The Daily Babble: Saturday

This past week I pretty much stayed away from the so-called news, the basically toxic blather spewed over the airwaves and cyberspace. Call it a mental health break. Watching this country in the throes of a nervous breakdown isn't pretty. The left is disgraceful and hasn't learned anything. The right is unspeakable--the circus of panic, of one-upsmanship and exhibitionism of bigotry and ignorance.

Usually my first refuge online and on the tube in recent years is sports. But after a bit of excitement it looks like the SF Giants aren't going anywhere after all. And while the Steelers season is starting to look like it might be better than I thought a month ago, the pleasure I take in football is rapidly diminishing due to the onslaught of information about the effects of concussions, one of which came close to home as researchers theorize that particular cases of ALS (including that of Lou Gehrig, whose name is the popular one for the disease) may be the result of repeated head injuries. There's hardly an ugler condition than ALS. But due to its relative rarity and the strange variations, I have suspected it might be the name for more than one disease or condition. Here's another article on this research.

So I spent the resulting free time on other pursuits, like reading one of those things you hold in your hand and turn the pages of, oh yeah, books. And writing about my fourth grade year. Hard to fathom how full it was. And with no Internet, ipad, Facebook, cell phone or even cable TV. How is that even possible?

Emerson for the Day

A person “must do the work with that faculty he has now. But that faculty is the accumulation of past days. No rival can rival backwards. What you have learned and done is safe and fruitful. Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.”

Emerson
Journals

Photo: Just released by NASA, the Earth and the moon from 114 million miles away, photographed by the Messenger spacecraft. Hat tip: Worldchanging.

Future Principles: Redundancy

The idea of redundancy I first learned, probably in high school, was based on the first dictionary definitions: superfluous repetition : an act or instance of needless repetition 4 : the part of a message that can be eliminated without loss of essential information. (Merriam-Webster.) It became a useful concept in editing, for example, as well as something impressive to yell at somebody in an argument.

But there's another, technical meaning. Redundancy is the use of redundant components, and redundant in this sense means: serving as a duplicate for preventing failure of an entire system (as a spacecraft) upon failure of a single component.

It sounds so sophisticated and technological, but it's really a principle that's summed up by a common wisdom: don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is, don't let the failure of a single component result in the failure of the entire system, i.e. your life.

It's an increasingly important principle, partly due to fast-changing pervasive technologies, and also to a future of multiple risks.

A word that's very fashionable among people and groups concerned with the mounting threats to the future is resilience. Well, one way to build resilience into a system, or into your life, is with redundancy. With diversity of means to attain necessary ends.

It is a principle not very fashionable in a society that gloms onto the latest new basket--ipad/phone/pod, or more broadly, wireless microwave technologies--and promptly throws everything into them, including the kitchen sink.

It is as well a principle that corporate capitalism does not favor. The point of corporate capitalism is to make the largest profit possible, which involves cost-cutting and taking market share, including the ultimate market share of a monopoly. Duplicating involves spending more. A diversity of means provided by different companies cuts into market share. Neither is good business.

That is, until the enterprise crashes. Like the BP oil rig in the gulf. I thought of that example while reading a new book, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America by David E. Nye (MIT Press) which is about the electrical grid, among other things. It's a complicated situation, but it's clear that there is neither enough redundancy nor resilience in the electrical grid to be very confident it will continue to deliver electricity dependably, or even sufficiently. Part of the reason is deregulation and corporate capitalism.

But my own point of view owes more to the pace of change I've seen over my lifetime. It used to be that new technologies overlapped for awhile with the old. (Nye writes about how long it took for electricity to become so dominant--for a long time, the previous technology of gas for lighting remained part of the mix in most homes and businesses.) Now millions of people rely entirely on cell phones, with no land line. We know about the theoretical power of a weapon or a situation that could disrupt microwave transmissions. But microwave has become so dominant that much of society would be thrown into chaos if some artificial or natural force seriously disrupted those transmissions.

We are utterly dependent on satellites, including and especially a relatively few that are the key components of the Global Positioning System or GPS. If something were to happen to that system, the feared consequences of the once-dreaded Y2K glitch would probably seem like a relative picnic.

Electrical power and communications are bad enough, but our greatest vulnerability may be food. We import too damn much of it relative to how much we grow. And the overwhelming bulk of it comes from too damn far away. We're very vulnerable to all kinds of catastrophes, from the effects of aformentioned failures in the complex and fragile global web of communications, as well as problems with transportation for any number of reasons, including suddenly prohibitive fuel costs or supplies.

In terms of a principle for the future, redundancy means that we should be careful to retain useful older systems and not become so totally dependent on new systems so fast. It means that meaningful redundancy should be built into new systems--not just technologically, but in how they are organized and managed. It means increasing viable local and smaller scale alternatives, like local power sources and local agriculture.

As families, individuals and communities, we should build as much redundancy into the systems we depend on as we can. Those with the most obvious resources--like money--can control more, and install that backup generator that can draw power from solar panels, etc. But people can make choices with redundancy in mind. And communities can use what they've got. Maybe it's land left vacant by vanished industry, as in Detroit, where neighborhood gardens are providing food and a whole lot more to distressed neighborhoods.

Although this community where I live has its advantages (local and nearby food sources, expertise in off-the-grid power, etc.) I worry that we don't have enough redundancy in this house. But power outages have provided lessons. We have a gas stove, at least (though with enough electrical components and controls that some of it is useless in an outage), and a loss of electrical heating won't kill us thanks to our climate. And we have the advantage of a 1950s home, with windows that open (which we've improved to include insulation as well as ventilation.) Homes and other buildings built since the 1950s are too dependent on air conditioning, heating and other uses of electricity. In some ways, my apartment in an old building (from the 1920s) in Pittsburgh was even better: heat by radiators, a gas stove with no electrical components, rooms designed to take advantage of ventilation, a lot of resources--food, clothing, medicine--within walking distance in an established city neighborhood. In many ways, older is better.

Old as well as new, local as well as imported, land line as well as cell, even bad old batteries as well as rechargeables, and maybe even tapes as well as CD/DVD/online. Oh yeah, books and newspapers as well as the Internet. The principle of redundancy, for the future, which is coming to your neighborhood soon.

Defending the American Soul

President Obama's defense on Friday night of the right to build the mosque in Manhattan that the Rabid Right have made into an inflammatory issue, has been widely praised for political courage and derided for "insensitivity" today. But how he said it is worth a second look. Here is the key and most widely quoted paragraph:

"But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure."

