From Stolen Intellectual Policy To Heteropessimism To Climate Catastrophe Greeting Cards

A link to Capacious led me into a rabbit hole that didn't let go for several hours.  As an academic, I found the first story too real and too chilling a possibility. And also quite relevant to one of the presidential candidates. The other two I'll touch on here were much further outside my normal world.  The journal Capacious does have room for many things.

A Tweet sent me to Capaciousjournal to read an article ["How Intellectual Property Theft Feels"  Jordan Alexander Stein] by an English professor who submitted a book proposal on Cotton Mather to Yale University Press.  One reviewer gave it a green light.  The other said no.  Several years later, she gets an email about a new book from Yale University Press - on, you guessed it, Cotton Mather with a blurb that very closely copies her original proposal.  And then she finds out the author is the reviewer who nixed her proposal and the editor is the one she originally sent the proposal.  

She finds that her options are slim but minimally she wants an apology and an acknowledgement of the hurt this has caused her.  She gets neither. 

Her article covers a wide range of topics.  Money wasn't particularly an issue, because, as she says, books on Cotton Mather are aimed at a tiny niche audience. Aside from the deceit, a general despicableness of this sort of crime (I call it a crime, she says the law is fuzzy. The university classifies it under moral lapses) it caused real damage to the writer.  

"Having to look back at the past five years of my career, I suddenly saw that I’d mostly stopped researching and publishing on Puritan writers. Nor in that time had I attended even a single one of the field’s multiple annual conferences. All the Mather books in my office had been pushed into a corner where I now found them hibernating under five winters of dust. The humiliation I had felt years before as a response to the ad hominem nature of George’s reader report had knocked me off my professional course. It had happened by no means necessarily, and perhaps not on anyone’s part deliberately, but, I reluctantly found myself admitting, it had happened absolutely." (p. 103)

Essentially the reviewer/thief/author and the editor got away with it.  Nothing bad came of it for them (at least in the awareness of Jordan Alexander Stein.)  

And this seems emblematic of the age we live in.  Where the norms have broken down and the wheels of justice are too slow to keep up.  Trump perhaps will become the patron saint of sociopaths.  The Supreme Court has even awarded him with immunity that is probably broad and slippery enough for him to escape punishment for anything.  

Stein goes on to say this was not about money, but reputation.

"Universities meanwhile don’t operate at merely human levels; they have more abstract things like brands to protect. From their perspective, this kind of dust-up wouldn’t be about personal relationships, even when financial considerations are not involved. (Never mind that the university whose press Martha works for and which has published George’s edition of Mather is so incomprehensibly wealthy, and again the money at stake would be so little, that even the upper-limit damages from any hypothetical lawsuit of mine would be to them about as negligible as a rounding error). More typically, the issue is about the priceless thing called reputation. Universities do not want to be seen as having done something for which any liability must be assumed. What universities seek to protect is symbolic. And they protect it very well." (p. 106) (emphasis mine)

It's not like any of this is new.  Professors stealing the ideas of others is an age-old practice.  What is new is that there are many more platforms from which to call it out.  

 

While scrolling through the online copy of Capacious, I found several other articles that reminded me that people are thinking about and writing about things I have not given much attention to.  

[I'd note the links here.  The basic Capaciousjournal.com goes to a table of contents for the current edition - Vol. 3 No. 2  (2024).  This page has links to some of the articles in this edition - including the next one on Heteropessimism.  But the other articles can be found by clicking the PDF file for the whole edition.  Which I had to do to find the article above.  So for Stein article, you have to scroll down.  The Heteropessimism link takes you directly to that article.  The Greeting Card article you have to scroll down - it's right below the Stein article.]

"Heteropessimism and the Pleasure of Saying 'No.'”Samantha Pinson Wrisley

I have reactions to this article, but it's a discussion I have not been a party to (the article has 42 or 43 references) so I'll keep my thoughts to myself, just listen, and offer this quote from the author. 

 "I take the heteropessimistic connections between feminism and incel to their logical conclusion, showing that feminist heteropessimism’s inherent essentialism affectively cements the incongruous ideological positions of feminism to incel’s sexual nihilism. I conclude with an argument for the naturalization of negativity as part of a broader move toward accepting the ambiguities of heterosexual desire and the antagonism(s) that drive it."

After rereading this quote, I realize it most readers won't catch the drift of the article.  Basically, as I understood it, Wrisley argued that one area of feminism looks at heterosexual relations as difficult because they can't stand the men necessary to have heterol relationships.  She saw a similarity between this attitude and that of incels who are virgins because they can't attract women to have sex with them.  Both, thus being characterized as 'heteropessimistic.'

