Silence in the Snowy Field

"His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

In anything that he constructed, so frail,

So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

He became an inhabitant, obedient

To gallant notions on the part of cold."

--Wallace Stevens

Cheers to all our family and friends in the Middle Atlantic and East Coast states where the snow is falling. And piling up. And so on. While all we get here is rain and earthquakes. Seriously, appreciate it while you can, as our planet does.

The top photo is from the Twin Cities--somewhere near them in Minnesota I recall standing in a field reading Robert Bly out loud to a laughing dark-haired girl, a long time ago. The bottom photo is mine, also from long ago, of snow in the yard in western PA where I played as a boy.

...For the similarly deprived out here on the West Coast, a neat bunch of snowy scenes.

Update 2/6: Wooah! Snowmageddon! I didn't mean to be insensitive to problems created by monster snowstorms in the East. Maybe I posted in haste, before the fact. Still, I'll bet it's possible in some places at least to appreciate and maybe even enjoy a nice big snowfall ?

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"There is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly."

Vaclav Havel

Obama, Optimism and Dreaming Up Daily

Close readers may wonder at my mood swings. One day I'm muttering darkly about impending doom, the next I'm quoting President Obama at length about his policies to make things better, and then quoting Howard Zinn on being hopeful. So what gives? What's the secret of my schizzy point(s) of view?

It's not really contradictory, but it may be complex. I admire President Obama for what he's accomplished and what he's trying to accomplish, and I approve of his message. He's a better President and U.S. leader than I thought we'd see again in my lifetime, and I have confidence in him (unfortunately, pretty much only him) to do what it is possible to do, given the current realities of politics and the rest of it.

The difference is this: President Obama professes to be optimistic about the American future. That is, he's optimistic that we can transition into a better future with relatively little pain or disruption. I am not. He's trying to do many things that need to be done, and he'll get done what it is possible to get done. But I don't believe that what really needs to get done to insure the future is realistically possible.

The toxic political culture is not going to permit the kind of change that's necessary. The Republican party is more extreme than ever, its membership is totally of the Rabid Right, for whom the Dark Ages of Ignorance constitutes the promised land. If you have any doubts about that, just glance at the results of the Research 2000 poll. This probably does mean that the Republican Party is shrinking in numbers, but it is still supported by powerful corporations pushing an anti-future agenda. Some of those corporations own information media. And since there are only five major media companies left, that power to control the conversation is considerable.

Meanwhile, electoral politics depends on the growing number of Independents. Independent is a fine sounding name, but it seems to me most Independents are basically politically unsophisticated, easily swayed and manipulated--especially by fear. They go for slogans and new faces. They're not the kind of voters you want to depend on.

We need to do some big things to save the future. But we can't even get a health care bill that has been compromised half to death, and against which there is not a single sound argument, and certainly not a humane one. Instead our political dialogue is frighteningly primitive.

The Obama administration can't even get the media, let alone the people, to acknowledge its considerable accomplishments--even in Congress, and especially in the federal government. But those accomplishments are mostly attempts to repair the damage of 8 disastrous Bush years. Just as Clinton had to struggle for 8 years to repair the damage wreaked by 12 years of right wing GOPer rule. At best, we're getting nowhere.

President Obama is nudging the country to accept the idea that clean energy is America's economic future, that this is America's chance to lead the world again. That's the broadest political argument that it is possible to make, absent the acceptance that clean energy is the only future for civilization. Yet he's getting plenty of resistance on this. Meanwhile, China is already cleaning our clock.

Not that it matters all that much. Because these beginning efforts, while essential, are not going to ease us into a better future.

It's the same with the efforts to halt Climate Crisis feeding pollution. It looks as if the U.S. is not going to adopt carbon cap and trade, nor a carbon tax, and so these efforts will be even weaker. President Obama will do what he can, but the fossil fuel industries still have their grip on the throat of the future. This is just the latest testament to their decades of obstruction and lies. Probably all you need to know is that the Saudi royal family is the second biggest investor in News Corps, the ultra-conservative media conglomerate and owner of Fox News. A foreign power with a vested interest in keeping the U.S. dependent on oil is bankrolling the loudest voices opposing any sensible response to the Climate Crisis, which would involve ending dependence on oil.

But even that may not matter in terms of the character of the future. Despite the noise over some insignificant errors, and the built-in uncertainty of details, the larger conclusions of the Climate Crisis are so solid the Pentagon is planning for them. The change I detect is the growing concern is that it's too late to stop the Climate Crisis from having significant consequences--so significant and for such a long time, that the second half of this century will look nothing like now, and that will just be the beginning.

I'm reading David Orr's new book, and it looks to be the beginning of a new consensus. The effects so far (mostly running way ahead of predictions) suggest that the effects of the greenhouse gas pollution of the past 70 years will be devastating. The subtitle of Orr's book is "Confronting Climate Collapse." The subtitle of Bill McKibben's forthcoming book this spring is "Making A Life on a Tough New Planet."

Scientists and others began talking about the potential for devastating global heating in the 60s. Arthur C. Clarke told Arthur Miller back then that it threatened the future. We've known enough about climate change to do something about it since the 70s, and scientists put together proposals for President Carter, but nothing was done. We could have acted then, or even in the 80s, and maybe avoided what's going to happen. Maybe even in the 90s, when Al Gore was vice president. Maybe even if the 2000 election hadn't been stolen. But it didn't happen, and now it's probably too late to prevent a civilization-straining change in the climate that will make the planet we know only a memory.