"As a citizen, and as President," says I'm speaking as an American, and as the voice of the United States as a nation, at this moment. "The Writ of our Founders" not only refers to the basis for this principle--the First Amendment to the Constitution, commonly called the Bill of Rights--but in language often used by conservatives--i.e. Founders: nota bene, Glenn Beck.

Then the President immediately returned to the particular--not that particular mosque, but the religion it represents. "And let us always remember who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for. Our enemies respect no freedom of religion. Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam – it is a gross distortion of Islam. These are not religious leaders – these are terrorists who murder innocent men, women and children. In fact, al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion – and that list of victims includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.That is who we are fighting against. And the reason that we will win this fight is not simply the strength of our arms – it is the strength of our values. "

President Obama was speaking at a dinner called an iftar, which breaks the fast commemorating the Muslim Ramadan, a White House event held regularly by President G.W. Bush, and begun (as President Obama noted) by President Thomas Jefferson. As would be typical of the commemoration of any ethnic or religious holiday, the President noted other contributions, including Muslim immigrants in the 19th century, but in today's toxic environment, these became all the more important. The President:

"Today, our nation is strengthened by millions of Muslim Americans. They excel in every walk of life. Muslim American communities—including mosques in all fifty states—also serve their neighbors. Muslim Americans protect our communities as police, firefighters and first responders. Muslim American clerics have spoken out against terror and extremism, reaffirming that Islam teaches that one must save human life, not take it. And Muslim Americans serve with honor in our military. At next week’s iftar at the Pentagon, tribute will be paid to three soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq and now rest among the heroes of Arlington National Cemetery. These Muslim Americans died for the security that we depend upon, and the freedoms that we cherish."

Note that sentence about an iftar at the Pentagon--where in fact there is a mosque. That's right--lots of angst about a proposed mosque two New York City blocks from Ground Zero, but not a word about a mosque inside the other building attacked on that September 11, resulting in the death of Americans.

Why is all this so important? Thanks to the leadership of Sarah Palin and others, the intolerance by the Rabid Right is feverishly spiraling to dangerous lengths, trying to prevent mosques being built not only in Manhattan but elsewhere, with one prominent spokesperson demanding that no mosques be built anywhere in America, and claiming they are all terrorist threats. According to an AFP report, a Florida church has actually scheduled a "Koran-burning" on September 11. And to demonstrate the pervasive xenophobia involved, a Texas Rabid Right congressman took to the House floor to buttress his argument for ending the grant of American citizenship to native borns guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, by spinning a wild tale of terrorist mothers coming to America to have babies, and return them to their terrorist countries to be indoctrinated so that in 20 or 30 years they could return to wreak terrorism on America. The link of the immigration issue and the mosque issue shows their common theme.

And so here's the absolute kicker of President Obama's brief speech, oddly missed in most accounts. The President clearly, forthrightly and eloquently based his support for freedom of religion that includes Muslims on the U.S. Constitution and American civic values. But he ended by referring to a key text and core principle of Christianity:

"And we can only achieve "liberty and justice for all" if we live by that one rule at the heart of every religion, including Islam—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us."

[Photo above: Arriving for a vacation weekend in Florida the morning after this speech. And here's Josh Marshall's take on the second-day story, the attempt to characterize President Obama's position as a contradiction.]

Meteors and Fog

Given what most of the U.S. has endured this summer, I'm not about to complain about North Coast weather. On those temperature maps, the only cool has been on a narrow strip along the West Coast, and that's us. But the same conditions that have given us August days and nights that rarely stray from the 50sF also provide plenty of fog, both high and sometimes low. And so tonight, when the absent moon makes the night sky perfect for the Perseid Meteor shower where skies are clear, it's no such luck here. Not that I've ever seen a really good Perseid, not even back in PA. But I keep hoping. It just ain't going to be this year, I guess. Good luck to you where you are!

Nightwatch: Trashing the Constitution

The tea partying Rabid Right is advocating trashing the Constitution and its Bill of Rights on behalf of numerous lunatic xenophobic cynical over-sugarified delusions. But the insidious but actual erosion--if not wholesale destruction--of Constitutional rights that got its big impetus with the Patriot Acts and other pandering- to- panic responses to terrorism, is continuing long past the last shadow of the Bushites cast on the White House lawn.

Some of that does get dropped at the door of the Obama administration, but a lot more is happening inside the Supreme Court, which used to be the prime protector of the Constitution because--remember those good old days?--that's supposed to be its job.

We all know about Citizens United which sells political speech to the highest corporate bidder, but a decision that completely got by me, for one, was Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, at least as interpreted in this article by David Cole in the current New York Review of Books. He writes that on June 21 the Roberts court"ruled that the First Amendment permits Congress to imprison human rights activists for up to fifteen years merely for advising militant organizations on ways to reject violence and pursue their disputes through lawful means."

In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protected the right to advocate even criminal activity, including overthrow of the government, so long as one’s advocacy was not intended and likely to produce an imminent crime. In the Humanitarian Law Project case, however, the Court ruled—for the first time in its history—that speech advocating only lawful, nonviolent activity can be subject to criminal penalty."

If that's true, do I have to point out the many ways this is really really, frighteningly wrong?

In a not unrelated story, yet more statistical evidence that the threat of terrorism in the lives of Americans is way overblown: last year, dogbites joined the list of dangers that are more likely to kill or injure U.S. citizens.

In other news, the monsoon disasters in Asia, particularly in Pakistan, may not interest the U.S. media, but the U.S. government is on the job, helping out.

The Rabid Right pulled all the old strings to make the media jump by accusing Michelle Obama of doing a Nancy Reagan with a lavish vacation in Spain. The real story looks to be here: a combination of friendship, compassion, parenting and the necessities of being the First Lady. Not that they would be interested in the real story, of course.

NASA ain't pulling no punches in its report on this long hot summer, calling July What Global Warming Looks Like.

Following up on the continuing storm at Kos over "progressive" dissatisfaction with Obama and (re Robt Gibbs) vice versa, a popular post by blogger "puakev" documented liberal anger with FDR, something I've mentioned here once or twice, along with liberal anger with JFK, and (as this post documents) often in the same language as has been inflicted on President Obama.

Where I stand on all this in function terms I reproduce from my own comment on that post:

The constructive function of the left with a sympathetic president is to 1)advocate on particular issues and 2)build support for their positions, giving the president both ideas and political cover for moving towards their positions. But when the left personalizes their dissent, castigating the president and his administration in a global way, or piles up lists of imperfections, they do little that's constructive, a lot that's destructive. And a lot that is ultimately self-destructive.

