Via Pixdaus via Kos.
1 week ago
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Gratitude
Three years makes a tradition, right? The perpetual crisis, it seems. Here again are some excerpts from an article by Joanna Macy called "Gratitude," published in Shambhala Sun magazine:
"We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--it is a wonder beyond words. It is an extraordinary privilege to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness that brings awareness of our own actions and the ability to make choices. It lets us choose to take part in the healing of our world."
"Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction, which we could never of ourselves create."
"That our world is in crisis--to the point where survival of conscious life on Earth is in question---in no way diminishes the value of this gift; on the contrary. To us is granted the privilege of being on hand: to take part, if we choose, in the Great Turning to a just and sustainable society. We can let life work through us, enlisting all our strength, wisdom and courage, so that life itself can continue."
"The great open secret of gratitude is that it is not dependent on external circumstance. It's like a setting or a channel that we can switch to at any moment, no matter what's going on around us. It helps us connect to our basic right to be here, like the breath does. It's a stance of the soul...."
"There are hard things to face in our world today, if we want to be of use. Gratitude, when it is real, offers no blinders. On the contrary, in the face of devastation and tragedy, it can ground us, especially when we're scared. It can hold us steady for the work to be done."
And this year we can at least add this, from a Thanksgiving eve email from President Obama: "So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy."
But even though this is a U.S. holiday today, let's not limit that committment to American families.
"We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--it is a wonder beyond words. It is an extraordinary privilege to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness that brings awareness of our own actions and the ability to make choices. It lets us choose to take part in the healing of our world."
"Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction, which we could never of ourselves create."
"That our world is in crisis--to the point where survival of conscious life on Earth is in question---in no way diminishes the value of this gift; on the contrary. To us is granted the privilege of being on hand: to take part, if we choose, in the Great Turning to a just and sustainable society. We can let life work through us, enlisting all our strength, wisdom and courage, so that life itself can continue."
"The great open secret of gratitude is that it is not dependent on external circumstance. It's like a setting or a channel that we can switch to at any moment, no matter what's going on around us. It helps us connect to our basic right to be here, like the breath does. It's a stance of the soul...."
"There are hard things to face in our world today, if we want to be of use. Gratitude, when it is real, offers no blinders. On the contrary, in the face of devastation and tragedy, it can ground us, especially when we're scared. It can hold us steady for the work to be done."
And this year we can at least add this, from a Thanksgiving eve email from President Obama: "So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy."
But even though this is a U.S. holiday today, let's not limit that committment to American families.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Sky Show
I don't have a camera capable of taking shots like this, but the top photo approximates what I saw at dusk on Monday:the crescent moon with the planet Jupiter just below it, as the evening star. Skygazers with telescopes will be watching Jupiter's moons this week. It was about a year ago that the November lst quarter moon was joined by both Jupiter and Venus, commemorated in the lower photo. I did spend an hour or so watching the sky last week during the Leonid meteor shower. Mostly what I saw were sinuous clouds moving around the sky, though there were large, ever-shifting swatches where stars were visible, and I did actually see three shooting stars. I've still to see a real shower--the kind with one meteor per second.
The Healthcare Tragedy
The Senate is now debating and amending their healthcare reform bill. It took an enormous political effort and the least possible number of votes just to allow it to be debated, as if it's unworthy of the Senate's time. I don't pretend to know if it will pass, or what will be in any version that does pass, or what if anything will get into law. But whatever the outcome, I have to regard it all as a tragedy.
Tragic partly because the best that's even being proposed only makes the U.S. healthcare system less unjust and less wasteful, and less tragic, while probably further enriching the same people who have created a vastly unjust and inhuman self-serving system exploiting the very lives of vulnerable people for some very literal blood money.
But also tragic for what it has revealed about the civic life of America. Opponents of reform have used outright lies with so little basis in fact that no kindergarten child would get away with anything like them. Yet these transparently false and truly vicious statements get repeated as legitimate assertions, and they become believed.
The suffering of ordinary people is being ignored, and now in perhaps the most shocking moment of all, laughed at and scorned, by other supposedly ordinary people. People who are themselves at risk of losing their savings, their homes, their health and even their lives if they dare to get sick or injured in a way that insurance companies can use to deny them the care they need. People whose hysteria and mob viciousness is being fed by people who probably will never have to face any of this, because they are rich enough to afford the best care. Yet even some of them are likely to suffer from this current system.
Though it is not the only such incident, this moment in Illinois-- where vicious "tea party" people who probably call themselves righteous Christians verbally abused a woman whose daughter-in-law died because she didn't have health insurance--should itself be enough to blow away this fog of insanity that passes as a health care debate. But somehow I won't be surprised if that doesn't happen.
Health care as a right is something the rest of the civilized world has recognized, but here it can't even be politically suggested. It died with Teddy Kennedy.
Yes, I know the monied interests are fueling this. And I recognize the ability through history of a few rich white people to convince the many poor white people that their interests are the same (although I can't think of any reason why it works other than racism and xenophobia), but how much more generally tragic can it be that in the 21st century, the wealthiest nation ever to exist on the planet cannot even recognize the need to reform this destructive system and at least try to deal with the widespread suffering it causes, especially when it can easily do something that will be to its economic benefit and in its own national interest.
Well, there's the intense denial of the Climate Crisis, ultimately a bigger tragedy. But right at this historic moment, there doesn't seem a deeper one for this country than healthcare reform. It tests our soul, as well as the ability of our discourse to deal with increasingly complex and threatening problems.
For all I know a healthcare reform law will emerge that will save lives, prevent so much injustice, and begin to tame the power of rapacious corporate interests and their cannibalism called healthcare insurance. And perhaps the nation will look back on this debate with shame and disbelief, and history will record this debate as a tragedy as well as a travesty.
Tragic partly because the best that's even being proposed only makes the U.S. healthcare system less unjust and less wasteful, and less tragic, while probably further enriching the same people who have created a vastly unjust and inhuman self-serving system exploiting the very lives of vulnerable people for some very literal blood money.
But also tragic for what it has revealed about the civic life of America. Opponents of reform have used outright lies with so little basis in fact that no kindergarten child would get away with anything like them. Yet these transparently false and truly vicious statements get repeated as legitimate assertions, and they become believed.
The suffering of ordinary people is being ignored, and now in perhaps the most shocking moment of all, laughed at and scorned, by other supposedly ordinary people. People who are themselves at risk of losing their savings, their homes, their health and even their lives if they dare to get sick or injured in a way that insurance companies can use to deny them the care they need. People whose hysteria and mob viciousness is being fed by people who probably will never have to face any of this, because they are rich enough to afford the best care. Yet even some of them are likely to suffer from this current system.
Though it is not the only such incident, this moment in Illinois-- where vicious "tea party" people who probably call themselves righteous Christians verbally abused a woman whose daughter-in-law died because she didn't have health insurance--should itself be enough to blow away this fog of insanity that passes as a health care debate. But somehow I won't be surprised if that doesn't happen.
Health care as a right is something the rest of the civilized world has recognized, but here it can't even be politically suggested. It died with Teddy Kennedy.
Yes, I know the monied interests are fueling this. And I recognize the ability through history of a few rich white people to convince the many poor white people that their interests are the same (although I can't think of any reason why it works other than racism and xenophobia), but how much more generally tragic can it be that in the 21st century, the wealthiest nation ever to exist on the planet cannot even recognize the need to reform this destructive system and at least try to deal with the widespread suffering it causes, especially when it can easily do something that will be to its economic benefit and in its own national interest.
Well, there's the intense denial of the Climate Crisis, ultimately a bigger tragedy. But right at this historic moment, there doesn't seem a deeper one for this country than healthcare reform. It tests our soul, as well as the ability of our discourse to deal with increasingly complex and threatening problems.
For all I know a healthcare reform law will emerge that will save lives, prevent so much injustice, and begin to tame the power of rapacious corporate interests and their cannibalism called healthcare insurance. And perhaps the nation will look back on this debate with shame and disbelief, and history will record this debate as a tragedy as well as a travesty.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
"Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible."
Maya Angelou. Illus: The Salmon People, blanket by Susan Point at Spiritwrester Gallery, Vancouver. In honor of salmon season on the North Coast.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
This Day in History
On this day 46 years ago, nobody believed a President could be assassinated in America. Political and racial feelings were high in some parts of the country, right wing fringe rhetoric was a little violent, but nothing that seemed significant--for example there wasn't a former Christian fundamentalist leader charging that elements of the right were "trawling for assassins," nor was there a brisk business in t-shirts and bumper stickers applying a particular Bible verse to the President: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." A situation taken seriously enough that several manufacturers stopped selling this merchandise.
The Daily Nightmare Babble
When they say history repeats itself, they usually mean not in a good way. There is this tendency--a law some say-- which I have never quite understood but which I acknowledge may well be true, to turn into the opposite. Enemies turn into each other, partly for the good, but also absorbing the evil they once fought against. Or as William Irwin Thompson has it, we become what we hate.
Are our painful centuries of two steps forward, one step back progress, coming to an end? Are we seeing the last dangerous spasm of a dying order, or are we entering a Dark Age? And quickly, right now?
The U.S. has a history of religious and racial intolerance, hatred, mob violence, willful ignorance in high places. Are we doomed to repeat it? Is it because we are ignorant of it, too far in time from the last major eruptions to remember in our bones and skin, what a terrible world they make?
On and after 9/11/2001, this country responded with cohesive strength and with fear, and our leaders chose to cultivate the fear. After manipulating themselves into power in 2001, their Rabid Right is now threatening to try to seize power by force. Do they really mean it? At a certain point it doesn't matter: they can create a firestorm they can't control. It's already feeding on itself.
