California poppies, sure sign of spring in Arcata, but there's not as many as there used to be, as more wildflower territory becomes concrete or otherwise de-lifed. Click photo to real life proportions.

Follow-Up: The New York Review

A few weeks ago, I posted here about why I value the New York Review of Books, and on an impulse, posted it at Daily Kos. It got only about a dozen comments and fewer than 20 recommendations, but eventually it appeared on the Rescued Diary list.

Then a few days later I got an email from an editorial assistant at the New York Review, which contained a PDF version of a brief note from Robert Silvers, who has edited the Review from its first issue in 1963.

It said: I was touched by what you said about the paper. During 46 years, I’ve never read a piece in which a writer said what was actually in an issue.

Awesome, and yet, I was aghast: nobody, in 46 years, had written about what was actually in an issue? Yet for 46 years, this man kept it going, and kept its quality and voice. That's truly awesome.

Although there were only 14 comments at kos, two of them stand out for what they say about the particular effects of this periodical.

From Dana Houle:

I grew up in a place where nobody went to college. My family also got three newspapers a day, and they bought me books because I was expected to go to college, but you can't say I "grew up around books." Nobody in my family had graduated high school. When I graduated high school, I couldn't write a complete sentence. I went to community college, got caught up on my basics, and then transfered to a pretty good state university. The first term I was there, a historian, a Viennese-Jewish emigre who came to the US as a teen, worked as a skilled craftsman while in grad school, and a man of the working class left, took an interest in me. He could tell I was trying to become educated, that I had many interests, but numerous holes in my knowledge. His suggestion was that I should start reading the New York Review of Books, every article, every edition. It's one of the best things that anyone has ever done for me. And the NYRB is one of the most enjoyable and invigorating things in my life.

and from someone else:

I used to think I was really intelligent until I picked up a friend's copy of the New York Review of Books and tried to read it. I could feel a whooshing gust as the contents went right over my head. Maybe if Jon Stewart did a Comedy Central version, I would catch on?

If you don't know what we're all talking about, the online version is here. But it's the full paper version that means the most. Here's the wikipedia history.

These particularly dark, velvety Irises that Margaret planted in the front yard are currently blooming. Click the photo to enlarge and get a good look. They are actually darker than this, though. Digital color just isn't there yet.

Convergences

Updates 5/20: A NY Times editorial on the case for these new emissions standards as "a huge step forward in the effort to limit greenhouse gases and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil" as well as "With this deal, America also wins back a bit of energy independence. But the biggest winner could be the atmosphere." Also indication that the climate and energy bill described below will be voted out of committee, on its way to passage.


For all the pain it is causing and will yet cause, the Great Recession is also providing unforeseen opportunities to improve the chances of a better future. The difference is who is President. And it isn't the Recession itself so much as the realities about our past and our future that it brings into sharper focus.

Tuesday, President Obama is expected to unveil new fuel mileage standards for American vehicles that will "mean a 30 percent reduction in global-warming emissions from new vehicles by 2016, with improvements beginning in the 2011 model year," according to this article at Grist. Though Republicans in Congress and in Washington will probably scream about it, the proposal may well have wide support where it counts--apart from the public and environmentalists, from business, including car companies.

Why? The Great Recession not only makes the auto industry more dependent on the federal government, but reduces the margin for error while providing an opportunity to chart a new course to its future prosperity. A number of states have enacted their own standards--California conspicuously--and a single federal standard saves the car companies money, plus it gives them a real blueprint for what they will be expected to do for the next decade:

The move will please the Auto Alliance, the major industry group representing car makers, which has been asking for one standard that unifies emission and fuel-economy standards across the whole country. “We recognize that greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles need to be reduced,” Charles Territo, a spokesperson for the Alliance, told Grist last month. “At the end of the day, what’s most important is that we have a single, national standard that is achievable, but that is aggressive and cost-effective.”

The standards are also more gradual, giving car companies more time to adapt. Consumers will gradually pay more, at least by today's estimates, though their costs will be offset by spending less on gasoline. This is no small deal--some say it is the biggest and most effective way so far to cut greenhouse gases. It eventually will "equate to taking 177 million cars off the road, or shutting down 194 coal-fired power plants."

This is separate from the cap-and-trade bill now in Congress, the Waxman-Markey bill that now has wide support. Despite Congressional GOPer promises to offer hundreds of nonsense amendments to tie things up, the bill is expected to become law this year. For some environmentalists it is too modest, and fossil fuel industries are pouring millions into opposing it. But on Monday, Paul Krugman made the best case I've read for why cap-and-trade will work. It's estimated that in lessening greenhouse gases, this bill will equate to take another 500 million cars off the road. "After all the years of denial, after all the years of inaction, we finally have a chance to do something major about climate change," Krugman concludes. "Waxman-Markey is imperfect, it’s disappointing in some respects, but it’s action we can take now. And the planet won’t wait."

Supporting the likelihood of both of these efforts are polls which suggest strong public support for regulating greenhouse gases, even if it costs.

One of the reasons Krugman favors cap-and-trade over a carbon tax is that it's international in scope. Everyone knows that without India and especially China, there isn't much hope. So these hints of secret and ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and China on Climate Crisis measures, plus public moves (like Secretary of State Clinton stating that U.S.-China relations should center around climate change) suggests a dramatic agreement may not be far off.

