Remora
The Post beats the Times for pungency, today, with its story about the Bush tax cut - about as fraudulent a piece of economic policy as a systems player's plan to beat the odds at blackjack at Trump Casino. Interesting, given the parallel between what Bush did on a national level and what he did in Texas. The same publicity driven tax cut, the same post budget repair work. The Times references further tax cuts to jumpstart the economy being mooted by both parties. It's beginning to feel a lot like a recession, so politicos are naturally getting antsy. The Post, however, revisits the budget which was passed this spring by the live wire Repugs and the cadaverous Dems, and guess what, my happy readers? Now that the budget is yesterday's papers, there's a lot of grinning and shuffling about how, shucks, the whole thing was sorta built out of fraudulent spending projections, taxes cut which will be supplanted by obscurer taxes revived, and the promise of consensual restraint on the part of Congress. Yeah, right. The last is like teaching abstinence in sex ed to teenagers - there's the gonad on the one side, and the rhetoric on the other. Which do you think is going to win?
Key Graf
Tax Cut Plan Filled With Dubious Spending Predictions (washingtonpost.com)

Discipline may indeed be needed. The tax package assumes that discretionary federal spending (about one-third of all spending) will grow annually by only 2.5 percent or less in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Such spending, however, has grown by an average of 6 percent annually for the past three years, and it hit 9.9 percent in 2001

Dope.

This is a story of orange peels.

One of the most famous facts about Mexico City is probably not known to a vast majority of the inhabitants of Mexico City.

In the 80s, William Rathje, the archeologist who started the famous Garbage project at the University of Arizona, conducted a comparative study of waste disposal between households in Mexico City and the average American urban household. With his associate, Michael Reilly, he published an article, "Household Garbage and the Role of Packaging." The article isn't on the Net, but there is an excellent article by Frank Ackerman of Tufts University at the Society for Philosophy and Technology, ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PACKAGING IN THE U.S. AND MEXICO, which summarizes it:

"The tradeoff between food waste and packaging waste explains one of the most remarkable empirical results in the field of "garbage research." Detailed surveys in the early 1980s found that households in Mexico City discard more waste than urban and suburban U.S. households, even after correcting for family size (Restrepo et al., 1991; for a summary in English see Rathje and Murphy, 1992, pp. 216-219). The Mexican households threw out twice as much food waste, while the Americans threw out more packaging and other materials; on balance the Mexicans discarded more per capita. Most other studies have found that the United States is the world leader in per capita waste disposal, and that developing countries generate much less waste. However, the defense of packaging presented here only shows that some packaging is desirable, including some of the exotic new plastic and composite packages"

There are a lot of examples of food waste in Mexico City, but the one that caught the eye of conservative commentators was the humble orange. Take David Koppel, who writes, in an article entitled Envirohogwash,

"For example, in Mexico � where packaging and refrigeration are rarer than in the U.S. � the average household throws away 40% more total refuse than the average U.S. household. It's not that the Mexican household has a higher standard of living; it's just that high-tech packaging and other advances make U.S. consumption more efficient. In Mexico City, households that drink orange juice usually buy fresh oranges, squeeze them, and throw away the peels � about ten and a half ounces of peels per week. Most American households make their orange juice from frozen concentrate, which comes in a package. The American household, making the same amount of orange juice, throws out a two-ounce cardboard or aluminum container. Thus, the American household creates more than 80% less solid waste."

The idea of all those orange peels flooding Mexico City, as though some bizarre sci-fi flick was running loose South of the Border, seems to have a dreamlike appeal to the defenders of the American Way of Packaging. This is Virginia Postrel , the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason:

"For instance, in Mexico City, most consumers squeeze fresh oranges to make
orange juice. The peels are then thrown away. Americans, by contrast,
tend to buy packaged frozen concentrate. As a result, the typical Mexican
household tosses out 10.5 ounces of orange peel each week; the typical
American household throws out 2 ounces of cardboard or aluminum ."

She adds a little flavor to this stat by commenting: "If all the orange juice
drinkers in New York Cidy individually tossed away their orange peels, one
day's haul would weigh as much as two ocean liners."

What an image! and a puzzle, too, since Mexico City has twice as many people as New York City. Is it true, then, that Mexico city is disposing of a fleet of orange peels every week?

