The President has presented his State of the Union address in which, with millions listening and watching, he reassures the world that climate change is no serious problem. He does this by not even mentioning — except to say we can't do anything about it this year — the most critical issue the world faces, the reality of which fewer and fewer Americans believe. And why do they not grasp its monumental significance? Because people like this president treat it as not something urgent, and people won't believe in nasty things they don't have to believe in. They'll take silence as permission to ignore.

Instead we heard that massive new territory is being opened up for oil drilling. And unless I misunderstood, they heard the president promote fracking for natural gas. He's apparently going to push domestic hydrocarbon production but not a price on carbon. It is very hard to comprehend why I should vote for that. Future generations will not forgive it. I don't think I can, either.

In other respects, it was good work. He hit pretty hard, with a lot of skill, on economic issues. That's good, and I was heartened by that. But I'm not at all sure I can vote for him. If I lived in a state that's in contention, I suppose I would hold my nose, for the sake of the Supreme Court, if nothing else. The Teapublican maniacs cannot be permitted anywhere near the White House. But I live in Massachusetts, and its electoral votes are not in question.

Romney, in his 10 January victory speech after New Hampshire primary, at Manchester:

President Obama wants to fundamentally transform America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great. He wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity. This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe. We look to the cities and towns across America for our inspiration.

Yeh, uh huh. Except that the "land of opportunity" is Europe and certainly no longer America. Lots of evidence for this. This is from the 4 January New York Times ["Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs," by Jason DeParle]:

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.

One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents' educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.

At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.

Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.

And I would add health care as another important factor because, in the U.S., it's tied to what job you have or don't have; so people stay stuck in work that isn't meaningful to them because they have to in order to keep health benefits. They cannot launch out into work that may be more satisfying, or more profitable; they certainly cannot attempt a new business startup.

Just back from Manchester—where the Republican presidential campaigns have converged, joined by lots of very dedicated Occupy folks! So our UU Church of Manchester was the only house of worship to house them and serve as venue for some of their programming, and a training session. They came from near and far. On Saturday afternoon they staged a gay pride march from the main downtown park on Elm Street within sight of the Radisson Hotel, where the candidates and media people are holed up, to another park in front of the library. I joined them. I walked near a fabulous band made up of saxophones, trumpets, and drums, and near a giant elephant wheeled along by Occupy Boston. The march made a point of going via the big Bank of America on Bridge and Elm, and the chanting there couldn't have pleased the BOA. But I joined it with conviction. Marching with us was Lt. Dan Choi. I stood at the park near the library to watch the marchers I hadn't seen behind me—a very big crowd. Throughout the week, Occupiers have been pinning down the candidates and demanding answers. And getting press attention. On Sunday morning, I used Henry Thoreau's phrase "A Counter Friction to Stop the Machine," as the theme of my sermon (you can hear the audio on the sermon page), and lots of Occupiers joined us for the service.

Meanwhile, it's a very fine thing to see the other Teapublicans round on Mr Romney. A bitter Newt Gingrich, who'd expected to be adored as America's intellectual hero and political savior, is pouring lots of money into the assault on Romney, running ads showing people who'd worked for companies taken over by Romney's Bain Capital, telling how Bain had sucked the life (and large fortunes) out of the companies and dumped throngs of employees in the trash. Oh, it's been lovely. The Obama campaign is having much of its work done for it by the ruthless ambition of the Republican candidates.

It's cold, but the sun is warm, and our champ lymphoma-survivor is quite comfortable, thank you.
Scooby!

Tomorrow is Bradley Manning's 24th birthday. It will be his second birthday spent as a pretrial prisoner in a military prison, and the second day of his Pretrial Hearing. This for of alerting us all to great wrongs that were being done in our name. Today I wrote the President imploring him to free Pvt. Manning, and — should he be convicted of anything, to issue a pardon. This week, after far too many years, the war has been declared over, at least the Iraq bit. So let our government close its war on Bradley Manning. Click here for the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Maybe, reading this blog, you'll take the hint to check Joe Romm's "Climate Progress" site. Today he marks the anniversary of Pearl Harbor by asking a pretty pointed question: "What Are the Near-Term Climate Pearl Harbors? What Will Take Us from Procrastination to Action?"

What will it take? Romm lists nine things:

1. Arctic goes [virtually] ice free before 2020. It would be a big, visible global shock.
2. Rapid warming over next decade, as recent Nature and Science articles suggest is quite possible
3. Continued (unexpected) surge in methane
4. A [multi-year] megadrought hitting the SW comparable to what has hit southern Australia.
5. More superstorms, like Katrina.
6. A heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003 one [Russia's in 2010 hitting the U.S. breadbasket].
7. Something unpredicted but clearly linked to climate, like the bark beetle devastation.
8. Accelerated mass loss in Greenland and/or Antarctica, perhaps with another huge ice shelf breaking off, but in any case coupled with another measurable rise in the rate of sea level rise.
9. The Fifth Assessment Report (2012-2013) really spelling out what we face with no punches pulled.

