from the mountains like a horror movie monster.
And we all thought Japan was going to be destroyed by Godzilla. Maybe the trees will save Japan by giving Godzilla a bad case of hay fever.
A burst of castle building during the Warring States period of the late 16th century, and the fuel and construction demands of oil-starved Japan during and after WWII, led to widespread deforestation and destructive hillside erosion.
The Tokugawa shogunate launched reclamation efforts in the 17th century, and significantly pruned the number of allowed castles. Similar programs following the devastation of WWII met with remarkable success.
Then foreign lumber imports priced domestic producers out of the market. Now untended tree farms, mostly comprised of Japanese cedar, are the problem.
The unharvested trees crowd out themselves and other species, causing the erosion they were supposed to prevent. The whole country is allergic to cedar pollen, which descends from the mountains like a horror movie monster.
 |
| Courtesy Andy Heatwole |
And we all thought Japan was going to be destroyed by Godzilla. Maybe the trees will save Japan by giving Godzilla a bad case of hay fever.
Labels: environmentalism, japan, serpent notes, serpent of time
January 02, 2012
The Second Coming went
Maybe you missed it, but the Second Coming didn't happen last year. Remember that Harold Camping guy? He had it scheduled for May 21, and when that didn't pan out, October 21. Oops! As with all unprovable negatives, Reverend Camping should have doubled down on the proposition:
Incidentally, Camping's "apology" is a beautiful piece of spin. First he blames God, and then he blames the model. Yep, Dispensationalists (along with astrologers) were avid computer modelers (these days using actual computers) long before anybody was talking about "climate change."
I suggests that all future presidential and Supreme Court candidates adopt that template (just swap in "Constitution" or any debatable chunk of legislation for "Bible") into their PR repertoire.
On the heels of the world-not-ending came the concern trolling (does the mass media do anything better?) about the world's population reaching seven billion. Another reminder of how much Dispensationalism and the latest environmentalist cause du jour have in common.
Just like global warming, "overpopulation" once triggered exactly the same apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom, and calls for a dictator of the world to save us from ourselves. Okay, nobody says it out loud now, but that's what it'd take to make any of these utopian schemes work.
By "work," I mean "address real problems," unless, again, an authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it ends up running things. Again, note how both religious and secular utopians pin their hopes on an angry, almighty god to save us from ourselves.
Except that the biggest authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it isn't exactly on board.
As P.J. O'Rourke puts it, "There are 1.3 billion people in China and they all want a Buick." Stopping continental drift would be easier than convincing China to cut its carbon emissions in a meaningful way (rather than nod solemnly until the earnest environmentalists leave the room).
We're all going to be doomed by global warming until the globe warms and doom doesn't arrive. But take heart. At that point, some other looming environmental catastrophe will rouse us to action, and the end of the world will again threaten our existence in equally exciting ways.
Besides, everybody knows the world is really going to end in December.
"Hey, how do we know Jesus didn't return? He could be currently holed up in an undisclosed location. Like Japan!"
Incidentally, Camping's "apology" is a beautiful piece of spin. First he blames God, and then he blames the model. Yep, Dispensationalists (along with astrologers) were avid computer modelers (these days using actual computers) long before anybody was talking about "climate change."
"Amongst other things I have been checking my notes more carefully than ever. And I do find that there is other language in the Bible that we still have to look at very carefully and will impinge upon this question very definitely."
I suggests that all future presidential and Supreme Court candidates adopt that template (just swap in "Constitution" or any debatable chunk of legislation for "Bible") into their PR repertoire.
On the heels of the world-not-ending came the concern trolling (does the mass media do anything better?) about the world's population reaching seven billion. Another reminder of how much Dispensationalism and the latest environmentalist cause du jour have in common.
Just like global warming, "overpopulation" once triggered exactly the same apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom, and calls for a dictator of the world to save us from ourselves. Okay, nobody says it out loud now, but that's what it'd take to make any of these utopian schemes work.
By "work," I mean "address real problems," unless, again, an authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it ends up running things. Again, note how both religious and secular utopians pin their hopes on an angry, almighty god to save us from ourselves.
Except that the biggest authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it isn't exactly on board.
As P.J. O'Rourke puts it, "There are 1.3 billion people in China and they all want a Buick." Stopping continental drift would be easier than convincing China to cut its carbon emissions in a meaningful way (rather than nod solemnly until the earnest environmentalists leave the room).
We're all going to be doomed by global warming until the globe warms and doom doesn't arrive. But take heart. At that point, some other looming environmental catastrophe will rouse us to action, and the end of the world will again threaten our existence in equally exciting ways.
Besides, everybody knows the world is really going to end in December.
Related posts
Apocalypse not now
The world ends (and I feel fine)
Labels: apocalyptic fiction, environmentalism, religion
December 19, 2011
Let there be incandescents
When it comes to consumer sovereignty, I'm a full-blooded libertarian. Governments only make things worse trying to control consumer preferences. In this case, it's even a matter of principle. I only use two incandescents: the reading light next to my computer and one ganged with a CFL that runs off the motion sensor in the kitchen (it require a low impedance load).
Though in the spirit of full disclosure, I should also point out that my apartment has electric baseboard heat and an electric water heater, which makes my light bulb choices utterly inconsequential in terms of power savings.
Let's consider the incandescent the government didn't have to regulate out of existence: the television tube. A television tube is a big vacuum tube, and the filament is basically a low voltage incandescent bulb. Vacuum tubes operate according to the "Edison Effect," observed by the inventor of the light bulb (it took another twenty years for Fleming and De Forest to put it to practical use).
To be sure, a vacuum tube only draws as much power as a Christmas tree light, though it pumps out a fair amount of heat. An old-fashioned television tube could severely burn you at one end and electrocute you at the other (the anode is charged to 25,000 volts). All-tube televisions and radios sported hefty transformers and sucked down a fair amount of current. You could heat a room with one.
Junction diodes and transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and were replaced by integrated circuits. The cathode ray tube was the last to go, but has been supplanted by plasma and LCD screens. I noticed a few years ago that tube televisions had disappeared from the shelves of the local Walmart, a good indication that a technology has saturated every economic stratum of the consumer market.
