Backwards Since Selma

Evaluating American capacity to respond to challenges, fifty years after Selma,  George Packer in the New Yorker pointed out the most telling difference, without getting into the relative change in racial attitudes.  The gist:

"As brutal as the Alabama state police and the Dallas County sheriff’s department were on Bloody Sunday, as violent as the vigilantes were who killed Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo in those weeks, as much progress as America has made in fifty years, something has gone seriously backward since 1965: the quality of American institutions." 

[photo above is President Obama embracing a granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma.  This and photo below are White House photos.]

Packer illustrated the difference with examples literally from that day's news.  Here are the concluding paragraphs of this trenchant piece, with my emphasis:

"There may still be ordinary Americans as brave and committed to justice as the civil-rights movement’s foot soldiers, but we no longer have a national government (or a federal bench, a press corps, labor unions, businesses, religious groups, universities) capable of coming together with the imagination, wisdom, and self-restraint necessary to achieve something on the scale of voting rights. These days, Congress can hardly keep the Department of Homeland Security open without tearing itself to pieces. As Charlie Dent, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, said to the Times, “We really don’t have two hundred and eighteen votes to determine a bathroom break over here on our side.”

On Monday, forty-seven Republican senators addressed an open letter to the Iranian leadership, declaring that “we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” The senators noted that Obama will leave office in 2017, while many of them will go on serving for decades—so why should the clerics pay any attention to the executive branch? The senators didn’t release classified U.S. intelligence on the nuclear negotiations, but it’s not altogether clear what stopped them. They’re doing all they can to sabotage their own country’s position in the talks, practically making themselves the de facto ally of hardliners in Tehran. Try to imagine such actions by America’s elected leaders during the Cold War.

It may be that the postwar decades, with a booming mixed economy, middle-class prosperity, and an agreed-upon enemy, created unique conditions for Americans to address some of the country’s deepest problems, such as a century of Jim Crow. Our problems today, from climate change to economic inequality, seem immovable not because they’re so much harder, but because we no longer have the political tools to budge them. Perhaps that’s why, last Saturday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Obama spoke more about the daring spirit of the American people than the greatness of constitutional democracy. If solutions arise from this generation and the next, they seem unlikely to come from Washington. They’re more likely to start in obscure places like Selma."

It's a sobering conclusion.  One hopes that these problems are not so deeply embedded in today's institutions, or in today's national culture, that they cannot be overcome relatively quickly.  But recent events, and of the recent past, suggest he's right about solutions for at least this generation.

A large part of the problem may also be defined as the lack of quality in the people who are in positions of leadership in these institutions.  I keep thinking about the nearly 900 pages of the book by Robert Sherwood I read, called Roosevelt and Hopkins, which deals in literally documentary detail with high level decisions and activities in the White House just before and during America's participation in World War II.  The immense undertaking in such a short time, the immense dangers of failure, with surrounding politics nearly as idiotic as today's, required near-genius from our leaders, and unrelenting dedication (several died soon afterwards, including Hopkins and FDR.)  We got it then.  It's not clear that we would get it now.

One more thing... Elizabeth Cobb Hoffman at Reuters chimes in on the Republican Senators letter to Iran:

"What happens when senators and congressmen go around a controversial president to communicate directly with the enemy? They undermine the stability of their own party — and the integrity of the nation.

That’s what happened to the Federalists, the glorious political party of George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Could the same thing happen to today’s Republican Party?...

The American people never forgave the Federalist Party for flirting with treason during that war. Today, Cotton and other Republicans court similar disgust with their disloyalty toward the nation’s sitting president."

The Accelerating Climate Crisis Future

A new study by climate scientists published today affirms that the rate of global heating will increase dramatically in the very near future, and keep on increasing.  Scientific American summarizes:

"By 2020, warming rates should eclipse historical bounds of the past 1,000 years — and likely at least 2,000 years — and keep rising. If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trend, the rate of warming will reach 0.7°F per decade and stay that high until at least 2100.

The northern hemisphere will be the first region to experience historically unprecedented warming. The Arctic, which is already the fastest warming part of the planet, will see temperatures rise 1.1°F per decade by 2040. North America and Europe will see slightly lower, though equally unprecedented, warming.

“With those high rates of change, there’s not going to be anything close to equilibrium,” Smith said, underscoring the profound potential impacts on both the natural world and society."

  This study is independent of those that looked specifically at ocean capture of heat that probably accounts for the slow (but steady) rate increase in recent years, below what was predicted.  Those studies also conclude that there will be a compensating temperature spike in the same time frame--beginning around 2020, or before.

As these conclusions reach policymakers and the public, the pressure to deal with the consequences of the climate crisis will probably increase, but the refusal to deal with causes--to even recognize them--continues to be a barrier to addressing both consequences and causes.

Live Science chronicles some extreme instances in the US, such as Florida where an unofficial ban directed by its governor forbids even using the words "climate change," "global warming" or even "sea level rise."  There and in other coastal southern states, the fear of fall real estate prices and rising insurance costs outweighs the fear of rising waters.

 "Sea level rise" is re-branded as "nuisance flooding."  If the seas do rise to the worst case levels anticipated, Miami will be underwater by the end of the century and eventually pretty much the entire state of Florida will follow.   Quite a nuisance, at least if you live in Florida.  Some of this rise is still dependent on current and near future greenhouse gases pollution.  But if we just close our eyes real tight, it will all go away.  Though not for the grandchildren.

The Rabid Right Dispensation

The Daily Show
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Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show, so he's doing some summing up within his segments these days.  As part of his response to  Fox's reaction to his leaving, he sums up exactly what's been going on for years: the "conservative" or rabid right movement has been jihading reality for being insufficiently rabid right, and most everyone has been appeasing them.

