The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals...The true war is a celebration of markets."

Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow

Labor Daze

So it's Labor Day, a national holiday since 1894. So what will I be doing? Working, of course.

I'll be working partly because others will be. I can't interview unless somebody agrees to be interviewed--in this case, because she's too busy during the official work week. I have a meeting because others will be there, and the grant proposal is due soon.

Though Labor Day--like a lot of holidays--now has very little to do with its origins (more about them in a sec), this year it's the occasion for opining on the economy. Which in case you haven't heard is pretty bad. President Obama (backed by some recent numbers) says it's improving, though not fast enough, and he will announce several proposals this week. The Republicans will be against them, progressive Democrats will be disappointed they don't go far enough. Paul Krugman's column of a few days ago seems the best summary of where we've been and where we are, and it points out the basic ironies. First, that Obama's Recovery Act is looking to have been too small, although it was the biggest he could get through Congress, and arguably what is needed now is another infusion of job stimulus money, although Congress will never pass it, partly if not wholly because Republican opposition is guaranteed. As Krugman writes," if he[Obama] came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American."

Krugman thinks President Obama's proposals should be bold anyway, just to force the GOPers to own up to opposing them. That's one political theory of how it might play out, but it's not the only one.

Anyway, everybody's got advice. Robert Reich, for example. President Obama keeps repeating that this is a long term process but people do eat--and vote--in the short term. Nevertheless, as TIME noted, the Recovery Act is going to transform the American economy--just not right away. Its investment in a green future is paying dividends in the present and will pay even more in the next several years, but the report that caught my eye suggests that green jobs of a certain kind can do even more to revive the economy. This Center for American Progress study finds that: retrofitting just 40 percent of the residential and commercial building stock in the United States would create 625,000 sustained full-time jobs over a decade, spark $500 billion in new investments to upgrade 50 million homes and office buildings, and generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for U.S. ratepayers.

Labor Day is also the traditional start of the election season, though that's now 24/7/365. The economy may be the excuse, but this campaign (if not the election itself) is shaping up to be a kind of climax of psychosis--the stoking and organizing of fear, pretty blatantly using the forbidden and hence more powerful undercurrent of fears focused on our first black President--in support of ignorance and lies, otherwise known as the GOP agenda. That's another irony of the Krugman column-- the GOPers who opposed the Recovery Act because it would spark inflation and kill the stock market were proven utterly wrong. So far, polls and those who interpret them claim this doesn't matter. People aren't mad at them just because they were dead wrong.

Will GOPers win back Congress with the same promises that, enacted during the Shrub years, ruined the economy? That's this year's bet, and it has a chance of winning, enhanced if not totally created by the very wealthy who profited the most in the Shrub years and have the most to lose from fairer taxes and a green economy with prosperity for more than just them. Newscorpse and its Fox in the henhouse of supposed news media don't bother hiding their manipulations anymore, and revelations of the billionaires behind the Tea Party movement are merely the most recent.

Which leads us back to the origin of Labor Day. It was a response to the slaughter of American workers by the U.S. military and U.S, marshals during labor union strikes against one of the most powerful economic interests of the day, the railroads. To avert something like a class war, Congress rushed through the Labor Day proclamation by unanimous vote. There were still plenty of bloody battles ahead for labor unions until they achieved better pay and working conditions...for a few decades anyway. Now it's a bloodless class war, in which workers are all but defenseless. The rich are getting immensely richer, and everyone else is getting poorer, with no shots fired except for the ones fired usually by members of the American underclass chiefly at members of foreign underclasses, who fire back. And the rich find ways to get richer still. A lot of people are unemployed, and GOPers want to let them starve. Nearly everyone else is working more hours and more days and more years, for less payment. But hey, there's this extra day off. Sort of.

This is also the traditional end of summer, and once again, it doesn't quite work--at least where I am. We had our warmest day of the year last week--almost 80-- and we look forward to what is often the warmest, sunniest time of the year here, in September. So: no farewell to summer cookout, no day off anyway, in a country apparently no wiser about falling for demagogues and fearmongers, or TV happy faces and push-your-buttons commercials obscuring the continuing rapacity of the ruling class, and their media/political pets. And happy Labor Day to you, too.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"This is our own age of exploration," she declared, "into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?'"