Finally:  "Greeting Cards For the Anthropocene"  Craig Campbell 

This one starts out with 

"In 1971 it cost only 50¢ for an eight page list of twenty-five Greeting Card companies in the USA and Canada that were buying greetings, captions, and ideas from hopeful writers."

He offers some examples of what the card makers wanted in people's pitches.  Using this idea, he moves closer to the present:

"In 2019, under the auspices of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography, we launched the Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene project.2 We sought to understand climate feelings first by making cards for an invented category of ‘Climate Catastrophe’ in the greeting card aisle of the local pharmacy."

 The article includes some examples of related letters and such greeting cards. 

In many ways Capacious does what I set out to do in this blog long ago - look at things we often overlook, or look at what we see, but differently.  It rearranges the furniture of the brain.  And reminds me to do more of this sort of posts.  

Alaska Press Club Friday - Judy Woodruff, Climate, Saving Local News

The Alaska Press Club annual conference gives this lone blogger an opportunity to connect with other journalists and learn something.  This really should be several posts, but I'm going to cover today pretty fast, just to give you a sense of things, but not too much detail.  

First session I went to was  Covering Climate Change in Rural Alaska.  

The room was pretty full for this panel of journalists who have worked in rural Alaska.  Issues covered how to get stories, particularly as outsiders;  how to write them so the local folks feel they've been fairly represented.  

Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer

The panelist I got the most from wasn't a journalist  (well that's not completely clear, she may have once been) who is now the Director, Climate Initiatives, at the Alaska Native Tribal Consortium, Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer.  

I've spent a lot of time learning about cross-cultural translation by spending a year or more in several cultures outside of my own.  I've paid close attention to Alaska Native issues and people in the years I've lived in Alaska.  But Jackie said things that captured wisdoms I'd never heard articulated like that before.  (Yes, I know I owe you a couple of examples, but my notes aren't good enough to write them here in a way that would due justice to she said. But trust me, she's comfortable and culturally fluent in the world of Alaska Native cultures and the more recently arrived Euro-American culture.  

                          Two of the other panelists who had a lot to contribute:  Rachel Waldholz and Tom Kizzia.

Keynote:  Judy Woodruff, PBS Newshour

The room was packed when I got there and I ended up in a seat right in front of the podium and it was clear I was barely going to see more than the speaker's forehead, so I took this shot while she was being introduced.  

Her theme was the two or three year tour of the US she's making trying to learn more about the extreme political divide that now exists in the US.  She started with Pugh Research (where she visited) polling data that shows the divide far greater than ever in any of their polls over the years.  She talked about Republicans who thought Democrats were immoral and Democrats who thought the same of Republicans.  About families that don't celebrate Thanksgiving together any more.  There used to be married couples who managed to stay together even though they were of different political parties.  Today, she said, that was down to 2-3% of married couples.  

She talked about the causes of the divide and they were all the usual suspects.  When she got to the media she emphasized the importance of local news and how the loss of some 2500 local newspapers was a blow to democracy.  That those local papers were raw glue that kept communities together, where people saw themselves and their neighbors mentioned in print whether it was local sports pages or stories about community arts, non-profits, local businesses.  And that local reporters were crucial to informing local communities about the local officials and keeping them accountable.  

John Palfrey,MacArthur Foundation

This all led into the next sessions (not accidentally) which dealt with an initiative Press Forward co-founded by the MacArthur Foundation (which supports the PBS Newshour) and the Knight Foundation.  When I looked at their website just now, there are lots of other foundations listed, but from the discussion it seems the two speakers in the next sessions - John Palfrey, CEO of the MacArthur Foundation and Jim Brady, Vice President for Journalism at the Knight Foundation - went out and encouraged the others to join this initiative.  

John and then Jim talked about Press Forward as one effort to save democracy by helping make local journalism sustainable as technology and online media are eroding traditional revenue sources for local newspapers.

They've raised half a billion dollars (!) so far and now are working on the other half.  

Jim Brady and Lori Townsend

Above is Jim Brady of the Knight Foundation being interviewed by Alaska Public Media News Director Lori Townsend.  While Palfrey talked more about the creation and vision of Press Forward and raising money, Brady spoke more to the kinds of things they are funding.  Sustainability was a word that was used often.  

Press Forward Alaska came to be with the help of the Rasmuson and Atwood Foundations and the strong public broadcasting network here which has already been working on the kinds of alliances among different media outlets Press Forward is encouraging.  There were other local Press Forward projects, but Alaska is the first State Project.  