It's not that we don't already know the dire situation and the certain consequences. It's not that we aren't, right now, perfectly capable of changing course and halting the madness—and creating a brilliant future for this world of life. It's that we go on deluding ourselves. It's that we have one entire political party devoted to madness and anti-science climate denial, and that we have another political party that professes to get it, but is gutless and without conviction.

Pearl Harbor got the nation on the same page in a hurry, feeling the reality of the moment in a way that evokes heroic action. Maybe Pearl Harbor didn't have to happen, but the day before, America slept. The day after, America was roused. The kind of "Pearl Harbor" Joe Romm is contemplating would be far worse, exponentially more catastrophic. How damning, then, the failure of the press and political leadership. And the pulpits afraid of making anybody nervous with inconvenient truth.

Here is a story in today's Guardian. And not in the New York Times. The headline: "World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change"

It was accompanied by a second story: "The science of global warming is clear and so are the solutions, yet the world is moving in reverse. Why?"

You can find more on this at Joe Romm's "Climate Progress" site, including today's lead story, "IEA's bombshell warning: We're headed toward 11ºF global warming and "Delaying action is a false economy"

This is particularly significant because, in the past, the IEA (International Energy Agency) has been so conservative in its projections that nobody much paid attention to them. But the IEA is, as Romm puts it, "one of the few organizations in the world with a sophisticated enough global energy model to do credible projections of the cost of different emissions pathways and the costs of delaying efforts to achieve them." And now this bombshell.

Could there be a more urgent story, a headline more worthy of page one, above the fold? So why isn't it in the New York Times? Why is Obama leasing drilling rights in the Arctic? This, in a country where one of the two political parties has devoted itself to contorting the facts and misleading the public on this matter? For their endangerment of all humanity, is there no penalty?

But my point. How are ordinary people who don't like facing hard things to face this when our leaders and our greatest newspaper won't take it seriously? What do they think all those thousands of scientists are doing? Why do they think that they can just choose to ignore them? It's a different situation in Europe, where this juggernaut denialist industry isn't so thoroughly established. Here, even "progressive" "leaders" are cowed into adject silence or pathetic half-acknowledgement. And we've got to do something about it.

Do check out those stories.

At last—my book! It comes out in a week or two. The official date is 3 October but there are many details twixt here and there, particularly one of the printers, who will get the book everywhere but Amazon (that's the other printer, which seems to be on time). The challenge now is to promote it very well, not that easy when you're fairly shy.

So the President has made his speech at the U.N. Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, an right-wing extremist, loved it so much he said he could sign it with both hands. You have to wonder why Mr Obama doesn't just appoint the Israeli cabinet as his own. Not a critical word about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Not even a mention.

The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, took hold of an opportunity and appealed for United Nations recognition of Palestine as a state. Israel would have been wise to support it. And so, of course, would the United States. We'll see what comes of this. Can it be worse than twenty pointless years of "negotiating." Deeply disturbing. And Rick Perry says Obama betrayed Israel in his speech. Amazing, except when you consider that the very crazy New Apostolic Reformation religious movement, of which Perry and Palin and Bachmann are part, fervently believes that Jesus will only come back once Israel reclaims its full biblical geographical dimensions. And, until the true believers seize control of the "seven mountains"—government, religion, business, education, family, entertainment, and media. Which, by the way, are currently in the grip of Satan and his demons.

It's a moment of great, maybe unlimited, possibility, but someone, somewhere, is going to have to see that, and believe it, and lay new tracks into new territory for human culture.

Good news: Mr Scooby (see below!) is still doing spectacularly well. I'm grateful for every day we have with him.

The lunatic fanaticism of the Teapublican Party is a bit hard to take in. But they mean to shape the debate and shape public consciousness, and I wish our President saw his role that way. He is not leading public thought, but crumbling before it appears to be at the moment: the austerity nuttiness. Austerity — in the depth of a big economic sinkhole — equals death for the economy. It simply shuts the economic machine down. No stimulus, the removal of money from the economy, joblessness. Sometimes (awfully often) we're told the country has got to manage its budget the same way a family must manage theirs. Not so. When the economy is working, you try to reduce the deficit or eliminate it. But at times like this, government has to get its engines running. Meanwhile there are urgent projects: urgent mitigation of, and adaptation to, global warming, to begin with.

But the President seems to have begun by adopting the Tearepublican premise: gotta cut the deficit, gotta cut spending. He has not shaped public consciousness in a better direction, or really shaped it at all; merely come across as calm and cool and compromising. Right now, it doesn't look good. I would have expected that all this lunacy would have destroyed any remaining Republican credibility. And it is eating away at it, but not the way it ought to be doing. The Prez's giving away the store hasn't moved anybody much. And the Teapublicans didn't even say thank you. It may be that their own craziness will yet destroy them. We'll see. Meanwhile there are too few of Bernie Sanders.

The Teapublicans are using the crisis to try to gut environmental regulations, tossing something like 70 anti-environmental measures into appropriations bills. The House Financial Services Committee isn't chaired any longer by Barney Frank, but by an anti-environmental Teapublican, who is leading the fight on the planet's health. There are efforts to kneecap the EPA. And lots more, coming from every direction.