Someday I may expound on that further. For now, it's back to third grade.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us?...the greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources...every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things.”

Goethe

Nightwatch: Tu to Wednesday

I guess I shouldn't be amazed--well, yes I should--that news of ongoing major disasters killing, poisoning, relocating, injurying, sickening etc. millions of people, are currently being highlighted only by Jeff Master's blog on Weather Underground. I quoted extensively from his Monday edition on Russia; Tuesday he wrote about the effects of monsoon rains in China, India, Afghanistan and especially Pakistan. "The number of people affected or needing assistance has been estimated to be as high as 13 million people--8% of the nation's population. The disaster is the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history, and is rightfully being called "Pakistan's Katrina."

But hey, that's not as important as a ticked off air attendant, or Sarah Palin's latest tweet. Or Robert Gibbs' inartful comments.

Daily Kos was all shook up today over comments made by the White House Press Secretary. Marc Ambinder puts them in context.

Primaries in Colorado, Conn. and some other states had the kind of mixed and mixed up results we're likely to see in November. At least one observer says they were good for Dems. And the NYT, coming around to my POV, sees a more complicated November with maybe even something for the hopey-changey thing as suggested in Colorado. The Washington Post has an interesting take on the possible roles for Michelle Obama in 2010 Dem campaigns. She's been specifically requested by Barbara Boxer in CA and Joe Sestak in PA.

An uptick in calls for bolder action on the economy, not just on cable Tuesday but in the Wednesday New York Times, in separate columns by Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman. Herbert writes about how dire the employment situation really is, and Krugman about how dire the infrastructure situation is as well as state and local governments' ability to function. Put them together and what do you get? WPA, anyone? Yeah, Robert Reich uttered those letters on Tuesday, too.

Meanwhile, President Obama signed the $26 billion emergency aid to states bill. And here's an interesting poll, from Public Policy: 51% of undecided voters pin the bad economy on Bush, 27% on Obama. Presumably the same 27 (actually 28%) pine for GW, while 55% are happier with Obama. Not happy, exactly, but happier.

In Obama hoop news, more word getting around about the Dream Team pickup game for injured troops, involving current and past NBA greats. Magic Johnson was one, and though no video/photos or accounts and descriptions of these games have surfaced, Magic let it slip that in one of the games, President Obama hit the winning shot.

Finally, on the pop psych front, a study concluding that your personality in first grade is--your personality, forever.

Global Significance of the Russian Heat Wave

This is a weather map of North America (I think) from Weather Underground that has almost nothing to do with what follows. I just liked how it looks. But it is part of a discussion about a new storm building in the Gulf that may affect the U.S.

It's not entirely clear to me all of what the Russian Heat Wave implies, especially its relationship to the fires that are raging in the area. But Jeff Masters' blog yesterday at Weather Underground did say this:

"The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 brought temperatures of 37°C (99°F) to Moscow today, and smog and smoke from wildfires blanketed the city for a sixth straight day. Air pollution levels were 2 - 3 times the maximum safe level today, and peaked on Saturday, when when carbon monoxide hit 6.5 times the safe level. The death toll from heat and air pollution increased to approximately 330 people per day in Moscow in recent days...

A plot of the departure of July 2010 temperatures from average (Figure 1) shows that the area of Russia experiencing incredible heat is vast, and that regions southeast of Moscow have the hottest, relative to average. Moscow is the largest city in Russia, with a population just over ten million, but there are several other major cities in the heat wave region. These include Saint Petersburg, Russia's 2nd most populous city (4.6 million), and Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's 5th most populous city (1.3 million people.) Thus, the Russian population affected by extreme heat is at least double the population of Moscow, and the death toll in Russia from the 2010 heat wave is probably at least 15,000, and may be much higher. The only comparable heat wave in European history occurred in 2003, and killed an estimated 40,000 - 50,000 people, mostly in France and Italy. While the temperatures in that heat wave were not as extreme as the Russian heat wave, the nighttime low temperatures in the 2003 heat wave were considerably higher. This tends to add to heat stress and causes a higher death toll. I expect that by the time the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 is over, it may rival the 2003 European heat wave as the deadliest heat wave in world history."

The factor of toxic air may not occur to everyone as a product of such a prolonged period of intense heat, especially the carbon monoxide. Some other non-obvious consequences are raging peat fires and the danger of nuclear radiation, according to this story. After noting that other nearby nations like Belarus are also experiencing extreme heat, Masters goes on to relate this event--which Russian officials are saying is unprecedented for at least a thousand years--to the Climate Crisis:

"These nations comprise 19% of the total land area of Earth. This is the largest area of Earth's surface to experience all-time record high temperatures in any single year in the historical record. Looking back at the past decade, which was the hottest decade in the historical record, Seventy-five countries set extreme hottest temperature records (33% of all countries.) For comparison, fifteen countries set extreme coldest temperature records over the past ten years (6% of all countries). Earth has now seen four consecutive months with its warmest temperature on record, and the first half of 2010 was the warmest such 6-month period in the planet's history. It is not a surprise that many all-time extreme heat records are being shattered when the planet as a whole is so warm. Global warming "loads the dice" to favor extreme heat events unprecedented in recorded history."

The Most Unpopular Post in Blog History

Nobody wants to hear bad news, and the worse it is, the more we don't want to hear it--except we do, we need to. Right now there is a lot of bad news the news media is not bothering with, for various reasons: the flooding in Pakistan that affects at least 13 million people, and the heat in Russia that Jeff Masters now estimates has killed at least 15,000 people. Here is one of the few stories to document some of the impact of these and other climate-related disasters.

Then there are the less apparent but equally ominious signs of the Climate Crisis future: in addition to this sudden hit on the Russian wheat crop, rice crops in Asia are generally declining.

All of this bears on a likely aspect of the future that nobody--and I mean nobody-- wants to talk about, including those in the forefront on the Climate Crisis and in the environmental establishment generally. For example, the new books I've praised by Bill McKibben and David W. Orr make veiled references to it, but never say it out loud.

What nobody wants to talk about is that climate emergencies are going to kill a lot of people, and that in both measurable events and over the long run, that could mean millions and even billions of people.

That's partly implicit in the fact that the planet cannot possibly sustain its current population, let alone the population projected for the next several decades, with the standard of living that the West enjoys and huge growing economies like China and India are fast approaching. There are those like engineer and innovative inventor of renewable energy-related technologies Saul Griffith ( profiled by David Owen in the May 17, 2010 New Yorker magazine) who have done the math and can't come up with any combination of known energy sources and even near-term technologies that can fuel societies at this level of consumption.

