Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

An interesting column on Paul Potts from the Sunday Star Times by way of the Paul Potts website. I don’t agree with the criticisms but as i say it’s an interesting reaction.

Potts of gold
Sunday Star Times, 5th August

A phone salesman with bad teeth and a love of opera has become an overnight sensation. Grant Smithies reports.

You look at Paul Potts and you immediately think this man must have been near the back of the queue when God was handing out the blessings.

Potts is fat, for one thing, with a round, jowly face that suggests a collision of jolly peasant genes and bad tucker. He has terrible teeth, for another: yellowish, uneven, like a row of knackered old fridges lined up at the tip. He has a slight lisp, too, and a crap job, selling cellphones in the culturally impoverished backwater of Port Talbot in south Wales. Even his name is profoundly unpromising; say “Paul Potts” fast, and it sounds as though you’re talking about the murderous former dictator of Cambodia.

But there is something special about Potts, as British viewers discovered recently when he appeared on UK TV show, Britain’s Got Talent. The guy can sing. Not “sing” like most of us sing in the bath, or even “sing” with the bland competence of the average run-of-the-mill pop singer. I mean “sing” like a wannabe Caruso.

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Science - establishment science, anyway - seems caught in the emotional necessity to disbelieve in the possibility of cataclysmic change, preferring the immensities of time that the Undirected Evolution fantasy usually requires. But I can remember - it was less than ten years ago! - when scientists were saying that the ice shelf off the Ross Sea would require decades to break up. It broke up in less than a month, in 2002.

That doesn’t mean that this particular warning is correct, and it certainly doesn’t mean that computerized climate models are correct. They are nearly certainly wrong, because life is more complex than our models of it. But it does mean that you would be wise to take with several grains of salt “scientific” statements that things are going to continue more or less as they are.

From http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1294172007

‘World on the edge’ as risk looms of ice sheet collapse

RHIANNON EDWARD

THE world may be on the brink of a global warming “tipping point” that could see a 23ft rise in sea levels and doom future generations to catastrophic flooding, an expert has warned.

A temperature rise of just 1C would trigger the unstoppable collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, a vast layer of ice stretching 1,200 miles and covering 80 per cent of Greenland, said Professor Tim Lenton.

Of this warming, 0.7C was already due to take place and was held up only by natural time lags in the climate system.

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In case you missed this interesting development. From http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070814.wpaper14/BNStory/Science/home

Get a charge out of this: a foldable battery

PATRICK BRETHOUR

Globe and Mail Update

August 14, 2007 at 5:53 AM EDT

VANCOUVER — It looks like a simple sheet of black paper, but it could spell a revolution in battery technology – not to mention an end to the miserable Canadian ritual of plugging in the car on frigid winter nights.

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have come up with a working prototype of a battery made out of cellulose, a coating of lithium and carbon tubes the size of a virus: a sheet of black paper that stores an electrical charge.

While it works on the same principle as any battery for sale in a corner store, the paper battery from Rensselaer is much different than a typical AA.

For starters, it can be as large as a newspaper page, or cut to the size of a postage stamp. It can be inserted under human skin, and be powered in part by body fluids.

Most important, the paper battery keeps functioning even at extreme temperatures, from -73 degrees to 148 degrees, meaning that it could be put to work in outer space.

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LETTERS AT 3AM

BERGMAN, ANTONIONI, FELLINI

From the Austin (texas) Chronicle - August 17, 2007

“The death of an artist is quite unassailable,” wrote Lawrence Durrell, adding: “One can only smile and bow.” And after one has smiled and bowed? When two master directors, who once shook my life to the core — Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni — died on the same day, July 30, it felt as though something needed doing, some observance needed to be observed. And their deaths brought up another, Federico Fellini’s in 1993. I hadn’t watched their films in a long while, so my observance (and I heartily recommend it) consisted of observing, watching, in no special order: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and 8½; Antonioni’s The Passenger, Blow-Up, and L’Avventura; Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, Summer Interlude, Autumn Sonata and Persona — experiencing all the while a state that my friend Evann DeMario described last summer, “Great art makes you feel that you’re being interrogated.”

She meant that in a good way.

To have one’s sense of beauty interrogated, as it were, by the extraordinary visual intelligence of these artists. To have one’s spirituality interrogated by down-to-earth souls who struggled with whether spirituality was even possible to an honest person anymore, and who accepted no obvious or whimsical answers. To have one’s vitality, one’s capacity for rich living, interrogated by questioners who refuse to accept irony in place of meaning. To have our era interrogated by another, stripping today’s preoccupations bare, right down to the essence of what we used to call “the human condition.” Beautiful and difficult awakenings await you. You are being asked, “Do you know what you believe? What have you taken for granted lately? Do you know you didn’t believe some things you thought you did? Can you see? What can you see?”

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This zoo in England has everything. The ever-popular penguins …

… and show-off seals …

… and otters …

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If you can get people acking the wrong question, it doesn’t matter how they answer it. The question of why in-state offenders have to pay and out-of-state offenders don’t is worthwhile, but it totally begs the larger question: Is it right to use what should be law-enforcement to raise revenue? How is this different in principle from the old-time speed traps that little hole-in-the-wall jurisdictions used to set up to milk travellers? From http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2007-08-14-0081.html

Driver fees are upheld by Henrico judge
In reversing lower court, circuit judge says it’s OK to exclude nonresidents

Tuesday, Aug 14, 2007 - 12:09 AM Updated: 12:45 AM

By BILL MCKELWAY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

A Henrico County judge yesterday turned back a challenge to Virginia’s new driver fees, adding another take to the growing controversy.

