Falling Blackwater?

So far, it's being treated as a small story, but I'm guessing that it might turn out to be a lot bigger, a lot more important: the Interior Ministry of Iraq has banned the Blackwater "security firm" from operating in Iraq, because Blackwater troops were implicated in the deaths of civilians in an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade.

I'd like to see some knowledgeable reporting on what's really behind this--the Interior Ministry is kind of notorious for its own brutal practices and ties to certain insurgent groups. But if this ban is actually enforced it could be quite a blow to the Bushites. Blackwater operates as a mercenary armed force, generally beyond the law. This company is the best known of the armed "contractors" who now outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq. In this for-profit war, they are very important: politically at home as well as on the streets in Iraq, because they are virtually invisible here; militarily because they can be doing jobs U.S. troops can't, because of their numbers or their ethical constraints; and most of all, because they are one of the businesses this war is designed to enrich. If our treasury can't pour money into Blackwater's coffers, what on earth will they spend it on?

Meanwhile, the former Fed chair Greenspan is taking heat for saying outright that the war in Iraq is about oil. He's only partly right. It's not about oil in the sense he means it, as a war for access to a strategic need for the nation. It's not even that noble. It's a war for the money certain folks make from the oil--as well as from the war.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"In ancient savannas we slowly teased them out of their chauvinism. In our plumage we gave them aesthetics. In our courtships we tutored them in dance. In the gestures of antlered heads we showed them ceremony and the power of the mask. In our running hooves we revealed the secret of grain. As meat we courted them from within."

Paul Shepard: A Letter from the Others, Delivered by a Bear

Bears R Us

"Dancing Bear" by P. Salia at Inuit.com

War on Terra: Lonely on the Planet

For decades now we have been living through the most massive species extinction since the dinosaur era. Update: The World Conservation Union annual Red List came out this morning: "the extinction crisis had escalated in the last year with 16,306 species now at the highest levels of extinction threat, equivalent to almost 40% of all species in the survey. A quarter of all mammals, a third of all amphibians and one in eight birds on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy." Some 180 species have been added in just the past year.

Until now the species that have disappeared were mostly those we'd scarcely noticed, if at all. But that's changing. Even the apparent disappearance of an obscure species of freshwater dolphin-- the first dolphin species to be eradicated as a result of human activity--is likely to be but a preview. Next to go could be the largest of the sea turtles.

But perhaps the most disturbing news is the study this week that confirms that up to two-thirds of all the polar bears in the world will likely be gone by 2050, due to the rapidly melting ice and warming in the Arctic. Photos and videos of polar bears are appealing, but it's more than cuddly imagery. The relationship between humans and bears goes back to our beginnings, and has been among the most important we've had. Bears are the creatures that look the most like us, apart from the highly endangered great apes. Unlike the apes, bears were once just about everywhere human beings were. They were important to our cultures and religions, and to our languages. As Paul Shepard points out, we get our bearings from bears; they're related to such words as "brightness" and perhaps even "dance." The plight of the polar bear may touch something deep and profound, and not merely sentimental.

The new study was related to the consideration of declaring polar bears an endangered species, and so some scientists spoke of hope. "The grim news about polar bears and sea ice decline is horrifying, but it is a call to action, not despair," said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Our hope lies in a rapid response, including both deep and immediate carbon dioxide reductions and a full-court press on other greenhouse pollutants." But that's not going to happen without a profound committment that transcends this one problem. Especially since actually declaring polar bears endangered would then require efforts to save them, which would mean halting greenhouse gases to a meaningful extent--which the U.S. government and its corporate sponsors, and indeed pretty much all governments, have resisted.

One of the first iconic creatures to awaken the world's awareness and inspire concern were the whales. The "Save the Whales" campaign beginning in the 1970s has now become a default position--something everyone believes in. But efforts to halt international whaling, never complete and recently breached, was an easy but incomplete answer. Today as in the 1970s the Blue Whale is still very much endangered, there aren't that many more Humpback whales, and the apparent success story, the gray whale comeback, may have been wishful thinking.