So the outlook is bad, really bad. No, it's worse than that. The 2012 election may turn this around. Or it may not, and even if it does, too much precious time will have been lost.

But there is good news, here on this micro-scale at 39 Stage Road. Scooby is still doing fabulously well. My champ.

Hope you'll take a look at the new Groundwave Publishing site and its page on my upcoming book.

The effect of the chemo, steroids, and pain pills has been — well, I don't like to use the word miraculous, but something like that. Scooby is his old self — for now, at least. This so far exceeds our best hopes! But he needs lots of attention. The steroids make him very thirsty so he needs frequent outings to pee surprisingly large quantities. So I worry about next week when I have jury duty, and devoutly hope I won't be needed. I postponed it once when I knew something was wrong. Massachusetts used to allow three postponements, but now allows only one, not a very civilized policy, I would have thought.

Meanwhile, the State of New York has joined the civilized world on same-sex marriage. The Assembly had passed a marriage equality bill before; a Democratic-controlled Senate voted it down, by a lot, in 2009. Then Andrew Cuomo became Governor, and he vowed to make it happen. With great determination and skill, he did, and five Republicans were won over, leading to a 33-29 vote. That's leadership. A night or two before, HRC had a big fundraiser in Manhattan. Speaker: the hapless Barack Obama. Why they invited him, I cannot tell. He couldn't bring himself to offer a word of support for the bill, at that moment hanging in the balance. Officially he still opposes marriage equality. At a moment like this, that is no friend of GLBTQ people. Pathetic.

But I'd sure like to be in NYC today, Pride Day! I've enjoyed New York's Pride many times, but poverty and other circumstances intervened . . . still, a happy day.

Yesterday we drove to Grafton, near Worcester, to the Tufts University Animal Hospital — not sure if we were going to say farewell to the best of friends. We'd taken Scooby there the day before for tests, fairly certain he had a lesion on his spine. Meeting the good dog neurologist doc at 6, we saw the MRIs, with the lesion taking over most of a short space in his spinal column. The pressure is why he can barely control his left legs. She explained what was happening, and told us that we could take him home and treat him with chemotherapy and steroids and see if this might reduce the lesion and give him some quality of life for awhile. Better news that we expected! He is home now, with areas of his black coat shaved off where the spinal tap was, and the IV was attached, and god knows what else. What gratitude I feel for every day Mr Scooby lives on with us! It may be a few days, or weeks, or even months. He needs a ramp to get into the house now, and cannot go up stairs; but he can run and play all he likes. His little falls when those legs of his don't cooperate aren't going to hurt him, 'cause he's only got a foot to fall.

Good Lord, somehow I got to be 65. Happened sometime overnight, like early Tuesday morning. Mainly, I've discovered that Medicare is complicated, and more expensive than I expected.

I haven't posted for awhile — from the looks of things, mainly the date of the last post, more than two months. Sorry.

Excuses: There was all that research to do about various Medicare options. There was the end of the program year at the church in Manchester, which finished Sunday (not that the work is finished; there's all the planning to do for next year, for one thing). The MINI required some major repairs (I, of course, had to have one the first ones sold in America, so my 2002 is version 1.0 with a few bugs). But mostly, it's been Scooby the Dog. Something has been going wrong for this best of companions. Less than two weeks ago, on Monday the 13th, I took him for his usual mid-day walk, with a swim in the creek. That night, maybe 2 a.m., Steve woke me up because something was wrong (Scooby sleeps in his room). Scooby's back was hunched and he was making little hiccup-y sounds with his breathing. We thought he couldn't breathe, and we carried him down to Steve's car and headed up highway 91 for the Deerfield 24-hour animal hospital. It had been a hot day but the night was cool, and Steve opened a window. I was in the back with Scooby. He put his nose close to the open window and soon was breathing deeply, and returning to normal. We watched him awhile and walked him, and he seemed fine — so we turned around and went home. Next day I took him to the vet, who thought it was a spasm of the larynx. The following night it happened again so we took him to the animal hospital. The doc thought it was paralysis of the larynx. Many more vet trips, x-rays, &tc later, it seems that his larynx is fine; it seems to be his neck, his spine. Inflammation, some sort of injury, maybe a tumor. So one of us stays with him downstairs all night, and he's got to rest and take anti-inflammatory drugs. If he gets better, hoorah. If not, it will be off to dog-neurologist and spine expert vets at Tufts or Angell. If only they could tell you where it hurts.

So — no special 65th doings, but the great present of having Mr Dog still with us. At 11 or 12, which, in dog-years, is older even than me.

Meanwhile, I've got the Index pretty much done, and the Permissions mostly resolved. Groundwave Publishing has a little more setting up to do, and I've got to engineer a successful launch for the book, soon! Each step brings some degree of anxiety, which is especially keen when you're working alone. Getting reviews and endorsements is the next and maybe most challenging bit.

But which logo to use? or how to make it stronger?

The image comes from the way terrestrial radio waves travel, btw. Soon I'll put the cover up, too, for you examination. Feedback invited! I'm learning Adobe Illustrator while I learn a lot more about Dreamweaver.

