Rhinocrisy

Rolling Stone (of which I am a big fan) has an article on the subject of plastic bags, including some daunting statistics: the world consumes 1 million plastic bags every minute, and Americans use 102 billion every year. While 500 billion plastic bags every year is an outrageous figure, and the plastic bag is a particularly egregious and permanent form of trash, it’s only one of hundreds of kinds of permanent trash that we produce every year.

There is an active, well-funded and continuous movement to maintain our trash productivity. Last year in California, there was an effort in the legislature by a number of environmental organizations, legislatures, and the governor (Schwarzenegger) to ban plastic bags state-wide. Ostensibly this ban exists in San Francisco, although you wouldn’t know it by the profligate use of plastic in this city. The legislative measure went down in flames at the last minute, thanks to extreme lobbying efforts on the part of plastics industry groups, notably the American Chemistry Council. Hopefully environmental groups will regird themselves and push this through in the future.

However: I like to keep my eye a bit ahead of the ball (which is why I suck at baseball). So, I’d like to suggest two laws that I think would do a lot to make our trash situation manageable (that is, virtually nonexistent).

1. Uniform Packaging law – This means that package design should be done with an eye towards recyclability. Packaging should be made of single materials that can be recycled as a unit – that is, nothing like the dreaded Tetra Paks, which, being made of paper laminated with polyethylene and lined with aluminum, are exceedingly difficult to recycle. Packaging should also be minimized – no triple-wrapping things in layers of plastic for no reason at all. I’ve always had a beef with the Japanese about this. Also, my books don’t need to be shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard when they arrive from Amazon.

2. Guaranteed Recycling law – This is the more draconian one, which specifies that any manufacturer has to provide means for recycling their product down to harmless components, either themselves or via a third-party service. This means everything – batteries, cellphones, egg cartons, bicycle frames, etc. The consumer will probably be made to bear the additional cost, but it would also mean that manufacturers will be forced to consider the decomposability of their products, and hopefully bring their design around to match.

This might seem like a heavy-handed way to deal with trash, but ultimately it’s the only reasonable way (other than, maybe, vaporizing it with a plasma torch) – we have to stop manufacturing things that are difficult to get rid of. In general, we need to think about who – and what – will bear the costs of our production, of our activity, not just until we get paid for our effort, but until the ends of existence.

So, following the downgrade and the resulting stock-market plunge, it’s worthwhile to shine a little light on S&P, to eradicate my own ignorance, anyway. If you wish to peer over my shoulder, I’m noting down my observations here. The company is a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill (yes, the guys who made your Geometry textbook), led by one Deven Sharma, a Bihari of relatively modest background (he has a degree in business management from OSU). Mr. Sharma last year penned an editorial in the WSJ complaining that they may be held to account (that is, face liability) for their rating standards, and calling for the repeal of ratings requirements on the debt held by certain investors. That is, the correct response to the colossal failure of ratings agencies to correctly identify CDOs, etc., as radioactive bombs, should be to remove ratings requirements from debt – that is, debt could simply be unrated, and a rating is merely a suggestive imprimatur bearing no significant or determining weight.

It’s quite clear why S&P’s president feels this way; he wants to punt. In the boom time he was happy to rubber-stamp junk and collect his commissions on it; now that the obvious deficiency of his agency (viz., their complete lack of any accountability for their ratings) has come to light, and some people in Congress are proposing an accountability mechanism, suddenly, S&P ratings should only be considered “just one of many tools”.

He also says:

[O]ur criteria for rating a security [following post-recession corrections] as AAA (our highest designation) include consideration of what could happen to a security if the country faces an economic scenario on par with the Great Depression.

Bear in mind that this was written well over a year ago. Now, it’s arguable that S&P was spot-on for rating all of that crappy debt AAA, since as it turned out, it was backed by the U.S. government. The government took the hit on behalf of all of that shitty debt, and now that its debt situation looks precarious, S&P wants to downgrade THEIR rating. This is high irony – if they had just done their fucking job correctly in the first place, instead of being greedy banksters, there would have been no need for a downgrade of U.S. government debt. S&P screws the pooch twice – first by not doing the job a ratings agency should (actually rating debt correctly), and then pillories the government (and the entire world) for cleaning up after their mess. Die in a fire, S&P.

None of which is to say, of course, that we don’t deserve a downgrade. We’re like a Bantustan right now, except without the political cohesion.

Lots of exciting stuff going on in the world these days, momentous, world-shaking events. And we all know what that means: now’s the time for dictators to swiftly crush their rebellious populace, while everyone is distracted by tsunami footage.

So, keep an eye on US ally Bahrain, where evil king Hamad has just imported troops from surrounding dictatorships (UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) to shoot and kill the angry plebes. Sounds reasonable, right? Fortunately our government is right on top of things: they are carefully evacuating all non-essential personnel from the US military base in Bahrain, and Secretary of State Hillary “Why Isn’t This Evil Shrike Dead Already O Lord”^* Clinton took the vital step of urging “all sides” to remain calm – gun-wielding foreign soldiers AND unarmed civilian protesters. In fact, it seems like all of our government officials, all the way up to the big Cheese himself, are “deeply concerned”.

Some of you might be wondering: “Wait, what was that about a US military base in Bahrain?” Well, what about it? That doesn’t really affect our deep, deep concern. After all, why would that be relevant?

“The welfare of our personnel and their families is of the utmost importance. This Authorized Departure is being ordered to allow family members who have concerns about their safety to depart without incurring an undue burden. We remain committed to our long-standing partnership with Bahrain.”

^* I am told the story of how she acquired this nickname at Wellesley is hilarious and instructive.

Just reposting a link to this excellent comic from BoingBoing, so that it can get a wider readership.

After nearly a year-long hiatus, I finally drew a new comic. Not a very funny one, but it serves as a bridge that will allow me to draw other unfunny comics.

I discovered my keys on my desk earlier this evening; I had believed them lost on a cross-city bike ride several weeks ago, and in fact had spent that evening slowly retracing the route in order to spot them on the ground. Apparently I only spared a desultory glance for my desk, since they shook out of a relatively unobscure corner (under my copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology). In the meanwhile, though, I had of course replaced everything on a new keyring; now I have two completely redundant sets of keys.

I feel certain that the incident demands being condensed into some kind of aphorism, but I’m unable to really make it manifest. Something about loss, certainty, and action. The proper steps after a moment of loss are to act to overcome the deficiency. Even if it later turns out that the loss was temporary, or in this case illusory, decisively overcoming it is better than clinging to a protracted hope.