What have we learned, if anything from the near meltdown at Fukushima?
The Germans learned something. They decided last week to close seven of its 17 nuclear plants. According to BBC, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that all reactors operational before 1980 would be taken offline, and safety checks carried out on the remaining plants.
Then there’s Russia. According to The New York Times, the Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely by selling reactors abroad, mostly to developing countries. That includes China and India — whose insatiable energy appetites are keeping them wedded to nuclear power.
But here’s the kicker. Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom, markets its reactors as safe — not despite Chernobyl, but because of it. Lessons learned and and all that jazz.
The safety pitch seems to be working. Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, himself flew to Belarus last week to sign the contract to build a plant in that country, worth $9 billion.
“I want to stress that we possess a whole arsenal of advanced technical resources to ensure stable, accident-free performance for nuclear plants,†Mr. Putin told journalists in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
What about us? Have we learned anything here at home? ‘Fraid not. According to Bloomberg, even as the administration reviews all U.S. reactors following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered radiation leaks from a crippled Japanese plant, Obama last week called nuclear power an “important part†of his energy agenda.
Obama’s 2012 budget calls for an additional $36 billion in U.S. loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants.
“The administration’s energy priorities are based solely on how best to build a 21st century, clean energy economy,†White House spokesman Clark Stevens said. “That policy is not about picking one energy source over another.â€
In other words, Americans who “hoped” Obama was somehow different are now painfully aware of the bill of goods they were sold in 2008. It’s business as usual in America and it will remain that way until we do something about it, and by doing something I don’t mean placing false hopes on a candidate. We, as citizens must do the heavy lifting, which begins with energy conservation. Nuclear supplies 20% of the nation’s power. The best way to minimize this insane threat is to reduce our power usage by 20% right now, today and everyday.
Host Courtenay Hameister’s conversation with Harvard-educated Rauch was, for me, the best part of the show. Rauch is an impressive man doing unbelievable work in Ashland. I’ve only been to one play in Ashland thus far, but I’m motivated to go back for many more. Rauch spoke eloquently about the need to support the arts and he’s right. Art creates culture. He also provided some perspective on the uniqueness of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which annually produces eleven plays on three stages during a season that lasts from February to October. OSF is the largest company of actors in the U.S. and Rauch reminded the audience that all classic plays were once new plays given birth in the nurturing environment of repertory theater. OSF is committed to the production of new plays under Rauch’s guidance and I’m excited to know that the power of live theater is alive and well in Southern Oregon (and that the ripples made there reach far out to other lands).
Here’s a look at Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 season:
To download past episodes of Live Wire! Radio, visit the show’s iTunes podcast catalog.
By the way, members of the audience are asked to submit haikus on pre-determined topics and the cast then chooses a handful of them to read aloud during the performance. Darby’s haiku was not chosen, but she’s got a talent for the short form.
Geek Love invites us
to hula hoops and freak shows
Please show me your tail
I did not turn a haiku on a given topic in to one of the designated haiku hotties, but maybe I can make up for it here.
Lucinda Williams’ new album, Blessed, has been out for two weeks. So there’s no excuse for you not to buy it and put it instantly into heavy rotation on your playback device of choice.
Martin Chilton, Digital Culture Editor at The Guardian is fully on board (if that means anything to you).
Although she has been performing for 37 years, she is still at the height of the song-writing prowess that prompted Time magazine to call her ‘America’s finest songwriter’.
The sad song “I Don’t Know How You’re Living” is about her brother, whom she admits she “hasn’t heard from in a long time”.
Bleak and haunting too is “Seeing Black” as she tries to make sense of the mind of a suicidal friend (the late songwriter Vic Chesnutt, who was recently the subject of an album of covers by The Cowboy Junkies called Demon).
Williams said: “Yeah, it was inspired by Vic. I should have said that instead of saying it was about him. It was inspired by his suicide, which happened during the time that I was writing. It was so sudden and shocking and stunning and sad . . . He had a wicked, wild sense of humor. And he had this sweetness about him.”
Elvis Costello, who sang a duet with Williams on 2008’s “Little Honey,’’ contributes searing guitar work on a handful of songs. Having admired his previous work in various genres, Williams chose Don Was to co-produce the album, and his touch is often “light and ethereal,” according to Boston.com.
