Good News For A Change (We Can Believe In)

Looking for some good news?  This will have to hold you for awhile:  A CDC study shows a 43% drop in early childhood obesity (ages 2-5) over the past ten years, most of it in the past two years.  This is the first substantial drop in any category, and it's also the only category that shows a drop this time.

Should First Lady Michelle Obama get some credit here for her strenuous efforts to bring attention to the problem and to get children to exercise?  I don't know, but I do remember when a different study a few months ago that showed no drop led to stories that suggested it meant she'd failed.

The Last Vigil

On Saturday evening was held the last candlelight vigil on Woodley Island in Humboldt Bay honoring the memory of the Wiyot women and children massacred in 1860 on the nearby Indian Island, and dedicated to regaining the island so that the World Renewal Dance--the reason the Wiyots were there--could be danced there again.

It was the last vigil because next month, for the first time since 1860, Wiyots will dance on the island again.

In 2004 I wrote a story about the vigils and the Wiyot for the San Francisco Chronicle.  At that time the Wiyot had raised enough money to buy back a few acres of the island called Tuluwat in the Wiyot language.  Shortly thereafter the Eureka City Council deeded back 40 more acres.  The process of cleaning up the land from years of industrial pollution began.  Expanded versions of articles I wrote about all this (for the Chronicle and News from Native California) are here at my archival site, Kowincidence.

Ten years later, the island is ready.  Other North Coast tribes are helping to bring back the World Renewal ceremonies.  Most of them have similar ceremonies.  The Wiyot dance is scheduled for three days at the end of March.

The vigils have been held since 1992, when former tribal chair Cheryl Seidner and a few others rebelled against remembering only Columbus (one of his replica ships was in Humboldt Bay) and organized a different remembrance, of what was nearly the end of a people on Indian Island in 1860.  Since then vigils have been held in rain, fog, wind and cold (the one in 2000 was brought indoors because it was raining so hard.)  But this last one was on a warm, clear bright evening--like the first one was, Cheryl would later say.  Here people are just beginning to gather.

 The sun was pouring its rays towards us.  Facing the camera in this photo is Leona Wilkinson, Cheryl's sister who was one of the original four who started the vigils.  They are direct descendants of an infant survivor of the 1860 massacre. Behind her across the water is a portion of Indian Island.

 What struck me this time was the number of children and babies, of families.  I thought of people I remembered from prior vigils who weren't there.

Cheryl conducted the event informally as usual.  She invited Wiyots in the crowd to come into the inner circle, where they sang a traditional song.  A drum circle from HSU did three songs.  There were moments of prayer and remembrance.

In the center of the circle was a fire that Cheryl tended.  By this time the sun was directly in my eyes, and in my camera lens.

 That's Cheryl tending the fire.  She grew up a baseball fan and remembered seeing Kent Tekulve pitch for the Pittsburgh Pirates.  I wore a black Pirates cap so she might remember me but it didn't work.

Beatles '64

There was so much hype for so long about the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first trip to America and first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, that I missed the actual anniversary days.  The first Sullivan show was February 9, 1964.

Though I saw the Sullivan show and liked them well enough, I personally didn't have my Beatles satori moment until 1965, when I sat in a near-empty movie theater in Manhattan (behind either Bob Dylan or one of many lookalikes) and watched their second film, Help!  Now I still score pretty high on the Beatles quizzes that were floating around this month.

But last month I did read the Rolling Stone cover story, and learned that I wasn't alone in missing the Beatles significance in 1964--neither did his record company. (Of course, I was in high school and they weren't.)

Here's a few key graphs from that story (this is the link but not all of it is online.)  The story quotes Jonathan Gould in the book Can't Buy Me Love concerning the clueless executives of Capitol Records, who owned the U.S. rights to release Beatles records but didn't think it was worth their while.  Then one of their executives read an article in Variety:

"...Variety reported that the Beatles' most recent single, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," had become the first British record to sell a million copies before its release.  The band's previous single, "She Loves You"--which had been rejected by Dexter on behalf of Capitol--had also surpassed a million sales, and the group's second album, With the Beatles, sold 500,000 copies a week after its release.

'This meant,' writes Gould, 'that in a market one-third the size of the United States, the Beatles had released as many million-selling singles in 1963 as the entire American recording industry.'"

So Capitol decided to release some Beatles tunes, but in due time.  But people took matters into their own hands.  From the RS story (by Mikal Gilmore):

"On December 10th, Marsha Albert, a 15-year-old in Silver Spring, Maryland, saw a rebroadcast of the CBS Morning News report from November 22nd disparaging the Beatles and the frenzy they inspired in England. Albert wanted to hear more of the music. She wrote to a local station, WWDC; the disc jockey there, Carroll James, located a flight attendant for a British airline, who brought a copy of the 45 rpm "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on her flight to Washington, D.C.

After the record arrived, James invited Albert to WWDC's studio. In the early evening of December 17th, Albert announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in America, here are the Beat­les, singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.' " "The switchboard just went totally wild," James later told Bob Spitz in The Beat­les: The Biography. Callers – apparently not all of them teenagers, since WWDC was an MOR station – wanted to hear the song again, and again."