Another, separate question is - why are Kopel and Postrel emphasizing the buying of concentrate? Their example has an oddly outdated feeling. The simple answer is provided in the quote from Anderson's paper - Kopel and Postrel is relying on a study made in the 80s. We'll see in a minute that the time frame of Rathje's study is important. But first, one more example of the by now famous inclination of Mexicans to incautiously make their juices from natural products. In a famous article, Recycling is Garbage, in the New York Times magazine by John Tierney, another libertarian type recycles Rathje to say:

"The typical household in Mexico City buys fewer packaged goods than an American household, but it produces one-third more garbage, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh foods in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale."

Okay, okay. The orange peel menace is beginning to seem truly threatening. The cold war is over, so we need a new enemy, but who knew that it would be a fruit? Still, one thing that seems to have gotten lost here. If orange peels are so bad, why haven't orange trees long ago flooded the world with orange peels? The answer is - orange peels decay. If they didn't, in fact, there wouldn't be orange trees - the fruit, you might have noticed, contains orange seeds.

Well, how about other orange juice containers? Here's what Tropicana has to say about its juice cartons at its faq site:

"IS THE PLASTIC BOTTLE RECYCLABLE?

The bottle is recyclable with plastics coded #2. It is predominantly high density polyethylene (HDPE), and contains a very thin layer of nylon which prevents oxygen penetration and deterioration of the juice. Therefore, we must label it as #7 for "layered" packages. But since the nylon does not interfere with its recyclability, we highlight its #2 compatibility.

ARE YOUR CARTONS RECYCLABLE?

Yes, for the most part. The carton's paper fiber has a high market value and can be recycled. Because the fitment and cap come in direct contact with the juice, they cannot be made of recycled material. These parts are removed during the recycling process."

Interestingly, according to the Plastics Council, an advocacy group for Plastics manufacturers, there was zero recycling of HDPE in the eighties - in other words, when Rathje made his study, the choice between throwing out an orange peel and throwing out a plastic jug full of juice was that the orange peel would decay, and the plastic jug would be left to chemically disassociate on a garbage dump. So in spite of the invidious comparison of the scale of disposal, the orange peel was still the preferred option for the environmentally conscious consumer. This is the kind of moderating fact that Tierney and Postrel seem unaware of.

Tierney, who is a reporter, is more to blame for his lack of curiosity about packaging. Since he was writing in 1996, he should have been aware that there were packaging developments that year, chief among which was the design of the "aseptic package." It won the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development that year. And, even more importantly, it introduced a wild card into Mexico City's orange peel crisis.
Juice in a carton had arrived.

Mexican juices are being packaged, now, in bulk, just like they are in the US. However, the packaging reflects, pace the John Tierney's of the world, the pressure from consumers and environmental groups to find stable, low energy, greener containers.

Having just come back from Mexico City, I can guarantee you that there are no ocean liners made out of orange peels blocking Reforma. If you are looking for juice in Mexico City, you will probably be buying some product of Jugos del Valle, which uses an aseptic carton supplied by SIG Combibloc Inc. Aseptic cartons drive container designers into heights of hyperbole. Here's a quote from the food product design people:

"Aseptic cartons are a lightweight, multi-layer, energy-efficient example of minimal packaging. They combine high-performance materials with high-performance construction and high-performance features. The package is 70% paper (to provide stiffness and strength), 25% low-density polyethylene (to seal the carton liquid-tight), and 5% aluminum (to keep out light and oxygen). Together, these materials produce a carton that safeguards the aseptically processed product inside. "

There isn't a simple moral to the story of the orange peel. On the one hand, you have claims about bulk solid waste which ignore the context of waste decay and use. On the other hand, you have claims made from a study that is ten to fifteen years old that ignore technological developments that are partly driven by environmental regulation. In other words, this is a classic picture of the Keynsian system at work - the state represents the interest of third parties, here, to force private industry to either carry the unadulterated costs of waste disposal or find ways to minimize waste.

The moral of this story, as of almost all the stories I tell, sadly enough, comes from Lafontaine:

Toujours par quelque endroit fourbes se laissent prendre
Quiconque est loup agisse en loup:
C'est le plus certain de beaucoup

