All posts by Steve Stern

A Couple of Random Thoughts

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I’ve started falling back on the “well, taylor swift wrote/produced 2 albums in the past 9 months, certainly I can at least vacuum” lro@LRo70 science doesn’t care what you think. Manhattan, NY instagram.com/larryrowe1/

As 2020 winds down towards the Winter Solstice, President Trump is no longer the focus of the world’s attention, two, two!, Covid-19 vaccines are their way – faster than expected and faster than usual because of the same Trump – and President-elect Biden is still making noises that suggest he is serious about both diversity and climate change. Even though the pandemic is raging across the country out of control, hope for an end to this bad trip is coming back.

With everybody stuck at home, the only reason to put up holiday decorations is for ourselves; nobody will see our tree and the carefully displayed decorations but us and that gives the tree and the other decorations a certain purity.

I saw one of my favorite houses on the Noah Trevor Daily Social Distancing Show a couple of days ago and I was thrilled. He was Zooming with an actor I only know from television and the actor was in the house (on the first floor by the fishpond, I think). I worked as a carpenter for the owner and designer Allyn Morris, on a house down the street, and was in the house almost every day for several months and it was sensational. It took my breath away every time I walked in which was Morris’s plan. The street view was an almost blank facade but, when you entered, you were standing on a landing in front of a two-story glass wall facing the Glendale Freeway with the San Gabriels behind. For a long time, Morris got very little recognition but, now, he is getting much-deserved credit. It turns out that the actor is the new owner and the house looked great behind the owner. If you are at all interested in architecture, check it out here: The A.E. Morris Residence | Crosby Doe Associates, Inc.

If you’re looking for an interesting read and are still not bored with politics, I suggest What It Takes, The Way to the White House, a book about the 1988 Presidential Election, by Richard Ben Cramer written in a sort of breathless Tom Wolfe style. It is fascinating (although very long at over a thousand pages and very dense). The book follows each of the major candidates, George “Poppy” Herbert Walker Bush who, you may remember, won and Bob Dole on the Republican side; Michael Dukakis, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart – with a cameo by Jesse Jackson – on the Democratic side as they run for the presidency but it also traces their roots sometimes all the way back to their grandparents. The book is fascinating not only because of the various candidates and not only because so many of today’s problems existed in the 80s in a nascent form, but because Cramer often presents information in a way that I haven’t thought about before.

As Bush starts to run for the Senate, he has a set of advisers who call themselves the Gee-6 who Cramer describes: The name was a tip-off: it was a play on the G-, the Group of Seven – Prime Ministers and Presidents who’d meet, from time to time, for photos and to decide what the dollar should be worth, what to do about oil, how the civilized world would fight terrorism, that kind of thing. It was the U.S., Japan, Germany Britain, France, Italy, maybe Canada was in there…pretty much everybody who can make a decent car. The meetings, the group photo, were meant to convey to the world’s unwashed that the Free World big boys, the guys with the twelve-inch GNPs bulging in their pants, were all agreed how the game should be played.

I’ve never thought of the Group of Seven that way, that arbitrary and dictatorial, before. I’ve sort of thought – and thought is the wrong word here, not much thinking was going on, mostly just taking in what I been told – was a benevolent organization keeping the world on track. And, of course, that is true…with the addition of for the benefit of the rich countries making the rules. One of the things that I’ve become much more aware of during the year of staying home is how the rules and regulations we are told is good for the commonweal are self-seving to the rule makers.

One of the signs that the Republicans really know that Biden has won is that they are now worried about the National Debt when the talk turns to giving survival money to people who are out of work, destitute, and hungry. It was not a problem when Congress and the President gave themselves a big tax cut, but giving broke, starving, people money, we are now being told, is not good for the country.

Originally Titled “Stupid and Gullible”; Now Titled “Distressing”

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Late Saturday, pro-Trump supporters descended on the nation’s capital and clashed with counter-protesters. Among the most vocal Trump supporters were members of Proud Boys, which is considered a hate group by human rights activists. More than a dozen people were arrested and four taken to the hospital with what authorities described as serious knife wounds. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers continued Sunday to shy away from urging Trump to accept reality. Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2020.

The Supremes, by a vote of seven to two, have voted to not hear what seems to be President-unelect Trump’s last legal chance to change the Presidential election (although, apparently, Trump has taken his case to YouTube). This whole thing has been surprising and distressing to me.

It’s not surprising that Donald Trump has been trying to fight the election results. He has an excessive need for admiration and we have been shown this from the get-go. The opening sequence of his Administration was to exaggerate the number of his adoring fans. It was not doing something he had promised, but sending poor, humiliated, Sean Spicer out to lie about the size of the Trump’s inaugural crowd. Spicer knew he was lying, I have no idea if Trump did, but President Trump’s first act was to try to bend, if not ignore, reality to flatter his own ego. That he is now telling us that he won the election, that it was stolen from him, that he got more legal votes than anyone in history just like his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history, is not a surprise, it is, after all, another attempt to flatter his own ego.

It is not a surprise that he is using this to try to get rich(er). What is a surprise and disheartening is the number of Congressmembers – and now, Governors, State Attorneys general – who have been willing to Sean Spicer themselves. It seems like most of them must know they are doing irreparable damage to the country, but, maybe, that is just projection on my part, maybe most of them are too stupid or too lost in the Inside The Beltway bubble. But I don’t think so and I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised. The opening sequence of this national nightmare, after all, was also Trump making Spicer his bitch and the closing scene may very well making the Republican Party his bitch.

Trump is a kiss-up, punch down, kind of guy. There are not many people in the world who are higher on the food chain that he has to kiss-up to but there are lots who are lower and he likes to punch down. He punches down at almost everyone no matter how much power difference, actually, especially with a big power difference, Colin Kaepernick, a black, out-of-work football player, for example. Few people are willing to go toe to toe with President Trump, interestingly enough, those that do are mostly women- Speaker Pelosi comes to mind – and especially women of color like Yamiche Alcindor, a reporter with PBS, or Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. But no Republicans, with the possible exception of Mit Romney, have the cojones to go toe to toe with him for the good of the country. He has dominated his Party, unlike any President I can remember and he has sown hate and distrust like no public figure since Joseph McCarthy. That is surprising and distressing.

Living In the Bubble

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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

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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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