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Jimmy Carter, man of a century

Happy 100th Birthday to Jimmy Carter, an amazing milestone for one of the most inspiring Americans with whom we could ever share the planet. As we do this day – what remarkable longevity for a cherished soul with a conscience that can move mountains. There’s probably a lesson in their somewhere. I’ll share another one I heard from him firsthand:

On a weekend visit to my in-laws in South Georgia, we rounded out the family time with something we had always heard about but never done: attending a Sunday School class taught by an ex-president.

It was a beautiful morning, and we made the eight-mile drive from my in-laws’ farm to Plains and the Maranatha Baptist Church, where Jimmy Carter holds forth about one Sunday morning a month. An excellent Squeeze song came on just as we entered town and the speed limit dipped to 35. A couple of blocks past the main drag, Maranatha sits in a pecan orchard just off Highway 45. On a Sunday morning when Carter is in town, there are far more cars than the small country church would normally boast. You can’t miss it.

No one seems too put out by the local deputies parked near the road nor the Secret Service folks at the church entrance—very civilized, only one metal-detector wand. Firm, but fair. We think we’re early, but as we walk up to and enter the back doors, the former president is already talking, asking the crowd of maybe 175 to tell him where they are from—and what religious denominations they profess. We dodge a videographer in back and take up an empty pew a couple of rows further up. The church is nearly full, but there is room.

He’s at the front but not in the pulpit, conversing with the crowd like it’s his natural state. And it must be. The former president is in his 80s and, from the back of the room, both looks it and doesn’t. In his jacket and bolo tie he is at ease and in command. He asks how many of the assembled have traveled to Cuba: one. Then, how many would like to: hands go up all over the room. He tells us that he and Rosalyn have just returned from there and what a mistake it was for the U.S. to have isolated Cuba via embargo all these years. While there, he met with prisoners, wives and mothers of Cubans held in the U.S., as well as members of the thriving Cuban-Jewish community in Havana—which, he reported, is in need of a rabbi. He also met with Raul and with Fidel, who, he reports, is recovering from his intestinal problems quite well. Candid, humble and witty, Carter shares these details not like they are in confidence or evidence of his importance, but simply as one might news of people one had visited while away.

With a word, but little more, of his upcoming trip to North Korea, he seems to have fulfilled the requirement of answering for himself and what he’s been up to, and moves toward the lectern down front and his lesson.

Read the rest…

Image: Nelson Mandela, left, and former President Jimmy Carter, right, hold HIV-positive babies at the Zola Clinic in Soweto in March 2002. ILLUSTRATION: Associated Press

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A target on your front

Georgia misses out on billions to cut climate pollution (sic?), the headline blared. Metro Atlanta failed to secure federal dollars to slash its emissions:

Last year, with the help of a $3 million federal grant, the state of Georgia began developing its first-ever plan to cut emissions of planet-warming gases. With funding from the same Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program, metro Atlanta drafted a climate road map of its own, too.

The plans were submitted to the federal agency this spring. The hope was to snag a slice of the $4.3 billion the EPA was offering, part of one of the federal government’s largest-ever grant opportunities for curbing heat-trapping pollution.

Let’s peek inside that first-ever plan, shall we? I wonder why the feds didn’t reward for these forward-thinker-lookers:

Peach State Voluntary Emission Reduction Plan

Oh.

Maybe that’s just the title and the plan is really much more aggressive inside, given the stakes not to mention the detestable traffic in that photo:

Strategy 1: Electrify Transportation Sector and Adapt to Mode Shift                                                                                                            Strategy 2: Improve Energy Efficiency and Promote Electrification
Strategy 3: Increase Availability and Use of Renewable Energy
Strategy 4: Improve Waste Diversion and Landfill Management
Strategy 5: Promote Use of Alternative Fuels
Strategy 6: Refrigerant Management
Strategy 7: Advance Conservation and Sustainable Land Use

The media report, and no doubt public officials, characterizes the rejection of federal funds to support this laughably obtuse plan as a ‘snub.’ I mean, where to start? This would have been decent plan had it been pursued in 1982, visionary perhaps. But now? Promote the use of alternative fuels? The absence of the words ‘mass transit’ is a damning indictment by the plan’s second chart, Figure 2, which indicates that the largest percentage of Georgia’s GHG emissions (38%) come from transportation.