None of these steps had to be "mandated" by law. They occurred when they made technological, economic, and aesthetic sense to both consumers and manufacturers.
Related posts
Lights out
Old wine, new bottles
The last picture tube show
Speaking truth to (gasoline) power
Labels: environmentalism, politics, science
November 07, 2011
Just stand there
One of the most destructive political impulses in the world today is the conviction that every identifiable problem must be addressed by having the government, at the highest levels, do "something" about it: invade it or regulate it or outlaw it or subsidize it or bail it out.
Bryan Caplan calls this the "Activist's fallacy":
As Northern Japan found out, you can spend billions of dollars building a "solution" to a known problem, only to see it completely fail. And in the process, exacerbate the original problem by creating a false sense of security.
NHK has been conducting interviews with survivors from these costal town (an abridged version was broadcast on PBS). One thing that becomes clear is that people who could see the coastline got away, while those behind the immense sea walls--that turned these villages into medieval walled fortresses--often had no idea what was going on.
TEPCO was certain the sea walls surrounding Fukushima Dai-ichi couldn't be breached. The situation might have turned out completely differently had they built the plant with the assumption that a tsunami would flood the plant. The solution in that case--more redundancy in the backup power systems--would have been far more effective.
A Nightly Business Report (October 04, 2011) story from the fishing village of Kesennuma represents the kind of thinking that's too often missing when the gears of government begin to grind. Instead of fighting nature, the new Kesennuma wants to forgo the massive sea walls.
As correspondent Lucy Craft points out, "Even huge tsunami waves couldn't topple most of the concrete-reinforced shops in downtown Kesennuma and floodwaters rose no higher than the second story."
As it has turned out since, some large structures failed because they paradoxically became boyant. In other words, the basement levels and first floors of coastal buildings should be designed to "fail" and flood, not remain watertight and trap air.
This is another good example of drawing the line--between a storm surge and a tsunami--when it comes to confronting nature. And we really need to start drawing those lines. Rather than acting, Congress needs to learn when to sit on its hands. Don't do anything, just stand there!
Don't (re)build cities below sea level. Don't build suburbs in flood plains. Don't reinsure people who build seaside houses in the path of hurricanes. Quit lining every waterway with levees. We don't live in freaking Holland! (Oh, and don't give home and student loans to people who can't possibly ever repay them.)
Whether a bank or a flood wall or that latest Keynsian extravaganza, if it's "too big to fail," then the faster it fails the better. We'll pick up the pieces (the smaller they are, the easier to pick up), learn from our mistakes, learn to live with what we can't actually change or realistically prevent, and move on.
Bryan Caplan calls this the "Activist's fallacy":
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.
As Northern Japan found out, you can spend billions of dollars building a "solution" to a known problem, only to see it completely fail. And in the process, exacerbate the original problem by creating a false sense of security.
NHK has been conducting interviews with survivors from these costal town (an abridged version was broadcast on PBS). One thing that becomes clear is that people who could see the coastline got away, while those behind the immense sea walls--that turned these villages into medieval walled fortresses--often had no idea what was going on.
TEPCO was certain the sea walls surrounding Fukushima Dai-ichi couldn't be breached. The situation might have turned out completely differently had they built the plant with the assumption that a tsunami would flood the plant. The solution in that case--more redundancy in the backup power systems--would have been far more effective.
A Nightly Business Report (October 04, 2011) story from the fishing village of Kesennuma represents the kind of thinking that's too often missing when the gears of government begin to grind. Instead of fighting nature, the new Kesennuma wants to forgo the massive sea walls.
Especially because we want to draw more tourists, building a wall to block off the sea is out of the question. Tsunami are a natural phenomenon. There's one major tsunami every few centuries. So you insure yourself and figure out how to make it safe to live and work around them.
As correspondent Lucy Craft points out, "Even huge tsunami waves couldn't topple most of the concrete-reinforced shops in downtown Kesennuma and floodwaters rose no higher than the second story."
As it has turned out since, some large structures failed because they paradoxically became boyant. In other words, the basement levels and first floors of coastal buildings should be designed to "fail" and flood, not remain watertight and trap air.
This is another good example of drawing the line--between a storm surge and a tsunami--when it comes to confronting nature. And we really need to start drawing those lines. Rather than acting, Congress needs to learn when to sit on its hands. Don't do anything, just stand there!
Don't (re)build cities below sea level. Don't build suburbs in flood plains. Don't reinsure people who build seaside houses in the path of hurricanes. Quit lining every waterway with levees. We don't live in freaking Holland! (Oh, and don't give home and student loans to people who can't possibly ever repay them.)
Whether a bank or a flood wall or that latest Keynsian extravaganza, if it's "too big to fail," then the faster it fails the better. We'll pick up the pieces (the smaller they are, the easier to pick up), learn from our mistakes, learn to live with what we can't actually change or realistically prevent, and move on.
Related posts
Apocalypse not now
The Sendai earthquake
Labels: earthquake, environmentalism, geology, politics, science, tohoku earthquake
April 04, 2011
Fukushima fallout
Japan's most immediate infrastructure challenge (thinking in stark economic terms) is power generation. A friend in Japan relates that when asked what they need the most, the people in the Tohoku region (around Sendai) say, "Send electricity."
The Fukushima's forty-year-old reactors were scheduled for retirement, so once things stabilize, Tokyo Electric will probably install gas turbine generators. The one meme the talking heads have all agreed upon at this point is that the "nuclear renaissance" has been stopped in its tracks.
Personally, I'm a nuclear agnostic. In the U.S., natural gas is the best solution in the near and medium term (heck, we could export it to Japan), though coal will continue to dominate (most of Utah's power comes from coal) because it's so cheap and plentiful.
But a country like Japan has no real alternatives to nuclear if it wants anything approaching energy independence.
Even if solar and wind could the surmount the storage, transmission, and baseload power problems, Japan's geography and weather make them less than viable. Japan would be ideal for geothermal--if the huge gap between theory and application could be bridged and scaled up.
The current state of the art nuclear designs eliminates most of the problems revealed at Fukushima. If we abandoned every initially risky technology instead of improving it, most comforts of modern life would not exist, starting with the automobile.
