Remembering A Few

In late Decembers, for some years now, I've been remembering and honoring some of those who died during the year.  As usual this year, I've done so on my blogs in specific areas: of books, the stage, Star Trek and science fiction, popular culture in the baby boom era, and Pittsburgh figures at American Dash.  This is probably the last year for all of that, but here I want to just add my favorite photos of some of these memorable people, with a few words.

I'll start with someone few have heard of: Stephen Gaskin.  I happened to be in Berkeley when his Monday Night Class at the Family Dog ballroom in San Francisco was packing in 1500 or so seekers in 1969.  It culminated in those months in the First Annual Holy Man Jam, at which I was ordained a minister in the Universal Life Church by means of a scroll conferred upon me with the holy word Zap! and a toke on the world's longest bong.

Great days.  As Gaskin, always wise, wisely said more recently, "You’ve got to be a rich country to have hippies. They’re a free, privileged scholar class that can study what they want. They’re like young princelings. That’s why the only other places to have produced hippies are countries like Germany, because they’re rich enough. It’s really been an upscale movement, in a way, except for when it broke through. And when it broke through was when it was the most revolutionary and really scared the Establishment, because hippies bond across cultural, religious, and class lines."

Above is what Gaskin looked like at the time of the Monday Night Class.  I have a couple of books that preserve some of what he said, and one of the last surviving magazines to keep faith with that era's best instincts, The Sun Magazine, printed an excerpt with Gaskin's pretty recent commentary, as part of a project to annotate and republish these old volumes.

Shortly after the Holy Man Jam he left the Bay area and started a particular kind of commune called The Farm which he talks about in The Sun  interview from the mid 1980s. He remained an activist, speaker and widely admired man. This photo is from 2009.

The Maestro.  No writer in my lifetime made as many people happy reading his work, particularly A Hundred Years of Solitude.  I saw the same joyful look on the faces of literary editor Ted Solataroff and the casual readers who read it on my recommendation.  He remains an heroic example.  In this click-happy age, his words are even more powerful: "Some say the novel is dead.  But it is not the novel.  It is they who are dead."  His work and his spirit are immortal.

This photo from the New Yorker says everything I want to say about Mike Nichols.  He was the most approachable yet incisive interpreter of our age, from the 1950s of Nichols and May to the 1960s of The Graduate to the  1970s of Carnal Knowledge to 1980s of Working Girl to the 90s of Regarding Henry and beyond. He brought both Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Angels in America to the screen. He was the medium cool of New York. Though I never met him,  I'll remember him for one week in 1984 when I saw two new plays he directed on Broadway: Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and David Rabe's Hurlyburly. There haven't been too many years on Broadway like that since. He had discernment and taste, and his gift was witty and accessible presentation.  He was the perfect host.

 The closest I got to Ruby Dee was at the Pittsburgh airport, when she and Ossie Davis were paged, but unfortunately they didn't come to the white courtesy telephone nearest me.  She was a familiar figure in the performing arts and in the public sphere from the 60s on, and by the 80s and 90s she was revered.

 But long before that she began breaking barriers for black women especially, beginning when she was a young woman in the 1940s.  

Robin Williams broke through the sitcom's mannered sterility in Mork & Mindy, and his frenzied humor remained to surprise and challenge the established forms. His hilarious genius in mating very different things is best expressed for me in his Elmer Fudd singing "Fire."  But then in the movies he played Garp with a natural humanity that was equally surprising.  Most of his film roles were like that.  Thinking about him is to think hard about the vagaries and vicissitudes of life, of what we're given from birth, and how we use and handle them.  There was a nobility about him, and a vulnerability too.

I once met a woman who had worked in Hollywood in the 40s who said that the romance between Bogart and Lauren Bacall was so smoldering that people from all over the lot came to watch the filming of To Have and Have Not.  Bacall was magic on the screen in the 40s, and a strong presence in her films and plays thereafter.  She lived beyond Hollywood, in circles that included writers and political figures.   She made her mark on her times in positive ways.  She was almost 90.

Peter Mathiessen wrote about his hard and extensive travels to places where few people were or go, and his face became the definition of weathered.  He wrote books on Leonard Peltier and Indian Country that didn't help his career, and got deeply into Buddhism.  His travel writings emphasized the ecological.  All of which I relate to.  He also wrote novels about a violent southern outlaw I couldn't relate to at all.  His life and his writing were part of the same persistent quest and journey.  Like the snow leopard he wrote about, he may have been among the last of his kind.

This is Mona Freeman in That Brennan Girl, released in 1946, the year I was born.  She was never a movie star, and worked most of her career through the 50s and 60s in television series dramas, in supporting roles.  She was a working actor, with another 40 years of life after her TV career.  But in this 1946 role, she was the face of a generation, of hope and yearning, of the future.  She stands in here for all the actors and others who did something that got their deaths mentioned in wikipedia or elsewhere, but who have been long forgotten.  I want to honor them too. Maybe another stranger will see this photo, and remember her--or discover her.

What If You Ended A War and Nobody Came?

On Sunday, a military ceremony officially ended U.S. and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan.