The last part of this Press Forward Initiative presentation was a panel of Alaskan journalists involved in cooperative projects.  And as I write this, I'm guessing that somehow they have been touched by Press Forward assistance, though I didn't catch that link at the time. 

Here are David Hulen (with the mic), editor of the Anchorage Daily News, Amy Bushatz, Mat-Su Sentinel, Joaqlin Estus, Indian Country Today, and moderator Wesley Early, Anchorage reporter at Alaska Public Media.

Finally, I wrapped the day up talking in the lobby with Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media and John McKay, an Anchorage First Amendment attorney who represents most local media.  (I realize the sentence says 'an', but John probably is 'the' key attorney in this field.)

I'd never met Ed (center) before and as a blogger, I often find myself having to convince people I'm not a flake.  John showed up at the right time.  John was an early supporter of my blogging work and when he worked out a deal for media covering the political corruption trials back in 2007 and 2008, to share the audio/vidoe evidence in the trials and to take cell phones and computers past the court security, he (unbeknownst to me) included my name on the list of journalists getting these privileges.  He later helped me out when I was threatened with a law suit for questioning the legitimacy of the Alaska International Film Festival whose only presence in Alaska was a post office box and which had no actual festival.  While we were talking Lori Townsend joined us briefly as she was leaving because she had a program to host at 5pm.  

That's it.  An incomplete view of the Alaska Press Club conference today.  But despite the fact that the conference is made up of journalists, not many of us actually cover what happens.  

JB MacKinnon Speaks On His Book "The Day The World Stops Shopping"

Wednesday night my daughter and I went to Bainbridge High School to hear author J.B MacKinnon.  He was interviewed on stage by local Bainbridge resident Becky Rockefeller whose a founder of the Buy Nothing movement.  She was a knowledgeable and perceptive interviewer.  

The discussion was exciting.  Mackinnon's ideas about changing consumerism were realistic - "if we cut back shopping by 25% one day, the economy would collapse" - and there were lots of examples of people who have chosen non-consumer life-styles.  

A key concept for me was the idea of one-world living.  Not sure what your first thought was when you hear that term, but mine was not what he was talking about.

He was talking about how many planet earths were required to sustain a country's level of consumption.  He said the US needed about five or six planet earths to supply the resources for all that we consume of the long haul. (He said he didn't remember the exact number.)  When he was writing the book he looked for countries that were one-world or less.  The most attractive life at the level, at the time, was Ecuador.  

But he also said that 1977 in the US fit that standard too.  I was alive and aware at that time and it wasn't a burdensome life.  

I realize that one reason I'm blogging less frequently is that trying to do it right takes more time than I seem to have.  So I'm going to use a shortcut and offer this YouTube with MacKinnon so you can get a sense of his ideas yourself. 

 

Climate Reality Spreading - 'Death' Valley Adds Another Victim

The weather around the world this summer is likely to convince a lot of people that climate change is serious.  That it is changing the conditions of living that we have simply taken for granted and assumed would continue.  

LA Times reporter Hayley Smith, started this story talking about covering disasters including floods and wildfires, but the heat at Death Valley

 ". . . was a different kind of beast, something most people alive have yet to experience. One park visitor described it as like an open oven; another like a blow dryer to the face . I imagined it was more like the surface of the sun, or like someone had left the lights on in hell. 

It was in those circumstances that I met Steve Curry."

She was interviewing tourists at Zabriski Point.  Then she caught my attention:

"Suddenly, my colleague, photojournalist Francine Orr, spotted a lone figure scrambling up a nearby canyon and snapped his photo."

Francine Orr sounded familiar.  I checked my blog to be sure.  Orr spoke to this year's Alaska Press Club Conference in April about photographing COVID victims inside a few LA hospitals during the pandemic. She had gotten permission to photograph patients inside a hospital just as COVID was about to start and she took striking photos.  

I posted them on my COVID page (You can scroll down to April 18, 2023, but I'll repost them here since I never put them up here in the main part of the blog. The photos and the presentation were powerful.) 

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

Over the weekend I attended the Alaska Press Club Annual Conference and the last speaker I heard was Francine Orr of the LA Times.  She's a photographer who got permission to take pictures in a hospital in LA just as COVID was beginning and continued doing that for a couple of years.  If people had been seeing her pictures daily, perhaps more people would have taken more precautions.  Here are a couple of the pictures she showed.  