  But as he says, they will never be satisfied by any appeasement, only complete surrender--only a rabid right reality.  That they intend to take the rest of us down with them into their self-destructive pit of ignorance and insanity is no secret.  They'll literally destroy the planet as we know it to make their points. But the extent to which our institutions and zeitgeist are cooperating is almost as bad.

And even if he's exaggerating a bit, I believe there's truth in it when he says that one reason he is leaving The Daily Show-the most consistent bulwark against the rabid right, using the best weapons ( truth, analysis and ridicule)--is that fighting this fight with an unrelenting and ever more obsessive foe is enough to drive anybody crazy.  We haven't figured out the appropriate balance of smacking them down and ignoring them entirely.

On a different but related manifestation of the rabid right's manipulation of an equally craven media, here's Steve Almond at Salon about the obsession with meaningless scandals, concluding that "scandalizing is the journalistic equivalent of spam."

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Today the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday was marked by thousands marching across the bridge in Selma.  President Obama is holding the hand of Amelia Boynton in a wheelchair--she was among those beaten on this bridge.  Here's a fine piece on the anniversary and the march itself, with links to the text of President Obama's speech Saturday.

Selma is Now

I am not even going to attempt to summarize this speech, given with the Selma bridge behind him, on the 50th anniversary of that definitive march.  I believe it will be considered one of the best speeches in recent US history, perhaps in all our history.  Here is a transcript.

 And it is certainly about our history.  It is vintage Barack, plus some JFK and not a little of Lincoln.  Quoting Walt Whitman,  Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Robert Kennedy, the same passage of Isiah that President Kennedy once quoted.  A pointed section in which he defines what loving America means, what American exceptionalism is, in terms that destroy all the "feeble" criticism.  Notice how many times he uses the word "imagination," including moral imagination.  The speech is about equal rights but more.  It is about how Americans march for change.  Given recent posts here, I could not help think about the climate movement, and the need for expressing moral imagination in that.  The moral imperative of the future, of life on earth as we know it.

I also thought about voices who can express our history and identity to all of us.  The only other such voice in public life who can really talk about American history I could think of was Bill Clinton, and he couldn't do this.  Certainly no known presidential candidate.  This was a moment.

Climate Crisis Comes Home

The sea level is rising faster in Humboldt Bay than anywhere else in California. The main route of 101 will face inundation in several places--including the strip that links Arcata and Eureka.  But there is no money to do what's necessary to make this corridor viable by raising or re-routing the roadway.  "Today there's not enough money to maintain what we already have," a Caltrans official said.

Those are a few highlights from two articles in this week's Mad River Union, covering Caltrans and Arcata officials Local Coastal Plan efforts to addresses some of the consequences of the climate crisis.

Until now, the mapping of low-lying areas has been motivated by preparing for possible earthquakes and tsunamis.  We see "Tsunami Zone" signs everywhere, including in the Arcata bottoms, miles of prime agricultural land that begins at the coast and ends up with housing developments.  That's just one low lying area bordering the sea or the bay.

So there are many vulnerable places, and it only takes one small entry point to flood acres of land.  Besides the Arcata-Eureka corridor, Caltrans identified three other highway sites that are especially vulnerable.  The Arcata Marsh with its local and migratory birds and its innovative sewage treatment system is also threatened, along with power generation and transmission, gas and water lines, as well as transportation.

Apart from the lack of funds to protect from some of these anticipated catastrophes,  there are the unprecedented solutions that involve competing bureaucracies on multiple levels of government.

But officials who gathered at a recent joint meeting on environmental problems and heard detailed analyses of coming challenges also heard a warning to get started on all this now or "The North Coast will find itself in tough competition for resources with other coastal regions," particularly the big and politically powerful ones like the Bay Area, Long Beach and San Diego.

It's all an indication of what many communities are facing.  But it's more specifically what we are facing, here at home.

Climate Crisis: Future and Past

My previous post included reference to the recent predictions of a sudden spurt of global heating in the near future, as heat is released by ocean waters where it has been stored, temporarily slowing the rate of atmospheric heating caused by greenhouse gases.

This is a more comprehensive article on that subject.  John Upton writes:

Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures. That’s the ominous conclusion of a vast and growing body of research that links sweeping Pacific Ocean cycles with rates of warming at the planet’s surface — warming rates that could affect how communities and nations respond to threats posed by climate change.

This is a very near future prediction. The research seems to indicate that this spurt could begin at any time but probably within the next five years.

The article reviews the research, some connections between higher temps and the climate crisis ("A suite of modeling studies have independently concluded that heat waves that ravaged Australia in 2013 would have been almost impossible without the warming effects of our greenhouse gas pollution.")

  It also briefly reviews preparations being made (and not made) to deal with the effects, especially hotter temps for longer periods. “The public health community is starting to talk a lot more about climate generally,” Georgetown University Law Center adjunct professor Sara Pollock Hoverter, who specializes in climate change and climate resilience, said. “I think that all of us need to do more.”

The article also discusses whether new doses of extreme weather will finally lead to action, with a little more detail--but no firmer conclusion (i.e. from probably to maybe) than the piece I linked last time.  You know what I'm going to say: it's crucial to always talk about both causes and consequences, or we may yield to panicky attempts to deal with effects and ignore addressing the causes.

Now--about the past.  In a previous post, I referenced a 1958 Bell Labs TV docu that warned of a possible climate crisis, and President Johnson's mention of the possibility in 1965.  Lately I've stumbled on a more precise reference from the 1970s--at a very crucial and unlikely time.

The subject is mentioned in Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon by Theodore H. White (whose "Making of the President" series of campaign books set a new standard.)  The book begins with Nixon's final days as President, as proof of his criminal behavior became clear, his support vanished layer by layer, and his closest aides tried to guide him towards resignation.