Tomorrow — Wednesday, 13 April 2011 — the House of Representatives takes up the Ryan budget proposal. It is iniquitous. I do not easily use the word "evil." No, I do not use the word at all. This budget is evil.

At a time when the economy urgently needs stimulus and public spending, only one thing gets an increase in this budget: the military! Really? Just as we face a climate emergency more urgent than anything — any war, anything — humans have ever faced — the EPA gets a 16% cut? Really?

When the richest two percent of us are paying less tax than almost ever — when our society is being made very, very sick by the gaping inequalities we've built into it — this budget is going to give the richest another tax cut? Really? Our current deficit is the result of the Bush tax cuts. Do you remember that? It is the Bush tax cuts for the rich that created the deficit. Do you understand that? Does the Congress? Really?

Cut the ground out from under Medicare and senior citizens? Replace Medicare with a voucher system and other changes that place our health even more seriously in the hands of a greedy health-insurance industry? Really?

I could go on — about cuts in public transit and rail projects, infrastructure projects, public welfare, and on and on and on. But here is what I want to know. Where are the Democrats? Did I not vote for a more or less progressive Democrat for president? Where did he go?

Why are the Democrats not making a case for stimulus? Why have they accepted the Tea-Republican argument that the problem is the deficit, or that Tea-Republican solutions will correct the deficit? Why do they not argue that the climate emergency requires action? Why cut air safety and air traffic controllers? Why, when we've got to build a truly viable passenger rail system, fail to do so? Why take up the Tea-Republican agenda as our own?

I have urged our good U.S. Representative John Olver to fight back, to vote no on the Tea-Republican agenda at every opportunity.

It is hard now, very hard, to be proud of this country, and I am not proud of it. If I could, I would trade my citizenship for a European country, or the United Kingdom. I can't. You can't either. We are here, stuck with this disgrace. It still has potential for greatness and that is what we have got to demand now. We haven't got any alternative. Maybe 2012 will re-establish and re-assert the sanity and morality of the American people. Don't know. But for God's sake, let the leaders of the Democratic Party begin re-establishing and re-asserting their own sanity and morality — tomorrow in the House of Representatives. And let the President do so in his address tomorrow evening. Please. I would like to be able to vote for him again.

James Lovelock, the great scientist who conceived the Gaia Hypothesis, thinks we must turn to nuclear energy — a view he shares with James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first warned us about global warming. He proposes a renewal of development of fourth-generation “fast” reactors that use 99 percent of the uranium as well as the very dangerous transuranic actinides that remain dangerous for 10,000 years. They leave far less waste, waste that can’t be turned into weapons of mass destruction. By 1994 the Argonne National Laboratory had completed all the essential tests, and “fast” reactors might have become a reality, but in the wake of anti-nuclear sentiment following Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the Clinton Administration killed the program entirely. Better, safer nuclear reactors may be the only way to halt the mining and burning of coal. But that new generation of reactors doesn’t yet exist.

Then, last month, a 9.0-scale earthquake and resultant tsunami catastrophically destroyed the first-generation 1960s-era Fukushima Daiichi six-reactor plant on the northeast coast of Japan. The weeks of uncontrolled radioctive emissions shattered the recovery of faith in nuclear power. The fear was only intensified by a compendium of studies published by the New York Annals of Science, just out, that had concluded that the 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in then-Soviet Ukraine had killed nearly a million people (though the official death toll is fifty-four). It moved China to cancel thirty-five new reactors, with the likely consequence that China will replace them with coal-burning plants — coal, the one fuel unquestionably, and infinitely, more destructive than nuclear. And that just after China approved a new technology, the pebble-bed reactor, less prone to overheating and meltdown, cooled not by water but by nonexplosive helium gas. Meanwhile it’s developing a more advanced approach: the “thorium-based molten salt reactor system” whose liquid fuel would be one thousandth as hazardous as uranium. Unlike uranium, thorium is as common as lead, and the U.S. Geological Survey says the largest reserves are here. And there’s no out-of-control chain reaction because fission happens only as long as the thorium is bombarded with neutrons. Switch it off and it stops. If, instead of signalling a switch to coal, the hold on new plants means China is preparing to unveil technologies are are vastly safer and more efficient, the news is good. Pebble-bed and thorium-based reactor systems are among six classes of Generation IV reactors.

The Fukushima plant was a copy of the General Electric Mark 1 boiling water design, one so flawed that a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission recommended in 1972 that the Mark 1 system be discontinued, one so flawed that three members of the design team resigned in 1976 in disgust, particularly because of what they knew would happen if the plant lost the capacity to cool both the active and spent fuel rods. And this one was built in a geologically unsafe fault zone on a tsunami-prone coast. Thirty-two of them are currently operating, twenty-three in the United States; one is located down Barnegat Bay from the town where I grew up.

We face a climate emergency unlike any peril humans have ever faced and we don't have much time. Halting the quickening warming of the planet will require nuclear power. It had better not come from outmoded and discredited technology like Fukushima Daiichi, or Vermont Yankee.