Perhaps most directly threatening are the bees, without whom even we are unlikely to survive for long. They pollinate plants that are responsible for more than a third of our food, but that's just the most direct link in the chain. Beyond the headlines about specific diseases affecting or not affecting certain bee populations, there's this recent blanket statement from an international expert: " I think that today the likelihood of a significant decline in bee populations, even the complete disappearance of certain species, is real." There appear to be many factors involved, including warmer winters, but many of the possibilities point to human causes.

Human impact on the planet has become massive, and life on earth as we know it cannot sustain this, and therefore it cannot sustain us. That's what the loss of our fellow creatures, including those closest to us in profound ways, is telling us. We may find ourselves lonely on this planet...but not for long. To truly stand for life will take an understanding, a consciousness and a renewal of heart that at the moment we can only imagine. Yet we must imagine it.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"We should not be mistaken about our terms. It is not technology or materialism that is the problem.The love of materials and the physical world and the extraordinary craftsmanship in its use have made us human. By catastrophes of industrial greed I refer to the corporate organization of the economy, with its destruction of the human community, its blindness to place, its obscene disregard for scale, its garbage, its rapacity, and its excessive desire for 'products.'"

Paul Shepard: The Only World We've Got

R.I.P. Anita Roddick

Dame Anita

I first became aware of Anita Roddick when she was featured in the PBS series, Millennium, about the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the environment and to our social evolution. She was the inspirational founder of the Body Shop in England, combining entrepreneurial skill with ecological and global social commitment. She tried to do it through her products as well as with her money, and not just products with an ecological style but made with the ecology, sustainability and health as important considerations. Further, she tried to involve disenfranchised cultures and people in making products she would then sell. It didn't always work out, but sometimes it did.

Then her Body Shop shops began showing up in U.S. cities and airports, and I started getting the catalogues. They sold a great blue corn wash for awhile, made by an Indigenous concern in the American southwest, and a nice coconut shampoo. I still have the last dregs of a tube of 'face protector' in their Mostly Men line, which they haven't made for years. Then, when they dropped most of their men's (or even gender-neutral) products in favor of a hard emphasis on marketing to women, I lost interest.

But Anita Roddick continued to do good work, like financing a publication by and for the homeless, and setting up Children on the Edge, a charity for young victims of violence, disabilities and HIV/AIDs in eastern Europe and Asia. She was a voice and a force for good.

Dame Anita was the daughter of Italian immigrants. She was much honored in the UK and around the world. She died shortly after a sudden brain hemorrhage. She was 64. Rest in peace.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

Halibut x 3 by Robert Davidson

at Stonington Gallery

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"It has taken four thousand years of struggle to 'lift' man 'above' nature. In the course of that struggle language and thought and behavior in the West have lapsed into a too-simple framework of discontinuity and opposition: spirit and body, mind and matter, earth and heaven, man and nature, good and evil. It is not an insoluble dilemma, but it is far more dangerous than we permit ourselves to know."

Paul Shepard: Man in the Landscape

...But It's Getting There

Sham and Shame

We're in for days of it now, as we go on being racked by Iraq and never told the truth: it's a for-profit war that the profiteers are going to keep in business as long as they can, by any means necessary, including fear-mongering, posturing, lies, half-truths and the kind of p.r. spin on selected bits of pseudo-information that got us into the war in the first place.

Maybe this time the Democrats will stand up to this, but in the end it's hard to see how it will matter---one of them will get stuck with the mess and probably the blame. Bush will soon announce that some troops are coming home, a very small number but enough to fool those who aren't listening. On the war itself the American people aren't fooled--several polls (including one from Bushcorps) affirm this--although they may listen to general betrayus, since they still believe in military leaders. Meanwhile, the suffering in Iraqnam hell continues, as does the shame of what our country and our tax dollars are doing--something like $2 billion a week. The longer this goes on, while ignoring the real needs of our people and our economy, will only make the pain of getting out of this war economy worse.

What all this does, besides poisoning the political air we breathe, is drive out even any recollection of the things we need to be thinking about, and focusing on, actively, for the future.

