Cry Me A River

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Williams and the Lynch Mob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Crisis: Cause & Effect

There's a threat to the future inherent in the language we're using--and not using--about the climate crisis.

For those of us sounding the alarm 20 or even 10 years ago, the climate crisis was something that was very likely to happen in the future if we didn't take steps to address it in the present.  Those steps--the various choices that might have made a difference--were mostly not taken.

Now we see the climate visibly, palpably and in various ways obviously changing.  Scientists tell us that these changes aren't going to change back for a very long time, if ever.  But they also tell us that there might be time to forestall even more severe, even much worse changes in the farther future, that might doom human civilization and end life on Earth as we know it.  There might be time--but not a lot of time--for humanity to finally understand the urgency, and take effective steps.

So now, the climate crisis is a two part crisis.  It is a crisis of the present-to-near future, and a crisis of all of the future.

The greatest danger to that future is that we refuse to see the relationship of the "climate change" of the present and the mortal danger to the human future.

That refusal is happening now, and our scientists and political leaders are letting it happen.  Some leaders are doing so deliberately, and the others--especially those who support efforts to address both parts of the climate crisis-- are making it easier for them.

This past weekend the New York Times published a long story called "Climate Change's Bottom Line."  It begins by quoting the chairman of a large midwestern food conglomerate:

"Mr. Page is not a typical environmental activist. He says he doesn’t know — or particularly care — whether human activity causes climate change. He doesn’t give much serious thought to apocalyptic predictions of unbearably hot summers and endless storms. But over the last nine months, he has lobbied members of Congress and urged farmers to take climate change seriously."

How is it possible for someone not to know or care what causes climate change, and yet urge others to "take climate change seriously"?

It is possible because of the murkiness and misdirection in the language that nearly everyone uses now to describe what we're up against.

Since it became clear that we are dealing with two parts to the climate crisis, two words to describe what we need to do to address each of them have become standard.  Efforts to cut greenhouse gas pollution by various means, including using alternate energy forms, in order to forestall worse consequences to the climate of the future--these go by the title of "mitigation."  Efforts to address flooding, sea level rise, drought and so on where these have become more likely because of "climate change," are called "adaptation."

There are several things very wrong about these words.  As language, they are fuzzy abstractions that are virtually interchangeable.  Maybe environmentalists, public works officials, some scientists etc. can tell them apart, and remember which applies to which set of problems, but for most other citizens, they are almost meaningless--hard to remember, and hard to tell apart.  That alone has political consequences.  At the very least, it doesn't exactly lend urgency to either set of tasks.

The words are weak and not even accurate.  Do we really want to "mitigate" future ruining of the climate and human civilization, species extinction and the creation of a immensely hotter planet?  Or do we want to do what we can to stop it?  Do we want to "adapt" to drought and floods or fix what we can in our social organization, our infrastructure, management, policy and planning?

But the most consequential feature of these words is that they have no relation to each other.  Yet the two parts of the climate crisis do.  And the future depends on keeping that in mind.

Of course there are words that make that relationship clear, and unbreakable.  They are simple words that everyone understands.  The words are "cause" and "effect."

Greenhouse gases are the cause of  climate change.  If they are allowed to continue their access to the atmosphere at current or greater rates, they will continue to cause greater and greater climate change.  Anything that reduces these gases, or that otherwise slows the progress of global heating, addresses the causes.

The effects of "climate change" are sea level rise, flooding, drought, and a host of further problems that can well include higher food prices and the spread of tropical diseases.

But the way we talk about climate does not make this cause and effect connection.  This failure to make that connection is even now aiding those who very much don't want the connection made.

For some corporate leaders (perhaps like this ag guy) and public officials (like those who emphasize "disaster preparedness" without mentioning climate), obscuring the cause and effect relationship is a political dodge, a way of getting support for efforts to deal with effects, even from those who don't accept the causes.

The vagueness of the preferred term "climate change" plays into this, since it can mean the climate change that's happening or is part of a discernible trend (though we don't know why), or it can mean the climate crisis in full.

There's a certain utility in this vagueness, as it doesn't overtly push denier buttons (or at least that's the hope.)  But in the long run it's dangerous.  Because sooner or later some smart Republican is going to say something like what the ag guy said: I don't know and don't care what causes it, what we need to do is deal with these  drought and flooding problems.

It would not surprise me to hear words like this coming from the ample mouth of Chris Christie.  As governor of New Jersey, he witnessed the devastation wrought by the storm called Sandy.  His state is in fact very actively working to deal with such effects.

Some polls are telling Republican presidential candidates that all-out denialism is a loser.  Christie or Jeb Bush could split the difference, talk about adapting to climate change and yet fail to support efforts to dramatically slash carbon and dramatically increase non-carbon spewing energy.  And all other efforts to address the cause.

They might even get away with it.  Why?  Because Democrats, environmentalists and advocates on this very issue won't talk about the relationship, the cause and effect relationship.  Which by now could be clear in the minds of most voters and even the media.

It's not that these advocates were unaware of this possibility of political opponents hijacking the issue in this way.  They've dealt with it in the past by conspicuously avoiding any talk about dealing with effects.  They wanted to emphasize dealing with the causes to such an extent that they talked way too optimistically about how soon dealing with causes would be successful.  Al Gore talked about "solving" the climate crisis.