And 50 years later, again and again.

The Beatles were a phenomenon throughout 1963 in the UK but America discovered them just over two months after the unspeakable trauma of the assassination of President Kennedy, who symbolized hope and the future. The Beatles did not replace that exactly. But they did offer another kind of hope for a future with a different kind of joy in it. Especially for those who were young then--the early and middle boomers--it was a Way.

Dueling Billionaires and other matters

Apart from wars, torture, corrupt politicians and hugely bad weather, what else is new?

Thanks to the unjust blindness of our Supreme Court that somehow can't tell the difference between dollars and words and therefore condone the massive influx of money to dominate political debate and jockey for the agenda: a couple of new billionaires are vying to get into the act.

One is at least on the right side of reality.  From the NYTimes:  "A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers."

The donor is Tom Steyer but before you get too impressed, he just provided $11 million to elect the dubious Democrat Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia.  Still, he's organizing other billionaires to join the fight, as a counterweight to the notorious Koch brothers.  If it sounds like something out of the Wild West, well...gunfighting is speech too, pardner.

Meanwhile, a new wild bunch of Republican billionaires are entering the political fray, though perhaps the interesting thing is they seem to be trying to save the party from the Tea Party, and once again, the notorious Koch brothers.

In other climate crisis news, that is apart from the usual bad news (yes, the Arctic is melting, etc.) there's the interesting situation in Nebraska where a judge has countered the high-handedness we've become used to from Republican governors when it comes to sucking up to their fossil fuel billionaires, and denied permission for the Keystone Pipeline to run roughshod through the state, "condemning" farm land in favor of pipeland.  He ordered the pipes people out of the state.

Some interesting reading:

Slate finds the research that says what many of us have figured out: Internet trolls are sick and evil.  Nothing to say however about the ones who are paid to be sick and evil.

A concise history of newspapers, and why they are still the best medium to explain the daily world, though they may have lost track of that.

A journalist crashes a secret society of the 1% and they are as disgusting as we figured.  So far it seems this is a real story, though not far from an Andy Borowitz column.  Meanwhile, Jonathan Chiat demolishes another of the psychotic 1% arguments, and this one involves Iron Man.

On the other side of the ledger, the Wonkblog reveals "how Obama secretly became the anti-poverty president."

Everyone agrees that Congress isn't going to raise the minimum wage, though President Obama has raised it for federal contracts, and some individual businesses are raising theirs.  So take comfort in the fact that there are no more good arguments against raising it.

And finally, in the new Baffler, David Graeber chronicles the long history of science's most perplexing mystery: why is there fun?

The Dreaming Up Daily Semi-Weekly Quote

"The mind best fitted for survival in any world is the mind that has discovered how knowledge can be joyful, leading to the friendship with wisdom that is pure delight, and is ready to tackle any kind of knowledge with clarity of perception and intentness of will."

Northrup Frye

Slouching Towards Urgency

In just the past few days, political leaders of three major nations declared the climate crisis a major global concern demanding action.

In what was clearly the fruit of ongoing diplomacy, the United States and China issued a joint statement declaring "In light of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and its worsening impacts, and the related issue of air pollution from burning fossil fuels, the United States and China recognize the urgent need for action to meet these twin challenges. Both sides reaffirm their commitment to contribute significantly to successful 2015 global efforts to meet this challenge. Accordingly, China and the United States will work together..."  A few specific instances followed.

Secretary of State John Kerry soon followed up on this with a major speech in Indonesia, which made headlines both before and after it was given. "When I think about the array of global climate – of global threats – think about this: terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – all challenges that know no borders – the reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them. And it is a challenge that I address in nearly every single country that I visit as Secretary of State, because President Obama and I believe it is urgent that we do so.

And the reason is simple: The science of climate change is leaping out at us like a scene from a 3D movie. It’s warning us; it’s compelling us to act. And let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the science is absolutely certain."

He outlined some of the consequences: sea level rise that would, among other things, flood half of Jakarta; species extinction; water shortages; agricultural transformation; unpredictable and violent weather--all of which involve heavy costs, among other dire consequences.

And in a widely quoted line: "And in a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction."

But perhaps the most interesting statements came from the UK, which has recently been beset with immense flooding in coastal areas.  Rains and storms had kept the country and the government in a crisis mode for weeks.  The floods have exposed a lack of urgency in executing protective plans, due to budgeting priorities.

In this context the leader of the Labour Party made headlines demanding a national commitment to addressing the climate crisis.  According to the Guardian: "Britain is sleepwalking towards disaster because of a failure to recognise that climate change is causing the extreme weather that has blighted the country for more than a month, Ed Miliband has warned.

The Labour leader says in an interview with the Observer that climate change is now an issue of national security that has the potential not only to destabilise and cause conflict between regions of the world, but to destroy the homes, livelihoods and businesses of millions of British people.

Criticising[Tory PM] David Cameron for appearing to backtrack on his commitment to the environmental cause, he calls on senior figures in all parties to unite behind the scientific evidence that climate change is a key factor in extreme weather. Failure to do so, he warns, will have catastrophic consequences."