A villain and a hero to note this week. The hero first: a UU named Tim DeChristopher. Here's what 350.0rg says about him:

Why Tim DeChristopher Is So Important

For anyone who hasn’t heard, an American activist named Tim DeChristopher is on trial in the Rocky Mountain state of Utah. His crime? Bidding for some oil and gas leases that the Bush administration was trying to auction off to big energy companies so that they could produce more fossil fuel. Tim—in an act of deep, spontaneous, creative protest—raised his hand and bid more than a million dollars, winning a couple of the leases. But he didn’t actually have a million dollars, and once the federal government found that out, they went crazy, charging him with disrupting the auction. He faces as much as ten years in prison.

He's 29, and a member of First Unitarian in Salt Lake City. He's messed up fourteen leases for 22,000 acres for oil and gas exploration. This, I'm convinced now, is what it's going to take. The Obama administration may be way better than Bush's, but it isn't prepared to do what's now required. DeChristopher has founded something called Peaceful Uprising.

Now the villain. Actually, he's only representative of the real villain, which is a filthy system that puts profit-grubbing insurance companies between people and their health. The USA is the only modern nation that gives for-profit insurance companies in that position (others that involve insurers require that they be not-for-profits). This guy is Cleve Killingsworth, the outgoing CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Massachusetts, walking off with an $8.6 million severance. He'll also be paid $1.8 million more for 2011 and another million for 2012. Massachusetts actually requires health insurers here to operate as not-for-profits. Our good Attorney General, Martha Coakley, is questioning how BCBS's operations resemble a not-for-profit.

Now, nobody, nobody, is that much smarter, meritorious, or harder working, than the mass of working people as to deserve compensation like that. The gaping inequality unique to American society has made American culture very, very sick.

Well well well. Well. Another uprising against another U.S.-supported dictator (which includes $1.3 billion in military aid every year), and we don't find ourselves in a very admirable position. What now can President Obama say? Call on Mubarak to reform? Egyptians won't go for that. Mubarak has to go. Not that he will. Not clear how long Hosni Mubarak can hang on, hated as he is. He promises a new government, tries to reassure the Egyptian people that he has fired the nasty old government. Trouble with that is that Mubarak is the Egyptian government, has been for thirty years — anything he may replace is just a rubber-stamp for himself, so what's the difference? Egyptians are enraged with the United States, and some American reporters found that no one would talk to them. What would replace Mubarak's dictatorship? We've been warned, for years: support Mubarak, or the dreaded Muslim Brotherhood will take power. Personally, I'm not very worried about the Muslim Brotherhood. But where no democratic institutions have been able to put in roots and mature, the power vacuum could be filled with — what? Can Mohammed el-Baradei help guide a peaceful transition? I have to hope so. Remember el-Baradei? He was the UN weapons inspector who said there were no weapons of mass destruction, whom George W. Bush chose to ignore and insult.

But think what we've gotten in the deal: an ally in our dubious military adventures that have enraged the people of how many other nations?

How long could it have taken to happen? There was Sharron Angle's call for "second-amendment remedies" and there were Tea Partiers showing up armed at political rallies. There was the Red State Blog frothing "At what point do the people . . . march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp?" There was Sarah Palin's ad for her campaign to unseat 20 selected Democrats last November featuring a U.S. map with gun cross-hairs tranposed over those 20 districts, including that of Rep. Giffords. There is Glen Beck's unending rhetoric of inflammatory misrepresentation aimed at scaring and enraging his listeners. Listen to them — whether Tea/Republican elected officials or talk-radio hosts or Fox hosts — doing what they can, with significant success, to persuade their hearers that Barack Obama is some kind of alien occupier who has ambushed the country, that he intends to appoint death panels that will order the deaths of unworthy old people, perhaps your mother. There is John Boehner on NBC allowing as how Obama really is a citizen but he won't tell his troops to cut out the birther crap because who is he to tell them what to say? There was Gabrielle Giffords' nearly successful opponent in November — here, this is from the ad for his campaign event: "Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly" (that's her Tea/Republican Party opponent). Or have you heard Mr Limbaugh lately? But the radio stations are making money, so who cares if it's true or if it starts a ignites a bit of a domestic bloodbath?

Well, it has. Jared Lee Loughner turned up at Rep. Giffords' public event with a concealed Glock automatic weapon, fully legally under Arizona's brand-new law that says you don't even need a permit to carry a concealed weapon. And in the context of all this rhetoric far more suitable for a war than for political discourse.

It seems the right moment to underline all this, to hammer away at this far-right campaign of explosive destructiveness. Now, even the Democrats hardly dare challenge the NRA (Rep. Giffords herself had taken up their line on "gun rights"). And the poison rhetoric — will it change? The Arizona head of the Tea Party promises that No, it won't change. But maybe those broadcast executives will have a brief attack of morality. Maybe the poison political voices will sense a rapid decline in public esteem and trust. I would bet that it takes more than this.

The best commentary I've seen on the Tuscon incident and what it means is — no surprise — from The Guardian, by Michael Tomasky.