It's hard to know how strong it really is. The kids at Kos have diverted themselves from attacking each other and even from highlighting Republican hijinks and simple (if Big) lies, to note in a remarkable series of recommended diaries the incidences of anti-Semitism and racism, of threats of violence against the President, of armed insurrection. But they are prone to their own firestorms.
Yet---since the Attorney-General announced a public trial for the alleged main perpetrator of the 9-11 massacres, one would expect this would be greeted with pride in the strength of the American judicial system and rule of law. But instead Rabid Right leaders call for summary execution without trial, and super-patriot O'Reilly shouts "I don't care about the Constitution."
Place these in context of the increasingly extreme and violent Big Lies and it seems clear that the Rabid Right is becoming what it beholds: their own example of Nazi Germany.
Last week, also on Kos, the writer who calls herself Plutonium Page wrote about the surviving navigator of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb exploded on a city, on Hiroshima. It was about an obscure newspaper article from New Mexico, which quoted Dutch van Kirk as being alarmed about today's casual public attitudes toward nuclear weapons. "You know, you get all these people that go around saying things like, with Iraq, 'We ought to go and nuke those bastards,' said Van Kirk, a spry 88. "They don't know what they're talking about. They have no idea what a nuclear bomb is."
I thought and felt the same way when all that talk was happening about the Bush plan to nuke the suspected nuclear sites in Iran, and I wrote extensively here and elsewhere about what a nuclear bomb is. Plutonium Page's article got many responses, mostly from readers old enough to remember the thermonuclear threats of the 50s and 60s, the renewed fears of nuclear war in the 80s. Those younger, or with inattentive memories, have less substance to grasp, and so the realities of nuclear weapons--even as far as we knew of them--can't combat the glib assumption that they're just blips on the video screen.
I mention it now because I wonder if part of the problem is that the reality of Nazi Germany, of Fascism in Europe and all that it did and represented, is also too remote in history now. People have no idea of what the reality is of a government brought to power by violence, which rules by fear and fiat. A government that really doesn't care about the Constitution, or trials, or rights.
But we do have artifacts of memory still existing in our main repository of meaning: popular culture. Just as the references to nuclear war that remain most vivid are movies and novels of the Cold War period, there are popular culture artifacts of the late 40s and early 50s especially--before the Red Menace took complete hold of the national soul, and in too many respects we became what we hated--and it's there: the way of life that we fought World War II to ensure. After all, that's basically how those in my generation absorbed the weight of the war that ended just before we were born.
It's there in something as otherwise silly as the first George Reeves appearance as Superman, in a low budget movie which later was folded into the first year of the series. The aliens from under the earth, the Mole Men, were pretty pathetic looking. But Superman's first act was to defend them against mob violence. He stopped one human (American) mob by shouting that they're acting like storm troopers.
Stormtroopers, the Holocaust, were fresh in the national mind. Though embattled, there was a strong strain in popular culture through the 60s that defended truth (as opposed to verifiable lies), justice (defendants had rights) and the American Way. The horror of torture in World War II and Korea led to the U.S. not torturing as an essential element of the national idenity. Our democracy was about ballots, not bullets, and our free press existed to convey and test the information we needed to know in order to come to agreement on how to proceed on our common destiny.
But it seems no generation of youth is ever ready for the reality of war, no matter how many war movies they see or video games they play. It may be that some of those fomenting chaos now are doing so intentionally out of some deluded faith that this is God's will. No doubt others aren't really thinking ahead, they're just inflating the rhetoric to get attention, to get ratings and political power and wealth. But how many others are being swept along for the ride?
It seems alarmist to even consider that armed insurrection could succeed, but the thrust of the Rabid Right rhetoric is aimed at destroying President Obama's ability to govern, and the dog whistle is sounding for some deranged assassin to do what they would swiftly condemn, but what they are overtly encouraging. In either or both cases, the aim is chaos, and then anything is possible.
There's been so much barely veiled rhetoric--to the extent that a former Christian Right leader charges that former compatriots are "trawling for assassins"--that I wonder if the trauma of JFK's assassination is itself too remote in history to resonate. JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King (the most prominent of the murdered black leaders) were all assassinated within a five year span, but the impact of an assassination attempt on this President could well be like all three at once, just for starters.
We are so smitten with the speed and power of our electronic communications that we haven't yet faced the reality it is creating: many sources, none trustworthy, certainly not for everyone. There is so much more noise than signal that we may not notice this until it all stops, until we really need to know what's going on, and we're helpless. It all fosters a disregard for truth that is in itself frightening, and it is already leading to an incredible credulity: people believe things just because their chosen media outlet or authority figure says so. But the noise is deafening, and swamps attention to meaning, or to what the past can still tell us.
Not that I'm a good example. I haven't yet learned from the past not to waste several hours babbling here for no good reason. And these days, the hours gone forever weigh more heavily. But I have babbled on, and there seems to be less point in deleting than posting.
Are our painful centuries of two steps forward, one step back progress, coming to an end? Are we seeing the last dangerous spasm of a dying order, or are we entering a Dark Age? And quickly, right now?
The U.S. has a history of religious and racial intolerance, hatred, mob violence, willful ignorance in high places. Are we doomed to repeat it? Is it because we are ignorant of it, too far in time from the last major eruptions to remember in our bones and skin, what a terrible world they make?
On and after 9/11/2001, this country responded with cohesive strength and with fear, and our leaders chose to cultivate the fear. After manipulating themselves into power in 2001, their Rabid Right is now threatening to try to seize power by force. Do they really mean it? At a certain point it doesn't matter: they can create a firestorm they can't control. It's already feeding on itself.
It's hard to know how strong it really is. The kids at Kos have diverted themselves from attacking each other and even from highlighting Republican hijinks and simple (if Big) lies, to note in a remarkable series of recommended diaries the incidences of anti-Semitism and racism, of threats of violence against the President, of armed insurrection. But they are prone to their own firestorms.
Yet---since the Attorney-General announced a public trial for the alleged main perpetrator of the 9-11 massacres, one would expect this would be greeted with pride in the strength of the American judicial system and rule of law. But instead Rabid Right leaders call for summary execution without trial, and super-patriot O'Reilly shouts "I don't care about the Constitution."
Place these in context of the increasingly extreme and violent Big Lies and it seems clear that the Rabid Right is becoming what it beholds: their own example of Nazi Germany.
Last week, also on Kos, the writer who calls herself Plutonium Page wrote about the surviving navigator of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb exploded on a city, on Hiroshima. It was about an obscure newspaper article from New Mexico, which quoted Dutch van Kirk as being alarmed about today's casual public attitudes toward nuclear weapons. "You know, you get all these people that go around saying things like, with Iraq, 'We ought to go and nuke those bastards,' said Van Kirk, a spry 88. "They don't know what they're talking about. They have no idea what a nuclear bomb is."
I thought and felt the same way when all that talk was happening about the Bush plan to nuke the suspected nuclear sites in Iran, and I wrote extensively here and elsewhere about what a nuclear bomb is. Plutonium Page's article got many responses, mostly from readers old enough to remember the thermonuclear threats of the 50s and 60s, the renewed fears of nuclear war in the 80s. Those younger, or with inattentive memories, have less substance to grasp, and so the realities of nuclear weapons--even as far as we knew of them--can't combat the glib assumption that they're just blips on the video screen.
I mention it now because I wonder if part of the problem is that the reality of Nazi Germany, of Fascism in Europe and all that it did and represented, is also too remote in history now. People have no idea of what the reality is of a government brought to power by violence, which rules by fear and fiat. A government that really doesn't care about the Constitution, or trials, or rights.
But we do have artifacts of memory still existing in our main repository of meaning: popular culture. Just as the references to nuclear war that remain most vivid are movies and novels of the Cold War period, there are popular culture artifacts of the late 40s and early 50s especially--before the Red Menace took complete hold of the national soul, and in too many respects we became what we hated--and it's there: the way of life that we fought World War II to ensure. After all, that's basically how those in my generation absorbed the weight of the war that ended just before we were born.
It's there in something as otherwise silly as the first George Reeves appearance as Superman, in a low budget movie which later was folded into the first year of the series. The aliens from under the earth, the Mole Men, were pretty pathetic looking. But Superman's first act was to defend them against mob violence. He stopped one human (American) mob by shouting that they're acting like storm troopers.
Stormtroopers, the Holocaust, were fresh in the national mind. Though embattled, there was a strong strain in popular culture through the 60s that defended truth (as opposed to verifiable lies), justice (defendants had rights) and the American Way. The horror of torture in World War II and Korea led to the U.S. not torturing as an essential element of the national idenity. Our democracy was about ballots, not bullets, and our free press existed to convey and test the information we needed to know in order to come to agreement on how to proceed on our common destiny.
But it seems no generation of youth is ever ready for the reality of war, no matter how many war movies they see or video games they play. It may be that some of those fomenting chaos now are doing so intentionally out of some deluded faith that this is God's will. No doubt others aren't really thinking ahead, they're just inflating the rhetoric to get attention, to get ratings and political power and wealth. But how many others are being swept along for the ride?
It seems alarmist to even consider that armed insurrection could succeed, but the thrust of the Rabid Right rhetoric is aimed at destroying President Obama's ability to govern, and the dog whistle is sounding for some deranged assassin to do what they would swiftly condemn, but what they are overtly encouraging. In either or both cases, the aim is chaos, and then anything is possible.
