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Solar Power for the Global Masses: The Next Revolution |
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Sunday, 01 June 2014 14:08 |
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Cole writes: "As the price of solar panels drops, they increasingly are being spontaneously bought and installed by villagers throughout the world, who are often ill-served, or not served at all, by the central power grid in their countries."
Juan Cole: public intellectual, prominent blogger, essayist and professor of history. (photo: Informed Comment)
Solar Power for the Global Masses: The Next Revolution
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
01 June 14
 s the price of solar panels drops, they increasingly are being spontaneously bought and installed by villagers throughout the world, who are often ill-served, or not served at all, by the central power grid in their countries. Some remain off the grid once they have gone solar. Just as many countries in Africa skipped the stage of building copper wire telephone transmission lines all over the place, and instead went straight for cell phones, so they may also be able to avoid trying to deliver power through a central grid to everyone. So here are some promising signs:
The new BJP government in India plans to install 20 gigawatts of grid-connected solar power by 2022, and 2 gigawatts of distributed solar power. New PM Narendra Modi says he wants to bring electricity to 400 million poor Indians who lack it.
South Africa’s two largest solar energy installations are now operational, providing electricity to 85,000 homes.
The Williamson Tea processing plant in Kenya has built a solar energy farm, which will supply 30% of the firm’s energy. Industry is often held back in the global South by intermittent electricity, which idles factories. Solar power can fix this problem.
Indeed, some analysts are saying that solar energy could provide the power to Africa needed for increased economic growth because of its increasing affordability.
Japan’s vegetable farmers are finding that they can put solar panels in their fields without hurting the growth of the crops, and then sell the electricity. They are bringing in 7 times from the solar panels what the land would produce in agricultural revenue. Because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan is electricity-hungry, and a new sort of solar farming is becoming lucrative among those in crowded Japan who have the space to erect the panels– the farmers.
Central America’s largest solar facility, in Guatamala, is still relatively small by world standards (5 megawatts). But it will power 24,000 homes and in a country like Guatamala, that is huge.
Given the power of Big Oil in North America and the utilities’ dilemma of how to incorporate solar into their business model, it may well be that the US is not where the solar revolution will occur first or most extensively. It may be the poor of the global south, hungry for electricity, which has been scarce in their countries, who lead this revolution.
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Why Men Don't See the Harassment Women Experience. Yes, All Women. |
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Sunday, 01 June 2014 14:07 |
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Hess writes: "How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even 'wonderful' in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men's notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives?"
A group of students in California protest about violence against women in the wake of the shooting spree by Elliot Rodger. (photo: Monica Almeida/NYT)
Why Men Don't See the Harassment Women Experience. Yes, All Women.
By Amanda Hess, Slate
01 June 14
Men were surprised by #YesAllWomen because men don’t see what women experience.
 hen Santa Barbara police arrived at Elliot Rodger’s apartment last month—after Rodger’s mother alerted authorities to her son’s YouTube videos, where he expressed his resentment of women who don’t have sex with him, aired his jealousy of the men they do choose, and stated his intentions to remedy this “injustice” through a display of his own “magnificence and power”—they left with the impression that he was a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human.” Then Rodger killed six people and himself on Friday night, leaving a manifesto that spelled out his virulent hatred for women in more explicit terms, and Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown deemed him a “madman.”
Another rude awakening played out on social media this weekend as news of Rodger’s attack spread around the world. When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to comply—filing their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomen—some men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even “wonderful” in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men’s notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives? Some #YesAllWomen contributors suggested that men simply aren’t paying attention to misogyny. Others claimed that they deliberately ignore it. There could also be a performative aspect to this public outpouring of male shock—a man who expresses his own lack of awareness of sexism implicitly absolves himself of his own contributions to it.
But there are other, more insidious hurdles that prevent male bystanders from helping to fight violence against women. Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around.
The night after the murders, I was at a backyard party in New York, talking with a female friend, when a drunk man stepped right between us. “I was thinking the exact same thing,” he said. As we had been discussing pay discrepancies between male and female journalists, we informed him that this was unlikely. But we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him.
A week before the murders, I experienced a similar dynamic when I went for a jog in Palm Springs, California. It was early on a weekend morning, and the streets that had been full of pedestrians the night before were now quiet. When I paused outside a convenience store to stretch, a man sitting at a bus stop across the street from me began yelling obscene comments about my body. When my boyfriend came out of the convenience store, he shut up.
