I bring this up just to note that we know this is happening and we are doing it.

If the Zephyr can safely return to Earth at that point, it will have smashed the official world record for continuous unmanned flight, now held by Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk drone. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, a governing body for aeronautic world records, is observing the flight.

The goal for the project has been to establish the Zephyr as the “world’s first truly eternal plane,” with future designs of the drone expected to provide “low-cost, persistent surveillance capability over months rather than days,” a company statement said. Both the British Defense Ministry and the Pentagon are involved with the development of the drone.

mmm… let’s all say it together: renewable eternal surveillance.

In honor of the ongoing, worldwide green (zzzzzz…!) revolution, here’s a recipe for my favorite French peasant food, may it forever be the fashion, Cassoulet.

Vive la revolution.

For related background, see these books by Claude Manceron. I’m sure there’s a thing or two in there that would be still instructive.

A coincidence the keeper is named Green? I think not.

This is hope, which everyone seems to agree, is not a plan. So what is hope?

Well, that depends on whether Your Hope is just hoping something happens, or hoping what you are doing will work. Which, again, neither plans, but they do part ways, fundamentally. There’s a difference, one from the other, in tone and tenor.

Research into building a quantum computer, for example. Not much of a plan; hopeful, maybe. Breakthroughs in encryption excites the NSA some people. But I think it is the off-shoot consequences of trying to hit balls into this cup from 90 yards out, day after month after year, that will be the real dividends of this kind of research. Of this kind of hope.

In its way, the same goes for hydrogen storage and electricity storage from wind, sun and wave. In these cases, we’re not hitting around the mark so much as increasing the volume of balls being chipped at the hole.

So, Bill Gates doesn’t care for efficiency, or cap-and-trade, for that matter. Fine. It’s a questionable signal to send, but fine. In a $ green culture, the billionaires get listened to the most. Sigh. You might as well have listened to Warhol about painting. That wasn’t was he was ever talking about – but I’ll save that for another time.

But Gates’ views are no more or less likely to be compromised by conflicted interests than anyone else’s. Just something to keep in mind. Especially of late, when hope is such an easy target for relentless pummeling. Go ahead, take that away and replace it with the best of the best laid plans ever devised.

What would we have?

I don’t know which image has the worse better portents – an empty parking lot or a full one.

The question will arise, is the lot half full? But worse cases aside, this isn’t about that. The price of diesel fuel continues to hover right at the point of viability for bio-diesel producers, such that they can’t really plan for anything permanent. Except they can. They don’t, and that’s another story. We thought five-dollar-gas would be here by now and that might be in part one of the reasons why it’s not. The shock that a fear of future economic shocks has itself put into the economy. It verges on the vertiginous, which itself makes all this sound like alliterative playtime. Which it isn’t.

There was a report on Marketplace yesterday about the fate of different kinds of malls in the present economy. In between the stats, something stands out a little more:

Hessam Nadji is managing director at Marcus and Millichap Real Estate Investment Services. He says one reason for the difference is an oversupply of strip malls. They’re cheaper and easier to build than great, big gallerias.

HESSAM NADJI: Because of the housing boom, there was a lot more construction of strip malls in reaction to the overheated housing market than there was construction of new malls.

Plus, he says, big shopping malls are more immune to the recession because — thanks to their food courts and movie theaters — they have an entertainment value that strip malls don’t have.

NADJI: You also have to take a look at the tenant mix that makes up a lot of demand for strip centers. And, unfortunately, a lot of them are local, smaller retailers that are under a lot of pressure right now.

Unlike chain stores that you see in a shopping mall, which don’t have to rely on just one location for business.

Sitting in an idling car in a half-empty parking lot as I was, the bigger message is the most obvious – when does the scale of what we do and what we can do slip, maybe accidentally, back into focus? Economies of scale seemed sexy, but they were nearly the opposite – though not just because objects in the mirror appeared to be closer than they actually were. We mistook the distance for something that didn’t matter, when any self-help book will tell you that the journey is the thing that counts. I think Henry Miller wrote it – happiness is not a destination. It’s a kind of dumb truth, a message we’re trying to send ourselves through the most obtuse signals. It’s why TV is so unintentionally funny.

And sometimes, radio.

This is one of those areas where green is green, green meets green, green begets green… however you want to think about it.