There's other good news in the climate crisis arena: from promising new technology to a suggestion that the Great Recession slowdown coupled with an imminent cap-and-trade system means that the growth of greenhouse gas emissions may have ended in the U.S. But continuing at the current rate will continue to make matters worse--we need to start cutting, and eventually, cut deeply.

Unfortunately however, there has been no good news in what's actually happening in the environment, or in predictions of what is likely to happen. Most of that is getting worse. This includes the widely reported study that cut in half the prediction of how much sea levels will rise as a result of melting from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Look under the headline and see that even if this study is correct, it doesn't mean sea levels will be half of previous predictions everywhere. In fact, they will be even higher in certain places--like the West Coast of the United States. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc. And also the East Coast. Boston, New York City. With impact on Washington, D.C.

Fascinating--and Logical

A lot of controversy, some anger and what's become the all-too-usual hyperbole and invective have accompanied recent decisions from the Obama administration. But beneath the often deceptive headlines there's something we're maybe not used to: intelligence. Maybe the decision is wrong, but it was arrived at with reasons and with a logical process that includes many sources of information and debate. In a new interview in Newsweek, President Obama describes the step-by-step process he undertook in making decisions on important matters like Afghanistan. And he says:

But one of the things I've actually been encouraged by—and I learned during the campaign—was the American people, I think, not only have a toleration but also a hunger for explanation and complexity, and a willingness to acknowledge hard problems. I think one of the biggest mistakes that is made in Washington is this notion you have to dumb things down for the public. I've always been struck by the fact that, if you can get me in a room with a group of people, even who disagree with me violently on an issue, they'll still take the time to listen. They might not, at the end of it, agree with me, but having seen how I'm thinking about a problem, having a sense of how I'm making decisions, that I understand their point of view, that I can actually make their argument for them, and that that's part of the decision-making process, it gives them a sense, at least, that they've been heard, and I think clarifies—well, it pushes us away from the dogmas and caricatures that I think get in the way of good policymaking and a more civil tone in our politics."

Later in the interview he mentions that he's just screened the new Star Trek movie in the White House, after people kept telling him he's Spock--and then he flashed the Vulcan greeting. He says he was a Star Trek fan from the age of 10.

The Star Trek connection and Spock both make sense. Spock was a symbol of intelligence--of what he called logic--when American policy in the late 60s was crazy, defying sense and logic. By the 80s it was even worse: the complete rule of the cynical and deluded selling patently stupid self-destructive policies to a hapless public glorying in a consumption based on dumbness. I keep thinking of a title of a book of essays about the 80s by Martin Amis--it was called The Moronic Inferno, and that's still the best description of the 80s, when our current disasters were born, brought to maturity by Cheney and the Bushites.

Spock stood for intelligence, which to him meant ethics as well: because they were logical. Gene Roddenberry said that Star Trek's popularity proved that ordinary people were ready for that kind of future, and that they were "light years ahead of their petty governments and visionless leaders."

We have a leader now with vision, who models intelligence. We're not used to this. We're not over Bush. We're not even over the '80s. We're still surrounded by the moronic inferno. But there's at least a light in the White House. Not just empathy but intelligence. May it live long and prosper.

Dumb and Dumber

Two stories in the news Friday suggest two different ways in which we're endangering ourselves in our thoughtless rush to become the global Borg. In the rush of events and the rush we get from new technologies that dazzle us--as we are hotly encouraged to be dazzled by marketing and advertising, but also mostly by peer pressure. As well as the mindless acceptance of warped economics while ignoring the immediate dangers, let alone the longterm ones.

Let's start with what seems to be the smaller problem but isn't--it's just more intimate to those reading this on the Net. It has to do with the wisdom of one of our many agricultural-age bits of nevertheless universal wisdom: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. The tech version of this is called redundancy.

The first story comes from the SF Chronicle, and it's about two hours on Thursday when Google was apparently inaccessible. "Frustration, distress over Google outage," the headline reads. Panic set in with some users, who discovered they couldn't get access to their e-mails, fearful that urgent messages were being missed. Companies that store their documents online with Google suddenly found they couldn't access them, raising fears their work was lost."

Google's troubles got a big airing online as users vented. The topic was among the most popular on Twitter, the micro-blogging service, where people posted things like "Google's down and the world stops ... Scary" and "Uh oh, Google is having issues. Let Internet calamity ensue."

Scary is right. The conclusion? In recent years, Google has marketed to companies the use of its online products, such as e-mail and documents, as an alternative to desktop software. But these outages could persuade potential customers to keep the technology in-house rather than paying Google to take care of it.
Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesman, acknowledged outages like Thursday's attract a lot of attention. However, "cloud computing," as the online software is generically known, is more reliable than companies operating their own data centers.

It's the thinking--or lack of it--behind such dependency that bothers me. And business practices that make it uncompetitive to use common sense, like storing vital data both online and on site.

When people fail to take common sense precautions for possible if not inevitable technical problems, it's bad for them. But when redundancy and thinking ahead to possible calamity is normal thinking, then we may really be in trouble. Are people thinking about earthquakes and storms? Are they so tied in--so hooked to GPS that a solar flare or some microwave hoohaw can endanger people, perhaps a city, a nation? Etc.

