Crisisville

This is a ten minute presentation for a fellowship that I'm applying for. It describes a membership-based social support and discount program to help middle income households achieve reasonable carbon loss based on a personal version of Socolow’s Wedge concept. Let me know what you think!

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.... We visit the four zones of the frozen ninth level of hell (plus South Park and Dennis Quaid) as we look at how climate change could make things colder, not warmer. Plus stories from a fight on a glacier in Kashmir, and the end of the world a la Kurt Vonnegut. Let's rock the apocalypse, baby! .... With Mitch Stripling.

The first podcast! Can increasing pressure on water cause the decline and fall of civilization? Mitch breaks down the history and consequences of water wars through stories and sarcasm over the past few thousand years. Three ghosts visit, a la a dehydrated Dickens.

So, in traditional insurgency theory, scholars from O'Neill to Stephen Metz to Ian Beckett have cited two features that distinguish successful insurgencies. First, they have external support from outside nations or groups (like a diaspora). Second, they have a secure base outside their battlespace (like across the border of a neighboring country). The question is, can global insurgents do away with physical bases through the use of information infrastructure? Can they also do away with external support? Yes and yes.

It could just be me, but it seems like one of the key constitutional questions of our time is how to circumscribe military action against non-state actors. That is, how far can the President dive into warfare before before being...

So everybody's talking about making new urban land use policies that use Smart Growth to build community resilience. I don't think you can put new wine into old suburban policy, though, and so it becomes key to describe a new...

By comparing the analogous frameworks of current liberal and postmodern urban policy, I try and sketch out a productive fragmentation that can be used to make coherent urban policies. Yep, the policy may look different--and it will certainly write across multiple sectors (nonprofit, social) in ways that current policy would never dream. But it is policy, you can benchmark it, and that's what maters to me.

So, do Muslims knock on doors like Jehovah's Witnesses? The answer I've got is No. This is the earliest paper I'm posting, and I can tell it's immature. But it's a useful model for the current situation and I post...

Theory alert on this one. It's a meditation on the Nietzschean concept of drama, and it wrestles with the Apollonian/Dionysian impulses. Break it down like this: How will the world end? In an orgy of violence, or from becoming so...

SciFi (not the channel) keeps trying to teach us how to die; we keep trying to live. But there are real lessons here. How do the stories say that we will create our replacements? What will the consequences be? And, most importantly, will the coming robot apocalypse go over-budget?

Los Angeles in the 1990s, just south of Rodney King and north of O.J., was a town desperately in need of a prophet. South Central was under the thumb of an actual, honest-to-god oppressive regime writ teeny--in the form of the police. You know, the ones that needed a good f*ckin'. There's a branch of theology called Liberation Theology that deals with practical ways to try and overcome oppressive regimes like that. It had been used in South America, some in Africa, and LA was eerily similar to those situations. All it needed was a liberator. And the thing is, it almost seemed like Cube was volunteering for the job. Almost. But he never quite made it. And the story of how he never made it, and why it mattered, is the one this paper tells.

So, a directed network is a network in which the connections aren't symmetrical. You click from one page to another and there's not immediately a route back. Like that. In terms of social phenomena, I think it indicates that you can make relationship connections that it's hard to move back from. Pair that with this idea: Most people are analysing these networks as if the nodes were actually people. But I think each node is actually the sum of the connections pouring into it. Yes, a person with a given set of qualities occupies it. But remove that person and those connections are going to start looking for another node to latch onto. In a sense, then, people can move to occupy different nodes in a given relationship systems. In a terrorist network, for instance, you might start off sympathizing, then supporting, then go operations. At each choide, you occupy nodes deeper and deeper into the network. After each choice, it's damn hard to get back where you were before.

We're human; we break things. Sometimes cheap blue glasses. Sometimes whole human beings, or clusters of them, and the sins pass down through generations. And then those generations are charged with the weighty task of making their own damn hope....

Have you heard the one about how warfare creates executive aggrandizement outside the Consitution? It's a old saw; James Madison told it. Here's my take. I wish we were in a war. Yeah, war leaders consolidate power, but classical warfare...

Faulkner said that the young writers of his time only had one question, "When will I be blown up?" At moments of crisis, I fear that something similar happens. We lock up the present into a kind of tunnelvision and...