People are getting very good at making deep fakes (fake videos that look real).
All posts by Steve Stern
Living In the Bubble
This year has served as a terrible reminder that there’s no such thing as normalcy—for many individuals and for society at large, crisis is a permanent state of affairs, and what’s normal, alas, is the systemic failure to recognize and respond to it. Richard Brody in The New Yorker.
Burning down the establishment seems controversial? Our lives have been burning into flames while the two-party system holds us hostage! Our lives have been on the balance while the corporate media holds us hostage! We have to take our lives BACK! Paula Jean Swearengin @paulajean2020 West Virginia Dem. Nominee for U.S. Senate, Mountain Mama, and Coal Miner’s Daughter fighting against the corrupt political machine. UniteOurFight#UnionStrong Coal City, WV PaulaJean.com
I live in a bubble and that point was driven home when I realized my Twitter feed was full of people Tweeting about a New Yorker cover Michele and I thought was particularly amusing and had been talking about. I live in a world that is very small and very homologous and has become more so under quarantine and – probably – as I’ve gotten older. My view of the world is primarily informed by the New York Times-NPR continuum with occasional jumps over to Fox, Aljazeera, and The Guardian. In my world, my personal world, 2020 has been strange but, actually, pretty good. I don’t know anybody who has gone hungry, I don’t know anybody who has been shot by the police, and I don’t know anybody who has been kicked out of their home.
Only, seeing the world only from inside that bubble distorts it. If I drive five miles, to El Camino in Palo Alto – average home price $3,112,592 – I see miles of rundown RVs parked along the side of the road in what can only be called an encampment. They are everywhere, these encampments, communities of homeless people; under the freeways in San Francisco, under a random overpass in Redwood City. This is a different bubble containing a different world. A world that was devastated before the Covid pandemic and is now whatever the step beyond devastated is. From my place of privilege, I can only guess what it must be like to live like this. The fear, the hunger, the anger. I used to think these homeless people were an anomaly and would soon get better, now I don’t think so. This is not the result of a few people falling through the cracks, this is what a non-functioning state looks like.
I have hopes that President-elect Biden will start to change this, but, after reading in my usual sources, how good and important it is that Congress passed the $740 trillion defense bill in a nonpartisan fashion, I am growing dubious.
The Radical Thing About the Green New Deal
It is easier to image the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Richard Taylor quoting someone else.
The radical thing about the Green New Deal is not the Green part it is the New Deal part. That the climate is changing is now a given for anybody who has been paying attention and is willing to believe the experts. Most crucially, that change, those changes, are going to get more extreme next year, and the year after, and the years after that, for the next fifty years. No matter what we do at this stage, the Global Climate Crisis is not going away soon; the fires in California are not going away next year, or the hurricanes slamming Louisana, or the hundred mph windstorms in Kansas. Even Trump and the Republican Congress must know that (although much of Trump’s pitch is that Global Climate Change is a hoax, just like Covid-19, and Biden winning the election). The escalating change, in itself, will make doing something about the Climate increasingly urgent, the Green part is no longer controversial.
But what do we do and how do we do it? The temptation is to do something, under the guise of moving quickly, that will involve getting the known players, with lots of money, to build expensive solar and windmill farms in the Great Western Outback. Huge solar farms and giant windmills are already being built by already huge companies. Their lobbyists, while not as powerful as the fossil fuel lobby, are already in place and ready to lobby for more. However, that is not the smart move. One of the big surprises of the Covid-19 epidemic, for me at least, is that our whole world, the modern world, cannot handle change very well. Everything in our society has evolved towards efficiency, over robustness and dependability, in an effort to become more cost-effective. The Holy Grail, it turns out, is lower costs and that has driven out redundancy and anything else that drives costs up, like being ready for a disaster. Everything is designed around a belief that nothing serious will ever go wrong.
When I first heard of Toyota’s “just in time supply chain”, it seemed like such a good idea. The Japanese were beating us with cheaper and better cars because they were more efficient. At the time, General Motors kept something like two weeks’ worth of inventory of the parts going into their cars, and Toyota with their just-in-time philosophy had way less money tied up in inventory. Now we have caught up. General Motors can build a car just as cheap as the Japanese. Everybody has learned the lesson. We have tried to eliminate redundancy and safety nets everywhere because they raise operating costs, every supply line, every process has been distorted by the quest for lower costs. Hospitals no longer carried enough masks and ventilators for a pandemic, a pandemic is an unusual event, and planning for something that won’t happen costs money that eats into profits and dividends.
