On Going Back

But before we move on too fast, let’s dwell on the White House OMB memo from the last year week, you know, the one that was rescinded the next day:

Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities. Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “ wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

That’s from the opening paragraph. Does it sound like any of that is coming from secure, well-adjusted, confident people? They have no idea, nor care apparently, what any of those words mean. They believe the words frighten people, because they are frightened of the words. But fine. Even if they’d like to put them back in the bottle, they can’t. But there’s an important point there, beyond even their great fearfulness about the present, much less the future.

That point is this: what is to be gained from going back? Even if it were possible, we’d still be racing to right here – welcome, you feinds! – But beyond trying to prove that Marx was unassailable correct go home again, what is the fascination with going backward? Trying to get back to higher levels of consumption and pollution? People may think they want more inequality, lower that or more quiescent those. But that ship has been crashed on the rocks by these ghouls, they either don’t know that or yet again misinterpret. The result of the 2024 election was only possible if the society was completely broken.

So, no going back – even if that’s not what KH initially meant by the refrain. Jamelle Bouie hits it hard today:

But as those opponents strategize their response, it is vital that they see the important truth that there is no going back to the old status quo. President Trump and Elon Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed. If American constitutional democracy is a game, then they’ve flipped the board with the aim of using the same pieces to play a new one with their own boutique rules.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.

Image: Author photo, sunrise about 100 miles off the Southeast US Coast.

The self-awareness of Dinosaurs

Yes, it’s a ‘choose-your-outrage’ kind of extended moment. More on that in a sec.

Pace Heisenberg, stationary objects are helpful for perspective, especially when events appear to be moving quickly. Keep your head, it is said, when others about you are losing theirs. That was is supposed to be metaphorical.

The dinosaurs are a metaphor we are just figuring out – if that. Do stalled behemoths understand the revolutionary effects of technology? The way you-know-who couldn’t outrun a meteor much less a changing climate is a little too on the nose for a society that sets its watch to a market economy skittishly attuned to every last one of the wrong indicators. Doing ______ the most expensive way possible to prove that only we can do it builds a tautology that invites correction. And corrections will find you.

How much time to spend worrying, being afraid, looking for meaning or alternative translations of the meanings coming through loud and clear? Some, but not too much. Remember how easily, purposefully we are distracted by trivialities and it actually both explains quite a lot and provides ample space to begin again. Turn around from the corner. The whole room is there and you see the space is being utilized quite poorly. What is love? What is this moment? What is the meaning?

I was telling a friend about film, or I will:

Pay attention to this moment. Everything is there. Perfect. And complete. Just as it is.”

Know your business

Imagine a new, but irreversible global appetite for good bread.

What if McD––––’s corporate decided to shift from fast food to baguettes? Locations around the globe were to undergo a radical makeover – a shift toward fresh bread, maybe assorted pastries, in cities and the smallest of towns around the world, as both a cost-cutting initiative as well as a new commitment to the importance of demand for delicious, high-quality bread. Sparking immediate reaction from competitors and observers in the fast food business media, would McD____’s put experienced bakers in the C-suite? In charge of marketing and vertical integration? Or open their kitchens to the people who know how slap the dough?

“This is a moment where the digital story feels like an existential question,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “If we do not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.”

Mr. Thompson has been spreading this message inside CNN during his first 15 months in the job. But now, he is taking the biggest steps yet to overhaul the company, steering it away from its reliance on traditional television and trying to cash in on digital audiences wherever they are, at the same time that President Trump has sent the news cycle into hyperdrive.

On Thursday, the company said that it would eliminate about 200 jobs focused on CNN’s traditional TV operations, and add about the same number for new digital roles like data scientists and product engineers. CNN is aiming to hire 100 of those people in the first half of the year, Mr. Thompson said.

CNN also previewed a new streaming service, similar to its TV product, that it will charge for. Mr. Thompson said that CNN would also release a new subscription product this year around “lifestyle” content — examples include food and fitness — though he didn’t specify what the product would be.

The push into vertical video illustrates some of the challenges that Mr. Thompson faces.

Speed is of the essence in digital publishing, where breaking news is only relevant for a few hours at a time. But getting those videos published has been slowed at times by CNN’s review process, known as the Triad, which used to include fact-checking and standards and legal vetting, according to two people familiar with the matter. Last year, Mr. Thompson moved fact-checking, formerly known as the Row, into a new unit called CNN Fact Check that works closer with editors and producers earlier in the story-generation process. CNN still maintains teams dedicated to legal and standards reviews.

Mr. Thompson and Ms. MacCallum have recruited several executives to overhaul CNN’s digital operations. Some were former co-workers of Mr. Thompson or Ms. MacCallum at The New York Times, including Ben French, who helped launch The Times’s cooking app, and Ben Monnie, who worked on subscription pricing and bundling.