It's still important to cut back climate deforming pollution, to prevent even worse consequences further in the future. But it looks increasingly to me that the smartest people are looking beyond the present, to figure out how to deal with the very great changes coming in the future.

I expect my own attention to be moving in that direction as well. But that's a matter of emphasis, because that's always been a concern of this site--its premise in fact. It is about "dreaming up"--that is, "dreaming up" ideas, using the imagination--to counter the "downward bound" movement of events.

Part of that "dreaming up" is the activity of hope, an act first of all of the imagination, and Zinn's words are particularly appropriate. In a way, I'm going through the stages of mourning for our civilization, and I guess I've passed denial. So I am not optimistic. But I choose hope. I don't believe a future smoothly continuous with the present is going to happen. So the task now is to evaluate and create what will help the future the most, and work that hope now. It becomes the meaning of the present.

Emerson for the Day

"This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted."

Emerson

"Nature"

Happy Birth/Groundhog/Day

"I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?" So wrote James Joyce, who crawled out of the cafe, saw the shadow cast by his birthday candles, and crawled back in, predicting six more weeks of winter. At least.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Our future shouldn't be shaped by what's best for our politics; our politics should be shaped by what's best for our future."

President Barack Obama

January 29, 2010

The Obama Drama

And I thought politics was never going to be fun again.

It sure was on Friday, when President Barack Obama schooled the Republican congressional caucus for 90 minutes on live TV. "President Obama dove headfirst into the belly of the GOP beast Friday - and left the not-so-loyal opposition bleeding on a Baltimore ballroom floor," said the usually conservative New York Daily News. "He skewered Republicans for obstructionist tactics, dubious facts and a lack of civility in opposing his domestic agenda, especially health care reform."

Obama Eats Republicans Lunch," said the Guardian. "When the Republicans invited President Obama to address their congressional House delegation in Baltimore today, they had no idea how badly it would turn out for them. Presumably the Republicans thought they'd get a high-profile chance to grill the president on live television. But instead, Obama – following on from his state of the union address on Wednesday night – turned the tables by highlighting the Republicans who opposed his policies and refused to bend, yet were prepared to "turn up and cut ribbons" when their constituents reaped the rewards."

"For President Obama to be allowed 90 minutes of national television coverage speaking at the GOP retreat was historic. It was probably one of the dumbest ideas the Republican leadership has ever had," suggested an Aussie site.

(Video is here. A transcript is here.)

The Republicans really did ask for it. Maybe they got especially overconfident when President Obama was a little halting in his prepared opening remarks. So they "asked questions" by reciting their usual public lies. President Obama simply refuted them with the facts--and then explained why their lies were so harmful, for the country and even for them. He did so fluidly and effectively.

He didn't let them get away with condemning proposals that included some of their own ideas, or in characterizing those proposals as "Bolshevik plots." He deployed humor, admitted mistakes and faulted Democrats for also going to extremes simply for political advantage, leaving little room for the kind of compromises necessary to govern.

He also came as close to anger as we've seen him--close enough when his final questioner was speechifying that you know you wouldn't want him really mad at you. Above all, he was direct. "I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign." He corrected the GOPer distortion on the federal budget and said plainly, "that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true."

If it wasn't clear before, we have a President of clear intelligence and vision, and formidable political skills. Above all he demonstrated that when the test is fact, his policies have been appropriate attempts to deal with the facts, and usually successful attempts.

Democrats were ecstatic--even comparing Obama to the greatest of them all, President Bartlet. Some wondered where this guy has been. Well, maybe he should have engaged like this before. But people forget that the President cannot suspend the laws of time and space. He has the same number of hours in the day as everyone else, to pay attention to much more than anyone else.

But Democrats need to heed his message as well. Although the President must lead and fight this way for what needs to be done, his message was that no one party is going to tackle the toughest problems, because they are too politically dangerous. Governing is a give and take involving everyone. Especially long-term. The stakes are in that quote, from his opening statement: "Our future shouldn't be shaped by what's best for our politics; our politics should be shaped by what's best for our future."

R.I.P J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger's death was announced on Thursday. I remember him here. This top cover of The Catcher in the Rye is the famous blank one J.D. Salinger insisted on, and of the edition I first read. Salinger didn't want an illustration to interfere with how the reader imagined Holden Caulfied, and he was right. When I first saw the cover on an earlier edition (bottom photo) that my friend Mike brought on a high school debate trip, I was shocked. That wasn't my Holden. Now I have paperbacks with both of these covers. Salon has a slide show of its many other covers--though I haven't been able to get it to work myself, here's the link.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
Howard Zinn
from his book, You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train. Historian Howard Zinn's death was announced today.

I Don't Quit

President Obama's State of the Union address was masterful, personal, politically astute, beautifully reasoned and perhaps most striking--100% Obama, the same as he was as a candidate, talking now about the first year of his presidency, and his goal's for the year ahead. While I didn't agree with all his proposals, he gave no ground on the most important issues of the past year and the year ahead, and he inspires confidence as our President. He called for action on health care reform, and said he won't abandon it. He called out the Supremely Political Court for its decision opening wider the floodgates of corporate money in elections. He emphasized that jobs will be the top priority this year.

In general, I agree with Joe Klein's reaction. Check out E.J. Dionne's column as well. The media response seems to have been very positive, and in the first CBS poll, 83% approved of his proposals. A few highlights (the text as delivered is here):

"And if there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, and everybody in between, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it -- (applause.) I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal. (Laughter.) But when I ran for President, I promised I wouldn't just do what was popular -– I would do what was necessary. And if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today."