So while this awful, tragic, shameful sham goes on this week, I'm going to stick with quotations for the future, many of them from Paul Shepard. It's not exactly a cure for heartsickness, but it helps the hope for sanity---mine anyway.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

sculpture by Emily Young.

The Shock Doctrine

The Must-Read Book of the Year

--maybe even the decade. THE SHOCK DOCTRINE : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein has just been published in Canada, which means I can finally talk about it. I've been reading the galleys for weeks--which brings up a second ethical problem, because I've just turned in my review to the SF Chronicle, and I shouldn't scoop that. But my review won't be out for a few weeks, and I know I'm going to be blogging from the content of this book well before then.

Though THE SHOCK DOCTRINE will be officially published in the U.S. and Europe later in September, it may be in some bookstores soon. Naomi Klein is traveling and talking about it, starting today. And there's a short film about it, by Klein and "Children of Men" director Alfonso Cuaron, at the Toronto Film Festival this Friday, and she's showing it at some of her appearances.

Before I say a little more about the book, my disclaimers: I have no personal or business relationship with the author (I've never met her) or the publisher. I just think this is a very important book, and one that people should be aware of--and consider getting behind, in case corporte media ignores it (a good bet.)

Some of you (especially in Canada and Europe) probably know Naomi Klein as an activist, journalist and filmmaker, who writes for The Nation and The Guardian, often about globalization issues, and who wrote the book, No Logo as well as a collection of columns, Fences and Windows. Her writing career started in Canada, and here in the U.S. especially, she's not generally well known, and that's one reason I'm blogging on this book right now. Her interview in Publisher's Weekly said she didn't at that point have any firm media bookings in the U.S. I'd like to see that change. She deserves a hearing more than a whole lot of people we hear too much from.

As for the book, it puts together a lot of what you might know and suspect (and a lot most people missed or don't know) into a powerful framework based on a central idea that she believes has governed American foreign policy for decades, but particularly now: THE SHOCK DOCTRINE.

She relates neocon (also known as "neoliberal" outside the U.S.) economic theories of "free market fundamentalism" and the resulting economic "shock therapy" many nations endured, to the actual (and horrific) theories and practice of early actual electroshock therapy, and shows how they relate to torture, and the "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq, and an overall pattern of taking advantage of disaster or creating it, for corporate profit.

She shows for example that Iraq and New Orleans were not the result of incompetence, but examples of disaster capitalism, which requires the destruction and privatization of the public and non-profit sectors, replaced by crony capitalism. She shows that torture is not an accident, but a tool of economic and political shock therapy.

The book's web site has more information, including access to many of her sources. But the book is the thing--it's very well written, and very important. It begins with Milton Friedman and Pinochet in Chile in the 70s, and brings together most of what has happened since (in South America, Russia, Asia,etc.), culminating in Iraq and, in the U.S., the homeland security state and post-Katrina New Orleans.

This book has the potential to be Very Big. The Guardian has named it one of the ten must-reads of the fall. But it could also be overlooked--intentionally, because of its content.

Every book arrives with blurbs, but not necessarily like the ones for this book from Arundhati Roy, John Le Carre, Howard Zinn and Sy Hersh. I join them in urging you to read and support this book. It could be one of those rare books that everyone reads and talks about, and that focuses the debate, and promotes needed change.

Now that I've said all that, I'll feel much more comfortable about blogging on topics within the book, and I hope to do that--several times--soon.

UPDATE: The Shock Doctrine short film is now viewable online. On its first day of publication, the book hit #1 on Amazon Canada.

click to enlarge

Storm Update: Blowin' in the Wind

It's a day for history: two hurricanes made landfall on the same day. Felix was a Category 5 again when it hit a relatively unpopulated area of Central America, while the Pacific storm Henriette achieved hurricane status just before it hit Baja. They left several deaths and unknown destruction; their residual winds and rains are likely to cause still more damage over the next few days.

This morning's Wunderblog notes that there have been 27 category 5 hurricanes since reliable records began in 1944. Eight of them have been in the past five years, and now we're two for two this year. It's the first time that two
Category 5s have made landfall in the same year. Fortunately they did not hit highly populated or built-up places. When Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, it was a category 3.

