What A Difference A Debate Makes

I don't recall a single primary debate making such an immediate and powerful impression as Hillary Clinton evidently did in the first Democratic Party presidential candidate debate on Tuesday.

Many of the first stories on the Internet declared Clinton the clear "winner," who "did what she had to do."  Subsequent stories Wednesday were even more laudatory.

There's a certain inevitability to this--the "story" had to eventually change from Hillary falls to Hillary resurrected.  But the political impact seems more substantial, especially since the debate brought in an estimated 15 million viewers, far surpassing predictions and previous Dem debate audiences.

I wasn't one of the viewers, of anything really but I was more involved in urging the Mets to defeat the Dodgers (not that I like the Mets that much; I dislike the Dodgers that much) which, by the way, they didn't do.  But I watched clips and read excerpts, and what was important to me was that Clinton understands how to tap into the powerful advantage she has.  She reminded everyone she is a woman.  She made it clear that she will continue policies and direction of the Obama presidency, which besides reassuring me, is good politics.  That's where the Democratic Party is.

Wednesday she did what winning politicians do--she capitalized on her gains.  Her first big rally was a solidarity march with Latino voters but more broadly, she spoke to the party's traditional support of immigrants.  She got a union endorsement and gushed over it.

Frank Rich rightly remarks that her fortunes started to turn when the House no-longer-to-be-Speaker McCarthy bragged that the GOPer generated Benghazi investigations had driven her poll numbers down. (A second GOPer House Rep admitted the partisan nature of the committee today.)  And of course, the Bernie Sanders moment ("The American people are tired of hearing about your damn e-mails") was another gift that will keep on giving.

So for Dems the headline on Jonathan Chiat's commentary says it: the panic over Hillary is over (Rebecca Traister took a similar approach, with her own ebullient prose.) (And I realize I've just linked to four columns on the New York Magazine site--I did read stories from at least 6 other sources, but these cover the ground.)

Hillary's got all kinds of room now to be the inclusive, the compassionate as well as the realistic candidate, thanks to these months of GOPer competition to be more outrageously vicious and reactionary, and stupid.  All she has to do now is not look insane.

Postscript: Then Thursday morning the Media woke up and thunk, hey, if Hillary won so decisively then there's nothing to watch for the next half year.  So today's story is: Bernie introduced himself to the American public!  They both won!  We've still got a race here folks you betcha--stay tuned!

Ryan's the Hope?

What? Me Worry?

Maybe not so much.  In countering the push to convince Paul Ryan to run and be crowned as Speaker of the House, the rabid right backlash has gathered strength enough for a New York Times headline that Stanley Kubrick or Kurt Vonnegut would have loved: Latest Unease on Right: Ryan Is Too Far Left

Paul Krugman doesn't think much of Ryan either, but for a different reason:

"What makes Mr. Ryan so special? The answer, basically, is that he’s the best con man they’ve got. His success in hoodwinking the news media and self-proclaimed centrists in general is the basis of his stature within his party. Unfortunately, at least from his point of view, it would be hard to sustain the con game from the speaker’s chair."

And Krugman puts his finger on how Ryan has succeeded so far:

"To understand Mr. Ryan’s role in our political-media ecosystem, you need to know two things. First, the modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems. Second, pundits and the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality."

But here's another wrinkle.  Congress is recessed and Ryan says he won't say this week whether he will run.  So between now and Oct. 20, a lot of candidate wannabes (an amazing number of whom are from Texas) will test the waters.  If none of them gets warm, then Ryan starts to look inevitable all over again.

Maybe.

Monday or Fryday?

Happy whatever it is Day.

It's federally Columbus Day, which over the years became an Italian American Pride sort of day.  (Even though Columbus was officially representing Spain.)

But Columbus and especially his Day came to represent the European invasion that destroyed a continent of Native American/First Peoples cultures. (Though Columbus himself enslaved some Natives, Italians by and large weren't among the subsequent major invaders.)

 In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' day, the new flowering of Native cultures came into beautiful full bloom and effectively hijacked the holiday. Which was a good thing.  Now hereabouts at Humboldt State this has become Indigenous Peoples Week, and at various places elsewhere it's officially Indigenous Peoples Day.

But it's confused and in places there is still conflict.  So maybe we need an Indigenous Peoples Day (or week or month) with cultural and educational events, speeches, parades and festivals, and an Italian American Pride day with cultural and educational events, speeches, parades and festivals, so we can have different days to appreciate these cultures and eat fry bread and, well, fried bread, which my (Italian) grandmother made.

Weekend Update: GOPers, Guns and El Nino

Though I saw the GOPer earthquake/meltdown coming, I was still amazed by a story Friday, written by a veteran political reporter (Karen Tumulty) and published in the Washington Post:

Less than a year after a sweeping electoral triumph, Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national political party.

That's something that was unthinkable, even during Watergate. "Ceasing to function" is of course the scary part in terms of shared governance.  "as a national political party" is an interesting characterization, for there is a strong argument that the Republican party electorally is becoming regional.  We aren't Red States and Blue States, the freshman Senator from Illinois famously said in 2004, we are the United States.  But are we?  If not entire states all the time, we do have Red and Blue congressional districts that are divided by more than party label.  And some of those Red Staters aren't interested in the interests of the United States, or the world.

But responding to the latest congressional GOPer crisis--the sudden end to the heir apparent's ascension to Speaker, and the resulting chaos that leaves no credible candidate for the job but Paul Ryan, who so far is refusing to run for it--Tumulty describes the tumult in her second graph/sentence:

The most powerful and crippling force at work in the ­once-hierarchical GOP is anger, directed as much at its own leaders as anywhere else.