The story concludes: "Miliband said he was ready to work with politicians of all parties, including "green" Tories such as Zac Goldsmith, to rebuild the consensus around climate change. He announced a three-point plan to tackle the crisis, including tougher decarbonisation targets, moves to strengthen the country's resilience to floods, and a push to boost business investment in the green economy."

This outlined program is similar to steps advocated by Secretary Kerry and President Obama, and it even more explicitly recognizes the twin challenges of the far future and the near future of inevitable consequences--which as in the UK is now the present.

  In a story not directly related to these statements by Miliband, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats party and deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government with the Tories, suggested a new coalition with Labour.  This may be little more than UK political posturing, but it does open the possibility of a united campaign for the government in which the climate crisis is a central issue.

It's all relatively little and definitely late, but in this case--as my friend Beckett says-- something's better than nothing.

This Monopoly Is Televised

The big corporate news that Comcast Cable bought Time Warner Cable in a friendly acquisition is the latest development in the history of cable television that I've witnessed from the beginning.

Back in the 1970s I did a long magazine story focusing on what was then Warner Cable but including the history of the cable business, and a counterexample to the corporate for-profit cable model in rural Pennsylvania.

In its beginning, delivering television by cable was sold as a no brainer good thing: it meant no more temperamental antennae, clear reception of local channels plus links to other channels all over the country.  There were also myriad possibilities for more locally produced programs at a low cost, since transmitting more shows by cable didn't cost anything.

And there would be any number of new cable channels--so many that they could be very specialized.  At last there would be movie channels, arts channels and even, you know, channels that challenge you intelligence rather than insult it, as well as various sports channels.  And because you paid for all this with your cable fee, there would be no commercials!

Warner in particular promised interactivity that would give the viewer unprecedented power and influence.  But their early experiments with an interactive cable device showed where this was going--a tool for advertisers and marketers, and as a novelty addition to programming that was even further dumbed-down.

Still, it was all so wondrous! There was one fly in the ointment, though.  Because of the cost of laying cable, the "investment," there could only be one cable company linking a given municipality.  In other words, a legal monopoly.

But there was a process, and municipalities could require spending to help local productions, and set all kinds of rules. If the company didn't stick to their agreements, the municipality could just throw them out.

So more than thirty years later, after cable companies essentially bought the loyalty of many municipal officials, as far as I know, not a single one has been asked to leave.  Locally produced programs have generally been relegated to fixed camera coverage of local government meetings, and a "public access" channel, which most of the time is a multi-color bulletin board for local events and advertisers, with maybe the correct time.

Meanwhile there are a zillion cable channels owned by the same half dozen companies, and they are pretty much all the same no matter what they are called, and almost all of them show a plenitude of commercials.  Cable companies have rivaled health insurers in relentless fee increases, and the biggest--Comcast and Time Warner among them--are the most arrogant and least interested in customer service.  Both brag about their monopolies and the even larger monopolies their merger will create.

Now they're getting into the Internet business, and--according to some--attempting to turn it into the same high profit model as cable TV, with the tried and true tiers of service and expensive spats with "content providers."

Once again we go  to the Brits for the stories, both from the Guardian.  This one describes the business, and this one the impact on the Internet.

The Parties of Now

At his Bloomberg blog, poli sci guy Jonathan Bernstein often affirms the power of parties and "party elders" in U.S. politics, which he maintains trumps issues most of the time in determining election winners.  This was a common view in past decades, but seems mildly unusual these years.

He recommended a piece by Seth Masket on how political parties now work--basically not as they used to, but as networks. Masket's most daunting sentences: "Now, it is entirely possible that a party network may be more prone to extremism than a party hierarchy. Ideological activists play a much larger role in the modern party system, and many candidates now come from their ranks.Yet just because a networked party may be more extreme doesn’t make it any less effective."

Theoretically this should make a highly progressive party as possible as a highly reactionary one. But that's not the case now; only the Republicans are really extreme, as evidenced in part by how extreme their rhetoric is condemning the historically center-right orientation of the Democrats as socialist.

 What Masket does not mention is that the Democratic Party was national to the extent that it had national allies in powerful labor unions, at least in the period of the 40s-70s. The unions were an institutional countervailing force to the corporatist Republicans.

Today the two party system seems to be fossil fuel money against Hollywood and some progressive tech company money (with Wall Street money as opportunist.)  Basically the money networks favor the Republicans, and so, the extreme right. What the Democratic party has going for it is demographics. But with this kind of party structure, people can be more easily panicked into voting a rashly extreme government into power.

Monarchs, Penguins, Marius and Wildleaks

Back in the mid 1990s I read of concern that Monarch butterflies were disappearing, and that their migration was being disrupted.  Like a lot of species now endangered or going extinct, humans are only recently aware of what they are about. So the Monarchs' actual migration paths were only recently mapped, and still incompletely.  I recall proposing an article on the subject to the Smithsonian Magazine--I was writing for them at the time--but they didn't assign it.