"As a result, the markets are now stabilized, and we have recovered most of the money we spent on the banks. To recover the rest, I have proposed a fee on the biggest banks. I know Wall Street isn’t keen on this idea, but if these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need."

"From the day I took office, I have been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious – that such efforts would be too contentious, that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for awhile. For those who make these claims, I have one simple question:
How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China’s not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany’s not waiting. India’s not waiting. These nations aren’t standing still. These nations aren’t playing for second place. They’re putting more emphasis on math and science. They’re rebuilding their infrastructure. They are making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well I do not accept second-place for the United States of America."

"...I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future – because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation."

"From some on the right, I expect we’ll hear a different argument – that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts for wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, and maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away. The problem is, that’s what we did for eight years. That’s what helped lead us into this crisis. It’s what helped lead to these deficits. And we cannot do it again."

"But what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent – a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game. But it is precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it is sowing further division among our citizens and further distrust in our government.

So no, I will not give up on changing the tone of our politics. I know it’s an election year. And after last week, it is clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern. To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills. And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that sixty votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions."

"We have finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us. We don’t quit. I don’t quit."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

--Justice Louis Brandeis

Emerson for the Day

"But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes, genius creates."

Emerson

"The American Scholar"

P.S. Click on the photo to really see it.

If We're Doomed, This Is Why

It's essentially all here, in one blog entry, by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress, originally posted on January 4 and still the site's most popular post. In the post, and in the comments. But before I get to that...

In the end, nobody beats evolution. You adapt to environmental changes, or you go extinct, or at least lose your character and status and start slipping back to something lesser in the long biological journey. What humanity has going for it is intelligence. But that intelligence has resulted in huge changes to the environment that demand even greater intelligence to deal with. In that sense, humanity has to take control of its own evolution. It has to change the game by changing itself, and then consciously changing the environment it has unconsciously disrupted to the point of collapse.

When Darwin first proposed evolution by natural selection, people like T. H. Huxley understood that humanity had to change the game first of all by changing its behavior based on an ethical evolution. Humans, like other animals, had the capacity for cooperation, compassion or empathy, and altruism, but humanity had to make a choice to give them prominence, and appropriate voice in its behavior. Or else it would destroy itself and its environment, thanks to its powerful but mindless and soulless technology.

Then people like H.G. Wells realized that human evolution had to speed itself up in the intelligence it applied to understanding the threats of the social environment. He saw for example that if nations continued to fight each other using technologies developed from scientific knowledge, they would destroy each other and civilization itself. The rational thing, the intelligent thing, would be to cooperate as a species. Later, ecologists showed how the intelligent thing to do is understand and foster the ecological balances that support our life. Humanity has to apply its intelligence to its place in the world, and its impacts on that world.

Though Wells died in despair months after atom bombs were dropped on Japan, the world has so far avoided blowing itself up. But in terms of just intelligence, you don't have to be too much smarter than a human child to see the rationality of what he ranted about all his life.

What takes a more sophisticated intelligence is dealing with a problem that is going to cause catastrophe--and quite probably, civilization-ending catastrophe--in the future, by unfamiliar means. So far we seem to be up to the challenge of gathering the knowledge necessary to know what's happening to the climate and why with enough precision and enough likelihood to rationally merit action to prevent the worst of it. But then the challenge is (or perhaps was) to get enough people to understand and accept this information, so that our democratic/bureaucratic societies will work together--coordinating as a single civilization--to develop and take those actions.

The challenges involved are multiple. But they represent the next steps in our evolution as a species, which turn out now to be necessary for our survival in the foreseeable future. These steps in intelligence and its application aren't beyond the physical capacities of our brains. Plenty of people have already taken them. Now they are steps in social evolution, involving changes in individual consciousness and, for want of a better word, psyches.

This is perhaps my usual all-too-wordy preface to the nub: this post and the responses. To confront this crisis of crises, the Climate Crisis, we as a species, as a civilization, must confront the evidence and what it means. That's mostly what the post itself is about. It lays it out, with all the links you could possibly want. The basic conclusions are up front: "Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected... If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century’s end." And beyond that, the end of life on earth as we know it, the end of civilization and for all intents and purposes, the extinction of humanity as we know it.

You've heard it all here before, but if we're doomed this is one reason why: we can't absorb and evaluate this information. Conceptually, we haven't evolved our thinking to cope with the reality of phenomena like feedback loops, lag times and tipping points. These relatively simple concepts concerning the behavior of complex systems are far too nuanced for anything in our politics but self-satisfied moronic ridicule.

Emotionally, we haven't evolved our feeling or consciousness to apply ethics--as well as compassion, empathy and altruism-- to all of humanity and the planet. If we did that, we would allow ourselves to see that the tremendous weight of this evidence is great enough to justify action, even if these predictions somehow turn out to be wrong. Why do we fear the miniscule chance of being the victim of terrorism, and ignore the much greater chance of huge catastrophe? Selfish genes, I guess.

Psychologically, we can't handle the truth. We go into denial, or we flop around in despair. We don't apply consciousness to at least considering that this is denial, a trick of the psyche--at best, an inappropriate survival mechanism in these circumstances. Instead, billionaires and wannabe millionaires encourage and exploit denial to extend their selfish brutal power and enrich their stupid short lives.