Jonathan Chiat analyzes how this plays out rationally, if not reasonably:

"What actually separates the insurgents from the Establishment is not ideology but tactics. The insurgents refuse to accept the constitutional limits of their power, and believe that more frenzied assertions of their core beliefs, combined with a periodic willingness to shut down the government and threaten a currency default, can prevail over President Obama through force of will. The insurgents mistakenly interpret disagreements over means as disagreements over ends; when Republican leaders express reluctance to shut down the government over Obamacare or Planned Parenthood, the insurgents take this as actual support for those programs."

Ryan's refusal may well be sincere--it's worse than a thankless job, and a former vice-presidential candidate doesn't need the prestige.  But if it's tactical, in order to let support build until he's crowned by acclamation, he risks what is starting to happen: rabid righters rebelling against Ryan basically because people they don't like support him, and he's unlikely to do crazy stuff like defaulting on the debt or shutting down the federal government.  So it seems he's going to have to declare in or out pretty soon. Update: Maybe too late. By late Saturday, Reuters has a story that their opposition is growing.

But even that may not be enough.  The New York Times Saturday suggests that rabid right insurgents want to take away much of the Speaker's power, which the story opines Ryan is unlikely to like.  If such demands are made, a Saturday Washington Post story also asserts, Ryan won't take the job.

Why would he? He's the most powerful chair of the House's most powerful committee.  And if insurgents get their way and distribute much of the Speaker's power to others, including committee chairs, he'll become more powerful by staying put.  Only big pressure to save the party might sway him.  But aren't the GOPers billionaires more rabid than right?

Of course, if the rabids prevent the US from honoring its debts on the debt ceiling vote in November, such "power" will be dismally irrelevant.

Land of Guns

President Obama had to hurry to comfort mourners and survivors of the gun massacre in Oregon but couldn't get it all done before there were two more campus shootings.

But it turns out these were fairly ordinary days in America.  Data published in the Guardian shows that in 1,004 recent days, there were 994 mass shootings, almost one a day on average, when "mass shooting" is defined as four or more victims.  Check out the chart.

Nick Kristof in the New York Times sifts more stats: more Americans killed by guns in America than died in all wars since (and including) the American Revolution.  And this one:

In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.

Kristof suggests ways of breaking the impasse and doing something about gun violence, for example by treating this as a public health issue.  He notes however that Republicans in Congress have forbidden the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence.

Meanwhile President Obama is considering using executive action to redefine what constitutes a gun dealer to include large-volume dealers at gun shows, so buyers would have to pass background checks.  This idea has been around since 2013, and seems to be the same as what Hillary Clinton proposed through aides the other day.

There's also been quite a bit of noise about arming more people to defend themselves against crazy shooters, along with louder condemnation of any kind of gun control (using false history and a phony Hitler quote to suggest the Nazis triumphed because they enacted gun control. They didn't enact gun control, and they encountered armed resistance.)  The latest poster child for giving more people more guns was a woman shopper who whipped out her concealed pistol to shoot at shoplifters.

El Nino Update

National Weather Service updated their El Nino forecasts, with even the official pronouncements bringing good news for northern California: an 80% likelihood of normal precip this winter (after several years of way below normal), and a 40% chance of above normal.

But a NASA climate expert at the Jet Propulsion lab said this was typically conservative--that the El Nino is so strong that northern California will get lots of rain, including a restored snowpack in the Sierras, maybe twice normal.

The problem with all these forecasts is that they are based on comparing this year's data with previous El Ninos and their effects.  Two problems actually: first, the number of El Ninos with data attached is pretty small.  Second, this isn't 1950 or even 1996 in terms of the other phenomena affecting weather that seem caused or exaggerated by global heating and its effects in the atmosphere and especially in the oceans.

So if it starts raining and raining a lot in November, it's encouraging. But we won't know about how this El Nino interacted with the Blob etc. until looking back at this winter.  However, maybe it's wishful thinking, but the feeling here is yeah--it's gonna rain and rain.

Sixty Days to Save The World

In sixty days, the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference will be underway.  In the strange trenches of pre-conference negotiating and writing of a draft agreement, some progress has reportedly been made--principally by reducing the early draft of 84 pages to 20.

Progress towards the goals of the agreement has been more substantial.  The United States and China continue to up their game, especially with China's surprise announcement of a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon.  The big missing piece in the global picture also started to move into place when India announced its own commitments and plans to address the climate crisis.  India had been resisting such action, resenting the burden placed on developing countries, but it is especially vulnerable to early and dire effects, so constructive engagement became a better policy.

Some warn however that the goals announced so far aren't sufficient to bring future heating under the 2 degree C goal.  That is the announced goal of the UN conference, reflecting the scientific consensus that this is the upper limit of global temperature rise before global heating gets completely out of control.  So there's negotiating ahead, with the real goal of getting some kind of meaningful binding international agreement for the first time.  The idea is to turn the ship around, and hope that near-future efforts will pick up speed in time.

Another good sign that this is happening is that the UN development goals for the future that seek to dramatically reduce global poverty, are also sustainable development goals that make clean energy and other efforts to address the climate crisis an integrated part of the plan.  This is a recognition that there cannot be a conflict between economic development and climate crisis efforts, as well as a recognition of the link that Pope Francis emphasizes, between the climate crisis and those who will suffer most from its effects: the world's poor.

Americans may be surprised that addressing the causes of the climate crisis is embraced by nearly every nation in the world, and by every political party in every country that has real elections (although of course the means advocated vary widely.)  The only exception is the US Republican party.

