http://yesterdayssalad.tumblr.com

It makes sense to me that the planet is heating up because you can measure heat. It’s not a stretch to say that what goes into the air is contributing to global warming, but I don’t want to be in the camp that says I know people in Northern Virginia will never see snow. At the end of the day, I think carbon pollution is worthy of being controlled, whether you believe in global warming or not. I do believe that all the CO2 gases, greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, and utility plants is not making us a healthier place, is not making our society better, and it’s coming at the expense of our national security and our economic prosperity. So put me in the camp that it’s worthy to clean up the air and make money doing so. This idea that carbon’s good for you. I want that debate. There’s a wing of our party who thinks carbon pollution is okay. I’m not in that wing.

And in response to the question, why is carbon dioxide bad?

“I just think it’s bad … the reason I don’t hang out in traffic jams and get out and suck up the wind is I think this crap is bad for you. We’ve had an increase in asthma cases, if you’ve ever been to Thailand stuck behind 400 motorcycles, it’s a lousy place to be. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist in my view to understand that the stuff floating in the Gulf , if you burn it doesn’t make it better for you. If you wouldn’t go swimming in this stuff, why would you burn it and want to breath it?

I cant parse it in the slightest. Maybe you theory types have some insight.

theriverjordan.tumblr.com repurposed it thusly:
“If reading Harry Potter was about learning how to live, then watching LOST was about learning how to die.”

now, i am not going to gush, nor will i enter into a spoiler-filled rant (though if you do not want to be spoiled, you should not even be on the internet, honestly).
all i want to say is this:

learning how to die was the entire point of the show. fuck all the science fiction. fuck all the mythology.
the theme of the show was about learning how to die.
sometimes it’s random. sometimes it’s heroic. it’s always final. whatever happens happens.
dying alone is something no one should endure. live together, die alone is now re-understood.

i think this theme was the entire reason so many characters had the names of enlightenment philosophers, to nudge us towards the righteous theme of de montaigne’s essay, “to philosophize is to learn how to die.”

in that regard, the finale was unspeakably on the mark, unspeakably touching.

while it is true that threads remain unraveled, and certain questions tug at the corners of my brain, i appreciate the experience overall, as well as the courage to confront and welcome death.

die together.

Oscar Wilde
Wiki – Harold Bloom – Anxiety of Influence
Homer
Dante
Shakespeare
Tolstoy
-Saul Bellow-NYer

But we will comment on Ryan Howard’s contract since lost in the kerfuffle over whether Ryan Howard’s extension is a good deal or a bad one are the discrete pieces of knowledge it gives us about Ruben Amaro, the Phillies GM.

1. Amaro is not afraid of old position players. We already knew this from the Raul Ibanez signing, but the Howard extension confirms that Amaro suspects that so called “old player skills” can now translate into production by old players. It doesn’t hurt that Ryan Howard’s conditioning has improved considerably in recent years and he looks less and less like Mo Vaughn and Cecil Fielder every day.

2. The Hometown penalty is real. Credit goes to Will Leitch for this one. It used to be said that  players would offer “hometown discounts” to continue playing with their current teams. If anything, the opposite is now true. Certain players are more valuable to their current teams than they are to other teams because they already play there and are identified as being singular causes of winning. Consider the outrage over the Phillies’ trade of Cliff Lee. Lee wanted more money than the Phillies were willing to offer, and a large portion of his demands clearly resulted from the Lee mythology that had developed in Philadelphia during last year’s postseason.

3. Conversely, being a winning team is/enables/exposes a market inefficiency. Roy Halladay took a below market deal to come to Philadelphia since he determined that being a Philly was a good way of getting to the postseason. There are players of a certain caliber who value winning as much or more than money itself. These players want to be on winning teams and will take less money to be on the winning team, lowering their acquisition cost. Yet this efficiency is only available to teams with the demonstrated ability to win (some matrix of actual won-lost record, perceived strength of franchise, and payroll).

Consider a hypothetical from the independent film world where actors will often work for scale to make a prestige picture with a high-chance of winning Academy Awards. John Travolta might normally want 10 million plus to star in “Pulp Fiction 2: Where Vincent Vega Never Goes to the Bathroom,” but he’d be willing to sign for much less if Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Ke$ha (in a “heart-rending dramatic turn” that “could only come from the mind of Quentin Tarantino”) all took reduced salaries to make the film a-go.

Could investing in Howard and locking in those wins actual lower the cost of the next win? In other words, there might be an additional value to sunk costs.

