NYCweboy

Praying For Time

“You break it, you bought it” has rarely fit so aptly as it does for Republican officials finding themselves suddenly with little choice but to emphatically call for their supporters across the South and West to finally get vaccinated. 

Vaccine misinformation and antivax messaging sits squarely with conservative news and media outlets; nightly skepticism from Fox, Newsmax and OAN joined up with months of Covid minimization and attacks on leading public health figures (the especially gross attempts to go after Anthony Fauci deserve their own special section of hell). The messy witches brew of Trump sycophancy, anti-intellectual takes on science and political gamesmanship around Covid were always bound to end in a mess of infections and finger pointing… still, its been a remarkably fast six weeks since Biden’s initial 300 million vaccines ran headlong  into the vaccine resistors, and the reality of the Delta variant started shortly thereafter. 

What had been whispered in polite circles has now become the undercurrent of urgency: if Republican officials aren’t successful soon, predictions of Republican voter dominance won’t be about manufactured conspiracies and ham handed legislating… instead it will be about the devastation done to one side of the electorate by misinformation and recalcitrance and how that dominance was lost. 

All of this underscores something even more obvious: the breakdown of the right wing noise machine, the carefully constructed false narratives that animate right wing “news” outlets, that have served as an endless buffet of distractions for right wing voters, the pundit class, and ultimately all of us. Who needs masks! Mandates are fascism! What about the lab in Wuhan? Critical Race Theory will destroy us all! And on and on. 

And so we get surreal moments like an op-ed from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one day after publicly questioning vaccines yet again, telling Arkansans that she was indeed vaccinated and they should too, but not because “The Left” is telling you to in some condescending way… do it because your preacher says so. Or something.

The narrative is falling apart because, mainly, it is a lie. When studies were able to show that the vast majority of vaccine misinformation can be traced back to just 12 Facebook users, when the Administration can calmly and with virtually no blowback point out that Fox News traffics in disinformation… conservatives panicked. It doesn’t help that at this point some 7 states in the south are facing outbreaks of Delta that amount to the worst period yet of infections and hospitalizations… and that was in the space of one week.The rest of us can (fairly) be concerned about potential implications… but all bets are going to be off if, as predicted, a swath of southern states will have India-like issues of nowhere to store ever increasing numbers of the dead.

So… well, good luck with that: good luck trying to say “we’re really telling you the truth now” as if you can perpetuate all the other lies - the January sixth insurrection stories, fearmongering Wuhan, smearing Hunter Biden, I could go on… - and not face consequences. This cannot be fixed with a tweet. This doesn’t just end. Conservatives are on the hook for all of it - all of the lies, all of the fake stories, all of the haze that kept their audience angry and fearful and spun up. In part, this is the lesson of playing with fire: I suspect many conservatives had little idea about the deep tentacles the antivax crowd had lying in wait for just this moment, ready to seize upon, repackage and expand on the little white lies they started telling about COVID vaccines. Much the way that some more cosseted Republican operatives didn’t understand a white supremacy movement just waiting for the green light to take dog whistles and make them into flat racist rhetoric. Not at first, anyway.

Critical Race Theory, though… that one you knew. You knew that was a put up job, a new meaningless jeremiad you could throw around as an all purpose slop of racist anger, education myths, and grievance politics that can set a nation back 40 years. Or more. Who cares! Anything for a win! Let’s all pretend to make Kevin McCarthy a serious man - whose only hope now is screaming at the sky while Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger help Democrats tell the true story of January sixth.

These are the days of the guilty man… and it was fine, taking all these chances while God didn’t seem to be keeping score. But the narrative is blowing up, what was over there is over here… and suddenly belief in witchcraft and fear of science could get a lot of people killed. And maybe we should all be praying for time… but hey, conservatives, why don’t you go first. Pray that you have enough time to stop the antivax madness. Pray that no one notices your house of cards tumbling down. Pray that one inkling truth doesn’t lead to a flood of raised consciousness. All that religious fervor has got to count for something. Or… just maybe… God was keeping score. And maybe you’re just not the children he’s coming back for.

Friday Evening Flora-and-Fauna-lude

jinb
 

Spills, Gulfs, Chasms... And The Mary Landrieu Effect, Part 2

As critical as I am about various aspects of the Obama Presidency, I think this moment where he's getting slammed is just a bit unbelievable. From the "I don't like his response to the oil spill" to the "he should be doing more/getting angrier" to the "why couldn't they have done more to prevent this", I just can't see the logic behind the criticism.