It's time to put some paranoids--or at least some farmers--on the payroll. Meanwhile, I'm going to do my best to keep a landline even if I have to get a cell phone.

The second story is more directly frightening, and in a sense larger. It was on the front page of the New York Times: it turns out that nobody can find out what may cause salmonella in prepared food. Here's the money graph: Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show."

Let that sink in. Companies we depend on for food don't know who is supplying their ingredients. THEY DON'T KNOW WHO IS SUPPLYING THEIR INGREDIENTS? How in a sane society is that even possible? Yeah, I know, that's an unwarranted assumption about this society. But the insane economics of gathering ingredients from great distances in order to make food cheaper--cheaper? Maybe that's the essence of the craziness. Only lunatic bookkeeping would suggest that transporting huge amounts of foodstuffs halfway around the world is cheaper. It eco-illogical.

Where I live we have much better than average knowledge and choice of local food, and much more choice of fresh food than much of the country. But I may not always have the choice of living here, so it's yet another nail in the coffin: if lack of good medical care doesn't kill me, maybe my food will.

Could we think ahead a little please? Could we think a little?

Waterboarding Is Not A Virus

Waterboarding was always a stupid term for what had previously been known as the drowning torture. Waterboarding sounds like some fun form of surfing. Guess what? It isn't.

But waterboarding was the term the media adopted. Now that more information is coming out about how often and how sloppily it was used by interrogators authorized by the Bush Administration, how useless and counterproductive it was in obtaining information, and how cynically it was used to extract predetermined and false information, the word is more current than ever.

And so it is being bandied about with little regard to its gravity or to its specific meaning. Comedians like Limbaugh and Wanda Sykes use it for punch lines, and others are adopting it, mostly for its current attention-getting value, and using it where it has no specific meaning.

The worst offenders I've seen so far are environmentalists. The failure of the Obama Administration to extend habitat protection to the polar bear that includes the effects of global heating--a decision I strenuously disagree with--has been stupidly characterized (in the message line of an email from the Center for Biological Diversity) as a decision that "waterboards polar bears."

That is a misuse, though it has some metaphorical claim, since the effect of global heating is to melt the ice, and polar bears drown. But now another environmentalist headlines his piece "EPA clears waterboarding for Appalachia." The topic is mountaintop mining, a horrifically destructive practice. But it has nothing whatever to do with the drowning torture. Nothing.

Language is not a virus. Memes don't exist. Words and expressions get adopted--more swiftly now in the age of Twitter--and so they are fads for awhile, or perhaps slang, until they fade away or are adopted as useful.

But people can choose what words they use, and how to use them. The use of a word is either apt or wrong, intelligent or stupid. The use of waterboarding in these contexts is wrong and stupid. The word becomes watered down to the point that it becomes meaningless, and why? To capture somebody's roving eye in the fast and heavy competition for attention. At best, these misuses of "waterboarding" are lazy, at worst exploitative.

We ruin our language at our peril, especially now, when small ripples of information make enormous changes quickly, and as attention moves on, those changes can keep operating in unforeseen ways. When we diminish our language, we lose another tool of insight and communication, when our survival and our future depends on them.

Congratulations to Brooke Grant of nearby Hoopa, CA, voted Miss Indian World at the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in New Mexico. She has lineage in three of our North Coast peoples (Hupa, Karuk and Yurok) as well as Chippewa. This is her Traditional song, part of the ceremony of coming of age for young girls.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that." Martin Luther King. Photo is of two galaxies becoming one.

My Name is Kafka, How May I Help You?

Our phone hasn't been working for weeks. Apart from the blessed silence, there has been the never-ending battle to get some attention from The Phone Company. Back in the day, when they first were The Phone Company, Ma Bell, etc., the monopoly and public utility combined, you could at least call the nearest office, talk to somebody, and get the appropriate repair person. Now, even though we live in a town the population of which would fit easily into a middling college stadium, with a larger but still fairly small city a few miles away, we're left with 800 numbers that don't work, talking to robots and India, and an online system designed to discourage anyone from using it.

And guess what, the monopoly never left, just the service. For us, it's the same company: AT&T, which bought up the various local and regional companies that were formed when Bell was forced to shed them in the 1970s. Well, Ma Bell is back, only now she's even more Kafkaesque.

The Phone Company got broken up because it was a monopoly, and because as such, it controlled the introduction of new products and limited choices. They owned the phones and everything else connected with them. So now we have a bewildering array of choices, plus all the complexities of what the phone company is responsible for and what they aren't. And the monopoly, where it counts: the wire.

The alternative for Internet is the cable company, another monopoly, which is just as allergic to service.

Check out their web pages and try and find how to contact them to get a problem diagnosed and repaired. If you accidentally hit upon the right 800 number, try getting a repair appointment out of their robot voice. You can scream "agent!" and "operator!" at him, and after a wait you might get one. Who will refer you to another number--and the same robot.

Our problem is complicated, having to do with the DSL jack, even though the DSL is fine at the moment, but the phone doesn't work. We've figured out that much, with the help of an electrician and the one human being apparently not in India I managed to talk to.

We're seriously considering joining the now one-third of Americans who have cell phones but no land line. But that's not much of a solution. We still have to deal with the DSL, or else go to cable, and the cable company is just as service-averse. Their web page is no better. They all offer you a stunning array of options to buy stuff and services. AT&T is apparently in the satellite TV business now as well. But try to find a contact number.