 White pauses in relating the dramatic developments at the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill (the House impeachment investigation) and in the White House to note the ongoing issues being engaged within the government that had nothing to do with the presidential crisis. One was this: the NOAA administrator Robert M. White was trying to impress on other officials the concern of scientists that the 1974 Midwest drought might be a harbinger of major climate change in the future.

Ten pages later, at the moment Nixon was making his televised farewell to the White House staff, White brings the subject up again.  Weather scientists were 
preparing for a meeting that afternoon "with other executive agencies, trying to devise some plan that might bring the long-range problems of climate change to the attention of the New President."

But--White quickly adds--"...the next President, or the next few Presidents, might have a fifty-year span in which to make ready this civilization for the changes that climate might force on mankind..." so they paused to watch Nixon's farewell.

This book was published in 1975, yet White considered the concern serious enough to write about it in this context.  This excerpt tells us of course that such concerns existed at a high level in 1974.  But it also suggests one reason nothing much was done: there's always some drama of the moment to absorb attention.

That has remained true for forty years.  By the time that fiftieth year comes, those civilization-challenging changes will very likely be impossible to ignore.  And the world will be changed, for considerably longer than 50 more years.

The Truth of Consequences

The weather may be exceptionally frigid in New York or surrealistically pleasant in California, but the consequences of the climate crisis are becoming starkly clear.

New York City peers through the snow at the future, as reported in Scientific American:

Heat waves and floods caused by climate change could mean disaster for the Big Apple's five boroughs by the end of the century, with sea levels now predicted by a new report to climb by as much as 6 feet by 2100.

According to the New York City Panel on Climate Change, an independent body composed of climate scientists, New York could see a 6-foot increase under a worst-case scenario that has been revised from previous estimates that 2 to 4 feet would be the maximum rise.

The report also marked a new estimate for how hot it could become within the next 80 or so years, with the panel projecting a temperature increase as much as 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit and a tripling in the frequency of heat waves by the 2080s in the city.

As for the current cold, yes--the climate crisis, the warming Arctic, is definitely involved.  So: colder, snowier winters AND way hotter summers.  Meanwhile, records reveal that sea levels north of New York rose faster in a two year period (2009-11) than ever in history.

California is acutely aware that despite (or because of) the winter sunshine, the state is in deep drought.  A mid-February report suggests this is the wave of the future.  As the SF Chronicle reported:

The Southwest, including California, along with the Great Plains states, will endure long-lasting “megadroughts” in the second half of this century, worse by far than anything seen in the past 1,000 years, a team of climate experts said Thursday. The driving force behind the devastating droughts? Human-induced global warming, the team reported.

Then as the month ended, a report from Stanford piled it on.  The San Jose Mercury News:

Human-caused climate change is increasing drought risk in California -- boosting the odds that our current crisis will become a fixture of the future, according to a major report Stanford scientists released Monday. The finding comes as cities across the Bay Area wrap up the warmest three-month stretch of winter on record.

Moreover, there are signs that the recent slowdown in the rate of actual heating
as predicted could be coming to an end--and we'll get compensating and dramatic spikes in temperatures.  This could accelerate concern--or panic--at least concerning effects.

What happens when you are not prepared for the consequences of global heating--when you don't even see them as consequences?  Another report points to Syria, as described by Salon:

A major new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines climate change as a contributing factor to the 2011 uprising in Syria, connecting the dots from our greenhouse gas emissions to an international conflict that’s killed 200,000 and displaced millions.

It's not the first such study to reach those conclusions, and not the first region of the world with warfare ascribed in part to the effects of climate change, though most reporting ignores this.  But the Pentagon and others are taking it all pretty seriously.  It is already in many places what Michael Specter in the New Yorker describes as "A Thirsty, Violent World."

Here in the states at least some people are asking the questions that are likely to become louder and louder, as in this article that asks "Are We Even Ready for a Megadrought?"

Are we ready for the effects?  Sooner or later, the public outcry will begin.  Is anybody ready to link the effects to the causes, so the future won't be even worse?  On the megadrought, for instance, one of the authors of the previously noted report emphasized: "And that's a really important point - we're not necessarily locked into these high levels of mega-drought risk if we take actions to slow the effects of rising greenhouse gases on global temperatures."

He's not saying drought won't happen--just that it could be less than the worst case scenario, particularly further out in time, if we deal with the causes of global heating.  But the connection has to be made--we must always be talking about both causes and consequences.

Meanwhile, mega-funded denialist nonsense continues in Washington, abetted by our lamestream media (yes, Sarah, I'm with you there, though for entirely different reasons.)  John Podesta left the White House with a hopeful statement about the prospects for action on the causes of the climate crisis.  I hope he's right, but until the public dialogue links the causes and consequences, we're unlikely to address the climate crisis intelligently and with the required focus.

He has been, and always shall be, fascinating

There was news some days ago that Leonard Nimoy had been rushed to the hospital. A story I read concluded that he was feeling better because his Twitter feed had resumed, but when I saw that the tweets were previously published poems, I had a feeling that all was not well.

Still, it was a shock to wake up to the news today that he had died. It's a major moment that will take time to absorb. Sobering and sad, but occasion to remember his many contributions, especially to the living mythology of Star Trek. Coincidentally I've been focusing recently on that mythology, and those contributions. This event will sharpen and deepen that exploration.

My relationship with Nimoy was brief and pleasant. I interviewed him by phone and met him once in person in connection with a New York Times article I was writing on Star Trek, just as what turned out to be the final season of Enterprise was starting. He emailed me to say how much he had enjoyed the article, and the feedback he'd received about it. We exchanged emails, as he advised me on book publishing matters.