We happily live with enormous risks when we really want something. Forty years ago, cars were death traps. In the U.S., traffic fatalities per million miles have dropped by more than half in that time. But cars still are death traps, the direct cause of 1.2 million deaths around the globe every year.
Chernobyl included, the mining and burning of fossil fuels causes more direct and indirect deaths than nuclear by several orders of magnitude. The psychological problem is that, like airplanes, the risk is concentrated, and the ability of the individual to control his own fate greatly diminished.
I know the feeling. I'm not afraid of flying, but I wouldn't live in the River Bottoms. When my mom was growing up, the River Bottoms north of Provo was rural farmland, so-called because when it flooded in the spring, the land was often covered by the Provo River.
The completion of Deer Creek Reservoir in 1941 put an end to the flooding, and now the River Bottoms is home to upscale McMansions and office parks.
The odds of Deer Creek Dam failing in my lifetime is about zero (though dams elsewhere have failed with horrendous results). But given the choice, I'd rather not have to think about it. That's the human animal for you: existential dread has become our postmodern fear of the dark.
As I said, I'm not emotionally vested in this fight, other than disapproving in general of political/industrial "solutions" at either end of the green spectrum that only survive through massive government subsidies. A government subsidy won't change the laws of physics or economics.
So the following prediction is made in the abstract: environmentalists who seize this opportunity vilify nuclear do so at their own peril. They will be admitting that the whole carbon emissions business is not that important, not apocalyptic, and the least frightening of their fears.
Nuclear paranoia will drag down all the overpriced and heavily subsidized "green" solutions with it. When Germany steps back from nuclear, count on it sneaking Eastern European coal and Russian gas through the back door. Ah, I love the smell of green hypocrisy in the morning.
A case in point is a proposed nuclear power plant near Green River, Utah. Emery County is already home to five coal-fired plants. It's where most of the electrical power in the state comes from. How badly to environmentalists want to replace them? Not that badly.
For me, at the northern end of Utah County, Green River (also known as "the middle of nowhere") is well out of my existential dread zone. So I sincerely don't care. But then I also don't lose one wink of sleep worrying about atmospheric carbon dioxide or "climate change" either.
You know people are serious about solving a problem when the solution switches from pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals (if Uncle Sam would only give them a big enough chunk of money or twist enough arms) to what's actually sitting on the table in front of them.
This is another example of how much environmentalists and religious dispensationalists have in common. However firm their belief in the cataclysmic end of the world, very few (thankfully) act on those beliefs, other than to fervently proclaim them. Because by faith are we saved.
The Fukushima's forty-year-old reactors were scheduled for retirement, so once things stabilize, Tokyo Electric will probably install gas turbine generators. The one meme the talking heads have all agreed upon at this point is that the "nuclear renaissance" has been stopped in its tracks.
Personally, I'm a nuclear agnostic. In the U.S., natural gas is the best solution in the near and medium term (heck, we could export it to Japan), though coal will continue to dominate (most of Utah's power comes from coal) because it's so cheap and plentiful.
But a country like Japan has no real alternatives to nuclear if it wants anything approaching energy independence.
Even if solar and wind could the surmount the storage, transmission, and baseload power problems, Japan's geography and weather make them less than viable. Japan would be ideal for geothermal--if the huge gap between theory and application could be bridged and scaled up.
The current state of the art nuclear designs eliminates most of the problems revealed at Fukushima. If we abandoned every initially risky technology instead of improving it, most comforts of modern life would not exist, starting with the automobile.
We happily live with enormous risks when we really want something. Forty years ago, cars were death traps. In the U.S., traffic fatalities per million miles have dropped by more than half in that time. But cars still are death traps, the direct cause of 1.2 million deaths around the globe every year.
Chernobyl included, the mining and burning of fossil fuels causes more direct and indirect deaths than nuclear by several orders of magnitude. The psychological problem is that, like airplanes, the risk is concentrated, and the ability of the individual to control his own fate greatly diminished.
I know the feeling. I'm not afraid of flying, but I wouldn't live in the River Bottoms. When my mom was growing up, the River Bottoms north of Provo was rural farmland, so-called because when it flooded in the spring, the land was often covered by the Provo River.
The completion of Deer Creek Reservoir in 1941 put an end to the flooding, and now the River Bottoms is home to upscale McMansions and office parks.
The odds of Deer Creek Dam failing in my lifetime is about zero (though dams elsewhere have failed with horrendous results). But given the choice, I'd rather not have to think about it. That's the human animal for you: existential dread has become our postmodern fear of the dark.
As I said, I'm not emotionally vested in this fight, other than disapproving in general of political/industrial "solutions" at either end of the green spectrum that only survive through massive government subsidies. A government subsidy won't change the laws of physics or economics.
So the following prediction is made in the abstract: environmentalists who seize this opportunity vilify nuclear do so at their own peril. They will be admitting that the whole carbon emissions business is not that important, not apocalyptic, and the least frightening of their fears.
Nuclear paranoia will drag down all the overpriced and heavily subsidized "green" solutions with it. When Germany steps back from nuclear, count on it sneaking Eastern European coal and Russian gas through the back door. Ah, I love the smell of green hypocrisy in the morning.
A case in point is a proposed nuclear power plant near Green River, Utah. Emery County is already home to five coal-fired plants. It's where most of the electrical power in the state comes from. How badly to environmentalists want to replace them? Not that badly.
For me, at the northern end of Utah County, Green River (also known as "the middle of nowhere") is well out of my existential dread zone. So I sincerely don't care. But then I also don't lose one wink of sleep worrying about atmospheric carbon dioxide or "climate change" either.
You know people are serious about solving a problem when the solution switches from pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals (if Uncle Sam would only give them a big enough chunk of money or twist enough arms) to what's actually sitting on the table in front of them.
This is another example of how much environmentalists and religious dispensationalists have in common. However firm their belief in the cataclysmic end of the world, very few (thankfully) act on those beliefs, other than to fervently proclaim them. Because by faith are we saved.
Related posts
Sendai earthquake
Apocalypse not now
Not an apocalyptic thriller
Labels: earthquake, environmentalism, geology, japan, politics, science, tohoku earthquake
November 11, 2010
Old wine, new bottles
The real problem with CFLs--besides exposing the hypocrisy of environmentalists who have suddenly discovered the wisdom of regulating toxic materials at threshold, rather than detectable, amounts (though that might be a benefit)--is that their wide adoption encourages political busybodies to imagine that mandating a technology can make it an economic reality.