Monarchs, among many kinds of butterflies were common in my backyard in western Pennsylvania when I was a child.  I especially remember the ones with Monarch-like patterns, but they were blue.

In the years since the 90s, some conservation plans were enacted for the Monarchs, many more discussed.  The Monarch migration to Mexico became something of an ecotourism attraction, and one of the California towns which had been witnessing their wintering there for years woke up to the wonder of it (and possible tourist dollars) and amped up an annual festival.

But this year, for the third straight year, the number of Monarchs who made it to their Mexican wintering and breeding spot has declined enormously.  The NY Times reports: Faltering under extreme weather and vanishing habitats, the yearly winter migration of monarch butterflies to a handful of forested Mexican mountains dwindled precipitously in December, continuing what scientists said was an increasingly alarming decline.

The migrating population has become so small — perhaps 35 million, experts guess — that the prospects of its rebounding to levels seen even five years ago are diminishing. At worst, scientists said, a migration widely called one of the world’s great natural spectacles is in danger of effectively vanishing.

35 million may seem like a lot, but not in comparison to the one billion of past migrations. This year's migration was a record low--and "it was just 56 percent of last year’s total, which was itself a record low."

Monarchs are a kind of beautiful poster child for the small creatures being forced into extinction by human action, indirect and direct.  Disappearing habitat, transportation of species to new places where they disrupt the ecosystem, pollutions of various kinds and the climate crisis are the most frequent causes.

Climate crisis victims include the polar bears and now at least one species of penguin, but again, they are only the most photogenic of larger creatures under severe pressure.  The BBC reports:  Penguin chicks in Argentina are dying as a direct consequence of climate change, according to new research.
Drenching rainstorms and extreme heat are killing the young birds in significant numbers. 

This is happening while the average global temperature is not rising as fast as models predict, at least according to some estimates.  Increased heat trapped in the oceans has become the chief theory for why this has happened for the past decade or so, and now there is some evidence for a mechanism to cause it: the abnormally high speed of winds over the Pacific.  Scientists warn that when these winds (or whatever else is causing this heat trapping effect) slow down again, the average global temperature will shoot up.

Meanwhile, the efforts of professional climate crisis deniers to demonize climate scientists felt a counterpunch when a DC Superior Court judge ruled that the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review website must face a defamation lawsuit for defaming the prominent Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann.

Although the U.S. east of the Mississippi has weathered more snow storms this winter than for a long while,  the winter Olympics in Russia have apparently focused at least ski observers on the global retrenchment of snow.  There is little in Sochi, and this article is about the possible "end of snow" in eastern US mountains.

The extinction of larger animal species is also being hastened by illegal hunting.  Because it is a big business and law enforcement is lax or more often outmatched in technology, it has been very difficult to control.  Now there is at least a way for ordinary people to get involved, assuming they are being ordinary in places where these animals live.  National Geographic reports on a web site for whistle blowers and observers of wild life crime called Wildleaks.  It bills itself as the first secure website for reporting crimes against nature, including illegal forest cuts.

There are species that no longer exist in the wild but only in human-maintained labs or zoos.  That isn't the case yet with giraffes, but the scientific bureaucratic reasoning that led to the killing of a healthy giraffe called Marius has caused a global furor, and has also been the occasion for exposing some of the complexities involved in the current situation, when humans try to compensate for the immense destruction they have unwittingly--but today, knowingly--unleashed.

The Gap

I don't have explanations or theories about this, nor do I have a plan or even a suggestion to propose.  I only have an observation, and I can't get past how astonishing it is to me.

Let me begin where I started thinking about this lately, with some history that is clearly still relevant.  Since technology began to reshape the workplace after World War II, forward-looking economists and other social thinkers saw that what was soon called automation was probably going to lead to a social crisis.  Machines were going to put humans out of work.  Unemployment would rise, incomes would fall, the economy would suffer with fewer consumers, and poverty would grow, with its attendant social problems as well as human suffering.

In the mid 1960s an approach was developed that came to be called the Guaranteed Income (also called the Guaranteed Minimum Income and Guaranteed Annual Income.)  Economist Robert Theobald edited a book of essays on the subject in 1966 called The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? It advocated the idea from economic, political, institutional and psychological points of view. (Psychologist Eric Fromm called it the key to the transition from a pre-human to a fully human society.)  Other books explored the moral dimensions.  We're talking facts and figures, studies and complex arguments.

A guaranteed income was seen as an antidote to job losses through automation, but also as a way to attack poverty and its attendant problems more efficiently. In substituting for a grab bag of inefficient and dehumanizing programs, a guaranteed income would not even cost more than the programs it replaced.  Society would have to bear less financial burden for health, education and other problems that were rooted in poverty, in not having enough money.

These ideas were influential and persuasive enough that they informed proposals for laws and implementation. Martin Luther King (whose federal holiday birthday so many piously and cynically celebrate) supported one version as part of the proposed Freedom Budget. George McGovern was ridiculed for proposing his version in the 1972 presidential election, but something like a minimum income passed the House and almost passed the Senate during the Nixon administration, with White House support.