There's been so much barely veiled rhetoric--to the extent that a former Christian Right leader charges that former compatriots are "trawling for assassins"--that I wonder if the trauma of JFK's assassination is itself too remote in history to resonate. JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King (the most prominent of the murdered black leaders) were all assassinated within a five year span, but the impact of an assassination attempt on this President could well be like all three at once, just for starters.
We are so smitten with the speed and power of our electronic communications that we haven't yet faced the reality it is creating: many sources, none trustworthy, certainly not for everyone. There is so much more noise than signal that we may not notice this until it all stops, until we really need to know what's going on, and we're helpless. It all fosters a disregard for truth that is in itself frightening, and it is already leading to an incredible credulity: people believe things just because their chosen media outlet or authority figure says so. But the noise is deafening, and swamps attention to meaning, or to what the past can still tell us.
Not that I'm a good example. I haven't yet learned from the past not to waste several hours babbling here for no good reason. And these days, the hours gone forever weigh more heavily. But I have babbled on, and there seems to be less point in deleting than posting.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Polarizing Express
There's plenty to worry about in the tendencies and policies of the Obama administration, and in a sane country in a sane time, debating them sanely would be a good idea. But the most glaring apparent problem is that we haven't gotten beyond the ideological polarization of the Reagan through Clinton through Bush years. In fact, it's become so extreme that is seems headed for some kind of apocalypse, before age and race demographics take firmer control. Sanity is the casualty.
Still, even in this toxic atmosphere where dealing with reality is a dream, the realities remain. The upcoming fateful Afghanistan decisions. Iran and its nuclear fixations. Policies on leftover Bush atrocities--trials, torture, rendition, secrets. But the most pressing "domestic" issues are funnelling again into one: the economy.
There's a lot of anger everywhere about the financial sector, which is spilling over into anger about efforts like the Recovery Act to deal with employment and the real economy. At the moment, Congress and the media are responding to the anger. They just don't seem to have any ideas on what to actually do.
The Obama administration, like most administrations that take governing seriously, is caught in the middle. Reigning in Wall Street, getting help to Main Street, are taking a lot of time and wearing out everyone's patience.
But the problems are complicated and I find myself so confused that I am equally persuaded by two diametrically opposed columns in the New York Times today, one by Paul Krugman, the other by David Brooks.
I usually find myself agreeing with Krugman, and hardly ever with Brooks. Yet even those these columns take opposite sides on the effectiveness of Treasury Secretary Geithner, I see ways in which they both are correct. It's possible that the Obama team was dealt some really bad cards by the Bushies and Wall Street, and they've done the best they could. The second Great Depression was avoided, and for the vast majority life goes on. Yet what the Obama team did and is doing may not be enough, or it may have not really been what was really needed--just what was possible to avert the worst.
The road ahead looks at least as complex and confusing. Unemployment rates in the nation and in individual states (like California) are higher than in recent memory. Business experts say unemployment nationally is likely to hang around 10% for another year. And though there are signs of stronger economic activity and a slowing of job losses, the social fabric--as well as many lives--may not be able to take much more of this strain.
Can unused TARP money be devoted to job creation and targeted to Main Street? Will the pressure to relieve the deficit and the GOPer-whipped up antigovernment sentiment prevent the kind of aggressive job creation efforts that Krugman and others believe is necessary?
Then there's the healthcare bill, which is itself a healthy job creation and anti-deficit measure, a necessity for future economic health. If it goes down, the immediate future is bleak. If it passes, then the atmosphere may change, or at least we'll get more clarity on where the public mood actually is.
Update: Apropos the Recovery Act, an article in the Saturday NY Times claims that a consensus of economists agrees that it is working: "The legislation, a variety of economists say, is helping an economy in free fall a year ago to grow again and shed fewer jobs than it otherwise would. Mr. Obama’s promise to “save or create” about 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 is roughly on track, though far more jobs are being saved than created, especially among states and cities using their money to avoid cutting teachers, police officers and other workers."
Still, even in this toxic atmosphere where dealing with reality is a dream, the realities remain. The upcoming fateful Afghanistan decisions. Iran and its nuclear fixations. Policies on leftover Bush atrocities--trials, torture, rendition, secrets. But the most pressing "domestic" issues are funnelling again into one: the economy.
There's a lot of anger everywhere about the financial sector, which is spilling over into anger about efforts like the Recovery Act to deal with employment and the real economy. At the moment, Congress and the media are responding to the anger. They just don't seem to have any ideas on what to actually do.
The Obama administration, like most administrations that take governing seriously, is caught in the middle. Reigning in Wall Street, getting help to Main Street, are taking a lot of time and wearing out everyone's patience.
But the problems are complicated and I find myself so confused that I am equally persuaded by two diametrically opposed columns in the New York Times today, one by Paul Krugman, the other by David Brooks.
I usually find myself agreeing with Krugman, and hardly ever with Brooks. Yet even those these columns take opposite sides on the effectiveness of Treasury Secretary Geithner, I see ways in which they both are correct. It's possible that the Obama team was dealt some really bad cards by the Bushies and Wall Street, and they've done the best they could. The second Great Depression was avoided, and for the vast majority life goes on. Yet what the Obama team did and is doing may not be enough, or it may have not really been what was really needed--just what was possible to avert the worst.
The road ahead looks at least as complex and confusing. Unemployment rates in the nation and in individual states (like California) are higher than in recent memory. Business experts say unemployment nationally is likely to hang around 10% for another year. And though there are signs of stronger economic activity and a slowing of job losses, the social fabric--as well as many lives--may not be able to take much more of this strain.
Can unused TARP money be devoted to job creation and targeted to Main Street? Will the pressure to relieve the deficit and the GOPer-whipped up antigovernment sentiment prevent the kind of aggressive job creation efforts that Krugman and others believe is necessary?
Then there's the healthcare bill, which is itself a healthy job creation and anti-deficit measure, a necessity for future economic health. If it goes down, the immediate future is bleak. If it passes, then the atmosphere may change, or at least we'll get more clarity on where the public mood actually is.
Update: Apropos the Recovery Act, an article in the Saturday NY Times claims that a consensus of economists agrees that it is working: "The legislation, a variety of economists say, is helping an economy in free fall a year ago to grow again and shed fewer jobs than it otherwise would. Mr. Obama’s promise to “save or create” about 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 is roughly on track, though far more jobs are being saved than created, especially among states and cities using their money to avoid cutting teachers, police officers and other workers."
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
I'm taking a little flak here for writing too much and too enthusiastically about Barack Obama, most of the comment being good-natured so far. I mentioned the North Coast blogger who links here not with this site's actual name but as an Obama blog. Now "cousin Lemuel" (old joke, between two old jokers) has broadened the charge in a comment, referring to my "propensity for hero worship of charismatic personalities." Could it be he's still sore because I backed Bobby Kennedy over Gene McCarthy?
On the more general charge, I'll say this: I've never been successfully accused of being an optimist, nor do I have a record of being uncritical (I do dispute "cynical" however). But I have shown evidence of preferring pop culture heroes and phenomena that represent the light over the dark, hope over despair, the commitment to good over the bad boys: from Superman to Spiderman and Harry Potter; Star Trek and Doctor Who over those s/f stories that are predictably described as "gritty." I even chose the Beatles over the Stones.
Whatever this says about me, here's what I say about context. The dark, the apocalyptic, the "gritty" are said to better represent reality and human nature. But it's not just half-empty or half-fullness in how you view this.
A century of Darwinism made the Social Darwinist analysis of ingrained, genetically programmed selfishness and cruelty in the struggle for survival into dogma, so dog eat dog capitalism, the rich preying on the poor and the sectarian violence serving the greed of those who make weapons for profit etc. have become enshrined as unalterable Human Nature.
This conveniently supports the rationale and lifestyles of militarists (and their video games), capitalists (who pay good lecture fees for intellectuals supporting this view) as well as TV and film writers who can't come up with a plot that doesn't depend on violence and the same old motives of jealousy, greed and revenge.
But now that even evolutionists are admitting that humans and other animals are also cooperative, caring, empathetic, compassionate, altruistic and yes, heroic creatures, human nature has room for all of this. Human behavior and the culture that supports it become matters of emphasis, of the value placed upon behaviors. But even those disposed to good may need models, and a sense of possibility. Heroes can personify those possibilities.
As for the function of charismatic figures in real life, particularly in politics, they can be powerful forces for bad or for good. But they are powerful, they do get things done. Here in the U.S., we had a series of Democratic Party candidates who would have made decent to very good Presidents, but they weren't, because they couldn't get elected. Barack Obama had the charisma, if you want to call it that, to inspire people to action.
Bobby Kennedy had two advantages over Gene McCarthy: he could have been elected, and he could have been a transformative President.
In Barack Obama (as in JFK and RFK), I value what I perceive as a complex intelligence, which includes complex feelings and a consciousness monitoring it all. I trust him and his judgment accordingly. But I don't worship him. I don't think he's infallible. And neither does he. That's partly why I have confidence in him.
Let me put it another way. I have long been interested in the insights of Eastern religions, but I had enough of priesthoods in my childhood, and my suspicion of gurus and their true believers probably stopped me from finding even a teacher. But I admire the Dalai Lama, partly because he doesn't believe in gurus either. He doesn't believe he's always right. Yet he has strong views and commitments, strong abilities to communicate, and--something else I value highly in RFK and Obama--a great sense of humor, including a saving sense of irony.
But here's the main point: we're up against a terribly crucial moment in human history. Humanity sliding into self-destruction and a long Dark Age is a very live possibility. Things in the U.S. are particularly dangerous. What happens in the next decade may tell the tale for America and quite possibly the world for centuries to come.