Rather, you can "mandate" something after it's been proved economically feasible. Fluorescent lighting technology has been economically feasible for fifty years.
A good example of a mandated failure is Japan's analog HDTV system, lauded as forward-thinking in the 1980s when everything Japan did was proof that whatever the U.S. was doing sucked (though that was true about the automobile industry). It ended up an expensive and wasteful white elephant. The U.S. implemented digital HDTV a year ahead of Japan.
There's a lot to be said for not rushing to embrace cutting-edge technologies. The CFL is based on quite old technology that now thrives through improvements in materials science and manufacturing (and, yes, regulatory capture). When I lived in Japan thirty years ago, the not-so-compact CFL was ubiquitous--because it was economical, not because it was "green."
Electricity in Japan is twice as expensive as the U.S. (and even more when factored as a percentage of real income in 1980; if you thought the oil shocks of the early 1970s were shocking in the U.S., they were heart-stopping in Japan). The same goes for automobile fuel efficiency. An old but refined technology like diesel blows away ultra-modern hybrids in raw MPG.
The Japanese make and drive fuel-efficient cars because gas costs twice as much and the registration fees and taxes on large engines ("large" meaning over a paltry 1.6 liters) are ten times as much, not because of government mandates. In fact, higher CAFE standards lower the cost of driving. Making something cheaper does not encourage its conservation.
Over the last quarter century, total vehicle-miles-driven in the U.S. has climbed three times faster than population growth and twice as fast as auto registrations. The only things that temporarily flatten the curve are big honking increases in the price of gasoline and big honking recessions.
Politicians can't raise the price of gas or tax vehicles to levels that would change the behavior of their constituents in meaningful ways (and get reelected), so they tell tall tales that only apply to hypothetical worlds where nobody lives. We go along with the charade because it makes us feel good. It's a substitute for religion--though tithing would be cheaper.
Rather, you can "mandate" something after it's been proved economically feasible. Fluorescent lighting technology has been economically feasible for fifty years.
A good example of a mandated failure is Japan's analog HDTV system, lauded as forward-thinking in the 1980s when everything Japan did was proof that whatever the U.S. was doing sucked (though that was true about the automobile industry). It ended up an expensive and wasteful white elephant. The U.S. implemented digital HDTV a year ahead of Japan.
There's a lot to be said for not rushing to embrace cutting-edge technologies. The CFL is based on quite old technology that now thrives through improvements in materials science and manufacturing (and, yes, regulatory capture). When I lived in Japan thirty years ago, the not-so-compact CFL was ubiquitous--because it was economical, not because it was "green."
Electricity in Japan is twice as expensive as the U.S. (and even more when factored as a percentage of real income in 1980; if you thought the oil shocks of the early 1970s were shocking in the U.S., they were heart-stopping in Japan). The same goes for automobile fuel efficiency. An old but refined technology like diesel blows away ultra-modern hybrids in raw MPG.
The Japanese make and drive fuel-efficient cars because gas costs twice as much and the registration fees and taxes on large engines ("large" meaning over a paltry 1.6 liters) are ten times as much, not because of government mandates. In fact, higher CAFE standards lower the cost of driving. Making something cheaper does not encourage its conservation.
Over the last quarter century, total vehicle-miles-driven in the U.S. has climbed three times faster than population growth and twice as fast as auto registrations. The only things that temporarily flatten the curve are big honking increases in the price of gasoline and big honking recessions.
Politicians can't raise the price of gas or tax vehicles to levels that would change the behavior of their constituents in meaningful ways (and get reelected), so they tell tall tales that only apply to hypothetical worlds where nobody lives. We go along with the charade because it makes us feel good. It's a substitute for religion--though tithing would be cheaper.
Labels: environmentalism, politics, science, taxes, technology
November 08, 2010
Lights out
They've gotten to the good enough and cheap enough stage that I use quite a few. I just picked up some 100 watt-equivalents for a buck a piece at Home Depot.
Make cars more efficient and we drive them more. Make light cheap and we'll produce more light (that sounds very New Age). My kitchen nook doesn't have windows, so rather than turning the light off, turning it back on, turning it off--oh, screw it, leave it on. They're CFLs!
Except that CFLs don't like the heat generated in enclosed fixtures, which is what my kitchen has. Before long the CFL starts having an existential crisis: Am I on? Am I off? Should I come on right away or take a while? I'm alive! No, I'm dead. I'm alive! Argh, I'm dyyiinngg.
I end up replacing them with incandescents, but those nickles and dimes start to add up. Because I'm lazy and like gadgets, I bought myself some economizing behavior in a box: a Heath Zenith SL-6105 motion sensor, $13 online at Walmart (that was the price a week ago).
Installation is the same as a standard wall switch, using wire nuts. Considering the price, I'll trust the electronics but not so much the mechanical parts. The timer screw, for example, has to be adjusted very gingerly to avoid the always-on or 5 second test mode setting.
Most of the complaints on Amazon about the SL-6105 is that it doesn't work with CFLs. That's because its solid-state relay trickles a high-impedance current that conventional bulbs ground, but is just enough to charge an electronic ballast, causing the CFL to strobe.
A electromechanical relay would fix this, but the paradox of integrated electronics is that old-fashioned mechanical devices like relays are bulky and expensive. The easier solution is to pair an incandescent with a CFL. Or just screw in a cheap incandescent.
Hey, who cares about conservation? I've got a motion sensor!
Labels: appliances, environmentalism, science, technology
July 19, 2010
You can't "jump" an EV
The Nissan Leaf is getting plenty of positive press these days. But when it comes to the pragmatic demands of the American market, the technology of the Chevrolet Volt trumps that of pure electrics.
The Volt miniaturizes the diesel-electric system that's been powering locomotives for more than half a century (minus the batteries). The internal combustion engine provides zero torque at zero RPM (hence the clutch), while an electric motor provides infinite torque at zero RPM.
Very useful when accelerating massively heavy objects from a dead stop.
But this is why the inherent advantages of hybrid systems mostly disappear at cruising speed. However, I suspect the costs associated with the Volt's steeper engineering curve (including battery R&D) will make the Nissan Leaf the more affordable pure "green" buy in the near future.