4. Baseball economics vs. Real Economics. Finally, what will the global market be in a few years? Obviously the baseball market is influenced by the real economy but we don’t quite know in what way. Is it a lagging indicator or reasonably recession proof? Certainly inflation will help balance out Ryan Howard’s contract but will it really balance it out? Rob Neyer suspects not, though there’s always the possibility that it could.

For example, what if we were to experience another financial panic (let’s bring back this term once and for all)? Ryan Howard’s contract might end up looking pretty good compared to the cost of a win in the miserable “Oops! I did it again Depression of 2013″ free agent market (a result of president Palin dismantling derivatives controls coupled with a strict no-bailout policy that leads us into a hyper-inflationary mess [shudder]). Or, more reasonably, what if the US economy resembled that of the late 1970s and we were suddenly in an era of double-digit inflation? Again, Howard’s contract might look a lot better.

Teams certainly consider all sorts of baseball and financial factors when offering a contract. What this clause presupposes is, maybe they also consider macroeconomic factors? Unfortunately that’s an area where no one really knows what’s going on, and Glenn Beck style gold purchasing might be a real loser in a deflationary economy. So to with Ryan Howard.

What is real is that the Oil Slick can have drastically negative impacts on
our  fledgling  economic  recovery. Sanford Bernstein analysts predict that
the  final  cost for cleaning up the spill could be $7 billion. The cost to
the  fishing industry in Louisiana could be $2.5 billion, while the Florida
tourism industry could lose $3 billion.

Yet  it  is  likely  that  that  cleanup  and  damages  figures  are vastly
underestimated.  BP’s  state-of-the-art  safety  measures  have all failed.
Furthermore,  there  is no precedent for deepwater leaks – a blowout at the
depth  of  5,000 feet has never occurred before. We’re also in the region’s
hurricane  season,  which could hamper clean-up efforts. To demonstrate how
accurate  projections can be, note that BP had previously ruled an accident
as “unlikely or virtually impossible”.

In the worst case scenario, the oil leak continues for months, damaging the
Gulf  for  a  generation.  The  Oil  Slick drifts beyond the Florida coast,
enters  the  Gulf-stream  and  sweeps  up  the  eastern coast of the United
States. Years of damage-control costs, in addition to lost revenue from the
adversely  impacted  states  could  lead  to  hundreds of billions worth of
federal  deficits.  This  would  impact  the  broader  economy,  raise  the
possibility  of a “double-dip” recession, and thus heighten the Oil Slick’s
likeness to the Dust Bowl.

Veering back to the academic, the Dust Bowl and the Oil Slick share similar
lessons  in  conservation.  Both  environmental  calamities  were caused by
unchecked  economic  development. The Dust Bowl was caused by unsustainable
agricultural  development.  The  Oil  Slick is a symptom of our reliance on
petroleum, which has caused us to drill for it in ever more hazardous places. Let
us hope that the similarities end here.

Key Facts (for when you rant at your friends):
-The Oil Slick is now 130 miles long and 70 mile wide.
-The current leak rate is 200,000 gallons of oil per day
-Oil  from  the leaking well is lighter than the Alaskan crude spilled by
the Exxon Valdez, which will lead to more toxic impacts.

Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6412H820100502

http://www.examiner.com/x-43367-International-Headlines-Examiner~y2010m5d2-BP-said-an-accident-was-virtually-impossible-that-would-lead-to-giant-oil-spill

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-30/u-s-gulf-states-mobilize-for-valdez-like-oil-spill-update4-.html

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/05/oil-slickonomics/

For instance, in typical Yesterday’s Salad style I’ve decided to save all my change and deposit it in an interest bearing account. I’m also transferring all my Bank of America “keep the change” over to that account. And I’m not making any withdrawals until the balance is ten thousand dollars. It seems like a suitably large number yet also something I could potentially reach before the end of time. And, the best part: should I ever hit 10k, I’m totally blowing the money on some fancy trip. I’m already 1/200 of the way there.

The truth of the matter is that climate change has to be fought intergenerationally. There has to be a core of voters,that put the environment in general and climate change specifically at the top of their agenda. There has to be consequences for government for the way they act. This must be true on the local level, on the state level, and on the national level. Alternatively, powerful enviromentalist local leaders and executives can have large effects. Several small cities already aim for carbon neutrality. It is not difficult to find cities that have made positive steps on their own. Strong actions by municipalities, such as San Francisco, have changed the way individuals conceive of trash and environmentalism.