The evidence for all of this is everywhere, including in the comments to this post. One finds that an estimate of those who understand and accept the outlines of the coming catastrophes at 2% is too generous:

"Even my very over educated friends are mostly out-to-lunch on this and while not “deniers” they are in major league denial about the whole thing….it’s like they just can’t believe it’s THAT bad."

But the most cogent comment is from scientist Tom Kimmerer:

"As the bad scientific news keeps piling up, we need to face the reality of weather: we have had an exceptionally cold year in North America, and are in the deep freeze right now. People don’t understand climate, but they do understand weather. I suspect that if we were coming off a really hot year, all the climate denial in the world would not move public opinion. Jim Hansen once said that we will take global warming seriously when the man on the street notices. Right now, the man on the street is freezing his butt off.

As a scientist, I fully accept that global warming is real, serious and a grave threat..but if there is no local (i.e. weather) experience to back that up, it is psychologically difficult for people to take the threat seriously...If 2010 is hot in the US, we are likely to get a climate bill. If the cool spell that began this summer continues, we won’t."

Look, I appreciate the emotional impact of such experiences of the senses as a really hot summer. The memory of a few of those from the late 80s and early 90s is still with me. But are we such captives of experience of the moment that we need it all the time? I mean, we will get it--more killer heat waves, storms, droughts, tropical diseases moving ever northward, flooding--and in relentless combination. It's just that it will be too late to do much about it then. And that's the point: the test of our intelligence is to anticipate a future problem and prevent it.

"As a species," David Orr writes, "we are in our adolescence, and as common at that stage of life, we live dangerously." Gene Roddenberry used to say the same thing. Fair enough, but attitudes like the above--which I think Kimmerer correctly nails--seem more like the thinking of small children. As a species and as a civilization we have a lot of growing up to do, pretty much instantly. If we are up to that, we will have taken an evolutionary leap, and we might even fulfill the promise of our civilization and species, even after all that waste, cruelty and blood in our painful history. If we aren't up to that, we've flunked the evolutionary test.

We don't have to be perfect. We're still bristling egoes, swarming with hurt, haunted by dreams, bathing in self-deception. We just have to be adults about it all.

Not that the twenty people who will ever read this need to hear it. This cuts no ice with some people, I know, who have their own narrative of reality. Extinction, the end of civilization, is part of the plan. But if our kind of consciousness doesn't exist anywhere else, then it dies with us, disappearing from the universe. We view the end of civilization, and the extinction of humanity as we know it, a little more seriously.

Not that I'm likely to live to see it. For me, the tragedy is all this potential unfulfilled. To contemplate that is saddening. To see how it is being cut short in my own time just makes me angry.

Another ridiculously long post. Well, I never could blog.

Star Cycle

A new image from earth-based telescopes of the Cat's Paw Nebula, some 5500 light years away. The photo is notable (click on it--it's huge) because it seems to include stars being born, and stars dying. In the night sky, this nebula is about the size of a full moon.

The Grand Psychopathic Party (And the Media Who Love Them)

Now there's this predictable "analysis/advice" from Newsweek's Jon Meacham who advises that Obama be more like Reagan, because he "has grandly failed so far in doing what presidents must do, which is to lead the nation emotionally as well as rationally. It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House."

Besides being repulsively patronizing, Meacham is spouting retread conventional wisdom that--with some decent point about communication within it--champions the simplistic and emotional over the complex and rational that happen to reflect reality.

So what does he have in mind? Something simple and emotional like this not untypically simple and emotional GOPer statement by Andre Bauer, current Lt. Governor and candidate for governor in the GOPer primary in South Carolina--a state with a high percentage of African Americans, and with more than half of all children in the free and reduced school lunch program? Because Bauer compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said.

The fact is that most simplistic and emotional appeals being made these days are by the Rabid Right, and they are overwhelmingly racist, ignorant and lies. Reagan's simple formulations and formulas had emotional appeal, because who can fail to be made happy by the idea that you don't have to pay taxes and you still get what you expect from the government? Or that the Contras in Nicaragua were "freedom fighters" instead of hired thugs? Or that we had to invade Iraq to prevent mushroom clouds over American cities? Or that "Obamacare"= death panels? This is the kind of crap that benefits politicians and ruins the country, impoverishes, maims and kills people, and kills the future.

It's not fun to watch Democrats soul-searching when they lose, or to open themselves to ridicule and lies by trying to communicate the nuances of policy that matches the nuances of reality. But if the choice is between that and deliberate simplistic emotionalistic lies justified by politics or by some warped version of faith, untrammeled fulminations from the dark unconscious masked as political dialogue, I'll stick with my soul and hope it sticks with me.

The charge that Obama doesn't relate policy to the emotional reality of people can be made only by people who don't cover his speeches. But the simplistic and emotionally charged stuff does make reporters' jobs easier, and certainly plays well in the media, where it fits in so well with simplistic, emotionally charged and often lying commercials. Maybe that's a big reason that politics isn't fact-based or nuance-based.

And we have to wonder just what emotions count in politics. President Obama utters the word "empathy" and the Rabid Right is up in arms, because apparently when you try to feel what others in different circumstances are feeling, this is not Christian anymore but socialistic. Yet there is a word for people without empathy: psychopaths. Is that the politics the media finds so sweet to empower?

Weekend Update

There are people who get told to clean out their desk and be out of here by noon, but if you make six figures or so, you just get another layer of boss. So it shouldn't be surprising that nobody got fired for the Democratic party debacle in MA, but they all got a new boss: President Obama hired one of his campaign chiefs, David Plouffe, to oversee all the Dem campaigns in 2010.