Even with the Leaf, though, that green will cost you a whole lot of green. Lexus prices for a Corolla ride.
The all-electric is a simpler engineering challenge. But it has a big problem. You're not going to drive one across Nebraska. Or, in my case, barely to the airport and back. If all-electric vehicles become as popular as the advocates hope, what happens when they run out of juice?
I've drained my ordinary lead-acid car battery twice by leaving things on. Two batteries have failed (one exploded). The last one had enough life left that I walked to the auto shop and borrowed a portable jump starter like this cute unit. It had just enough oomph to start my car.
I've run the tank dry once. I walked across the street to a gas station and bought a gallon of gas. I had a motorcycle in college. It had a reserve tank you could access by flipping a valve under the main tank. Of course, once you've used it, you can't not know it's there.
But the energy density of gasoline is so high that a motorcycle can go fifty miles just on the reserve. This is why (a la Seinfeld) when your car's gas gauge reads "empty," you've got a big safety margin.
An electrical metering system, on the other hand, reports exactly how much power is left. One "fail-safe" technology is a low-current "limp home" mode that kicks in when the battery is drained. But how many people want to spend a couple of hours covering the last twenty miles?
And even if you have a fast-charge battery, the laws of thermodynamics say that tow trucks will have to haul around huge, industrial-sized generators (diesel-powered). A 49 KW fast charger for the Leaf will set you back $16,200. Except the typical house can handle only half that load.
By "fast charge," we're talking 15-30 minutes, instead of 8 hours plugged into your home outlet. In the brave new EV world, you'll need an insurance policy just for the "roadside assistance." The Volt has a gas-powered battery charger under the hood--hence the high cost but great range.
Alas, the main obstacle here--the laws of physics--cannot be overcome by throwing lots of money at it. Recall that before the Manhattan and Apollo projects began, the underlying scientific challenges--the liquid fuel engine (1926) and nuclear fission (1941)--had already been solved.
Back during the waning days of Apollo (yes, I was alive back then), we were assured that fusion was just a few billion dollars away from becoming a reality. Forty years on, the basic scientific problem has still not been surmounted, let alone all the engineering hurdles if it was.
Lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of .72 MJ/kg. A conventional lead acid battery has an energy density of .14 MJ/kg. So production EV batteries are only five time more efficient than a technology invented in 1859. Gasoline has 62 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.
A lithium-ion battery pack that would give an EV the same range as the average gas-powered sedan would weight twice as much as the car itself.
So it makes a whole lot more sense to just use up all the natural gas and oil first, then synthesize butanol (less corrosive than ethanol and can be piped). Or diesel from algae, if that ever works. Butanol has an energy density of 37 MJ/kg, only slightly less than gasoline and LNG.
But if you really want to go electric (and carbon dioxide upsets you), first build lots of nuclear power plants. One pound of enriched uranium-235 has the same energy density as a million gallons of gasoline. The U.S. has tons of that too.
While we're at it, Japan produces energy efficient cars not because of CAFE standards, but because gasoline in Japan costs $5/gallon, and gas guzzlers are taxed within an inch of their lives. And yet the streets of Japan are not crowded with EVs. Electricity has high costs too.
The low power densities of solar and wind in particular will require huge electrical grids, which depend on the mining and smelting of millions of tons of aluminum, copper, and iron ore, not to mention importing the lithium and rare earths for the generators, PV panels and batteries.
For the uninitiated, this is what a copper mine looks like:
A more realistic solution is the "greenest" and is the fastest growing in China and Japan: electric bikes. But their utility is due to high population densities, which are the product of high relative energy and land costs. And they are an order of magnitude more dangerous.
I'm not sure where you'd put the car seat. Or the groceries. Or how you drive one when there's two feet of snow on the ground and it's 20 below outside. (Or for that matter, how far a Leaf battery will last stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam with the air conditioner on full.)
Ironically, strict CAFE standards have the opposite effect: they lower the unit-cost of gasoline and encourage sprawl, just as houses get bigger when insulation and HVAC systems improve. We'd rather spend energy savings on making our lives more comfortable, not on saving the planet.
That's no less true of two billion Indians and Chinese. If you want to "save" the planet, you'll have to get a handle on human nature first.
The Volt miniaturizes the diesel-electric system that's been powering locomotives for more than half a century (minus the batteries). The internal combustion engine provides zero torque at zero RPM (hence the clutch), while an electric motor provides infinite torque at zero RPM.
Very useful when accelerating massively heavy objects from a dead stop.
But this is why the inherent advantages of hybrid systems mostly disappear at cruising speed. However, I suspect the costs associated with the Volt's steeper engineering curve (including battery R&D) will make the Nissan Leaf the more affordable pure "green" buy in the near future.
Even with the Leaf, though, that green will cost you a whole lot of green. Lexus prices for a Corolla ride.
The all-electric is a simpler engineering challenge. But it has a big problem. You're not going to drive one across Nebraska. Or, in my case, barely to the airport and back. If all-electric vehicles become as popular as the advocates hope, what happens when they run out of juice?
I've drained my ordinary lead-acid car battery twice by leaving things on. Two batteries have failed (one exploded). The last one had enough life left that I walked to the auto shop and borrowed a portable jump starter like this cute unit. It had just enough oomph to start my car.I've run the tank dry once. I walked across the street to a gas station and bought a gallon of gas. I had a motorcycle in college. It had a reserve tank you could access by flipping a valve under the main tank. Of course, once you've used it, you can't not know it's there.
But the energy density of gasoline is so high that a motorcycle can go fifty miles just on the reserve. This is why (a la Seinfeld) when your car's gas gauge reads "empty," you've got a big safety margin.
An electrical metering system, on the other hand, reports exactly how much power is left. One "fail-safe" technology is a low-current "limp home" mode that kicks in when the battery is drained. But how many people want to spend a couple of hours covering the last twenty miles?
And even if you have a fast-charge battery, the laws of thermodynamics say that tow trucks will have to haul around huge, industrial-sized generators (diesel-powered). A 49 KW fast charger for the Leaf will set you back $16,200. Except the typical house can handle only half that load.