On Christmas, President Obama visited a military base in Hawaii to thank troops for their efforts, and to announce that combat operations had ceased.

Neither story got much play.  Perhaps they were anti-climactic, or because thousands of troops remain in Afghanistan on training missions. Or because US military personnel are involved in operations against ISIL forces in the region.  Or because somehow it is old news, and a forgotten war.  Or whatever.

But it does seem a little weird that the end of a trillion dollar war passes without notice--can you even imagine what a trillion dollars could have done for this country? Or that the US being not at war anywhere for the first time since the first year of this century seems to mean nothing.  Especially since ending these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than any other single issue, got Barack Obama elected President in the first place.  

Evaluating 2014

The transcript for President Obama's final press conference of the year has just become available.  Though the questions were mostly about North Korea and Cuba (which I'll skip), he began by emphasizing decisions and policies that came into fruition in 2014, some going back to the start of his administration 6 years ago:

"In last year’s final press conference, I said that 2014 would be a year of action and would be a breakthrough year for America. And it has been...  The steps that we took early on to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation helped make 2014 the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s. All told, over a 57-month streak, our businesses have created nearly 11 million new jobs. Almost all the job growth that we’ve seen have been in full-time positions. Much of the recent pickup in job growth has been in higher-paying industries. And in a hopeful sign for middle-class families, wages are on the rise again.

Our investments in American manufacturing have helped fuel its best stretch of job growth also since the 1990s. America is now the number-one producer of oil, the number-one producer of natural gas. We're saving drivers about 70 cents a gallon at the pump over last Christmas. And effectively today, our rescue of the auto industry is officially over. We've now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration committed, and the American auto industry is on track for its strongest year since 2005. And we've created about half a million new jobs in the auto industry alone.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, about 10 million Americans have gained health insurance just this past year. Enrollment is beginning to pick up again during the open enrollment period. The uninsured rate is at a near record low. Since the law passed, the price of health care has risen at its slowest rate in about 50 years. And we’ve cut our deficits by about two-thirds since I took office, bringing them to below their 40-year average."

"...And in less than two weeks, after more than 13 years, our combat mission in Afghanistan will be over. Today, more of our troops are home for the holidays than any time in over a decade. Still, many of our men and women in uniform will spend Christmas in harm’s way. And they should know that the country is united in support of you and grateful not only to you but also to your families.

The six years since the crisis have demanded hard work and sacrifice on everybody’s part. But as a country, we have every right to be proud of what we’ve accomplished -- more jobs; more people insured; a growing economy; shrinking deficits; bustling industry; booming energy. Pick any metric that you want -- America’s resurgence is real. We are better off.

I’ve always said that recovering from the crisis of 2008 was our first order of business, and on that business, America has outperformed all of our other competitors. Over the past four years, we’ve put more people back to work than all other advanced economies combined. We’ve now come to a point where we have the chance to reverse an even deeper problem, the decades-long erosion of middle-class jobs and incomes, and to make sure that the middle class is the engine that powers our prosperity for decades to come.

To do that, we're going to have to make some smart choices; we've got to make the right choices. We're going to have to invest in the things that secure even faster growth in higher-paying jobs for more Americans."

cartoon from the New Yorker

Expressing a desire to work with Congress to get stuff done, he also expressed skepticism of GOPer rhetoric on why they couldn't do anything in the last Congress:

"If Republicans seek to take health care away from people who just got it, they will meet stiff resistance from me. If they try to water down consumer protections that we put in place in the aftermath of the financial crisis, I will say no. And I’m confident that I’ll be able to uphold vetoes of those types of provisions. But on increasing American exports, on simplifying our tax system, on rebuilding our infrastructure, my hope is that we can get some things done.

"I’ve never been persuaded by this argument that if it weren’t for the executive actions they would have been more productive. There’s no evidence of that. So I intend to continue to do what I’ve been doing, which is where I see a big problem and the opportunity to help the American people, and it is within my lawful authority to provide that help, I’m going to do it."

President Obama, in setting out the facts concerning the tars sands oil pipeline from Canada, found nothing good to say about it.  So the GOPers really will have to consider whether they want to make their first big fight over this, which benefits the Koch brothers and other oil barons, and nobody else.

After discussing racial issues in a low-keyed way, he ended with a statement of belief based on his experiences and special perspective:

"The one thing I will say -- and this is going to be the last thing I say -- is that one of the great things about this job is you get to know the American people. I mean, you meet folks from every walk of life and every region of the country, and every race and every faith. And what I don’t think is always captured in our political debates is the vast majority of people are just trying to do the right thing, and people are basically good and have good intentions.

 Sometimes our institutions and our systems don’t work as well as they should. Sometimes you've got a police department that has gotten into bad habits over a period of time and hasn’t maybe surfaced some hidden biases that we all carry around. But if you offer practical solutions, I think people want to fix these problems. It’s not -- this isn’t a situation where people feel good seeing somebody choked and dying. I think that troubles everybody. So there’s an opportunity of all of us to come together and to take a practical approach to these problems.