It is turning out that the outlook for investments in smart growth real estate are better than for investments in sprawl(!).

“Next-generation projects will ori ent to infill, urbanizing suburbs, and transit-oriented develop ment. Smaller housing units-close to mass transit, work, and 24-hour amenities-gain favor over large houses on big lots at the suburban edge. People will continue to seek greater convenience and want to reduce energy expenses. Shorter commutes and smaller heating bills make up for higher infill real estate costs.”

In the near term, the report advises investors to “buy or hold multifamily” as “the only place with a hint of hope, because of demographic demand” as a large contingent of echo boomers seek their first homes.  In a section titled “markets to watch,” the report also advises investors to favor convenient urban office (see graph), retail, entertainment and recreation districts where there are mass transit alternatives to driving.  Investors are advised to shy away from, among other things, fringe areas “with long car com mutes or where getting a quart of milk means taking a 15- minute drive.”

The report is Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010 and its conclusions are pretty obvious. What the report signifies is this outlook working its way into the consciousness of real estate developers and investors. Change the diaper, change the landscape.

Did something happen in the art world recently? Or more specifically, did everything that appeared to have been happening in the art world over the last thirty five years suddenly just give itself away? British Non Shark-killer Damien Hirst (at least he himself didn’t do the killing) had a show of oil paintings at the Wallace Collection. It turns out they were teh suck:

The fact that he appeared to be attempting to align himself with the other great artists in that gallery, by using Old Master imagery such as the skull, that he employed a dark blue-dominated palette reminiscent of the early works of his hero Francis Bacon, while making reference to Picasso’s Blue Period in the title of the exhibition, merely compounded the offence. Hirst’s presumption in comparison with the technical inadequacy of the work was simply unforgiveable. For once, chutzpah wasn’t enough.

Tom Lubbock, writing in the Independent, felt the need to preface his particularly acerbic remarks by reiterating – in an almost apologetic manner – one of the great mantras of contemporary art, that “skills needn’t matter”. Yet perhaps the great lesson of today’s responses to Hirst’s paintings is that skills most definitely do, should and always will matter.

Skills? What a concept? (sorry, low-hanging word choice). More like the above here, here and here.

To me, we have an easy political comparison. The Republican party has been trying to convince Americans for at least a generation that government just flat does not work. From 2001 to 2009, they attempted to demonstrate this and convince us via indisputable evidence and example.

For the last 35 years or so, the art world has been trying, desperately some might say, to convince us that art does not matter.

So I’d love to think the mask is off. Did Hirst manage to do it, with paintings?

Thanks, AC.

Many people associate that date with Columbus, the year he returned with 17 ships and the multi-century salvation massacre of indigenous North Americans commenced. We don’t know our own history and this creates all sorts of cognitive dissonance and other cultural blockages not at all unrelated to sustainable issues. We recognize who we are in what we’ve done – we identify ourselves with wars and conquests in ways that most, if not all, of those more malign events happen of their own volition and/or the hand of destiny – we just don’t know who or what is responsible for those. That our popular entertainments mostly exacerbate this self-re-certification in terms of all we know as good and true, and hence lead to indictments of culture and entertainments, are crimes which appear to be their own punishments.

And if it’s too early in the week for you to follow that kind of Calvinist logic, remember: the best way to discover anything to be willing to find out.

Take it from a no good coward, an American, too. (A North American, that is).

One of the Rupert WSJ blogs, enigmatically titled ‘Environmental Capital’ (get it?), asks whether the world can really afford to roll back carbon emissions. Choice quote:

“It’s the cost of doing nothing that’s going up,” says Frank Ackerman, an economist at the Stockholm Environment Institute at Tufts University and lead author of the report. “There are costs [to tackling climate change], but nobody is going to be living in a tent without electricity.”

Unless they are, in which case we’ll see a return to the group hug directed at self-preservation, otherwise known as keeping warm. We’ll use daylight for reading and when night falls we’ll only speak and relate stories until we don’t recall any more old ones and are forced to make up new ones. Night poetry and everything it stands for will see a resurgence – and this is to say nothing of things of which we shall not speak but merely delight and so must remain nameless because the words fail even when the people don’t. Hands searching in the dark, and for not a switch. Sounds hellish, I know. But even now, before night falls and the tents go up, before everything goes dark and the stars return, some are doing many of these things, even tonight. And they’re not even calling it practice.