Now most of them know that we can only solve problems resulting from global heating, and solve problems on how to reduce future global heating.  The climate crisis isn't going away.  For all of us now alive, even just born, the climate crisis is permanent.  And to some degree it will be for many future generations.  We don't really know how bad it might get, and how soon.  But we do know that if we keep injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at our ever-increasing rate, there is an ever-decreasing chance of human civilization surviving more or less intact.

It is still possible--and so easy--to start talking about this sensibly, to start making the connection in every policy statement on every level, by talking about the causes and the effects, thereby linking them together and making them inseparable in the public mind.

Weather Report

Today being February 2, which is famous of course for being...James Joyce's birthday.

(Or were you thinking Groundhog Day, a pseudo-holiday that at least one publicity-seeking mayor may wish to forget.)

The Midwest got hammered by a new winter storm,  now moving into the Eastern US.  Before that started, my friend Mike sent me a photo from central PA, from one of his hikes along the Appalachian Trail.  It's generally been colder than normal there.  I miss my cold weather rambles through the snow.  Within reason, of course.

Here in far northern CA it's been warmer by anywhere from 5-10F.  I posted that after our sunny and bone dry January (the first on record since 1850) I was hoping for a repeat of last year's totally rainy February, and it looks like I'm getting my wish, at least for the next week or so.

It rained through the night and into the afternoon, with a little sunlight late.  That's when I took some pictures of raindrops on the cala lillies near the back porch.

But the total rain was under a half inch.  That's not likely to be the case this weekend however, when an "atmospheric river" is predicted to deliver several inches from Thursday through Sunday.  The Weather Underground is showing more than a inch per day, sometimes more than two.  Higher elevations could get a foot of precip.

This river should deliver rain farther south, at least into the Bay Area, and best of all for them, precip in the Sierras, which depending on temps could replenish the snow pack.

This isn't all risk-free, as so much rain at once can cause lots of problems.  But that's weather for you, especially these days.

Meanwhile, Southern California has its collective fingers crossed that a NOAA long range forecast is correct, and the region will get higher than normal rainfall over the next three months.

Accentuate the Positive

The Pew poll cited in the previous post tended to accentuate the negative when it came to attitudes on the climate crisis.  Now a different study not only accentuates the positive but adds to it.  According to the New York Times (via Boston Globe):

"An overwhelming majority of the American public, including nearly half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University, and the environmental research group Resources for the Future.

In a finding that could have implications for the 2016 presidential campaign, the poll also found that two-thirds of Americans say they are more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change. They are less likely to vote for candidates who question or deny the science of human-caused global warming.

Among Republicans, 48 percent said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports fighting climate change, a result that Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University and an author of the survey, called “the most powerful finding” in the poll."

Somewhat contradicting the Pew study finding: "Overall, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is caused by human activity is growing. In a 2011 Stanford University poll, 72 percent of people thought climate change was caused at least in part by human activities. That grew to 81 percent in the latest poll. By party, 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said that climate change was caused at least in part by human activities."

The basic and most powerful finding:

"The poll found that 83 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of independents, say that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem in the future.

On the issue of policies, the poll found that 77 percent of Americans say that the federal government should be doing a substantial amount to combat climate change. Ninety percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Republicans said the government should be fighting climate change."

This last number is actually a bit below what a Yale survey recently found: "56 percent of Republicans support regulating climate-warming greenhouse gases."

Slate reproduces the exact statements that respondents to the poll were asked to evaluate.

The Seattle pi story reporting on the survey gave several recent examples of Republican leaders making aggressive moves to thwart recognition of the climate crisis and government attempts to address it.

Contrast their positions with what an independent voter is quoted by the Times/Globe story as saying: that although he doesn't see it as a more crucial issue than dealing with terrorists like ISIL, he is turned off by absolute denialists, the most prominent and widespread position among Republican leaders:

But, he said of climate change, “if someone feels it’s a hoax, they are denying the evidence out there. Many arguments can be made on both sides of the fence. But to just ignore it completely indicates a close-minded individual, and I don’t want a close-minded individual in a seat of political power.”

The Times/Globe story ends with unnamed "political analysts" suggesting that Republicans need to develop a position that speaks to that voter's concerns while not alienating the Koch Brothers.  Good luck with that.  The Kochs have made it known they're going to spend close to a billion dollars in the next election cycle, including money targeted to defeat any candidate--including Republicans in primaries--who don't toe the denialist line.

However, the possibility of some Republicans offering a different approach eventually (and maybe Christie will start this) is a lead-in to what I want to say in my next post.

Climate Crisis: Convincing and Communicating

A Pew study released the other day compared two recent surveys which asked the same basic questions of two groups: scientists and non-scientists.  Some of the questions were general ones about science and society, others were about "beliefs" on specific issues.  These got the headlines, because of the difference between the percentage of scientists versus the percentage of non-scientists on what they believe is proven fact on "key scientific issues."

One of the issues that got into news stories was climate change, and predictably, a higher percentage of scientists than other citizens believe it is caused by that nebulous euphemism, "human activity."  The very high percentage of scientists (87%, which is about 10 points lower than climate scientists alone) probably is expected, but notable was the size of the gap between them and others, and the low percentage of non-scientists (50%).