These are forms of male aggression that only women see. But even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation. Four years before the murders, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C. with a male friend. Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”
Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.—who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up—spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do—she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”
When Elliot Rodger finally snapped, he drove to a Santa Barbara sorority house as part of his plan to give the “female gender one last chance to provide me with the pleasures I deserved from them,” and killed two women who were walking outside. Before he hit the sorority house, he stabbed three men in his apartment; after he left the sorority, he killed another man who was entering a nearby convenience store. In the course of the attack, he wounded 13 more people. Rodger hated all the women who did not provide him sex, but he also resented the men he felt had been standing in the way of his conquests, though they were never made aware of this belief. (Many men die of domestic-violence-related murders this way, killed by ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, and family members of the women in their lives.) Some men are using this death count to claim that Rodger’s killings were not motivated by misogyny, but that is a simplistic account of how misogyny operates in a society that privately abides the hatred of women unless it’s expressed in its most obvious forms.
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The Problem Isn't the VA or Eric Shinseki |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 01 June 2014 14:07 |
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Pierce writes: "And thus ends the honorable career of a soldier who was correct about the lies behind the greatest policy disaster of our times, about the essential criminality of the people who launched the invasion of Iraq, but whose primary failures as an administrator were his inability to oversee the people in his department who were directly trying to cope with the flood of casualties that resulted from all of those soldiers."
Eric Shinseki. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Problem Isn't the VA or Eric Shinseki
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
01 June 14
 ric Shinseki resigned today as a result of the unfolding scandal within the Department of Veterans Affairs. This event became inevitable the moment that Shinseki sat down before the Veterans Affairs Committee of the United States Senate. It became clear almost immediately that Shinseki didn't have two votes in that room; Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal who, despite Shinseki's departure, shows no sign of getting this teeth out of this story any time soon, made it quite plain that he wasn't buying anything Shinseki was selling. And thus ends the honorable career of a soldier who was correct about the lies behind the greatest policy disaster of our times, about the essential criminality of the people who launched the invasion of Iraq, but whose primary failures as an administrator were his inability to oversee the people in his department who were directly trying to cope with the flood of casualties that resulted from all of those soldiers that most of official Washington told Eric Shinseki they would never need to create a democratic paradise in Iraq. Irony is the rail on which Shinseki now has been ridden out of town.
One of my first beats in this business was covering the Vietnam veterans movement as they tried to get the various veterans organizations, including the VA, to pay attention to things like PTSD and the longterm effects of Agent Orange. They spoke with contempt of the World War II veterans who staffed those organizations, scoffing at what they called "the Class of '45" for the way those veterans looked down on them because they had "lost" their war. The people most willing to help were the scattered remnants of the antiwar movement -- like the people who ran the GI coffeehouses and, I guess, people like us in the alternative press. I recall vividly the general anger at the Reagan Administration when it proposed to close down the psychiatric outreach centers that they had fought so hard to include under the VA system. Those centers served some 52,000 veterans of the war Reagan called "a noble cause." That was my rude introduction to the vast gap between the political rhetoric about America's veterans and how they actually are treated. "I got a hundred stories," my best source within the Vietnam vet community told me when we first met. "Which one do you want?" Two years later, he took his M-1 into a closet and only the rifle came out.
It is no surprise at all that Shinseki's resignation is not enough for the people who perceive a political advantage to be derived from what's been going on in the VA hospital system. The inexcusable John Boehner made sure we knew that his departure was essentially meaningless. Republican members of the United States Senate who, back in February, refused to allow a vote on a comprehensive veterans health package that took more than a year to craft, swifly went into high dudgeon, where they met John McCain, who lives there permanently now, like Goofy at Disney World. Marco Rubio, the rake-stepping lightweight from Florida, chimed right in:
"Secretary Shinseki's resignation is just the first step in addressing
the institutional neglect of veterans at the VA, but that alone won't
solve the problem," he said. "The systemic mismanagement will continue
unless we bring reform to the VA and hold all those who are responsible
accountable."
Rubio is pumping himself up for introducing a Senate bill to make it easier to fire people in the VA, as though that means he's committed to improving the health-care system for veterans, instead of being the same ambitious opportunist who's been making a dunce of himself on every issue from climate change to this one since his attempt to be reasonable on immigration got lit on fire by his own party. Rubio, of course, joined with all the other Republicans in blocking the bill last February, which got him quite a recent hiding from Bernie Sanders.