I am not, at the moment, proud of this country. Not even a little. So, the House of Representatives is now in the hands of the Tea/Republican Party. Run by people who avidly disregard science and disparage scientists. People who have promoted a number of serious lies — like the death panels. (Will they now offer legislation to revoke the nonexistent panels?) At a time when we — the inhabitants of the planet — have maybe three to five years to reverse climate change — now the Tea Party/Republican climate-emergency deniers are in charge.

They claim this nation already has the best healthcare system in the world — even though the facts speak otherwise, and 50 million Americans have no insurance, and millions more are underinsured and/or paying far too much for their insurance and care, and Americans' life expectancy is lagging behind other, more civilized, nations'. The Congressional Budget Office says this modest reform of healthcare — primarily a modest application of regulation to a greedy insurance industry — will save $230 billion, but the Tea/Republican Party's new rules mean ignoring the CBO and making up their own facts! And there's the Tea/Republican Party opposition to regulation of America's corporations and financial empires. And efforts to undermine Social Security and Medicare. And — but you know the rest. Many state governments are now in those same foolish, fanatical hands (Massachusetts and Vermont, thankfully, rejected the Tea/Republican propaganda; but Maine and New Hampshire swallowed it). And what can we say about that?

Does it mean that the public, who elected them, is stupid? Well, it says, irrefutably, that the public hasn't been paying attention. And Democracy cannot work where the public isn't paying attention. How could so many seniors have believed the Tea/Republican propaganda machine's fantasy that it's the Democrats are the threat to Medicare and Social Security? Why did young voters sit this past election out?

And the younger voters, who stayed home: progressive-minded people have felt deeply betrayed by what happened during the two years when Democrats had the power to fulfil the hopes, dreams, and values that got them elected. If Mr Obama is "primaried," I'll vote for a credible progressive alternative. I found his approach to the presidency incomprehensible. You cannot crank up the hopes of people, excite their sense of the possible, and trumpet their best dreams, and then govern as he has governed. But young voters' dropping out of the last election is not thereby excused. If the President and the Democratic Party failed, the public — and especially the progressive public — failed more damningly.

Now, honestly, I don't know if the human experiment on earth can make it. We cannot negotiate with the science. Gaia isn't amused. Emerson understood this in his first book Nature and he never ceased to hammer that theme. We are responsible, and we can't invent our own facts.

I am, remarkably, an optimist. I believe in human possibility. But if you believe in human possibility you've got to be relentless about the betrayal of human possibility.

Next, we'll see if the Senate Democrats have the integrity, the guts, and the political skill to end the pathetic disgrace of the filibuster rules.

I believe we can yet create a brilliant future. Each of us individually, and communally as well, will have to find the ways in which we can be effective. But the outcome isn't guaranteed. Never was. Certainly isn't now. What we do now matters more than we can know.

Why I meditate

Since I shared in the EnlightenNext Meditation Marathon, for which many of you sponsored me, I want to answer the question. BTW, we [400 meditators at various locations around the world] also raised over $150,000. As of my latest info, our Boston group of 25 or so had raised just short of $10,000. But that's an incidental benefit. Here is why I meditate:

I meditate because I want to be free from the conditioned, “karma”-laden ego with its fears and wants, its pretenses and defenses, its limitations. I want to sink deeply into the interiority of Being Itself and of my being, into the essence of what I am, where my own individual existence meets the boundary with the One of which I am part & parcel.

I meditate because being still is a stance of freedom in which I freely refuse to be driven this way and that from one form of busy-ness to another distraction. More than that: when I identify with that larger Self beyond the surface trivia and tumult, I rest on solid ground where no wind can shake me nor tide move me.

I meditate because meditation takes me to zero, to this place before I was ever hurt, ever defeated, ever frightened; before I ever won or lost, ever was disappointed or exulted, before ever I was poisoned with flattery or humiliation;

Before I crossed the threshold from infinite unmanifested potential and turned down the corridor of struggle into the din of time and space and experience to try, to want, to hope and do and feel;
Before my first hope was truncated and made small, before walls falsified the horizon, before I could not see the Goal and began to choose between substitutes.

I meditate because the future is in our hands, and this return to zero alone opens the space for creation, for the new — even as it is from the “vacuum state,” the apparent emptiness where we had thought there was nothing, that the Universe never ceases to create, even as being emerged from emptiness 14 billion years ago. I meditate, I say again, because the future is in our hands, and we must be its creators.

The hills behind my property a few days ago

Tomorrow morning it's back to Manchester for a few days. On the way, a UU ministers' meeting at Concord, where I'll promote my winter course in The Transcendentalists Spirit and an Evolutionary Spirituality and leave some brochures. But wait . . . is there something under this chair?

A big, ugly, rusty air conditioner used to be here. Steve is repairing the second-floor opening and the clapboard on the exterior.

Beginning work at the Unitarian Universalist Church at Manchester, New Hampshire!

Out for a walk.