The radical part of the Green New Deal is to decentralize and democratize the solutions to Global Climate Change rather than defaulting to huge companies. The Green New Deal proposes, among other things, putting solar panels on every house in America rather than huge solar farms. This is a way more expensive proposition than the humongous facilities now being built in the desert but it is also less susceptible to natural disasters making it safer and more reliable. If nothing else, Covid-19 has shown us that eliminating the safety net will make a terrible situation even worse.
The Green New Deal is based on the thesis that a giant array in the desert is only cheaper in the short run, but that it is not healthy for the economy – long run – or as safe as solar panels spread out everywhere, like on house roofs, public parking structures, and bus stops. The New Deal part of the Green New Deal is a make-work program similar to Civilian Conservation Corps, or the Civil Works Administration, or the National Industrial Recovery Act. It is designed around good-paying jobs for Union workers. That is going to be a harder sell, even with a Democratic Congress, but President-elect Biden seems to be surrounding himself with economic and financial experts who are going to try.
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The Allure of the Daily Drama
Actually, [Rudy Giuliani’s melting hairline] was a perfect sequel to the press conference fiasco at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philly — you know, the one between the sex shop and the crematory. That one betrayed the comic incompetence of the Trump legal operation. This one poetically exposes its inner corruption. In a way, I think Giuliani is doing the country an unwitting service by turning a vile conspiracy theory into a national punchline. Bret Stephens, Opinion columnist in the New York Times.
In the headlines, on the radio, on my computer, everywhere, the drumbeat of fear and loathing has been going on and on, seemingly forever; Trump, 200,000 dead, Trump, Covid, Trump, Wayne County, Trump, Covid, Trump, Trump. My relief has been watching Lewis Hamilton race. He just won his seventh championship and I wanted to write about it but I am caught in a sort of limbo of Now. Every day, the seductive drumbeat of today’s headlines pulls me back into the urgency of the constant Now. Today, at last, it feels like we are moving off the knife-edge between democracy and a Trump autocracy, it didn’t feel like that the day before yesterday or the day before that, those days felt more dangerous. For what seemed like weeks, day after day, the world felt precariously the same.
Way back on last October 25th, Lewis Hamilton won the Portuguese Grand Prix. In doing so, he passed the great Michael Schumacher to become the winningest driver in the history of Formula One. Watching him celebrate with his race engineer and then hug his dad – watching with about a four-hour time delay from 5660 miles away, I should be clear – I teared up. That was a surprise. I didn’t expect to be that moved. I tried talking about it in my blog but, as moved as I was, I couldn’t escape the limbo of Now. The daily drumbeat of fear and loathing crowded out almost everything else. Then, last weekend, Lewis won the Grand Prix of Turkey on a wet slippery track, on a day when his car was only sixth fastest, to become the World Champion for the seventh time and I knew I wanted to say something, or, at least, acknowledge it.
Two days ago? it seems like weeks, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy finally acknowledged – sort of – the transition from President Trump to President-elect Biden allowing her to release several million dollars for the transition. After four years, that often seemed longer, the nation’s attention was on somebody other than Donald Trump. Although, I have to say that even that always-before-routine task was given a Trumpian twist with Murphy referring to the President-elect as Mr. Biden in a long whinny letter in which she said that I have always strived to do what is right…I came to my decision independently just before Trump said that he told her to release the funds.
Right after the election, Michele became afraid that Trump was going to try a coup. I agreed but I was not very concerned that he would be able to pull it off. I think that Trump is just too inept to pull off something like a coup. Watching Rudy Giuliani’s slap-dash attempt was even more amateurish than I predicted. I realized that not only is Trump incapable of doing a good job, he is incapable of finding someone else to do it.