Games played by non-serious people. Meanwhile, those voluntarily miserable drivers keep enjoying the scenery.

Les miz, indeed.

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Comme d’habitude

Pierre Bourdieu on taste, as luxury vs. necessity:

The true basis of the differences found in the area of consumption, and far beyond it, is the opposition between the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity. The former are the tastes of individuals who are the product of material conditions of existence defined by distance from necessity, by the freedoms or facilities stemming from possession of capital; the latter express, precisely in their adjustment, the necessities of which they are the product. Thus it is possible to deduce popular tastes for the foods that are simultaneously most ‘filling’ and most economical from the necessity of reproducing labour power at the lowest cost which is forced on the proletariat as its very definition. The idea of taste, typically bourgeois, since it presupposes absolute freedom of choice, is so closely associated with the idea of freedom that many people find it hard to grasp the paradoxes of the taste of necessity. Some simply sweep it aside, making practice a direct product of economic necessity (workers eat beans because they cannot afford anything else), failing to realize that necessity can only be fulfilled, most of the time, because the agents are inclined to fulfill it, because they have a taste for what they are anyway condemned to. Others turn it into a taste of freedom, forgetting the conditionings of which it is the product, and so reduce it to pathological or morbid preference for (basic) essentials, a sort of congenital coarseness, the pretext for a class racism which associates the populace with everything heavy, thick and fat. Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary.

Doesn’t quite explain why people eat chickfila who don’t have to – or does it?

Full text

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Remarkable and glaring

Take the frog in boiling water apologue.

The extent to which we notice general goings on and are able to get used to them – acclimate, if we’re looking for a poor word choice – remains a much greater, darker mystery than the fable of the mythical frog. Still, perceiving danger and saving oneself, one’s country and compatriots needs a bit of  a reset.

Slender appetites for suffering but no end of explaining away those who explicitly promise more nightmares. The kind of true that some desire the worst of everything if it will hurt others elicits a shrug, or even shrewdness toward toward their understanding. It’s an opinion you can understand enough to pity, though it must be appreciated enough to fight. Not correct, but confront and conquer. Comprehending simple minds bent on retribution meets an unmovable force in climate change. Misogyny, too, has an endgame.

There is no gradual increase in this temperature. You may wake up today and note that you are in boiling water, but there has been no creeping authoritarianism, slowly appearing right under your nose. All along, individuals chose not to notice – or celebrate its arrival, let’s be honest. The rationalized-away digression of what on some level was accepted as agreeable was approved as such. More please, we were actually demanding.

But the magnitude by which we choose bewilderment instead of joy, fiery passion and benevolence is all on us. Seek no refuge in ‘how could we have known?’ Wonder instead why we did not and begin to paddle toward others, recognize salvation.

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Gradual familiarization

A time to mention, quite a time to live. We see, we illustrate, we experience, we relate, we leave it for later when we should probably jot a few things down first.

Via The Paris Review, Theodor Adorno speaking about the effects of televised music – From an interview in Der Spiegel (February 26, 1968).

SPIEGEL

The culinary element seems to us to be especially prominent in music broadcasts. A candlelit Karajan and Menuhin concert framed by the plush furnishings of a Viennese salon; Bach passions and cantatas in the obvious setting, a baroque church. As the distinguished vocal soloist is singing his part …

ADORNO

The listeners make furiously sorrowful faces …

SPIEGEL

… And the camera fondles lovably chubby-cheeked putti and Madonnas. Is this acceptable?

ADORNO

It’s horrible, the worst sort of commercialization of art. Here the mass media—which precisely because they are technical media are duty-bound to forgo everything unseemly and gratuitous—are conforming to the abominable convention of showcasing lady harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit ancient keyboards. I think it’s more than high time for purging the mass media of all this illusional kitsch and of the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria that’s forever haunting it. … It engenders an absolutely inadmissible image, above all because here an illusional element also supervenes; it’s as if one were present at some sort of shrine where a unique ritualistic event were being enacted in the hic et nunc—a notion that is completely incommensurable with the mass reproduction that causes this same event to be seen in millions of places on millions of television screens. … One can never shake the feeling that such things must be regarded as grudgingly doled-out servings of schmaltz within the politics of programming, wherein the so-called desires of the public, which I have absolutely no inclination to gainsay, are oftentimes employed as an ideological excuse for feeding the public mendacious rubbish and kitsch. I would also include in this kitsch the kitschified production styles applied to the presentation of so-called—I might have almost said rightly so-called—classic cultural artifacts.