The reporting of President Obama's comments at the Ohio Town Hall was puzzling, until I saw this extended excerpt of what he actually said. Then I felt better about what he said, and even more depressed by the quality of the reporting.

Speaking about health care, he said: " I didn't take this up to boost my poll numbers. You know the way to boost your poll numbers is not do anything. That's how you do it. You don't offend anybody. I'd have real high poll numbers. All of Washington would be saying, "What a genius!" (Laughter.)...So if I was trying to take the path of least resistance, I would have done something a lot easier. But I'm trying to solve the problems that folks here in Ohio and across this country face every day. And I'm not going to walk away just because it's hard. We are going to keep on working to get this done -- with Democrats, I hope with Republicans -- anybody who's willing to step up.

Because I'm not going to watch more people get crushed by costs or denied care they need by insurance company bureaucrats. I'm not going to have insurance companies click their heels and watch their stocks skyrocket because once again there's no control on what they do.

So long as I have some breath in me, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your President, I will not stop fighting for you."

The President also came down hard on the Supremely Political Court's decision in his Saturday media talk.

Elegy for Blue

Pema has been progressing further in becoming a house cat--she's actually drinking water from a dish now, as opposed to only when it's mixed with wet cat food --although recently she's been spending a lot of time in one of her little beds (as in the bottom photo.) But this past fall we were also visited regularly by a cat I called Blue, for her startling blue eyes (top two photos.)

At first she seemed like just another of the cats that have come and gone in the neighborhood, sniffing through the yard, curious about Pema. But Blue had a sweet, calm but insistent disposition, and followed Pema into the house a few times, just to look around. Sensing Pema's lack of interest (and occasional hostility), Blue turned her attention to the human members of the household. She became my particular friend. She had no problem being picked up (something that Pema still won't allow), and loved to be petted. She was very responsive to words and even thoughts, but she was also a puzzle.

We didn't know where she came from or who kept her, yet she seemed well-fed and groomed, at least at first. But when I saw her outside at all hours of the day and especially night, I started to wonder. Yet she wasn't interested in food or even water. It seemed to me she lost weight, although she seemed generally healthy. Then when we had a cold spell, I worried when she was outside at night. She came around one of those nights and I carried her inside. She stayed with me, on my lap as I rocked gently on the old rocking chair, but after checking out a couple of rooms, she clearly wanted to go back outside. Still, when we left an old blanket on the porch, she would sleep there through the morning.

One night we sat together in a chair on the patio, checking out a reputed meteor shower. She liked to get her head inside a jacket or sweater, or just under an arm. She came around late Thanksgiving night, and I sat with her in a chair on the porch for probably a half hour or so. She purred continuously for most of that time, until she dozed briefly, and then she was off. She would come around every day, sometimes more than once, and then not show up for a few days. I saw her last in mid December, when she finally deigned to eat from the dish I left for her, although not when I was looking.

I last saw her at just about the time that students were leaving after first semester. They're back now, but she hasn't reappeared. I can only hope that she belonged to a student who wasn't returning, and took her home. But especially since she was abroad at night, there's really no telling. There are raccoons around, and other dangers, like humans and their machines. Blue is a beautiful cat, as you can see. I miss her, and I just hope she's doing well wherever she is.

Corporate 1984?

The Obama administration is embarking on tougher talk and proposals on jobs, the economy and reining in Wall Street. According to the NY Times: "The tougher approach to financial regulation that President Obama outlined on Thursday reflected a changed political climate, the rebound in big banks’ fortunes after their taxpayer bailout and a shift in power within the administration away from those who had been seen as most sympathetic to Wall Street."

But is it all too late, and was it ever really possible? It's clear now that Republicans and insurance companies--perhaps in conscious collusion--lied repeatedly to the White House before getting brazen on their so far successful attempts to delay a health care bill until they could change the politics enough to kill it.

Corporate money also flowed into creating and maintaining the so-called Tea Party movement, currently with factions at war with each other over money as much as anything else, and the largest group proving to be a profit-making enterprise.

So now the Supreme Court weighs in, by misapplying law to the wrong case, in order to unleash corporate money to further corrupt politics and government. It's the most blatantly political decision since Bush v. Gore.

This has the obvious potential to turn this country into a corporate version of the Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four. Except that it probably won't be that obvious. As repugnant as it is for me to agree with anything in Politico (and I will instead link to the Caucus blog describing it), it had already occurred to me that corporations are unlikely to put their logo on their actual political stands. They could lose customers that way. They are far more likely to continue their currently successful practices of creating dummy advocacy groups and phony scientific research institutes, all with deceptive names--and of course, the lying only starts there.

So the real effect of the decision is probably not in giving corporations the right to buy political commercials but in allowing them to spend a great deal more money contributing to their dummy groups that create and buy political commercials, and otherwise engage in buying politicians.

What dim hope there is for balance resides in corporations with a stake in the future--technology companies and those engaged in clean energy businesses, for example. Plus the citizen activism that can boycott offending companies, although to be effective, these boycotts may require some self-induced pain. Will people stop using their electricity completely once a month, say, to protest even more coal and oil money pouring into politics?

Of course this doesn't work so well for health insurance, since the whole goal of these insurers has been to soak up market share and then kill off or eat the competition, so that they have a monopoly in entire areas, even entire states and regions. Making sure they got no new competitors--a public option, say--seems to have been the first stealth goal of killing health care, although killing any sort of regulations on their conduct came in a close second.