 So rigid and extreme has this party (and this "brand") become that it's big news when a few GOPers finally dare to take the climate crisis somewhat seriously. But polls suggest a majority of Republican voters at least see the threat of the climate crisis.  Something's got to give, sometime.

The political leadership of the party is also increasingly out of step with major elements of its constituency.  In a notable announcement, six major US banks urged global leaders to make a climate agreement in Paris.  Many corporations support efforts to address the causes of global heating, but this is a significant advocacy for the global commitments themselves.

Meanwhile, the effects of past carbon pollution are about to become even more obvious, according to a British study, which says that the world will be much hotter this year and next as those effects combine with other climate phenomena.

But the kind of news that either scares people into denial or scares them into support and action is this: photos of visibly starving polar bears. It's one thing to read that it's probably too late to save the polar bears from the effects of the climate crisis, but it is another to watch a species die, especially one so close to ours.

Guns and Bombs

Umpqua Community College

Responses to the Oregon gun massacre and the continuing failure of gun policy in America have continued, as President Obama once again becomes the Mourner-in-Chief.

Hillary Clinton was impressive in her town hall, talking with emotion about gun violence and in general about the changes in law and practice she advocates.  One of her bolder proposals she left to a staff member to explain to the media--something that can be done administratively by the President, which perked up a lot of ears in the general despair that anything will get done soon.  Here and here are articles on a couple of different proposals she made, or is said to make.  And here is some video on the subject from the town hall.

Of all the resonances--about Oregon gun laws, etc.--that have emerged, there's video of an appearance in this very Oregon town by Robert F. Kennedy during his campaign in 1968, in which he advocates for common sense gun control measures, and not to a friendly audience.

So this has been going on a long time.  The state of the debate is suggested in this series of opinion pieces from CNN: "Why We're Still Debating Guns in 2015." It doesn't actually answer that question but the accumulation of views demonstrates that we certainly are.  (Anyway everybody knows the answer: it's money.)

As usual it is the "humorists" who cut through the platitudes and tortured policy discussions.  Australian comic Jim Jeffries video on the subject has reputedly "gone viral."  Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker titles his latest column: Americans Opposed to Being Shot Seek Representation in Washington.

And while this ritual goes on, one of those stories that happens literally every day in America surfaces: an 11 year old shot and killed an 8 year old in an argument over puppies.  A moment that once might have ended with at worst a bloody nose has now forever deformed the lives of two families and their community, killed a child, and left an 11 year old with a murder charge.

Why has nothing been done on such an obvious and tragic problem, even as we learn of the lives ended in this latest massacre?

There is a lot of despair about this.  Some other problems that have been destroying lives for a long time but aren't discussed as much, aren't political issues as much, like mandatory prison sentences, capital punishment, the war on drugs, are actually being addressed at least somewhat, but quietly, or piecemeal in the states.

 It may be that these gun massacres that rivet attention on the topic for a few days or weeks are counterproductive because they force everyone into their rigid political positions, with the opportunity that outrage provides both sides, all sides, to raise money.  Unfortunately, they keep happening.  Plus the powers that are not opposed to people being shot (the NRA) are still powerful, or seem to be.

It may be that a woman President could be the right person to get something done, if she sticks with it. Something isn't enough, but at least it could be something.

Update 10/6: President Obama called for voters who are part of the coalition of  Americans Opposed to Being Shot (and forming such a group is actually not a bad idea) to take positions on gun regulations into account in the candidates they vote for.  Now some powerful Democrats in the Senate want to make those positions clearer by forcing votes on gun legislation. 

Now to bombs--specifically the bombs that rained down on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan.  That organization and the UN have made a very good case for an international investigation, with possible charges of war crimes.

It seems undisputed that the coordinates of the hospital were known to all combatants, and that the US forces were notified while the bombing continued for some 30 minutes.  Doctors Without Borders denies that Taliban fighters were firing from the hospital grounds, and while the Afghans still maintain this, it seems the US is less willing to confirm.

 Nothing that the US military has said so far seems trustworthy (so I'm not bothering to link to anything.) Although my intuition was that the attack was prompted by Afghan forces, and the latest US statements finally say that, there is still no excuse for the US military to have begun this attack, and even less to have continued it.

There are screwups that kill people, including innocents and your own in every war--that's what letting lose "the dogs of war" means, and why it is such a fatal step.  But this is an extremely serious situation, because this is an international humanitarian organization that provides services that no government and no military provides.  It puts every such mission and every such organization everywhere in question.

 Right now everything coming out of the Pentagon sounds like ass-covering.  That has to stop.  An investigation with judicial powers by an impartial international entity is necessary and right.

Update 10/6: The Pentagon began singing a different tune, and the White House pledged review and changes. Whether this is higher ups throwing underlings under the bus or an accurate assessment of who is responsible remains to be seen.  An international review however is still appropriate. 

Gun Massacre in Oregon, Anger at the Podium in Washington

President Obama responded to the massacre by firearms in Oregon with obvious anger, but as usual it only clarified what he had to say.

"There’s been another mass shooting in America -- this time, in a community college in Oregon. That means there are more American families -- moms, dads, children -- whose lives have been changed forever. That means there’s another community stunned with grief, and communities across the country forced to relieve their own anguish, and parents across the country who are scared because they know it might have been their families or their children...

But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America -- next week, or a couple of months from now.

We don't yet know why this individual did what he did. And it's fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be. But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months...

The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We've become numb to this.

We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.

And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun safety laws.