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

Francine Orr, LA Times at AK Press Club Conf

But back to Death Valley and Steve Curry.  

"He was from the Sunland neighborhood of Los Angeles, he told us from beneath his wide-brimmed straw hat. He was 71."

He was on his annual hike there in Death Valley and they offered him more water (he had one water bottle), a reprise in the air conditioning of their car, even a ride back to the trailhead.  

"The park service advises visitors not to hike in the park after 10 a.m. during extreme summer temperatures, but Steve was chipper. He said he was an experienced outdoorsman, and he was determined to finish his round-trip solo hike to Golden Canyon.

"Already, a scalding wind was blowing through the park, overheating our electronic equipment and turning metal door handles into hot irons. Francine and I could bear only a few minutes of it before diving into our cars for the relief of air conditioning, but Steve was persistent. He said he had completed extensive training and was getting ready for another hike in August. 

"What we now know is that Steve did finish his journey, but just barely. He collapsed outside the bathrooms at Golden Canyon at about 3:40 that afternoon and died shortly after. Though the coroner has not yet confirmed his cause of death, officials said they believe it to be heat-related."

 

Smith tells us she ended up meeting Steve's widow and wrote his obituary. 

"He said he was an experienced outdoorsman"

The world is changing.  Our experience of the world as we have known it doesn't necessarily prepare us for the world that is here today and the one it is evolving into because oil companies and their allies have been spreading and continue to spread misinformation to continue making money.  Foolish venal people are not a problem if the consequences of their folly only affects them.  But in this case the world is suffering and will continue to suffer because of them and the people unwilling to stand up to them.   

Tonıght 7pm: ADN And Seattle Times Pair Up For Report on Sockeye Salmon And Crab Issues

Seems this would be interesting for many of you readers.   

Join a livestream of this event Dec. 12 at 7 p.m. Pacific time. Register here.

As the world warms, the Bering Sea tells a story of boom and bust. The sockeye salmon runs of Bristol Bay are to be marveled at. More than 78.3 million sockeye surged home last summer, filling nets and spawning grounds. The spectacular display came as Alaska salmon runs of chum and chinook once again imploded.

Meanwhile, Bering Sea crab populations have crashed. The snow crab harvest—for the first time ever — has been canceled, and the king crab season was shut down for the second year in a row.

Join Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton, Anchorage Daily News photojournalist Loren Holmes and a panel of experts in a discussion of some of the effects of a warming climate on one of the planet’s most productive marine ecosystems.

Warnings From Half Of A Yellow Sun

The phrase, "Everything is impossible until it is done" often attributed to Nelson Mandela among others, tells us not to give up hope that we can accomplish something.  It's a positive inspiration for people fighting to elect sensible politicians or to change oppressive laws.  Surely the Supreme Court decision declaring the right to gay marriage is an example of the truth of that quote.  Tattoo it on your brain.  

But I want to look at the possibility of negative events in this post, which might be more aptly said, "Everything is impossible until it isn't."  NOT taking action because we DON'T think something bad can really happen is a problem.  

Below is a short passage from Half Of A Yellow Sun a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  

The book portrays the lives of (mostly) upper class, educated Nigerians.  Part I is titled "The Early 60s."  I'm now in Part II:  "The Late Sixties."  I'll briefly point out why I think it is relevant to us today for those who may not see in the passage what I see.

The narrator, in this chapter, speaks from the perspective of Ugwu, an Igbo, who is the houseboy of Odenigbo who teaches at the university in Nsukka. He is also Igbo though he often speaks to Ugwu in English.  Odenigbo is often referred to by Ugwu as Master. Odenigbo hosts weekly afternoon lunches for a small group of faculty - where they have lively discussions about the politics of their newly independent country.  

The gathering in the passage is a little different.  There had been a recent coup and now there are reports on the radio that the Muslim, Hausa-speaking Northerners are starting to attack the Christian Igbo soldiers who they accuse of tribal favoritism and corruption in the newly independent nation of Nigeria.

"Ever since the second coup some weeks ago, when the Igbo soldiers were killed, he had struggled to understand what was happening, read the newspapers more carefully, listened more closely to Master and his guests.  The conversations no longer ended in reassuring  laughter, and the living room often seemed clouded with uncertainties, with unfinished knowledge, as if they knew something would happen and yet did not know what.  None of them would ever had imagined that this would happen, that the announcer on ENBC Radio Enugu would be saying now, as Ugwu straightened the tablecloth, "We have confirmed reports that up to five hundred Igbo people have been killed in Maiduguri."