In an immediate sense, the clear beneficiaries of the Supreme Court decision will be media companies and public relations firms. We will soon be even more awash in bullshit--all of which we pay for as surcharges to every product and service we buy--as wells as more Newspeak and doublethink, on the way to thoughtcrime and the Thought Police.

Don't Blame Me, I'm Not From Massachusetts

Back in the early 70s, I traveled around with my guitar case emblazoned with a bumper sticker that read: "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts." And in those days, I was, and proud of it: the only state to not vote to re-elect Richard Nixon to the presidency. Yes, 49 states did so in 1972, despite the abuses of power that were already known, including the outlines of Watergate, and the bombing in Cambodia, as well as the violent and disastrous policies in Vietnam.

The rest of the country soon came to regret that vote. As they did their election of G.W. Bush in 2004, as well as the votes that made it possible for the Bushites to steal the presidency in 2000.

How soon will yesterday's election in MA be regretted? Not soon enough. As to why it happened, there was a vaguely interesting debate at Kos, between someone's mother who said it was all local politics and someone's father who said it wasn't. (Kind of tells you the age of the posters at Kos, though.) If it was something of a referendum on Obama, there's suspicion that race was involved (not too surprising in MA actually), and GOPers seem comfortable with that idea.

So the Senate seat of the man who championed health care for decades goes to a man who promised to kill that dream, and probably will. The minute hand just moved up a notch on my personal Doomsday Clock.

Well, at times like this the choice of responses narrows down to sarcasm or escapism. I choose escapism. Bye.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

During a church service on Sunday, a visibly moved President Obama spoke about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but in terms of today. More in the post below.

But Never Lose Infinite Hope

President Obama's remarks in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (which can be seen here; transcript is here) applied the spirit of Dr. King to events and the context of the past year, including some obvious references to the health care fight:

"Reverend Wheeler mentioned the inauguration, last year's election. You know, on the heels of that victory over a year ago, there were some who suggested that somehow we had entered into a post-racial America, all those problems would be solved. There were those who argued that because I had spoke of a need for unity in this country that our nation was somehow entering into a period of post-partisanship. That didn’t work out so well. There was a hope shared by many that life would be better from the moment that I swore that oath.

Of course, as we meet here today, one year later, we know the promise of that moment has not yet been fully fulfilled. Because of an era of greed and irresponsibility that sowed the seeds of its own demise, because of persistent economic troubles unaddressed through the generations, because of a banking crisis that brought the financial system to the brink of catastrophe, we are being tested -- in our own lives and as a nation -- as few have been tested before."

After enumerating some of those challenges--particularly the pain caused by economic hardships and unemployment--he suggested what lessons might be drawn from Dr. King and the Civil Rights generation, and applied to today's problems.

"First and foremost, they did so by remaining firm in their resolve...

Second, they understood that as much as our government and our political parties had betrayed them in the past -- as much as our nation itself had betrayed its own ideals -- government, if aligned with the interests of its people, can be -- and must be -- a force for good. So they stayed on the Justice Department. They went into the courts. They pressured Congress, they pressured their President. They didn’t give up on this country. They didn’t give up on government. They didn’t somehow say government was the problem; they said, we're going to change government, we're going to make it better...

Third, our predecessors were never so consumed with theoretical debates that they couldn't see progress when it came. Sometimes I get a little frustrated when folks just don't want to see that even if we don't get everything, we're getting something. (Applause.) King understood that the desegregation of the Armed Forces didn’t end the civil rights movement, because black and white soldiers still couldn't sit together at the same lunch counter when they came home. But he still insisted on the rightness of desegregating the Armed Forces. That was a good first step -- even as he called for more. He didn’t suggest that somehow by the signing of the Civil Rights that somehow all discrimination would end. But he also didn’t think that we shouldn’t sign the Civil Rights Act because it hasn’t solved every problem. Let's take a victory, he said, and then keep on marching. Forward steps, large and small, were recognized for what they were -- which was progress.

Fourth, at the core of King's success was an appeal to conscience that touched hearts and opened minds, a commitment to universal ideals -- of freedom, of justice, of equality -- that spoke to all people, not just some people."

President Obama noted that Dr. King also "remained strategically focused on gaining ground -- his eyes on the prize constantly -- understanding that change would not be easy, understand that change wouldn't come overnight, understanding that there would be setbacks and false starts along the way..."

He spoke about the difficult steps his administration has taken, and the difficulties ahead in making a better America and a better world. He urged everyone to remain involved:

Let's work to change the political system, as imperfect as it is. I know people can feel down about the way things are going sometimes here in Washington. I know it's tempting to give up on the political process. But we've put in place tougher rules on lobbying and ethics and transparency -- tougher rules than any administration in history. It's not enough, but it's progress. Progress is possible. Don't give up on voting. Don't give up on advocacy. Don't give up on activism. There are too many needs to be met, too much work to be done. Like Dr. King said, "We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."

He added this personal note:

"You know, folks ask me sometimes why I look so calm. (Laughter.) They say, all this stuff coming at you, how come you just seem calm? And I have a confession to make here. There are times where I'm not so calm. (Laughter.) Reggie Love knows. My wife knows. There are times when progress seems too slow. There are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt. There are times when the barbs sting. There are times when it feels like all these efforts are for naught, and change is so painfully slow in coming, and I have to confront my own doubts. But let me tell you -- during those times it's faith that keeps me calm.."