And I guess that's my general theme for the end of the year -- which is we’ve gone through difficult times. It is your job, press corps, to report on all the mistakes that are made and all the bad things that happen and the crises that look like they're popping. And I understand that. But through persistent effort and faith in the American people, things get better. The economy has gotten better. Our ability to generate clean energy has gotten better. We know more about how to educate our kids. We solved problems. Ebola is a real crisis; you get a mistake in the first case because it’s not something that's been seen before -- we fix it. You have some unaccompanied children who spike at a border, and it may not get fixed in the time frame of the news cycle, but it gets fixed."

And a theme we're likely to hear again in the State of the Union:

"And part of what I hope as we reflect on the New Year this should generate is some confidence. America knows how to solve problems. And when we work together, we can't be stopped."

Though he proceeded gently, his emphasis not only on outcomes but on the problem-solving process and the time that it takes, identifies something important and doubtlessly true.  For this process takes time: identifying the actual problems, identifying possible solutions, analyzing costs, benefits and possible collateral and unintended consequences, deciding on a course of action, organizing the administration of that action, getting it started, monitored and modified if necessary, then watching as changes affect the course of whatever it is--all of that takes time, and definitely does not "get fixed in the time frame of the news cycle."

I can only marvel however at his faith in people being "basically good," with good intentions.  It's especially difficult to say this in the face of the ongoing racial situations in which police are killing black men with impunity, and now the New York City police union leader is essentially declaring war on protesters, at the very least.

However he is perhaps on firmer ground in believing that there is good in nearly everyone than whatever faith he has (or must have) in the American government and the international political process.  2014 did not buttress my faith in either, and 2015 will likely be crucial in this regard.  It's true that President Obama can veto the worst the GOPers can do here.  But this is the year that governments can really commit human civilization to do its best for its own survival in confronting the climate crisis.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets.  As the caricature goes into public circulations with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist."

William Irwin Thompson
"The Borg or Borges? Reflections on Machine Consciousness"
in honor of the news that bots now outnumber humans on the Internet.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Change is hard –- in our own lives, and in the lives of nations. And change is even harder when we carry the heavy weight of history on our shoulders. But today we are making these changes because it is the right thing to do. Today, America chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future –- for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere, and for the world."

President Obama on Wednesday, announcing the immediate establishment of normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, and other measures.  But most of these words pertain to other aspects of the future, such as addressing the climate crisis.

Climate Notes

It's a kind of subsurface story from Lima but one that bears watching: some real discussion and support for a bold longterm goal: zero carbon pollution by the year 2050.

That the story appeared in the Washington Post begins to tell you on what level this is being considered.  How Lima turned out may not be a great indicator of the possibility, but the idea that it is practical is getting around.

The story points out that corporations want some kind of longterm goal for their planning.  Right now, absent international or national goals, they are dealing with regional, state and local regulations and models.

We'll see how far the idea gets in Paris.  In Washington, we may be in for a kind of showdown over the Keystone Pipeline early in 2015, as the GOP majority leader has announced it is first priority.  With oil prices so low, it makes less economic sense, except for the fossil fuel billionaires to whom the craven GOP officeholders are beholden.

But the goal itself could begin to transform energy, economics and global society, and give human civilization a fighting chance to survive this, while at last getting closer to living up to its promise.

Meanwhile, a scholarly survey of scholarship on climate as an important factor in history.

Reality-Based? Fear-Based? You Decide

                      Doonesbury from this past Sunday.

The Torture Doctors

Apart from the nature and extent of the brutality, I didn't think there was much new to learn from the Senate torture report itself.  But it did expand on a little known aspect of it--the role of "professional" psychologists, and indeed, the organization that purportedly represents professional psychology.

Those are the allegations in this report on Slate.  It begins: Thanks to revelations in the newly released report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it is now widely known that the CIA’s torture program was created, supervised, and implemented by two licensed clinical psychologists—James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen—who were paid millions of dollars for their efforts. Less widely known is that the Bush administration’s torture operation, at both the CIA and the Pentagon—at “black sites” and at Guantanamo—was devised and supervised largely by clinical psychologists.

The piece by Steven Reisner goes on to note that the only major professional organization in medicine not to forbid their members to engage in torture is the American Psychological Association.

This has more than symbolic significance.  These professional associations police their membership.  If members are found guilty of ethical violations, they could lose their right to practice. Yet, Reisner writes:

"Recent revelations in James Risen’s new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, add an additional dimension to this story—it appears that senior staff members of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychologists, colluded with national security psychologists from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House to adapt APA ethics policy to suit the needs of the psychologist-interrogators."

I've made the observation before that the psychology seems to be the only science that's actually gone backwards in the past few decades.  I based this on the lack of scientific rigor, and the rise of behavioral psychology which is deterministic and mechanistic on the most basic levels.

Implicit in this is the power to manipulate behavior, something that's largely absent from the psychology of William James or of Carl Jung, which sought to provide tools to individuals to help them guide their own behavior.

Now we see where these trends in psychology lead.  Led by craven opportunists, with apparently little or no self-knowledge.  Unless of course they knew they were evil and just didn't mind.      