The new Lost Highway album needs very little promotion, but the label produced a series of well-made Web videos anyway. Here’s one:
I’m starting a new email newsletter for paid subscribers. No, I have not gone mad, I’m merely inspired to pursue various strategies that pay me to write, edit and publish.
Why would you want to invite me into your inbox like this? And why would I bother to charge for the content and effort needed to create it?
My hope is you’ll invite me in and pay me to return again and again because you, like me, like to have a finger on the cultural pulse, a.k.a. the zeitgeist (and you want it served up in an easy-to-carry package that saves you time and the hassle of preparation).
As for the nerve it takes to charge you–even a token like my introductory rate of $1/month–I’m looking forward to the pressure the paid model creates. When you pay me, I owe you more and more kernels of meaning and wit. Simple as that.
My friend and personal ombudsman, Tom Asacker, advised me earlier this week to find what my audience on AdPulp.com is hungry for and feed them. We discussed some good ideas that are currently simmering before being plated. Perhaps I’ll create more paid newsletters that feed those hungers too, but I want to start here, with “Hungry for Gumbo,” because I’m more than a marketer who serves a highly defined audience hungry for one thing like steak, or fish, or whatever.
I’m a writer and I like gumbo, literally and figuratively.
Interestingly, the email format also lends itself to a more intimate relationship with readers. Email is digital content that can be shared/spread, but it’s provided in a private, one-on-one setting. In other words it can be a place for “loose talk,” in a way that a Web site with comments is not.
Here’s a video from Mayfield performing “Sometimes at Night” from her album, Tell Me live at the Kent State Folk Festival in her hometown of Kent, OH. The album, produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, is out now on Nonesuch Records.
I also like this “official video” from Nashville duo The Civil Wars:
According to Twangville, the harmonies between Joy Williams and John Paul White of The Civil Wars “have a dark sweetness to them that grows even darker as gothic-folk arrangements envelope them.”
Rich says he wants to go long, that he no longer wants to feel the strain of shortening his thoughts to column length. Okay, but I’m more interested in what leads a man to write a column in the first place. Rich shares his thoughts on the matter:
For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage.
I can relate, as I too like to “stimulate debate” and “look for narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.” That stage at present is full tilt. Japan’s nuclear plants are melting down; gas prices are on the rise at a time when Americans can least afford it; we’re waging two wars for Empire that we will not win; class warfare is spilling into the streets and state houses of the land; our drinking water is being poisoned by natural gas drilling; kids are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, and so on.
The kind of challenges we’re facing demand that we stand together to meet them. Will we?
Rich says it is foolhardy for an opinion writer to try to shape events. I don’t know. Someone’s got to shape events.
Meyer Wells in Seattle builds modern furniture from reclaimed urban trees. The Seattle Times and The New York Times have both profiled the company in recent months.
Although custom furniture builders are abundant in the region, Meyer Wells staked out a distinct territory: the big slab, furniture that bring the raw power of the environment indoors .
The company harvests local urban trees doomed by development, disease or storm damage, and turn them into custom furniture, each piece a distinct botanical narrative.
Meyer Wells has been profitable from the start and revenue has grown annually. There are now nine employees, and high-visibility clients like Starbucks and the University of Washington.
The company also diversified its holding with Green Tree Mill, which provides builders with sustainable wood products.
“I think our idealism is meeting with the demand to make buildings greener,†John Wells says.
Self-publishing is for wannabe writers. Right? Wrong.
Austin, Minnesota fantasy fiction writer, Amanda Hocking, sold over 650,000 eBooks in January alone. She’s the number one selling indie author on the Kindle and the Web is full of articles on her and how she’s proof that the publishing industry–like the music industry and the newspaper industry before it–is being blown to bits by the Internet.
With all the press attention she’s receiving, Hocking decided to address some of the speculation swirling around the story of her success.
Saying traditional publishing is dead right now is like declaring yourself the winner in the sixth inning of a baseball game when you have 2 points and the other team has 8 just because you scored all your points this inning, and they haven’t scored any since the first.
eBooks make up at best 20% of the market. Print books make up the other 80%. Traditional publishers still control the largest part of the market, and they will – for a long time, maybe forever.
Her Kindle eBooks range in price from $.99 to $2.99 on Amazon.com. The prices presents little risk for buyers, which helps to explain the incredible volume of units sold by Ms. Hocking. I have not yet read her work, so I can’t comment on its quality, but whatever the quality, she’s clearly appealing to a large group of readers. She’s also busting her butt to make it happen.