Labor's New Public Role

The Labor Day holiday has come and gone, but the particular problems and opportunities for labor unions and for workers in America remain.

As American corporations hollow themselves into illusory vessels designed to game banks and fool the stock market, fewer jobs remain. Whether manufacturing's dive to the bottom can continue short of open slavery in some ninth world nation is a continuing question, but clearly a United States which makes nothing but buys everything is gambling with perishing from this earth. A nation of consumers with dwindling incomes can't be masked forever by phony numbers and deceptive averages pulled up by a few obscenely wealthy folks who can't buy fast enough to support an entire economy.

Americans are increasingly left with servant sector jobs, and they face fights and their own prejudices when they have to compete for even those. But as bad as the labor market is, there's a glimmer of hope in organized labor.

E.J. Dionne had an interesting column on this. He offers the same gloomy facts that after a unionization rate of 26% of the workforce in 1974 (around the time the steel mills started to close in Pittsburgh), the 2006 figure is but 12%. But he also points out that while unionization in the public and private sectors was roughly equal in the 70s, now it's just 7% in the private sector, and a whopping 36% in the public sector.

Dionne also notes that organized labor had a lot to do with the Democratic victories in the 2006 congressional elections, and the Democrats know it. If 2008 is really going to be a Democratic year, the unions will be a big part of it. But what especially interests me is that their new-found power is more clearly identified with issues affecting the public sector--with teachers, firefighters, municipal employees--and with the public sector itself.

If this country is going to undergo renewal and revival of its politics, its economy and its soul, then it's going to involve the renewal and revival of public institutions and serving the public good.

The neocon call for government and public institutions to disappear has resulted in disaster and a weakened country, just when we need so much common effort to meet the very serious challenges of our immediate common future. Privatization has done little but enrich a few and enfeeble everything else, and it has failed at virtually everything except creating suffering and tragedy. The health insurance system, which in any other civilized country would be considered a criminal enterprise, is the most conspicuous case in point.

When unions back universal health care, they do so for the public good, the common good, as well as their workers. When unions partner with public and private institutions to promote the Apollo Alliance for sustainable and renewable energy, they do so for the country's good, the world's survival. They don't stop at self-interest, because the common good is the bedrock of all our self-interests, and our ability to pursue happiness as individuals and families. The same is true of education, public health and safety, infrastructure, and justice.

It's time as well to understand that despite their excesses, unions have contributed to prosperity as much as businesses have. And for that matter, so have non-profit and public institutions. Anyone with common sense can see this in their daily lives, if they just look around for themselves. Let's return a sane balance to the enterprise we share.

by Gino Severini, circa 1908

Two Storms, Two Fives

At about 1 AM Eastern Time, Hurricane Felix, which had been a relatively weak storm 24 hours before, was declared a Category 5 hurricane. This is the "rare" designation for the most powerful storms. But this year there have been two named Atlantic hurricanes, and both have reached Category 5.

According to a Reuters report, "Forecasters at the hurricane center said Felix was strengthening at one of the fastest rates seen..." It seems headed towards the Honduras, where the earlier report at Weather Underground warned, it could have catastrophic effects even if it passes within 100 miles of the coast on Monday, if it grows in size as well as intensity. Felix is on track to hit the Yucatan, and depending on interaction with a low pressure center, it could make landfall in Mexico or Texas.

Meanwhile, tropical storm Henrietta in the Pacific could strengthen to hurricane status Monday, forecasters said, threatening Baja California.

These storms are strengthening because of very warm ocean water, likely a product of the Climate Crisis, which is one of the reasons--along with the record of severe storms in the past decade--that some climate scientists believe that global heating is leading to a greater number of the more intense hurricanes.

And last week, NASA issued a study that says global heating will also contribute to more severe weather over land, including more frequent and intense thunderstorms and tornados.

Also this past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that the near-record high temperatures in the U.S. in 2006 were primarily due to greenhouse gases, not El Nino. A British study suggests that flooding will be more severe in the Climate Crisis future than previously predicted.