What, ultimately, will be the consequences of the Wikileaks revelations about the tragically misguided war in Afghanistan? At the time — last week — it didn't look as though the exposed logs had shaken anything up very much. But I knew they had shaken me. Now, two brilliant assessments of their impact — one in last Sunday's Times, and the other in The New Yorker out today. I urge you to read them. Here they are:

Frank Rich, "Kiss This War Goodbye," in Sunday's Times

Amy Davidson's lead piece in "Talk of the Town," "Leaks," in The New Yorker

Yesterday, a driver for a beer distributor who'd been called in for a discliplinary chat and told to resign showed up with a bunch of guns and murdered eight people, then killed himself. Which prompted Connecticut Governor Rell (it happened in Manchester, CT) to ask, "How could someone do this? Why did they do this?"

WIth all due respect, Governor, it's a stupid question. Human beings — including the driver in yesterday's incident, someone with no criminal record and described as having "not a mean bone in his body" — get desperate, and explode in rage, and, having handy access to deadly weapons, do things like this. So the question for the governor and the rest of us, especially our very strangeCongress, is — how could you do it? How could you allow yourselves to be mowed down by the National Rifle Association? What will it take for us to remove this deadly plague of guns? Why are there so many millions of them out there, and why are they so easy to get, and how is it that the gunman in yesterday's incident had quite a number of legally-registered guns? This is insanity. Remember: what happened yesterday illustrates this definition of a "criminal" — a law-abiding citizen the moment after, in a moment of rage or desperation, and with easy access to a gun, he or she fires the gun.

If you'd like to read an insightful piece critiquing the recent Supreme Court majority decisions on this question, do see this — by one of the four dissenters from that decision, Justice Stephen Breyer. It's in The New York Review of Books, which arrived here today.

After an incredibly long time, I'm very satisfied with the book manuscript! A couple of chapters will require minor revisions right up to publication because they have to do with the climate emergency and with "faith-based hate," each of which topics provides new headlines daily. Now the very big question looms: how to get it published. I can try more proposals to agents and publishers, but when you're not a celebrity or published author, it's likely to come down to self-publishing — for which there are several options. You can go through the steps of becoming a tiny publisher yourself, and handling all the very many details yourself, or you can turn to a self-publishing company. Some of the better ones still have a disadvantage the I found annoying: just look at the religion and spirituality titles! Totally vomitous.

There is still some possibility that a particularly sympathetic independent publisher might want it. One way or another, it's time to do this. And then it has to be promoted, which is a huge undertaking. If my "The Transcendentalist Spirit and an Evolutionary Spirituality" seminar/retreats get any traction, I'll have a venue. There are UU events and Evolutionary Enlightenment and Integral Spirituality events, and it ought to have some interest for queer folks on a spiritual quest.

It all looks very daunting now, and I'm aware that one on one's own cannot begin to do what a community of committed people can accomplish.

Meantime, shortly, I'll be sharing the fire with a terrific bunch of people who have asked me to serve half-time as their parish minister — in Manchester, New Hampshire. While I'm in Manchester I'll be lodging with the magnificent people at Sunpoint Sanctuary in nearby Derry. Paul and Patricia are Unitarian Universalist pillars whose vision and action reaches deeply into social justice and the wider possibilities of evolving consciousness. Funny how things work out.

While I enjoy the quiet of a perfect summer day at Westhampton, I'm reading the stunning disclosures obtained by Wikileak and published today in my two favorite newspapers, the Guardian (London) and the New York Times. I think the Guardian has done a particularly excellent job with this. It comes from 90,000 actual military logs of the war in Afghanistan and it contradicts what we've been told is going on. The logs all come from the Bush presidency, but don't therefore dismiss the implications for what is happening now. You can see the reports at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-wikileaks
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

The President has just addressed the nation. Speaking from the Oval Office. Should have been standing in oily sands in Louisiana or Alabama, but that's a small matter of style. I was expecting something serious. That's a big matter.

Early on he assured us that in "the coming days and weeks" 90 percent of the surging oil will be captured. Oh? Did you get that from BP, too, sir?

There are a few things I expected to hear, and didn't:

1. Deployment of a take-charge goverment intervention: with a place for scientists, the military, and serious direct management of the situation. So the government knows how much oil is coming out down there and what the condition of the well actually is; knows what exists below the waves; gleans all the best available wisdom, science, and possible solutions. Lay out how this is being structured.

2. Announce those working near the oil and doing the clear-up operation will wear proper equipment like respirators, and announce that you are overriding BP's self-serving image-protecting orders that this equipment not be used (or employees using them will be fired). Announce access — overriding BP's ban on photography and journalists' access, and access for others who want to help or just to see for themselves.

3. Tell us what energy policy and environmental policy must now follow and that you are going to fight for. Be specific and unbending. Respond to the climate science as though you believe it. Demand that the Senate pass at least this wimpy piece of climate legislation — so that if the Congress resists, it will be their failure and disgrace. Tell us that from this moment on, you can't do offshore drilling or operate an offshore well without at least two additional relief wells, as some European countries and the UK require. We shouldn't be waiting for those wells to be drilled. We don't even know that the first or second attempt will hit the target.