This past week I caught up on his recent interviews on YouTube--I especially liked these, with Geoff Boucher. Also this one with Pharrell Williams. Nimoy had a singular life, and a very full one. He had a lively mind and a complex personality. He was large souled. In many ways he was a keeper of the soul of Star Trek.

Of all the Nimoy photos floating about today, I like the one below, with the Buddha statue in the background (Trek Movie used it, among others.) I ended my phone interview with Nimoy by telling him a story that involved the San Francisco Zen Center.

I stayed there once, a few months before our conversation, in one of the rooms they rent to visitors. My room didn't have its own bathroom, so that night I walked down the hall to the large common bathroom and shower. Monks, many of them young, also lived on that floor. I took a wrong turn on the way back to my room and found myself in the monks' wing. As I turned back in the correct direction I noticed a bookcase in the hallway outside the monks quarters, filled with books. I couldn't see the titles in the dim light, except one: I Am Spock.  It is of course by Leonard Nimoy.

He laughed and said, "Thanks for that." Along with difficulties and travails, he had rewarding careers and a rewarding life, but it turns out that all I have to say today is just that: Thank you, Leonard. It's been fascinating.

May he rest in peace. His work and his legacy live on, into the future.

This is the month of the 30th year since my book The Malling of America was published.  If memory serves, it's also the official publication date, so it's officially 30 years exactly: February 26, 1985.

Last year I thought about preparing an anniversary edition, a kind of final wrap on an era, with an introductory essay bringing things up to date.  Maybe I'll do it eventually but it seemed too daunting.  Surprising the emotions and memories it can still evoke (the book and publication etc, not the topic.)  The main motivation to do it would have to be mine.  I'd have to essentially publish it myself, as a print-on-demand.

But there still is a paperback edition available through online booksellers, like Amazon for instance. (That's the paperback cover up there.) Amazon also offers a hardback but they don't reproduce the first edition cover, so I have no idea if these are legit, especially the ones called "new."  The used ones are cheap enough to gamble on, though.  The ex-library books are probably pretty nice--I never liked the garish dust cover but the book itself looks quite elegant, with the title in gold on white.  Maybe I'll order one myself--I like that my book was in libraries.  I'd like to have one with that library card envelope in the back.

I let the 25th anniversary go by without even a mention on a blog. Seemed unseemly to be the one noting it, or maybe just humiliating.  Don't know why I mention it this time, except that the day didn't go by without recalling it.

Drop the Denial? Probably Not (Mr.) Soon

Why do some people persist in denying the realities of the climate crisis?  In some cases, the cause is easily named: money.  Last week Greenpeace revealed documentary evidence (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) confirming that one of the most prominent scientists who insists that climate changes are not caused by greenhouse gas pollution has been generously funded by the fossil fuels industry, and just about nobody else.  The Guardian:

Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, the documents obtained by Greenpeace through freedom of information filings show. According to the documents, the biggest single funder was Southern Company, one of the country’s biggest electricity providers that relies heavily on coal.

Does this mean that the deniers who quote him religiously will soon drop Soon, and maybe even their denial?  Not in the media or in other rabid right institutions, for most of their paychecks also depend on orthodox denying.  The fact that Greenpeace got the documents will invalidate the numbers themselves in the eyes of many deniers.  Because all of their "facts" are 90% ideology, they believe as an article of faith that everybody else's facts are as well.

Beyond those addicted to Koch--and we're all shocked, shocked that gambling has been going on here--there are others who lack a direct profit motive.  But according to Joel Achenbach in the National Geographic  there are other ways to profit--by remaining a member in good standing of your group, your circle of actual and virtual friends, your associates (and not appearing weird to them may also be a matter of keeping your job, moving on up, etc. and therefore also related to money.)  He quotes Dan Kahan of Yale:

In the U.S., climate change somehow has become a litmus test that identifies you as belonging to one or the other of these two antagonistic tribes. When we argue about it, Kahan says, we’re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We’re thinking, People like us believe this. People like that do not believe this. For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

“Take a barber in a rural town in South Carolina,” Kahan has written. “Is it a good idea for him to implore his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on climate change? No. If he does, he will find himself out of a job, just as his former congressman, Bob Inglis, did when he himself proposed such action.”

This article has many other observations and theories, some I would argue with, some I'd give a "yes, but..."  And I sense I wouldn't agree with much else that Kahan writes (what does he really know about rural South Carolina towns?), but since this agrees with my own observations I'll endorse it.  A lot of what people say--including almost all gossip--is really about being recognized as a member of their group, even if it is not a group of their choice but of circumstance, like (most often) in the workplace.

How does any of this change?  Global heating as an "issue" is so difficult because it is part of a bundle of issues that define politics and groups.  Republicans won enough in 2014 that they're not budging from any of their stands, no matter what the consequences.  But more generally, big changes on apparently intractable issues happen underneath the surface noise, person by person, then group by group, until suddenly it's all over.  It happened with South Africa and apartheid, it happened with cigarette smoking.

One of the most effective anti-apartheid tools was disinvestment, and it was incremental over years.  As was noted before here, disinvestment in fossil fuels have been accumulating even faster.  One of the big academic holdouts has been Harvard.  Last week some 30 prominent alums signed a letter in support of disinvestment:

The alumni included Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam war memorial, Nobel laureate Eric Chivian, Pulitzer prize-winning author Susan Faludi, academics, preachers, former US senators and Securities and Exchange commissioners as well as Bill McKibben, the founder of the group 350.org, which has driven the campus divestment campaign.

And the dance goes on.

One more thing...

President Obama vetoed the bill Congress passed to force him to approve the Keystone pipeline.  A flurry of emails ensued, including from environmental groups.  The Climate Reality Project claimed total victory, but 350.org got it right--the veto was not on the merits of the pipeline, but on Congress usurping an executive branch function.  Though it seems more and more likely that this administration will not approve the project itself, that decision hasn't happened yet.