STORM UPDATE: As of Monday afternoon, Felix has been classified as a Category 4, heading for Honduras. According to the Wunder Blog on Weather Underground, the good news is that while incredibly powerful, Felix has remained small in area, so Honduras may well escape catastrophe, though there will be destructive effects. Also good news: if the storm continues on its predicted track, it will miss highly populated areas in central America and Mexico, and isn't currently headed for Texas. The bad news is the strength of this hurricane. According to Jeff Masters at Wunder Blog, Felix holds the record for the fastest intensification to category 5 strength, and incredibly it was at that strength longer than any lesser strength or classification. If a hurricane this powerful were to hit populated areas directly, the destruction could be unprecedented.

In the Pacific, though Henriette remains a tropical storm, it could bring hurricane conditions to Baja Tuesday.

Another view of Tuesday's eclipse, from San
Francisco. Courtesy SF Chronicle and Space.com.

Clear and Present Danger

UPDATE: Suggestions in the blogosphere that Cheney is orchestrating an early September sales campaign for war on Iran.

The noise is killing us in more ways than one. We keep missing the important stories. Sometimes because they're deliberately hidden and those whose job it is to discover and tell these stories just aren't doing it. When the Bushites sneaked a provision into the huge Defense Authorization Act last October that allows the President to declare martial law--to override state and local officials and use the military as domestic police in response to unspecified "emergencies"-- virtually no one reported it. It remains what it was supposed to be, a secret.

In this case, one which potentially makes dictatorship legal. For the entire history of the Republic, every President could declare martial law only if threatened with an armed insurrection. That's how seriously this nation's founders considered it, and not in the most perilous times in our history has this law changed, until last October.

But right now we're missing a crucial story that's totally public, that in fact President Bush announced in a media-covered speech. Even most of the lefty blogs, currently feasting on the Idahomosexual story, ignored it.

Fortunately one of the more respected bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, didn't. Perhaps Bush's threat against Iran sounded like the same old. Greenwald calls it "the most disturbing speech of his presidency." It sounded to me when I heard just the soundbite that it was tantamount to an announcement that this administration is going to militarily attack Iran, very soon.

Nobody wants to believe Bush will do it. It's too much of an utter nightmare. The military is overstretched to the breaking point in Iraq. There's some question as to whether orders would be followed, although Bush--or should we say Cheney--is likely to depend on the Air Force and Navy who have paid less of a price and may want more of the action. And nobody wants to contemplate what a disaster it could very well begin.

It seems in fact like madness. Apart from the rising guilt over needless death in Iraq, the Washington and media establishments are apparently willing to tolerate a crazy President and an insane Vice-President for a year and a half more, assuming they will confine their looniness to surreal speeches and delusional press conferences. We wish. But it seems increasingly like we're not going to get off that easy.

So far the human price of Iraq has been paid (at least directly) by a relative few, and the bulk of the cost has been pushed into the future. Bush's design in Iraq seems to be to push obvious failure past the expiration of his term, so Republicans can blame Democrats should they win the White House and retain Congress. But a sustained bombing of Iran would likely begin a sequence of events that would make Iraq pale by comparison. The calculation might be that an even greater war, a regional war with global reach, would force voters to support the war party and its candidate, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

Such an attack and such a war have endless possibilities for catastrophe that might transform the country, and could very well destroy it. A wrecked domestic economy, energy rationing, a military draft--it could well end up with the realization of that first untold story: martial law in America, brought to you by Halliburton and Blackwater.

And don't forget, the plans for attacking Iran as initially revealed involved the U.S. using tactical nuclear weapons. It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheney government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power in the world under Bush is that this government is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.

But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran could turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long-lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.