"Rubbish!" Master shouted.  "Did you hear that?  Did you hear that?"

"Yes, sah,"  Ugwu said.  He hoped the loud noise would not wake Baby up from her siesta.  

"Impossible!" Master said.

"Sah, your soup," Uguw said.

"Five-hundred people killed.  Absolute rubbish!  It can't be true." [emphasis added]

I'd note that in the next chapters the slaughter will get even worse.  

My sense is that most US citizens are still sitting too comfortably in their lives to believe how close we are to the impossible.  Or maybe a little too uncomfortably to believe things could really get even worse.  They are telling people like me not to be alarmists.  Things always work out.  

Well, until they don't.  

In May 2020, Trump said Trump said keeping US deaths to 100,000 would be a ‘very good job.’  Over a million people in the US died of COVID.  Where's the outrage?  Well, the million who died aren't here to complain.  And while their families were affected,  most of us didn't have physical contact with all those dead bodies.  The deaths were spread out geographically.  But let's consider how many people died.  The ten largest cities in the US have populations above 1 million.  

But the next ten, if all those deaths took place in their cities, would have been wiped out!

11	San Jose	California	1,003,120
12	Fort Worth	Texas	958,692
13	Jacksonville	Florida	938,717
14	Charlotte	North Carolina	925,290
15	Columbus	Ohio	921,605
16	Indianapolis	Indiana	892,656
17	San Francisco	California	884,108
18	Seattle	Washington	787,995
19	Denver	Colorado	760,049
20	Washington	District of Columbia	718,355

Source:  https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities

It would have a lot more impact if the deaths had been geographically concentrated in any of these cities.  The whole population would be gone!  Ghost town.  

We still don't comprehend the enormity of the disaster.  And because we refuse to even wear masks, we continue to offer our bodies as breeding ground for the virus.  Even if we have no symptoms, we give the virus a host where rest and mutate into newer and potentially even more deadly variations.

But perhaps the biggest catastrophe waiting to happen is the loss of our democracy.  Women have already had a basic human right ripped away from them.  Now far right legislators are trying to limit their right to interstate travel.  If the Supreme Court next fall cedes all voting decisions to state legislatures, Republican legislatures will gerrymander their states so that only Republicans can win.  They'll change voting laws and procedures so that potential Democratic voters will have a video game worth of obstacles blocking their attempts to vote.  

Armed (unregulated) militias could duplicate the slaughters that Odenigbo can't believe are being reported on the radio.  If you don't believe that you didn't see any footage of January 6.  You don't understand the hate and anger behind the anti-abortion laws.  You fail to consider the 320 million guns owned by US citizens.  You're not paying attention to regular mass shootings - there have already been 48 in the US in July 2022 and today is only July 17!

Some US citizens understood the gravity of things when they watched the January 6 insurrection.  Others while listening to the Congressional Jan 6 hearings.  But most people seem to be incapable of believing a fascist takeover of the United States could really happen.  Their image of the US as the land of democracy and freedom blocks the image of an authoritarian take over.  No government in history has not eventually fallen.  Despite the talk of American exceptionalism, we aren't any different.  

Some people may think that they are law abiding white citizens so they'll be fine. Only bad people have to worry.  

And many might imagine the worst, but can't imagine they have the power to do anything about it.  That's understandable and curable.  

We all need to keep these two quotes visible:

EVERYTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL IT IS NOT.  

To remember that losing our democracy is very possible.

EVERYTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL IT IS DONE.

To remember that we can work to preserve our democracy and defeat those who want to kill it.  

The most immediate thing you can do is make sure as many people as possible vote blue. Don't believe me?  Stacy Abrams got enough blue voters registered and to the polls in Georgia in 2022 to give its electoral college votes to Biden and to replace two Republican US Senators with Democrats.  She did it by planning and hard work.   There are many organizations working hard to duplicate that kind of work.  In 2020, nearly 2/3 of eligible voters voted.  That was a presidential election year when more people vote.  It was a record high.  But it means that 1/3 of voters did NOT vote.    

You can help find those non-voters and encourage them to vote blue.  Here are some organizations working on that.  

Six Organizations Getting People to Vote and How to Help Them

Fearless Action is a youth led group getting people to vote.

The League of Conservation Voters

Fascist/authoritarian takeover isn't inevitable.  But the fact that majority of the Republicans in the House and Senate won't say that Biden won the election, but instead are denying the insurrection, and are attacking the January 6 investigation, and doing nothing to prevent it from happening in 2024 is not a good sign.  