The Torture Games

The Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on Torture has been published in paperback, though it is apparently a 549 page executive summary--the documentation running into the many thousands of (heavily censored) pages.  An excellent summary and commentary on the Report--what it does and doesn't say and do--can be found at the New York Review of Books in an interview with Mark Danner, who knows the topic from having covered it for some time.

Even given the tenor of the initial coverage of the report's findings--chiefly that the torture imposed by the CIA was even worse than previously known, and that despite CIA and GOPer claims it resulted in no important information--Danner highlights even more hair-raising contexts.  For instance, that torture was a first resort, done without any real planning or investigation into precedent and results, and that the prime suspect involved gave lots of good information before he was tortured, and none during or after.  Here's Danner:

"What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million.

The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, lifesaving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating."

It remains a puzzle to me--as it does to Danner--why the Obama administration hasn't pursued prosecutions, or even why the President kept this report at arms length.  The Senate report itself doesn't include recommendations for any actions. Danner suggests it's melancholy evidence of the power of the CIA.

Another fact I didn't know: the Senate committee got the votes to conduct the investigation only when Democrats agreed to limit it to the CIA, and to stay away from the Bush executive department.  Even so, while the FBI comes off pretty well in this report, and the Justice Department not as badly as it might have, the fingerprints of Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush and their minions are all over this.

As Danner says, without prosecutions that involve judicial decisions, all that prevents the US engaging in torture again is President Obama's executive order, which can easily be disregarded by a future presidency.

Meanwhile, it appears that US police have taken more than surplus military weaponry from the so-called war on terror. The depravity unleashed by torture and other abrogation of rights justified by the Bushites has come to the United States, perhaps in racial attitudes, but specifically (according to one report) in the adoption of police state tactics and familiar CIA "black sites" but for American citizens in at least one major U.S. city.

The only positive in this is the fact that the Senate committee did investigate, and that after all the roadblocks thrown in their path by the CIA and allies, it has actually been published.  We'd all like to forget this happened, that our leaders could be this cowardly and depraved, or that people who did it are still politically powerful.  But what we'd better remember is that it could easily happen again.

Less Than Zero

The first time the words "below zero" were impressed on my consciousness as a child, I was thrown into a quandary.  If zero meant "nothing", what could possibly be less than zero?  (Yes, this was before Robert Zimmerman got out of Minnesota.)  How could anything be below nothing?

But there it was, and my mother took it very seriously.  For years afterwards, any temp "below zero" was like a cosmic event, what "awesome" actually means.  And in western Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s there were more than a few.

When I lived in Pittsburgh in the late 80s and 90s, that winters were shorter and milder was street wisdom.  I recall a veteran of the Squirrel Cage bar pointing to where ice used to form on the street in front of it in November, not to disappear until March.  Not then, though.  Not anymore.

So I appreciate that folks in that part of the world had to readapt to that kind of weather this winter, after a generation or so.  It's hard to judge at a distance whether it is more extreme now than even back then, but it does sound like it.  And a lot less predictable.

That global heating could lead to intense cold and big snowstorms may be counter-intuitive, but it was predicted long before it started happening.  The physics of it aren't complicated, though the many factors involved make the time and specific manifestations difficult to predict.  But readers of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy from the 90s will recall that intense cold visited Washington as a consequence.  Cold and snow is there now.

Here we've had no winter at all.  The tulips are blooming (I took this photo however in March last year), the hummingbirds departed several weeks early, and it's generally been a warmer, sunnier winter than any in the 19 we've seen here.  Even last winter was not this consistently mild.  We also did not get the wet February we got last year.  We got some moisture from the storms earlier in the month, and some foggy days.  But the last appreciable rains were in early December.

The departures from normal here are certainly a lot more pleasant, which is some ways makes them more eerie.  But the new extremes in the East as well as most of the West, which right now may not be so far from normal variation to be intrinsically alarming, certainly add an edge to the kind of scientific speculation that emerged this past week, predicting mega-drought for the West, and significant deterioration of livability in New York--studies I'll review in another post.

In some ways, getting our heads around the climate crisis is a little like dealing with the concept of below zero, though even more complicated to contemplate.  We get to some understanding by degrees, by paying heed to what climate scientists say about the weather, and adjusting our ideas accordingly, about what the climate crisis is and what changes it can make.

For right now though, my thoughts are with those suffering cold and snow extremes in places I used to live (Boston, DC, PA etc.) or have visited, like Niagara Falls, where days of below zero temps actually froze parts of the falls themselves (photo above.)  But I'm still going out in the sunshine.

How To Create More Inequality Part 2

1.  After buying enough lawmakers, feel free to consolidate major products and services on which people depend into as few corporations as possible.

2. Severely reduce the workforce by automation and outsourcing to slave wage countries.  Reduce actual physical presence in places where people use your products and services so that they won't expect you to service or repair anything, and instead of paying people to spend time providing services, make customers spend their time trying to deal with automated responses on the telephone, and if they happen to survive long enough to get an actual person on the phone, make sure that person is very far away, and badly trained as well as, of course, poorly paid.

All this means fewer people in US communities have good paying jobs, everyone is enslaved to a few corporations that have as their sole aim to cut costs, drive up the artificial short-term stock valuation, and reward their executives with larger and larger shares of the profits.  

3. Without meaningful choices in the matter, people will have to put up with all this.  They are also more likely now to buy a new product rather than try to have their present one serviced or repaired.  They must spend whatever these corporations charge in fees as well as prices, with the money going straight to the top.