Perhaps even more alarming, or maybe more telling, was another comparison, between a similar Pew poll of citizens in 2009 and this one.  In 2009, 11% of those surveyed said there was no solid evidence the climate is warming.  But in 2014--after mounting and very obvious evidence in every region of America over those 5 years--it was up to 25%, fully one quarter.  Opposite to the evidence.

One could point out that this means that 75% at least do accept evidence and experience on this topic. But it must raise again the question (which it perhaps answers) of what if any evidence will convince enough people to stop wasting energy and attention on denial, so our society gets into the fast lane of addressing the climate crisis?

There is a lot going on here.  Attitudes towards science and scientists is a complex area (or a tangled morass) that would take many words to even approach.  Then there is the fear factor of all the implications of the climate crisis that amps up denial, so that the perception of climate change actually intensifies denial of its existence or causes.

All of this bears upon questions that recur in many forms almost constantly. How can the climate crisis be communicated effectively, so that at last society addresses it with the necessary unity and dedication?

Scaring people won't do it, says Dean Ornish, you need a positive approach: "If we are going to find sustainable ways of dealing with global warming, we have to base it on love and feeling good, not fear and loathing. If it’s fun, then it’s sustainable."    

Science won't win over climate sceptics, asserts Adam Comer in the Guardian--we need stories. But what kind of stories?  Comer also suggests the positive--stories about low-carbon solutions.

Or maybe personal stories of the negative effects.  Climate scientist Heidi Cullen admitted in a New York Times oped that she found these more powerful than scientific facts.  But will they, as the headline promised, change minds? Maybe, she writes, in combination with factual documentaries and works of fiction that both evoke feeling and offer a broader humanized perspective.

Others agree that negative stories get to people better.  But which ones?  David Roberts notes that environmentalists have been tearing their hair out trying to figure out what horror will get the attention --drought?  Disease? Sea level rise?--that will finally turn the tide (so to speak) and galvanize action.  His own candidate in this piece is flooding, some of which happens regularly right now due to sea level rise in several coastal cities.

Or the story doesn't have to even be related to climate, like the man who is walking 3,000 miles across America to increase awareness of the issue, and who gets attention for it by the fact of his walk, and how he relates to people he meets.

Do any of these actually work?  Who knows? In a different piece, David Roberts links to some of his posts analyzing the complexity of responses by those he calls conservatives, while debunking claims (desperate claims in some cases) of psychological etc. means to convince them.

Bill McKibben, who has been writing about climate change probably longer than anyone, takes the "ignore them" route by continuing (for example) his series of carefully written and assessed evaluations of where we are in this area (many of them over the years, like last summer, in the New York Review of Books) that appeal to believers monitoring the changing situation,  while simultaneously organizing activists--particularly young ones--to turn this into the civil rights movement of the age.  Presumably, at least until the old denialists die, he's given up on the "emotional consensus" he once called for, though perhaps I'm the only one who remembers these words, which he uttered in an interview or press conference I saw eons ago on C-Span.)

Naomi Klein has joined the fight, admittedly late in the game, with her political and economic perspective, and eloquent support for activism as well.  Like many, she sees the climate crisis as requiring major change (though few disagree on scale, they don't always agree on the time scale) and the nature of these changes being beneficial in a much wider way than only addressing the climate crisis.
(Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker was skeptical of Klein's prescriptions.  Their dialogue is worth a look.)

But the problem remains, so it isn't surprising that it is the headline for a recent Atlantic article: How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen/
Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here's how we can move beyond the impasse. Unfortunately the long piece that follows, a serious analysis with some convincing and unconvincing conclusions, isn't about this.  Yet another product perhaps of the articles and the headlines written by two different people, possibly two different species.

But the writer (Charles Mann) does suggest that the issue that might finally galvanize action is the threat of the technological "solution" of geoengineering, which is dangerous in palpably scary ways.  So he comes down on the fear factor as the motivator of acceptance.

Let me give the short version of my answer.  First, I believe communicating clearly and more effectively on this issue is essential.  Second, while I believe that "conservatives" and others suspicious of science and today's scientists raise other issues that ought to be recognized and addressed,  and I suspect the increase in total denial is partly due to failures to communicate clearly, I don't believe it all is, and I don't believe evidence, or stories of any kind will convince everybody.

While we're dealing with a crisis of an unprecedented nature, within a particular historical context, we're also operating within political constraints that may well be centuries old. In the 19th century for example, John Stuart Mill theorized that under most circumstances the masses are always innately conservative--in the sense of not wanting to risk change--while liberals are always a minority, and must find ways towards a temporary majority on specific matters.  That's part of our context.  It's there underneath the fear and ideology, and the greed that also takes advantage of it.

Nevertheless, there is a public out there that's close to (or already is) an effective majority on this issue, though it may take more than that to overcome entrenched power.  I support communicating evidence (and repeating it, because what you may lose in attention by repetition you may gain in understanding among nonscientists) and arguing for specific solutions to specific problems (ways of cutting down on carbon pollution, directly and through alternative energy sources)--because there are an awful lot of people who are listening, even if only now and again.  I support activism, from demos and creative variations on attention-getting actions, to divestment campaigns. I support positive stories (though Ornish obviously doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis) and I support negative stories, and I see dangers in both.  So in terms of strategy, I'm for all of the above.  Because in the end it's individuals at a particular time, so it's serendipity, before it's a politically effective constituency.