In addition to discouraging low-profit services like repair, there is the additional motive of discouraging land lines altogether, partly because they aren't as profitable in general than cellular, but also because there are legal requirements, in order to insure that all Americans have the basic right of phone service, no matter where they live. That makes the whole business less profitable, and therefore, something to discourage.

The cynicism of all this is pretty sickening, but equally sickening is the ethic behind it. It's all about buying, not repairing. That's a big problem with the alternative: the cell phone is the epitome of the throwaway culture. There are millions of cell phones--perhaps billions by now--that had a brief life of use but will exist for much longer as long-term toxic waste. E-waste is a growing problem that will soon be overwhelming.

I don't have one, although this now probably means I will have to give up my goal of being the last American to have a cell phone, but I'm pretty sure that the idea of getting a cell phone repaired would create blank stares in an entire generation. It does not compute.

In the meantime, don't call us, we'll call you. On Margaret's cell phone.

Emerson for the Day

"The moral nature is not a patch of light here, whilst the social world is a lump of darkness there, but tends incessantly to rectify and ennoble the whole circumference of facts." Emerson, journal November 6, 1839

Though this photo is from awhile ago, it's been a moody, rainy start to May so far. So why not more empathy in politics talk, in the posts below? And happy Cinquo de Mayo!

The Other Side of Empathy

Empathy is not just about identifying with the good guys. It's also getting into the heads of people who do destructive stuff. PBS just finished running the latest BBC dramatic version of Little Dorrit, the novel by Charles Dickens, and Dickens made a living getting into the heads and hearts and souls of heroes and villains, and especially the people who switch between being one to being the other.

President Obama has a contemporary novelist's approach when he talked to a writer for the New York Times Magazine on the subject of the financial future. He started out being deftly analytical, saying that the financial sector is not going to be the same even after recovery. But when asked whether we'd "miss it" he went straight to the kind of detail that a novelist would notice:

"We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan. "

It's a portrait of a culture of excess that Dickens would appreciate. We can laugh at that 25-year old, or react with envy, anger or satisfaction that this will change. But Obama knows that for these people--the young executives and the waiters--life is going to change in ways they may not like or be prepared for. It's a human problem, for them as well as for the unemployed auto worker in Detroit, or the young and sincere starting their careers and their families in companies and jobs that are going to change, having nothing to do with anything they personally did or didn't do.

But Dickens, like Obama, would also see the larger picture. (A key plot point in Little Dorrit after all is a financial bubble and a Ponzi scheme, with familiarly devastating effects.) Obama continued:

But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years.... Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design."

He also talked about some of the kinds of jobs in the new green economy that use skills that mean something of value to the people who have them, like jobs "where you’ve got a bunch of welders and tradesmen who are now retrofitting buildings. They’re not performing the same kind of manufacturing that their fathers might have, but with similar skill sets they are now making hospitals and schools and office buildings much more energy efficient, and then that’s providing enormous value to the economy as a whole."

There's empathy that informs ideas of what's needed in a positive sense, but also a kind of empathy to understand the impacts and therefore the resistance to change. This means that President Obama doesn't just listen to the point of view of opponents as different positions on issues, but from their perspective as people. This is a key to two-way communication. He may not convince every corporation that enjoys tax havens overseas to support his proposals to close those loopholes, announced Monday. But he's going to convince some--especially those who are doing it because their competitors are doing it.

Having empathy with someone doesn't mean therefore you're going to change your principles or policies. It isn't weakness, though our conflict-driven media storylines would like to depict it as such. It's part of understanding, that informs intelligent action, and helps to both form policy and communicate the need for it.

The Justice of Empathy

President Obama speaks frequently about the need for empathy. He did so in outlining the qualities he will be looking for in choosing a new Supreme Court Justice to replace David Souter, who announced that he'd like to retire at the end of the current Court term in June.

Even before he named the usual judicial qualities--respect for the rule of law, deep understanding of the Constitution, President Obama said:

"Now, the process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious responsibilities as President. So I will seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity. I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives -- whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes..."

Obama is likely the first President to repeatedly use the term "empathy." The "pathy" part (from the Greek) is about feeling. The "em" (also from the Greek) in this case means "to cause [one] to be in [another.] Sympathy is close but different, both in practice and in its roots. "Sym" is a prefix similiar to "co-," so it means "with" or "together."

Sometimes the difference is described as: "I feel sympathy for what you are going through." Whereas empathy is more like "I feel what you are going through." Sympathy may be more general, but empathy--while it can lead to wider action--begins with the very specific. As the terms are used, sympathy often implies pity, assuming the superior position of one over another. Empathy implies equality.

Both sympathy and empathy require acts of imagination, but the imaginative identification for empathy is arguably stronger. Empathy often requires the power of story. President Obama reads ten letters from Americans each day, to learn their stories. He renews his empathy.

But often the stories that evoke empathy in many of us require imaginative telling as well as hearing. This is why good storytelling--in dramatic and literary forms--is as important to a sense of justice and a society that values equality as any legislation or social or political action in a democracy. This special kind of dreaming is important to the soul of the future, which must cultivate, value and commit to empathy.