Lima Call for Climate Action

The UN climate conference in Lima ended with a glass half-full, half-empty agreement.

The glass half-full was that there was an agreement at all, but especially that, as the Guardian subhead declared: Deal would for first time commit all countries – including developing nations – to cutting emissions.

The Guardian story also has the full text of the agreement, and a summary of what is in it, and what is not.

It is an agreement in principle.  As the Guardian wrote: The five-page text agreed on Sunday – now officially known as the Lima Call for Climate Action – represents the embryonic phase of the deal due to be delivered in Paris.

As sketched out in Lima, all countries, rising economies as well as rich countries would pledge action on climate change. Wealthy countries would help developing countries fight climate change, by investing in clean energy technology or offering climate aid.

Countries already threatened by climate change – such as small island states which face being swallowed up by rising seas – were promised a “loss and damage” programme of financial aid.

The all-inclusive nature of the emissions cuts constitutes a break with one of the defining principles of the last 20 years of climate talks – that wealthy countries should carry the burden of cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

The Guardian described the agreement as "embryonic."  Others derided it as weak. The Reuters story took the dim view, with its headline: Lima climate talks fall short, making 2015 breakthrough less likely.  Its story stated:Lima had a straightforward agenda: agree the scope and schedule for the Paris agreement.
But countries split on both big fundamentals and many of the details of a future agreement, and the meeting ended with a far more modest agenda than many had hoped for.

Both stories have accurate facts, and mostly state them differently, or with different emphasis.  There will be a lot of that going around.  But the fact is that nobody knows yet what will turn out to be more important: the agreement in principle, or the resistance to setting specific and tough standards.

Will reality sink in and urgency surface in Paris?  All the media's pundits and all the presidents men don't know either.    

A Nation of Witnesses

Thousands in Washington, more thousands in cities across America, marching to protest killings and coverups that have become too numerous and obvious to hide.

Rain of Drought

Right here on the North Coast, the biggest storm in five years to hit California didn't amount to much.  The rain was sometimes heavy but mostly moderate to light, and actually that's good, especially as it was spread out over time. We had some temporarily flooded streets (though the photo above is from southern CA.) There was some wind but not alot and not for long.  We had two brief losses of electricity here-- the one last night seemed to go on a long time but when the lights came suddenly back on, it had only been about 20 minutes.

We were prepared for "Rainageddon" especially by Lost Coast Outpost, probably our most reliable source of local news, where the rain puns ("rain of terror") were rife.  They had an ongoing watch on the rivers, but they never got close to flood level. (An aside: Lost Coast Outpost picked up the Person of the Year story below from my post on one of my other blogs.)

But Rainageddon was no misnomer elsewhere in the state.  The Bay Area and the LA area both got hammered, with copious rain and attendant mudslides, flooding, power outages, coastal collapse, cancelled flights, etc.  Also some relief from the drought, as reservoirs and rivers got replenished, and the falls at Yosemite flowed again.

The best long-term news is that the precipitation in the Sierras improved  to 147% of normal for this time of year, although the total snowpack is still only 40% of normal. Many places depend on the melt for their summer water.

But the reign of drought is not over. Though the moisture this month and this storm especially have provided some relief, it will take a very wet winter (75 additional inches of precip) and probably two to end the drought.  Or as Wired reports, about a dozen more epic storms like this one.  This report has a lot of stats and graphs about this storm's dimensions.

There were also stories the other day indicating that the California drought was not "caused" by the climate crisis.  This is a common dodge based on the lack of appreciation for the real complexities (though it's not quite as bad as laughing at the idea of global heating because it snows.)  As Dr. Jeff Masters suggests, the unprecedented heat over the past three years in California likely made the drought worse but about a third--enough to make this drought the worst in 1200 years (that research, as well as before and after photos of the Yosemite falls, are in this Weather Underground post.)

Person of the Year

Time Magazine has chosen its Person of the Year for 2014: The Ebola Fighters.  One of the five covers belongs to Ella Watson-Stryker, the Doctors Without Borders worker I referred to without naming in a previous post.  She's one of our own here in Humboldt--the daughter of a long-time friend, Betsy Watson, and a person we've watched and been proud of for a long time.

According to the magazine's description, Ella didn't even want to spend the ten minutes on having her picture taken, as it was distracting her from her work.

Her mother writes that Ella is good health, and very proud of the work they and the US military did in Liberia, where Ebola has been virtually eradicated.  But after some time in Europe training other workers and some r&r over Christmas in the states, she's back in the fray in Sierra Leone, where things are dire indeed.

I didn't mention her name before because of the stigma that was ignorantly attached to these heroes.  And even now, Ella has to go out of her way in entering the US to avoid airports where she could be forced to spend her holidays in quarantine.

It's hard to have much faith in humanity after something like the wanton torture the US engaged in, as we are being reminded again.  Then there's Ella, and Doctors Without Borders.  And even Time Magazine, for doing this.  A better world is possible.