Remora
There's a couple of stories in the NYT Biz section today on the interplay between the profit motive and the environment. One touts the savings and even profit to be made from redesigning the flow of wastes from production plants, both in terms of its composition (fining safer chemical products, for instance) and its re-use. Unfortunately, its smily business message is rather contradicted in the article on low emission autos. If you follow the auto company juggernaut and their fight against CAFE standards (an obsession with yours truly, as my readers know), the profit to be made from more environmentally sensitive autos is balanced, in Detroit's mindmeld, by the panic that Green cars might, after all, compete successfully with the Behemoth guzzlers that are the most profitable sector of the auto industry. So Detroit follows a two-fold strategy. It poormouths the technology needed to produce cleaner cars, with the big claim being that they are more dangerous - an ironic claim, given that the danger comes from the size of the Behemoth guzzlers. It also claims that Green cars are not good handlers. And there is a subtle sexual claim here as well - cars haven't been advertised for fifty years as an accessory to essential malehood to no effect. Green cars are, in the subconscious of an industry that hires women to design cars about as often as Bush utters five consecutive grammatical sentences, a surrender of privilege. The other leg of the policy is to comply, with great fanfare, to the mandate to research Green vehicles, but to hike prices and make the vehicle as scarce as possible. Ford did that with their EV SUVs in the 90s.

Here, however, we can say something good about globalisation. Or at least about international competition in the car market. Hybrid's and, eventually, fuel cell powered cars are a more rational vehicle for the Japanese and Europeans than the gut burgerliche Detroit mobiles, and so they have developed there. Now they are coming to the American market.

Key grafs in the Times piece:
Cleaner Cars Are Here, if You Can Find Them
Unlike electric cars, hybrid gas-electric cars need no special equipment, like battery-charging stations.

"A lot of people are surprised that you don't have to plug them in," said Ernest Bastien, corporate marketing manager at Toyota Motor Sales USA, who is in charge of American sales for the Prius. The car became available in Japan in 1997 and in the United States last year.
But first, you have to find one. Both the Prius and the Insight are in short supply � the Prius is sold out until April, while the Insight can be extremely scarce in markets like California, where they are most popular. (The City of New York just bought 231 of them, while New York State and New Jersey bought several dozen to be used by municipal and state agencies.)

Remora

Friends and foes, I�m back.

Mexico was � well, you can begin a sentence like that, but how are you going to end it? I�m probably going to refer to my Mexico trip here and there in the next couple weeks. Summing it up briefly, I crawled around on the floor with Baby C., trailed behind Miruna as she made her rounds in Polanco and at UNAM � other people have personal trainers, Miruna has me as her personal anthropologist -, listened to Rodrigo�s friends talk about Mexican politics (straining for the cognate words and the smattering of Spanish I have memorized), spent a very nice day in Cuernavaca with Andrea, who will be reading this post, I hope, and so on and etc and und so weiter.

Then I get back, transiting from the endless traffic of Mexico City (the ecology of walkers, taxi cabs, luxury cars and compact cars on the streets (and sidewalks, a favorite avenue for impatient or simply homocidal motorcycle riders) of Mexico City is always a study in dangers averted at the last second) to the hopeless dump of the San Antonio airport, with its listless cafeteria style restaurant, closed at 10 pm, and its general air of Poky-town nastiness. It is not an airport so much as a glorified bus terminal. I mean, American bus terminal � that dumping ground of the nomadic poor. Speaking of which, I went directly, via cab, from airport to Greyhound station, and got a little taste of the the national bus system in all its inglory and wretchedness. Want to see a case study in the pitfalls of monopoly power? Want to see what happens when the State outrageously neglects its duty to guard the common good? Want to meet the huddled masses on uncomfortable chairs trying to get a little sleep before some bad tempered bus driver yells at them for attempting to simply get on a bus with a ticket they bought from the man at the ticket counter before they were supposed to get on the bus, which is not, of course, announced? Want to breath the air of a vehicle that hasn't been thoroughly washed in thirty years? Then by all means, go on down to your local bus terminal.

Finally, after the hustle, I�m home. Time to go through my calls and check my e-mails. Numbers on the e-mails: percent of correspondence from friends: 5; percent of correspondence from news services: 25. percent of sheer junk: 70. Among the junk, prizes go to life insurance scams (40%), cheap viagra scams (20%) and penis enlargement scams (15%).

The penis enlargement scams puzzle me. Okay, mass e-mailing is a very cheap form of advertisement. But what return could there be in mailing out random offers to augment your member? I mean, are there men out there just waiting for a chance to extend the lengths of their organs? And even if this desire exists, do these men entrust their penises to just any stranger? Oh, yeah � men. We are talking about men. Scratch the last question.