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day

photo: from the Cassini spacecraft near Saturn: Saturn's moon Janus in the distance, its moon Rhea in the foreground, partially obscured by Saturn's rings. Photo 2010.

Turning the Page

In his Oval Office address, President Obama called war "the darkest of human creations." On Tuesday night, he ended one. Turning the page doesn't mean ignoring the lessons that must be learned. And of course, fighting and dying in Iraq and other places hasn't ended. But it has lessened significantly, and many people there and here can turn back to an emphasis on life. And that alone is worth celebrating. From President Obama's speech:

"So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.

This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s Security Forces and support its government and people.

That’s what we’ve done. We’ve removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. We’ve closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases. And we have moved millions of pieces of equipment out of Iraq.


The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people -- a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle-class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.

And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it’s our turn. Now, it’s our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for -- the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President."

Remember: Cry Havoc in Iraq

[Third of three posts]
Tonight President Obama will announce the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq. At this moment it is instructive to remember how all this began, seven years ago. It began with the bombing of Baghdad, a massive American bombing campaign of a city and a country that had not made war on anyone, including the United States. It was one more escalation in the morally indefensible history of bombing, and it presaged everything that's happened since in that part of the world.

The history of such bombing is considered in the following piece, published in the San Francisco Chronicle several weeks before the Baghdad bombing began, and the evil of bombing, culminating in our time with nuclear bombs, is the thread that runs through my three essays posted here in the past two days, which all originally appeared in the SF Chronicle.

In this piece I refer to what was a new and little known phrase then, but which has since become a cliched description of this bombing campaign: Shock and Awe. It was supposed to break the will of whoever the Bush administration considered the enemy, but it did not.

I also quoted the famous lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war." I focused on the "havoc" in this piece, but in other writing of the time I emphasized the rest of the quotation. The point of the metaphor of the dogs of war is not only that a pack of dogs are indiscriminately violent but that once loosed, they are very difficult to control or to stop. A war is much easier to start than stop, and it begs the question of how many wars it will take before people figure that out.

Once this war started it was clear to some of us at least, that it would go on for a long time. And it has, with immensely and deeply destructive consequences to the U.S. as well as to Iraq. It has eroded us morally, depleted us financially, destroyed thousands of people physically and psychologically, and distorted our politics. We don't seem to have learned much from it either. If for no other reason than the resources of all kinds it stole from facing up to the double challenges of the Climate Crisis, it has deeply wounded the future.

February 2003

When Islamic armies were the most powerful in the world, conquerors of Asia Minor and North Africa, and poised at the gates of Europe in the 8th century, Abu Hanifa, founder of a school of law in the city of Baghdad, proposed that the killing, maiming and raping of civilian noncombatants in war be forbidden. It was one of the first attempts to codify some kind of moral and legal restraints on civilized societies engaged in the dangerously uncivilized practice of warfare.

If and when war comes to Iraq, it will likely feature the relentless and perhaps unprecedented bombing of Baghdad. According to CBS News and other sources, the United States is considering implementing a strategy called "Shock and Awe," developed in 1996. The plan could result in at least 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad in just the first day of an aerial campaign - more than were used on all targets in the entire Gulf War. And the plan calls for an equal or greater number on the second day as well, up to 800 total, each capable of carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives. There was no estimate of how many days the bombing would continue.

Although missiles would likely focus on infrastructure including electricity and water supplies, an average of one missile striking a city of 5 million inhabitants every four minutes around the clock could kill and maim thousands of civilians.

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," according to an unnamed Pentagon official quoted by CBS. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

The prospect of war in Iraq is crowded with moral as well as political questions, with multiple possibilities for ethical outrages of stunning proportions. But the continuous bombing of a city of civilians would probably be the first that confronts the watching world.

In A History of Bombing (published by New Press in 2001, and forthcoming this spring in paperback), Sven Lindqvist follows three main threads: the technology and use of aerial bombing in history, the attempts to deal with the moral implications of its use against civilian populations (Abu Hanifa is one example he cites), and social attitudes toward bombing found in sources such as popular fiction.