Water You Saying

Yeah, I know the torture report is hogging all the headlines.  And that it was issued, with unequivocal statements by Senator Feinstein that there was not a single instance in which these barbaric horrific acts yielded any information, and that everybody is forced to face it now--all righteous things.  But as long ago posts here and previous blogs show, it's not new.  We knew all this, if not in such horrifying detail.  And the GOPer response is also not exactly unpredictable, though Borowitz summarized it well in his satiric column claiming that Cheney called for an international ban on torture reports.

But let's talk about something else.  Like water.  It's coming down, East Coast, West Coast.  Changes in the dispersal of water from the heavens over time is likely to be a major effect of the climate crisis.  Deserts will grow, other places will persistently flood.  Food supplies, power generation, transport, health, let alone the human need for drinking water every day, all are disrupted.   It's happening now.

And here's the thing for our vaunted scientific expertise: nobody knows what water really is.  They fool you with that familiar grade school formula: H20.  Two hydrogen atoms and one atom of oxygen.  Sound simple.

But if it is so simple, and so simply described, why can't they make it in the lab?  They make all other kinds of stuff.  Some labs claim they're making organic life out of inorganic material.  But on the most useful possible bit of manufacturing, they come up empty.  They can't make water.  Except by pissing in the wind.

We don't even know where water came from.  There's new research on that--scientists say that at least half of the water on the Earth is not only older than the planet, it is older than the sun.

If not even the Earth knows how to combine two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms,  where did our water come from?  Some place older than the solar system, it seems.  A prominent theory was that comets delivered it, a very long time ago, from cosmic space.

Now there's data from the Euro Space Agency probe that landed on a comet that the water it harbors isn't the same as the water on Earth. (That's the comet up there, real photo, minus tail.)

 Apparently the comet theory has been controversial for some time.  The best story on the whole topic I read today is this one in the NY Times.  It says this kills the comet theory.  Other stories say it suggests it is wrong, but more evidence is needed.

So the prevailing theory now is that water arrived here via asteroids.  The Times story concludes:

In October, in another Science paper, researchers found that meteorites that originated from the large asteroid Vesta, which is believed to have formed inside of the snow line, also possess Earthlike deuterium levels. These scientists believe that ice-rich asteroids from outside the snow line were pushed inward and were among the pieces that combined to form Vesta and Earth hundreds of millions of years before the late heavy bombardment.  In other words, Earth may have been wet from almost the beginning.

So by this description the Earth was originally a large snowball in space. (Asteroids are getting other kinds of attention, too, including the likelihood that one may come this way.)  But the asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, within the solar system.  So that still doesn't explain where the water came from originally.  Or how it came to be.  Or what it is.

Storm Day

It's raining.  We're into a storm that's reputedly to be the strongest in five years, and will last into Friday.  High winds inevitably lead to power outages here, so I'm taking this opportunity now.  That photo is supposedly what the winds look like.  So Van Gogh was a meteorologist?  If this storm really has as much moisture in it as predicted, it's going to help the snow pack in the Sierras a whole lot.  Flooding of course is a worry almost everywhere, including here.  There are also hints that this is going to be a wet winter up here, to remind us of what normal was.  

Tech Deception, Digital Slavery

In a New York Times oped, George Mason University economics professor, Tyler Cowen claims that the answer to income inequality in America might well be more and better computer technology.

Applying technology in smarter ways could bring down the costs of education and medical care. "We can easily imagine medical diagnosis by online artificial intelligence, greater use of online competitive procurement for health care services, more transparency in pricing and thus more competition, and much cheaper online education for many students, to cite just a few possibilities. In such a world, many wage gains would come from new and cheaper services, rather than from being able to cut a better deal with the boss at work."

Income gains, he suggests, are limited now by lack of computer skills. "Not everyone can work fruitfully with computers now. There is a generation gap when it comes to manipulating electronic devices, and many relevant tasks require knowledge of programming or, more ambitiously, the entrepreneurial skill of creating a start-up. That, in a nutshell, is how our dynamic sector has concentrated its gains among a relatively small number of employees, thus leading to more income inequality."

But simpler "human-computer interfaces" such as computers that respond to spoken commands will open up new job opportunities, such as supervising smart robots on the factory floor.  Income inequality could also lessen as emerging nations like China and India begin to innovate products that are now expensive and make them cheaper.

Cowen's argument in general is that income inequality is not structural, as Thomas Piketty famously wrote, but a product of an application lag in technology and the ability of many people to use this technology.  His conclusion: "growing inequality is highly contingent on particular technologies and the global conditions of the moment. Movements toward greater inequality often set countervailing forces in motion, even if those forces take a long time to come to fruition. From this perspective, rather than seeking to beat down capital, our attention should be directed to leaving open the future possibilities for innovation, change and dynamism. Even if income inequality continues to increase in the short run, as I believe is likely, there exists a plausible and more distant future in which we are mostly much better off and more equal. The history of technology suggests that new opportunities for better living and higher wages are being created, just not as quickly as we might like."

This analysis, hardly reassuring to begin with, and clotted with all its meaningless buzzwords, is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin, as should be obvious to anyone who lives in the actual world rather than the economics world.  But for a cogent blast of cold water, there's Jacob Silverman in The Baffler which exposes the actual dark side of the computerization of everyday life, including the rise of digital slavery.