This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.
Speaking of marketing, Hocking, like so many authors today has invested in video as a promotional tool.
Pulitzer prize-wining journalist Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He’s also the author of Death of the Liberal Class and several other books.
I’ve been reading through some of his essays on TruthDig and finding that I generally agree with his assessments, but not with his recommended solutions, nor his alarmist tone.
Let’s take this passage on the 2012 election and how “the left” has nowhere to go:
Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope.
The inevitability of corporate slavery? Really? That’s the choice before the American people?
I totally agree that the Democratic Party is controlled by corporate interests. There’s really no debate there, as corporate lobbyists line the pockets of all lawmakers, not just the conservative ones.
Now, what do we do about it? Hedges wants people with core moral imperatives to lay their bodies on the line, and I’m sure there’s a place for that, but getting big money out of politics is the only way to shift the balance of power back to the people. If my voice is going to be equal the voice of Exxon-Mobile, then my contribution to candidates has to be equal, as well. Otherwise, Exxon-Mobile’s millions will be always be a million times more important.
I also question what Hedges and Nader mean by “the corporate state.” It’s too broad a statement, in my opinion. The great majority of Americans work for a corporation, and many of these corporations do great things for people. After all, corporations are nothing more than a group of people with a common commercial interest. It seems that the need to make dramatic statements to jar people from their sleepy stupor is more important to Hedges than being clear and accurate–a fact which strips some of the power away from his fiery rhetoric.
President Obama visited the Portland area on Friday. He used the opportunity to highlight an American company that’s big on innovation. He also said, “America has to out-build, and out-innovate, and out-educate and out-hustle the rest of the world.” That’s the path his administration hopes will help us “win the future.”
The President also made his weekly address to the nation from Intel’s campus in Hillsboro during his visit. Let’s listen.
Companies like Intel are proving that we can compete – that instead of just being a nation that buys what’s made overseas, we can make things in America and sell them around the globe. Winning this competition depends on the ingenuity and creativity of our private sector – which was on display in my visit today. But it’s also going to depend on what we do as a nation to make America the best place on earth to do business.
That last line is an interesting one to deliver in Oregon, a state that is widely regarded as being anti-business. Many articles have been written about the topic, but I think you can boil it down to the fact that Oregonians believe in regulating business. When you fail to regulate business, the greedy bastards take down your forests, foul your waterways and lop off the top of mountains for coal and other minerals. Ask someone from West Virginia what happens when you don’t regulate industry. Ask someone from Louisiana.
I like the loftiness of Obama’s stated goals. Hustle is an intangible, and it’s something we see in action everyday, especially in immigrant-owned small businesses. Maybe we can all tap our inner-immigrant and put a bit more hustle into our routines.
To out-innovate and out-build, we first must out-educate, and that costs money. Tax money, to be specific. Going to college today is an outrageous expense. If Obama is serious about his stated intentions, then he and his team need to wrestle away money wasted on corporate welfare and put that money into our schools and into students’ hands, so they can afford to attend.
I was pleased to learn last week that the administration’s new budget proposes to slash tax credits for the oil and gas industry, a move that will save $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2012 and a total of $46.2 billion during the next decade. Naturally, the gas and oil titans have the most powerful lobby in Washington, DC and those hired hands are now busy slapping backs and lining pockets up and down the halls of Congress to counter Obama’s cuts.
Does it not boggle your mind that the forces who make so much noise about social entitlements, fight to the death for corporate entitlements? It’s doublespeak and we the people need to know and reject doublespeak when we hear it. Republicans believe in small government is doublespeak. Small governments don’t fund imperialist wars. Small governments don’t build more prisons than schools. At the same time, I have plenty of complaints against the Democrats. Democrats are not the answer, you are the answer and I am the answer. We need a people-powered movement in these states.
Personally, I don’t care what your political stripes indicate, I care about what’s in your heart and in your mind. Is the promise of a better America one you’re willing to keep? If so, it’s time to believe in yourself and in your neighbors. It’s time to think on your feet, and time to dampen all the polar language and work together to advance our common cause. It’s not an abstract concept and there’s room for you in this solution. It may mean building a business or it may mean building houses for the poor. The point is find a way to contribute.