The question, logistically, is how. Probably the most powerful and indeed in some ways the most effective (in the sense that they have staked out an extreme position that has garnered literally massive, international support) is a group called 350.org, led primarily by Bill McKibben. This group, along with a few affiliates, chose Copenhagen as its goal and held a massive worldwide rally on October 24th, an achievement that is some ways unparalleled, but also a bit overhyped. It set out a framework for negotiation, but it did not achieve any of its real goals at Copenhagen. 350.org is also closely allied to poorer nations, in particular those like the Maldives who stand to lose their territory to climate change.

350.org has responded to the morass of post-Copenhagen politics by a campaign called Let’s get to work, scheduled for 10/10/10, which focuses on green actions like installing solar panels, planting gardens, etc. 350 is big, new, and relatively locally lead. It has none of the downsides of a Greenpeace with its extreme positions or a Sierra Club or the other countless environmental organiztions that are all too often implicated in the horse trading of Washington politics. What 350 needs to do is transfer their enthusiasm into political consequences for national leadership. Sometime in August, say 8/8/10, 350 needs an event that will get all of the people who are planning to come out for 10/10/10 together, to make sure everyone is registered to vote. They need to get candidates to come talk. Μοst importantly, they need a list of about 15 or 20 representatives to beat. At 10/10/10, everyone should sign some sort of pledge to vote. Politicians need to feel the consequences of ignoring the environmental movement.

350 can follow up whatever successes it has in 2012 with another promise. Any Democrat who opposes climate legislation or dawdle will have a Green Democrat primary opponent. It’s time to stop playing these games, waiting for crumbs, but to show that there will be some cost for acting like climate change isnt happening.

i am religious, yes.  jewish to be exact.  however, my type of jewish is an odd duck to hunt and then mount.  it’s rigorous, but it’s leftist.  it prefers the ecstatic fervor of the hasidim, but (and!) it is radically egalitarian.  it is clearly un-orthodox.  you might even call it heterodox.

so, this brings me to my musings.

the one thing that bugs me the most about the theological debate as it stands is the pathological obsession with biblical inerrancy.  first of all, the idea of the bible as lynchpin of faith is a distinctly protestant notion.   it is clear to anyone with the barest understandings of interpretive history that there is not really any such thing as “biblical literalism.”

even the debate surrounding this principle has ceded ground from the outset to this ridiculous position.  to be forced to represent yourself as “not believing in a literal interpretation of the bible” already positions you as a weak-tea version of the true religionist who has enough strength in his convictions to override modern lily-livered qualms and put the whole world in G?d’s hands.

whatever.

the jewish (and catholic and muslim and even protestant) traditions have a long and rich history of biblical interpretation.  but not only that.  there are whole scores of religious literatures which make reference to the bible and are grounded in it, but serve their own function as well.  in fact, the study of the bible in the world of the yeshiva (advanced jewish study academy) has relegated the bible to a distant fourth behind the talmud, jewish law, and ethical texts.  the bible is present, of course, but it functions more as the ground whence texts bloom than the dominant focus.

now, all that being said, i want to acknowledge the feeling of needing perfection.  the books of psalms tells us, “the Torah of the Lord is perfect.” (Ps 19:7).   i want to propose a radically difference understanding of perfection.  from plato on down, we have felt compelled to understand perfection as implying stasis, wholeness.  i want to suggest a more fluid understanding of perfection.  it is an organic perfection, one emerging from the amazing adaptations happening around us all the time.  michael jordan was perfect in that game, because he was able to provide what was needed at the time.  the clash was perfect because they were able to create the most wonderful friction.

the Torah is perfect because it is able to provide us with what we need in every time.  the bible is perfect because it will never stop being an incredible textual resource and framework.

we must loose ourselves of this silly notion of “biblical faith.”  all faith is “biblical” in some way.  we are always conditioned by the externalities that help form us into the people we become.  our bible hums around us at all times.

perfect.

Enter Grist. Small and lean (and Seattle based!), grist.org has regular columnists with assigned beats, long running series, and an active set of commenters. They cover long term environmental policy, specific sustainable practices that can be put into effect, notably through the Ask Umbra video and Indoor Gardening Girl video series, and recipes. They talk about food policy, international carbon trading regimes, and even, and perhaps most importantly, the changing face of the environmental movement itself. Some of the most interesting posts examine Greenpeace and Sierra Club tactics to see how they play out, and how these organizations have used Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to wage asymetrical and symbolic public relations wars against corporate actors. Grist has also covered Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry, i.e. Lieberman-Kerry-Graham much better than anyone else. In a mainstream source, you might hear a miss contextualized quote or two from Lindsey Graham about energy, but you sure wont see this. There is no more important source for understanding climate change, the environment, and the politics of green than grist.org