I don't mean digital addiction, I mean working for nothing, or next to nothing, which Silverman describes in detail.  We know about the digital sweatshops but most of those are abroad.  He writes about digital slavery in America:

"Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones. Whether operating a bin selector in an Amazon warehouse or freelancing from a coffee shop, many Americans work long days without having contact with other human beings—neither coworkers nor supervisors. (There are no subordinates for this class of workers.) Everything they do is tracked, because efficiency is the sine qua non. Some of them work for online labor markets like Elance, oDesk, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which offer micro-jobs that can be done remotely, with little to no training. They complete surveys, tag photos, and transcribe interviews, for pay of a few dollars per hour or at a piecework rate of little more than a few cents per task...These labor markets depend on a kind of internalized offshoring."

Contrary to Cowen, computer literacy isn't confined to well-paid professionals.  It is the structure of the market, as well as the devious propaganda of the tech giants, that enslaves people and keeps their incomes down.  And it's all done automatically, without apparent human intervention, as so much in the world as wired now is:

"The software facilitating this transaction acts as the ultimate mediator; the employee and the employer never have to deal with one another directly. Payment can be unreliable and is wholly contingent on the employer accepting the laborer’s product. If the former doesn’t like what he receives, he can simply reject it and not pay the worker for his time. Contract employees have no chance, in this setup, to appeal or to revise their work."

According to Silverman, this is the real meaning of "crowdsourcing." Moreover, it is building into the market an increase in income disparity, by paying a lot of people a little, and forcing them to compete with each other, forever:

Companies begin to think in terms of short-term spending rather than long-term investment, as borrowing and hiring both atrophy. More and more of us are forced to be contingent laborers, freelancers, crowdsourced volunteers, or “permalancers” always on the lookout for more opportunities, always advertising ourselves through social media and public networks, knowing—with a sense of generalized suspicion—that our public utterances on social media may influence our future job prospects. Risk assessment algorithms may already be parsing our social media profiles, pooling information to be used in a future background check."

A lot of this, Silverman writes, is being sold to people as a libertarian ideal, when it is pretty much the opposite: "Workers, in turn, have more mobility and a semblance of greater control over their working lives. But is any of it worth it when we can’t afford health insurance or don’t know how much the next gig might pay, or when it might come? When an app’s terms of service agreement is the closest thing we have to an employment contract? When work orders come through a smartphone and we know that if we don’t respond immediately, we might not get such an opportunity again? When we can’t even talk to another human being about the task at hand and we must work nonstop just to make minimum wage?"

So far in history, capitalism has been unable to survive without slavery somewhere.  With the slaves of the South and elsewhere, slave labor in South American mines, industrial wage slavery, outsourced and piecework slavery in the digital age. Update: Slavery exists in prison labor; the state of California has officially argued it needs prisoners for their slave labor. That's a problem capitalism doesn't even recognize, so of course it has no solution.

Meanwhile, it consumes the planet like the mindless mechanism it is, when people with minds refuse to see the problem.

Can't Breathe

I can only take note of the ongoing actions in cities across America protesting the police killings of young unarmed black males.  I did see that the protests in Pittsburgh shut down part of the Parkway, something that to my knowledge has not happened since the 1960s.

Protests have included members of the St. Louis Rams football team making the "hands up" gesture, referring to the killing in Ferguson, Mo., and now NBA player Derrick Rose, wearing a t-shirt with the symbolic last words of a black man who died after a police officer had him in a choke hold in New York.

While these incidents were in the courts and in the news, a 12 year old black male was shot and killed by a police officer who described him as 20 years old, and an unarmed 33 year old black father in Phoenix was shot and killed by a white police officer while bringing food to his two daughters.  Remind you of anyone?

Lima Update

Silence in the media--what else is new?  Here's an NPR report on the terms of discussion at the climate talks in Peru.  Kyoto only applied to developed nations, but this time there's movement in expanding to all countries.  The big fund to aid developing countries in confronting the climate crisis is an incentive (and a huge business opportunity for clean energy.)

But most nations haven't met Kyoto voluntary goals, but by setting their own goals publicly, there is at least accountability.  The story asks, what happens if even the self-set, voluntary goals don't add up to enough to stop runaway climate catastrophe?  That may be what confronts the treaty-making meetings next year, for which Lima is a crucial preliminary.

Meanwhile, the world is on track for its hottest year in recorded history in 2014, and Antarctic ice is melting faster than ever, and California's drought is the worst in 1200 years.  

So here's a pretty elementary shot at understanding the psychology of climate crisis denial.  How is it that the so-called science of psychology seems to have actually gone backward in the past 75 years?

The Climate in Peru

Climate talks begin in Peru Monday, and some diplomats are expressing optimism, according to the Guardian:

UN climate negotiations opening in Lima on Monday have the best chance in a generation of striking a deal on global warming, diplomats say.

After a 20-year standoff, diplomats and longtime observers of the talks say there is rising optimism that negotiators will be able to secure a deal that will commit all countries to take action against climate change.