Of course... I wasn't that impressed to begin with, so I think my disappointment gauge is set to a different level than many.

So, on one level, I'll agree: the perceptions of mistakes and missteps and how bad all of this is have everything to do with the Obama team's initial setup of a false expectation. He was sold as too much to too many with too few specific benchmarks, and he's paying, in no small measure, for unrealistic standards he helped to create. And a good bit of the unrealistic expectations he helped create are damaging fantasies that Americans need to have confronted if anything, really, is to be changed or improved in the short run.

Also, in the short run... nothing will change if, well, nothing changes.

More than anything, what mystifies me about the supposed genius of Obama and his team is their resistance, even defiance, in the face of missteps. With each setback, each negative response... they seem determined to retreat further into the insular circle. This is one reason I've thought lately, and really all along, that the real overselling of Barack Obama wasn't the vague descrption of hope and change everyone could glom onto... but selling a two year Senator with little real world business experience as a capable executive able to adapt quickly and intelligently to ever changing circumstance. More than anything, when Obama talked about "what it takes to be President," I'd think, that man is talking through his hat. It sounds good... but it doesn't have the weight of actual knowing what it's like when bad things are unfolding and hard choices have to be made.

I don't feel let down, as a Democrat or an Americna generally, by President Obama. I do think he's not doing things as well as he could, or solving problems as creatively as I'd like, but I'm not sure it's fair to expect more on that. What I find disappointing though is that an Administration which seemed to have some sense of PR and advertising and messaging seems incapable of changing its own.

And that's why, yet again, I find myself saying... is anybody watching Mary Landrieu?

If You Love This Planet... You're Still Helpless To Save It

I haven't been writing about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico for a couple of main reasons: I'm generally on the sidelines when it comes to environmental issues, and frankly, I have no idea what to do about oil spilling out of a giant hole in the ground. And I don't like to write a lot about what I don't know.

That latter point, though, is apparently no reason not to write something: since the spill "I don't know anything about how to deal with a giant hole under the sea where oil is spilling out" appears to be the main qualification many writers and TV personalities share when discussing it.

There's a profound sense of helplessness watching the oil spill disaster unfold; though I don't necessarily agree with Rachel Maddow's high dudgeon on the subject, I do agree with the point she made last night: there just isn't much known about dealing with the risks posed by oil spills, and we've made a bad compromise worse by "improving" drilling technology so it can be done in deeper, more risky areas.

I share the frustration of many, if not most, people watching the horror unfold: this is a spectacular disaster, one cannot avoid feeling helpless in the face of it, and I wish, heartily, that something could be done to stop the leak and catch the oil before it does serious damage. I do also wish we didn't engage in wildly risky exploration for oil... but I'm also realist enough to say they'll stop drilling when we stop needing it.

And if we really loved this planet... we'd be trying harder to end the addiction to oil. All of us.

So yesterday, into last night, was for me the last straw. Being tired of listening to a rondelay of similar complaints, I just have to point out a few of the things that are just not worth saying and repeating as this mess unfolds... becaiuse someone should. These are my faves:

• "We need to know just how much oil is spilling into the Gulf" - this was Anderson Cooper's refrain all last night, Cooper having positioned himself, yet again, in a warm climate with a tight tee-shirt, to play the impassioned truth teller in the face of sure disaster. He's still my secret boyfriend (it's the t-shirt, and that hair...)... but the sanctimony is starting to grate. So here's the thing: knowing how much oil has been spilling out would be a "nice to know" but it isn't really a "need to know." It's not as if there's some "70,000 Barrel A Day" piece of equipment they'd pull out as opposed to a "5000 barrel a day" alternative" The bottom line is... there's a lot of oil out there. "A lot" covers most of what we need to know, and gives a good indication of the problems we face mopping it up.
• "BP is failing to stop the leak, and the government should step in and take over"... because the Coast Guard knows how to drill for oil? This fairly ludicrous argument, in many forms, suggests that there's some mysterious "expert" person or company who, if we only just brought them in, would magically stop the leak, right now, and make it all better. Talk about Deus Ex Machina! (Yeah, I went to college... I love throwing that in. Best thing I ever learned. Ever.) I've been trying, very hard, to keep my discussions of what the experts think to actually watching experts - which is not easy, these days, when reporters like to do a lot of interviewing each other - and the experts do seem to agree: the people who know about oil drilling and plugging leaks are working on this... and they don't have a lot of good answers. Because... there aren't a lot of good answers.
• "The cleanup is badly managed and going too slowly!" Granting, for a moment, that a massive operation stretching from the Louisiana coastline all the way to Florida (and possibly affecting the entire Florida panhandle at that) is bound to have logistical nightmares... we should remember something more obvious: it's really hard to a) stop oil that's floating in water, and b) clean up oil that hits land. The "let's stop the oil before it makes land" plan amounts to this: wrap the sea in a giant baggie, and either pick up, or disperse it. "We don't have a baggie big enough" only begins to cover it. Second, cleaning up the spill as it hits the coast just won't be pretty. That's especially true in Lousiana's marshland, where the local officials are screaming - literally - that nothing's being done. And perhaps more could be done... I'm not entirely convinced... but there is a reason we call that terrain a "swamp", and it's because the buildup of mud and crud is hard to prevent, and hard to remove... without, well, draining said swamp. And this, really, does back to remembering that Louisiana's problem - aside from being really dependent on, you know, the oil industry - is about what happens when you build a civilization based on living and working in below sea level swampland. There's only so much that can be saved, or fixed.
• "The dispersents are dangerous chemicals! Where's the EPA?" I have to admit, I'm concerned about using the huge amounts of disperents on the oil that they've used... but it does seem pretty clear that pretty much all chemical dispersents are, well, dangerous. So it seems like the choice is... trying to decide which of the dangerous petrochemical treatements is less bad, or don't use them and have more oil issues... or use them, and see what develops. Isn't science interesting?
• "They won't let us build a giant sandbar to protect the coast!" Louisiana officials seem to have two ideas when it comes to public projects: complain, often quite emotionally, about feeling abandoned and mistreated... and propose enormous boondoggle projects to solve their problems. They have been abetted in this, a lot, by having the largest office of the Army Corps of Engineers in their state, mostly because of the (er, somewhat boondoggle-ish) projects of levee building that never seem to end. Last year, they were all about chasing down enormous sums of money to build a new hospital downtown, which they claimed was a way to address the closing of Charity Hospital after Katrina (and which community activitists insisted could be solved by renovating Charity; both ideas being problematic). Now, the President of Plaquemines Parish says he just wants billions of dollars and thousands of man hours to build... islands to protect the... er, islands that are meant to protect the marshes that are not sufficiently protected from oil that's already hittting the coast. Never mind that there probably isn't enough sand for it. Never mind that no one actually knows if it will work. Never mind that it's just the sort of, well, enormous boondoggle that Louisianans seem to know best: lots of federal dollars thrown at dubious solutions which involve enormous amounts of labor and earth moving. Again... you built your lifves and livelihoods around swampland. I'm not saying you should suffer because of it... but there are limits to what's feasible to fix that.

None of this, even the sly sarcasm, is meant to suggest that I think people should suffer, that our fisheries along the Gulf Coast should be destroyed, or anything like the idea that I don't care, deeply, about the terrible events that are unfolding. But what's unfolding there is defined most, and best, by the reality that it is, enormously, out of our control. The problem with oil drilling - and coal mining, and foresting and all the other detsructive things we do to have our way with he planet's natural resources - is that we are fairly helpless in the face of the consequences of our acts. Mines collapse. Forests burn. Oil wells leak. Gas explodes. If we loved this planet... well, we'd love it more and molest it less. But we don't, and we do... and no matter how much some of us want to love the planet more or better... we are, collectively, kind of helpless in the face of enormous natural disaster.s we can't control. The illusion, really, is that we'd like to think we have more control than we actually do. It's no use, really, crying overspilt oil, wailing that someone, somehow should have a way to clean this up. We just don't have that level of control. Realizing we don't, and figuring out how to live with that... much harder.

Um... What Were We Talking About Again?

In the wake of Tuesday's primary results, and a slew of political developments in the past few days (I do, as well, plan to talk about, um, ...Rand Paul? Is that his name?... in a separate post), I've been struck by the resumption of a familiar aspect of the recent deep partisan divides: that there are multiple conversations happening, each largely ignoring the others.

As a lefty, I notice it especially in the right's determined silence, and fleeing from, most discussions of Rand Paul, and more specifically, refusing to touch the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I mean - Christ - even Jeff Sessions (that's Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) came out to say the Civil Rights Act was basically a good thing and Paul was wrong about the regulation of private business. And that's more than most people on the right did.