At least at the moment, the President of the United States is in many ways the psychological king of the world. Everyone projects onto the President their hopes and fears, and especially what they won't face about themselves. I've seen this with every President but of course it is more obvious to me when the President is one I voted for. I saw it clearly with Bill Clinton, who I kept called the President of Projection.
Though uncharismatic leaders can do just about as much damage, charisma in a leader can be dangerous. I was more than immune to Reagan's charisma but apparently he had it, and there wasn't another politician alive who could counter it. We got through that decade only by the charisma of writers and (for some of us) musicians. The critiques of the age came in songs by Joni Mitchell, Sting, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, etc. They inspired us to hang on, by giving form and voice to our intuitions and observations.
But all charisma is not created equal. Barack Obama is a positive role model and a force for good in so many ways. We're going to need every ounce of his charisma, his ability to speak and inspire, the personal power to make and effect positive change and to hold off the gathering forces of evil.
He's the best hope going and I'm sticking with him until convinced otherwise. And because I trust his judgment I'm going to give him every opportunity to explain and convince me he's right, or at least that he's made the best possible choice.
I choose to emphasize the good he does, though some expect him to never disappoint them, to do everything they want immediately. Who is being unrealistic then?
I am not going to attack him and try to weaken him, as some on the left are now doing, because he isn't measuring up to their preconceptions of what he should be doing on some particular issue that's important to them. He isn't Bush. I don't see that weakening him is ultimately a positive.
Is that hero worship? I don't think so. I may look for the good and underestimate the bad, but I am not deluded and I gave up worship a long time ago. A couple of other dangers in hero worship are passivity and narcissism. I'm not passive, at least beyond my own fatalism, laziness and personal self-delusions. I believe that people find direction and hope by identifying to some degree with heroes and role models. Sure, I see the danger of such identification becoming psychotic, especially in this celebrity-crazed culture, but let's not throw out the planet with the bathwater.
We follow the leader who is leading in the direction we believe in, and in whom we have confidence. We follow what in a hero defines for us what we value, what we want to be, where we want to go, who we are committed to being. For those defined by their fears there is Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and a host of others, mostly to the right, but also left and center. For those defined by their hopes, there are lots of quiet heroes, lots of role models past and present, but mostly, there's Obama. Or maybe I should say the Obamas, because women (among others) are inspired by Michelle, and children (among others) are inspired by Sasha and Malia.
It's all a matter of emphasis. I'm for tipping the delicate balance towards equality, compassion, empathy, freedom, "truth, justice and the American Way." Technical adjustments may be necessary to get there, but we need more than technicians. There are powerful forces in opposition that are inside us as well as arrayed in the shared world. This looks like a job for the Superman inside. Out there, too, we need all the heroics we can get.
On the more general charge, I'll say this: I've never been successfully accused of being an optimist, nor do I have a record of being uncritical (I do dispute "cynical" however). But I have shown evidence of preferring pop culture heroes and phenomena that represent the light over the dark, hope over despair, the commitment to good over the bad boys: from Superman to Spiderman and Harry Potter; Star Trek and Doctor Who over those s/f stories that are predictably described as "gritty." I even chose the Beatles over the Stones.
Whatever this says about me, here's what I say about context. The dark, the apocalyptic, the "gritty" are said to better represent reality and human nature. But it's not just half-empty or half-fullness in how you view this.
A century of Darwinism made the Social Darwinist analysis of ingrained, genetically programmed selfishness and cruelty in the struggle for survival into dogma, so dog eat dog capitalism, the rich preying on the poor and the sectarian violence serving the greed of those who make weapons for profit etc. have become enshrined as unalterable Human Nature.
This conveniently supports the rationale and lifestyles of militarists (and their video games), capitalists (who pay good lecture fees for intellectuals supporting this view) as well as TV and film writers who can't come up with a plot that doesn't depend on violence and the same old motives of jealousy, greed and revenge.
But now that even evolutionists are admitting that humans and other animals are also cooperative, caring, empathetic, compassionate, altruistic and yes, heroic creatures, human nature has room for all of this. Human behavior and the culture that supports it become matters of emphasis, of the value placed upon behaviors. But even those disposed to good may need models, and a sense of possibility. Heroes can personify those possibilities.
As for the function of charismatic figures in real life, particularly in politics, they can be powerful forces for bad or for good. But they are powerful, they do get things done. Here in the U.S., we had a series of Democratic Party candidates who would have made decent to very good Presidents, but they weren't, because they couldn't get elected. Barack Obama had the charisma, if you want to call it that, to inspire people to action.
Bobby Kennedy had two advantages over Gene McCarthy: he could have been elected, and he could have been a transformative President.
In Barack Obama (as in JFK and RFK), I value what I perceive as a complex intelligence, which includes complex feelings and a consciousness monitoring it all. I trust him and his judgment accordingly. But I don't worship him. I don't think he's infallible. And neither does he. That's partly why I have confidence in him.
Let me put it another way. I have long been interested in the insights of Eastern religions, but I had enough of priesthoods in my childhood, and my suspicion of gurus and their true believers probably stopped me from finding even a teacher. But I admire the Dalai Lama, partly because he doesn't believe in gurus either. He doesn't believe he's always right. Yet he has strong views and commitments, strong abilities to communicate, and--something else I value highly in RFK and Obama--a great sense of humor, including a saving sense of irony.
But here's the main point: we're up against a terribly crucial moment in human history. Humanity sliding into self-destruction and a long Dark Age is a very live possibility. Things in the U.S. are particularly dangerous. What happens in the next decade may tell the tale for America and quite possibly the world for centuries to come.
At least at the moment, the President of the United States is in many ways the psychological king of the world. Everyone projects onto the President their hopes and fears, and especially what they won't face about themselves. I've seen this with every President but of course it is more obvious to me when the President is one I voted for. I saw it clearly with Bill Clinton, who I kept called the President of Projection.
Though uncharismatic leaders can do just about as much damage, charisma in a leader can be dangerous. I was more than immune to Reagan's charisma but apparently he had it, and there wasn't another politician alive who could counter it. We got through that decade only by the charisma of writers and (for some of us) musicians. The critiques of the age came in songs by Joni Mitchell, Sting, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, etc. They inspired us to hang on, by giving form and voice to our intuitions and observations.
But all charisma is not created equal. Barack Obama is a positive role model and a force for good in so many ways. We're going to need every ounce of his charisma, his ability to speak and inspire, the personal power to make and effect positive change and to hold off the gathering forces of evil.
He's the best hope going and I'm sticking with him until convinced otherwise. And because I trust his judgment I'm going to give him every opportunity to explain and convince me he's right, or at least that he's made the best possible choice.
I choose to emphasize the good he does, though some expect him to never disappoint them, to do everything they want immediately. Who is being unrealistic then?
I am not going to attack him and try to weaken him, as some on the left are now doing, because he isn't measuring up to their preconceptions of what he should be doing on some particular issue that's important to them. He isn't Bush. I don't see that weakening him is ultimately a positive.
Is that hero worship? I don't think so. I may look for the good and underestimate the bad, but I am not deluded and I gave up worship a long time ago. A couple of other dangers in hero worship are passivity and narcissism. I'm not passive, at least beyond my own fatalism, laziness and personal self-delusions. I believe that people find direction and hope by identifying to some degree with heroes and role models. Sure, I see the danger of such identification becoming psychotic, especially in this celebrity-crazed culture, but let's not throw out the planet with the bathwater.
We follow the leader who is leading in the direction we believe in, and in whom we have confidence. We follow what in a hero defines for us what we value, what we want to be, where we want to go, who we are committed to being. For those defined by their fears there is Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and a host of others, mostly to the right, but also left and center. For those defined by their hopes, there are lots of quiet heroes, lots of role models past and present, but mostly, there's Obama. Or maybe I should say the Obamas, because women (among others) are inspired by Michelle, and children (among others) are inspired by Sasha and Malia.
It's all a matter of emphasis. I'm for tipping the delicate balance towards equality, compassion, empathy, freedom, "truth, justice and the American Way." Technical adjustments may be necessary to get there, but we need more than technicians. There are powerful forces in opposition that are inside us as well as arrayed in the shared world. This looks like a job for the Superman inside. Out there, too, we need all the heroics we can get.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
"If all possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all."
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Welcome to the Neighborhood
A new portrait of the central Milky Way using infrared and X-ray photography, a composite with contributions from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, and Chandra X-Ray Observatory. [Click on the photo to enlarge. Credit: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC and STScl.] It's enough to make you wonder--which, it turns out, even the Vatican is doing, at their conference on whether there is other life in the universe. Could Galileo being orbiting in his grave?
The Hypocritical Oath
There's a war on Americans that has killed twice as many U.S. veterans in one year as were killed in Afghanistan since 2001. It's the war against universal health care.
A new Harvard Medical study finds that 2,200 vets under the age of 65 died last year because they didn't have health insurance.
This is only one item in the scandalous treatment of veterans. I'm not going to join in all the hyperbole about soldiers that's customary on Veterans Day. The military is not the only way to serve and protect, and heroism used to mean something more than the pious name given to every member. But the hypocrisy of a country that doesn't take care of its veterans, that skimps on care and allows huge loopholes in coverage, is simply disgusting.
But this is a specific instance of the war against universal health care now being waged, which even victimizes the veterans that the hypocritical patriot mouths will praise today. It's a war on the many--especially the least powerful--by the very powerful few, as most wars are.