The two weeks of talks in Peru are intended to deliver a draft text to be adopted in Paris next year that will commit countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions without compromising the economic development of poor countries.

Diplomats and observers of the UN climate negotiations said recent actions by the US and China had injected much-needed momentum.

“I have never felt as optimistic as I have now,” said Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which are sinking as sea levels rise in the Pacific. “There is an upbeat feeling on the part of everyone that first of all there is an opportunity here and that secondly, we cannot miss it.”

The New York Times also spots the optimism and emphasizes the stakes:

After more than two decades of trying but failing to forge a global pact to halt climate change, United Nations negotiators gathering in South America this week are expressing a new optimism that they may finally achieve the elusive deal.

Even with a deal to stop the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warn, the world will become increasingly unpleasant. Without a deal, they say, the world could eventually become uninhabitable for humans."

"Unpleasant" is an uneasy euphemism for what may already be on the way.  Besides the long term goal of saving planetary life as we know it,  an agreement on attacking the causes of global heating has another crucial purpose: it makes it more possible to openly acknowledge and deal with these effects that have already begun, and which will increase from now on.

Michale Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor geosciences and international affairs is quoted in the Times piece setting forth what is now the generally accepted future.

“What’s already baked in are substantial changes to ecosystems, large-scale transformations,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. He cited losses of coral reef systems and ice sheets, and lowering crop yields.

Still, absent a deal, “Things could get a lot worse,” Mr. Oppenheimer added. Beyond the 3.6 degree threshold, he said, the aggregate cost “to the global economy — rich countries as well as poor countries — rises rapidly.”

People can extrapolate from the changes they see to what could come in the far future, but increasing attention is inevitably going to be focused on dealing with the effects as they happen.  So it is important to deal with the causes now, for a couple of reasons.

First, because there is not yet an overwhelming clamor to deal with effects that could drown out any attempt to attack causes.  Second, because opponents of attacking causes (fueled by reactionary titans of the fossil fuel industries) cannot acknowledge effects if they deny the phenomenon of global heating caused by greenhouse gases emissions.   An international treaty is a broad acknowledgement of the climate crisis.  It could at least gradually sap the power of deniers, and especially the attention they are afforded by a somewhat captive media.

Effects are already on the agenda in Lima. Peru  is already experiencing effects of their diminishing glaciers, vital to fresh water supplies.

 A Reuters story focuses on these issues, which go by the name of adaptation. "From the Andes to the jungles, communities are doing what they can, but their efforts will never be enough without ambitious global action to tackle climate change,” said Milo Stanojevich, CARE International's Peru director.  He advocates help for poorer countries to deal with effects as part of the international agreement.

Hey Cuz, I Mean Mr. President

Thanks to stumbling on my parents' names in a genealogy online, I discovered for the first time that I've acquired new relatives.

An email exchange to the person who posted it confirms that the daughter of one of my first cousins married into this family.  But in first trying to figure out why my parents were part of this family tree, I followed one of the branches to find some familiar names: George Bush, George W. Bush.  Yeah, those Bushes.

So I am distantly related to the Bushes, which means I am even more distantly related to the Clintons and the Obamas, because they are all related.

So, however distantly, I am related to the last four Presidents of the United States, and maybe the next one.






And not one of them invited me to Thanksgiving dinner.

The Week in Not Bad News

From the New York Times

"For the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and natural gas.

That day appears to be dawning.

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas."

A different perspective to the 2014 elections by a Republican whose analysis is that because the wrong GOPers won, the Democrats are in a position to dominate beginning in 2016:

In a careful analysis, Ladd builds a case: The Midterms of 2014 demonstrate the continuation of a 20 year old trend. Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level where the population is the largest utilizing a declining electoral base of waging, white, and rural voters. As a result no GOP candidate on the horizon has a chance at the White House in 2016 and the chance of holding the Senate beyond 2016 is vanishingly small.

 And on ballot questions, the results were more sweeping than I knew:

Every major Democratic ballot initiative was successful, including every minimum wage increase, even in the red states. AND every personhood amendment failed.

His conclusion:

“It is almost too late for Republicans to participate in shaping the next wave of our economic and political transformation. The opportunities we inherited coming out of the Reagan Era are blinking out of existence one by one while we chase so-called “issues” so stupid, so blindingly disconnected from our emerging needs that our grandchildren will look back on our performance in much the same way that we see the failures of the generation that fought desegregation. Something, some force, some gathering of sane, rational, authentically concerned human beings generally at peace with reality must emerge in the next four to six years from the right, or our opportunity will be lost for a long generation. Needless to say, Greg Abbott and Jodi Ernst are not that force. ‘Winning’ this election did not help that force emerge.”

This is the Daily Kos diary that summarizes it, with a link to the original article in the Houston Chronicle and a followup.

And shhhh, don't tell anybody but the House of Crazy Reps admitted in its own report that everything GOPers have been screaming about Benghazi!  Benghazi! was utter fantasy.  The Associated Press:

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

So how did Faux News react to its hysteria being trashed by facts?  By telling a completely different story.

A Larger Reality

Ursula LeGuin made two different but related points, both vital, in accepting an award.