The problem with the VA system right now is that, for an entire decade, we sent people into the meat grinder of a war the architects of which conducted completely off the books. They kept it off the books used to keep the federal budget, and they did all they could to keep it off the books of the nation's moral conscience as well. They lied and they cooked their estimates on everything far worse than did the likely criminals who fudged the documentation at the hospital in Phoenix. The whole country was awash in the moral equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, all glistening and shiny and bedecked in bunting. Meanwhile, the physical, financial, and moral cost of it all built up and built up until the scheme got bigger and more complicated and, ultimately, it became untenable. And now, the people who launched it in the first place are tut-tutting about what happened when the whole thing finally collapsed. The one thing to remember about a Ponzi scheme is that the people who get in first get paid off. They got their war. They profited from the double-entry bookkeeping they kept on the national conscience and, now, there's a Democratic president, and a whole lot of injured veterans, who end up holding the bag.
There was no question that Shinseki had to go. That was clear from the moment he sat down before the committee. Now, there will be a lot of stuff and nonsense about reforming the whole system -- privatizing it, so that it more closely resembles the wonderful health-care system we had before the Kenyan Usurper cast his socialist spells upon the republic -- and there will be a great deal of posturing from both sides about the "debt" we owe to our "wounded warriors." But, as we all know, you can't solve any problem by "just throwing money at it." The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which has been completely mad since before Reagan closed all those counseling centers, pointed that out to us just today. But, ultimately, Bernie Sanders is completely correct about it all. If you don't want to pay all the real costs of taking the nation to war, then don't take it to war at all. It is, after all, criminal naivete to be shocked by the inevitable.
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If You Thought Oligarchy and Aristocracy Were Bad, You'll Really Hate Kochocracy |
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Sunday, 01 June 2014 14:05 |
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Durst writes: "In the bad old days, medieval German Lords figured out how to pocket some quick coin by charging a toll on the primitive paths meandering across their lands. The money wasn't used to improve the roads or better the lives of the peasants or clean the rivers their pigs pooped in but rather heighten the piles in their treasury."
Koch Industries executive VP David Koch, left and Charles Koch, head of Koch Industries, right. (photo: AP/Getty Images)
If You Thought Oligarchy and Aristocracy Were Bad, You'll Really Hate Kochocracy
By Will Durst, AlterNet
01 June 14
The lords of a vast oil empire are buying up our entire democracy with a fraction of their fortune.
 n the bad old days, medieval German Lords figured out how to pocket some quick coin by charging a toll on the primitive paths meandering across their lands. The money wasn’t used to improve the roads or better the lives of the peasants or clean the rivers their pigs pooped in but rather heighten the piles in their treasury. Even back then, you just couldn’t have enough pewter candlesticks.
These were the first robber barons. Literally. Rich people whose sole pursuit was to survive to become richer people. A criminal aristocracy. A term history has proved redundant.
During the Gilded Age, the flushest one percent of the country held one-third of the national income. In the 1920s, this figure ramped up to two-fifths. Molehills compared to today’s mountainous wealth, where the richest 400 American families control more money than the poorest 165 million of their fellow citizens put together. And if all 165 million were knelt end to end, those 400 families would have footrests from any compass point.
Six members of the Walton Family have accrued as much money as the bottom 41 percent of all Americans. Now, how hard would it be for them to cover the health care of Walmart employees? They’d still be worth as much as the bottom 34 percent. How many pewter candlesticks does one family need? You’d think they could get them wholesale.
In decision after decision, the Supreme Court has equated money with free speech. Which would be great if it meant the more we spoke, the more we’re worth. But, alas, no. That’s not the deal. Pretty much the opposite, come to think of it.
Rich people have exploited these high court rulings like foxes given skeleton keys to the Tyson chicken empire. Any politician who espouses lowering taxes on the rich and blunting the powers of the poor gets backed. With unlimited sums. Of course the poor have free speech too, but we might as well be whispering downstage at a Metallica concert.
A plutocracy is a society where the rich make the rules — quickly becoming our norm. The ninth richest man in the world, Sheldon Adelson, focuses on politicians whose Israeli policies most closely mirror his. That’s it. One issue. In 2012, he gave 90 million to various GOP presidential candidates. And in the next election cycle, he is reportedly ready to triple that number, recently holding auditions in Las Vegas for his own personal presidential candidate American Idol. Once again: not Clay Aiken.
The most Darth-like of the new Robber Barons are the Koch Brothers, (rhymes with rock) David and Charles, each richer than Adelson. These self-made inheritors of a vast oil empire are responsible for jumpstarting the Tea Party and ALEC, and are now hand picking candidates all over the country — pouring in vast amounts of money to get them and their skewed legacies elected. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is one of the first generation Kochbots. And a bit glitchy.
If so desired, the Koch Family could spend a billion dollars a year for the next 85 years buying politicians. Bankrupting the rest of us through Kochbot legislated tolls on the primitive paths meandering across Koch owned lands. Especially egregious when ALL lands are Koch owned. Get ready for the American Kochocracy.
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