Like Martin Luther King, this is a religious faith. But it is also a faith in the future, as Dr. King expressed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, excerpted below.

Okay, I trot out this photo of MLK every chance I get (although this version's a little sharper) because I'm in it, sort of. It's at the March on Washington, and I'm over by the trees somewhere to the left. I wasn't at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo, however, where he gave the address excerpted below.

Martin Luther King, Jr: Faith in the Future

In the midst of a strife-torn decade of change, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. professed his faith in the future--a future which is still developing, as President Barack Obama noted-- with these words in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech:

"Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow."

Hope in Haiti

New York Times photo and story: "rescue workers pulled more people alive from the rubble — including a 7-year-old girl who survived more than four days eating dried fruit rolls in the supermarket that collapsed around her — as water and emergency aid deliveries improved on Sunday..." UN Secretary General on the scene has message of hope, but the tasks and challenges are enormous. Former Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush heading up effort to raise private funds for relief. Meanwhile, there have been several earthquakes in South America. No word of damage.

Helping and Holding On in Haiti

This photo from the LA Times suggests that in the midst of enormous tragedy and extreme emotions and situations, the struggle for many in Haiti is to live through these days the best they can. While estimates of the dead now vary from 140,000 to 200,000, the leading edge of the massive aid began reaching Haitians on Friday. Dangerous and difficult rescue of survivors still in the rubble has been in some ways the simplest task, with still a dire shortage of doctors, medicine and facilities, and the stores of water and food had not reached many of the needy. Some of the logistical slowness is hard to understand to an outsider--why weren't more trained medical personnel on that aircraft carrier? Why aren't supplies and personnel parachuting in? But while there has been some violence, I heard one (black) U.S. general caution that people get a little too nervous about crowds of black people, and exaggerate the threat of widespread violence--as indeed turned out to be the case in New Orleans after Katrina, where there was much less crime than first reported. While many of the aid efforts now underway are nothing short of heroic, we all hope and pray things get a lot better Saturday.

(Here's another LA Times story--I like their reporting--that goes into the military's efforts, and why they didn't do air drops. Apparently a paratrooper on NPR suggested that troops could be dropped along with supplies to prevent rioting, but perhaps that was impractical, too.)

Late Saturday Update: Water, food and medical care reached more people on Saturday, and rescuers freed people who incredibly survived four days in the rubble, but the massive problems coupled with the massive influx of stuff still meant that distribution was still difficult and many needs were not yet being addressed. With some reports of looting and violence, but also with more soldiers and police to keep order, aid officials emphasized progress, with more progress expected Sunday and in succeeding days. Some were beginning to turn their attention to longer run needs, and as enormous as the immediate need is, there is a long haul ahead.

A Very Dangerous Game in Kennedy Country

The assassination of a young archduke of a European power and his wife by terrorist fanatics of the Black Hand, set off a chain reaction of war that became the Great War, the first world war that killed a generation of young men and led to millions of deaths from disease.

It doesn't always take something as titanic as a presidential election--or the stealing of the presidency--to end up wreaking incredible destruction. This Tuesday it could be a special election in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate. According to polls and pols, the previously unthinkable could happen--the conservative Republican could win Senator Ted Kennedy's seat--a man who pledges to defeat the universal health care bill, what Kennedy described as the cause of his life. And thanks to the lack of any margin in the Senate, he would do just that.

A defeat of health care, after so much political capital has been spent on it, would be a devastating blow to Democrats and to the Presidency of Barack Obama. That of course is what has Republicans so excited. It's their Tea Party revolution, the functional overthrow of the elected government and the not really American, not white enough President! And it could very well begin a chain reaction that ends any hope for the future.

That may sound like alarmism, but all the dominoes are lined up. With the ability to filibuster and therefore defeat any major legislation, Republicans will kill not only health care but economic reform and stimulus, climate crisis legislation, nuclear weapons treaties, green energy, environmental protection and, in short, anything that Democrats or President Obama propose for the next three years or longer--not even because Republicans oppose it, but because their political enemies are for it. This is the definition of political party fanaticism. All for themselves, not a care for their country.

That's the state of this country right now--while the electorate that elected Obama sleeps, or indulges their frustrated fantasies of instant change, extremists have taken over the GOP with loud voices proclaiming outrageous lies, aided and comforted if not led by racists and cynical fanatics like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck--currently lambasting President Obama for trying to help Haiti's earthquake victims--and the smug ignorance and lies of stealth zealots like Sarah Palin, who don't care about facts or reality but only on imposing religious and political ideology, and making a personal fortune doing it.

You can describe them in various ways. Baby Bushcorps on steroids. Tools of corporations solely interested in feeding more millions to their billionaires. Possessed by ambition and their own unconscious wrath and destructiveness. Their blatant lies and obvious racism is chilling. Whatever you call them and however they are described, if unleashed they will lead the way to the new Dark Ages. And that isn't hyperbole. There is only so much time left to confront our growing problems before they overwhelm us.

The Democrats aren't blameless. The Dem candidate in MA, Martha Coakley, is by many accounts not a very good candidate, though she would be infinitely better as a Senator than her opponent. In general throughout the country, Democrats have not fielded very good candidates or made good appointments for the many vacancies resulting from Obama's election and cabinet appointments. Nor have they responded adequately to the economic pain and disquiet in the country, or to the shameless lies of the Rabid Right.