Third: what I fear will be a consequence of this stubborn inability to reach "emotional consensus" and common effort.  I am afraid that the current complacency riding the undercurrent of denial will suddenly become panic (my guess it will be the result of sky-high food prices, already going in that direction.) And that panic could demand unfortunate reactions.

  There are ways to prepare for that, to make it less consequential perhaps, and ultimately overcome it.  Our politics now aren't encouraging in this respect.  But not everything is politics.  I'll have a post (much shorter I hope) on one aspect of that soon.

2014, 2015 and the Climate of History

     Not my photo of Clam Beach (it's from here) but it's been this kind of day.

It's hard to complain about our weather here.  It was a rainy December until Christmas, and it's pretty much been sunny ever since.  Warmer than usual for winter, and at times, warm enough to think it might be summer.

Clam Beach is only 8 miles away on the 101, but we don't usually think of it, especially in winter, because it's so open and often windy.  But we've been there twice in the past week or so, two warm, windless golden afternoons, among the families and their sandcastles, kids with kites (new kinds to me, small low-flying ones, shaped and colored like butterflies), dogs frolicking with their humans and each other, (mostly) girls on horseback trotting on the sand.  Though once, at sunset, we saw two horses a-galloping at water's edge, moving silhouettes against the burnished sky and glittering water.  With men in the distance grouped to fish, and some people with sticks down near the waterline with the shore birds, clamming.

Sure, it should be raining. With a rainless January in SF and north, the CA drought is worse than ever. The West in general is unusually hot, and south of us the heat has melted much of the snowpack in the Sierras built up in November and December, all but very high up.  A lot of places depend on that spring melt for their water.

We're hoping here for a rainy February and March, like last year.  But the unseasonable, even unprecedented perfection of our recent weather isn't the only reason it seems otherworldly.  It's that the weather doesn't make sense anymore.

It was apparently a pretty temperate 2014 on the East Coast, too. At least until this snowy winter, including the latest storm, all of which is fed and made more intense by warmer ocean water.

 Unfortunately, the big picture was not so good.  Despite the slowing in the global warming rate that still has scientists scratching their heads (Ocean capture?  Volcanoes?) and despite the temperature neutral bust of this year's El Nino, both NASA and NOAA culled their data to declare 2014 was the Earth's hottest year on record, which means from 1880 at least.  The ten hottest days in that period have all happened since 1997 or 2000, depending on whether you throw out 1998 as freakishly hot.  For the entire state of CA it was also the hottest year on record (by 1.8F), and December the hottest month.

There's more evidence, accumulating faster, is it worth it to recite it? Carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2014, growing at the fastest rate in 30 years. More and faster melting in Greenland.  More land species on the brink.  The crashing of marine life is just beginning.  And so on.

But as Amy Davidson's piece in the New Yorker was headlined: Our Hottest Year, Our Cold Indifference.  Denial and indifference have definitely emerged as factors as potent as greenhouse gases in determining the future of civilization.  It doesn't look great in either category.  No wonder the atomic scientists who used to monitor the danger of nuclear apocalypse in their calculations on the likelihood of doomsday, this year have named the climate crisis as a chief reason they've shoved the Doomsday Clock hands forward to three minutes to midnight.

So that's where we are.  Lots of people are pushing back, organizing, speaking out, acting and trying to act--much of which is coming to a crescendo this year, as the world's nations meet to make or not make serious commitments to address the climate crisis, both causes and effects, but especially causes.

There is a kind of orchestration, you might even call it a chess game beginning.  Two of the major players (both on the same side) are President Obama and Pope Francis.  Obama has already secured some commitments from China.  He made a point of pushing India in the right direction during last week's visit.  And he's done more than any other U.S. president to act effectively here.

The word has been out for weeks that Pope Francis is about to take the highly unusual step of issuing a papal encyclical on the moral necessity of addressing the climate crisis.  For Catholics this is especially serious, because encyclicals invoke papal infallibility on faith and morals.  But it is important beyond active membership.  It has already caused some grumbling, and will undoubtedly be met with vituperation when it happens.  But Pope Francis will have confirmed his status as the most progressive pope since John XXIII, and he will be a beacon and a hero to many.  This issue can never have too many heroes.

Last Word

And it gets better.

Defiant

Headline of the day after, in the Guardian: Off-the-cuff and full of swagger: Obama's State of the Union leaves GOP enraged

The word that seemed to be most prominent in coverage was "defiant," as in Reuters: After defiant speech, Obama plugs tech jobs in Republican heartland

 E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post also noted the ad libs in the speech, particularly the first one, after declaring that the US has emerged from economic doldrums to silence from Republicans present he said: "This is good news, people."

"With those five words, President Obama made clear that he thinks it’s far more important to win a long-term argument with his partisan and ideological opponents than to pretend that they are eager to seize opportunities to work with him. He decided to deal with the Republican Party he has, not the Republican Party he wishes he had.