Does anybody really believe that?.... There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America. So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer? We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don't work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.

We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours -- Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.

And, of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue. Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.

 I would ask news organizations -- because I won't put these facts forward -- have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports. This won't be information coming from me; it will be coming from you. We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?"

This time President Obama did not try to appeal to current officeholders to see the light or be reasonable, because after all this slaughter, it is clear they never will be.  Instead he suggested to American voters:

"I’d ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws, and to save lives, and to let young people grow up. And that will require a change of politics on this issue. And it will require that the American people, individually, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, when you decide to vote for somebody, are making a determination as to whether this cause of continuing death for innocent people should be a relevant factor in your decision. If you think this is a problem, then you should expect your elected officials to reflect your views."

This latest mass shooting happened a few hundred miles from here, in a community much like this one.  A campus shooting here could kill and maim students I know, faculty I've known a long time, or my partner, or me.  California gun laws are pretty good, but the state line to Oregon is close by.

When I was in college, during the Vietnam War and the high draft calls, I lost one kind of innocence when I realized that there were people in power, and people with money, who would sacrifice my life and many lives in their pursuit of more power and more money.

This is even clearer in the case of gun violence and gun laws.  It isn't about rights.  It isn't about suspicion of government power, though that is a real fear that's being cynically exploited, along with other cynically fed fears. It's about political power and it's about money.  And these people will sacrifice me or you, or your children and grandchildren, and the possibility of including their own in that sacrifice, for power and money.

For more on the prevalence of guns in this country, there's this.

Update 10/2: Profiles of the slaughtered.  It appears to have been a writing class, and one of the slaughtered was a writer and teacher about my age.  President Obama's response to Jeb Bush excusing the slaughter as "stuff happens."  In his statement quoted above, President Obama made reference to the UK and Australia.  Here's an article on what these countries did to virtually end gun slaughter.

Pope of Hope

Pope Francis has ended his eventful week in the United States, and evaluations have begun.  He spoke at the White House, to a joint session of Congress, to the United Nations,  to congregations in New York and elsewhere, to a conference in Philadelphia, (where he was introduced by Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and spoke at the podium used by Lincoln for his Gettysburg Address) among many other activities.

In ways superficial and profound, Pope Francis came to this American moment as the anti-Trump, as the antidote to the Trumpery that seems to dominate the dialogue.  In a broader historical context, he is this generation's John XXIII, a brother to President Obama the way Pope John was to JFK.  He is the pleasant surprise, adding new moral support (in both senses of moral), another hero of hope.

For me he is the first Pope I can believe in since John XXIII.  His encyclical takes historical place beside Pope John's Pacem in Terris for importance to the time as well as affirming and updating a moral tradition.  But he is also different.  He chose a name never used by another Pope, the name of a saint with a very high profile, a unique and universally known "brand."  Francis of Assisi is the saint of the poor, of Nature, of simplicity and contemplation.  Let there be a Fiat.

  Pope John's encyclical was bold and modest.  Pope Francis' is more scholarly and wide-ranging.  But even though it quotes a long list of his predecessors, the first Pope it names is Pope John.

Though I'm no longer a Catholic, I'm very aware of the pendulum swing represented by his singling out Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton in his speech to Congress.  Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker.  Merton: fearless intellectual, ecumenical, a contemplative who was practically a Buddhist with close ties to D.T. Suzuki, who brought Zen to America.

In his encyclical and his public statements here, Pope Francis' moral positions are firm, but he is politically astute; both sophisticated and straightforward.  By now his asserting that the Earth itself has moral standing is both revolutionary and supported by years of writing and advocacy by others.  But it's especially important because, hey, he's the Pope.

In Washington he made very direct and devastating points in a very soft voice and manner. Some of his statements seem radical because of how warped our political dialogue has become, how extreme the Republicans have become.  His views on immigration are the views of the Kennedys, but today they are radical.  But some of his statements remain as radical as they used to be.  Saying that we don't have peace because of people who make their money from war was considered sacrilegious in the 1960s, and still is.  Although instead of receiving censure, the Pope's call for the end of the arms trade simply was ignored.

His positions are not mine on everything, and the high profile canonization of the symbol of the shameful Mission period and its subjugation of the Native Americans in California was melancholy at best.  But overall Pope Francis is proving to be a real force for hope.

 He is correct that prior Popes have championed the poor and oppressed in their speeches and writings, but he is advocating much more actively, specifically and astutely.  But the greatest hope is in his elevation of the climate crisis as the transcendent moral issue of our moment (and he is unique in championing the poor who are most endangered by it.)  His visit to the U.S. and to the UN this September was no coincidence.  It is part of a global push, the marshaling of moral as well as political authority, to get the necessary international treaty done in December. In this he is exactly on the same page as President Obama.  Their rhetoric of urgency is almost identical.

But someone else should not be forgotten.  The words of Pope Francis reminded me of another spiritual and moral leader, the Dalai Lama, who has been speaking on these principles and issues for many years.  The insane hatred and paranoia of the Chinese when China is so politically and economically important to the West has somewhat marginalized the Dalai Lama in recent years.  So it was hardly noticed that he was soon to visit the U.S. and doubtless add his voice to supporting a climate crisis agreement--or that because of illness and exhaustion, that trip has been cancelled.
      

Trump, GOPers and the Future: Quaking With Laughter?

"After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends."
Wallace Stevens
opening lines "The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

In American politics and government, things seem to be moving towards the Big One, the earthquake that changes the landscape.