By "fast charge," we're talking 15-30 minutes, instead of 8 hours plugged into your home outlet. In the brave new EV world, you'll need an insurance policy just for the "roadside assistance." The Volt has a gas-powered battery charger under the hood--hence the high cost but great range.
Alas, the main obstacle here--the laws of physics--cannot be overcome by throwing lots of money at it. Recall that before the Manhattan and Apollo projects began, the underlying scientific challenges--the liquid fuel engine (1926) and nuclear fission (1941)--had already been solved.
Back during the waning days of Apollo (yes, I was alive back then), we were assured that fusion was just a few billion dollars away from becoming a reality. Forty years on, the basic scientific problem has still not been surmounted, let alone all the engineering hurdles if it was.
Lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of .72 MJ/kg. A conventional lead acid battery has an energy density of .14 MJ/kg. So production EV batteries are only five time more efficient than a technology invented in 1859. Gasoline has 62 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.
A lithium-ion battery pack that would give an EV the same range as the average gas-powered sedan would weight twice as much as the car itself.
So it makes a whole lot more sense to just use up all the natural gas and oil first, then synthesize butanol (less corrosive than ethanol and can be piped). Or diesel from algae, if that ever works. Butanol has an energy density of 37 MJ/kg, only slightly less than gasoline and LNG.
But if you really want to go electric (and carbon dioxide upsets you), first build lots of nuclear power plants. One pound of enriched uranium-235 has the same energy density as a million gallons of gasoline. The U.S. has tons of that too.
While we're at it, Japan produces energy efficient cars not because of CAFE standards, but because gasoline in Japan costs $5/gallon, and gas guzzlers are taxed within an inch of their lives. And yet the streets of Japan are not crowded with EVs. Electricity has high costs too.
The low power densities of solar and wind in particular will require huge electrical grids, which depend on the mining and smelting of millions of tons of aluminum, copper, and iron ore, not to mention importing the lithium and rare earths for the generators, PV panels and batteries.
For the uninitiated, this is what a copper mine looks like:
A more realistic solution is the "greenest" and is the fastest growing in China and Japan: electric bikes. But their utility is due to high population densities, which are the product of high relative energy and land costs. And they are an order of magnitude more dangerous.
I'm not sure where you'd put the car seat. Or the groceries. Or how you drive one when there's two feet of snow on the ground and it's 20 below outside. (Or for that matter, how far a Leaf battery will last stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam with the air conditioner on full.)
Ironically, strict CAFE standards have the opposite effect: they lower the unit-cost of gasoline and encourage sprawl, just as houses get bigger when insulation and HVAC systems improve. We'd rather spend energy savings on making our lives more comfortable, not on saving the planet.
That's no less true of two billion Indians and Chinese. If you want to "save" the planet, you'll have to get a handle on human nature first.
Labels: environmentalism, science, technology
April 08, 2010
"Mononoke" vs. "Avatar"
On a more serious cinematic note, Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke makes for a better critical comparison to Avatar. Like Jake in Avatar, Ashitaka journeys into a magical forest protected by a willful princess. The archenemy is Lady Eboshi, who needs the lumber and iron ore in the forest for her foundry.
The difference is, Hayao Miyazaki doesn't reduce things to simplistic, black and white terms. He let Lady Eboshi compellingly argue that the gains from economic development accrue to the most dispossessed. The boars defending the forest are boorish and ugly, and tend to turn themselves into cannon fodder.
And when the modern goes up against the primitive, no matter how pristine and spiritual it may be, the primitive will—sooner or later, rightly or wrongly—get its butt kicked. As Kate says about the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, "Yeah, sure, Winnie the Pooh versus lasers. My vote is on the lasers."
Another good Ghibli comparison is Pom Poko, in which a bunch of tanuki (racoons) band together to kick the humans out of the Tama New Town housing development. The effort fails for the same reasons such efforts usually fail: zeal can't compensate for incompetence, and little furry animals can't compete with bulldozers.
In Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki has Lady Eboshi presciently declare that, "When the forest has been cleared and wolves wiped out, this place will be the richest land in the world." For a time, it literally was. Miyazaki is not denying this fact, nor his own good fortune at being able to share in it. He is saying, "Yes, but."
Yes, economic progress is good, but there are costs. Yes, the environment is harmed, but we benefit enormously. And having seized those benefits for ourselves, it is awfully self-serving to pull an Augustine and pray, "Give everybody else chastity and temperance now, and thank God we didn't have it then."
We're like the tanuki, who shout and protest loudly, only to discover in the end that golf courses make for nice habitats. There's a great scene at the beginning of Pom Poko, reminiscent of Life of Brian, where the tanuki get sidetracked talking about all the great human stuff (television, garbage cans) they can't live without.
The difference is, Hayao Miyazaki doesn't reduce things to simplistic, black and white terms. He let Lady Eboshi compellingly argue that the gains from economic development accrue to the most dispossessed. The boars defending the forest are boorish and ugly, and tend to turn themselves into cannon fodder.
And when the modern goes up against the primitive, no matter how pristine and spiritual it may be, the primitive will—sooner or later, rightly or wrongly—get its butt kicked. As Kate says about the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, "Yeah, sure, Winnie the Pooh versus lasers. My vote is on the lasers."
Another good Ghibli comparison is Pom Poko, in which a bunch of tanuki (racoons) band together to kick the humans out of the Tama New Town housing development. The effort fails for the same reasons such efforts usually fail: zeal can't compensate for incompetence, and little furry animals can't compete with bulldozers.
In Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki has Lady Eboshi presciently declare that, "When the forest has been cleared and wolves wiped out, this place will be the richest land in the world." For a time, it literally was. Miyazaki is not denying this fact, nor his own good fortune at being able to share in it. He is saying, "Yes, but."
Yes, economic progress is good, but there are costs. Yes, the environment is harmed, but we benefit enormously. And having seized those benefits for ourselves, it is awfully self-serving to pull an Augustine and pray, "Give everybody else chastity and temperance now, and thank God we didn't have it then."
We're like the tanuki, who shout and protest loudly, only to discover in the end that golf courses make for nice habitats. There's a great scene at the beginning of Pom Poko, reminiscent of Life of Brian, where the tanuki get sidetracked talking about all the great human stuff (television, garbage cans) they can't live without.