Those ad-libbed words followed what ranks as one of the more polemical passages ever offered in a State of the Union address. “At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious,” he declared, “that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health-care inflation at its lowest rate in 50 years.”

Good news, indeed, and in telling the Republicans that all their predictions turned out to be wrong, he reminded his fellow citizens which side, which policies and which president had brought the country back."

Dionne also quoted a line that sums up this "defiant" and direct tone:

And he got pretty personal with the honorable members of Congress when he renewed his support for an increase in the minimum wage. “If you truly believe you could work full time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year,” he said, “go try it.”

Pick Yourself Up

"My fellow Americans, we too are a strong, tight-knit family. We, too, have made it through some hard times. Fifteen years into this new century, we have picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and begun again the work of remaking America."   President Obama, ending his State of the Union 2015

Imagine

"Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns. Imagine if we did something different."

President Obama returned to the themes that first attracted national attention and inspired his first presidential campaign, once again standing against cynicism and for hope, calling for a unified commitment to address needs--and for Congress to at least pass some legislation on which they and Democrats agree.  But this time with the experience of the past 6 years in mind:

"A better politics is one where we appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears.

A better politics is one where we debate without demonizing each other; where we talk issues, and values, and principles, and facts, rather than “gotcha” moments, or trivial gaffes, or fake controversies that have nothing to do with people’s daily lives.

A better politics is one where we spend less time drowning in dark money for ads that pull us into the gutter, and spend more time lifting young people up, with a sense of purpose and possibility, and asking them to join in the great mission of building America.

If we’re going to have arguments, let’s have arguments — but let’s make them debates worthy of this body and worthy of this country.

That’s a better politics. That’s how we start rebuilding trust. That’s how we move this country forward. That’s what the American people want. That’s what they deserve."

He began his State of the Union with the accomplishments of the past six years--reviving the economy, ending wars--that rhetorically allowed him to pivot to our ability (now that "the State of the Union is strong") to concentrate on building a better future, but that also gave a factual account of what in any objective evaluation constitutes a great presidency.

He outlined elements of his Middle Class Economics.  New tax proposals and free community college made the pre-speech headlines but to me the most impressive moments were the careful rationales made for the importance of increased access to childcare (combined with the growing necessity of two working parents.)  That a year of child care can cost as much as a year of college was new information for me.

  He reinterated his positions on a smarter foreign policy, war only as a last resort, against torture, and for closing Gitmo.  He added cybersecurity and a free Internet.  He was strong if brief on the climate crisis, beginning: "And no challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change."

He made pointed references to the expensive lessons of these years of Bushwars, and of hysterical statements and inflammatory rhetoric reacting to the apparent crisis of the moment: "When we make rash decisions, reacting to the headlines instead of using our heads; when the first response to a challenge is to send in our military — then we risk getting drawn into unnecessary conflicts, and neglect the broader strategy we need for a safer, more prosperous world. That’s what our enemies want us to do."  Instead America leads "not with bluster, but with persistent, steady resolve."

In an effort to better use new media, the White House made the speech text available on the Internet in advance, and provided real time video with accompanying information in visual form.  So the President needed to stick to the prepared text, which he did but for one delightful moment towards the end, when he was preparing to say that he will concentrate on his agenda for the next two years without the distraction of politics.

"I have no more campaigns to run," he began, and paused at the smattering of applause.  "I know," he said, looking at the Republican side, "cause I won both of them."

Into the Gap Pours Fear Part II

[Part I is the post below this one.]

That 2014 was the hottest year on record, contradicting the latest claims of climate crisis deniers? (More on that in a post to come.) That there's yet another painful example (the state of Kansas) proving that supply side economics doesn't work?  Or growing evidence that Obamacare is working better than even its supporters predicted?  So what? The facts--new or accruing old--don't matter, writes Paul Krugman.  Not to the true unbelievers.

"And the list goes on. On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk. If you’ve gotten involved in any of these debates, you know that these people aren’t happy warriors; they’re red-faced angry, with special rage directed at know-it-alls who snootily point out that the facts don’t support their position.

 The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together.. Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest." 

"And why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed conservatives are actually reactionaries. That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary citizens better and more secure."

Krugman links to this Corey Robin essay from 2012.  It's a political science piece that gets into group psychology, asserting that the support of political or corporate hierarchy often begins with a sense of preserving family hierarchy, or more broadly, the traditional lines of family, gender and racial power.

 I'm not sure Robin says this, but this easily extends to class, although it often means supporting a class structure in which you personally are relatively powerless and exploited.  It's one of several ways that this formulation supports the sometimes mysterious conjunction of lower middle class (white) conservatives with the interests of billionaires to keep things as they are, so they can keep making their billions in the same way.

Robin doesn't give much supporting evidence for his claims on the private-to-public support for hierarchy, but clearly there are ongoing changes in America that conservatives believe are wrong, and that includes most of those changes.  It's clearer in some areas than others--immigration for example--that people feel threatened, when the trends are against them anyway (ironically, to the benefit of the billionaires who fund their politics which first and foremost supports the billionaires' interests.)