We kind of know something like this is implied. It's even there in disaster movies in which the focus is on the small group that is saved, ignoring that millions have died off-camera, in addition to the thousands in those exciting disaster scenes. The concept of die-off is out there, but nobody really wants to talk about it.

I think it has to be acknowledged. It's the elephant in the room, and it's not pink. Allowing it to remain invisible doesn't help realistic planning as a society, or helpful attitudes individually. To acknowledge that life is going to change, and that there are going to be a lot of victims, is a more realistic way to get to the fact that some people are likely to survive, that even in times of terrible change, life will go on.

How to Become A Foreigner

We'd like to think that the investigations and prosecutions in the so-called War on Terror are as efficient as we see on NCIS or other TV dramas, and if there are corners cut it's justified by how bad the bad guys are. But even figuring in recent examples of what look like very good results of investigations into groups planning terrorist acts, a review in the NY Times of a new book reminds us that the abuses of the Bush years aren't necessarily over.

The case is made in this book by A. Kumar that the same sort of xenophobia currently rampant in U.S. politics also is present in the ham-handed approach to enforcing terrorism laws. It's the same profile of foreign poor, swept up in the careless need of the rich to protect themselves.

Mr. Kumar writes about many such men in this book, most of whom aren’t terrorists at all but bunglers and fools who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were, quite arguably, the hapless victims of entrapment. Mr. Kumar doesn’t deny that there are bad men in the fundamentalist Islamic world, men worthy of the American military’s attention. The problem is that we seem to be filling prisons with very minor characters.

He describes one man, imprisoned at Guantánamo, who was a cook’s assistant for Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Mr. Kumar quotes one observer’s bitterly funny observation: “O.K. We have the assistant cook. Where is Mr. Big? Where is the cook?”

It goes beyond individual injustices, as corrosive as they are. Despite the hope engendered by the election of Barack Obama, international anger with the U.S. is again increasing, due in part to the pattern of injustice, and the attitudes behind them, as well as other notable and obvious manifestations of xenophobia, and particularly a sudden spike in anti-Muslim prejudice that seems to be responding to no particular new event, but to a mood fostered for political gain in a time of economic anxiety.

Yet the underlying message of this is more universal: the non-rich don't count. Even if the success of politics and policies based on this apparently growing assumption are based on some of the non-rich identifying with this proposition, without looking at themselves. The way to become a foreigner is to not be rich, and therefore unprotected against the whims of circumstance.

Terror in the Age of Consequences

An object lesson in global heating: a tragic heat wave in Russia means bread may cost more in America. Responding to the loss of at least a fifth of its wheat crop due to unprecedented heat, Russia has banned wheat exports. That's what captured international attention (briefly)--but the extreme heat in Russia has also claimed the lives of thousands, although no exact count has been published. These heat waves, which Weather Underground's Jeff Masters calls "one of the most extraordinary weather events of my lifetime," have also touched off devastating fires that claimed more victims. "...soil moisture in some portions of European Russia has dropped to levels one would expect only once every 500 years," Masters writes.

There may be many reasons that we don't have an actual count of heat-caused deaths in Russia. But it's worth mentioning that I can't find an accurate tally of heat-related deaths this summer in the United States, where heat waves continue, and have been experienced in nearly the entire country. When I googled this, the most recent national count I got was 150, but simply adding up reports from individual cities and states comes to more than that: 132 in California, 27 in the Washington DC area (as of July 27), 19 in Maryland, 13 in Memphis, 11 in Philadelphia, 10 in Oklahoma, etc. And apparently in many places, quantifying those deaths in a google-capable newspaper story isn't important enough to do.

I also came across an article in Slate from 8 years ago noting that heat-related deaths outnumber deaths from floods, tornadoes and earthquakes in an average year--in fact, heat-related deaths are double deaths from all the others combined. Yet, writer Eric Klinenberg asserts, Americans ignore heat-related deaths and illnesses. More than that, in at least one major case, many deny these deaths took place. A Chicago heat wave in 1995 killed 739 in one week, more than twice the number of people who died in the great Chicago Fire of 1871. Yet---

"From the moment the local medical examiner began to report heat-related mortality figures, political leaders, journalists, and in turn the Chicago public have actively denied the disaster's significance and questioned whether the deaths were—to use the popular local phrase—"really real." Although so many city residents died that the coroner had to call in nine refrigerated trucks to store the bodies, skepticism about the trauma continues today. In Chicago, people still debate whether the medical examiner exaggerated the numbers and wonder if the crisis was a "media event" that the press had "propped up somehow." The American Journal of Public Health definitively established that the medical examiner's numbers actually undercounted the mortality by about 250 since hundreds of bodies were buried before they could be autopsied. But how many people read the American Journal of Public Health? For now, the heat wave stands as a nonevent—perhaps a footnote—in the grand narrative of affluence and revitalization that dominates accounts of urban life in the 1990s."

One possible reason that the Slate writer suggested for this disbelief was that people who die from the heat usually live alone--they are typically old people. While that's undoubtedly a factor in why they died and why people don't know the people who die from the heat, this phenomenon of denial seems so close to how some people deny global heating that I wonder if something similar is going on. Are the roots of the denial the same?

It's worth exploring, especially considering the much more visceral response to the kind of attacks officially lumped together as terrorism. Is it possible that the spectre of excessive heat, of persistent excessive heat and its effects caused by global heating, is so much more terrifying that denial is the first defense?

It is terrifying. It is painful to contemplate-- at times overwhelmingly so. My insistence on confronting it here has probably limited this site's readership significantly. But I believe that there are ways to prepare for such new realities, beginning by dealing with heat-related problems right now. And by understanding that the most pervasive source of terror is going to be global heating, if it isn't that already.

R.I.P. Tony Judt

Historian and essayist Tony Judt died Friday as a result of ALS. Despite the progressively devastating effects of this virulent disease, he continued to write his trenchant essays, including one in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. The NYRB web site currently links to all his recent articles there. I posted excerpts from his essay on Words here. Tony Judt lived and died a hero. Never were the words more appropriate: may he rest in peace.

The Week That Was

Not a bad week for the Prez. His Supreme Court choice, Elena Kagan, was confirmed. The worst seems to be over with the BP Gulf Oil Gusher (even though there's still a lot of oil out there), and the federal response is finally getting some credit. The Senate approved a bill to get money to the states so that they don't have to fire so many teachers and police (the House is coming back Monday to add their approval.) Together with the unemployment extensions, this helps people and the economy.

