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1516 Doug and Charles' hair shirts -- rank: 1000

Charles writes "How much different is that" - Jim H. :Who are you - or I - to say what people ought or ought not to be spending their money on? - "than saying for whom people should vote, or whether they should struggle for socialism?" Quite a lot different, I'd say. Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes: "If you think, as I do, that waste spewed by cars is harmful to the earth and the creatures who live on it, then reducing auto use is rather urgent." W ...

Document Size:	8506
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Mar 25 02:52:03 PST 2002

1517 Don't blame Hakki for the Turkish government -- rank: 1000

Dennis Perrin berates Hakki: "Believe me, dear friend, I would love nothing better than to see my tax dollars finance something more constructive than that Kurd-killing police state you live in. Then you'd be on your own with no one to blame but yourselves, and free to jail or slaughter whoever you choose so long as US citizens aren't footing the bill." I think this is pretty scuzzy. Hakki has never articulated a Turkish chauvinist attitude as far as I can remember. So attacking him fo ...

Document Size:	6172
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Mar 24 15:38:31 PST 2002

1518 If gas didn't cost less than Evian -- rank: 1000

Doug writes: "Dan Lazare told me he saw research saying that the average suburban household in the U.S. takes 11 trips with the car. If gas didn't cost less than Evian, the number might be lower." Perhaps its unexpected, but Europeans who pay much more for their petrol, especially Britons who pay much much more, continue to increase their car use. In fact the proportion of journeys Britons make in their over-taxed cars is pretty close to the proportion that Americans do in their - appa ...

Document Size:	5537
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Mar 24 15:56:28 PST 2002

1519 Israel -- rank: 1000

a rebours <a_rebours68 at yahoo.com> reproduces the Prospect article about 'the Israel lobby': I don't think that it is illegitimate to investigate whether there is a Jewish lobby that is shaping US policy, but looking at the question, you would have to conclude that its not true. It would be truer to say that the United States' changing policy towards Israel had an impact upon mainstream Jewish organisations in the sixties, and more so in the seventies. I can't quote chapter and verse, bu ...

Document Size:	9591
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Mar 24 15:14:33 PST 2002

1520 Kids, homes -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 24 March 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF THE KIDS? British education secretary Estelle Morris turned on the 'feckless' and 'yobbish' parents of supposedly delinquent children, in an outpouring of spleen that is becoming characteristic of the government's attitude to the public. Morris blames parents bad behaviour for the bad behaviour of children, and demands to know why local authorities have failed to use the 'parenting orders' that empower them to send adults to 'anger management' classe ...

Document Size:	8984
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Mar 24 11:23:25 PST 2002

1521 US public spending -- rank: 1000

Max B. Sawicky <sawicky at bellatlantic.net> writes: "I spend a lot of time inveighing against regressive taxes, but I am more concerned about the impact of a shrinkage of the public sector." Why? I heard that GW Bush was calling upon congress to raise the limit on govt. spending. For myself I would much prefer to see the US public sector shrunk, since as far as I can see its principal activity is killing people. I'm happy to oppose cuts where these are an attack on people's livi ...

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Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Mar 23 16:52:59 PST 2002

1522 Green insincerity -- rank: 1000

Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> writes: 'I read Deffeyes' Hubbert's Peak a few months ago. I thought he made a pretty good case for the peak in world oil production occurring within the next decade, and decreasing inexorably after that. ...What's wrong with his analysis?' It would be hard to say without seeing it. However, previous warnings of oil depletion (as in, say, the Club of Rome reports) made the mistake of confusing the economic definition of oil reserves with the absolute defini ...

Document Size:	6069
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Mar 22 23:35:32 PST 2002

1523 Doug's hair shirt -- rank: 1000

Doug writes 'C'mon James, this is ridiculous. I have no interest in holding down mass consupmtion; I'm a member of the masses, and I like consuming goods & services. I despise hair-shirtism, whether it's coming from a monk or Ralph Nader.' I'm happy to assume that you have no interest in holding down mass consumption, which makes it all the more strange that you would argue for it. You say that that's not what you mean. But what else can it mean? Car journeys are a substantial part of mass c ...