While the 2022 election is critical to maintaining a democracy, the larger threat looming over the world is Climate Change.  While a growing number of people are convinced that climate change is real, they aren't willing to fight hard to slow it down.  Every day of delay means more extreme climate change impacts and more suffering of all living creatures on the planet.  (Well, there probably will be some creatures who will find a way to thrive in the new earthly reality.)

I'm guessing the title of the book is related to the flag of the short-lived breakaway country of Biafra.

Campbell Creek Yesterday And Last Year - Big Difference

 Weather, from one year to another, in one particular location, doesn't tell us anything about climate change.  For that you need data over many years and many locations.  

But, for whatever reasons - more snow, lower spring temperatures, etc. - Campbell Creek - from the bridge at Lake Otis - was almost completely iced over on April 15, 2021.  

But yesterday (March 30, 2022), I took the bike out for the first time to check out conditions and here's what Campbell Creek looked like.

Whatever the reasons, we are way ahead of last year.  

Cell phones let us quickly retrieve old photos to be able to do a comparative post like this.  

Oil, Ukraine, Flopping, And A Cameo Part For Sen.Dan Sullivan

 When you get a chance, tie up one of your oil fanatic Republican family members and/or friends and make them watch this.  It covers most of the relevant issues.  Trust me.  It's worth watching.

Thanks, George.

Manchin - Thinking Out Loud

[I live in Alaska.  I've passed through West Virginia long ago.  I have no inside knowledge about Manchin.  Just general thoughts about how people behave in political organizations.]

Manchin and Sinema keep trading places in the headlines as the person who is holding climate change and other critical issues hostage.  

Since I live in an oil state, I have an inkling of the pressure that any US Senator from Alaska feels - Democrat or Republican.  When Mark Begich was the Democratic Senator from Alaska, he supported oil development.  It's part of the job of an Alaskan Senator.  Or at least the perception is that if you aren't an oil supporter, you won't get elected.  Oil money will sink your campaign.  So Alaskan Democrats might lobby a Democratic Senator on climate change, but we know oil interests lobby harder.  Sen. Murkowski understands the importance of climate change and bows to oil and GOP pressure.  

So I understand that Manchin needs to stand strong on coal.  He stands strong with the coal industry and the jobs it brings his state.  Even if the demand for coal is waning.  Even if many coal miners die a premature death from black lung disease.  In Alaska oil doesn't actually employ that many people compared to other sectors.  And almost 40% commute from Outside for one or two week rotations. But for the last 40 years it has paid for state government.  Whenever there is any opposition to what the oil companies want, they spend massive amounts of money to sway public opinion that only oil can keep Alaskans employed and enjoying the lifestyle they've come to expect.  Even if it's not true. 

I saw a Tweet yesterday responding to someone complaining that Biden couldn't deliver major legislation the way LBJ or FDR could.  The responders pointed out that LBJ had a 66-34 Democratic majority going into the 1964 and a 68 -32 majority after the election.  There were lots of Democrats from the South that wouldn't vote for the landmark Civil Rights legislation.  LBJ needed Republican votes to beat the filibuster, which in those days you had to actually carry out by speaking 24 hours straight or longer.  But when you were done, the vote was taken and it wasn't 2/3.  Today you just push a button and kill the legislation.  Biden has 48 Democrats and 2 Independents and 50 Republicans. He has no wiggle room whatsoever. 

One could say that by holding up critical climate change legislation to prolong the coal industry's slow death, Manchin is condemning millions of people around the world to premature deaths.  Not just because of this one bill, but because if the US falters on this, then it will give other countries around the world an excuse to go slower too.  And the slower we go, the more people will be displaced and die because of how climate change will play out.  More violent storms.  More drought causing massive fires and forcing people off the land their families have farmed for generations.  More wars to fight for scarce resources like water, arable land, livable temperatures.  And it wouldn't be wrong to say - and history books might - that Manchin was the person who did this.

But Manchin is only the focal point because of other problems as well:

• Our US Senate is grossly unrepresentative.  Because every state, no matter the population, has two senators, small, rural states have more more senators than their small populations deserve.  Alaska, with 733,391 people has two Senators just like California with almost 40 million people  - 54 times as many people!  Democrats in the Senate represent 43 million more people than the Republican Senators represent.  
• There are 50 Republican Senators who aren't being put in the spotlight like Manchin.  What are they doing?  There isn't one who has the courage to vote yes?
• Minority leader McConnell could work out a deal to get this passed.  But making Democrats look bad is his main objective.  That and voter suppression is the only way Republicans can stay in power at all for now.  