Today we are living in the world those people were worrying about.  It hasn't played out exactly as any of them foresaw but the basic situation is here: technology combined with other factors has created a permanent surplus work force, either permanently or often unemployed, underemployed or unemployable.

And we continue to have complex and dehumanizing social programs that really nobody likes, and they are insufficient.  So given how long ago these problems were anticipated, you'd think we'd be pretty smart about them now.

Instead, what do we have?  Not only aren't we progressing on this growing problem, we're falling back from where we were in the 1930s.  The U.S. Congress has once again failed to renew unemployment insurance which they let lapse just in time for Christmas.  Unemployment insurance is something that workers have paid into, and so the government took the premiums and refuses the insurance.  Sounds like the health insurance business before Obamacare.

Congress is balking at raising the pitiful minimum wage.  Republicans are busily trying to prevent people from getting health care.  Congress cut food stamps--food stamps! for the poor.  At best, damaging individual and national health and nutrition,  at worst telling poor people to please just starve.  At least, poor people in Democratic states (the cuts targeted 16 states and DC; 15 went Obama twice, 28 of their 32 Senators are Dems.)  

This of course comes at a time when the gap between the very wealthy few and everyone else is as extreme as it has been since at least World War II.  Such a huge proportion of money in the hands of a few helps to cripple the economy by keeping that money out of circulation.  But coupled with this, the public views of the very rich and their minions also have never been so extreme.

This was summed up in a recent dumbfounding story. When Oxfam released its report showing that the 85 richest people in the world hold more wealth than the 3.5 billion poorest (that's the collective wealth of 85 vs. the collective wealth of 3,500, 000, 000), an on-air apologist for the wealthy exclaimed that it was great news.

These extreme views of a handful of very wealthy men and women are so politically powerful that any semblance of democracy is threatened.  Some of these views are so outrageous that they seem surreal, but they aren't just the views of a few cranks (Josh Marshall has some penetrating thoughts on what they are.)

Whatever the psychology involved, it's a clear threat, especially when politics is more and more about money.  When the Koch brothers, through their tax exempt groups, spent more money in the 2012 election than all of the candidates combined in 2000, it's just a matter of time before that investment pays off.

 It clearly is paying off in Congress.  It's becoming clear now that the story isn't a sane Republican business class trying to control and manipulate the Tea Party rabble.  The rabid right as well as the Tea Party is the direct product of some of the wealthiest and most politically active right wing extremists.

Meanwhile the spiral continues downward.  A new report confirms that nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.  These include the new lower middle class, mostly two-parent, two-job families with at least one college education--yet they still struggle.  It seems that everybody sees the growing wealth gap, and can't agree on anything else.

Meanwhile the suffering continues and grows, and so far mostly in silence.  If there isn't a hell I hereby authorize Sister Editha to design one, just for that billionaire who said that he's rich because he works harder than people who aren't rich.  Here's just one story about the lives of people who work harder than that asshole can even imagine, and are still in a world of pain.

It's not completely bleak.  President Obama keeps shining a light on all this, and much to my surprise, there's a Pope now who is more than mouthing platitudes.  Some like Robert Reich call for a new WPA (some guaranteed income proposals call for community service and public works), stating the same basic economic point: "The real job creators are the vast middle class and the poor — when they have enough money in their pockets." There are even corporate leaders who are aware of the dangers of the growing gap.  And even versions of the guaranteed income or negative income tax are being discussed--in Europe.  

 Another variation getting some attention is the "Citizen's Dividend."And as eye-rolling as otherworldly academia can be, it's worth mentioning that in its precincts, the guaranteed income remains alive and well.  Now it's called the Basic Income Guarantee--" an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs."  There's a U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network with a website, academic papers and an annual Congress.  The 12th was last May in New York (a joint project of Basic Income Canada Network and the U.S. network.) The 13th joint confab is scheduled for June in Montreal, perhaps to prepare an actual proposal for Canada.

Still, the state of the U.S. political zeitgeist is clear.  At a time when most everyone agrees the income or wealth gap is so extreme (and the numbers clearly show it is), we are at the extreme edge of not dealing with it--of actually penalizing the people who suffer the most instead of coming up with the best ways to help them, and to help this economy and this democracy get better, instead of sliding into decadence and despair.  And it is the most wealthy--the greatest beneficiaries of the political system, including efforts by the Obama administration--who are the most publicly aggrieved.  It seems the gap between political perception and reality is just as enormous.

And it reminds me a little too much of the political zeitgeist in regard to the climate crisis.  You could essentially write the same story.

Rain, We Don't Mind

It's churlish to complain about our weather, considering the winter storms that continue to wreak havoc from the Midwest to the East Coast.  So let's just call this a report.

Now officially in serious drought, we're having an eerie winter. Lots of sun in the rainy season has made people oddly nervous. So far it has been warmer than usual in the daytimes (mostly due to that sunshine) but colder than normal at night, often hovering around freezing, which usually happens a few times but not so often or steadily.

  But in just the past few days the pattern started to revert towards "normal", with fairly steady temperatures( 50s/40s) and a series of rain-bearing storms. That's good.  Only so far the rain here in northern Humboldt has been minimal, and it looks like it will continue that way.  The rain is mostly falling north and south of here (with snow to the east).  Even San Francisco will probably get more rain out of the system coming through tonight than we will.