In a recent Times Literary Supplement review of a novel by Nobel Laureate J. M. G. Le Clezio of France, Natasha Lehrer wrote: "If empathy is at the heart of the novelist's undertaking, then there is no doubt that Le Clezio deserves his accolades." This sense that empathy is at the heart of the novelist's undertaking is a salutary thought for all of us, including novelists.

"I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air. I am to fire with what skill I can the artillery of sympathy and emotion. I am to indicate constantly, though all unworthy, the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, the Forgotten Good, the Unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin. I am to try the magic of sincerity, that luxury permitted only to kings and poets. I am to celebrate the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time. I am to console the brave sufferers under evils whose end they cannot see by appeals to the great optimism, self-affirmed in all bosums."

R.W. Emerson, Journal entry, October 18, 1839.

Coo Coo Ca Cockatoo

Get an early start on the weekend: Rock out with Snowball, the dancing cockatoo. Turns out humans aren't the only dancers on the planet. Duh. (Despite the stutters in this video--the BBC has a better one--this is real, at least according to this accompanying story.)

Swine

The flu formerly known as swine may or may not amount to much this spring--evidence so far is not so much, though WHO scientists caution it's still too early to tell. It's both fascinating and disconcerting to hear doctors and medical reporters say contradictory things about it--for instance, on why younger patients have been hit harder (I've heard both that it's because of undeveloped immune systems, and immune systems that are too good and produce stuff that blocks up the lungs in fighting the infection). But one thing I heard that makes at least common sense is that this is a dress rehearsal: flu of any kind usually weakens in the spring and pretty much disappears in the summer, but a new spring strain typically recurs the following fall.

As a political opportunity it's also losing focus. For the GOPers, there's not enough travail to nail the Obama Administration with anything, and for Dems there's not enough to nail the GOPers with the consequences of crippling public health and killing flu prep money in the stim by calling it pork. Or of holding up key health appointments for unrelated political purposes. Even the entertainment value of the secessionist Texas gov begging for federal help didn't last long. The fickle national attention span moved on, before we got a real good look at who the swine really are.

But in the end it's a good thing: politics and public health crises don't mix, as was evidenced the last time the U.S. tried to deal with swine flu in the 70s. Neither party's administration distinguished themselves in that debacle. The Obama Administration's cool, competent and caring approach is the appropriate one.

A Transformational President

It's 100 dizzying days later, and President Barack Obama is already being called a transformational leader, which is what we needed and what the American people voted for. His job approval rating in all major polls is above 60% and his personal approval rating in the NBC poll is above 80%. In these dire times, America is happy with its leader, and more hopeful than it was. Today both houses of Congress passed his budget, which builds on the Recovery Act to address pressing needs and future investment. Secretary of HHS Sebellius was confirmed yesterday, although that news was swamped by PA Senator Specter joining the Democratic Party, which should help at least symbolically in passing the remaining major elements of the President's agenda for this year. The transformation is on: full speed ahead.

"The future must bear within it every past."--Wallace
Stevens. Photo: Eagle Nebula from Hubble (NASA).

Rahm was Right: Read the New York Review of Books!

Update: A version of this made the Rescued list at Daily Kos.

When the release of the torture memos was criticized, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel responded, "Go get the New York Review of Books!"
He's right--and for more reasons than he meant specifically in that interview.

He was talking about the Mark Danner articles about the secret Red Cross report on U.S. torture, that ran in the April 9 and April 30 issues. But this kind of reporting, which may seem odd to those who don't know the tradition of the New York Review of Books, is only one reason to read this periodical.

As it happens, my subscription is up for renewal. So I'm about to tell you why I'm ponying up to renew it. The first reason is that tradition of reporting represented by Danner, with the kind of courage and in the kind of detail that got me reading this periodical a long time ago.

In the mid and late 60s, when the very young New York Review was among the few publications to expose the lies supporting the Vietnam War. It did so with essays and reporting, and with--perhaps most surprising to readers today--reviews of books.

I recall one vividly. It was a review of Air War: Vietnam by Frank Harvey, which simply reported on the reality of U.S. bombing and the devastation it caused. The review by author Robert Crichton (which is excerpted on the back of the paperback edition of the book)reproduced sections of the book and summarized others. The book had been published some time before and was unnoticed until this review.

For those of us not in New York or even on a large politically active campus, sources of information were few. We got pamphlets etc. from various antiwar organizations, but we relied on just a few sources, like the magazine Ramparts in San Francisco, a scattering of articles in Esquire and other magazines, but most of all, the New York Review of Books.

This was important, because opposition to the war was fed by facts, despite the movies you may have seen. Teach-ins were important and substantive. We were steeped in the history of southeast Asia, in the experiences of colonial regimes, in geopolitical theory and realities,as well as the suppressed facts about what was actually happening in Vietnam. So the recent Mark Danner pieces are squarely within that tradition. (They are online here and here.)

But just as important as the reporting and political discussion is the context of books and the culture of intelligence. We exist in an interrelated world where it is impossible to understand politics--and such complex and emotional issues as torture as an interrogation technique--without knowing as much as we can about what humans are thinking and feeling in a given time, and where historically those thoughts and feelings come from, as well as what light current science can shed on what seems inexplicable. Plus it's a big world.