How to Create More Inequality

1. Elect a Republican governor and legislature.  In many states that should know better, this is already a done deal.

2.  Governor announces lower taxes on the rich, which he promises will spur business investment and fill the state coffers with abundance.

3. Tax revenues fall and a big budget deficit results.

4.  Governor blames excessive pensions paid by state government, especially teacher pensions.

5.  Instead of being arrested for fraud or theft or whatever criminal statutes apply to people who abrogate contracts that one party has fulfilled, governor and legislature succeed in "reforming" pensions so that retirees get less.  Combine with other efforts to shrink public education, health and welfare, because the state can't "afford" them anymore.  So retirees and middle class teachers, government employees etc. make less or are fired.  Redistribute saved income upwards!

That's it, in five easy steps.  Oh, and the sixth---

6. Elect one of these governors as President of the U.S. so the same procedure can be applied nationally, and even more income transferred from middle class and poor people to rich and richer people.  It worked for Reagan, it can work again.  (Ask Scott Walker.)

Bonus: though this hurts some white people, it's predominantly old white people that it benefits  Everybody else loses.  In fact, everybody loses.

Appreciate

Paul McCartney brings the subversive power of rock and roll into the post-human future, with a poignancy at the end that speaks for all human music.  Watch and listen, you'll appreciate.

Beyond the Hashtag

Rather than a series of tweet-like posts on separate subjects--which I know is the proper way to do it these days--I'm going to catch up on non-climate crisis topics from the past week or so, all right here.

Brian Williams:  Evidence is starting to mount up, however dubious, in the same direction.  One thing seems pretty clear: he doesn't have a lot of defenders.  But my point about the wired lynch mob (by which of course I mean the spirit and function of it, not equating the outcome) remains valid.  So I don't know what the now-former governor of Oregon is guilty of, but these sentences from his resignation statement (as quoted by Reuters) seem apt:

"It is deeply troubling to me to realize that we have come to a place in the history of this great state of ours where a person can be charged, tried, convicted and sentenced by the media with no due process and no independent verification of the allegations involved," Kitzhaber said.

"But even more troubling – and on a very personal level as someone who has given 35 years of public service to Oregon – is that so many of my former allies in common cause have been willing to simply accept this judgment at its face value," he said.

Digital domination: In line with my accidental series on digital domination earlier this year, concern has been expressed that an entire generation or even century of data may be lost because it's all been digital or digitized and the paper thrown away (or never existed), but the programs to read this material are gone or certainly going.

 He was talking most specifically about emails and photos, but I've heard this about company records and even books, and probably have said it before myself. But what's remarkable about the warning is that it comes from the head honcho of Google, himself kind of implicated in the digital domain (Google was sued for digitizing copyrighted text but recently won the case.)  So maybe that gives it the extra weight it may take to wake up some people from their digital swoon.

I might also mention my tantrum on the subject of keyless car ignitions, which got some detailed rebuttals on another blog from someone who sounds like he's in the car business.  He talked about security but didn't mention what I didn't know about then, which is the vulnerability to car theft etc. by electronics via the keyless system.  Apparently a growing problem.

The President of Projection:  I wasn't going to dignify the rabid right freakout over President Obama's comments at a prayer breakfast by even mentioning it, but I've now got two reasons.  First, the two pieces (here and here) by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject.  In addition to providing actual history that rabid rightists ignore (big surprise) he led off the second piece with this great ascerbic comment: "People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast."

Second is something that immediately occurred to me but I haven't seen mentioned.  Here's what President Obama said that offended these folks: "Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Coates provides the history to back this up, my interest is in the "high horse" part of it.  It is precisely the high horse perspective that allows and fuels the kind of hysterical "patriotism" that the Bushites inflamed after 9/11 that resulted in inanities like "freedom fries" but also the emotional push behind the self-righteous invading of Iraq, which even then was obviously irrelevant to 9/11.

So while we revile the extreme inhumanity of ISIL, only riders on the "high horse" (which likely include the rabid right critics of this comment) can justify mirror-image atrocities like torture, or expand the targets to Muslims in general, or anybody different in any way--different that is from right wing Christian fundamentalists.   And this precisely is the effective reason for President Obama's remark.  He wants action against ISIL, but for us to keep our heads, and perspective.

Where the Future Is (II)

Global Divestment Day: South Africa 

Who among us in the US (apart from more than 80% of scientists and more than 95% of climate scientists) recognizes the reality of the climate crisis?

82% of African Americans say the world is getting hotter, and 56% correctly identify fossil fuel pollution as the chief cause.  That's the reality that 54% of Latinos recognize as well.    Compared with 37% of white Americans surveyed.

So the question arises: are white people inherently inferior?

A glance at American politics would suggest that conclusion.  Especially when one of the two major political parties is officially stupid on the subject.  And most white people are Republicans, as most Republicans are white people.  So if a Republican politician is not actually a moron, he or she still has to pretend to be one.

 Willed ignorance and strategic stupidity, while  probably more dangerous than sincere if psychologically twisted ignorance and stupidity, in the end amount to the same thing, for their clueless selfishness risks the well-being of the planet and the future.  Which makes white people seem inferior in more than intelligence.

Norway

But the world is actually bigger than America.  As counter-evidence to the white inferiority theory there's Scandinavia, where there's been a meaningful safety net for all citizens for generations, and where the question of whether the climate crisis exists or not probably comes up as often as fierce debates on whether gravity is real.

Those of us Americans who don't get out much anymore may be surprised as how the world views our willed ignorance and sociopathic stupidity, so a reminder such as Ann Jones' bracing piece in TomDispatch ("Is This Country Crazy? Inquiring Minds Elsewhere Want to Know") is a much needed splash of perspective.

