Jan

28

When Old is New

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If I told you that railroads could provide a cost-efficient and environmentally friendly alternative to using long distance trucking and air shipping to move much of our mail and freight, you might be skeptical. But in Phillip Longman’s new piece in Washington Monthly he makes an extremely credible and timely argument for this very idea.

In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 83 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s carbon emission by 39 percent and oil consumption by 15 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 10 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.*

I highly recommend the piece. It’s intriguing to consider that an industry that radically transformed the country once over a hundred years ago could again become a cutting edge technology in reworking our relationship to finite fuel sources.

Jan

26

Cleaning Up

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I took a short vacation over the Martin Luther King holiday to work on some projects that I just never get around to doing. In this case the focus was on the basement, which is also my painting studio. I took a leisurely pace and never envisioned actually finishing. But I was able to do exactly that. In fact, moving around in again feels so nice I’m hesitant to start working again. But working again was the point in the first place.

Jan

21

Inspirational

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Obama

I came across this image of a quilt by Lucky Shie at Lesley Riley’s blog. I continue to be slightly amazed at the impact Barack Obama is having on people. In psychological terms, it is sometimes referred to as a shift. I’m starting to think something in our national consciousness has indeed shifted. And it is about time.

Jan

7

Please, Get Over Yourself

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In a trend that is becoming far too common, best-selling author Neale Walsch was found to have published an essay that was actually written by Candy Chand ten years ago. The article involves a story about a child in a Christmas pageant who held a letter upside down. The children had letters meant to spell out “Christmas Love”, but the “m” was inverted and “Christ was Love” was spelled out instead.

Walsch has apologized and acknowledge he made a “serious error.” He acknowledged he has been retelling the story as his own for years.

“Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized … and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

Chand is unconvinced.

Ms. Chand said in a telephone interview that she did not believe Mr. Walsch’s explanation. “If he knew this was wrong, he should have known it was wrong before he got caught,” she said. “Quite frankly, I’m not buying it.”

Fair enough, Walsch plagiarized the story, cops to it and Chand rejects his apology. But she just won’t let it go.

“I have strong issue with anyone who would appear to plagiarize my work and pretend it is his own,” she said. “That takes away from the truth of the material, it takes away from the miracle that occurred, because people begin to question what they can believe anymore.

Here is where Chand starts to lose me. I understand her outrage at being plagiarized. But what is this business about the truth of the material being undermined? And a miracle happened? Oh, and Neale Walsch passing off this story as his own makes it hard for people to believe?

For the record, I congregate with the unwashed heathens as a rule. So an inverted “m” that changes the meaning of a cute holiday message does not rise to the level of feeding the masses with two loaves of bread and a basket of fish, in my mind. But others see it differently—I understand. Had the child inverted the “m” and then it suddenly transfigured into an “i” and the “a” next to it disappeared in front of the assembly, I would concede that a miracle of some sort had occurred. Short of that, what you have is a cute Christmas story.

But wait there’s more.

“As a professional writer, when someone appears to plagiarize, they damage the industry, they damage other writers’ credibility and they hurt the reader because they never know what to believe anymore.”

Now we are back to Walsch making it impossible to believe again. She never says what we can’t believe in now, but I have an idea. She continues on about his damaging her credibility by recounting the story publicly. But she isn’t quite finished.

Speaking of Mr. Walsch, she asked: “Has the man who writes best-selling books about his ‘Conversations With God’ also heard God’s commandments? ‘Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property’?”

This is where she completely crosses over into self-righteous sanctimony. Candy, please get over yourself. That guy whose name appeared in the Christmas play your were at also said something about turning the other cheek. You might want to look it up.

Jan

6

Lost Upon the Road to Peace

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The violence continues unabated. At least thirty people were killed by the Israeli military today, according to the New York Times.

“Despite mounting diplomatic pressure to end its offensive in Gaza, Israel’s military onslaught unfolded for an 11th day on Tuesday. Since launching its ground offensive, Israel has killed 130 Hamas fighters, Israeli officials say. Hamas has killed five Israelis by rocket fire and in combat. Palestinian medical officials on Tuesday estimated that the death toll during the 11-day war exceeded 560, and the United Nations said that about a quarter of those killed were civilians.”

The seemingly perpetual cycle of violence between the Palestinians and Israel saddens me greatly, though I am optimistic that the incoming administration really does intend to do things differently. Yet, for some reason the headline about today’s strike reminded me of “The Road to Peace” by Tom Waits.