The relative silence on Paul and his fairly pure approach to libertarian ideals (I even slogged my way through multiple pages of the usually nutty Redstate bloggers to be sure), seems to be a tacit admission that initial cheering for Paul's solidifying Tea Party power was premature. Cooler heads that long predicted Paul was a disaster waiting to happen turned out - sooner than I think anyone expected - to be more than a little accurate.

When Up From The Ground Comes... The Cost Of Doing Business Without A Plan B

Watching the oil spill unfold has been like moving through glue - or like oil following the move of the tides - everything moving in some odd, slow motion, the actual contours and dimensions of disaster only just beginning to come clear.

If nothing else, Barack Obama somehow looks like a genius of timing in announcing his plans to expand drilling last month; after carefully constructing an offshore drilling compromise that pleased basically no one, but managed to look like "doing something" on energy policy, the Administration now gets to put all those plans on hold in the name of environmental safety, and returns the oil industry to "evil, bad polluter" status.

And all it took was the largest oil spill in US history.

Like the volcanic ash moment across Europe, the oil spill probably best reflects how feeble our best efforts can be in the face of nature. The "moving through glue" quality of the response of to the spreading oil slick headed for the Gulf Coast has everything to do with not having, really, anything more than "try to surround it with big plastic barriers" as much of a solution. There's an inevitability to all of it that both amazes and awes.

I've been kind of ambivalent about energy policy; I think a lot of the energy vs. environment argument on the left is more than a little naive and surely unrealistic in a world that seems determined to consumer resources at enormous, even alarming rates. You can't stop progress, and if that progress needs fuel for... well, fuel, then people will be to make a lot of compromises for the desired result; whether we feel bad for the trees and the water and the animals, or not.

"Deep Water Drilling" has always struck me as an accident waiting to happen. It's getting oil from very far away, reaching into places we can't otherwise necessarily reach, a hole in the ground with a really long pipe. Breaking, leaking, the explosion of volatile material in the pipe... that all seemed likely. Stopping it, never quite so clear.

But the question of not doing the drilling strikes me as answered: we will keep drilling, for a long time. All the pushing for "green energy" - faith that wind and solar can deliver prodigious results - won't change that. And the other alternatives - nuclear and coal, essentially - are accidents also waiting to happen. Two mine disasters in two weeks underlines the coal dilemma, and living near Indian Point always reminds me that brave talk about massive nuclear plant expansion will always meet hurdles about risks and safety, with safety tending to prevail.

Environmental policy is where the cynicism in my liberalism wins out - all the talk of green things and conservation and Honor the Earth make lovely bumper stickers, but aren't likely to win political arguments. If environmentalism was winning, I think the Green Party would havemore to show for it, just for starters. And in the end we have this compromise, which we pretend to be fine with: the drilling happens, mostly without us looking... and God forbid anything happens to go wrong. That seems pretty close to the definition of "wing and a prayer". And for it, we get oil, lots of it, spreading out in all directions on top of the Gulf of Mexico. Just the cost of doing business... when you don't really have a Plan B.

Publish... Or Perish

The relative silence of blogs in discussing Amy Bishop is almost as odd as the collections of incidents leading up to her arrest.

Bishop - the University of Alabama professor who shot up the Biology Department faculty meeting - puts an interesting wrinkle on both workplace shootings and on mass events at schools. And all of it complicates the usual left/right divides on gun incidents, school politics and the mindsets of shooters.

For me the case has felt unusually intimate: my Mother was Chair of her department for pretty much all of my youth, and ran an undergraduate program until she retired. The ins and outs of tenure process, the dynamics and politics of faculty relations and the occasionally unpleasant employment dilemmas... all of these were part of my growing up experience, and inform a lot of views on higher education as well as my approach to interpersonal dynamics. The idea of a disgruntled faculty member resorting to violence never seemed to me to be an especially farfetched possibility.

And when Amy Bishop's arrest was announced - before anyone knew who the exact victims were - I said to my Mom, "she shot the Chair of the Department. And the head of her tenure committee." And she did.

Southern Storms, And The Pet Theories We Keep On A Leash

It's very odd living north of a blizzard.

Across NYC and the suburbs, we were promised, at the very least, a glancing blow: at least a few inches of snow as the massive storm passed by, relieved to miss a direct hit. Instead, come Saturday morning, it was clear we were to be denied: not even a flurry, or a flake, never mind a light dusting. There was, I'd say, a pretty collective disgust at having been promised a snowstorm, and getting nothing.

I wonder if this is how Buffalo feels when New York City gets the brunt of an East Coast storm.