The historical parallels to the current prospect as well as the ironies are disquieting. The impact of the "shock and awe" strategy is meant to be on hearts and minds: to destroy the enemy's will, and mental and psychological ability to resist. But bombing's ability to terrorize - the sudden explosive death from the sky without warning - was one of the first effects to be observed, noted in 13th century China. It has often been a prime strategy of bombing, according to Lindquist, used extensively by European colonial powers in Africa, India and Asia.

Bombing is especially terrifying when used on the helpless. At first it was shelling from ships far offshore (which is how the United States bombed Nicaragua in 1854), then bombs dropped from airplanes. Bombing was a cost-effective way of keeping subjugated populations in line. Baghdad was a British target more than once in the 1920s.

As airplanes, bombs and cities all got bigger, moralists and diplomats negotiating the international rules of war and definitions of war crimes struggled to keep up. Several prohibitions against air warfare and the bombing of cities were proposed, and some were signed, except by the major powers capable of the bombing. Well into the 20th century, bombing was considered not so bad if the victims were of "inferior races." Some authors wrote glowingly of bombing as a way to civilize the world by permanently subjugating or even wiping out these races.

European bombing gradually got closer and closer to home, until the German military on behalf of Franco tested new kinds of bombs by dropping them on cities in Spain. Japan bombed civilian cities in China. Then in the 1940s, bombing of even the capital cities of combatant nations - Berlin, London, Tokyo - became a normal instrument of warfare, finally leading to the annihilation of the undefended cities of Hamburg and Dresden by British saturation firebombing, and of Hiroshima and much of Nagasaki by the U.S. atomic bomb.

By that time, terror was not the only result of bombing. Fifty thousand civilians were killed in a single night in Hamburg, most of them women, children and elderly. Twice that number died in Dresden. Two atom bombs did fill Japan with shock and awe, and killed several hundred thousand civilians in the process.

There are various strategic arguments for bombing campaigns that dovetail with apparent moral concerns, usually involving shortening a war's duration or substituting for ground assaults, thus saving lives, especially the lives of the side doing the bombing.

When facing the possibility that this war would unleash chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that have been largely absent from warfare for decades due to international taboos of one kind or another, it may seem quixotic to argue that bombing of civilian populations should be regarded as an evil in itself, and beyond the pale for nations that desire any sort of international relations. But it seems morally obtuse that there is a stronger taboo against assassinating a declared enemy's head of a state than against slaughtering babies in their beds. Surely bombing should be a last resort, not the first.

For even if the historical parallels are coincidental and not disturbing echoes of residual racism and empire-building, the bombing of Baghdad to begin this war would have a terrorizing effect on more than its residents. In Shakespeare's time, there was another word for the terror, the shock and awe that accompany a war without moral limits. The word was "havoc," as in the famous quotation from Julius Caesar, "Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war."

The bombing and havoc may already be starting by the time you read these words, although according to Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus on the Washington Week in Review, "You can pretty well mark on your calendar March 15. " It's the date formerly known as the Ides of March.

Postscript: The bombing of Baghdad and Iraq began on March 19. It involved more than 500 cruise missiles. There is still disagreement on the number of civilian deaths.

Remember: Profiles in Courage

[Second of three posts.]
The following piece is from 2003, also published in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section. In a sense it follows from the previous piece posted here, although that was actually written later. It arose from a sense that using nuclear weapons was again becoming legitimized, particularly by the GW Bush administration, but also by fading memory of what nuclear weapons actually are. What they are not is just bigger bombs, with bigger, more cinematic explosions.

But President Obama has turned that particular tide, at least in terms of official U.S. policy. New nuclear weapons programs have been stopped, and steps have been taken to reduce U.S. weapons and reliance on them. More significantly in light of this piece is President Obama's efforts to institute new international agreements. He negotiated and signed a new START treaty with Russia, and began implementing the U.S. part of the agreement, even lacking Senate confirmation. He convened a meeting of 47 nations that resulted in agreements designed to decrease proliferation and accidental nuclear explosions. His plans include reviving a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. These efforts were prominent reasons for his Nobel Peace prize.

They also clearly and consciously honor the courageous and ground-breaking efforts of President Kennedy in proposing and successfully completing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and gaining public support to insure its ratification in the Senate.