I don't know what other pressures Manchin is under.  It's clear he's not looking at his situation in a long term world survival perspective.  He's up for reelection in 2024.  Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels and it's going to end soon,  It's already way down in production and use,

So what must be going on behind the scenes? Some (not mutually exclusive) possibilities.  

1. He needs to publicly (in West Virginia) appear to be the man who stood up to protect West Virginia's coal,
2. He needs to protect the coal interests of his major financial backers.
3. He wants to protect his own financial interests in coal.  

Numbers 2 and 3 are harder to make deals on.  If it were only #1, it would seem like the Democrats could do a number of things that benefit West Virginia in exchange for his vote like:

1. exempt West Virginia from restrictions on coal- though if power plants are giving incentives for clean fuel, that would mean they would move away from West Virginia coal even if it were exempted.
2. offer boosts to care for coal mine related health problems for West Virginia
3. offer job retraining programs for coal miners and incentives for businesses in West Virginia to hire them and/or incentives for companies outside of West Virginia to relocate or open work places in WV
4. make a big public show of all the sacrifices Democrats had to make to satisfy Manchin for WV consumption

He's already getting lots of attention for standing firm for West Virginia's interests (whether that's true or not, it's the perception) so I'm guessing it's pressure from businesses more than voters.  Or, businesses that will spend money in the next election supporting or opposing Manchin.  While he first got elected by a strong majority in 2012, in 2018 he squeaked by with less than 50% of the vote.  

But life oddly thrusts people into the spotlight for different reasons.  Had Georgia not elected two Democratic Senators, Manchin would be much less important.  Maybe invisible.  And people really mad at Manchin have to remember if he weren't a Democrat, McConnell would still be the Senate Majority leader.  

I'd also note that we see many headlines about Manchin as well as those about Biden being in trouble because conflict and drama attract eyeballs, so the media push the conflict and use competitive sports metaphors as a way of getting more advertisers.  

"Don’t call them “at-risk.” They’re “at-promise" And 3 Other Articles Of Interest

Let's start off with some good news.  If you're only going to link to one of these articles, I recommend this one.   There are better ways to do things.  For one things, being smaller and close to your people helps.   I also want to disclose that the head of Fledge is a close relative.

Novel Holding Company Africa Eats Has Raised $1.8M For Its Impact Startups (Forbes)

About a year ago, Fledge, which operates about 10 impact accelerators around the world, launched Africa Eats, a holding company with 27 agriculture and food-focused Africa-based graduates of the networks’ programs. The goal: supporting entrepreneurs on-the-ground with an intimate understanding of how best to address hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since then, the company has raised close to $2 million—and, despite the pandemic, the portfolio companies are doing fine.

Another good news story, where calling attention to labels can make a difference.  Not 'at risk.'  'At promise.'  Most kids want to be good people, they just need support for those dreams.

Caring for the environment helps South King County kids recovering from trauma or hardship find a sense of purpose  (From the Seattle Times)

"This summer, Park, Amine and Tracy are among two dozen mostly South King County youth learning to be stewards of the environment. 

They clean urban lakes during kayak patrols, plant trees, learn field mapping skills and test water quality in streams and rivers on state parks and public lands. They’re on water or trails several days each month. They’re paid $15 an hour for the work — enough to keep most of them from having to take other part- or full-time jobs that would otherwise consume their days — and they’re getting leadership training so they can help lead conservation and pollution prevention efforts in the future. . .

Many of the youth involved in Unleash the Brilliance have faced early adverse experiences “on steroids,” says Dorsey. Amine was peer pressured into regularly using drugs in middle school; his grades and relationship with his parents tanked. Park’s family faced bankruptcy. Other youth bore witness to their parents’ addictions, moved around a lot or lived in extreme poverty. Some have a history of being incarcerated, skipping class or facing delays graduating from high school. 

Dorsey sees them for their potential. Don’t call them “at-risk.” They’re “at-promise,” he says."

How much do your peers impact your behavior?  This Atlantic article addresess peer pressure and vaccination.  

The Anti-vaccine Con Job Is Becoming Untenable:  Why targets of deliberate deception often hesitate to admit they’ve been deceived

"Something very strange has been happening in Missouri: A hospital in the state, Ozarks Healthcare, had to create a “private setting” for patients afraid of being seen getting vaccinated against COVID-19. In a video produced by the hospital, the physician Priscilla Frase says, “Several people come in to get vaccinated who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance and even went so far as to say, ‘Please, please, please don’t let anybody know that I got this vaccine.’” Although they want to protect themselves from the coronavirus and its variants, these patients are desperate to ensure that their vaccine-skeptical friends and family never find out what they have done. . .