Labels: criticism, environmentalism, kate, movies, studio ghibli
April 06, 2010
Secret unreleased "Avatar" trailers
February 18, 2010
The world ends (and I feel fine)
This year's NHK historical docudrama is about Ryouma Sakamoto, Japan's most brilliant and charismatic 19th century revolutionary (in the traditional sense of being open to new ideas and then seeking pragmatic ways of implementing them).As the program vividly illustrates, the arrival of Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" was no less shocking to both the populace and the powers-that-be than an invasion from outer space.
Two centuries earlier, Japan could boast of having one of the most advanced societies in the world. But in 1853, Perry's steam-powered warships confronted the Japanese with technology beyond anything they could imagine.
A mere fifteen years later, after ruling uncontested for 250 years, the Tokugawa regime was crushed and swept from power in a civil war that lasted a matter of months.
Add to that regular earthquakes, volcanoes, and typhoons, the occasional suicidal end-time cult, two atomic bombs and losing a world war, and it's no surprise that the apocalypse has become part of the national consciousness.
Japanese F&SF writers love apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic plots. And perhaps perversely, Japanese love being entertained by them. They come in all shades and varieties. To name a few of the sub-genres off the top of my head:
- Japan sinks into the Pacific (Japan Sinks).
- Japan (or parts thereof) is destroyed by rampaging monsters. Or robots. Or aliens. The Gozilla series covered all of these at some point.
- A secret conspiracy destroys Japan (or parts thereof) to keep an even bigger conspiracy secret (Vexille). Attempts to explain said conspiracy usually result in much tangled logic and head scratching in the denouement (Evangelion).
- More specifically, Tokyo gets destroyed. Repeatedly (Akira).
- Instead of destroying Tokyo, aliens park the whole city in a different dimension (RahXephon).
- The oceans rise, threatening to inundate most of metropolitan Japan (Patlabor). Toss in a mutant sea monster (Patlabor: W-13).
- Earthquakes, with both natural and supernatural causes and effects, wreak havoc (Demon City Shinjuku).
- The planet is rendered unlivable by external astronomical events, like the Moon exploding (Cowboy Bebop).
The apocalyptic event is often an excuse to wreck the current social order (Burst Angel). Japan is such an orderly society that if you want to inject a Mad Max element—or postulate that everybody's as well-armed as Americans—you need an upheaval first to make it believable.
The cheesy but fun (and even poignant at times) anime version of Witchblade combines a Tokyo-wrecking conspiracy with supernatural earthquakes, rising seas, and law & order so gone to hell that superhero gunfights (among barely-dressed babes) can break out at any moment.
The best defeat of extraterrestrial invaders occurs in Magic User's Club, wherein the heroine turns the alien spaceship into a giant flowering cherry tree.
My favorite post-apocalyptic series is the Yokohama Shopping Log (not available in English). A combination of natural disasters and rising oceans has destroyed most of the "post" in postmodern Japan. But all things considered, life didn't turn out half bad.
Think of Little House on the Prairie with modern plumbing and an android as the protagonist. Seriously, reading this manga is better than an antidepressant. Maybe the world ought to end on a more regular basis.
Related posts
The Big Bad
Apocalypse not now
Demon City libertarianism
Oh yeah, we're baaad
Labels: anime, anime lists, apocalyptic fiction, demon city, environmentalism, geology, japan, movies, pop culture, robots, sakamoto, superhero, ww2
February 15, 2010
Apocalypse not now
The world is always ending and never will.
That is, until the sun goes nova, a black hole swallows up the Earth, or a nearby star collapses in a gamma ray event that turns us all into irradiated food. Since we can't prevent any of those things from happening, there's no point worrying about them (asteroids we can actually do something about).
But we love imagining that "it's all over (almost)," largely because Sunday School is boring. Plus that "love your neighbor" stuff isn't as much fun as hoping the son of a bitch fries when the big one hits. Thus every screaming headline is treated as evidence that the big, bad Damoclean Sword is about to go into free-fall.
Yet as Stephen Pinker and Jared Diamond have pointed out, during the 20th century, even including WWII, a member of the human species had a lower chance of suffering a violent death than at any time else during recorded history. We mistake news of bad things with the incidence of bad things happening.
What we're mostly witnessing presently is the inevitable shifting of the momentum of history from one part of the globe to another. Having previously identified and invested ourselves with the ascension of the West, this decline arouses much angst. But in the long view, it's another day at the office.
The "West" is aging so fast (along with China, Japan, and most of the developed world) that any call to arms in order to usher in Armageddon would first send us scurrying for our walkers.
Doomsayers used to warn us that when the nuclear apocalypse came (assuming, improbably, that all those long-dormant missiles would obediently fire when the button was pressed), only the cockroaches would survive. Human beings are more resilient than cockroaches and thrive in far more extreme environments.
It's unfortunate that Chinese history during the Three Kingdoms period and Japanese history during the Warring States period isn't a regular part of the high school curriculum. It would impress upon students how resilient the human animal is under extreme duress.
During the Three Kingdoms period, attrition rates in many areas exceeded 50 percent of the entire population. That'd be like the population of the U.S. dropping from 300 million to 150 million in a single generation. Now China is our principal loan officer.
True, it took a few centuries, but it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even the end of Chinese civilization. The history books simply marked the beginning of a new dynasty.
These same historical periods saw great social change and advances in technology and culture (ditto the aftermath of the Black Death). Give the human race a challenge and after a bit of Darwinist pruning it'll rise to it. This end-of-days stuff makes for entertaining movies. But in real life it's a cop-out.
It's hard to match the presumptuousness of a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears teenagers selling the secret sauce to save our souls. Except that they're dim bulbs compared to to the blinding arrogance of the secular evangelists who claim they are going to save the whole bloody planet.
The new religion of catastrophic environmentalism has also embraced the apocalypse, along with the fundamentalist's fear of change. But just as much worse changes have happened to human civilization in the past, much worst changes have happened to the planet itself than we're capable of inflicting.
And will happen in the future, regardless of anything we do or don't do. Planetary catastrophic change—earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, oceans rising and falling—is what the planet does normally. (The mean temperature of the North Slope of Alaska was once thirty degrees warmer than it is today.)