Australia

While it's true that the few pockets of climate crisis denial in other countries (Australia, Canada, etc.) tend to be mostly white people, on the whole the reality of the climate crisis is accepted by the rest of the world, including whites, and they would just like to get on with dealing with its causes and effects.

Which is why political activities such as Global Divestment Day (today and tomorrow, according to datelines)  organized by 350 and related organizations are in fact international, even when their chief aim is to affect policy in the US.

Philippines

Racial prejudice is not necessary in evaluating white American behavior.  But the increasing isolation of older white Americans (which may in part be a defensive response to our minority status) should motivate some conscious reflection.

 Especially since, as Jones' piece points out, white dominated America is seen not only as shockingly brutal, it is recognized as falling behind the rest of the world, both internally (collapsing physical and social infrastructure) and internationally (collapsing education, health etc. compared to many other countries, including some that Americans have long considered inferior.)  It's not that America is the worst.  It's the contrast with America at its best, as well as this comparative fall.

That's far from the whole story--America still has vast resources of intelligence and compassion, knowledge and resilience. (It actually takes a lot of energy to keep up the pretense that there is credible evidence the climate crisis isn't happening, or that frigid winter weather in the Eastern US is an argument that there is no global heating.)  But it also seems that America is becoming too much like the last days of Rome, decaying at a very bad moment for the world.  That possibility also should motivate people to step up their efforts to meet these challenges.  Old assumptions no longer accurately reflect the whole reality, for the whole world.

Boston

Put Your Money Where the Future Is

It started in a circuitous way as a Vietnam War protest.  It went global and was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa, and it helped free the US from Big Tobacco.  Now divestment is being applied to the climate crisis, and it's starting to take off.

A number of universities, local governments, pension funds and organizations have withdrawn their financial investments in coal and other fossil fuel enterprises.  It's a matter of heavy debate at others (Harvard for instance.)   In total some $50 billion has already been withdrawn. And there's legislation in the California senate to divest two huge state pension funds from coal.  If successful, it would be the mightiest blow yet.

This Friday-Saturday has been named as Global Divestment Day by 350 and Greenpeace, with a range of activities scheduled around the world.  According to the Guardian, the event has the fossil fuel fossils worried:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,” said Mahatma Gandhi. The climate change campaign to divest from fossil fuels seems to be moving through those stages at express speed, with a sudden barrage of attacks from the coal and oil lobbies ahead of its global divestment day on Valentine’s day.

The speed is appropriate given that the campaign, which argues the fossil fuel industry is a danger to both the climate and investors’ capital, is the fastest growing divestment campaign yet seen, moving quicker than those against tobacco and apartheid. It’s moving fast in the financial world too, with one finance executive calling it “one of the fastest-moving debates I think I’ve seen in my 30 years in markets”.

Divestment is not just negative in this instance.  California is among those considering investing that money in clean energy.  This is not the throw your money away on a do-gooder gesture it once might have been, nor is it even that risky.  What's risky long-term, as even conservative investors know, is staying with coal.  What with the climate crisis coming on as well as other factors, coal is a future loser.

An interview in Grist with Naomi Klein describes the history of divestment and this particular divestment campaign, as well as its rationale.

It Came From the Screen

Jeff Masters at Weather Underground unearthed this brief video excerpt from a Bell Laboratory Science series episode in 1958, that includes a mention of the climate crisis consequences of CO2 pollution.  He gave more historical examples to show that global heating has been a topic of concern for longer than generally realized.

 This included a specific warning in a 1965 message to Congress by President Lyndon Johnson--when the far-seeing Stewart Udall was still Secretary of Interior (he was appointed by JFK), with responsibility for environmental matters before they got their own cabinet secretary in the Nixon administration.  Though as a high school student I knew of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (which I saw on the Best Seller List in 1963), it was Udall's 1963 book, The Quiet Crisis, that began my education on environmental matters.  (I still have the paperback copy I first read then.)

But this video is fascinating in itself.  I remember these programs, as I'm sure lots of Baby Boomers do.  If we didn't see them on TV, we saw them run from film projectors in school.  There were 8 of these specials made in the decade of 1954-64, each on a specific subject.  "The Unchained Goddess" about weather was the one that mentioned global heating, in a characteristically dramatic way.

 This was the fourth and last of the specials produced and written by the eminent Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe etc.)  Disillusioned with Hollywood  (and/or vice versa) in the Blacklist era, he used his science schooling and filmmaking chops to create these, which included technical as well as narrative innovations that became standard for both documentaries and feature films.  Shot in technicolor, several of the films won Emmys in various categories.

The basic interplay in the film is between a science expert (Dr. Frank C. Baxter, and it's recognizing him that brought these all back to me) and a "fiction writer," played in this episode by actor Richard Carlson, who also directed it. (You'll see just a moment of him in the above one-minute excerpt.)

But Carlson wasn't just any actor, especially to the young Boomer audience. Many adults were familiar with him as the star of the 1953-56 espionage TV series I Led Three Lives. But he was also the star of such Saturday afternoon epics as It Came From Outer Space and Creature From the Black Lagoon.

 Moreover, the characters he played were significant.  In most Hollywood films (as in most fiction), scientists were either mad and evil,  or blandly evil.  Though the first scientist as hero was in H.G. Well's The Time Machine (published 120 years ago in 1895) it took a long time for the movies to catch up.  Carlson played several of the early examples of scientists as heroes--even action heroes-- in 1950s science fiction and monster movies.

The combination of FBI man on TV and sci-fi scientist gave him a weird sort of credibility with both adults and children.  I'm sure we were captivated as well by color if we saw these in school, as well as by the high level of filmmaking skill and familiar stars.  For me they came at an age that I wanted to be a scientist, before the realities of math overcame the romance of the scientist who saves the world, and not incidentally rescues the beautiful girl.