A friend of mine, Don, told me that there�s more cosmetic surgery done on the humble male organ than is done on women�s breasts. Well, that sounds like a factoid to me, unless cosmetic surgery includes circumcision. Circumcisors, by the way, feel no need to advertise via mass e-mailings. Cut off your foreskin, cheap! Has not yet arrived in my box. Perhaps my skepticism says more about my unzeitgemaessige inner austerity than about social reality. I don�t understand certain luxury products, like first class airplane seats, limo rides and such. Having had to pass through the first class cabin to reach my seats about five times in the last two weeks, I�ve thought about this. Three hundred dollars more, and you get a roomier seat for an hour, plus some undistinguished alcoholic beverage. It seems to me that the pleasure is more about reveling in the symbol of luxury, rather than experiencing a greater degree of happiness. Although I�m always being assured, by people who do take first class seats, that it is worth it.
Is it really? Well, maybe this is at the heart of penis enlargement too � out of your expenditure, you budget yourself a veritable limo dick, and it doesn't matter that it doesn't give you more specific pleasure - it gives you more total pleasure, not analyzable into individual components. Once again, the mystery of emergent properties.
Basta.

Remora

Companeros - I'm going to Mexico City today, and won't be back for a week. This will probably be my last post until the 7th.
I'm going down there to visit my friend, Miruna, and her husband, Rodrigo. Their daughter, Constanza, will be one year old tomorrow. Imagine - I'm told she has gotten too old for her bouncy-bounce, which was her favorite thing to do in the morning when I visited them in January. From her seat, dangling in the doorway in the kitchen, she could preside, with appropriate shrieks, over the coffee being brewed there, and the reading of the morning's Jornada.

Back then, staying upright on the sofa was a job - not one Constanza particularly liked. But even during the two weeks I was there, she was visibly gaining motor skills. Or at least she was getting good at balancing herself upright. Now I'm told she's an ace crawler. My god, she'll be walking pretty soon. The biped thing. She is traversing worlds. I write fiction when I can, and one of my reasons for doing so is to timidly pierce that separation between myself, centered in this world, and other selves, centered in their worlds, and centrally private within them - at some lone point, untouched. This fascinates me - this separateness of people, the vegetable/animal/material aspect in the word, "grow."
Not that Constanza's growth is anybody's growth - she is already probably making gestures and seeing things in a way that will characterize her throughout her life. The dim index to which we unconsciously refer - the memory encoded in our gaits and ways of tilting our heads.
Enough of this.
Supposedly, tomorrow's itinerary will include the zoo.

On another front:
I know there will be those of you - one of you - maybe half of one of you - who will miss my daily harangues. Other visitors to this site might want to look into the archives. One of these days I am going to post a sort of index, so that visitors interested in Plutarch can visit the Plutarch posts, and those interested in Nirvana can visit the Nirvana posts, and so on.
Farewell for now.

Remora

Every once in a while, I think of Ulrike Meinhof.
Of course, when the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades and Direct Action were doing primal political therapy by planting bombs and having shootouts with police, I was an American teenager, thinking that listening to old Bob Dylan albums was an act of extreme bohemianism. Besides, I was a conservative teenager - my folks were Republicans, and until I was in college, my heros were William F. Buckley and Solzhenitsyn.

At the same time, though, I was a romantic - I still am, essentially - so that I always understood the terrorist position, which is that politics is always a subset of drama, and that it should be judged by the same standards. A polis that was stagnant, smug, self-satisfied - that was, in short, dramatically uninteresting - was, if one investigated it, usually living on buried crimes. The uninteresting, in other words, is motivated - and the motivations for it are often not uninteresting. In fact, they are often events of a signally bloody and bitter nature. I was a teen reader of Dostoevsky - I absorbed the atmosphere of the Dostoevskian novel, I understood the desperation of his heros, their sense that the air was being sucked out of their lives and that they had to do something - they had to do something major - because I felt the same way, living in a Georgia suburb, feeling myself dimished by every church picnic and pep rally. Yeah, I was a self-important little creep, but on the other hand, I really think it is good to develop the feeling of self-importance if you are an outsider. And it is never clearer that you are an outsider or an insider than in your teen years. In Dostoevsky, there was always the melodrama, there was always the action which seemed to exactly parallel the metaphysical issues. But when his characters come to do a major thing, it always ended up as a minor homicide: the breaking of pawnbrokers, dissolute old men, ex-revolutionaries in provincial towns. These murders were, indeed, lurid, but the light they shed, once committed, was incommensurate with the expectation one had, the projects leading up to them. Planning the murder, the perpetrators seemed outsized, but doing the murder, trying to get away with the murder, the perpetrators seemed tawdry. One meant to strike at the face of God, and one ends up burying a shovel. It is all so sad and disgraceful.