Still, the tepid reception in the U.S. to Obama's efforts, the failure of the Senate to ratify START, and the lack of understanding of either the reality of nuclear weapons or the importance of JFK's achievements, suggest that the fears expressed in the following piece still have substance.


October 2003
Last fall, the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis was accompanied by media stories and symposiums. This fall, the 40th anniversary of the most significant outcome of that crisis, the first nuclear arms treaty signed by the superpowers, has come and gone in silence.

It has been not quite 40 years since the release of Stanley Kubrick's classic film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. One conclusion that might be drawn by the widespread indifference to the anniversary of the limited nuclear test ban treaty of 1963 is that we've all learned to stop worrying. We may not love the bomb, but perhaps we're not so frightened of it anymore.

The specter of nuclear war dominated politics, culture and insinuated itself into daily life for decades after Hiroshima. But in recent years it seems to have lost its potency. Although the stories are tucked in back pages or hardly reported at all, the dangers continue to slowly grow.

Israel modified U.S.-made cruise missiles to carry nuclear warheads on submarines, to counter suspected advances in Iran's long-range missiles and the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear arms. This new element of an atomic arms race in the highly volatile Middle East joins the continuing threat of North Korea to make and even export nuclear weapons, and the continuing danger of two known nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, facing off over disputed territory at their borders.

Few North American news outlets even noted a recently revealed Russian plan to consider using nuclear weapons to fight terrorism, although the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki noticed it, and sent protests to the Russian government. But the U.S. could hardly object, since the Bush administration just pushed through the Senate its plan to develop low-yield nuclear bombs for battlefield use.

A chief reason for today's indifference probably is the belief that the fall of the Soviet Union meant that thermonuclear holocaust is no longer a real possibility. But a recent Rand study asserts that due to disorganization in Russia as well as other factors, the threat of a devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia caused by accident or miscalculation has not lessened but increased.

Another reason could be that there hasn't been a visible nuclear bomb detonation in many years, and no atom bomb has been used against an enemy since World War II, resulting in a diminished appreciation for their power. But continued proliferation of weapons in a world where hostility is increasingly open, violent and unrestrained may change that, to our certain horror.

It could also be that because the size and power of conventional weapons has grown (and some are radioactive), while new nuclear weapons seem smaller and more precise, there doesn't seem to be as much difference.

But as California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said recently, "The administration is saying we can make nuclear weapons less deadly, and acceptable to use. Neither is true." According to an article in New Scientist magazine, the United States is exploring an entirely new class of gamma-ray nuclear weapons, which are thousands of times more powerful than chemical weapons and (the article stated) "could trigger the next arms race."

That is the greatest danger, as Feinstein noted: a new nuclear arms race. Which is precisely why it is so important to remember the nuclear test ban treaty four decades ago. It did more than ban the ever-larger nuclear explosions pouring radioactive poison into the atmosphere shared by the whole Earth. It broke the momentum of the arms race, which seemed to be out of human control, propelled by its own deadly logic of inexorably increasing force and counterforce. The Cuban Missile Crisis had sobered the U.S. and Soviet leaders into seriously negotiating a treaty.

What made a crucial difference was President John F. Kennedy's eloquent and persistent attack on the irrational logic of the arms race, and his insistence that humanity begin preparing for peace with the same courage and diligence as it prepares for war.

To those who think peace is unrealistic in a world of conflict, Kennedy countered, in a speech at American University, that this view means "that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view." Then he used the phrase that more than any other sums up the Kennedy faith: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

He advocated an attainable peace "based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions. ... Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. ... For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

In its most quoted phrases (spoken more recently, without attribution, by a fictional Russian president in Tom Clancy's film The Sum of All Fears) Kennedy said: "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." How different these words are than any we have heard recently.

"What kind of peace do I mean?" Kennedy asked. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war ..."I am talking about genuine peace, not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time."

The test ban treaty was negotiated in the midst of the suspicions and fears of the Cold War, just as today's world is permeated with suspicions and fears of terrorism. We desperately need to remember this first step toward peace. The threat of nuclear weapons, of becoming captives of an arms race and a psychology of war, belongs not just to history.