Meanwhile, President Obama got on the road to Detroit and Chicago, touting the success of the aid to auto industries, which helped them hire more workers this year than any year in the past ten. (That's a Chicago speech in the bottom photo.) Back at the White House, he met with young and perhaps future leaders from across Africa, and on his birthday gave out the 2010 Citizens Medals to a number of Americans who've done great work in their communities, including the woman in the top photo, Lisa Nigro, who started out with a food cart in the streets of Chicago to help the homeless, which led to a restaurant for the homeless, that employs homeless people and partners with other organizations to provide job training and housing assistance. Something we can all be happy about.

Update: But new unemployment figures, not so much.

WTWT

I don't text or tweet, but if I did, I'd be way too frequently using this acronym I've just invented: WTWT: Wasting Time With Technology.

Lately I've been wasting time playing with blog site designs. Which is at least elective--product of my own whims and obsessions. But also: trying to figure out why the DVD recorder doesn't actually record. Or why it won't play a particular set of DVDs, won't even bring up the menus. Though they play happily on other machines.

But the biggest time wasters are in the normal course of navigating the net these days. We may have escaped the commercials on TV that seem to be entirely overtaking any other content, but recently they've become more ubiquitous and insistent online. Commercials that dance, that float and follow you, that send you to other sites if you brush your cursor over them to get somewhere else, that demand you close them or you can't see what you came to the site to see, except that they keep moving the place where you can click to close it.

Wasted time, as well as broken attention and frayed nerves from sites that load slowly or freeze up because of some new video or animation capability, which is only there for the commercials. And just the ads, cluttering up the pages, ads of the type that used to appear in tabloids and cheap magazines. Now they're everywhere.

Now I have a new printer I have to figure out how to hook up. It came with a power cord and a connector to the computer that are both absurdly too short to use. I can't even turn on my laptop without getting seven messages out of the ether about updates to this or that, so I am WTWT just fending off unwanted intrusions. Just to get to the spam, and the constant attacks for various nefarious purposes by invisible intruders from outer space, or at least Taiwan, Russia or for all I know, South Dakota.

WTF? WTWT.

California Nightmare (The Continuing Story)

Ahnold the Terminator is the most unpopular governor in the U.S. A recent California poll has him running behind the Dem governor he got recalled, Gray Davis.

So far however the campaign for governor has been oddly quiet--that is, Jerry Brown has. Meg Whitmaniac has been loud loud loud for most of this year, and Brown's chief tactic seems to be to let her blow herself out. She's spending $100 million--more than the GDP of 8 countries. She's recently been spending more per day than Jerry Brown has spent all year. And he's letting people know that this is a key difference...but quietly.

Not that he's silent. He did a newspaper interview in which he said that California's climate crisis laws were key elements of his economic approach to building jobs in green energy.

Meanwhile, the state is quickly coming up to another budget crisis, maybe even worse that last time. The Terminator is trying to reduce state employees to minimum wage--literally, to minimum wage--and all that is apparently stopping him is the Dem official who says that the state's cranky old computer programs can't manage the change. But some state employees are already subjected to forced furloughs--this time, three days a month without pay. And major program cuts are again on the table.

But for the first time I know about, somebody has had the guts to talk about a tax increase. Sort of. Dems are proposing a tax swap, in which most Californians will actually pay less (more in income tax, less in sales tax.) Apparently this works out to increase revenues somehow. Yet some are wondering why not do the decent thing, as well as the simplest and smartest--increase taxes on the wealthy. Things have to be really desperate for that even to be mentioned, in this political climate of toxic insanity.

Weather or Not

How hot is it, still? Weather Underground forecast map for Aug. 5 high temps.

Update: Because of continuing extreme heat in Russia that is destroying wheat crops, Russian President Medvedev said: "What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, for we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past."

"The year 2010 is now tied with 2007 as the year with the most national extreme heat records--fifteen," Jeff Masters wrote the other day in his Weather Underground column. But then..."Seventy four extreme hottest temperature records have been set in the past ten years (33% of all countries.) For comparison, 14 countries set extreme coldest temperature records over the past ten years (6% of all countries.")

The New York Times reviews two new books on the Climate Crisis: one dealing with the politics of it in Washington, the other on what people can expect in the near future because of it. No surprises on future weather to devoted readers of this site, but perhaps Heidi Cullen's writing (as well as her highly presentable self) will get a wider hearing.

Meanwhile two interesting pieces of research, even considering the likely biases of the organizations issuing them:

First, an Australian study finding that real forests soak up more CO2 than do timber plantations, and for the same reasons that these forests are generally healthier and better for the overall environment: they are more complex and full of varied life than monoculture tree farms.

Second, a North Carolina study that shows that solar power can produce electricity cheaper than nuclear power. Though government incentives are in the mix, it is chiefly attributed to a marked decline in the costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems seen over the past decade. At the very least this challenges the growing assumption that only more nuclear power plants can scale up enough carbon-neutral energy generation to make a difference. Personally, I believe that even wind power technologies could turn out to be transitional. If some sort of civilization makes it through the next century, its future is in a combination of large scale (perhaps space based) and very small scale solar power technologies.

Updates on solar at Climate Progress: A major California solar power project has won state approval, and " Researchers from Stanford University in the US claim to have found a new solar energy conversion process that could be twice as efficient as current methods. The process, called photon enhanced thermionic emission or PETE, improves the conversion of solar energy to electricity by harvesting the waste heat generated by the process."

Happy Birthday, President Obama

The President is 49 today.

The GOPer Strategy: Increase Suffering

The political dynamic is set by this perennial difference: Republicans depend on the rich (banks, corporations, lobbyists, certain big media) and promote policies which favor the rich. But that advocacy is only half of the political purpose. They also oppose policies which favor the non-rich--because Democrats depend on the non-rich, the sheer numbers of voters, with particular emphasis on the lower middle class and aspiring middle class, which often means minorities of one kind or another.

The natural constituency of Democrats theoretically should make them the dominant party, because they have the numbers. So how do Republicans win? By manipulating non-rich voters to vote against their own interests. They do this with an arsenal of time-tested techniques and issues. They absorb certain "social" issues that don't hurt the rich, like abortion, guns, etc.--and latch onto politically potent movements, like fundamentalist Christianity and the Tea Party. They divide the non-rich by promoting racial fears, fears of external or internal enemies (Communists, socialists, Muslims.) And they use the time lags and resilience in the political and economic systems to promise something for nothing: government services without taxes.

