Some day I will describe the joys of more than three days without power– getting closer to my neighbors, melting snow to make coffee, hauling water from a nearby pond for the w.c., reading Doris Lessing by candlelight, waking with the sun.
Not today. Today I’m pissed. I was offline for three days, charging a laptop at a neighbor’s generator to write, but never getting on the internet. I need the internet.
And even today, four days after the storm, hundreds of thousands of people in Connecticut and New Jersey still don’t have power. They want heat but they also want the internet– the new social tissue.
A friend who’s running for office in my town in NY says that there ought to be conduits big enough for a person to walk through buried alongside our highways to carry the cables. And he’s right. Where is that initiative? Our weather is changing, we all know it; NBC Nightly News was on the story of the new stormy weather last night. Thanks to global warming, of course, which the Republicans deny.
Occupy Wall Street is to some extent a generational movement. The babyboomers ruined the planet and ruined the economy. We were given the great society and we handed the next generation a plate of rinds.
The untimely storm has got to have political consequences. More than anything, the issue is investment. The failure of corporations to invest in the future, the failure of the wealthy to part with their gains for the sake of the next generation, the failure of government to understand what people need to participate in the modern economy. And these failures are failures of temperament, failures of conservatism: all the people who are too afraid of what the economy will bring to take a risk on the United States.
The storm has left rich political material in its wake– an opening for visionaries and leaders. I look forward to the young people and the creative politicians who will seize on the issue, and inspire the country to a more hopeful, and expansive place.
Whoa cut off from your lifeline.
“The failure of corporations to invest in the future, the failure of the wealthy to part with their gains for the sake of the next generation, the failure of government to understand what people need to participate in the modern economy. ”
Micheal Moore, my WWII union member father and so many others have been talking about this for decades. Corporations abandoning the US, going for the all mighty dollar made off the backs of cheaper wages, lower or non existent environmental standards..etc. As Moore has said in the past corporate heads were willing to or forced to share the booty. People were able to access a middle income, have insurance,send their kids to college etc. Greed became a religion and our country has crumbled as a result
NBC Nightly News was on the story of the new stormy weather last night. Thanks to global warming
Sorry to disabuse you of this. It’s the La Nina. Global temps in the mid-tropospheric are down, even lower than the La Nina of 2008.
See the NASA satellite temperatures for yourself:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Select the temps in the 25,000 ft/7.5 km/ Aqua o6 and then select the years you want to compare. Try 2008 (the last time global temps dipped like this because of the La Nina) and 2011 for comparison. .
These are the NASA satellites. These are the real data, and not models created in the 1980s. The satellites to use are the NASA AQUA satellites that went up in 2003; they are way more accurate than the previous NOAA satellites, which were found to falsify data.
The La Nina is causing blizzards across the middle of the country today.
Asia has 8,000 to 10,000 years of burying customs, and valuable temples, buildings, etc. It can neither afford, nor is it willing to dig up the ground to bury fibre optic cable. So it erected powerful cell towers to carry wifi at a rate 10X ours across their metropolitan and rural areas. I remember people watching movies and shows on their cells 10 years ago. They are light years ahead of us in providing the net.
What the hell is wrong with us?
The government should be building military-grade cell towers across this country so that every rural area is blanketed. (Designers can dream up aesthetic ways to cover them). Ditto the lines for high-speed trains. They can license this work product to vendors and carriers.
Instead, we have congressmen whose one goal is to unseat the Prez, and we have environmentalists who have got their attention on the wrong end of human interaction.
I was offline for three days, charging a laptop at a neighbor’s generator to write, but never getting on the internet.
ouch. this explains a few things…
It all goes back, if you’re as ancient as I, (or me, for that matter) to Reagen.
I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’ll be glad when that idiot finally kicks off.