Remember: When It Was Real

[Top photo: Hiroshima. Bottom: Nagasaki. First of three posts]

The month of August now ending marked the 65th anniversary of the only nuclear weapons to be used in war, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These anniversaries passed without much notice, although for the first time there was an official American presence at the Hiroshima commemoration. This lack of attention is disquieting, not only to some in Japan, such as this prominent writer, but to others, such as this teacher whose students consider it "ancient history." The further we get from the reality of the damage caused by two atomic bombs of very modest yield by today's standards, the more complacent we seem to be, and therefore the more likely that nuclear weapons will be used again.

What follows is my piece published in the San Francisco Chronicle Outlook section marking the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima in 2005.

July 2005
On July 16, 1945, the cruiser Indianapolis sailed from Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, carrying one 15-foot crate. Inside were the components for the first atomic bomb destined to be dropped on a city. It was being shipped to Tinian Island in the western Pacific, and its final destination a few weeks later would be Hiroshima. It left San Francisco just four hours after the first successful atomic bomb test in history, in the New Mexico desert.

Sixty years is a long time to keep even such an immense memory alive, but several books published recently bring these events into sharper focus than ever before.

Several are biographies of key figures like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, but one is billed as a biography of the bomb itself. The Bomb: A Life by Gerard DeGroot (Harvard University Press), professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, benefits from newly available records, especially concerning the Soviet nuclear program. But mostly it is a skillfully condensed narrative of the nuclear era, fascinating in the selection of details and riveting in its revelations of how possessing nuclear weapons changed those involved, and changed America.

On the day of that first test in July 1945, no one knew what would happen. About half the scientists didn't think the device would explode at all. Enrico Fermi was taking bets that it would burn off the Earth's atmosphere.

It did explode, with such brightness that a woman blind from birth traveling in a car some distance away saw it. "A colony on Mars, had such a thing existed, could have seen the flash," DeGroot writes. "All living things within a mile were killed, including all insects."

America was now in sole possession of the most powerful weapon in history. The first effect of the bomb was in Potsdam, Germany, where President Harry Truman was conferring with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, premier of the Soviet Union, then an ally in the war against Japan. After Truman received the news of the successful test, he was "a changed man" and "generally bossed the whole meeting," according to Churchill.

That the second bomb left San Francisco on the day the first was tested suggests the momentum to use it. Whether dropping the bomb was necessary to secure Japan's surrender before an invasion became necessary is still being debated. DeGroot believes that Japan was looking for a way to surrender in June and July. But there were other considerations, mostly to do with demonstrating American power, especially to the Soviet Union.

Using the bomb quickly became a test of patriotism. "For most Manhattan Project scientists the bomb was a deterrent, not a weapon," DeGroot writes. Physicist Leo Szilard had done as much as anyone to try to persuade FDR to develop the bomb because Germany was doing so. But on the day after that first test, he sent government officials a petition signed by 69 project scientists arguing that to use the bomb would ignite a dangerous arms race and damage America's postwar moral position, especially its ability to bring "the unloosed forces of destruction under control."

The petition was ignored, and Gen. Leslie Groves, the senior military official in charge of the project, began making a case that Szilard was a security risk. It's a pattern that would be repeated often.

DeGroot places the decision to drop the bomb on Japan in the context of the brutalization that occurred during the long years of World War II, with an unprecedented scope of savagery on both sides. The bombing of civilians and cities, morally unthinkable in the West before the war, became a major feature of it by its final years, long past the time many military targets were left. Gen. Groves, he writes, was worried that Japan might surrender before the bomb could be dropped.

Hiroshima was selected as the primary target because it had no allied POW camps. However, there were nearly 5,000 American children in the city -- "mainly children sent to Japan after their parents, U.S. citizens of Japanese origin, had been interred." It seems likely some of those children were from San Francisco.

The nuclear era began with the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, which is perhaps partly why it was accompanied throughout its history by lies and denial. It began with Hiroshima. As many as 75,000 people died in the first blast and fire. But in five years the death toll would reach 200,000 because of what the U.S. government denied existed: lethal radiation.