 There have been smaller quakes for years, but the land has always settled into looking reassuringly as it did before.  There were important changes in that landscape, but they weren't obvious to everyone.  A major quake is of a different order.  We don't know how long it will last, or what things will look like when it's over.

The latest indicator is the resignation of John Boehner as Speaker of the House (and therefore the last time I'll have to look up the spelling of his name.)  He was the trembling finger in the dike of rabid right anarchy--even as he loudly advocated for the anarchists.

This is what a Republican member of Congress told the New York Times:

“There are anywhere from two to four dozen members who don’t have an affirmative sense of governance,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania."They can’t get to yes. They just can’t get to yes, and so they undermine the ability of the speaker to lead. And not only do they undermine the ability of the speaker to lead, but they undermine the entire Republican conference and also help to weaken the institution of Congress itself.”

And when they are not paralyzing the entire federal government, they are weakening its ability to meet crucial challenges, which sows chaos down to the community level.  Now that they have gotten rid of Banal, they (and we) will have no place to hide.

And then there's Donald Trump.  In a New York Magazine cover story, Frank Rich poses and answers this question: How could a crass, bigoted bully with a narcissistic-personality disorder and policy views bordering on gibberish “defy political gravity,” dominate the national stage, make monkeys out of pundits and pollsters, and pose an existential threat to one of America’s two major parties?

Rich finds his answer not in politics but in fictions about politics: "His passport to political stardom has been his uncanny resemblance to a provocative fictional comic archetype that has been an invigorating staple of American movies since Vietnam and Watergate ushered in wholesale disillusionment with Washington four decades ago."

He's Bulworth (the Warren Beatty movie), Pat Paulsen, Guy Grand (The Magic Christian) and the character Steven Colbert played on his first show.  Except he's a real candidate.

 Among the outrageous things he says (some perceptive, some nuts, some brave, some craven), "Trump embarrasses the GOP by saying in public what “real” Republicans keep private....Republican potentates can’t fight back against him because the party’s base has his back. He’s ensnared the GOP Establishment in a classic Catch-22: It wants Trump voters — it can’t win elections without them — but doesn’t want Trump calling attention to what those voters actually believe."

Trump's trumpery appears spontaneous, which this year's "serious" candidates (from Jeb Bush to Hillary) do not. "It’s as if Trump were performing a running burlesque of the absurd but intractable conventions of presidential campaigns in real time. His impact on our politics post-2016 could be as serious as he is not."

"The best news about Trump is that he is wreaking this havoc on the status quo while having no chance of ascending to the presidency," Rich concludes. "You can’t win the Electoral College in 2016 by driving away women, Hispanics, blacks, and Asian-Americans, no matter how large the margins you pile up in deep-red states. Republicans who have started fretting that he’d perform as Barry Goldwater did on Election Day in 1964 have good reason to worry."

But his gift to American democracy (in Rich's terms) or at least his effect, may be as the fracking operation that starts the earthquake:

"Far from being a threat to democracy or a freak show unworthy of serious coverage, it matters because it’s taking a much-needed wrecking ball to some of what has made our sterile politics and dysfunctional government as bankrupt as Trump’s Atlantic City casinos. If that’s entertainment, so be it. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the Republican Party is reduced to rubble along the way, we can live with it. Trump will not make America great again, but there’s at least a chance that the chaos he sows will clear the way for those who can."

I'm not sure I can identify any longer with 1960s style up the revolution joyousness that in other words likely means a period of chaos and destruction.  It would be nice if just the fat cats, the pompous politicos, the well-paid cynics and the vicious haters were the only ones hurt.  But that's not how it usually works.  Still, the logic of an approaching earthquake is compelling.  And clearly we need to get beyond the pious nihilism, the rigid denial that has reached insane proportions.  We need to get to working together to solve the considerable problems we face, to save the future.  We need to get to yes.

News From the Neighborhood

For the foreseeable future, and probably well beyond that, the future of humans in space (if any, which is a big question) will occur in our cosmic neighborhood: the solar system.

And we really are exploring it, even if manned observation is only in the close Earth orbit of the international space station.  Far-flung instruments continue to produce new knowledge--as well as some great photos.

The most recent photos come from Pluto, a world that has generally gotten little respect until now.  Small and remote, demoted from planet status, so only a few scientists dare stake their careers on studying the meager information available, at least until the New Horizons spacecraft mission.

The latest photos show a world "more Earthlike than anyone could have imagined," in the words of this excellent National Geographic piece, and yet very alien--fogs and glaciers of nitrogen instead of water, mountains that formed in some mysterious way, and so on.  Yet it is not the bald featureless globe of prior illustrations.  It is a place.  Be sure to click on the photos here and at the NG piece--they're breathtaking.

Also this week:"NASA's confirmation of the existence of a vast global ocean on Enceladus casts a spotlight on Saturn's icy moon as the most potentially habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it," in the words of another excellent piece, this one at the Daily Galaxy.

It has liquid water, organic carbon, nitrogen [in the form of ammonia], and an energy source," said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Besides Earth, he says, "there is no other environment in the Solar System where we can make all those claims."

Yet it is not the only really good candidate for finding life in the solar system.  (The others also are moons rather than planets. This Daily Galaxy piece is a good summary, with links.)  It's news like this that prods my intuition that some form of life outside the Earth will be discovered in my lifetime.

Unreality Show

Just remember that I am not blogging about the 2016 elections.  But in previous posts that mention it, a theme emerged that has continued: the Republican candidates are insane.