It's good for the state, for the snowpack in the Sierras, and probably good for our water supply from the north.  But locally, our rivers and so on, not so much.  Nor for our plants and trees.  In a drought you start to see how things are connected.  The dairy farms, food prices, potential conflicts and problems for our cash economy--whatever kind of grass, it takes water to grow it.  Farmers vs. fishermen/wildlife (salmon) vs. "growers" vs. townspeople etc. for what water there is.   (However, southern Humboldt--where the "growers" mostly are-- is expected to get decent rain from this system.)

 So despite the reassuring sounds outside, I'll continue to be nervous until I see a few inches of rain have come down from one storm.

About the only good thing to come out of this drought so far however is increased pressure on the Brown administration in Sacramento to not approve fracking in the state, which uses millions of gallons of water.  A protest march in Sacramento to make that point is scheduled for March 15.

Long Ball, Long Life

Hearing about big league baseball as a child, Ralph Kiner was probably the first name I knew.  His rookie year was mine--he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates the year I was born.  The late 40s and early 50s were not great ones for the Pirates; Kiner was their biggest and sometimes only star.

 He was a home run hitter in a baseball park--Forbes Field--that wasn't built for the long ball.  But his 54 homers in 1949 was about as close as any hitter got to Babe Ruth's 60 home run record for a long time, and is still a record for the Pirates.  He hit 51 in 1947, just his second year.  (By the way, Babe Ruth hit the last two homers of his career at Forbes Field, both in the same game.)  Kiner led the National League in homers for every full season he played for the Pirates--7 in a row.

Kiner also hit over .300 twice, and knocked in more than 100 runs six times.   Given the rest of the Pirates lineup and Forbes Field, his run of RBIs from 1947 to 1953 was phenomenal: 127, 123, 127, 118, 109.

He was traded to the Cubs and then to Cleveland.  I'm pretty sure I was aware of him as a Pirate but I probably got his baseball card when he was with one of those two teams.  I remember reading his stats with awe.  He retired after the 1955 season, and was later elected to the baseball Hall of Fame.

But the bulk of his life in baseball was ahead of him.  He became an announcer and interviewer for the New York Mets from their first season in 1961, and did some play by play as recently as last year.  His death at the age of 91 was announced today.

Noise Equals Money

Poli scientist Jonathan Bernstein has moved from his "Plain Blog" blogspot to the big time at Bloomberg.  When those of us who were regulars in the comments section at the old place learned this, there were congratulations but also regret that our little community of sanity was likely to be broken up.

That seems to have happened.  Since many commented anonymously it's impossible to know how many have continued commenting at Bloomberg,  but I don't recognize but a few of those voices.  Instead there are the predictably extreme, dismissive, hate-filled comments that mock the idea of an exchange of information and views in a comments thread.

My routine these days has me checking JB late in the day if not the night, so I notice two things: I've arrived after the clamors of the day have ended, so the whole futile pattern emerges, and secondly,  if I comment it is often the last one and so it sits there nicely at the top, apart from the carnage below it.

Still, it's not as much fun as it used to be.  However I occasionally write something there that's worth repeating here, as in the following comment to JB's post on partisan media.  The topic got current I think because of a recent survey showing that a much higher percentage of those surveyed got their news primarily from FOX (almost half the total) and the usual candidate for its leftward counterpart, MSNBC, was close to the bottom.

Here's what I said:

Partisan media hype emotions, which as advertisers know, motivates buying i.e. contributing to candidates and parties. Though they operate differently--right wing media distorts or makes up facts, progressive media is more factually careful but still spends excessive time highlighting the emotionally potent outrages committed by the other side--they both have become important politically. Outrage as well as other more personal factors motivates people to clot comment threads with their often hate-filled shouting. Anything in this fast, increasingly connected and easily panicked information system can bend the debate and influence the terms of it. Any bit can be amplified by repetition as it moves up the aggregation chain. Otherwise the effect is cumulative--in supporting affiliations it gets tribal, and in information it adds to the noise that overwhelms the signal. That's probably why people are paid to make incendiary comments at places like this, although not everyone needs that kind of encouragement.

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

"Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships--the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in his last speech, as World War II was ending, while the atomic age was gestating, and decades before the Climate Crisis showed signs of becoming the ultimate test of human civilization.

Super Seattle

Back in 2005 when the Seattle Seahawks had the misfortune of playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl, a Seattle journalist traveled to Pittsburgh and was amazed.  In Seattle she said, there wasn't much buzz about the Seahawks.  But in Pittsburgh, from the moment she landed, everybody talked about the Steelers.

In 2013 it seems that just about everybody in Seattle was going to see the Seahawks.  The fans there became internationally famous as the "12th man" in home games.  Their thundering feet registered on nearby seismographs.

As the 2014 Super Bowl approached, Denver quarterback Peyton Manning was perhaps the most famous player in the NFL.  But the jersey of the relatively "unknown" Seattle quarterback was outselling Manning's.