It's a war that has already watered down even the strongest health care reform proposals currently being considered. But former President Clinton is right--something is better than nothing. If universal health care had become law in 1997, those veterans would not be casualities of this war, nor would the estimated 45,000 Americans who die each year because they have no health care coverage. And as baskeball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said Tuesday, as he revealed his serious medical condition that fortunately he can afford to have addressed, "It’s a just and noble cause to make health care available to everyone."
A new Harvard Medical study finds that 2,200 vets under the age of 65 died last year because they didn't have health insurance.
This is only one item in the scandalous treatment of veterans. I'm not going to join in all the hyperbole about soldiers that's customary on Veterans Day. The military is not the only way to serve and protect, and heroism used to mean something more than the pious name given to every member. But the hypocrisy of a country that doesn't take care of its veterans, that skimps on care and allows huge loopholes in coverage, is simply disgusting.
But this is a specific instance of the war against universal health care now being waged, which even victimizes the veterans that the hypocritical patriot mouths will praise today. It's a war on the many--especially the least powerful--by the very powerful few, as most wars are.
It's a war that has already watered down even the strongest health care reform proposals currently being considered. But former President Clinton is right--something is better than nothing. If universal health care had become law in 1997, those veterans would not be casualities of this war, nor would the estimated 45,000 Americans who die each year because they have no health care coverage. And as baskeball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said Tuesday, as he revealed his serious medical condition that fortunately he can afford to have addressed, "It’s a just and noble cause to make health care available to everyone."
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Dreaming Up Daily Quote
"Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience."
--Albert Einstein
painting: "The Boulevard" by Gino Severini
Saturday, November 07, 2009
History
In a late night session, the House of Representatives passed the Obama-backed Democratic health care reform plan 220-215. As President Obama observed in an email, "Despite countless attempts over nearly a century, no chamber of Congress has ever before passed comprehensive health reform. This is history."
Democratic House members met earlier with President Obama, and Representative Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said afterwards, “This is an opportunity to do something as big as Social Security,” he added. “And me, personally, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.”
After meeting with Obama, some Democrats began a familiar chant: Fired Up! Ready to Go! Fired Up! Ready to Go!
Republicans offered their own bill, which was defeated, and attempted to disrupt the debate by shouting down Democratic speakers. Republican leadership guaranteed that no GOPers would vote for the bill, so they must have been surprised when one Republican did--Representative Ahn Cao of Louisiana, the first person born in Vietnam to be elected to Congress. He said in a statement: "I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding — if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children.”
TPM summarizes what the House and Senate bills contain. Among those voting against in the House was liberal Dennis Kucinich, who supports a single payer system. Some interesting quick reflections on that, and on the politics of the vote, here from Booman.
Update: The NYTimes adds some handy stuff: a point by point comparison of House and Senate bills, an interactive map of districts by who voted for and who against the House bill, plus a chart concerning the Democrats who voted against the House bill. Meanwhile, Josh Marshall sees the vote as historic--but even though he believes health care reform will be enacted, it could possibly lead to Democrats losing Congress in 2010, and/or the presidency in 2012. (But then the world ends in 2012 so it won't make any difference.)
Democratic House members met earlier with President Obama, and Representative Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said afterwards, “This is an opportunity to do something as big as Social Security,” he added. “And me, personally, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.”
After meeting with Obama, some Democrats began a familiar chant: Fired Up! Ready to Go! Fired Up! Ready to Go!
Republicans offered their own bill, which was defeated, and attempted to disrupt the debate by shouting down Democratic speakers. Republican leadership guaranteed that no GOPers would vote for the bill, so they must have been surprised when one Republican did--Representative Ahn Cao of Louisiana, the first person born in Vietnam to be elected to Congress. He said in a statement: "I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding — if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children.”
TPM summarizes what the House and Senate bills contain. Among those voting against in the House was liberal Dennis Kucinich, who supports a single payer system. Some interesting quick reflections on that, and on the politics of the vote, here from Booman.
Update: The NYTimes adds some handy stuff: a point by point comparison of House and Senate bills, an interactive map of districts by who voted for and who against the House bill, plus a chart concerning the Democrats who voted against the House bill. Meanwhile, Josh Marshall sees the vote as historic--but even though he believes health care reform will be enacted, it could possibly lead to Democrats losing Congress in 2010, and/or the presidency in 2012. (But then the world ends in 2012 so it won't make any difference.)
Friday, November 06, 2009
Grand Entrance
In honor of the history-making White House Tribal Leaders Conference yesterday, which President Obama and tribal leaders hope is the beginning of a new era of justice and partnership, subject of the post below. "Grand Entrance" by Kenojuak Ashevak (Inuit.)
A Lasting Conversation
The President of the United States met with American Indian leaders from all 564 tribal nations on Thursday, at the conference he called. It was the first time--as the BBC pointed out--that a sitting President has ever held such a meeting.
The recognized tribes weren't the only ones represented, because problems of getting officially recognized is one of the issues discussed.
Several times President Obama made this point: "And I want to be clear about this: Today's summit is not lip service. We're not going to go through the motions and pay tribute to one another and then furl up the flags and go our separate ways. Today's sessions are part of a lasting conversation that's crucial to our shared future."
The shared past has been ugly, long past the well known history of slaughter, concentration camps and slavery in the 18th and 19th century, and the racism and exploitation of the 20th. Some members of Congress, such as Senator Ted Kennedy, and later President Clinton made some efforts to establish new federal policies, but such efforts died in the Bush administration, as corruption and exploitation again became more characteristic.
But as a candidate, Obama was the first since Robert Kennedy to actively campaign for Indian votes by engaging tribes and Native groups, and speaking to their issues. On Thursday, he could speak to these leaders with a record of having kept his major campaign promises to them, and he was honored for this effort. So the president of the National Congress of American Indians could say, "we respect you as a man of your word."
Throughout the day, cabinet secretaries and other federal officials listened to tribal leaders and their issues: the effects of the Climate Crisis on tribes in Alaska, the environmental destruction when reservations are used as toxic waste dumps, continuing issues of land and sovereignty, severe unemployment, and terrible health and education problems.
The Obama administration has already demonstrated its awareness by targeting money from the Recovery Act to Indian nations. In particular, recognizing that some of the better sites for solar and wind power projects are on Indian lands, the administration is interested in fostering clean energy projects. So are tribal leaders.
The President opened the conference, and handled this occasion with skill and style. He didn't suggest a Native genetic heritage, like the Cherokee blood that I've heard Indians say is the most common and meaningless claim. He spoke of a relationship that is taken seriously: he was adopted into the Crow Nation. Even though this can be a courtesy to flatter important people, it can have real meaning, depending on how seriously the parties take it.
And speaking of seriously, President Obama used a tool that Native peoples appreciate: humor. For example, after his remarks, Obama signed an executive order giving federal agencies 90 days to submit detailed plans on ways to improve their consultations with tribal leaders. He did so using 8 pens, which as is customary, would then be given to leaders. As he signed bits of his signature with each pen he told the audience, "this isn't as easy as it looks."
However, he may not have been prepared for the lengthy and almost ceremonial statements he got in the Q and A period, during which no Qs were asked. I recognize that, too, and I learned to love it.
President Obama returned at the end of the day to reiterate his resolve that this was a beginning and not an end to--at last--an attentive relationship between the U.S. government and the Indian nations. Unfortunately, the shootings at Fort Hood not only dominated the day's news but prevented the President from making his final remarks.
Here's a brief story from AFP, the New York Times account of the day, and USA Today. A transcript of Obama's remarks in the morning and the Q & A are here, in the Washington Post, and Reznet News has a story and video.
The recognized tribes weren't the only ones represented, because problems of getting officially recognized is one of the issues discussed.
Several times President Obama made this point: "And I want to be clear about this: Today's summit is not lip service. We're not going to go through the motions and pay tribute to one another and then furl up the flags and go our separate ways. Today's sessions are part of a lasting conversation that's crucial to our shared future."
The shared past has been ugly, long past the well known history of slaughter, concentration camps and slavery in the 18th and 19th century, and the racism and exploitation of the 20th. Some members of Congress, such as Senator Ted Kennedy, and later President Clinton made some efforts to establish new federal policies, but such efforts died in the Bush administration, as corruption and exploitation again became more characteristic.
But as a candidate, Obama was the first since Robert Kennedy to actively campaign for Indian votes by engaging tribes and Native groups, and speaking to their issues. On Thursday, he could speak to these leaders with a record of having kept his major campaign promises to them, and he was honored for this effort. So the president of the National Congress of American Indians could say, "we respect you as a man of your word."
Throughout the day, cabinet secretaries and other federal officials listened to tribal leaders and their issues: the effects of the Climate Crisis on tribes in Alaska, the environmental destruction when reservations are used as toxic waste dumps, continuing issues of land and sovereignty, severe unemployment, and terrible health and education problems.
The Obama administration has already demonstrated its awareness by targeting money from the Recovery Act to Indian nations. In particular, recognizing that some of the better sites for solar and wind power projects are on Indian lands, the administration is interested in fostering clean energy projects. So are tribal leaders.
The President opened the conference, and handled this occasion with skill and style. He didn't suggest a Native genetic heritage, like the Cherokee blood that I've heard Indians say is the most common and meaningless claim. He spoke of a relationship that is taken seriously: he was adopted into the Crow Nation. Even though this can be a courtesy to flatter important people, it can have real meaning, depending on how seriously the parties take it.
And speaking of seriously, President Obama used a tool that Native peoples appreciate: humor. For example, after his remarks, Obama signed an executive order giving federal agencies 90 days to submit detailed plans on ways to improve their consultations with tribal leaders. He did so using 8 pens, which as is customary, would then be given to leaders. As he signed bits of his signature with each pen he told the audience, "this isn't as easy as it looks."