This was the often an implicit theme in coverage of the second GOPer "debate," this time on CNN.  It was overt in Jonathan Chiat at New York Magazine, whose report was headlined At Second Presidential Debate, Republicans Try to Out-Crazy Trump, and Succeed.  He concluded: "The [R] party’s decades-long flight from empiricism and reason shows no sign of abating. Alas, from Trump to Rubio to Carly Fiorina, it is filled with talented demagogues well suited to pitch America on nonsense."

The New York Times editorial board later said pretty much the same thing in an editorial entitled Crazy Talk At the Republican Debate: "Peel back the boasting and insults, the lies and exaggerations common to any presidential campaign. What remains is a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns.

It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws — like physics and the Constitution — constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don’t just do what you want them to, just because you say they will."
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New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz turned to Strangelovian gallows humor as he headlined his report on the debate Millions Watch American Democracy’s Final Episode: "American democracy, a long-running institution whose popularity endured for over two hundred years, drew millions of viewers to its final episode Wednesday night.

 While the official ratings for democracy’s finale will not be available until Thursday, initial reports indicated that a larger than expected number tuned in to witness the last moments of the nation’s system of government. Network executives had warned that the final episode was not for the squeamish, but many viewers were still shocked by how dark and apocalyptic it turned out to be."

Borowitz followed up with a column entitled  Fact Checking Reveals G.O.P. Debate Was Four Per Cent Fact: "According to HonestyWatch, a Minnesota-based fact-checking organization, over the course of three hours the Republican candidates served up between eight and twelve facts, not including their names and job descriptions."

Also in the New Yorker, Amy Davidson (who is a reporter rather than satirist, at least in intent) began her report:  "With about fifteen minutes to go in the G.O.P. Presidential debate last night, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, it looked as if it might be hard to pick a low point. The candidates had, after all, been squabbling for almost three hours, long enough to foster fantasies of using Reagan’s Air Force One, which was onstage, as an emergency-escape vehicle."

Margaret Hartmann at New York culled the coverage on each candidate.  One of her choice quotes from others:"Trump came out swinging — but ended up missing. Not only wasn't he substantive — again — but he made some pretty bizarre statements. " —SE Cupp, CNN.

There was one question about the climate crisis in this debate (which brings the number of questions in both debates up to one), and not surprisingly the ignorance and fact-free denial were universal.

Otherwise, the coverage was about as insipid as this "debate" apparently was.  On my Google News page, the topic was dominated by "listicules"--the six big moment, the 10 quotes, the five takeaways, seven ways the debate changed the race etc.  By late today, the conventional wisdom was that dangerous demagogue Carly F. was the winner.  Trump's trumpeting being muted.

The world hangs by a thin thread?  What if something goes wrong with the psyche?  Welcome to the Republican Party.

Psych Out

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent 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.”
FDR 1945--his last speech, prepared but never delivered.

"Nowadays particularly, the world hangs on a thin thread....We are the great danger.  The psyche is the great danger.  What if something goes wrong with the psyche?  And so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of psyche is, how important it is to know something about it.  But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."
C. G. Jung
interview in English, 1957

Professional psychology in its current form has taken some withering hits lately.  In July there was the report that revealed (in the words of the Washington Post story) "Leaders of the American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with officials at the Pentagon and CIA to weaken the association’s ethical guidelines and allow psychologists to take part in coercive interrogation programs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a report released Friday."  

It was asserted years ago, and more recently proven, that several psychologists helped torturers during the Bush administration.   This report showed that such psychologists were highly influential in the organization.  But after this report was issued, the APA did not apologize, but defended what it did. Eventually it cleaned house and passed a binding resolution forbidding its members to do anything outside international law.

In August another study made news when a group of psychologists attempted to replicate 100 previously published psychological studies, and most of the time could not.  Their conclusions couldn't be proved, or they were overstated.

This is a kind of internal failure, within contemporary psychology's own assumptions and rules.  These failures were attributed in various technical ways as well as the inflation of results for gain and fame.  Some of the technicalities, other scientists claim, apply to all kinds of medical and other scientific research, so that most research findings are dubious.

But contemporary psychology's bullshit factor is so high for other reasons, many of which are identified by the eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan in his remarkable and predictably ignored 2012 book, Psychology's Ghosts.  Some of the established and therefore repeated mistakes are the failure to recognize and consider context (class, culture, situation) and the hidden biases that define healthy and unhealthy.

For example, Kagan writes: "Too many papers assume that a result found with forty white undergraduates at a Midwestern university responding to instructions appearing on a computer screen in a small, windowless room would be affirmed if participants were fifty-year-old South Africans administered the same procedure by a neighbor in a larger room in a familiar church in Capetown.”

This is not drollery: American university students of European background were the main subjects for more than 2/3 of the papers published in six leading journals between 2003 and 2007. There are usually a small number of participants, yet universal conclusions are offered.

In my review of this book, I add a corollary factor from my own experience: how the participants are chosen, and what that means.  I offer as an example the famous Yale Miligram experiments that purports to prove that people will obey authority figures to the point of causing painful shocks to others. Accidentally in New Haven at the time, I inquired about participating in what I'm pretty sure was one of those early experiments, but I ultimately refused.  Why I was interested, and why I refused suggests other factors that seem to cast questions on these conclusions, and to my mind invalidate them.

In these ways, psychology seems to invalidate itself as a science.  (Some believe that all of the so-called social sciences are pseudo-sciences.)  Psychology's attempt to measure behavior in order to predict it or modify it (often with drugs) is a failed and pernicious project.  It is based in part on trying to ape the methods of so-called hard sciences, depending on experiments and so-called controlled studies and deductions.  Why this doesn't work for anything as complex as human beings was eloquently explained, off-the-cuff, by the late great Jane Jacobs.  Basically, science can deal with just a few variables, and not with connections.  Science and psychology as they are predominantly practiced, deal with averages and quantities.