This photo of the moon's eclipse early Tuesday
is from Japan, but it was pretty amazing here, too.
I first saw the totality with a reddish orange orb
and coppery interior. But the changes over the
hours were spectacular, especially as the left rim
turned yellow, then the silvery white began at the
upper left edge like a light shining on the moon.
Then the quick movement of the earth's shadow,
darkness to light with a faint red rim underneath.
The moon was full and whole again, just in time
to yield to the sun. Magnificent. (Photo courtesy
space.com)

This is Not A Blog

A lot has changed in what is now called the blogosphere since I started "blogging" five years ago or so. The bloom is off the rose in many respects. While there are zillions more blogs, the buzz has moved on to newer activities (posting and networking on MySpace and Facebook, videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr etc.) In the political blogosphere, a lot of individual blogs are folding, and even the middle sized community blogs are having trouble surviving. It seems to be true for blogs specializing in other subject areas for a global audience: the big blogs get bigger, while the small ones fade away. Those who made their names with their own blogs are joining with others in group or community blogs, so that together they can reliably attract a sufficient audience, and maintain or enhance their influence: their buzz. (The big blog is also the only one that attracts enough advertising so you can, you know, get paid.)

The success of individual blogs is increasingly measured by numbers of "hits" and readers, and by the number of "comments," and the energy of the dialogue in the comments to each post. That became very evident to me with a local blog called The Buhne Tribune. It was comprised of fairly short posts with lots of visuals, witty in a way that became characteristic, almost always on local topics. The comments became the locus for--let's say "intense"--discussion, often about local media, particularly the newspapers. That seems to be largely because many of the people making the comments worked for one or another of these newspapers.

For awhile, the Buhne Tribune was the one "must read" of the local blogosphere. The person who created it was known only as "Captain Buhne," and there was much speculation on his identity, expressed on his blog and elsewhere. Eventually his name became known. Shortly afterwards, apparently in the face of declining comments, he closed his blog, saying it had no function anymore, now that his identity was known.

I always knew that most of my blogs are local only in that I live here (on the North Coast of CA) and occasionally write about it. But other aspects of the Buhne Tribune situation were sort of revealing to me. That the interest was so dependent on the gimmick of the blogger's real identity was mystifying. (While I keep this Captain Future persona, I don't hide my non-screen name.) But I was especially stunned by the violence and viciousness of the comments there. Each thread was a separate snakepit. And it was a kind of community, in that the commenters seemed to know the other commenters, although they seemed to mostly insult each other.

On selected community blogs I like to engage commenters to my posts, and to comment on others'. But comments on a lot of blogs are the same polarized arguments from the same easily identifiable ideologies. For me, it's mostly a waste of time and energy, and I learn little except what each subgroup's position is. And I'm certainly not interested in engaging in petty warfare, and especially not in providing the battlefield.

So while I understand that comments reflect the number and engagement of readers, and I wish my posts on my blogs got more, if it means hosting prefab arguments and general nastiness, I guess I'm happier without the hassle.

Which is probably further evidence that this is not really a blog. My basic reason for blogging has not changed from five years ago, as I expressed it in a North Coast Journal story: "Once I got past the name ("blog" sounded like something you might need medicine for) I saw immediately that the web log format would allow me to do what hadn't been possible before: To publish on the Internet easily, without limit and for free."

As I got familiar with the evolving tools available to me, I also got hooked on using the links, photos, tags and other elements to create a visual as well as verbal equivalent to making up my own little newspaper, as I used to do in grade school. And I do mean hooked, because the pleasure of doing it was the reward, not very often the response.

This blog and its predecessors and cousins did get me in touch with old school friends and distant relatives. But in blog terms, my most successful is Soul of Star Trek, which got me readers within the Star Trek and sci-fi communities (including a few stars of Star Trek series') and seems to be leading to a larger audience through a Trek community blog. But even this blog gets few readers in Internet terms.

In fact, it's clear from links to my blogs that most of their readers are not blog readers per se, the people who check in every day or so for whatever you've posted recently, but people doing searches on particular subjects. Again, though I'd love to have scads more regular readers--and I still write for that mythical reader--I've come to terms with reality. The truth is there are few blogs that I read regularly. They are either on topics that don't interest me that much, or reference items on the Internet that I've already seen with commentary that doesn't reveal anything new to me. So how can I blame others who feel the same way about my blogs?