However, he may not have been prepared for the lengthy and almost ceremonial statements he got in the Q and A period, during which no Qs were asked. I recognize that, too, and I learned to love it.
President Obama returned at the end of the day to reiterate his resolve that this was a beginning and not an end to--at last--an attentive relationship between the U.S. government and the Indian nations. Unfortunately, the shootings at Fort Hood not only dominated the day's news but prevented the President from making his final remarks.
Here's a brief story from AFP, the New York Times account of the day, and USA Today. A transcript of Obama's remarks in the morning and the Q & A are here, in the Washington Post, and Reznet News has a story and video.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Shooting
I turned on the TV at about 145 Pacific time and heard the reports of gunshots and deaths at Fort Hood. Apparently the cable news outlets had been reporting the wildly varying information for awhile. Then the first official spokesperson for the base provided this information: 12 dead, 31 wounded with wounds varying greatly in severity, the shooter was killed by a civilian police officer, the incident took place in a building where troops were gathered as part of the processing for imminent deployment--at least some to Iraq and Afghanistan. Two suspects were also in custody--they and the shooter are U.S. Army, though the victims included civilian police.
Though this official was careful to say there was one shooter and two additional suspects being questioned, it took miliseconds for both Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews to begin referring to the three shooters. It may turn out to be the case, but it may also turn out to be that the two suspects didn't actually shoot. They may be guilty of nothing. It's more than sloppy reporting, it's bad reporting, with a hint of hysteria. It's what comes of employing people not to think but to shoot their mouths off. I've turned the TV off.
Update: By about 630 pm Pacific it was confirmed that indeed the two suspects were not shooters, and after questioning were released. However, the official report was also wrong in saying that the accused shooter was dead. A second press conference revealed he is alive, with multiple gunshot wounds, as is the person who first shot him, described as "a female first responder." Whether this misreporting was intentional or not is a question that is likely to be asked.
Update 2: The New York Times story about the alleged shooter, Major Nidal Hasan, corrects yet another bit of misreporting on cable news. CNN in particular reported that the FBI had looked into web postings Hasan made, about suicide bombings. The implication was that they should have realized he was trouble. But the Times emphasized (repeating it twice) that the Nidal Hasan who posted had not been definitively identified as Major Nidal Hasan. Kind of an important point.
The Times story also suggests a rationale for the apparently paradoxical fact that Hasan was a psychiatrist:
He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.
“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”
This doesn't make the taking of innocent life any more rational, and certainly not justifiable, but it does link Hasan's expertise to the situation.
Though this official was careful to say there was one shooter and two additional suspects being questioned, it took miliseconds for both Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews to begin referring to the three shooters. It may turn out to be the case, but it may also turn out to be that the two suspects didn't actually shoot. They may be guilty of nothing. It's more than sloppy reporting, it's bad reporting, with a hint of hysteria. It's what comes of employing people not to think but to shoot their mouths off. I've turned the TV off.
Update: By about 630 pm Pacific it was confirmed that indeed the two suspects were not shooters, and after questioning were released. However, the official report was also wrong in saying that the accused shooter was dead. A second press conference revealed he is alive, with multiple gunshot wounds, as is the person who first shot him, described as "a female first responder." Whether this misreporting was intentional or not is a question that is likely to be asked.
Update 2: The New York Times story about the alleged shooter, Major Nidal Hasan, corrects yet another bit of misreporting on cable news. CNN in particular reported that the FBI had looked into web postings Hasan made, about suicide bombings. The implication was that they should have realized he was trouble. But the Times emphasized (repeating it twice) that the Nidal Hasan who posted had not been definitively identified as Major Nidal Hasan. Kind of an important point.
The Times story also suggests a rationale for the apparently paradoxical fact that Hasan was a psychiatrist:
He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.
“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”
This doesn't make the taking of innocent life any more rational, and certainly not justifiable, but it does link Hasan's expertise to the situation.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Seriously though, folks...
This is the guy who wants Death Panels? Whose health care plan is equivalent to the Holocaust? The new Hitler, the new Stalin, the unAmerican Anti-Christ? The media may eat it up, but the cognitive dissonance is clearly too much for the majority of Americans. A tumultuous and yet basically calmer year later, apart from an increasingly dangerous fringe. More on the year later theme in the post below.
A Year Later
The first November election after Barack Obama won the presidency had several races that the politicians and media watched for real and mostly imagined significance. The early morning after stories trumpeted Democratic defeats for governor of New Jersey (the incumbent lost) and Virginia (the Democratic incumbent wasn't running.) By the time Morning Joe begins fulminating, the GOPers will be crowing all over the place.
However, their glee might be tempered by a couple of House races where they lost badly, particularly the one in New York, where a Democrat won a Republican seat, for the first time in more than a century. This was the race where Rabid Right leaders endorsed the Conservative Party candidate over the Republican, who dropped out--and endorsed the Dem. The Conservative was still expected to win, but he sure didn't.
Inevitably there's the question of what this says about Obama. Looking at the polls, Kos said "nothing." Obama's support in Virginia and New Jersey is about the same as when he won those states, and in exit polls most voters said they weren't saying anything about Obama either way with their vote.
Later in the evening, Kos played a slightly different tune, attributing the low turnout among young voters to disenchantment with the lack of bold action. Earlier in the day I caught Chris Matthews railing against Netroots kids expecting that political change is as easy as "asking your mother to make you pancakes." So that's another argument that's bound to gas up the airwaves Wednesday.
Whatever each of them does or doesn't portend, a few off-year elections aren't going to change the dynamic for Obama. But how the perception game among pols plays out might, specifically in terms of pending legislation on healthcare and the Climate Crisis. If GOPers can project more strength and cast Obama as politically weaker, it could be trouble. However, GOPers feeling their oats are fairly reliable in their tendency to overplay their hand.
But what is important about a year later? We've forgotten the Great Recession--and how close we came to Great Depression II--even before the economy is actually healthy. That's remarkable. What isn't remarkable is all the hoo-haw about what Obama is and isn't doing, and particularly the inspiring speeches he's not making. I was only 16 or 17, but I remember the same hoo-haw about President Kennedy. He's such a great communicator, why isn't he doing more FDR style fireside chats? Etc. JFK may have been too skeptical, but he did understand timing, and nobody has been better at timing in recent years than Barack Obama. He waited until the right moment to address Congress on health care, and evidence is mounting that it was that moment that turned things around.
Sure, it's not done yet, and there's plenty of danger ahead. But that isn't the worst of it. What I find most appalling and most dangerous is the attempt to discredit and destroy the President. I understand where some of this is coming from. It's a brand of justice called revenge.
I saw it on a bumper sticker in front of me at a red light--surrounded by other Rabid Right slogans, it said something to the effect of: I'll respect your President exactly as much as you respected mine.
This is partly payback for what was said about G.W. Bush. And there's something to this: there was disdain, disrespect, however justified or not.
But the Rabid Right is much better at hate. Their leaders--including elected bigwig DC leaders-- aren't even pretending to restrain the haters. GOPers in Congress and possible presidential candidates fan the flames, as do ambitious media stars eager to cash in. They have inflated the rhetoric beyond reason. No longer even bothering with "socialized medicine," they've gone right to the inflammatory "socialism."
Was Bush closer to being a fascist than Obama is a socialist? I'd say yes, but someone could probably make the case that these propositions are equally wrong. I can recite ways in which Bush earned disdain (his appointment by the Supreme Court, Iraq, Katrina, torture, etc.) And I can show how a lot of this extreme opposition is delusional. So the equivalence breaks down, though obviously not everyone thinks so.
Is the racial hatred of Obama more toxic than the disdain for Bush as a spoiled rich kid? I'd say yes, but somebody on the other side might make a case that they're the same in some way.
What I don't think is debatable is the greater potential for violence now--there is a difference between gun-toting and civil disobedience. And again, GOPer leaders are eagerly embracing and encouraging the vocabulary of the haters, as well as their campaign contributions. They are extreme enough that columnist Joe Klein, not exactly a roaring leftist, accuses some of them of sedition.
Here's what I worry about, beyond the very real worry over President Obama's safety, and what will happen to the country if there is even an assassination attempt. We have a huge and powerful military, a military-industrial complex, constrained only by one civilian authority, the President. Anything that undermines his legitimacy and authority, threatens his control over the military specifically, and the military-industrial complex.
The relative power of the military today is an open question. Maybe they aren't as powerful as they once were, in the fifties and sixties, when even the Secretary of Defense admitted they were itching to start a thermonuclear war. But Obama may need all his authority to keep the military in control, especially if he makes decisions counter to their wishes in Afghanistan.
There's a delicate line between criticizing, even castigating the man who is president, and damaging the presidency and the ability of the President to fulfill constitutional roles and duties. But I don't think the Rabid Right is aware of that, or particularly cares. That's scary in itself.
On the plus side, most of the American electorate is being decidedly turned off by this rabid rhetoric. Still, it's a volatile situation, in a country where civilization itself seems increasingly vulnerable.
However, their glee might be tempered by a couple of House races where they lost badly, particularly the one in New York, where a Democrat won a Republican seat, for the first time in more than a century. This was the race where Rabid Right leaders endorsed the Conservative Party candidate over the Republican, who dropped out--and endorsed the Dem. The Conservative was still expected to win, but he sure didn't.