The Seattle defense dominated the Super Bowl,  the special teams had their moments, and the offense produced enough error-free football to wipe out the slightly favored Denver Broncos.

Congratulations then to Seattle and its fans.  We're glad you learned something from playing the Steelers.

Two Voices That Made A Difference

American music lost two historic figures in January: first Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers, and then Pete Seeger, whose performing career goes back to the 1940s.

Josh Marshall's appreciation of Seeger and one by Bruce Springsteen include a video previously featured on this site, of Seeger and Springsteen singing "This Land is Your Land" as part of President Obama's first Inaugural celebration.  Time Magazine has videos of his performances of some of his most famous songs.

Appreciations of Phil Everly that place him in musical and historical context by Linda Ronstadt and Paul Simon, among others are here and here.  Ronstadt wrote a neat three paragraphs for Time Magazine, which is buried behind their subscriber/registration wall.  But it's worth seeking out.

As these articles make clear, their legacies live not only in their own music but in musicians who came after them.  In Seeger's case, as Josh Marshall writes, his activism changed America in many ways. Helping to save the Hudson River from death by pollution is one of his greatest and least appreciated contrbutions.

Pennsylvania: The Company Town

Once upon a time I did some work for the Pennsylvania governor's office which included writing a booklet to accompany the state budget summing up programs underway.  It was called The New Pennsylvania: A Commonwealth That Works.

Well apparently there's an even newer Pennsylvania: The Company Town. Or to be more specific, Fracksylvania.

In some ways it's like the old old Pennsylvania of my grandfather's day, bringing up his family in what was literally a company town for many years, owned and operated by a coal company.

Now the fossil fuel frackers apparently own not only big chunks of the state--and I mean own--and they evidently own the legislature and governor's office, no surprise there--but they also apparently own the law.

Here's the story that only a British newspaper appears to care about:

Vera Scroggins, an outspoken opponent of fracking, is legally barred from the new county hospital. Also off-limits, unless Scroggins wants to risk fines and arrest, are the Chinese restaurant where she takes her grandchildren, the supermarkets and drug stores where she shops, the animal shelter where she adopted her Yorkshire terrier, bowling alley, recycling centre, golf club, and lake shore.

In total, 312.5 sq miles are no-go areas for Scroggins under a sweeping court order granted by a local judge that bars her from any properties owned or leased by one of the biggest drillers in the Pennsylvania natural gas rush, Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation.

What is this woman's crime?  She's a political activist against fracking.  Not violent, and there's little evidence she's even disruptive. (Unless you count bringing celebrities in to see the fracking for themselves.)  She's just a heretic.

So two things here.  The law simply bans her from property owned or leased by this monstrous company, with the full knowledge of its extent, and that it includes what passes for public spaces in this town.  Which is totalitarian enough but in practical terms it is an order almost impossible to obey because this company pretty much owns or leases the town.

The court order didn't specify the actual places she can't go, that is, nobody told her exactly what the company owns or leases.

Montrose where Scroggins lives

The company is Cabot.  The story continues:

" Cabot turned up with four lawyers and nine witnesses, employees of the company and the firm it hired to provide security. Scroggins represented herself. She told the court she had been unable to find a lawyer as the hearing had been called on 72 hours' notice.

By the time the hearing was over, the judge had granted Cabot a temporary injunction barring Scroggins from all property owned or leased by the company. "It is hereby ordered that Ms Scroggins is restrained, enjoined and prohibited from entering upon property owned and/or leased by Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation including but not limited to well sites, well pads and access roads," the injunction reads.

The effect of that ban is far broader than the dry legal language would suggest.  In court filings, Cabot said it holds leases on 200,000 acres of land, equivalent to 312.5 sq miles. That amounts to nearly 40% of the largely rural county in north-eastern Pennsylvania where Scroggins lives and where Cabot does most of its drilling."

coke oven in Mt. Pleasant past

This is hardly the only outrage to the rights of American citizens perpetrated by the law in Pennsylvania at the behest of its apparent masters, the fossil fuel frackers.  An earlier case arose in Mount Pleasant,  very near where my father was born and grew up.  It was coal and then coke country then.  Now it's a fracking motherlode.  From another Guardian story:

 "The Hallowich family had earlier accused oil and gas companies of destroying their 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and putting their children's health in danger. Their property was adjacent to major industrial operations: four gas wells, gas compressor stations, and a waste water pond, which the Hallowich family said contaminated their water supply and caused burning eyes, sore throats and headaches."

The family settled with the companies involved for $750,000 to move to a safer and healthier place.  But a condition of the 2011 settlement was recently revealed: no member of the family can ever, ever, ever talk about fracking, from any point of view, in any way, to anyone, until they die.  That includes the Hallowich children, who are 7 and 10 years old.  If they speak out of turn, the family loses the money, and at least one of the companies-- Range Resources-- said it will hold them to it.

This story was at least broken locally, by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.  This story adds that confidentiality agreements usually don't apply to children, but there was some question about it in this case because of the specific court order.  What is it?  Well, who really knows?  Reporters were barred from hearings and the record sealed.  The companies involved (not just Range Resources) are so far adamant.