And even when I don't quite understand why a particular blog doesn't seem to have the audience I'm writing it for, in the end I don't have to understand it to recognize it. Again, there's a certain freedom in this, in that I'm doing it for my own pleasure and satisfaction, and perhaps also for those individuals from everywhere in the world who are looking for something specific that I can offer them. The comments I get from such searchers who stick around to read more are among the most gratifying, though they are few.

I've had the chance to practice my fantasy by being an editor and an on-deadline writer for newspapers, but the control and the opportunities for experiment and plain old playfulness that the blogs provide remain way too seductive. I hope I don't wake up one day and realize I've got nothing to show for my life than time lost in cyberspace that should have gone into writing books or something. Though in fact I have that thought about every other day.

Still, I feel a responsibility to my few and/or non-existent regular readers to say that I may show up relatively often as I have in the past, or not. I sense the futility of trying to be Climate Crisis Central on this blog, though I don't know of another blog that treats the topic or the more general theme of the future quite the way I do. Nor have I found a better blog on topics of some of my other blogs. But it is what it is. Some days (or let's face it, nights) I'm going to waste time doing this anyway, because I feel the need to, or for the fun of it, to cheer myself up, or to tell the world the truth no one else will tell you! And other nights (and days) I will listen to my more responsible voices and work on something else.

But even then I suppose I'll blog about it.

I bought this bowl from the artist, Ed Eberly,

years ago at a sale of pieces with imperfections

that disqualifed them for gallery sale. He had the sale

for friends who couldn't otherwise afford his work.

It's been a treasured part of my daily life ever since.

I love it. Thanks, Ed. [BK photo]

Quiet, Please!

Update: I posted versions of this on the European Tribune and Daily Kos. Very interesting comments about noisiness internationally.

Of all the forms of damaging pollution, the one that gets the least attention is noise. People don't listen, they don't want to hear about it. It just seems like an inconvenience, like complaining. It's not like having your nerves frayed and your hearing fried is worth crying about.

Well, YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! Thousands of people around the world are dying prematurely from heart disease triggered by long-term exposure to excessive noise, according to research by the World Health Organisation. Based on WHO figures, the British newspaper the Guardian estimates that of some 100,000 annual deaths from heart disease in the UK, more than 3,000 are from chronic noise exposure.

"Until now, noise has been the Cinderella form of pollution and people haven't been aware that it has an impact on their health," said Deepak Prasher, professor of audiology at University College London. The Guardian writes:

Research published in recent years has shown that noise can increase the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenalin in the body, even during sleep. The longer these hormones stay in circulation around the bloodstream, the more likely they are to cause life-threatening physiological problems. High stress levels can lead to heart failure, strokes, high blood pressure and immune problems. "All this is happening imperceptibly," said Prof Prasher. "Even when you think you are used to the noise, these physiological changes are still happening."

The basic problem with noise--and one reason it causes stress--is that when it's noisy you can't hear anything. We depend on hearing a great deal more than we're normally conscious of. I suspect that noise suggests to what we call our subconscious that we're in danger, that we're under attack. It turns out, we are.

Our very noisy society also interferes with our ability to think--to essentially talk to ourselves for a continuous concentrated period. A lot of people like that, of course; it's how they make their money, by preventing people from thinking, and pushing their other buttons.

"Totalitarianism," Norman Mailer once wrote, and then thought so highly of it that he said it on television, "is the interruption of mood." Noise is one of the major weapons of totalitarians (Hitler, Big Brother, Dolores Umbridge) and of torturers. Now it's more than shattered mood and thoughts. It's a heart attack.

Breaking Laws, Breaking Ice

A federal judge has ruled that the Bush administration illegally withheld global warming research, and ordered the administration to publish a summary of climate research for public comment by March 1, and send the completed report containing the scientific assessment of global warming and its effects to Congress by May 31.

As things are shaping up, that may be too late to affect the campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, but there are other phenomena that may yet get the Climate Crisis higher on the political agenda. Like...the weather.