Even after the hydrogen bomb was developed in the 1950s (so powerful that the first test vaporized an island and created a mile wide crater 175 feet deep), the untruths continued. In 1954, Dr. David Bradley reported on 406 Pacific islanders exposed to H-bomb fallout: nine children were born retarded, 10 more with other abnormalities, and three were stillborn, including one reported to be "not recognizable as human." Such information was denied or routinely suppressed through all the years of testing, even on U.S. soil. Groves even told Congress that death from radiation was "very pleasant."

Even after the war, criticizing the bomb in any way became a threat to national security, an act of disloyalty that only helped the communist enemy. And so people were silent and compliant, and streamed into air-conditioned theatres to see movies about monsters created by atomic radiation.

This extreme weapon prompted extreme and contrary emotions, often within the same people. Some of the same Los Alamos scientists who cheered madly at the first news of Hiroshima were later shell-shocked with regret. Gen. Omar Bradley called his contemporaries "nuclear giants and ethical infants." Yet he pushed for developing the hydrogen bomb.

This peculiar combination of denial plus the immense power of thousands of bombs contributed to an era of deadly absurdities: the age of Dr. Strangelove. Yet reality was not so different, right down to the preposterously appropriate names: the head of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Tommy Power, gave his philosophy of nuclear war in 1960: "At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"

The warp in American political life created by the bomb might be summarized in two statements. "In order to make the country bear the burden," said President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, referring to the Cold War arms race, "we have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to a wartime psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without."

The second is more famous, but perhaps its connection to the bomb and its effect on America has been forgotten: Eisenhower's farewell address. "We have been compelled to create a permanent arms industry of vast proportions," he said. "We must not fail to comprehend its vast implications. ... We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring out."

Alexander Pope
Photo:Galaxy M82 from infrared observations by Spitzer Space Telecope. NASA via Monitor.

The Week in Blogview

Here are a few off-headline stories that caught my eye this week:

A couple of interesting court cases: Zombies won the right to demonstrate against consumerism--well, activists dressed as shopping zombies. They won a settlement against restraint by police, whose excuse was terrorism, what else.

At least here in CA, Sarah Palin's big payday for a speech at a state university got some attention (not much.) Now a court has decided the terms of her payment must be disclosed. Update: and here's the contract.
$75,000, pre-screened questions and a bendable straw.

The state government of CA is busily self-destructing and taking the state down with it, but there are occasional glimmers of life--like getting it together to be the first state to organize its health-insurance market under the new healthcare law. It'll all happen too late to help me--I'll have Medicare by then--but implementation of reforms is going to be as difficult as passing them. So the biggest state economy in the country going first is a big deal.

And here's a mere detail of news you probably missed, since it wasn't exactly headlined: the much-maligned Recovery Act resulted in millions of jobs in the second quarter of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As bad as things are, they would have been greatly worse without it. Update: a great story in Time Magazine on how the Recovery Act will transform the future.

Sanity made a brief appearance on the rec list at Daily Kos this week. But I wouldn't count on a recurrence.

Finally, the NY Times has been doing a series on "Your Brain on Computers," a series of research-derived cautionary tales, which might also be classified under my "all your eggs in one basket" refrain. For this article warns that among the effects of being constantly plugged in is the lack of downtime for information to establish itself in memory. It's just a constant stream of triviality. Which I guess returns to the previous theme--the Institution of Ignorance.

The Institution of Ignorance

I've referred to the evolution of ignorance, and the ecology of ignorance. It has now become the institution of ignorance---ignorance as the official ideology of a major political party, and the media which controls it.

Timothy Egan's column lays out the basics and the consequences:

"It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present? "
"Climate-change denial is a special category all its own," Egan writes. "Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox."

But it isn't just them. It's the American media in general. Kristina Hill, chair of the University of Virginia Landscape Architecture program who is looking ahead at designing for the Climate Crisis near future, said this:

Here, in the U.S., we live in what I call the American Media Bubble – where the media aren’t using climate change to sell papers, unlike their Canadian and European counterparts. Since they don’t see the headlines the rest of the world is reading, the average American doesn’t know what’s at stake. And as a result, their elected officials are discouraged from taking action. But the rest of the world is starting to prepare. Our economic future, and the health, safety and welfare of many of our citizens, depends on learning from the best practices that are out there."