The first has to do with the literary legitimacy of science fiction and fantasy writers, and the importance of future visions to the future itself:

"And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

The second point is the restraint on the freedom to write and on true authorship that's been growing a long while and has now reached nearly impossible proportions, not because of some fascist or even national security state, but because of the takeover by the institutionalized greed of capitalism:

"Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words."

This is almost her complete speech--it's under six minutes in the video above, and the complete transcript is here.

We Were Strangers Once, Too

It didn't take long for Republican noisemakers to pummel the media with their hypocritical cant and carping, so here is a rare opportunity to hear what President Obama actually said in his 15 minute talk to the American people Thursday on immigration.

He spelled out actions he'd taken to strengthen the southern borders and results that should cheer GOPers if they could accept the facts, and he talked about the efforts to pass immigration reform that have been stymied by Republican leadership in the House.  Like Ronald Reagan and lots of Presidents before him, he outlined a few steps he could take under well-established presidential authority.

But why bother?  That's when this talk rises above policy to get at the American soul, and the soul of our President.  So don't let your ears glaze over before you get there.

"Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger -- we were strangers once, too.  My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal..."

What We Can't See Does Hurt Us

We  can't see CO2 or what it's doing to the thin layer of atmosphere that enables life as we know it on Earth.  But a NASA satellite has been looking back at the planet to study what its instruments can see.  Video with narration (and music) from NASA that shows the flow of carbon dioxide and other gases over the planet in a year.  National Geographic supplies some further explanation.

Mega$+MegaFear=GOP 2014

Another Monday, another Doonesbury instant classic from yesterday's papers, and here on the Internet.

Taking It To the World

The Maldive islands off India as seen from space. They are among the world's most endangered from climate crisis sea level rise.

Update early Sunday: Reuters reports that the G20 summit voted in favor of addressing the climate crisis, as President Obama advocated. 

 Reuters: "The United States and other nations overrode host Australia's attempts to keep climate change off the formal agenda. Australia is one of the world's biggest carbon emitters per capita. The final communique called for strong and effective action to address climate change with the aim of adopting a protocol, with legal force, at a U.N. climate conference in Paris in 2015."

"The most difficult discussion was on climate change," an EU official told reporters on condition of anonymity. "This was really trench warfare, this was really step by step by step. In the end we have references to most of the things we wanted."

Saturday:
Following up the US agreement with China on reducing global heating emissions, President Obama challenged the G20 meetings in Australia to make an international climate agreement next year.  And he backed it up with a new contribution to a UN fund that helps poorer nations confront the climate crisis.

The Guardian story begins: Barack Obama has stared down both Republican hostility at home and the reluctance of his Australian G20 hosts to insist that the world can clinch a new climate change deal next year.

The story quotes his speech in Australia, referring to the pledges that China has made in the new agreement: “So them setting up a target sends a powerful message to the world that all countries, whether you are a developed country, a developing country or somewhere in between, you’ve got to be able to overcome old divides, look squarely at the science and reach a strong global climate agreement next year.  And if China and the US can agree on this then the world can agree on this, we can get this done and it is necessary for us to get it done.”

The LA Times reports that President Obama is pledging a US contribution of $3 billion to the UN Green Climate Fund, which funnels funds from the world's largest economies and biggest greenhouse gases polluters to nations most endangered by the climate crisis.

The story notes that "The fund is essential to getting developing nations to sign on to a climate pact international negotiators will present in Paris in December 2015."  Though other countries have pledged, US pledge is the largest to date.

The story quotes “A $3-billion U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund would be an important show of American leadership to help the most vulnerable people in the world protect themselves from dangerous climate impacts and to ensure a coordinated global response to climate change,” said Heather Coleman, climate program manager for Oxfam America, who noted that the pledge is similar to American commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Obama Traded To Canada

The Republican majority in Congress has wasted no time, not even waiting to be officially sworn in.  GOP congressional leaders have announced that they've made a deal with the country's chief trading partner, Canada.  They've traded President Barack Obama.

"It was their idea," Senate Majority Leader Ted "Tailgunner" Cruz claimed, pointing to a letter to the editor published in a Canadian newspaper.

"Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections," wrote Richard Brunt of Victoria, British Columbia. "Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country's adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there's no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money."

America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden. So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason."

"All that leftist socialist Kenyan uppity Nazi stuff was pretty disgusting," Cruz claimed.  "But he had one good idea that he ended his letter with."

Brunt's final sentence was this: "When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?"

Cruz could hardly control himself when he saw that, he intimated loudly.  So he got his GOP colleagues together, they contacted Canadians they knew (mostly in the oil industry) and quickly made a deal.

In a post-midnight session they traded President Obama for Doug Ford, Jr. who they described as Canada's Prime Minister, and a bagman to be named later.

Douglas Ford is a Toronto city councillor, the brother of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford and part owner of Deco Labels and Tags. He was recently defeated in his electoral bid to become mayor of Toronto.

When a US reporter informed the GOP officials that Ford is not the Prime Minister of Canada,  GOP senator-elect Joni Ernst of Iowa said, "That's your opinion."