What contemporary psychology ignores is the psyche.  That just never comes up.  There's the brain and there's behavior.  The mechanism and the output.  It's either falsely mechanistic or falsely quantitative.

The psychology of Jung has been left behind and forgotten.  But it applies to individuals, not averages or quantities, not mechanisms.  In his own inductive science, through seeing patients and through introspection, Jung created conceptual tools that can help people examine and understand themselves enough to make their own changes in behavior.

Some of these tools I explored in the series on this site called The Climate Inside.  Concepts like the shadow, projection, denial, that individuals can use to examine their own psyches and behavior (with or without professional help), and come to their own conclusions. But today even more than in 1957, "no one gives credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."

Today's psychology is about treating humans as machines.  Most often as computers, "hard-wired" (often by Evolution) and fixable through tricks or drugs. Machines can only be altered from the outside.  But we are not hard-wired (there are no "wires" for a start), any more than our brains are telephone exchanges, or clocks, or our bodies are dynamos--all dominant metaphors of past ages.

Psyche is another word for soul.  Jung saw it as unfathomable, but we could learn something about it--not just from science but from untold centuries of stories and dreams, including the great cultural dreams called myth.  From the arts and humanities, and from minds that make the arrogant and often naive pronouncements of today's psychologists just so much simplistic nonsense.

There's a reason psychologists were so eager to sell out to government torturers--that's a very big client, and today's psychology is all about clients.  It's so obvious from the level of research that they are all about providing information on behavior and how to manipulate it for advertising, marketing and less subtle forms of persuasion and manipulation.  It's clearly a short walk to the best ways to inflict pain.  Today's psychology has no soul.  

Yet here we are, at a time when it is crucial for us to understand ourselves--without a psychology worthy of the name.

Political Climate

As we continue to see in the North Coast sky reminders of forest fires still raging, there are a couple of unexpected political changes internationally in advance of the Paris meetings on the climate crisis, with perhaps more to come.  What they may mean is unclear, but they do offer interesting possibilities.

The biggest news so far is the ouster of one of the world's biggest climate crisis denial blowhards, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott.  In Australia's parliamentary system, the PM is the leader elected by the majority party, in this case called Liberals.  In what was essentially a party coup, they replaced Abbott with Malcolm Turnbill.  He'd probably be considered a liberal Republican in pre-1980s US.  He is not a global heating denier, and specifically opposed Abbott's position.  He's announced however that for now he's staying with the enacted policies backed by his party.  But he is likely to be more open to negotiations in Paris.

Another surprise was the Labor Party in the UK electing a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  Initially given no chance of winning, Corbyn ended up with a nearly 60% majority.  He is considered far left, harking back in some ways to Labor's post-WWII roots, but in other ways his views are not so easily classifiable.  He stood out among the Labor candidates by speaking clearly and directly about the issues.

 Right now Corbyn is given no chance of leading Labor to a majority and himself to Prime Minister, but where have we heard that before?  In any case, there's no UK election before Paris conferences in December.  But he supports efforts to address the climate crisis, and his voice may help push the UK conservative government to a stronger role.

A more directly meaningful change could come from October elections in Canada. The current PM, Stephen Harper, has pretty much taken Canada out of real action to address the climate crisis.  He's been the PM of Oil.  Mostly for other reasons he's become vastly unpopular, but it's not clear what kind of policy will result from this election, since, as the Toronto Star noted, in this country with the longest Arctic coastline, global heating has not been a campaign issue for anybody, and the candidates are quiet or coy about their proposed policies.

  But the timing is such that a saner approach to the Paris meetings may result, from Canada as well as Australia.  That seems to be the view of this Washington Post article.

It must be added that in both Australia and Canada, as in the US, efforts outside national policy are being made to confront climate crisis challenges.  These include major progress in clean energy in Australia, and grassroots and organizational advocacy and action in Canada.

Politics is in many respects an unreal world that can markedly affect the real world.  The news in that real world continues to be urgent: a widely reported study outlines the very dire consequences of burning the fossil fuel known to exist, especially in rising sea levels that would inundate the world's major cities, and the growing speculation that this year's El Nino and other factors are triggering and will trigger a big jump in global temperature.

All this in the waning days of the summer that is almost certainly to be declared officially the hottest on record globally and in the US.  A summary of the summer's climate news in a new column at the Atlantic.

To Save the World: "There is, suddenly, hope"

Jonathan Chiat, who I tend to quote alot around here, has an impressive piece online and in the current issue of New York Magazine.  It's called The Sunniest Climate-Change Story You've Ever Read: This is the year humans finally got serious about saving themselves from themselves.  The title is maybe a bit too cute, but the subtitle is accurate: it's the premise of the piece.

"Here on planet Earth, things could be going better," Chiat begins. "The rise in atmospheric temperatures from greenhouse gases poses the most dire threat to humanity, measured on a scale of potential suffering, since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany launched near-simultaneous wars of conquest."