All of this is evident in pretty extreme form in the headlines of the day. The divide-and-conquer xenophobia over illegal immigration and a Muslim mosque in Manhattan. The corporate funding and direction behind the Tea Party "movement." The opposition to climate crisis and energy legislation, to protect the interests of Big Oil. And close to the essence of it all, the GOPer opposition to measures like unemployment benefits and continuing tax cuts to the middle class, while being in favor of continuing the tax cuts to the rich that by themselves pretty much account for the federal deficit, and that even GOPers like David Stockman recognize are behind the weakening of the very fragile American economy and the health and welfare of its citizens.

The main GOPer technique is the whopper. They lie, frequently and repeatedly. They claim illegal immigration is leading to runaway crime, especially violent crime, when the statistics show this is nonsense--crime in Arizona, for example, had been going down steadily in all categories for at least five years. Nor is there increased crime in border areas.

They claim that Americans are paying more taxes, and that the administration is proposing a tax increase. But the middle class has seen federal tax cuts under Obama. And while I for one predicted this outcome--that when the Bush tax cuts for the rich expired, GOPers would characterize this as a tax increase--it remains true, one way or another, that most Americans will not see their federal taxes increase, but will see the benefits of a declining federal deficit.

By preventing Democrats in Congress from addressing immediate and long-term problems, and thus benefiting their constituencies, GOPers are engaged in a strategy of increasing the gross national suffering, as economist Paul Krugman has pointed out in relation to their position on unemployment insurance.

So far polls indicate that the GOPer strategies are working. They may be working in part for the paradoxical reason that GOPer policies have ruined the economy and government to an extent that is becoming very alarming, very scary. The slack is rapidly running out of the system. State and local governments are starting to cut back essential services. In places like California, the poor have been all but abandoned, and here as elsewhere, cutbacks are affecting schools and even police.

Key businesses are increasingly fragile. The airline industry is on a path to self-destruction. Its attempts at imposing an array of stupid fees are being replicated in hotels. These are key indicators of the weakness in the white collar middle class. America has been on a trajectory since 1980 of dividing the few who are rich from the many who are not. That division has never been greater in terms of absolute wealth, and in social terms it is approaching the Great Depression and before.

It is now seriously being suggested that the economy of the rich can prosper apart from the economy of everybody else, and that they can maintain a society separate from everyone else, as they get ever richer, and everyone else gets poorer.

The resulting realities are accumulating in daily life, evoking powerful responses like this one from Daily Kos. These too will have political ramifications, as divisions increase even as they become starker and more pronounced.

If Republicans succeed in lying their way into control of Congress, especially given the extreme policies they advocate, this basic political division will only increase, and the economic division will increase, and among the non-rich the suffering will increase to levels unseen in generations. Ordinary people, as well as state and local governments, are going to be severely weakened in terms of the resources they can apply to coming emergencies.

Style Note

Blogger has made a number of new templates available, some new features and a new text editor. I am trying new templates on some other blogs (most recently, Blue Voice), but not this one. I've always liked the clean look of this template, and I've become fond of that little lighthouse logo.

Nor I am going to be using the new text editor immediately. It has new capabilities for integrating and sizing photos which I'd like to have, but it has actually made the process of ordinary posting more bothersome, at least for me. And there are a couple of specific capabilities lost that would affect this blog, though that's probably more than you want to know already.

However, I've made one noticeable change that's recently been enabled: I've changed the type size, made it larger. This should help those who prefer (or need) larger type and haven't been using (or can't use) a feature that generally makes the type bigger.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“Sooner or later life becomes a matter of being, or failing to be, loyal to to the beauty one has known.”
Michael Ventura
...and Happy Birthday to Mike K

How Hot Is It?

The 1980s were the hottest decade on record for planet Earth. Until the 1990s.

The 1990s were the hottest decade on record. Until the 2000s.

The 2000s are the hottest decade on record. This year is hotter. 2010 is on pace to be the hottest year on record--and last week was the hottest week on record.

It's not just the hot summer in much of North America, or the very hot summer in Russia, or just the more violent storms and floods in parts of the U.S., or the fires in southern California and the drought in the southwest, nor even the melting Arctic. The surface of the planet itself is hotter, on average.

It's called global warming, a term that will shortly be 35 years old. It means in terms of statistics and phenomena, that everything gets exaggerated. The El Nino effects are greater because of it, for example.

How hot is it? In what may be the worst news of the year for the human future, its hot enough to kill over an estimated 40% of the ocean's phytoplankton, the very basis of the ocean's food chain, which also produces half the world's oxygen and devours a lot of CO2.

It may not seem like much. But it's like the bees--few people even notice these little creatures, but if they died off, human life would probably end within months, if not weeks. If this ocean finding is confirmed, it raises the Climate Crisis to yet another level of urgency and portent.

How hot is it? Hot as hell. And not as hot as it's going to be.

Poli-ticktock

I spent an hour or so today watching and listening to President Obama, courtesy of blackwaterdog's latest diary at Kos. Obama on the View, Obama at two auto plants in Detroit--these were briefly on TV and then talked about a little but shown no place I've seen. And the signing ceremony for the Tribal Law and Order Act probably didn't even make C-Span. But they were all interesting--and all instructive counteractives to the dominant narratives.

On the actual facts, President Obama talked about the decisions he faced when Chrysler and GM were on the verge of going out of business. He could let them fail, as many GOPers wanted. He could just give them government money, as several GOPer presidents did. Or he could impose conditions on government money, giving them incentives to streamline and change, especially so they would be in better position to compete globally with more energy efficicent vehicles.

He took that third course and it has paid off. For the first time in a decade, the Big Three are all profitable, and hiring. Some auto plants have been transformed and saved, with shifts added to meet demand. The money is being paid back. It's a very big success story, and President Obama made a strong statement of faith in the American worker. These were the kinds of events that the Recovery Act needs.

On the View, President Obama said that he was disturbed by the Endless Campaign--it used to be that there was a period of political campaigning, and stretches of time for governing, when the question was what was good for the country instead of only what was politically exploitable. He said that he can appear so calm because he takes the long view--that his job is to look out for the next generation, not the next election. And if he does that job well, the politics will fall into place when the time comes.

This is a perspective that while it may not be the entire picture is at least a very valuable if usually missing part of it. He is certainly right that our hot button politics lurches frequently--consider little more than a year ago, when the pundits were asking whether the GOPers were finished as a party. Today a poll suggests that the Dems may have turned the corner for the next election, that the GOPer surge is waning. But who knows.

Certainly GOPers in Congress are doing nothing but playing politics, as they have been since Obama took office. They've managed to squelch aid to small business and even health care for 9-11 victims. Granted that nearly all politicians are continually compromised, and many are corrupted, in both parties. As long as campaigns are financed as they are today, this is all but inevitable. But there is a difference, and it is that Dems have at least tried to solve problems and make things better, and GOPers have not.