How sweeping is the ban on free speech?  It sounds like it goes far beyond commenting on the case itself.   But the law is apparently conspiring to keep even that much secret.

So in Pennsylvania, free speech is controlled by frackers, a power which the law seems only too happy to hand them.  You can talk about anything in PA except what the fossil fuel dictators say you can't talk about, unless you want to be banned from your grocery store, or have your children live in fear of saying the wrong thing.The U.S. Constitution apparently doesn't apply there anymore.

What's next for Pennsylvania-- the Iron and Coal police? Pinkertons and state police shooting down protestors?  As Pennsylvania becomes Fracksylvania it drills down into the muck of its own worst history.

Believe It

Gloomy poll numbers (the ones they choose to headline) and cynical analyzes, the time is out of joint, and so you might expect a defensive, awkward State of the Union.

Instead President Obama gave a confident, energized and forward-looking address, crisp and comprehensive, speaking over the heads of Washington to America, to history and to the future.

This is not a view you're likely to read elsewhere, at least not yet.  But it is what I saw and heard.  Last year President Obama urged Congress to act on a host of proposals that were eminently doable, both practically shovel-ready and politically mainstream.  They did nothing, bringing shame on themselves and a cloud of depression on the country.

This year he spoke of successes wrought usually by executive initiative and in partnership with coalitions of state and city governments, educational institutions and corporations, and he announced further initiatives to partner even more widely and deeply.  And he invited Congress to come along.

Rhetorically he did not use the word "progressive" but spoke several times of progress. One of his themes was citizenship--individual responsibility for the common good.  He spoke of opportunity, equality, justice and freedom--themes repeated from his famous speech after the New Hampshire primary that became mantras in the most famous campaign videos ever.

There are as usual hints of JFK especially in his final emphasis that progress is not easy, it takes time and effort.  The media says and will say that he said nothing new--that's right, he's been announcing these principles and goals, and ways to move towards them, while cautioning that it won't be easy and it will take time--from his 2008 campaign and especially his victory speech on election night in Chicago.

The speech transcript is here, the video of it with a second screen of facts and images is here.  I won't go through the themes of the speech, but simply reproduce some of the sentences that jumped out at me.

"After five years of grit and determined effort, the United States is better-positioned for the 21st century than any other nation on Earth. The question for everyone in this chamber, running through every decision we make this year, is whether we are going to help or hinder this progress."

"But America does not stand still – and neither will I".

"Opportunity is who we are. And the defining project of our generation is to restore that promise."

"Taken together, our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet. Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth. But we have to act with more urgency – because a changing climate is already harming western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. That’s why I directed my administration to work with states, utilities, and others to set new standards on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants are allowed to dump into the air. The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did."

"A pre-existing condition used to mean that someone like Amanda Shelley, a physician assistant and single mom from Arizona, couldn’t get health insurance. But on January 1st, she got covered. On January 3rd, she felt a sharp pain. On January 6th, she had emergency surgery. Just one week earlier, Amanda said, that surgery would’ve meant bankruptcy. That’s what health insurance reform is all about – the peace of mind that if misfortune strikes, you don’t have to lose everything."

"After all, that’s the spirit that has always moved this nation forward. It’s the spirit of citizenship – the recognition that through hard work and responsibility, we can pursue our individual dreams, but still come together as one American family to make sure the next generation can pursue its dreams as well."

"We have to remain vigilant. But I strongly believe our leadership and our security cannot depend on our military alone. As Commander-in-Chief, I have used force when needed to protect the American people, and I will never hesitate to do so as long as I hold this office. But I will not send our troops into harm’s way unless it’s truly necessary; nor will I allow our sons and daughters to be mired in open-ended conflicts. We must fight the battles that need to be fought, not those that terrorists prefer from us – large-scale deployments that drain our strength and may ultimately feed extremism. So, even as we aggressively pursue terrorist networks – through more targeted efforts and by building the capacity of our foreign partners – America must move off a permanent war footing."

"... working with this Congress, I will reform our surveillance programs – because the vital work of our intelligence community depends on public confidence, here and abroad, that the privacy of ordinary people is not being violated. And with the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay – because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action, but by remaining true to our Constitutional ideals, and setting an example for the rest of the world."

"But these negotiations [with Iran] do not rely on trust; any long-term deal we agree to must be based on verifiable action that convinces us and the international community that Iran is not building a nuclear bomb. If John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan could negotiate with the Soviet Union, then surely a strong and confident America can negotiate with less powerful adversaries today."

"Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than two hundred years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress – to create and build and expand the possibilities of individual achievement; to free other nations from tyranny and fear; to promote justice, and fairness, and equality under the law, so that the words set to paper by our founders are made real for every citizen.

 The America we want for our kids – a rising America where honest work is plentiful and communities are strong; where prosperity is widely shared and opportunity for all lets us go as far as our dreams and toil will take us – none of it is easy. But if we work together; if we summon what is best in us, with our feet planted firmly in today but our eyes cast towards tomorrow – I know it’s within our reach.

Believe it."