Inevitably there's the question of what this says about Obama. Looking at the polls, Kos said "nothing." Obama's support in Virginia and New Jersey is about the same as when he won those states, and in exit polls most voters said they weren't saying anything about Obama either way with their vote.
Later in the evening, Kos played a slightly different tune, attributing the low turnout among young voters to disenchantment with the lack of bold action. Earlier in the day I caught Chris Matthews railing against Netroots kids expecting that political change is as easy as "asking your mother to make you pancakes." So that's another argument that's bound to gas up the airwaves Wednesday.
Whatever each of them does or doesn't portend, a few off-year elections aren't going to change the dynamic for Obama. But how the perception game among pols plays out might, specifically in terms of pending legislation on healthcare and the Climate Crisis. If GOPers can project more strength and cast Obama as politically weaker, it could be trouble. However, GOPers feeling their oats are fairly reliable in their tendency to overplay their hand.
But what is important about a year later? We've forgotten the Great Recession--and how close we came to Great Depression II--even before the economy is actually healthy. That's remarkable. What isn't remarkable is all the hoo-haw about what Obama is and isn't doing, and particularly the inspiring speeches he's not making. I was only 16 or 17, but I remember the same hoo-haw about President Kennedy. He's such a great communicator, why isn't he doing more FDR style fireside chats? Etc. JFK may have been too skeptical, but he did understand timing, and nobody has been better at timing in recent years than Barack Obama. He waited until the right moment to address Congress on health care, and evidence is mounting that it was that moment that turned things around.
Sure, it's not done yet, and there's plenty of danger ahead. But that isn't the worst of it. What I find most appalling and most dangerous is the attempt to discredit and destroy the President. I understand where some of this is coming from. It's a brand of justice called revenge.
I saw it on a bumper sticker in front of me at a red light--surrounded by other Rabid Right slogans, it said something to the effect of: I'll respect your President exactly as much as you respected mine.
This is partly payback for what was said about G.W. Bush. And there's something to this: there was disdain, disrespect, however justified or not.
But the Rabid Right is much better at hate. Their leaders--including elected bigwig DC leaders-- aren't even pretending to restrain the haters. GOPers in Congress and possible presidential candidates fan the flames, as do ambitious media stars eager to cash in. They have inflated the rhetoric beyond reason. No longer even bothering with "socialized medicine," they've gone right to the inflammatory "socialism."
Was Bush closer to being a fascist than Obama is a socialist? I'd say yes, but someone could probably make the case that these propositions are equally wrong. I can recite ways in which Bush earned disdain (his appointment by the Supreme Court, Iraq, Katrina, torture, etc.) And I can show how a lot of this extreme opposition is delusional. So the equivalence breaks down, though obviously not everyone thinks so.
Is the racial hatred of Obama more toxic than the disdain for Bush as a spoiled rich kid? I'd say yes, but somebody on the other side might make a case that they're the same in some way.
What I don't think is debatable is the greater potential for violence now--there is a difference between gun-toting and civil disobedience. And again, GOPer leaders are eagerly embracing and encouraging the vocabulary of the haters, as well as their campaign contributions. They are extreme enough that columnist Joe Klein, not exactly a roaring leftist, accuses some of them of sedition.
Here's what I worry about, beyond the very real worry over President Obama's safety, and what will happen to the country if there is even an assassination attempt. We have a huge and powerful military, a military-industrial complex, constrained only by one civilian authority, the President. Anything that undermines his legitimacy and authority, threatens his control over the military specifically, and the military-industrial complex.
The relative power of the military today is an open question. Maybe they aren't as powerful as they once were, in the fifties and sixties, when even the Secretary of Defense admitted they were itching to start a thermonuclear war. But Obama may need all his authority to keep the military in control, especially if he makes decisions counter to their wishes in Afghanistan.
There's a delicate line between criticizing, even castigating the man who is president, and damaging the presidency and the ability of the President to fulfill constitutional roles and duties. But I don't think the Rabid Right is aware of that, or particularly cares. That's scary in itself.
On the plus side, most of the American electorate is being decidedly turned off by this rabid rhetoric. Still, it's a volatile situation, in a country where civilization itself seems increasingly vulnerable.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Yes We Can
Here on what one North Coast blogger links to as "Bill's Obama Blog," let's celebrate and remember another election night one year ago, with this terrific video by Jed Lewison. Note Obama's election night speech, warning that this was just the beginning of change, that it would be hard and require much of us, but as long as we breathe, we hope. A year later--only one year later-- it's good to remind ourselves of the magnitude of what happened, which was and remains a reason to hope that the future can still be saved.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Bookmark: Self and Society
Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture
by William Irwin Thompson
Imprint Academic 184 pages
Self and Society is an oddly vanilla title for the guy who wrote At the Edge of History, Evil and World Order, Coming Into Being, The Americanization of Nature and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. William Irwin Thompson burst on the scene in the early 1970s as a counter-cultural intellectual and later a boundary-crossing New Age synthesist of history and future, art and science, culture and psyche, media and Gaia. For almost forty years, Thompson has been one of those few writers and speakers that an intelligent and otherwise eclectic and self-defined public looks to for illuminating ideas about what’s really going on in this mixed-up world, and therefore what’s to come. This new and expanded edition of Self and Society is a cumulative summary of his latest thinking.
This book expresses his transition from cultural historian to cultural ecologist, he writes. He spells out this personal journey in more detail in talks recorded in Reimagination of the World (Bear & Company). He elsewhere refers to himself as primarily a poet, and on hiatus in Europe, reimagined his own career while writing a science fiction novel, Islands Out of Time (Bear & Co.) His foreword to that book asserts that character and story are old fashioned delusions (“People who believe in egos write novels with characters.”) Maybe I’ve got a warped sensibility, but I enjoyed this novel for its characters and story.
Though he continues to find guidance in that Old Master, Marshall McLuhan, Thompson adopted ideas and vocabularies from chaos theory and the new physics, as well as the new biology of Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock (Thompson edited two anthologies, Gaia: A Way of Knowing and Gaia 2: Emergence, both from Lindisfarne Press.) Maybe it’s just because I’m not clear on the significance of such concepts as “attractors,” but the vocabulary sometimes gets in the way, and sounds like jargon. Still, Thompson’s use of these new approaches in science is far from the trendy appropriations (and distortions) of some popular New Age authors. They guide him into some profound possibilities.
Though sometimes maddeningly sketchy or abstruse, his ideas are bracing, especially for those immersed in the supposed intellectual mainstream. For example, though he writes about physical and cultural evolution, he finds a lot of trendy evolutionary psychology reductive and misleading. But in this brief review I want to concentrate on what he sees as today’s nascent patterns, moving into the future.
Thompson sees the growth of a planetary culture over the past century, still defining itself. It involves the arts, belief systems and cultural values as well as economics, politics and science. But this is not some gauzy New Age vision. “So when I am writing about the emergence of a new post-religious spirituality that is resonant with science” (exemplifed by the Dalai Lama)...”I am perfectly aware that I am living in the ‘sunset effect’ time of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell.” It's in this sunset period that reactionary ideologies seem most fierce, if not most powerful.
Cultural transformation is complicated not only by conflict but by the tendency to “become what we hate,” (for instance, torturers.) Thompson concludes that “if we’re lucky” we may avoid a downslide into a dark age “that could last for centuries” before the new “noetic” future might emerge. That luck would be in avoiding self-annihilation by any combination of ecological and economic catastrophe and weapons of mass destruction.
At times he sees this “luck” as very unlikely, and seems resigned to a civilizational apocalypse. Even in our gigabite-giddy, electronic denial, he’s hardly alone in this analysis, especially in the darkening decades from Reagan through G.W. Bush.
But in his last chapters--blog entries about the 2008 presidential campaign-- his hopes are raised by the election of Barack Obama. Of Obama's speech in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, Thompson writes: “he stood in the moment in which yesterday becomes tomorrow as an entire epoch comes to an end...So yesterday is an age ago, and if tomorrow is filled with new challenges and crises, at least the whole world can now look to them with a new face.”
by William Irwin Thompson
Imprint Academic 184 pages
Self and Society is an oddly vanilla title for the guy who wrote At the Edge of History, Evil and World Order, Coming Into Being, The Americanization of Nature and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. William Irwin Thompson burst on the scene in the early 1970s as a counter-cultural intellectual and later a boundary-crossing New Age synthesist of history and future, art and science, culture and psyche, media and Gaia. For almost forty years, Thompson has been one of those few writers and speakers that an intelligent and otherwise eclectic and self-defined public looks to for illuminating ideas about what’s really going on in this mixed-up world, and therefore what’s to come. This new and expanded edition of Self and Society is a cumulative summary of his latest thinking.
This book expresses his transition from cultural historian to cultural ecologist, he writes. He spells out this personal journey in more detail in talks recorded in Reimagination of the World (Bear & Company). He elsewhere refers to himself as primarily a poet, and on hiatus in Europe, reimagined his own career while writing a science fiction novel, Islands Out of Time (Bear & Co.) His foreword to that book asserts that character and story are old fashioned delusions (“People who believe in egos write novels with characters.”) Maybe I’ve got a warped sensibility, but I enjoyed this novel for its characters and story.
Though he continues to find guidance in that Old Master, Marshall McLuhan, Thompson adopted ideas and vocabularies from chaos theory and the new physics, as well as the new biology of Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock (Thompson edited two anthologies, Gaia: A Way of Knowing and Gaia 2: Emergence, both from Lindisfarne Press.) Maybe it’s just because I’m not clear on the significance of such concepts as “attractors,” but the vocabulary sometimes gets in the way, and sounds like jargon. Still, Thompson’s use of these new approaches in science is far from the trendy appropriations (and distortions) of some popular New Age authors. They guide him into some profound possibilities.