While the comparison in terms of cost etc. may be arguable, it is a potent metaphor:

 "And the problem has turned out to be much harder to solve. It’s not the money. The cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels, measured as a share of the economy, may amount to a fraction of the cost of defeating the Axis powers. Rather, it is the politics that have proved so fiendish. Fighting a war is relatively straightforward: You spend all the money you can to build a giant military and send it off to do battle. Climate change is a problem that politics is almost designed not to solve. Its costs lie mostly in the distant future, whereas politics is built to respond to immediate conditions. (And of the wonders the internet has brought us, a lengthening of mental time horizons is not among them.) "

The nature of the emergency is different.  Fictions about efforts to meet global catastrophes typically include a huge galvanizing event that changes everything, as Pearl Harbor did in vanquishing US isolationism.  Perhaps the nature of this emergency--being in the present widely dispersed, or being familiar phenomena with other causes, etc. In his climate crisis trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson invented a perfect storm that flooded Washington and ended political denialism-- in this fiction the storm was even called Sandy.  When an actual storm Sandy hit the East Coast and flooded Manhattan in 2012, it demonstrably did not end political denialism.

But in any case, as Chiat points out: "There has not yet been a galvanizing Pearl Harbor moment, when the urgency of action becomes instantly clear and isolationists melt away. Instead, it breeds counterproductive mental reactions: denial, fatalism, and depression."

Nevertheless, Chiat writes--and illustrates convincingly in the rest of this brilliantly reported and written piece--things have changed dramatically for the better in the last few years--and the prospects of a meaningful climate agreement in December are consequently pretty damn good:

The technological and political underpinnings are at last in place to actually consummate the first global pact to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. The world is suddenly responding to the climate emergency with — by the standards of its previous behavior — astonishing speed. The game is not over. And the good guys are starting to win.

The basic reason has also been mentioned here, though not with the force of the numbers that Chiat presents: the rapid and extensive rise of clean energy technologies and their adoption, together with the rapid decline of coal.  The price of solar is falling rapidly, he writes, far faster than even its most optimistic promoters predicted.

In the US, this was driven by the stealth revolution President Obama created by insisting on substantial seed money for clean energy tech in the Recovery Act.  It's starting to really pay off, and Chiat has the numbers.

But it's not just a US phenomenon--Chiat is particularly interesting on China, which is the world's leading carbon polluter (twice that of the second place US) but which is currently getting off the coal standard and onto the sun:

 But in the past year, something amazing has taken place. In 2014, China’s coal production and its consumption both fell, and the drop appears to be continuing, or even accelerating, this year. Derek Scissors, a China analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, who had previously believed Chinese coal use would rebound, conceded his error and called the shocking reversal “an economic and social sea change.” ...

China has made colossal investments in green energy. It plans to increase its solar-energy capacity this year alone by 18 gigawatts — as much solar-energy capacity as exists in the U.S. right now."

What about the rest of the world?  Chiat has the numbers, all in one place, and they are encouraging.  He sees in the combination of pledges already made to cut carbon plus the real commitments to clean energy expansion, the outlines of a doable global climate crisis deal in December.

And while there is some opposition and certainly footdragging in various countries, Chiat is succinct on how backward the US is on this, principally because of the propaganda machine called the Republican Party--which is essentially unique in the entire world:

 Eileen Claussen, former president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told National Journal that, while some individuals in other countries question climate science, there is “no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of.”

"Of course, it is unfortunate for the future of mankind that climate-change denialism has surfaced as a regional quirk in the most powerful country on Earth," Chiat writes with appropriate tragic understatement.  He writes perceptively about why denialism has set itself in concrete in the Republican party--all the major and minor R presidential candidates and so-called leaders, as well as an apparent majority of its rank and file--with such emotional ferocity that, he notes: "An alarming social study from June found that climate skeptics who read reports about natural disasters were less likely to favor helping the victims if the story connected the disaster to climate change."

(This could be then another reason why they aren't like to respond to the current refugee crisis in Europe, which is--as recent articles suggested --also a climate refugee crisis.)

But it could simply be a matter of time, Chiat suggests, for once the clean energy economy reaches critical mass in the not distant future, the denialism will lose its force.  The greatest danger he says is a Republican winning the White House in 2016.  (Something--he's written previously--that he does not expect to happen.)

The last part of his piece ushers us into the aspects of the future that perhaps I've anticipated too much here: the realities of dealing with the now inevitable effects at the same time as we address the causes of global heating.  He, too, faults leaders for approaching climate change as a win or lose, all or nothing battle. (although this works with his war metaphor, it's not how it's usually said--the word that Al Gore used and even President Obama slipped into his Alaska speech is "solve" the crisis.)

He points out especially that the goals of the international push for action--keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees C--is approximate: A rise of 1.9 degrees does not mean salvation, and 2.1 degrees does not mean doom. It is a problem of gradations of suffering and expense — but remaining on the lowest possible point on that terrifying, unknowable scale is a question literally of life or death.

 He notes the psychological and political effects of discourse driven by this either/or:

"The danger of black-and-white moralism is that it can be paralyzing. Ironically, the despair of the left has one quality in common with the denial of the right: They are both coping mechanisms. Denial is conservatism’s way of avoiding the collision between its belief that governmental power over the economy must not be extended and the likely truth that climate change is a problem that can only be solved through more government. Despair is a means of coping with the contradiction between the awesome scale of the climate crisis and the paucity of political tools to solve it. Both render us passive bystanders to history and, by hiding our agency, distort our vision of the world. An inability to parse degrees of too little and too late can blind you to something revolutionary and historic taking place."

He ends with a summary evaluation, and with the word that above all, matters right now:

"The limits agreed to at Paris will not be enough to spare the world mass devastation. But they are the beginning of a framework upon which progressively stronger requirements can be built over time. The willpower and innovation that have begun to work in tandem can continue to churn. Eventually the world will wean itself almost completely off carbon-based energy. There is, suddenly, hope."