Now the attention is turning to President-elect Biden and his Cabinet picks. When I first started reading the names – Ron Klain, Antony Blinken, Alejandro Mayorkas, Avril Haines, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, John Kerry – not knowing any of them, except John Kerry, I was slightly annoyed. Then sort of elated; these are functionaries who have been doing the grunt work in past Democratic Administrations, not politicians looking to make a name. Now they are the bosses, known and reliable, who will hopefully do their job without drama. Hopefully is the operative word here, hopefully, their job will not be a return to almost constant drone strikes.
The exception is John Karry, the first Presidential Envoy for Climate, who will, hopefully, bring some clout to working on the Climate Crisis.
The work we began with the Paris Agreement is far from done. I’m returning to government to get America back on track to address the biggest challenge of this generation and those that will follow. The climate crisis demands nothing less than all hands on deck.
It’ll be an honor to work with our allies and partners, alongside rising young leaders in the climate movement, to tackle the climate crisis with the seriousness and urgency it deserves. Tweets by John Kerry @JohnKerry Teresa’s husband, 28 years representing Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, 68th U.S. Secretary of State, now fighting the climate crisis. Proud Bostonian buildbackbetter.com/the-administra…
Happy That Biden Won
Um, Fox News says 70% of voters want the government spending more on green energy. I think we might be winning the messaging battle on this one. Tweet by Bill McKibben @billmckibben Author, Educator, Environmentalist and Founder of http://350.org Opinions emphatically my own Vermont billmckibben.com
Now that Biden is the president-elect, the question that I keep asking myself is Why am I OK with Biden? More than OK really. Why do I think this political animal – this consummate insider – is going to bring much-needed change to the country? Besides Cognitive dissonance reduction, that is? But, first, as hard as I keep trying to push it to the bottom of the queue, Trump’s childish temper tantrums around his refusing to acknowledge the election results, keep bubbling to the top. I keep wondering What is the end game here? I get that Trump doesn’t like the results and is being a petulant child and I keep reading that his goal is to discredit the process so he can claim he didn’t lose but why are the Republicans, who won on the same ballot, humoring him?
BTW, as an interesting aside, Trump, ever the con-man, is using his claim of a fraudulent election to raise money but, when you read the small print, 60% of that money actually goes to pay down the Trump campaign’s bills, among other non-related activities. The longer he can stay in the game, raising money, the more the damage from his campaign mismanagement can be ameliorated and the more money he can raise for his 2024 run. End aside.
It is hard for me to believe – actually, the confirmed count, some of it in Republican-controlled states that tried to suppress the vote, make that impossible to believe – that this election is going to be turned around. How do the rational Trump supporters, like McConnell, think this is going to end? What do they seek to gain by discrediting the entire voting process? The damage being done frightens me.
Back in the real world, where Joseph R. Biden is the Presiden-elect, I feel optimistic. Yeah, cognitive dissonance reduction is part of it, and my being an optimist is part of it also, of course. But, Biden being an insider is also part of it; he should be much less susceptible to the “This is the way it’s always been done and it is the only possible way,” razzle-dazzle of entrenched Washington. Biden knows the country has to change, saying, in his acceptance speech, “America has always been shaped by inflection points” and then referencing both “Lincoln in 1860” and “F.D.R. in 1932,” in his acceptance speech. That Trump seems determined to leave the United States Government a smoking ruin might also help.
On the issue that concerns me the most, the growing Global Climate Change Disaster, Biden has repeatedly said that he understands that it real and man-made. and it helps that the polls show 70% of the electorate agrees. There is going to be a lot of pushback – from every fossil fuel lobbyist in the world, from most the Republicans, from Blue Dog Democrats including Nancy Pelosi, among others – but there is a lot a President Biden can do by executive order. He has already said he will get us back into the Paris Accord “on day one”, and he says he will call for a Climate Summit to accentuate the problem. He has said he will cut emission standards and cancel Trump’s energy rollbacks (so, if you really are worried that your dishwasher doesn’t use enough water and energy, one of Trump’s favorite laments, you better wash all your dishes now). None of these may have much real meaning besides a sort of ceremonial changing of the national priorities – maybe national myths would be a better descriptor – but they are a place to start.
I am also optimistic because, like Covid-19, the Global Climate Disaster is going to continue to get worse until we start actually dealing with it so the presssure to start working on solutions is not going away. My optimism, however, is tampered by what I think will be very strong Republican intransagence.