Hurricane Dean was just the first hurricane of the year, but it was the third most intense to ever make landfall, the strongest in the Atlantic since 2005, and the ninth strongest known in history. (There's already an excellent Wikipedia entry on it.) As predicted, it struck a relatively unpopulated area in Mexico as a Category 5, weakened and returned to shore as a Category 2. Though it didn't strike a highly populated region head-on, it caused at least $4 billion in damages and killed more than 20. Its second landfall is expected to spawn some 20 inches of rain, likely to cause flooding and mudslides.

Flooding caused by excessive rain has recently been the problem in the upper Midwestern U.S., especially in Ohio where hundreds have been driven from their homes.

Meanwhile, the melt of Arctic ice is so severe that new islands are appearing, and so unexpectedly immense that it suggests that the UN global heating predictions were too conservative. A British official told an European gathering of scientists and policymakers that the effort to confront the Climate Crisis will be at least as extensive and complex as the Cold War. But with the Arctic warming and access to its fossil fuels easing, the U.S. and Russia are both exploring the area with the intent of claiming territory. It may be the Cold War all over again. Only hotter.

Young warrior-poet by Emily Young.

School Daze

In the thick heat of August, thoughts don't automatically return to a new school year, particularly college. Some colleges, like my alma mater, don't begin until the third week of September, but many are starting today, including the one across the street (just about), Humboldt State University.

So here are a few college facts from a New Yorker essay last spring (probably part of a commencement address in progress) by one of the best writers writing, Louis Menand. There are some 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the U.S. A far greater percentage of the population goes to college now than when I did (about half) , and a lower percentage graduates (also about half.) Harvard used to accept about 30% of its applicants; today it accepts 9%.

About a million and a half students graduated last spring. 22% of them majored in business, far more than any other field. Some 4% majored in English, as I did. Menand writes: "There are more bachelor degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies, than in all foreign languages and literatures combined."

So college and its apparent purpose for many students is very different now, although my contact with students is generally in the arts, so I know they still exist! College is far more of an employment prerequisite, and so surly students must go into debt for this credential. There was a certain scam quality to the enterprise in the past as well, but today it's a dim student who doesn't sense that possibility. Some college teachers and administrators may also suspect it, though they must wonder who is really getting the financial benefit.

I just heard a Virginia Tech professor on TV mentioning that far more students now are "on medication," meaning for psychological problems. This is a new item that transcends the dubious and the gloomy into the territory of danger. Teachers are not trained to handle aggressively disturbed students (in fact, in a generally unappreciated irony, most college teachers haven't actually trained to teach.) The movement (it's hard to say how big it is, since TV news picks up on the novel and strange whenever possible) for students to tote guns, is hardly a practical alternative, unless more routine bloodshed is the goal.

The idea that colleges have shifted to cynical credential mills and one dimensional job training facilities with poor security screening is pretty disheartening. All the more heroic then are the students who pursue real education and the teachers who help them. Such students are a minority but we always were. But today they must be even more focused on their ideals.

Menand had another message for American students as well, as good in August as it was in May. In facing the great questions of the day and of all time, in learning the many approaches and points of view, and in experiencing the great diversity that is another newer feature of the U.S. campus, they may learn humility. "We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence," he wrote.

It's the statement that reflects a nation no longer changed only by 9-11 but by the arrogance of the war in Iraq. But it's universal enough for a university in any time.

As for my own college daze, there's not a week that I don't connect to something that began or that I learned there. Right now on my desk is a book--the actual, physical book--that I bought for a literature class some 40 years ago. I went to a liberal arts college, which according to Menand is a classification no longer used. I may not have done all that well at business, but I'm proud to be in the four percent.

Surging Storm

Update Monday 6pmPST--Hurricane Dean is now a category 5 storm, with winds gusting up to 190 mph.

Hurricane Dean only brushed Jamaica, though much of the island experienced force 2 winds and electricity was out, leaving a billion dollars worth of damage. Today it is gathering strength over very warm water and seems headed to becoming a category 5 storm again. Initial landfall is expected in a relatively sparsely populated area of Mexico north of Belize, but a second pass could take it into more populated areas.

Meanwhile the U.S. mainland is mainly hot. Storm remnants caused flooding in various places over the weekend, and 6 people dead in Oklahoma.