But Robin seems on more certain ground when he suggests the reasons for the rabid quality of the right these days:

"There's a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver's seat since, depending on who's counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is. Though the spirit of militant opposition pervades the entirety of conservative discourse, Dinesh D'Souza has put the case most clearly:

Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But ... what if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must ... be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical."

And this is where the rabid right and the fundamentalist religious right meet.  In religious terms, today's family-hierarchy-destroying, etc. society is terminally sinful, and nothing will save us but a total return to their prescriptive righteousness as interpreted by particular preachers who cherrypick the Bible to support their political agenda.  As apostate fundamentalist Frank Schaeffer wrote:

"The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?"

There's another element that Christian fundamentalist leaders have in common with rabid right political leaders (as Schaeffer also notes): anger is good for fundraising.

Fundamentally, rabid right ideologues feel terminally threatened by a range of societal changes, some of them (like climate) emphasized or added to the mix for the benefit of certain billionaires in particular.  Each of these issues has an additional set of fears associated with it, particularly climate, which seems to threaten ways of life built around fossil fuels.  But basically these changes are threatening, and the response is fear translated into anger, which is fed and rationalized by ideology.

All of these are related to what's called income inequality, but for most people means less money to support lives that cost more every year, regardless of what the inflation numbers say.  When you see elements of your life slipping away, you fiercely protect what's left.  You don't want to risk losing even more.

  But nothing is just one thing.  Racial feelings related to status, regional and family history, local culture, all kinds of things play into the formation and expression of this resistance to admitting that there are problems that need new solutions, and not just some hazy and inconsistent return to an old order, or at least the parts of it you'd like to revive.

Whether there's any way to reach these people, or it's best to just write them off as a lost cause and endless energy sink, while devoting all efforts to building political power for supporters of these issues and occasionally contending for the hearts and minds of the muddled middle, are questions for later noodling.

Into the Gap Pours Fear

In his brief time in the public spotlight, Martin Luther King championed at least three interrelated causes.  The first of course is racial justice in America.  That aspect has been the focus of protests today related to the wanton killings of black men by police.

But King's concerns did not end with Selma or the March on Washington.  His persistence and eloquence advocating the end of racial injustice has become the least controversial of his public commitments, though it takes an unhealthy dose of hypocrisy for most conservatives to claim common cause.

He also became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, which roiled his reputation at the time.  But his most controversial concentration that remains a flashpoint (and therefore most ignored) is poverty and more broadly, economic injustice and inequality.  That's one reason I led the day with a quote from him on that subject.

It happened that his holiday saw the release of the latest and probably most detailed report on growing "income inequality," this time on a global scale.  The report from Oxfam made some headlines, since it found that by next year, the world's top 1% will control more wealth than the other 99% combined.

To be more specific, it's the combined wealth of 80 billionaires versus everybody else on planet Earth combined--all 3.8 billion.  This is a change from 2010, when it took 388 billionaires to balance out the rest of the global population.  And when the 1% had just 48% of the world's wealth.  The incomes of these 80 doubled since 2009.  Did yours?

“The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement. “Despite the issue shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

A summary of this study, with graphs and pie charts, can be found at the end of this article that begins by noting that a lot of these billionaires along with business and political leaders are going to be in Davros, Switzerland this week, talking about all this.

There are a number of even less appetizing details in the study, such as the fact that many of the top billionaires made their money from healthcare and pharma.  In other words, they became obscenely wealthy by taking advantage of the sick and dying, their pain and their fear.

It's already been widely reported that in his State of the Union on Tuesday President Obama will again talk about income and economic inequality, and barriers to fairness and opportunity in the U.S., and that he will propose new tax revenues from the very rich and tax breaks for the middle class, and that they have no chance of passing Congress.

But the situation remains, the proposed solutions are clearly inadequate (absolutely no one of prominence I know of is talking about anything like a guaranteed income, as King did) and even these paltry proposals are unlikely to be instituted. People are increasingly afraid.  You can tell because they aren't talking about it.

The Dreaming Up Martin Luther King Day Quote

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1967
excerpted Seattle Times

The irony is obvious. We're going backwards.  For more on the guaranteed income, an idea widely discussed in the 1960s and 70s, see the posts on this blog accessible through the "guaranteed income" label, and this post at Soul of Star Trek.

Is Print the New Vinyl?

Before we move on beyond this accidental series on digital domination, one interesting and perhaps delightful (if true) countertrend.  However, first let's restate the trend, with the eloquent opening to the previously quoted (in the last post) Leon Wieseltier New York Times Book Review essay (with my emphases), in your Sunday Times today and here online:

 "Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” 

What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous."

The death knell for non-digital reading and writing is often sounded, sometimes with lived alarm, sometimes with complacent (I've made my money and reputation thanks) acceptance.

But leave it to my favorite newspaper columnist, Jon Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle, to find (or maybe make up, just a little) a somewhat countervailing trend: "Print is the new vinyl."

These words were uttered, he writes, by a tech savvy entrepreneur, suggesting a trend that combines retro with realization (that analogue records offer better sound than digital.)  Together they fantasized a sweet (if likely brief, or if ever) future:

"So perhaps the latest bunch of tech billionaires want quality too. They want long-form journalism, say, that can be reproduced in a portable and well-designed format. They want editing and fact-checking. Perhaps they want fiction, poetry, excerpts from the classics.