There are lots of books published about all kinds of important and fascinating subjects, as well as novels and volumes of poetry that provide their own kinds of information on our world. The New York Review's writers--among the best writers and scholars around---write in depth and enough length to give us the gist of the books under discussion (and let's face it, it's unlikely we'll read all of them, so this is about as much as we'll learn from them) as well as trenchant commentary and informed context.

The April 9 issue, containing the first Danner piece, is a great example. It has Pico Iyer reporting on the current situation in Tibet and the Dalai Lama. It's relatively brief yet covers a lot of ground incisively, informed by personal experience, so it's probably the best you could read anywhere.

How about connecting the economic crisis to the foundation ideas of major religions, as well as the planet, the past and the future? Novelist Margaret Atwood does in a new nonfiction book, and John Gray's review describes and summarizes it in a tantalizing way.

There's also an interesting review of Robert Kaiser's book on lobbying in Washington, Anthony Lewis on a book about lawyers, pieces on the South African president who followed Mandella and the courts in Cambodia.

But in this same issue is a review of a new novel by Zoe Heller, Freeman Dyson writing about a new book on a unified physics theory, Jeremy Bernstein on Big Science. Books on Lincoln, what makes the French French, and Flannery O'Connor.

There is also the best article I've read on the poetry of John Ashbery, by Dan Chiasson. It's trenchant and comprehensive, and without jargon, cant or any obscurity. It is a great example of what the New York Review publishes at its best. I believe in the liberal arts ideal as well as liberal ideals--and this publication brings both to life, in the moment.

This is the Spring Books issue, so not every issue is this big or good, but it gives an accurate idea of the range. Politically as in the arts and sciences, the Review gives space to well articulated arguments of various persuasions--in fact, the new May 14 issue has an article calling for the limitation of presidential power by Senator Arlen Specter.

The New York Review places some but not all of its articles on the Internet, so the paper edition is essential. My biggest problem with the Review is the same now as it always was: getting to read all that I want to before the next issue arrives. This year I did pretty well through the fall and winter until March. Now I'm behind. But the publication schedule slows in the summer (it's normally every two weeks), so I'm looking forward to some hours in the sun catching up. Right now though I have to make sure the issues keep coming, by renewing my subscription.

State of the Hope: The First 100 Days

The headlines say he's touched off a firestorm on both right and left on the torture issue. The headlines say the banks are resisting his proposed credit card reforms. The blogs say he's trying to do too much, he's not doing enough. The Republican obsessed cable shows duly report and debate every flaky pompous self-serving crass piece of idiocy anyone says or belches about how he's ineffective and wrongheaded.

Oh yeah?

The Associated Press:

"For the first time in years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, a sign that Barack Obama has used the first 100 days of his presidency to lift the public's mood and inspire hopes for a brighter future.

Intensely worried about their personal finances and medical expenses, Americans nonetheless appear realistic about the time Obama might need to turn things around, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. It shows most Americans consider their new president to be a strong, ethical and empathetic leader who is working to change Washington."

Act Locally

For Earth Day 2009, President Obama went to an Iowa factory that manufactures wind power turbines to continue his economic argument for ecological sanity: "The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy—it’s a choice between prosperity and decline,” said Obama. “The nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.”

He spoke in support of the EPA finding that greenhouse gases are harmful pollution and should be regulated. He also announced that the federal government is beginning the process of leasing offshore areas for electricity generation projects using wind and ocean currents.

That's good news for us here on the North Coast, where interest in using wave power has already generated some encouraging studies and discussion. Apparently our offshore area is prime for this kind of power.

Federal leadership and seed money are crucial, but local and state efforts are where things happen. California continues to lead in the attempts to control carbon emissions. The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that "The California Air Resources Board is expected to approve on Thursday a far-reaching rule called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, the biggest step yet in the state's campaign to slash greenhouse gas emissions."

The Bay Area is also participating if not leading in innovation to foster a green economy. Another Chronicle story reports: Several Bay Area companies, including Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Google Inc., were recognized Tuesday for pioneering environmental-saving innovations that cut costs and create new business. Smaller businesses are also recognized.

But there are other kinds of efforts that are just as crucial in safeguarding our planetary resources. Back when Earth Day started, so did recycling efforts (which so many experts said people would never do. They were wrong.) The full and too often forgotten mantra was "Reuse, Reduce, Recycle." One of the worst things we're doing that's poisoning our shared resources and causing geometrically increasing damage is dumping huge amounts of stuff, a lot of it toxic. No one seems to want to talk about it, but we're rapidly busy filling up and poisoning the earth with millions of cell phones a year.

But even with ordinary, non-toxic stuff, we've lost the ethic of repair and reuse. The Great Recession however is starting to reverse those practices. Yet another Chronicle piece reports on a suddenly thriving business: SCRAP, or Scroungers' Center for Reusable Art Parts. It's more than art parts now--it's become a place where companies with surplus stuff (because they're downsizing or going out of business or just changing inventory) unload without discarding, and where people with various needs can buy the stuff cheap.

The stuff includes clothing from Banana Republic, a textile company and an architecture firm, for instance. There are other companies besides SCRAP doing similar work in the Bay Area, most of which have been around for years (SCRAP for 30 years or so.) The difference is interest--and more stuff, being reused in more ways. "We used to have people come for things to accessorize. Now we have more people making their own clothing."