SPIEGEL

Take for example Brahms’s German Requiem on the second channel. The images concurrently broadcast with it were of trees, forests, lakes, fields, monuments, and cemeteries.

ADORNO

The acme of wanton stupidity.

SPIEGEL

Professor Adorno, a pedagogical argument is also always trotted out in connection with this. According to this argument, televised music gives consumers a preliminary introduction to the work and thereby stimulates them to attend concerts or opera performances in person. What do you think of this kind of musical therapy?

ADORNO

It’s wrong. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.

Image: Robert Rauschenberg Canto XIV: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art, from the series Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno1 959-60

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Never so much in common as this

Reminiscent of the fabled National Debt clock, Bloomberg Green sports a running, parts per million CO2 counter that clicks up and down at various speeds depending on, well, you can check it out.

Despite some with fancy hats acting interested in horse racing, versus others in famine-plagued refugee camps, there is a great bit of unanimity of experience in our current moment. Some dissonance concerning the effect of heat on the Miami Grand Prix notwithstanding, the inability to escape the unusual effects of global warming unites us all, on a way. Not the good kind, yet still, unity toutefois.

One of the questions is whether this great common crisis may elicit in us urgency for collective action that serves the greater good. And yes, cynicism circles the globe twice every morning before hopefulness pours its first cup. But this forced grouping of everyone with everyone else no matter your station under the banner of This Is Happening kicks our profit-maximizing distraction seeking onto a side street. And you know how people like to browse.

There are many things to see. Maybe you consider picking up something special – like something for someone everyone else.

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Recipes for frittering

This very poignantly familiar article on How to get Americans to care about a War includes most all the essentials that pour drama, apathy, and avoidance into a toxic stew of catastrophe and suffering around the world.

The dangers issuing from obtuse and deliberate lack of awareness resonate with a study published in the journal Nature this week. The research frames the economic damage that will come from climate change, a projections-based picture of missed opportunities of the world we might have been living in 2050, had different choices been made – in voting booths and boardrooms, primarily.

We can play the blame game of ‘who started what,’ and maybe we should to [better] inform future results. But that fact certain people around the world of whom Americans are definitely some can continue to play games and distract ourselves from wars and global warming is all of a part. The distraction game itself is seen as a growth industry in many quarters, and so of course it is. In the face of getting serious about consumer choices and investment portfolios as incentives or tradeoffs to be considered in the calculations to do anything about massive abstractions like ocean temperatures [not abstract at all, -ed] future choices and prosperity are frittered away.

Getting people to care about things that matter as just another version of vying for your attention is a triumph of marketing and failure of education. It is no indictment of childhood to tell people to grow up. It’s even in the one book they use to ban other books.

Also: put the damn books back. It’s embarrassing. What are we, chil–?

 

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Opportunity Costs

I had a note to write a post about ‘Why the ______ industries collapse’ inspired by a WaPo news story about emus, but this is difficult to ignore and maybe that’s a bigger point:

Trump’s golden façade has been crumbling for years. Since he was elected president, units in his buildings have sold for less than those in their luxury competitors and struggled with vacancies. Condo boards across Manhattan have voted to remove his name from their buildings; in 2019, even the flagship Trump International Hotel and Tower agreed to reduce the size of his name. But Trump’s grift came into sharper focus after New York attorney general Letitia James’s civil lawsuit in late September, which alleges that Trump and his family fraudulently inflated the value of their properties in order to receive favorable loans and, in the process, hundreds of millions of dollars. In mid-February, Justice Arthur Engoron found the Trump Organization guilty, and the judgment, tallied on February 23, totals $454 million with interest. Engoran’s ruling doesn’t permanently bar Trump and his eldest children from running the Trump Organization, but Trump is barred from running any corporation in the state for three years, while his sons Donald Jr. and Eric are barred for two.

How much time and energy has been wasted over the previous nine years on this trash person? You can find these stories practically anywhere these days but he has never been anything but a bullshit con. It’s a reminder that the U.S. is still a very young country,  a creaky constitutional republic that we’re too afraid to tinker with. Maybe in a country that has always been dominated by religious crazies, criminals, and tax cheats, it’s a miracle it took this long to produce its perfect avatar. But there he is.