The nearly three feet of snow in Baltimore brought me back to my childhood and the blizzard of 1978, when a friend of my mom's came for dinner on the night of the big storm... and stayed for a week. We didn't have school for two - which wrecked the school calendar - and for the first few days "playing in the snow" amounted to put on snow clothes, venturing out the front door, wading about 4 feet out into the yard in waist deep snow, and coming back for cocoa. Good times.

Around here, today, life goes on pretty much uninterrupted; the snowed in Mid-Atlantic makes an interesting case to observe, to remind ourselves that up here in North Country we know how to handle our snowfall, a weather anomaly to prove whatever pet theory we carry around about global warming.

It snowed, a lot. That must mean... something, right?

Anomalous is probably a lousy barometer of climate issues; I mean, it does matter that we've been getting bad hurricanes, mudslides in southern California, blizzards more likely to snow in DC than Boston... but nature is unpredictable. Sometimes it snows in April. You can't necessarily draw a lot of conclusions from isolated incidents, and that, really, is the whole point of scientific study.

Conservatives, as they do in winter months, have taken this week's storm as another way to question reports of global warming, restoring, if nothing else, faith in their absolute scientific illiteracy. Who cares what science says? Look at that snow!

The trouble with our global warming conversation, I think, is that the left has a similar, opposite struggle, taking these anomalous events and pointing to their anomalousness as proof warming exists: it snowed in DC! it didn't snow in Boston! We're all doomed! Look at that snow!

We have a global warming problem, it should be noted, because we have science for it (and that, despite the efforts over the past few months to try and debunk the research with a cache of stolen e-mails which reveal far less than many suggest): global temperatures that appear to be rising, and global effects that demonstrate concerning changes over time.  It's not a snowstorm. It's not a melting glacier. It's not a hurricane in October. It's everything.

I don't know what to do about global warming. I'm not sure a lot of people do, and I'm not convinced liberals do a great job of staking out environmental policy built around debatable notions of what "stops" global warming: science is not quite as conclusive as our policy proposals suggest. But all of that doesn't negate the obvious: global warming is clearly happening, and is just as clearly a problem. Snowstorm or no, three feet in Baltimore or clear streets in New York... that doesn't really change. It's not the deepest thought on a snowy day, but it might help keep those pet theories in perspective.

Gone Fishin'...

As previously announced, the NYC Weboy will be on a hiatus from blogging here for the rest of August. Please scroll down, as it's likely that J in Baltimore and RedStar may fill in the gaps with musings, links and photos of their own. You may also find me blogging some critical things over at newcritics. I will not be checking this blog on any kind of a regular basis, but I can be reached via e-mail (nycweboy at nycweboy dot com)... and I do welcome correspondence. I will resume blogging the Tuesday after Labor Day. Yes, that means I will not blog about the Democratic Convention... but just assume I liked Hillary's speech, that the VP selection is not my favorite choice, and I wasn't all that impressed with Obama's speech.

Have a great summer. Enjoy.

Lower 9th Ward Photo Essay

I'd been wanting to write about LA's Gov. Bobby Jindal, who's been popping up around the intertubes lately as a possible VP candidate for McCain, a former biology major who's performed exorcisms, and the leader of the state that just passed by a landslide the teaching of intelligent design in local schools.  But honestly, you should just read this post at Firedoglake.  It's got all details of the horrendous, humorless, dangerous irony of Jindal's Reaganesque conservative rise against the backdrop of Katrina.

My contribution? A dear friend's work-in-progress photo essay of the "recovery" of the Lower 9th Ward, captured from January 2006 through August 2007 (and the second anniversary of the storm).  It will be updated next month.

I guess LA school children will be learning how God leveled New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina to punish those homosexuals after all. 

From McCain/Jindal '08, may G-d save us all. 

- Redstar
x-posted at The Redstar Perspective

Odds and Ends V: Personality Profile

One last side note - as I head off to the National Training Night at the 'Bucks - Red mentioned at the end of last week that she had taken Myers-Briggs, the well known personality profile system, and came up as INTJ. There are descriptions of the INTJ personality here and here... but what's weird is that Red and I, without ever comparing, turn out to be exactly the same.  I, too, tested INTJ.

Since taking Myers-Briggs, I've come around to the notion that it really does provide interesting insights, partly because the relative similarities of its insights to deep astrology are more than many (like my Mom) would care to see. You can take the quiz here. In the meantime, I plan to continue quietly taking over the planet. :)