Nothing like old media to add that sheen of prestige. The guy I was with suggested that writers might once again make actual money, that the sight of someone carrying a book would be like seeing someone toting around a dulcimer — it indicates that they have hidden depths. We’re talking about a covert desire to follow the dream of the Enlightenment."

A last ditch dream?  Probably.  But I do recall that on several visits to a fashionable cafe in Menlo Park not far from Stanford--close enough to ground zero for the tech world--I saw more people reading books, newspapers and magazines than were starring at laptops and tablets, or even conspicuously glued to their smartphones etc.  A definite counter-trend to, for instance, the HSU campus.

A Critical Need

"Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof...

Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose."

Leon Wieseltier
an essay in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review

Keyless for the Brainless

Phones and other electronic devices may be smarter, but people are heading the other way into a brainless stupor.

It's not just the kids who literally cannot be separated from their phones without psychological and even physical trauma.  There's an even more serious form of dependency, and it is becoming less and less avoidable, even for those who reject it.

For instance the keyless car.  An item in Consumer Reports recently affirmed that new cars in all price ranges are coming equipped with this technology.

What is this electronic marvel?  It allows you to start your car without sticking a physical key into a physical slot.  You just push a button on your device, known as the key fob (even though there is no key attached to it.)

What a miracle!  You can start your car with your hands full of something else--your smartphone probably.  Although you've had to push a button on the fob to get into the car, and then you still have to push another button in the car.  But you don't need that damn inconvenient key.

So let's start with the basic rule of electronic wonders in and on your car, which is that, for all their benefits, they are each something else that can go wrong.  Usually more than one something else.  And almost always nothing you can fix yourself.

So there are things that can go wrong with your fob, such as the batteries, and if you don't have a backup system (electronic or key), you're screwed.  You ain't moving.  It may mean a tow, and it definitely means time and money.

But that's minor compared to the much more likely possibility--you misplace or lose the fob.  Then without a mechanical key system, you are really really screwed.  And CR says replacing the fob could cost hundreds of dollars, and who knows how much time and trouble.

Think about it.  When somebody swiped my jacket with my car keys in the pocket, I got someone to drive me home, wait a minute while I got my duplicate key, then he drove me back to my car.  Duplicate keys cost a few bucks, and you can make as many as you want and stow them in as many convenient places as you wish, so losing your car keys is not a catastrophe.

But for the dubious benefits of a "keyless" ignition, you still have to have that fob (although eventually there will be an ap on your phone device, which will make losing that even more catastrophic), and the cost of losing it is much much greater than losing that terrible old fashioned key.

Behind this is the survival principle of redundancy, along with hedging your bets with alternatives (a gas stove that operates even when the electricity is off, etc.)  Everybody loses stuff, so you cut down the consequences with redundancy (i.e. duplicate keys.)  That is, while you can still buy a car that allows you to start it with a key.

And that's the most brainless part of it.  An entire society so dazzled with new toys that they never bother to think ahead to what could go wrong, and what the comparative consequences might be. It's great for the car companies etc. who sucker you into this, and then charge you hundreds of dollars for a fob, and thousands for extra electronic toys that may or may not improve the operation of your vehicle, but certainly make it harder and more expensive to repair.  When something goes wrong.  And something always does.

  But you have no alternative.  How smart is that?

At the Speed of Tweet

It's hard to know what to say about the events surrounding the assassinations of cartoonists in Paris, except that they've happened with blinding speed: from the horrific incident to international protest involving millions of people including European heads of state leading a march in Paris of up to a million and a half people, to becoming a fashion statement at a show business award show, and the backlash to the response (for example here and here.)

Meanwhile, here's an interesting post at Daily Kos about one of the cartoonists who was assassinated, at the age of 74.  It suggests the dangers inherent in the reaction, understandable and necessary though they might be, increasing police and military presence and power.  That and the accelerated right wing and racist bushwah.

 On the whole though, it strikes me that the Europeans are handling this with a lot less inflated panic and hyperbole than the Bushites did 9/11.  Or that the right wing here continues to do,  focusing on the US participation in the Paris event, which the White House clumsily has made into a bigger story today.  But it's a story only in US politics, not in Europe.

Insight Ephemeral

Whatever the future of this site will be this year, I've already determined that it will not follow the 2016 presidential election campaigns.  I've done enough of that.  So there will be no 2016 label to join the previous ones.

On the other hand, I still read the news headlines at least and I'm not cancelling my email notice of Andy Borowitz satirical commentary, and he's already come up with two wonderful posts: First Smart Move of 2015--Jeb Bush Resigns as George W. Bush’s Brother, and today's:Poll: Most Americans Now Consider Romney a Stalker.

Really, isn't this all you need to know?  A laugh, being a brief outburst, seems the proper response to insights about the ephemeral.

One Amazing Old Trick to Make Millions!

Shocking Top Ten of All Time Made Easy!
photo credit

Andrew Marantz in the New Yorker recently profiled young Emerson Spartz, crowning him King of Clickbait.  The Spartz new-media company made millions in ad revenue last year, and attracted even more millions in venture capital.  At 27, Spartz is widely admired, the article says, he's "inspiring," "awesome," "impressive."  One of his investors is quoted as calling him "a Steve Jobs kind of guy...I think his stuff is indicative of where digital media is heading."