And we need to move on. There are many, many issues that require urgent attention and from serious people. Be one. Start now.

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Natural selection

It’s important to step back for a moment and consider the scrum from which the hype around Artificial Intelligence arises.

Even without casting [m]any aspersions on the tools as they are bandied about – and there ARE documented, purposeful uses for crunching data with super computers, from folding proteins to finding exoplanets; real stuff and revolutionary for these fields – the general rush to embrace AI for all sorts of, let’s say, less purposeful application should be acknowledged.

After decades of artificial sweeteners, fabrics, food, and foliage, and of course the accompanying, devastation of health impacts and pollution from plastics, PCBs, and many more, a noticeable shift toward the all-natural, hand-selected, bespoke, organic, non-invasive ensued, at least in the marketing materials. This acknowledgement, more human-centered, initially had a kind of desperate last-gasp tone to it that morphed into a realm of preference, if not elevated choice. Thanks, branding!

But it was more than that, and the shift itself coincided with a growing awareness about the dangers of this fakeness and its seamless integration into the activities as well as the mindset that led to and accelerated global warming.

So, now – if you’re keeping score at home – because some of our overlord disruptors in Silicon Valley need to get in on the ground floor of the next new thing, we’re ready to reek further devastation on the information and images we use to navigate the world. It’s not enough to use the verb ‘consume.’ Once we began to use the word and consider ourselves consumers and now just customers instead of citizens, students, patrons, whatever, everything else became easier. And by everything else, I refer to most things unpleasant, empty, lesser, vapid, wasteful of your time, and detrimental to your heart. Yes, doesn’t that sound quaint. Your heart, come now! C’est drôle.

It’s not that the next new thing could destroy us, but that we are so happy to play our part in the destruction. Suddenly we’re helpless to watch another dynamic seize control of how we navigate the physical world as humans. You need not be an AI skeptic to be a tiny bit underwhelmed by that prospect.

The next new thing after this (not investment advice!) will surely consist of selling us back the key to imagination(tm) we somehow lost because everything is fake.

We worry about AI taking jobs but do our part in cheer-leading the takeover, in wonder no less at the ease with which it all happens and the productivity gains sure to follow. In this senseless meandering from one shiny thing to the next, AI might appear to be just another trend we might try, even get used to. Meanwhile, our only job ever has been to discern not the good from the bad, but the real from the fake.

Natural selection, by humans. Darwin should have been more specific.

And by the way, I’m not at all amused by the extent to which this all rhymes with the original rationale I presented for the green blog, oh so [no that] many years ago.

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The Green Revolution

No, not that one. This one:

The Green Revolution refers to a transformative 20th-century agricultural project that utilized plant genetics, modern irrigation systems, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides to increase food production and reduce poverty and hunger in developing countries. The Green Revolution began in Mexico, where scientists developed a hybrid wheat variety that dramatically expanded yields. Following its introduction, hunger and malnutrition there dropped significantly.

The model was subsequently extended to Asia, Latin America, and later Africa to increase food production for growing populations without consuming significantly more land. Over time, however, the techniques and policies of the Green Revolution were questioned as they led to inequality and environmental degradation.

Ahem. Such language. But being mindful of these transformations is important, especially as we seem to be on the verge of several others happening simultaneously and at terrific speed. For instance, which kind of battery will follow lithium-ion? In early 2023, we heard about iron-air batteries that use a water-based electrolyte and store energy using reverse rusting. Now, that’s the sexy tech we need. Companies are being funded and manufacturing facilities built. The storage needs changing, not to mention the problematic issues around mining lithium, are driving this ongoing series of shifts. Like the earlier Green revolution, it’s less important to cheer these development as good or bad but rather to see them in a kind of continuum and consider how each new standard performs under these changing market conditions. Yes, market – the economics as well as the social and physical constraints.

Climate tech is on-again, off-again as we get jaded accustomed to shiny new things, seek improvements and various strategies win out. But as the pressure continues to push costs down and use up, the newer green revolution can usher in a more stable form of societal improvements for everyone.

That, we should expect.

Video: the great Arthur Blythe (Thanks D!), with Bob Stewart on Tuba, doncha know.