Imaginative stories that used scientific what-ifs got two basic responses in the 50s--very negative (from embarrassment to angry scoffing) and very positive, because the ideas as well as the action were stimulating.  Today, a lot of deniers count on the angry scoffing of what they would like to believe is the science fiction of the climate crisis.

But we're all facing its reality now.  The difference may be that some of us were opened to possibilities of real science speculations in the Bell series and other documentaries by fictional stories in which an international team of scientists convinces leaders of a mortal threat to the planet, and the world unites to overcome the threat.  In that regard it turns out they were science fiction, at least so far.  

The Week in Borowitz, Internet Hysteria Etc..

Sometimes the funniest part of an Andy Borowitz piece at the New Yorker is the headline, as in last week's Zombie Jonas Salk Rises from Grave to Hunt Idiots. But his piece on bringing back the glories of the Bush years with Jeb (speaking of zombies) is a satirical masterpiece from start to finish.

The Salk piece of course is about the Internet-stoked and celebrity-enabled justification for refusing measles inoculations that is now paying off in a resurgence of a once-dead disease.  Millions of dollars, suffering and perhaps some lives will be the price for this.  Notably, a whole lot of backtracking is going on now, as people wake up to the consequences that were staring them in the face.

Hysteria, born of repressed unconscious emotions, has been a feature of so-called civilization since well before the witch hunts, but contemporary complacency (it can't happen here, or now) is unwarranted, especially since the instantaneous mobs enabled by the Internet have proven such eruptions are alive and well, and larger and faster than ever.

It's easier for some to discount or ignore these phenomena, based on the conventional dogmas of mechanistic psychology and the brain as computer.   Yet old fashioned Freudian/Jungian terms are the only ones that actually explain what's going on, as unconscious fears are displaced (from suspected conspiracies that are too big to think about, to seemingly safer but illusory ones) and projected (furnishing a lot of the lynch mob energy that gets focused on leadership figures, currently including Brian Williams but also, on any given week, President Obama.)

Cry Me A River

Here in Arcata we seem to be in the still point of a raining world.  The "atmospheric river" (that's its profile picture above) is dumping rain all around us, causing sporadic flooding, downed trees and power lines, power outages, and some landslides.  Though we've had wind and fairly steady rain, it's had less impact locally.

There's been much more rain to our north (as far as Washington and Oregon) and south (as far as the Bay Area), but so far the coastal whatevers are shielding us from the several inches a day that others are getting.  We even had some sun breaks today.

The latest pulse of rain has just started. The river will deliver more waves of moisture through Monday, though the various weather models differ from one another, and seem to change a lot.  What is indisputably true is that it's stayed warm--8 to 10F above normal--although falling temps and accompanying thunderstorms are expected.  They just keep changing their minds on when.  We may see some heavier stuff yet, whatever the hourly forecasts say now.

Meanwhile the Midwest and East are getting hit with another named storm--Marcus.  It's expected to dump steady snow for several days, though not a lot until it reaches New England.  Boston may get another foot, on top of the two or so on the ground.

So what's with the names?  Easier twitter hashtag?  And if snowstorms get names, why doesn't our river?  Is this prejudice against atmospheric rivers?  A river has to be liquid water in order to have a name?  Is that fair?  Why, you tweet "atmospheric" and you've used up most of your letters.

Update: The river continued to flow right over us.  We got lots and lots of wind but very little of the rain as the Humboldt Bay area remained the still dry point as the rain turned around us in the rainy region.  Looking at the maps of where precip was happening confirmed this impression--at several times there was rain literally all around us, including out at sea.  We got enough rain however to cause a significant mudslide near an HSU dorm.  Still, the several inches first predicted turned out to be less than one inch total, I'm guessing. Now on Monday night there's the supposed chance of a few passing showers before dry sets in officially on Tuesday.

Brian Williams and the Lynch Mob

NBC anchor Brian Williams told a story about an event some 12 years in the past.  His account is untrue.  He admitted this and apologized.

He didn't answer every question that has been raised about this, and now it's open season on his integrity and credibility in general.  Even though most of the noise is coming from people who appear to be doing it for their own political ends, self-aggrandizement and careers.

It's the hysteria that exercises me.  There is a lynch mob mentality that the twitterverse and 24 hour news cycle enables.

Did he deliberately lie?  Is he a bad reporter?  These may be open questions, but the lynch mob has mind up its frenzied mind.  Don't bother with the trial, we know he's guilty.

Brian Williams was on a helicopter in Iraq.  One of the pilots said it took small arms fire, other servicemen apparently aboard say it didn't.  Ahead of them was another helicopter that took significant fire and was forced down.  Williams said he was on that helicopter.  He wasn't.  But he did not say he was at the time.  The story grew over the years.  That's actually fairly normal--we tend to remember the stories we tell rather than the actual event.  It was in an unfamiliar combat situation.  The emotions stay.

What somebody says about something that happened more than a decade ago does not necessarily mean that he habitually lies about events he is covering at the moment, or that he often gets the reportage wrong.  Evidence on these possibilities has not been fully reported, just suggested, just stated as fact.

Everything about a lynch mob mentality is out of proportion. Williams' fish story about a single event is not comparable to politicians who repeatedly claim to voters that they served in Vietnam or Iraq when they never did.  There's a difference between wishful mis-remembering and systematic lies for political gain.

NBC has appointed an investigative unit to examine the evidence, and some other media organizations that might have some residual sense of responsibility to find the facts before they report them might start digging as well.

I for one will wait until there is a credible body of evidence, apart from political agendas which may well include those of former members of the military.  If that ever happens.

But as a major firestorm of a story today, this is just scary.  This is epic scapegoating so far. There are so many more important matters to attend to.