If that's true it's heading in the direction of manipulation on the order of Orwellian cubed. And theft.  Theft is very old news, and apparently very new media.  For that seems to be how the Spartz sites make money.  They steal the work of others.

It's not just that Spartz is a self-righteous Philistine whose idea of how to make a great song is to get 40 people to record vocals, ask thousands of people to pick their favorite, then use the winner. "To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio, he says. "Art is that which science has not yet explained.”

Or even that his model for success is relentless cynicism, which is admittedly widely shared among those trying to get attention through the Internet.  His websites are all about attracting traffic, and learning what content and packaging attracts the most traffic at a given moment.

It's the same sort of technique that fills my inbox with email appeals for political donations that vary mostly by the subject line and the purported sender. (At least I hope President Obama isn't spending a lot of time drawing boxes for me to check beside the amount of my donation.)  The idea is to throw a lot of subject lines out there, see which ones succeed the best, take the top five or so and use them, throw out the rest, and invent another five to test tomorrow.  Or more likely, later today.

Similar techniques are used to test and select photos and copy, including the kind that appear as ads on just about every web site, and contribute to making otherwise substantive sites look and feel like the back pages of tabloid papers and cheap magazines.

But moron bait (and there's a moron lurking in all of us) is only part of it.  There's the content, and where it comes from.  One of Spartz Inc.'s sites, called Dose, publishes lists.  (Lots of sites do that these days, because as Spartz proclaims, "Lists just hijack the brain's neural circuitry." This is your brain.  This is your brain on the Internet.)  For example, “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.”  But all Spartz did was slightly repackage this information (as other similar sites had already done.)  They didn't do the research, and didn't even link to the guys who did, let alone pay them a fee or a cut of their winnings. On Dose, the list got 200,000 page views, very good for advertisers, and very good for Dose. The New Yorker:

'The Dose post, which received more Facebook shares than its precursors, briefly mentioned D’Aluisio and Menzel (though D’Aluisio’s name was misspelled). But their book, “What I Eat,” went unmentioned, and they certainly did not share in the advertising revenue. “This took us four years and almost a million dollars, all self-funded,” Menzel told me. “We are trying to make that money back by selling the book and licensing the images. But these viral sites—the gee-whiz types that are just trying to attract eyeballs—they don’t pay for licensing. They just grab stuff and hope they don’t get caught."'

But when you have no respect at all for content or for authorship, theft is probably not how you think about it.  Spartz admits that content is of no interest to him: "We considered making Dose more mission-driven,” he said. “Then I thought, rather than facing that dilemma every day—what’s going to get views versus what’s going to create positive social impact?—it would be simpler to just focus on traffic.”

As someone who creates "content" (i.e. writes stuff) on the Internet, I'm waiting for the argument that convinces me that making millions from somebody else's work isn't theft.  Sure seems like it to me.

Maybe it doesn't occur to them that real people have worked to gather information, judge its value, see patterns, check it, find where it fits in larger contexts, craft it into a story etc. or even a damn list.  Because most of their work is done by mindless algorithms.

But not even that charitable excuse will wash.  Spartz himself says why. On earlier sites they featured novel combinations of images, with text that reflected at least a few minutes of online research—but with Dose “we’ve stopped doing that as much because more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”

Right--stealing is so quick and easy! Let other people do the creative and actual work.  It's been the secret of success for generations of robber barons.  How inspiring!

What's really amazing is that Spartz got started at the age of 12 by creating a Harry Potter fan site.  He got to meet J.K. Rowling.  Does he now think that the way to create a Harry Potter saga is to propose alternative plot points, and choose what happens by vote?  Not that plot is the only factor in the saga's success--there's characters and their characteristics, descriptions, pacing, chapter order, chapter content, right down to the individual words. Not to mention the values, morality and emotion within it all. Got algorithms for that?  And if you did, do you really think the whole Potter thing would have happened, including inspiring a 12 year old in Chicago to create a fan site?

And how do you suppose Jo Rowling feels about somebody appropriating somebody else's creative work--say, Harry Potter?  Maybe let her lawyers answer that for you, although she's been known to show up in court herself to defend her intellectual property.

The New Yorker article mentions an internal study at the New York Times lamenting that their Internet site isn't creating these viral blizzards.  What's scary about this memo is that journalism in its various forms and functions is talked about only in the argot that Spartz and his ilk own.  When you define what you are doing by the premises and terminology of those whose mission sees yours as irrelevant, and they're out to destroy you or just suck you dry, you've pretty much lost already.

The New Yorker article ends with Spartz' ultimate solution: “The lines between advertising and content are blurring,” he said. “Right now, if you go to any Web site, it will know where you live, your shopping history, and it will use that to give you the best ad. I can’t wait to start doing that with content. It could take a few months, a few years—but I am motivated to get started on it right now, because I know I’ll kill it.”

I'm guessing that Marantz, with some old media skills, didn't end the piece with "kill it" by accident.

Spartz begins his canned speeches by proclaiming that he wants to change the world.  Apparently he is doing so.  He's helping to make it way way worse.