I was reminded of these things by an essay by Paul Berman in the latest New Republic. He mentions, in passing, something I didn't know - that one of the victims of the RAF (popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) was himself an unindicted former SS officer.

"Of the many crimes committed by the Red Army Fraction, the most famous of all was the cold-blooded execution of Hans-Martin Schleyer, the president of the West German employers' federation, who turned out to have been a top SS officer in Prague during the Nazi occupation."

There are a few sites devoted to the Baader-Meinhof gang on the web. In a sense, these sites are about a time that seems incredibly dated - the motives and lifes of these terrorists seem as far away as the motives and lives of the levelers in 1640s England. Here's a beautiful, eerie scene form Ulrike Meinhof's life. it is 1972. She has been captured by the police.

"Meinhof is transferred from Ossendorf Prison to Zweibr�cken Prison to take part in an identification line-up. Meinhof is determined to ruin the process by screaming "I'M ULRIKE MEINHOF!" The police instruct the other women in the line-up to follow suit; the witnesses are treated the unforgettable spectacle of six women screaming and clawing at their guards; five impostors and one true criminal all screaming hysterically: "SWINE!" "THIS IS ALL JUST A SHOW!" and "I AM ULRIKE MEINHOF"

I am still moved and puzzled by these people, though. I went through a period, in my twenties, when I thought Dostoevsky was below me - that Nabokov's judgement (N. opined that Dostoevsky was not only a bad writer, but a rather disgusting one) was just. I now believe that Nabokov is not only the lesser artist, but the reason that he is a lesser artist is wrapped up in his inability to appreciate Dostoevsky. It is the key to his failure to ever write a novel as good as Belyi's Petersburg.

It is easy for me to dig down to a level in which my alarm and melancholy about the cultural debasement of the USA, and the American tendency to not only shun contrition, but to actually express pride about the crimes of America's past - about the source of so muich of Europe's wealth - the arms sales, the encouragement of the worst third world dictators, the alternative of ostracism or savagery meted out to anyone who challenges the status quo - overwhelms my reason, making me think that there was something right about the Meinhofs of the world. That there was a justification in all this dionysian bloodshedding.
Well, there is always a justification for bloodshedding. I can enter that level, but, luckily for me, I can't stay there very long. They were shallow thinkers, moralists of the visceral response, and their crimes easily dwindled into a private vindicativeness far from the grander political action which they dreamed to unfold - the children of Nechaev, not so different, really, in their justification of every crime, from their brothers and sisters who took managerial positions with multi-nationals and were able to justify every enclosure of land, every theft of mineral rights, with some dumb allusion to economic theory. Yes, a historic dead-end, Nechaev, Ulrike, Baader who were, nevertheless so necessary to literature. In the case of the sixties radicals, though, their poet was Delillo - a writer of a much different sensibility than Dostoevsky. Although, come to think of it, they both share a very paranoid mindset.

Remora

Tony Blair is finally getting a bit of resistance in his party for trying to complete the Thatcher revolution. Usually a good Marxist would have some French Revolutionary analogy at hand - you know, Blair is playing the Demoulins to John Major's Lafayette, or some obscure thing like that - but there is nothing I can think of at the moment. Roy Hattersley has a nice denunciation of Blair in today's Observer. Key grafs

"...during the general election campaign Tony Blair was asked on television why he was not prepared to increase taxes on the rich in order to help the poor.

He replied that increasing the top rates of income tax would drive entrepreneurs from the country - without explaining that they would be unlikely to go to those other European Union members where both direct taxes and gross domestic product are higher than in Britain.

The second part of his answer must have chilled thousands of Labour Party members to the bone. The object of his policy was, he said, a general expansion in wealth. If that happened the higher earners would drag the poor along behind them. The Labour Party now believes in the trickle-down effect."

Warning about this article: Hattersley makes some batty remarks about inherited traits. His opposition to Blair avails itself of a pseudo-science that makes me uncomfortable. But at least there is some striking out at today's appalling Labour party. Meanwhile, the Tories are floundering about, with Clarke and Smith going at it like mudwrestlers on a sinking lifeboat. Which is a shame, because there are serious problems with the Europe Idea, and nobody is going to represent them. Duncan Smith is of course a joke, and his problem with Europe is basically, well, Europeans live there. The typical xenophobia of the retarded right wing. And that will be a great cover for advocates of Europe to get across an un-democratic program that, in a thousand ways, de-politicizes the economy - in other words, invests its control even more firmly in the hands of speculators, CEOs, and central bankers.