Looking around, Kraft said, "This was all going to be garbage. Companies probably would have just thrown it away. It's such great stuff."

Blue Planet

Last Chance

We're probably down to the wire on addressing the Climate Crisis to avoid planetary tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions and duration. The worst of it could begin later in this century, unless we stop the process now. It's humankind's last chance to redeem itself, before it become the species that kills the others. The experiment in complex life that didn't work out.

So optimism is a relative thing, and hope springs this spring in Washington. First the EPA finding on Friday: "said rising sea levels, increased flooding and more intense heat waves and storms that come with climate change are a threat to public health and safety. The agency predicted that warming will worsen other pollution problems such as smog." Declaring greenhouse gases pollution a threat to health and safety signals that the EPA will take steps to regulate it, even if Congress doesn't act.

This week could be the beginning of an historic shift, as Climate Crisis legislation comes forward for consideration. Apart from the important shift represented by the Obama administration, there is growing support if not yet consensus. "For the first time ever, we have got the political actors all aligned," said Richard Lazarus, Georgetown University environmental activist and author. "That is not enough to get a law passed, but that is a huge start. We haven't been close to that before." So the work is just beginning.

Of course, there is tremendous opposition, especially from fossil fuel conglomerates, as well as their sad sack know-nothing minions, tea-baggers all.

But it's getting harder for reasonable people not to see what's happening, or to see that the solutions are beneficial anyway. Forbes magazine has just named Denmark as the best country in the world for business--partly because it has one of the strongest committments in the world to reduce carbon, and a relentless effort to conserve energy and develop and use clean energy technology.

The dangers of not confronting the crisis--a frequent topic at international gatherings, like the recent one of Latin American nations-- were outlined by Energy Secretary Steven Chu as comparable to an Ice Age in reverse. Chu is direct, as is President Obama's chief negotiator on the next round of Climate Crisis international agreements, Todd Stern. They know the reality and what is at stake. The deck at this point is stacked against all of us: we may be too late, we may do too little. But we have to try, and if we've got any chance at all, now is the time to seriously start.

April is the New May

In 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted lilacs in some 70 locations in the northeast, and noted when they first bloomed. Figuring that the onset of spring was signalled by the lilacs blooming, the USDA was trying to help determine the best time for planting crops, like corn. But what they now have is a record of when lilacs bloomed in the past 44 years. And they are blooming as much as two weeks earlier now than in 1965.

Other evidence of early spring (and summer) onset is discussed in new books by Amy Seidl (Early Spring) and Stephan Farris (Forecast) but almost anyone in agriculture or forestry, etc. from wineries in California to corn growers in Iowa to maple sugar producers in New England can tell you this has been happening, and it's starting to have an impact. Sugar maples in New England (above right), for example, are dying and may soon be virtually extinct. The rippling effect of climate change--from northern species dying out to disease-carrying insects moving north--is just beginning. For now, some of it is pleasant, as April becomes the new May. But it's already starting to change lives and livelihoods, and a sane society would have noticed that by now.

Pillar of the Future: Fiscal Discipline

The final pillar of the future in President Obama's speech at Georgetown was restoring fiscal discipline in the federal budget. The topic of government spending and taxes inevitably comes up at tax time, pumped up this year by some big Republican lobbying firms and FOX news, owned by the biggest media company in the world, in the guise of a grassroots revolt.

Apart from very troubling matters of tone (which I'm writing about elsewhere), the tax-and-spend portion of this revolt is revoltingly incoherent and exploitive. In a month when 95% of American families are starting to receive the tax cuts that President Obama made a key part of his recovery package, Republicans ignore this inconvenient fact to complain about taxes--which their administration did nothing to lower, except for the very rich. And after eight years turning a surplus into huge deficits and debt, the Republicans complain about deficits and government spending.

To show how little sense they make requires nothing more than quoting President Obama in this speech. First of all, he talks about successful efforts to cut spending in the budget by eliminating unneeded programs and budget items. "Already, we have identified two trillion dollars in deficit-reductions over the next decade...Altogether, this budget will reduce discretionary spending for domestic programs as share of the economy by more than 10% over the next decade to the lowest level since we began keeping records nearly half a century ago. And as we continue to go through the federal budget line by line, we will be announcing additional savings, secured by eliminating and consolidating programs we don't need so that we can make room for the things we do need."

Before talking about entitlement reform he adds these common sense points:

"First, as I said earlier, the worst thing that we could do in a recession this severe is to try to cut government spending at the same time as families and businesses around the world are cutting back on their spending. So as serious as our deficit and debt problems are – and they are very serious – major efforts to deal with them have to focus on the medium and long-term budget picture.

Second, in tackling the deficit issue, we simply cannot sacrifice the long-term investments that we so desperately need to generate long-term prosperity. Just as a cash-strapped family may cut back on luxuries but will insist on spending money to get their children through college, so we as a country have to make current choices with an eye on the future. If we don't invest now in renewable energy or a skilled workforce or a more affordable health care system, this economy simply won't grow at the pace it needs to in two or five or ten years down the road. If we don't lay this new foundation, it won't be long before we are right back where we are today. And I can assure you that chronically slow growth will not help our long-term budget situation."

He then talks about the need for all parties to come together to fashion serious reforms of Medicare and Social Security, because only this will really deal with long-term federal deficits.