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Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Mar 22 13:29:17 PST 2002

1524 cars -- rank: 1000

Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> replying to Gar >Suprisingly this [energy tax] > probably is NOT the best way to reduce energy consumption. Hmm, why not? Greenhouse gas emissions are lots lower in Europe and Japan than they are in the U.S. Correspondence is not cause. Europe and Japan have had much lower growth rates than America in recent years. I question this: 'energy is absurdly cheap here.' Why absurdly cheap? It seems like a good thing that energy is cheap. That's why livi ...

Document Size:	6351
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Mar 22 11:32:49 PST 2002

1525 rude Kromm -- rank: 1000

You are such a mindlessly rude pig, Kromm: 'If anyone else coughed up analysis as astoundingly ridiculous as Heartfield's, and you would skewer and ridicule them...' What you mean by 'ridiculous' and 'astounding' is that you have a different view, but you are too conceited to set out your argument. That's fine by me. But something drives you on to this boorish unpleasantness. It only reflects on you. -- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, pl ...

Document Size:	4925
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Mar 22 11:17:46 PST 2002

1526 Why green warnings cannot be taken seriously -- rank: 1000

Gar dismisses the exaggeration of melting ice shelves as an incidental error by a British newspaper, but you have to ask yourself, was it ever likely that the mistake would have been the other way, that the problem would be underestimated. No, unfortunately it is a patter in environmental reporting, that wildly alarming claims are made, grabbing headlines, only to be later scaled down when the story has slipped out of the headlines. Consider some examples: * collapsed ice shelf exaggerated to on ...

Document Size:	7296
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Mar 22 08:07:50 PST 2002

1527 85 per cent of all journeys by car -- rank: 1000

Cian writes 'Its never going to happen, but (as a highly taxed Brit) I think that petrol in the US is way too cheap, given the costs to the environment, declining reserves, etc. Hell I live in London, owning a car doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I can't even drive.' Well, I guess owning a car makes no sense in London if you can't drive. But if I want to drop off my daughter at the nursery, or do the weekly shop, I have to tell you, the car's the thing. Car journeys represent something like 85 ...

Document Size:	5853
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Mar 21 18:47:36 PST 2002

1528 Ice shelf climb-down -- rank: 1000

Surprisingly, the keen students of ice shelf tectonics on this list have failed to keep up with the story. The Guardian newspaper, from which the original story was clipped published a retraction in today's edition. They say that they exaggerated the size of the ice shelf by six times, and its weight by one million times! (Corrections, Guardian 21 March, 2002) If any of the new recruits to ice shelf preservation were genuinely interested in the issue, wouldn't they have noticed this report? What ...

Document Size:	5660
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Mar 21 16:22:17 PST 2002

1529 Green insincerity -- rank: 1000

Nathan, Miles and Doug all protest that I must be wrong about global warming, but in all seriousness, if they believed one per cent of the predictions of impending environmental disaster WOULDN'T THEY FEEL OBLIGED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. I really do not see the point of explaining why a point of view is wrong when plainly those who are expressing it do not even themselves take it seriously enough to act upon it. Nathan in particular takes exception to my argument that it is hypocritical to con ...

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Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Mar 21 05:59:33 PST 2002

1530 Miles' case for a cut in wages -- rank: 1000

Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> writes 'I'll interject the crude Marxist insight here: individual energy consumption in the U.S. is not some personal preference; it is the inevitable outcome of a society based on capitalist production. ... Of course Americans use lots of energy; it's an integral aspect of our way of life! But we shouldn't treat this "SUV culture" as the product of uninformed or deluded individual choices. The energy consumption choices people in our society ma ...

Document Size:	6322
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Mar 20 10:07:55 PST 2002