We've turned into roosters convinced the sun rises on our command. We're quite capable of fouling our own nests, but only in the sense that a horsefly fouls the windshield of a tractor-trailer cruising down the interstate. It's not like the tractor-trailer cares. A swish of the windshield wipers and its gone.
Let's keep in mind who's really in charge. There are more bacteria on earth—in mass and number—than all other living things combined. For that matter, there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the human body. The bacteria keep us around because we're convenient.
Our ultimate fate is to become compost. It is more comforting to believe that we're standing at the fulcrum of history, that like Archimedes we can move the Earth if given enough leverage (or "political activism"), rather than accommodating ourselves to whatever direction the Earth wishes to move in.
Except not that mundane, sausage-making politics. Or anything that requires any actual risk to life and limb. Just idealistically protest stuff and vilify those of different (political) faiths (the ones counting on you being "left behind"; it's apparently a very mutually-annihilating sentiment).
Merely declare your "awareness" of the situation and you are saved! (Wait, I forget, is that evangelicals or environmentalists?)
Making every conflict, every frustrated objective, every twist and turn in the course of geological and human events, into a Manichean contest of wills buys into the same fanciful thinking as the conspiracy gnostics who insist they're the only ones who really know what's going on (and then can't shut up about it).
It's a trap that teenagers easily fall into, what with all their "goth" posturings and dour convictions that nobody (let alone their parents or teachers) has ever suffered as much as them in the whole history of the world.
But teenagers grow out of it. Adult, middle-class Americans indulging in non-fiction apocalyptic fantasies are like twelve-year-olds gathered around the campfire telling ghost stories and scaring themselves for the giggly thrill of it, knowing that in the morning they'll be driving home to the suburbs.
That is, until the sun goes nova, a black hole swallows up the Earth, or a nearby star collapses in a gamma ray event that turns us all into irradiated food. Since we can't prevent any of those things from happening, there's no point worrying about them (asteroids we can actually do something about).
But we love imagining that "it's all over (almost)," largely because Sunday School is boring. Plus that "love your neighbor" stuff isn't as much fun as hoping the son of a bitch fries when the big one hits. Thus every screaming headline is treated as evidence that the big, bad Damoclean Sword is about to go into free-fall.
Yet as Stephen Pinker and Jared Diamond have pointed out, during the 20th century, even including WWII, a member of the human species had a lower chance of suffering a violent death than at any time else during recorded history. We mistake news of bad things with the incidence of bad things happening.
What we're mostly witnessing presently is the inevitable shifting of the momentum of history from one part of the globe to another. Having previously identified and invested ourselves with the ascension of the West, this decline arouses much angst. But in the long view, it's another day at the office.
The "West" is aging so fast (along with China, Japan, and most of the developed world) that any call to arms in order to usher in Armageddon would first send us scurrying for our walkers.
Doomsayers used to warn us that when the nuclear apocalypse came (assuming, improbably, that all those long-dormant missiles would obediently fire when the button was pressed), only the cockroaches would survive. Human beings are more resilient than cockroaches and thrive in far more extreme environments.
It's unfortunate that Chinese history during the Three Kingdoms period and Japanese history during the Warring States period isn't a regular part of the high school curriculum. It would impress upon students how resilient the human animal is under extreme duress.
During the Three Kingdoms period, attrition rates in many areas exceeded 50 percent of the entire population. That'd be like the population of the U.S. dropping from 300 million to 150 million in a single generation. Now China is our principal loan officer.
True, it took a few centuries, but it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even the end of Chinese civilization. The history books simply marked the beginning of a new dynasty.
These same historical periods saw great social change and advances in technology and culture (ditto the aftermath of the Black Death). Give the human race a challenge and after a bit of Darwinist pruning it'll rise to it. This end-of-days stuff makes for entertaining movies. But in real life it's a cop-out.
It's hard to match the presumptuousness of a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears teenagers selling the secret sauce to save our souls. Except that they're dim bulbs compared to to the blinding arrogance of the secular evangelists who claim they are going to save the whole bloody planet.
The new religion of catastrophic environmentalism has also embraced the apocalypse, along with the fundamentalist's fear of change. But just as much worse changes have happened to human civilization in the past, much worst changes have happened to the planet itself than we're capable of inflicting.
And will happen in the future, regardless of anything we do or don't do. Planetary catastrophic change—earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, oceans rising and falling—is what the planet does normally. (The mean temperature of the North Slope of Alaska was once thirty degrees warmer than it is today.)
We've turned into roosters convinced the sun rises on our command. We're quite capable of fouling our own nests, but only in the sense that a horsefly fouls the windshield of a tractor-trailer cruising down the interstate. It's not like the tractor-trailer cares. A swish of the windshield wipers and its gone.
Let's keep in mind who's really in charge. There are more bacteria on earth—in mass and number—than all other living things combined. For that matter, there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the human body. The bacteria keep us around because we're convenient.
Our ultimate fate is to become compost. It is more comforting to believe that we're standing at the fulcrum of history, that like Archimedes we can move the Earth if given enough leverage (or "political activism"), rather than accommodating ourselves to whatever direction the Earth wishes to move in.
Except not that mundane, sausage-making politics. Or anything that requires any actual risk to life and limb. Just idealistically protest stuff and vilify those of different (political) faiths (the ones counting on you being "left behind"; it's apparently a very mutually-annihilating sentiment).
Merely declare your "awareness" of the situation and you are saved! (Wait, I forget, is that evangelicals or environmentalists?)
An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through "awareness." Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it. This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges.
Making every conflict, every frustrated objective, every twist and turn in the course of geological and human events, into a Manichean contest of wills buys into the same fanciful thinking as the conspiracy gnostics who insist they're the only ones who really know what's going on (and then can't shut up about it).
It's a trap that teenagers easily fall into, what with all their "goth" posturings and dour convictions that nobody (let alone their parents or teachers) has ever suffered as much as them in the whole history of the world.
But teenagers grow out of it. Adult, middle-class Americans indulging in non-fiction apocalyptic fantasies are like twelve-year-olds gathered around the campfire telling ghost stories and scaring themselves for the giggly thrill of it, knowing that in the morning they'll be driving home to the suburbs.
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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, environmentalism, geology, history