Recent Posts
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Silicon Valley: A Living History
May 6, 2024
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And Yet, We Go On
April 22, 2024
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It IS Happening Here
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General Ludd to General Intellect
January 11, 2024
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Temporal and Geographic Edges
December 26, 2023
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The Root of All Evil
October 13, 2023
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Post-Pandemic Melancholia . . . Same As It Ever Was?
September 3, 2023
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Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
June 24, 2023
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Reparations is the Least We Should Do
May 11, 2023
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We Are Not Alone
April 9, 2023
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Last weekend I joined a bike tour of Treasure Island, meant to acquaint us with the possibilities of a bike-and-ped friendly redevelopment of the man-made island. Originally built to host the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exhibition.
 Photo of photo in Treasure Island museum, original Bay Bridge under construction. It was thought that Treasure Island would be a suitable place for a new airport, and the Pan Am Clippers, which could land on water, did use the island for a brief time as their terminal. Some of the architecture at the southern edge of the island dates from that time, including the main building which has a control tower on its top, and two large hangars behind it.
 Photo of photo in Treasure Island museum Treasure Island was a navy base for decades, but these days is a bit desolate, with about 3000 people occupying the increasingly decrepit Navy housing, awaiting the approval of the big plans to remake the island into a new mini-city of 12,000, with 300 acres dedicated to open space and wetlands. A good deal of the island may go under water within the next few decades with rising oceans, so it’s a little hard to think about investing billions in redeveloping it. Still, that’s the plan. Here are some photos I took from Treasure Island, back at SF and the Bay Bridge, and a couple of the new dirigible that recently showed up and is giving rides for $500/hour… here it is over Alcatraz:
 The Dirigible: Our Future, post-petroleum Air Travel System!  Dirigible over new and old Bay Bridge from Treasure Island The views from Treasure Island are what make it such a cool spot. Here’s a couple looking at the city:
 New eyesores at west end of Bay Bridge!  Your classic skyline view from Treasure Island. After we got back from the bike tour midday on Saturday (Nov. 15) on Market Street, a breakaway march from a Civic Center demonstration pro-gay marriage came down the street. I always enjoy San Francisco demonstrations, and as much as I am antipathetic to marriage (straight or gay), this march brought out some great creativity too… here is a small gallery of home-made expression, one of San Francisco’s better qualities, and best uses of its public space:
 Nov. 15, Market Street, San Francisco Continue reading Contesting Sad and Bad History
Global deflation is underway. I’ve linked to some sites in recent posts that I spend all too much time reading, especially The Automatic Earth and The Daily Reckoning, two of the more insightful pessimistic financial writers. Today Russia is reeling from massive capital flight, threatening to set off new panics and bank runs, similar to what they went through in the late 1990s. The blatant theft of public wealth going down in the U.S. is really breathtaking, what with AIG, and the newly minted banks like American Express, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all queueing up to drink deeply at the public trough. This whole bailout scenario is so cynical–basically it’s a bunch of millionaires rushing to fill their pockets at the U.S. Treasury before the rules change or anyone demands any real accountability, getting ready for the global Depression that is unfolding slowly but surely every day. Huge debt rollovers scheduled for December 1 and dates in the year to come ensure that many more bankruptcies will be announced soon.
Notably the big three carmakers are going down. I say, good! But of course the people who will be hit hardest are the autoworkers and especially their pensioners, and all the folks who depend on autoworkers-as-shoppers, all of whom will be left high and dry, while the big rollers who ran these companies into the ground will surely waltz off with millions in golden parachutes. It’s astonishing how myopic the United Autoworkers has been all these years, and I have to credit Mark Brenner of Labor Notes who was very good on Democracy Now! this morning, calling out the union for its lack of independence vis-a-vis the industry, marching in lockstop behind the ecocidal agenda of SUVs and minivans. Brenner called for government subsidies to be withheld from the car companies unless it was sure to be used to move the transportation system away from private gas-powered vehicles. Fat chance! Obama and his advisors, along with the Democratic congress, are painfully conservative and unimaginative about how big the problems are, and how dramatically the priorities have to shift immediately.
Continue reading Dawn of Deflation
 Old friends from the Committee for Full Enjoyment, drumming during last night's Dia de los Muertos in San Francisco. (see below) Haven’t been blogging much lately… The election is dominating airspace, and though it’s not dominating the small space between my ears, I haven’t been able to focus on any good themes to blog about lately. I’m reading the People’s History of the Civil War and Framing the Black Panthers, both good books, both kind of slow reading. I figured it would be good background reading during the election of Obama, even though he’s as far removed from the issues of slavery and 1960s’ black militance as you can get and still be black…
I hope he wins. It’ll be much more interesting than the other option, but a day ahead of the election, I still wonder if we won’t be “shocked” by the news that McCain somehow pulled out a dozen states that he wasn’t expected to win, while charges of electronic fraud and broken machines, and lack of ballots, pile up all over the place. Democracy Now! covered the story of a guy who is being deposed today, a fellow accused of masterminding the election fraud perpetrated by Cheney/bush in 2000 and 2004, by forwarding the results from various states like Ohio to an intermediary computer in Tennessee where of course the results were doctored to suit their goals.
Probably we’ll have President Obama, and then it’ll be interesting to see if he will break with his sponsors at Goldman Sachs and the coal and nuclear industries to pursue the grassroots-supported “Green Economy,” one which is fraught with contradictions itself, but is being pushed by countless small groups, independent political actors, and is somehow embedded in a lot of folks’ deep aspirational psyches… or so it seems. To some extent the analysis in Nowtopia taps this too, though my book of course tries to reframe these aspirations in terms of class and an anti-capitalist agenda.
I’ve been reading a lot at Automatic Earth which is written in England and is just a fantastic clearinghouse of bleak analysis and financial information. The breaking news on a fair number of economically minded websites is that world trade is collapsing. Whatever attention you’ve paid (or not) to the bailouts and the fluctuations of stocks and housing prices, off our radar in the U.S. to a great extent are numbers like the Baltic Exchange Dry Index which measures the cost of shipping worldwide. This article at the TimesOnline UK (via Automatic Earth) gives the latest amazing stats wherein the cost of a Capesize freighter in May 08 was some $230,000 a day, and as of last week the same ship had fallen to about $5,800 a day! Apparently the credit freeze-up has stopped a huge amount of shipping, and we may be entering a period of radical contraction in world trade. That’s not gotten much attention lately during the insanity that passes as “politics” here in the U.S. election crazy season…
Continue reading Floating, Waiting, Wondering
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