Shifting from an individual to a relational perspective helps us understand why people are seeking vaccination in disguise. They want to save face within the very specific set of social ties that sociologists call “reference groups”—the neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and friendship networks that help people obtain the income, information, companionship, mutual aid, and other resources they need to live. The price of access to those resources is conformity to group norms. That’s why nobody strives for the good opinion of everyone; most people primarily seek the approval of people in their own reference groups."

Do you know whether your insurance company is insuring coal companies?

U.S. INSURERS FAIL ON CLIMATE ACTION:   Global insurers make coal increasingly “uninsurable”; whole industry fails to act on oil & gas  

LONDON (December 2, 2020)—U.S. insurance companies lag behind their global peers and play a key role in enabling the fossil fuel industry, the Insure Our Future campaign revealed today in its fourth annual scorecard on insurers’ climate policies. 

Insuring Our Future: The 2020 Scorecard on Insurance, Fossil Fuels and Climate Change finds that most European and Australian insurers no longer provide coverage for new coal projects, which has made it harder and costlier to secure the insurance that coal projects need to operate. Coal companies face rate increases of up to 40%. Controversial projects—like the Adani Group’s Carmichael coal mine in Australia—are finding it hard to obtain insurance at all. This demonstrates the insurance industry’s unique power to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.  

 More useful for most folks is the scorecard here.  

Unfortunately, smaller companies like All State and State Farm aren't listed here.  They are both independent companies.  But Geico is owned by Berkshire Hathaway which is one of the worst offenders.

 

Neighbors Came By To Welcome Us Home

I went out to check on the snow conditions of the driveway yesterday.  We'd gotten back late the night before.  Two of the neighbors came by to welcome us home.

The biggest issue I saw was that the mailbox had been barricaded by the plowed snow.  

I emailed Nordic Lawns, the company that was taking care of the snow in the driveway while we were gone so our house sitter could get in and out.  Then I went back out and carved some steps to the mailbox for the time being.

When I got in there was a call from Nordic Lawns apologizing profusely and saying they would come out.  This was NOT something that should happen.  Meanwhile the mail carrier managed the steps I'd made and stuffed the mailbox with about as much mail as it could hold.

And then Nordic showed up to clear in front of the mailbox.  So I went back out and asked if he could also just clear a space in front of the house for me to park the van, which is still sitting in the neighbors' driveway.  It's great to have good neighbors.  When I called him to ask if I could rent part of his driveway (his is double wide) he said no - I could just use it.

So now the berm the city left in front of the house - which would have meant I would have to park well into the traffic lane - has been rearranged with a space.

Then I rushed off with my wife's car to the Alaska Public Media Community Advisory meeting.  I figure I can't reasonably complain about their practices until I know more.  They went through their listener/viewer statistics for the Anchorage area.  KSKA is the most listened to radio station for a number of time periods during the day.

And by the time I got home, my knee was bothering me again.  So today I spent a lot of time with ice on my knee.  That was good enough to allow me to shovel the deck.  Tomorrow it's supposed to be warmer - into the 20s - so I'll wait til it's toasty to see if my car will start up after sitting there so long next door.

Alaska's - particularly further north - has had one of its coldest winters while the rest of the US and northern Europe have been having an unusually warm winter.  It is nice to have snow that doesn't get turned to ice on a regular basis because the temp snakes above and below the freezing point regularly.

At Citizens Climate Lobby Regional Conference in Vancouver, WA

Took the train from Seattle to Vancouver yesterday.  Much less painful than going to the airport.  Since I was already in the Seattle area, I thought it was a good chance to go to a regional CCL conference nearby.






Last night was a social evening just getting to know people from other places.

We were all together for the opening session, then broke into smaller groups.

I'm now on one about a EN-ROADS that is a simulator for calculating the impact of different actions on climate change.

And here are some slides that show some of the latest data on climate change.

Lots of questions about what things are included in these charts and what's left out and warnings that these are models, approximations, but they give us more information about climate change progress and how the EN-ROADS model would affect things.

Here's one more slide - that shows the EN-ROADS model results of one simulation (as I understand what's happening.)

You can't see much here, but you can go online to see the EN-ROADS simulator and play with it.

Let's see how clear this screen shot of the variables that are manipulated in this simulation to see which measures impact future temperature change.

If you click on the image it gets much clearer