Whether it’s baking baguettes or becoming using TikTok, there are people who know how to do these things. Also the news cycle doesn’t passively ‘get sent into hyperdrive’.

What business are they in again?

Image: Mmmmmm

His Air was on Fire

I saw this show of paintings, sound installation, and short films by David Lynch in Paris in 2007, by far the most hilarious art show I’ve ever enjoyed:

Lynch started out as a painter at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art way back in 1966, and famously moved to making short abstract films, which he calls “moving paintings”, when he saw one of his canvases moving in the wind. With the money he made from his first private commission while still an art student, he bought a Bolex Super 8 camera.

Given the almost accidental nature of his move into film-making, would he ever have been satisfied had he remained a painter? “Oh yes,” he says, without hesitation, “for sure. That’s all I wanted to do for a long time. Just paint. But, suddenly, now there was film. This big thing.”

THE ground floor at the Fondation Cartier is devoted to Lynch’s paintings and drawings, the latter of which number in the region of 400, and some of which seem to date back to his college days.

“I hadn’t seen a lot of this stuff for a long, long time,” Lynch drawls, “and it made me realise that it’s actually a very good thing to see old work again. Some of the stuff that came out of storage really fired me up. I really don’t know where it will lead but it sure feels good.”

Over the last few years Lynch has been painting several series of nightmarish landscapes, each peopled with vague shapes in opaque, dusky landscapes. One such series is called the Mr Jim Series another, the Bob Series, perhaps inspired by his love for the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles where he used to breakfast daily on “four, five, six cups of coffee – with lots of sugar”. He’s since given up sugar as a creative catalyst but his vision remains somewhat frantic.

We both stare at a work called Bob Burns Tree. I ask him to talk me through its gestation.

“Well, it’s called Bob Burns Tree ,” he says, pointing to the Bob figure and then to the tree. “I knew from the start it was going be about, well, Bob burning a tree. I started with that idea and I kind of stayed with it. Yep.”

So good. Writing in paintings, normally abhorrent, sat with a kind of sang-froid alongside jeans that had been run over multiple times by a car, next to plaintive flat-space ear-marked for ill by the master with his own hand. I mean.

And then you would catch the sound loop running throughout the skeletoid building, akin to holding a stethoscope on the chest of gun factory.

Thank you and godspeed, sir.

Fearing the wrong storm

Panicky news media and political opposition frets and pre-surrenders to the prospects of what the next US president will do to climate goals and renewable energy projects. If you’re not accustomed to pushing back, prepare to be pushed around.

A few facts:

The U.S. currently produces more crude oil than any country, ever. What more fracking and drill babying will do to the price oil is an unsolvable mystery.

A powerful bomb cyclone is ripping the Pacific Northwest with hurricane-strength winds as the season’s first atmospheric river comes ashore in Northern California, promising torrential rains, floods and mudslides across the region.

Advanced energy capacity is concentrated in renewables, just ask the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, farmers continue to take massive financial hits from the effects of destructive storms.

What to do with this information (yes, after you stop ignoring it)? Use it to make decisions, including voting, but not just that. But speaking of voting, leaders have to be led to the safe place to do the right thing. Who’s going to do that? Who’s going to create the safe place and lead them there?

It’s almost flattering to think global warming is complicated and difficult to solve.

Moving away from cars

As difficult, and complicated, as contemplating the move away from cars might be, it can be strangely contextualized by reckoning with the move away from Florida:

The Sunshine State rode a post-pandemic growth wave to surpass New York as the country’s third-most populous state, and has four of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas‍—including Cape Coral–Fort Myers, which Hurricane Ian slammed in 2022, producing the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Will Florida’s lifestyle migrants decide they would rather live on higher ground? “The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone,” warns the Wall Street Journal.

Fat chance. To the extent that these storms will push anyone from Florida, it will not be people with the means to go, but people without the means to stay. This phenomenon—sometimes called “climate gentrification”—cuts against one popular idea of climate migration, in which wealthier households move to more secure locations and leave the poor to face extreme weather.

Locals are already conscious of this outcome. “The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” Sam Henderson, the mayor of Gulfport, told the Tampa Bay Times after Helene. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”

So, a series of counterintuitive developments – much like many of these communities themselves – where, rather than becoming cheaper and less habitable, Florida becomes more expensive and more appealing.

If history is any guide, this devastating hurricane season will increase the state’s rents and home prices, rather than drive them down, and Florida’s growth will continue apace.

Then again, as hundred-year-storm chasers know, history may not be much help in the era of unprecedented weather events fueled by a changing climate. The hazards of long-term sea-level rise are distinct from those associated with disaster recovery, which comes with rebuilt, functioning infrastructure and a sense of returning to normal. Future climate change risks are not included in FEMA flood maps, insurance policies, or Florida land-use planning—and seem not to impact the way people consider the risks of coastal property.

Oh, yes. People prefer less complication.

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

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.

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

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.