It's a perilous moment. Former Obama supporters, especially in the blogosphere, are engaged in various civil wars, including progressive contests that seem to be more about ego, marketing and glands than ideology, and more about ideological purity than a better if imperfect future. In Massachusetts as elsewhere, many Obama voters are withdrawn, nursing disappointment that the world hasn't changed in a year, and that Obama has chosen to try to make a real difference rather than go down gloriously in pure self-righteous flames.

But the sins of the Dems don't match the stakes. The stakes couldn't be higher. President Obama needs this election in Massachusetts, he needs the Haiti relief effort to succeed faster, and he needs to get health care done and out of the way. And then he needs to go on the offensive, and confront his opponents and their threats directly. What's going on in Washington now is often not very pretty and at times angers and disgusts us all, but the Republicans have no solutions.

The ugly genius of Republicans since Obama's elections, even more than in the Bush years, is to look into their souls and project their own tendencies onto their chosen enemies. They are fascists with all the respect for the truth that Orwell's Big Brother had, and so they call Obama and the Democrats fascists and Big Brother. They are racists who shout that they are the victims of racism, and they compare to the Holocaust a health care bill more modest than most civilized countries in the world, that gives some government control over a wasteful, unjust and inhumane private health care system that is wrecking small and large businesses as well as countless lives--as well as help for those who will otherwise suffer and die without minimum health care. That these people are even taken seriously demonstrates in chilling fashion our society's decadence and lack of maturity. That they are this close to effectively reversing the last election and taking power again, with a single election in a single state, is beyond frightening.

Few if any in America, and not many in Europe, knew anything about the Archduke Ferdinand. Europe was a well-armed tinderbox, but a world war wasn't inevitable. Most historians would probably now agree that World War II was mostly an extension of the Great War, and the Cold War was a result of World War II. It was a chain reaction that mauled the future of generations.

Now once again, what happens in a single state, in a special election nobody was paying much attention to until recently, on a single day, the day after a holiday, may lead to immense damage and suffering for generations, and possibly more than that.

The Democrats have woken up. President Clinton, very popular in the Commonwealth, is there. President Obama will go. Mrs. Edward Kennedy is more visible and audible there. I hope more of the Kennedy family joins her there as well. But the last word comes from the voters of Massachusetts. They can't afford to "send a message" or think it doesn't matter who wins.

That's the kind of non-thinking that got G.W. Bush so close to the White House that he could steal it. The divided progressives, the start-over/new face/ bright new product consumerist approach to elections, it's the same formula. And all we got then was at best a lost decade, the treasury raided by arms merchants and oil companies, a surplus to help prepare for the future turned into a deficit to cripple the future, one of the longest and most costly and unjustifiable wars in American history, official federal corruption including partisan political rule over the judiciary and the outing of our own intelligence agent working on terrorism, torture as a national policy, an attitude of let people die in New Orleans because they're black and Democrats, plans for more nuclear weapons and refusal to ratify nuclear proliferation and Climate Crisis treaties... and the list goes on.

Thanks to that little tremor in the national electorate in 2000, we'll be lucky to get out of this century alive. Another little tremor in Massachusetts on Tuesday will most probably set us on a course of foaming conflict that makes that getting-out-alive prospect considerably more remote.

But we can still come out of this, if Massachusetts steps up. Once the health care bill is a done deal, President Obama's State of the Union could be the time we turn the corner, and renew the focus and the hope that flowered last November, and--hard as it is to believe--only a year ago next week at the Inaugural in Washington.

Doomsday Postponed...Slightly

Today the Bulliten of Atomic Scientists moved back the minute hand on their famous doomsday clock, because of a "more hopeful state of world affairs," due to a "new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government’s orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of Obama." The scientists have traditionally been concerned with nuclear weapons, and so--like the Nobel Prize Committee--they cited President Obama's efforts towards ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

But in recent years, the scientists--including 19 Nobel laureates-- also included the Climate Crisis in their calculations. So their statement said: "By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization."

Yet the change (only the 19th since the clock was established in 1947) was only one minute, and so the Doomsday Clock reads six minutes to midnight. Other news reminds us why: the world is not yet facing up to the likely rise in sea level of at least 7 feet over the next century, thanks in part to well-funded Climate Crisis deniers like U.S. Senator James Inhofe who complained that he was only #7 on Rolling Stone's list of the "planet's worst enemies." Inhofe insists he is #1. And apparently very proud of it.

"You Will Not Be Forsaken, You Will Not Be Forgotten"

With visible emotion, President Obama pledged this morning: "To the people of Haiti, we say clearly, and with conviction, you will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you. The world stands with you."

Water, food, medicine, doctors and rescue personnel arrived all day to the only airport in Haiti, but travel is still extremely difficult because of devastated roads, and communication is still lacking. Rescue teams are working, and heavy equipment is arriving to clear or even create roadways. For the first time since the earthquake, there are runway lights at the airport so flights can land and take off at night. U.S. ships have begun arriving, and an aircraft carrier will arrive Friday with helicopters, supplies and U.S. Marines.

CNN reports that some 400 Americans have been flown out of Haiti, but many of the 40,000 or so Americans there are remaining to help with relief efforts. The Red Cross estimates some 50,000 deaths, including several UN personnel and at least one U.S. State Department worker. The Haitian governmental infrastructure remains practically nonexistent.

Friday update: This LA Times story tells the tale: airport and seaport damage, roads and other logistical problems mean aid is only slowly reaching those who need it. The weekend could be crucial.

The Horror in Haiti

Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 earthquake, but relief efforts have begun--see the post below. Photo: by Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times, with this story.