So here is my mid-term perspective. One thing you can always count on about GOPers is that they will overreach--their arrogance quickly comes to the fore. They are riding such a wave of racism, xenophobia and simplistic pandering to the worst in the electorate, that the point of diminishing election returns is fast approaching. They will probably make some gains in November, though it will likely be much more of a mixed bag and a mixed message. Then in 2012, the country will repudiate them with President Obama's reelection, and this period of rampant insanity at the forefront will be purged.

I note also a lot of the comments to blackwaterdog's diary, their gratitude for this perspective and especially their decrying of the relentless negativity of even and especially "progressive" cable TV shows and blogs. I've noted before the fact that every outrageous statement by every Rabid Right nutjob no longer needs the rightwing echo chamber--the progressive media amplifies their message for them. It may get people angry enough to read or listen, and to contribute to progressive politicians and groups. But it just isn't healthy, and it just isn't reality.

Emerson for the Day

" Let us express our astonishment, before we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss. I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos."

Emerson

Journal

Blogifying Wednesday: The Credit Crunch

While some polls suggest that a stunning percentage of Americans give no credit to the Obama Recovery Act, and everyone really hates the Bush bailout that the Obama administration administrated, two economists with enough clout to get the NY Times' attention say that the data shows that without them, we'd be knee-deep in Great Depression II.

The study, authored by two economists with names straight out of a Thomas Pynchon novel (Blinder and Zandi), says that without the measures taken--including others by the Obama administration--the economy would be tanking, eight and a half million more people would be unemployed and we'd be into a deflationary spin. In other words, a Depression.

Their conclusion: "When all is said and done, the financial and fiscal policies will have cost taxpayers a substantial sum, but not nearly as much as most had feared and not nearly as much as if policy makers had not acted at all.”

Meanwhile, Marc Ambinder summarizes the Democratic message going into the midterm elections: "The Democratic strategy in a nutshell is small enough to fit in one but has the protein of a good, tasty nut. The Republicans want to be mayors of crazy-town. They've embraced a fringe and proto-racist isolationist and ignorant conservative populism that has no solutions for fixing anything and the collective intelligence of a wine flask. This IS offensive and over the top, and the more Democrats repeat it, and the more dumb things some Republican candidates do, the more generally conservative voters who might be thinking of sending a message to Democrats by voting for a Republican will be reminded that the replacement party is even more loony than the party that can't tie its shoes."

More evidence that California is not fond of candidates trying to buy high office, especially when the state is going broke: yesterday's poll showing Barbara Boxer up by 6 over nutjob Carly Fiorina was matched Wednesday by Jerry Brown up 6 points over billionaire Meg Whitman, who has already spent enough on her campaign to fund a school district.

BP Fallout: While Congress may actually pass a slimmed down energy bill that puts the force of law behind getting BP to pay for damages, and the Justice Department is investigating BP and other oil corps, there's positive news about future drilling. After a federal judge halted a drilling project in Alaska last week, on Wednesday the Obama administration announced it's canceling two offshore oil and gas lease sales: one in the Atlantic off the coast of Virginia and another in the Gulf of Mexico. The White House also told CNN that the previously approved BP mega-project in the Arctic is under review.

"Nobody Knows Why"

Earth's thermosphere: photo from UCAR.

Though I didn't see the story picked up on the usual climate sites, several mainstream outlets headlined it, usually with words like "mysterious" and "scientists baffled." But the CS Monitor's headline was seriously attention-getting: "Earth's upper atmosphere collapses. Nobody knows why."

It's the thermosphere, which apparently has its ups and downs, but this was the biggest contraction in 43 years, with none of the usual suspects as reasons:

The collapse occurred during a period of relative solar inactivity – called a solar minimum from 2008 to 2009. These minimums are known to cool and contract the thermosphere, however, the recent collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain. "Something is going on that we do not understand," Emmert said.

And yes, a key global heating factor seems to be involved, but this may be one of those synergistic effects no one imagined. Of course it may not, but...

Emmert suggests carbon dioxide (CO2) in the thermosphere might play a role in explaining the atmospheric collapse.

This gas acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in Earth's atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified the cooling action of solar minimum.

"But the numbers don't quite add up," Emmert said. "Even when we take CO2 into account using our best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully explain the thermosphere's collapse."

One of the functions of the thermosphere is screening out harmful UV rays. So this is a mystery worth looking into.

The Legacy of Words

Tony Judt is a distinguished historian and author of my generation, who is writing heroically. He has ALS, which is an awful degenerative disease I've seen in too much detail. It's a mysterious and varied disease. Some who get it young, like Stephen Hawking, live with it for a long time. Others deteriorate rapidly, and according to this article, that's the case with Tony Judt.

He's been published a lot recently in the New York Review of Books, another reason to revere that publication. He giving us his beautifully expressed wisdom while he can. He's apparently lost his ability to speak clearly as a result of the disease, but he has been writing with great clarity.

What follows are excerpts from his essay in the July 15 issues, simply titled Words. The first part sets a personal context, and warns of the misuse of rhetorical skill. But---

All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favor independent thought: “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.”

"Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection." Judt acknowledges that it was our generation that"played an important role in this unraveling" but that the reaction to artificiality has led to the demeaning of clarity and precision.

"For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst."

The lack of precision in vocabulary and expression generally devalues the responsibility--the courtesy--to communicate, and is reflected not only in the purportedly "natural" modes but in the most deliberately artificial:

The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But whereas an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today’s “accessible” writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience’s consciousness. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience’s attention is drawn."

That eloquently expresses my own objections to the hegemony (to use one of their pet words) of the shill-masters of semiotics, deconstructionism and related fads that have largely driven out articulate criticism and analysis. Judt turns next to the Internet and the culture it is so rapidly transforming:

In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—”I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself: “people talk like texts.”

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy."

Judt ends his essay with a final cultural reference, and a very personal observation:

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have."

Blogifying Tuesday: Don't Panic

Following up a bit from yesterday, via the Kosness himself, there's this post from Balloon Juice, which introduced me to the useful word: poutrage. And he uses it in a sentence. After pointing out that the right wing was just as upset with Ronald Reagan early in his presidency as some lefties are with Obama, he concludes:

"I find this amazing in no small measure because Barack Obama has already done far more in his first 18 months than Reagan did at this point in his first term. Conservatives took on Reagan over specific battles, but basically they always trusted him. When push came to shove they always had his back. Today they have made Reagan’s record into a myth of conservative victories and Reagan into a romanticized Wingnutopia Saint (despite what actually happened).