"But let's not kid ourselves and suggest that we can do it by trimming a few earmarks or cutting the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts," he said.

But of course, that's exactly what Republicans and these anti-tax rebels talk about. They aren't serious. They're trying to score political points. They aren't trying to solve big problems, or any problems at all, except how to win elections and serve the interests of their rich backers. They'll use anyone and anything to keep doing that. They aren't interested in governing, and they aren't interested in the well-being and the future of America.

President Obama ended his speech with his vision of the future, once these pillars and this foundation is in place: "There is no doubt that times are still tough. By no means are we out of the woods just yet. But from where we stand, for the very first time, we are beginning to see glimmers of hope.

And beyond that, way off in the distance, we can see a vision of an America's future that is far different than our troubled economic past. It's an America teeming with new industry and commerce; humming with new energy and discoveries that light the world once more. A place where anyone from anywhere with a good idea or the will to work can live the dream they've heard so much about.

It is that house upon the rock. Proud, sturdy, and unwavering in the face of the greatest storm. We will not finish it in one year or even many, but if we use this moment to lay that new foundation; if we come together and begin the hard work of rebuilding; if we persist and persevere against the disappointments and setbacks that will surely lie ahead, then I have no doubt that this house will stand and the dream of our founders will live on in our time. "

Pillar of the Future: Health Care

"The fourth pillar of the new foundation is a 21st century health care system where families, businesses, and government budgets aren't dragged down by skyrocketing insurance premiums" President Obama said in his Georgetown U. speech. "Fixing our health care system will certainly require resources, but in my budget, we've made a commitment to fully pay for reform without increasing the deficit, and we've identified specific savings that will make the health care system more efficient and reduce costs for us all."

Universal health care is necessary not just for individuals but for companies, large and small, swamped by the cost of health insurance. To help the budgets of individuals, families and businesses, health care will free money for other purposes in both the short and long terms, and therefore is a critical part of economic recovery and restructuring. But President Obama made one other point, that isn't usually noticed.

At first he seemed to be moving on from the pillar of health care to the pillar of reducing the federal deficit. But after explaining the need to deal with the long term government deficit and how his administration is attacking this problem (more on that in a post to follow), he spoke about the need to reform entitlements like Medicare and Social Security in order to forestall greater deficits, and to meet this goal, "Nothing will be more important to this goal than passing health care reform that brings down costs across the system, including in Medicare and Medicaid. Make no mistake: health care reform is entitlement reform. That's not just my opinion – that was the conclusion of a wide range of participants at the Fiscal Responsibility Summit we held at the White House in February, and that's one of the reasons why I firmly believe we need to get health care reform done this year."

Pillar of the Future: Energy

"The third pillar of this new foundation is to harness the renewable energy that can create millions of new jobs and new industries," said President Obama in his speech at Georgetown. This is crucial to our future for many reasons: to save scarce resources and reduce pollution, environmental destruction and waste; to end dependence on foreign oil and foreign wars for oil; to reduce global heating and head off a history-ending Climate Crisis. To name a few.

But at Georgetown, President Obama concentrated on American competitiveness in the world: renewable, sustainable and clean energy is the technology of today, the crucial need of the world's future, and therefore America's best opportunity to do what it has traditionally done best: invent, innovate and build new industries for customers around the world.

"We all know that the country that harnesses this energy will lead the 21st century," the President said. "Yet we have allowed other countries to outpace us on this race to the future. Well, I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders. It is time for America to lead again.

The investments we made in the Recovery Act will double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years. And we are putting Americans to work making our homes and buildings more efficient so that we can save billions on our energy bills and grow our economy at the same time."

Science will invent, entrepreneurs will innovate and industries will spring up not only because there is a need, but because there is demand--and for demand to grow fast enough, the price of clean energy must be competitive. It's getting there now, but President Obama wants to give it a nudge--while reducing the greenhouse gases that are causing the growing Climate Crisis.

This is a simple formula, but it is daring to propose it. But for those who say fighting greenhouse gases pollution through carbon cap-and-trade should be left to another day when the economy is fixed, President Obama says doing it now is necessary to fixing the economy, both in terms of immediate economic activity and in his overall plan to build the foundation for a strong economy for the foreseeable future. Read what he said carefully:

"But the only way to truly spark this transformation is through a gradual, market-based cap on carbon pollution, so that clean energy is the profitable kind of energy. Some have argued that we shouldn't attempt such a transition until the economy recovers, and they are right that we have to take the costs of transition into account. But we can no longer delay putting a framework for a clean energy economy in place. If businesses and entrepreneurs know today that we are closing this carbon pollution loophole, they will start investing in clean energy now. And pretty soon, we'll see more companies constructing solar panels, and workers building wind turbines, and car companies manufacturing fuel-efficient cars. Investors will put some money into a new energy technology, and a small business will open to start selling it. That's how we can grow this economy, enhance our security, and protect our planet at the same time."

Other efforts along these lines are building a smart and secure electrical grid--another area where other countries are moving ahead--and Thursday's announcement of a plan for a new, smart high-speed rail network.

Go Ask Alice

Something to ponder in view of Wednesday GOP "tea parties" and the Rabid Right in general. For Alice's adventures at one, try companion blog American Dash here.