Though sometimes maddeningly sketchy or abstruse, his ideas are bracing, especially for those immersed in the supposed intellectual mainstream. For example, though he writes about physical and cultural evolution, he finds a lot of trendy evolutionary psychology reductive and misleading. But in this brief review I want to concentrate on what he sees as today’s nascent patterns, moving into the future.
Thompson sees the growth of a planetary culture over the past century, still defining itself. It involves the arts, belief systems and cultural values as well as economics, politics and science. But this is not some gauzy New Age vision. “So when I am writing about the emergence of a new post-religious spirituality that is resonant with science” (exemplifed by the Dalai Lama)...”I am perfectly aware that I am living in the ‘sunset effect’ time of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell.” It's in this sunset period that reactionary ideologies seem most fierce, if not most powerful.
Cultural transformation is complicated not only by conflict but by the tendency to “become what we hate,” (for instance, torturers.) Thompson concludes that “if we’re lucky” we may avoid a downslide into a dark age “that could last for centuries” before the new “noetic” future might emerge. That luck would be in avoiding self-annihilation by any combination of ecological and economic catastrophe and weapons of mass destruction.
At times he sees this “luck” as very unlikely, and seems resigned to a civilizational apocalypse. Even in our gigabite-giddy, electronic denial, he’s hardly alone in this analysis, especially in the darkening decades from Reagan through G.W. Bush.
But in his last chapters--blog entries about the 2008 presidential campaign-- his hopes are raised by the election of Barack Obama. Of Obama's speech in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, Thompson writes: “he stood in the moment in which yesterday becomes tomorrow as an entire epoch comes to an end...So yesterday is an age ago, and if tomorrow is filled with new challenges and crises, at least the whole world can now look to them with a new face.”
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Where the Marx Brothers Got Their Material
Sure, Duck Soup is silly. But...here's a 'this day in history' note from wikipedia, verbatim and in full: 1268:Conradin, the last Duke of Swabia, was beheaded in Naples after failing to reclaim Sicily for the House of Hohenstaufen from Charles of Anjou." Now class, who was the first Duke of Swabia? How far is Swabia from Freedonia? And who was Charles of Anjou pere? Any other new business? Sorry, that's old business now.
Speaking of old business, the My Little Blogosphere links are still not registering new posts on American Dash, where the NFL has progressed through the 6th week and the seventh, with appropriate posts (mostly about the Steelers of course)... As for the World Series, Margaret's brother is a Yankees fan and he could use a win, plus growing up in Pittsburgh Pirates country I never developed any affection for the Philadelphia Phillies. But there's something about watching the Yankees lose...
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Harvest
After a winter-preview rain the day before, yesterday was sunny but with a strong cold wind. These pears are gone now, and I picked the last apples yesterday. What passes for winter here is on its way. Pretty good harvest, though, for the first year these trees have been out of pots and in the ground. But the mystery is, why aren't I seeing the hummingbirds as I used to?
The Climate Crisis Future
Maybe it's hard to think through the prospects of a Climate Crisis future. People seem to leap from "nah, it won't happen" or "nah, we'll fix it before it gets bad" to "we're doomed! I don't want to think about it!"
But here's part of what we're not thinking about. As Climate Crisis-related problems and phenomena grow, governments and entire societies will be spending more and more time and money on dealing with those problems and phenomena. Eventually it's at least possible if not pretty likely that a lot of society, a lot of life, will reorganize to deal wih them.
This links you to a couple of interactive map that begins to graphically illustrate the landscape of that future. And then there are the same old stories about the consequences, that seem to run in a rotation of repeating studies, like this reinteration of the relationship of hotter climate with more disease and less food and water, with the Washington Post's shocking headline, Ailing Planet Seen As Bad for Human Health. How many times do we have to hear this before it starts to sink in?
Another consequence of dealing with the Climate Crisis problems is that the resources to do a lot of other stuff will be less, much less or just won't be there. That's going to be difficult, but it may have its up side. It's is kind of why I don't worry so much about gene-designed humans or the Internet version of a 1984 total survelliance culture. Because they will cost too much, and the money won't be there.
Neither will the energy. People are virtually blind to the cost in energy of the virtual worlds of the Internet, of GPS, cell phones and BlackBerries and all the other interlocking electronics. But it is huge. And the infrastructure is pretty fragile.
The energy cost of massive survelliance alone is incredible. In James Banford's revealing look at the dubious recent history of U.S. "intelligence," he notes that a new data-mining National Security Agency facility in Salt Lake City will use "the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined."
So nobody's geeky toys are going to be worth much, especially if we don't get a better and greener energy infrastructure. It's the heroic struggle of the age, and President Obama was out there on Tuesday, standing in front of solar collectors and reminding everyone that his Recovery Act stimulus includes about three and a half billion bucks to modernize the country's energy grid, matched and exceeded to the tune of nearly five billion bucks from the private sector. This is small stuff so far that can make a big difference. It's a start. (Update: Another link to NPR report on other administration announcements.)
President Obama also used the occasion to assert that consensus is building for a climate bill in Congress, and a climate treaty in Copenhagen. He is using the true and often effective strategy of making this a fight between the future and the past. You can say a lot of things about the Obama administration so far, but it's hard to dispute that symbolically in just about every way, this guy stands for the future. He's out there trying hard to make it happen. Keep hope alive.
But here's part of what we're not thinking about. As Climate Crisis-related problems and phenomena grow, governments and entire societies will be spending more and more time and money on dealing with those problems and phenomena. Eventually it's at least possible if not pretty likely that a lot of society, a lot of life, will reorganize to deal wih them.
This links you to a couple of interactive map that begins to graphically illustrate the landscape of that future. And then there are the same old stories about the consequences, that seem to run in a rotation of repeating studies, like this reinteration of the relationship of hotter climate with more disease and less food and water, with the Washington Post's shocking headline, Ailing Planet Seen As Bad for Human Health. How many times do we have to hear this before it starts to sink in?
Another consequence of dealing with the Climate Crisis problems is that the resources to do a lot of other stuff will be less, much less or just won't be there. That's going to be difficult, but it may have its up side. It's is kind of why I don't worry so much about gene-designed humans or the Internet version of a 1984 total survelliance culture. Because they will cost too much, and the money won't be there.
Neither will the energy. People are virtually blind to the cost in energy of the virtual worlds of the Internet, of GPS, cell phones and BlackBerries and all the other interlocking electronics. But it is huge. And the infrastructure is pretty fragile.
The energy cost of massive survelliance alone is incredible. In James Banford's revealing look at the dubious recent history of U.S. "intelligence," he notes that a new data-mining National Security Agency facility in Salt Lake City will use "the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined."
So nobody's geeky toys are going to be worth much, especially if we don't get a better and greener energy infrastructure. It's the heroic struggle of the age, and President Obama was out there on Tuesday, standing in front of solar collectors and reminding everyone that his Recovery Act stimulus includes about three and a half billion bucks to modernize the country's energy grid, matched and exceeded to the tune of nearly five billion bucks from the private sector. This is small stuff so far that can make a big difference. It's a start. (Update: Another link to NPR report on other administration announcements.)
President Obama also used the occasion to assert that consensus is building for a climate bill in Congress, and a climate treaty in Copenhagen. He is using the true and often effective strategy of making this a fight between the future and the past. You can say a lot of things about the Obama administration so far, but it's hard to dispute that symbolically in just about every way, this guy stands for the future. He's out there trying hard to make it happen. Keep hope alive.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Emerson for the Day
"I am sane only when I have risen above my common sense, when I do not take the foolish view of things which is commonly taken, when I do not live for the low ends for which men commonly live. Wisdom is not common. To what purpose have I senses, if I am thus absorbed in affairs? My pulse must beat with Nature."
H.D. Thoreau
Journal 1851
[Image: Nebula ngc 6599 Sagitarius]
Monday, October 26, 2009
Yes We Can
On the day that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the consensus Senate healthcare bill will contain a public option (with a state opt-out provision), supported by statements from progressive Senators, the conservative Max Baucus and the White House, there's this report from Reuters:
"The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.
The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.
"America's healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial," the report reads."
As for the opt-out provision, it doesn't hurt the principle (no individual mandate without public option) or very likely the practice. With the public option pretty popular now, and likely to be even more popular once it is working, it's going to be politically difficult for states to opt out, and will tend to marginalize the Rabid Right even more.
But key to that is getting the reforms working, and some Dems are looking to move up the date for the reforms to go into effect, from 2013 to next year.
"The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.
The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.
"America's healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial," the report reads."
As for the opt-out provision, it doesn't hurt the principle (no individual mandate without public option) or very likely the practice. With the public option pretty popular now, and likely to be even more popular once it is working, it's going to be politically difficult for states to opt out, and will tend to marginalize the Rabid Right even more.
But key to that is getting the reforms working, and some Dems are looking to move up the date for the reforms to go into effect, from 2013 to next year.
Breaking News! He's Still Pretty Popular
Sure, the enthusiasm isn't what it was during the election, which could be because it's not during the election. And people do disagree with stuff you do, once you've done something. But for all the negative spin on poll numbers, there's Obama at the percentage he got in 2008 or higher, and these numbers from Public Policy Polling: President Obama's approval rating with people who didn't vote for him is 14% and his disapproval rating with people who voted for him is 6%."So he's won over twice as many people as he's lost since he got elected. Who in the national media is going to write that story? Not bad for someone whose support is supposedly falling apart."
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