Progressives, OTOH, have worked over time to turn an amazing chain of victories over the last 18 months into a narrative of defeat. It is a bit mind boggling to watch as so many ‘progressives’ embrace the memes, frames and talking points of the Right as they level an endless stream of attacks at the most progressive President in my lifetime. And why? Mostly because President Obama does not follow this or that preferred strategy, timing and/or set of tactics to the imagined screenplay of these armchair generals with keyboards. It is stunning to see process trump results and spin trump reality. Watching so many on the left jump at a chance to downplay the victories and inflate the outrage is like tracking an epidemic of foolishness. Useful critiques about important things are lost in the nonsensical noise about every rumor, every post, every tweet and each twist of every news cycle.

It is odd that some on the left have chosen to embrace the same attack tactics, strategies and rhetoric used by the Right when they confronted a President who is basically the champion of their POV without also embracing the way the Right always got Reagan’s back whenever it really mattered.

Meanwhile, things move on. More and more things are getting done by this White House despite the tantrums. Of course, even more could be done if some of the progressive poutrage practitioners would place action and unity over their egos, but they can’t. So it goes. Good luck with that in November.

Time will tell how the story of the Obama Administration will be told and what will be his impact on our Nation. I think it will be a good story regardless of current levels of poutrage on all sides. We shall see, but I think Steve is spot on when he said: I guess the moral of the story is that perceptions can change in time."

Which brings us to the question, are Democrats really toast this November, as the panic media has it? Maybe, but at least in some races, independents are swinging towards the Dem they know rather than the GOPer idiot they fear, and despite the great press she's getting on her endorsements, away from a Sarah Palin-approved mama grizzly.

Why? When elections are perceived to be what they are, a choice between actual alternatives, generic anger might get ungenericated. And as polls often show, Obama policies in themselves are often approved--most recently, Obama's economic policies over Bush's, which remain GOPer priorities. Hammer that theme, as Obama has been doing, and it doesn't look so bad for Dems.

This doesn't mean that Congress isn't still a corporate lobbyist and campaign contribution snakepit involving both parties, but the GOPers are in much deeper, both personally and in terms of policy.

Sherrodgate: yeah, it didn't last long enough to get such a moniker, and that's what I find interesting, and even heartening. I agree with this post by Jed Lewison--FOX was its usual despicable self, the NAACP and Ag Dept. panicked, but the media dealt with the story surprisingly well, and kept driving home the central message of: don't panic. Verify.

And speaking of FOX, how surprising is it that this watchdog of racism has an viewership in prime time that's less than 2% African American.

Emerson for the Day

"Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven...What we are, that only can we see. Build, therefore, your own world."

Emerson

Blogifying Monday: Leaks and Bleaks

The Big Noise of the day seems to be the Wikileaks on Afghanistan. Some compare it to the Pentagon Papers (or not), and the Tet Offensive. The White House points out that it's all about the years before Obama took office. And while the White House must officially condemn the release, my general attitude would be closer to John Kerry's. We'll be out of Iraq in a month. We should get out of Afghanistan ASAP.

There's been more negative reaction to the failure to bring forward climate/cap & trade legislation before congressional recess, especially among NYTimes columnists and in a NYT editorial. As I've said, I hoped for and expected more. It's easy enough to see the opportunity--the congressional numbers which are real unlikely to get better after the November elections, the attention-getting Gulf oil gusher and maybe above all, record heat in DC--surely God's vote. What may not be so easy to see are the no votes, cast in stone this close to the elections, that doomed it.

So I've got no problem with enviros and progressives decrying this lack of action, pointing out its dangers and calling for renewed efforts. And I even understand initial expressions of anger against the Administration as well as Congressional leadership and--incidentially--the GOPer Senators who actually prevented this legislation. But there are continuing modes of attack that are counterproductive, if not destructive. I'm saddened that Joe Romm at Climate Progress is placing himself in that category, with his blanket smear of Obama as a failed President.

It's a delicate dance, passionately urging change from outside and from "the left" to use a barely accurate cliche, on an Administration that basically agrees with you. The danger is poisoning support and contributing to a political weakening that emboldens the opposition and increases the likelihood of them taking power. The GOPers have already announced that among their top priorities "when" they take over Congress is defeating anything with the faintest aroma of climate crisis legislation, or support of clean energy.

You should give this kind of aid and comfort to the enemy only when you are convinced that your president is politically and morally done. We made that calculation about LBJ with good reason, and even at that, we wound up with Nixon and 6 more years of war.

I don't believe that of Obama. And I believe that the book hasn't closed on his activity on this issue. Would it have been better not to have left this crucial climate and energy bill to the end? Sure. It would have been much better if the GOPers hadn't timed their Great Recession with such precision, and virtually bankrupt the federal government as well. So do you want to tell people who now will have health care or a job that their needs aren't as important? Maybe I would, but I'm not President of the United States.

I have no doubt that the Climate Crisis is the most important issue of our time, and that, figuring impact and likelihood of that impact, it poses the greatest threat to human civilization, dwarfing other political issues. But where this climate bill fits into that is what's questionable to me. Maybe if this were a year ago, I would feel worse, because I would have believed that it was very important to pass this legislation at this time. But after reading new books by David Orr and Bill McKibben, I've kept my eyes open, and realized that many if not most reputable scientists and observers agree with them.

That is, it may have been possible for me to believe that there was a chance that civilization could make a smooth and relatively safe transition to the future if the U.S. passed strong Climate Crisis laws, and led the world to do the same. But it's very likely too late for that. The future, whatever it's going to be, is already decided for the next forty years, and it's probably going to be catastrophic. The far future may or may not have been decided yet, so maybe there's time to head off the worst. But this legislation wasn't strong enough to do that anyway.

This legislation--or something like it--may yet pass before the end of the year. But the time to head off catastrophic change was probably in 1976, or maybe 1992, or no later really than the election of 2000, when it "didn't matter" who won, Bore or Gush. The vast weight of industrial capitalism, and in recent decades of a vicious oligarchy leading the U.S. down into decadence and denial, are the forces of history that we still must oppose. But when we don't defeat them on a given issue, is that a surprise? Is that the reason to self-destruct?

Joe Romm may want to add to the defeatism that has Glenn Beck and the congressional GOPers gloating. I think it's politically dumb, historically myopic, as well as self-indulgent. I prefer to listen to people like Van Jones (also here) and Bill McKibben. But I am upset that Climate Progress is not a haven of sanity anymore.