The institution of ignorance is now the greatest threat to the immediate and long-term future. Even over the next few years, it will be difficult to dislodge misinformation and lies, and get this society moving to deal its real and present dangers, instead of its absurd and loathesome fantasies. But even that could be made immeasurably more difficult if Republicans use this perfect storm of economic discontent to actually put these willed ideological idiots in office. E.J. Dionne has written again on the necessity of Democrats generating a backlash against this extremism in the defense of ignorance. We'll see, but so far the signs aren't good.

Update: Well, maybe this is a beginning--a Democratic National Committee YouTube video. But viral videos won't be enough. Words from the top eventually will be necessary, I believe.

Emerson for the Day

“The first rule of writing is not to omit the thing you meant to say.”
Emerson

Extremism is the Issue

I'm agreeing with E.J. Dionne that Democrats have to make a major campaign issue of Republican Tea Party Foxnews extremism.

The bigotry for sure. The news today is, what else, a poll, which purports to indicate that an additional 5% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. It's gone from 13% in polls before the 2008 to 18% now. Apart from how little statistically this might be, here's one set of experts' conclusion:

A 2009 study on this question by University of Michigan opinion research scholar Brendan Nyhan and Georgia State University political scientist Jason Reifler conducted experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that contained misleading claims from politicians.

Those who were then shown corrections to the mock news often were not swayed by the update. They had more faith in the original, misleading piece, particularly if it conformed to their ideological preconceptions. Messrs. Nyhan and Reifler even documented something of a backfire effect: corrections made some participants cling even more tightly to their mistaken beliefs.

“Corrective information in news reports may fail to reduce misperceptions and can sometimes increase them for the ideological group most likely to hold those misperceptions,” concluded the pair.

So it's not enough to correct the misinformation, because the actual facts don't matter to these people. The truth about them must be exposed: it's extremism, it's prejudice and bigotry. And this is dangerous, and must be named. It is also a hell of a way to govern. Do you really want to elect these people, just because you're pissed off? Their entire qualifications are bigotry and lies.

Moreover there is plenty of evidence that this is not just the Republican party welcoming bigots, it's the Republican party fomenting bigotry and extremism. Frank Rich (with a nod to Salon's Justin Elliot) chronicles how the current hate-fest over a mosque in Manhattan is pretty much the product of Fox News. Not even GOPer conservatives were upset about it when it was first announced.

But bigotry is just the obvious and ugly face of extremism. There is also the plain and simple extremism of their economic policy. Like the only federal measure they apparently support, the Bush tax cuts for the rich. As Paul Krugman writes:

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent."

What does this mean? Instead of continuing Obama's tax cuts to the middle class, the GOPer proposal amounts to cuts: averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

That's the essential extremism going on here. The rest is bigotry, orchestrated and fed in order to make sure the favored 120,000 get their millions.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The lasting aim of literature is to display our destinies.”

--Jorge Luis Borges

The above illustration by Alex Schomburg was reproduced in the front and back of the science fiction novels for young people known as the Winston Science Fiction series, published in the 1950s. I found novels in the series in the public library beginning in fourth grade, and I would examine this illustration over and over, wondering about the stories these images made, or could make. While these did not depict our destinies in this world, they represented the investigation of destinies through fiction of the future.

Eggs

Unfortunately I did accidentally catch the first 30 seconds of the NBC Nightly News, to hear the teaser on the egg story. About reaction to the apparently contaminated eggs from Iowa, including people who wonder why the "government" didn't catch this.

Well, maybe if governments had enough qualified people working to safeguard food and safety, which would happen only if they can tax the right people and politicians stop successfully making a fetish out of cutting the size of government, which starves the resources to do what people assume and demand the government is doing.

And the GOPer obstructionists in Congress wouldn't hold up the appointment of the undersecretary for food safety for nearly a year, so President Obama had to make her a recess appointment.

Hereabouts we aren't especially worried, because in addition to imported eggs, we get ours from diary farms nearby. Actually we can occasionally hear the chickens that a neighbor keeps. All of which may serve as another object lessons in not keeping all your eggs in one basket, that is if anybody actually ever learns anything, which is increasingly doubtful.

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.