Reversing the findings a lower-court judge issued less than two weeks ago, Circuit Judge L.A. Harris Jr. said yesterday that efforts to overthrow the hefty fees because they don’t apply to out-of-state drivers fail because the legislature had a rational basis for passing the law.

Laws do not need to be fair or politically correct if they have a rational basis, Harris wrote, acknowledging that fees in at least four other states incorporate both in-state and out-of-state drivers.

“The two classes in this case do not have an equal obligation to pay for Virginia roads,” Harris wrote. “Clearly, Virginia residents have more of an obli-gation to finance their own roads than do nonresidents driving through on Virginia’s highways.”

The ruling, which attorneys for Henrico resident Anthony O. Price said will be appealed, apparently means that fees of up to $3,000 will be resumed in Henrico, after a brief hiatus imposed by a lower-court judge Aug. 2.

But the Henrico case is only one matter in a number of challenges that have appeared across the state.

Challenges have been filed in Northern Virginia, Roanoke, Hanover County and Richmond, although Harris’ opinion apparently is the first to be issued by an appeals-court judge. Esther J. Windmueller, one of Price’s lawyers, said yesterday that she expects to take the case directly to the Virginia Supreme Court.

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CG Jung, Robert Clarke, and the way forward

Years ago, Carl Jung saved Robert Clarke’s life. He did so without ever having met him - in fact without ever knowing that he was alive. He did it in the ultimate arm’s-length manner, by appearing on a television show. The results of that TV program continue to spin themselves out as the years go by, as Robert follows where he was led, creating lessons and opportunities for the rest of us.

Robert Clarke was born during the final years of World War II and grew up in the English midlands town of Burslem, one of the towns that they call The Potteries. His family was working class, his economic and educational horizons were limited, to say the least — college was out of the question — and he wound up in series of dead-end jobs. Unable to believe in the religion he had been raised in, he became to all extents and purposes an atheist. After a while, more than 30 years ago now, the accumulated meaninglessness of his life resulted in his having a nervous breakdown.

Then one night, watching the tube, he saw a documentary that included extensive clips of Jung speaking on his life and work, and suddenly, intuitively, he knew that this was the way forward for him. (Good thing he was in England. Had he been in America he probably would have gotten something on the intellectual level of “Car 54, Where Are You?”)

“When I first saw Jung in the TV programme (by van der Post),” Robert told me recently, “Jung was literally all lit up and magical to me. This is because the ‘wise old man’ archetype was being projected onto him from the collective unconscious. Jung calls this archetype ‘the personification of spirit’ and this is what was happening, the Holy Spirit was projecting onto Jung because, he, Jung, as a wisdom figure was an entirely suitable receptacle. In later dreams the Holy Spirit actually took Jung’s form.”

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Suppose they hadn’t stolen the 2000 election

You will remember that Al Gore was elected but did not get to serve because the Supreme Court first said stop re-counting ballots then after a couple of days said (5-4) that there wasn’t enough time to count ballots now.

Suppose with me for a minute that instead the court had followed the law of the land, and allowed Gore to become President.

Okay, so let’s suppose that it’s Sept 11, 2001, and the attacks on New York and Washington proceed as they did on this reality-time-stream. (That’s a big “suppose” already. Mr. Mission Accomplished took the entire month of August off and he and his team never looked at the report specifically outlining the prospective attacks. Think Gore would have done the same?)

How likely is it that in the previous months Gore would have allowed oil company executives to draft the national energy plan? How likely that he would have proceeded on the assumption that some pretext had to be found so that we could invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein? Not bloody likely.

How likely that he would have had us invade Afghanistan? A pretty good likelihood, I’d say, and I don’t see much reason why he (or anyone) shouldn’t have done so. It is well known that the Taliban who were running Afghanistan were running terrorist training camps. If you want to play that game, you had better expect some major blowback. I think we would have invaded and overthrown the Taliban, just as we did - and in that process, the really major difference begin to show themselves.

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I was riding in a train in England and I happened to mention to a woman sitting next to me how wonderful I thought the English trains were. (That goes for buses too.) She asked me what we did for travel in America, and then answered her own question — we drive everywhere. No choice, I told her.

These couple of photos ought to give you an idea of the difference between our crumby so-called transportation system and a system of buses and trains designed for a country where people are used to taking public transportaiton — and where gasoline is $8 a gallon

Note the inside of this very typical bus. Perhaps you can see that it is (gasp) comfortable. The indistinguishable red things in the front are a digital clock. The seats are fabric, not hard plastic, and they are neither slashed nor dirty nor defaced with graffiti.

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This is from the Schwartzreport. Editor Stephan Schwartz says:

This article is reprinted from The American Prospect website. The author of this article, Glenn Hurowitz, was former Deputy National Field Director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group where he fought to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and protect America’s national forests.

Thanks to Sam Crespi.

Environmentalism for Billionaires

GLENN HUROWITZ - The American Prospect

Lately, I’ve been inundated with phone calls from venture capitalists, private equity guys, and hedge fundistas. They’re coming to me because I’m their environmentalist friend and they all want to know one thing: how they can make a buck off the surge in interest in combating global warming.

In a way, that’s a sign that the environmental movement has finally arrived. After decades of struggling to convince the titans of finance that protecting the planet and making money weren’t mutually exclusive, the tycoons are now coming to us.

But many of these capitalist converts need watching. While Wall Street’s eco-splurge has generated a flood of financing for legitimately clean ventures like wind and solar power, it’s also spawned extremely dangerous projects that are painted green by their unscrupulous backers, but that at their core are as black as, well, coal.

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