Young Abdel Madi Shabneh was only 18 years old,
He was the youngest of nine children, never spent a night away from home.
And his mother held his photograph up in the New York Times
You see the killing has intensified along the road to peace

He was a tall, thin boy with a wispy moustache disguised as an orthodox Jew
On a crowded bus in Jerusalem, some had survived World War Two
And the thunderous explosion blew out windows 200 yards away
With more retribution and seventeen dead along the road to peace

Now at King George Ave and Jaffa Road passengers boarded bus 14a
In the aisle next to the driver Abdel Madi Shabnet
And the last thing that he said on earth is “God is great and God is good”
And he blew them all to kingdom come upon the road to peace

Now in response to this another kiss of death was visited upon
Yasser Taha, Israel says is an Hamas senior militant
And Israel sent four choppers in, flames engulfed his white Opel
And it killed his wife and his three year old child leaving only a blackened skeleton

They found his toddlers bottle and a pair of small shoes and they waved them in front of the cameras
But Israel says they did not know that his wife and child were in the car
There are roadblocks everywhere and only suffering on TV
Neither side will ever give up their smallest right along the road to peace

Israel launched its latest campaign against Hamas on Tuesday
And two days later Hamas shot back and killed five Israeli soldiers
So thousands dead and wounded on both sides most of them Middle Eastern civilians
They fill the children full of hate to fight an old man’s war and die upon the road to peace

“Now this is our land we will fight with all our force” say the Palestinians and the Jews
Each side will cut off the hand of anyone who tries to stop the resistance
If the right eye offends thee then you must pluck it out
And Mahmoud Abbas said Sharon had been lost out along the road to peace

Once Kissinger said “we have no friends, America only has interests”
Now our president wants to be seen as a hero and he’s hungry for re-election
But Bush is reluctant to risk his future in the fear of his political failure
So he plays chess at his desk and poses for the press 10,000 miles from the
road to peace

In the video that they found at the home of Abdel Madi Shabneh
He held a Kalashnikov rifle and he spoke with a voice like a boy
He was an excellent student, he studied so hard, it was as if he had a future
He told his mother that he had a test that day out along the road to peace

The fundamentalist killing on both sides is standing in the path of peace
But tell me why are we arming the Israeli army with guns and tanks and bullets?

And if God is great and God is good why can’t he change the hearts of men?
Well maybe God himself is lost and needs help
Maybe God himself he needs all of our help
Maybe God himself is lost and needs help
He’s out upon the road to peace

Well maybe God himself is lost and needs help
Maybe God himself he needs all of our help
And he’s lost upon the road to peace
And he’s lost upon the road to peace
Out upon the road to peace

In my mind, the futility of this violent cycle is made poignantly clear by Waits. I wish it were clearer to the people who could break the cycle.

Jan

2

Vacuums Suck

Filed Under Politics | Leave a Comment

In today’s Times there is a clear-headed assessment by Paul Krugman on exactly who is to blame for the near-total collapse of conservative political ideology—conservatives themselves.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
For several weeks now I have been following two ongoing threads of reporting as the Republican Party digests the results of the election. One train of thought involves the Republican relationship to minorities. While they talk about outreach, their actions say something else.

The other issue the conservatives are grappling with is newer—media infrastructure. Grumbling about the progressive advantage in the websphere is increasing. But as Steve Clemmons points out, the real problem conservatives are facing lies within.

These things are more related than they appear. A well functioning government makes it possible to implement policies. But you cannot implement policies without ideas about what you want to create. It’s a lesson made very clear in Iraq – a series of good tactics do not result in a solid strategy.

The call for tax cuts has become their mantra, but it also calls attention to the dearth of new ideas within Republican circles. This lack of creative thinking is particularly evident in conservative media outlets. Histrionics and rabid rhetoric mask the intellectual emptiness of media loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Michael Savage, but conservatives get the message . Their sound and fury doesn’t mask the contempt conservatives seem to posses for solid policy thinking.

Republican strategists are still content to bandy about calls for tax cuts that they know will negatively impact liberal constituencies while making happy talk about that strangely sounds like compassionate conservatism. They don’t seem to realize that most of the country has moved on. Regardless of whether the country is center-right or center left, wedge issues won’t fly any more. People are tired of partisan hacks, on either side, and seem to genuinely want from their leadership a properly functioning government. Thanks to the extreme neglect of the last eight years, the machinery of government will need some time to get working again. However, it seems like people have a new appreciation for what government can do.

This leaves conservatives in a tricky spot. Devoid of ideas and stripped of the levers of powers, their best hope is to develop a strategy that makes their party relevant again to a large segment of the country and gives them viable policy alternatives to counter Democratic programs.

Any bets on whether they are up to the task?

Jan

1

2008 Weblog Award Finalists

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The finalists for the 2008 Weblog Awards have been announced. There are many familar sites on the list, but several new blogs that I intend to visit over the next few days. It’s sufficient motivation for me to start cleaning up my link list.

Jan

1

Motivation

Filed Under Creativity and Art | Leave a Comment

The William Eggleston restrospective runs at the Whitney until January 25th. If you need a reason to go to New York, go see the show. If you need a reason to see the show, this should suffice.