4. Go easy on the platitudes. We don't want platitudes. Platitudes make us wretch just now.

5. Addressing the greatness of America isn't entirely appropriate when Europe has already done so many of the things you seem to be saying only the American spirit can do, which it hasn't done. This is a moment for a little preaching and a clarion call to repentance. Tell us how we have to change and how we might learn from others.

6. You seemed to be telling us about some restructuring of MMS. Weak stuff. Tell us what the Bush Administration did. Really — don't mince words. Tell us how you're going to dismantle that and put something specific and just and effective in its place.

I think this crisis has got the man down. One isn't getting that Harry Truman or FDR feeling from this. I note my own internal reaction and it isn't pretty. I think the speech was pretty much pious malarkey. Why did you approve offshore drilling, accepting the assurances and promises of the industry? Aren't you sorry? Tell us the mistake — don't have to dwell on that — and then do the Commander-In-Chief thing.

And then, tell us about the Manhattan-Project-style national energy retrofit you're undertaking.

For progressive people driven by an evolutionary vision of human possibility, this has to be a moment of painful disappointment. We believed him when he promised a new progressive government, and change we could believe in. Not so.

If you want a particularly revealing, particularly pertinent case in point, I refer you to Tim Dickinson's piece in the current Rolling Stone titled "The Spill, the Scandal, and the President." A couple of weeks ago I wrote the President (I do this a lot: you can do it too at http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/ ) urging him to replace the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, whose career to date had demonstrated a significant fondness for offshore oil drilling and who not made good on the promise to reform the MMS — the Minerals Management Service — which was set up during the Bush administration to promote offshore drilling, and which is supposed to manage it, ensure compliance with environmental law and policy, grant (or withhold) permits to drill, and collect the "royalty" fees. At first, Salazar made some changes and announced "there's a new sheriff in town." But he proceeded to put 53 million new Gulf offshore acres up for lease, more than had ever been opened to drilling in a single year. The lawlessness in the agency continued. The 27 May post below tells the too-familiar story from there. There are employees at Salazar's Interior Department (of which MMS is a component) who describe their experience there as "the third Bush term."

Now, no one these days much likes BP. The behemouth company is a legitimate object of wrath. And no one bears more responsibility for the current catastrophe than the Bush-Cheney administration, which defined the terms and conditions under which the oil giants would operate and the values to be served by those terms and conditions. We knew that.

What we didn't want to know is that we had been lured into a regime of same ole' same ole' corporatism and get-alongism — by thrilling rhetoric that turns out to have been halfhearted window-dressing. If Mr Obama actually believes the scientists, what in hell is going on in the Gulf? Where is the Manhattan-Project-like national conversion to sustainable energy? Where are the new passenger rail lines? Why are solar and wind component companies like Evergreen sinking? Does he mean it?

Why is Larry Summers and fellow corporatists and banksters running the economy while progressive economists like Krugman and Reich and Stiglitz left out in the cold? Why is the Defense of Marriage Act still in place? Why are we left with a healthcare system that puts for-profit insurers between you and your health? Why is the United States still supporting the occupation of Palestian lands and, indeed, the blockade of Gaza?

There's something particularly dangerous about exciting people with empty promises. Hearing Barack Obama, throngs of young Americans and throngs more older ones who had been cynical about the political process allowed themselves to hope and believe. Can they hope and believe again? They don't now, and now, their renewed cynicism is deeper. It has to be described as a tragedy. In Mr Obama, there's evidence of many fine qualities and capacities. But he is in over his head, challenged with crises beyond his wisdom.

Indisputably, there have been policy shifts for the better. Manifestly, the cast of characters in this administration is to be preferred to the last. But what we've gotten are the kind of halfway measures the don't quite work. Now the looney right can make its case that the Gulf catastrophe and the economy (and on and on) are the fault of the left. It's hard to see how Mr Obama can be reëlected (remembering that his margin of victory over such low-quality, frequently off-the-wall opponents was appalingly small in 2008).

Which all begs the difficult question: does the progressive movement need to find a new leader?

On the night of April 20, an offshore oil rig called Deepwater Horizon — so named because it was drilling for oil under 5,000 feet, or nearly a mile, of seawater in the Gulf of Mexico — exploded. The rig had drilled a further 13,000 feet — altogether, three miles — pushing the limits of both technology and safety. Water at 5,000 feet is under tremendous pressure, something like 2,000 pounds per square inch. Oil and gas even deeper surges upward under more extreme pressure.

A month before the explosion, there’d been a series of accidents. One resulted in the destruction (undisclosed by BP) of the blowout preventer, or BOP, device near the seabed. It’s used to seal the well shut once it’s been drilled so as to test the well’s pressure and integrity. In the event of a blowout, a rubber gasket called the “annular” is supposed to close around the drill pipe. The BOP had other malfunctions, including dead batteries and a leaky seal. Now the well couldn’t actually be tested, and there was no working blowout prevention device.

Then it came time to seal the well. Deepwater Horizon would be removed and another rig would be moved into place to pump the oil. And BP, which leased the Horizon from Tranocean, had decided the procedure was taking too long, and cut some corners, despite Transocean ’s protests. The sealing with concrete plugs was fast-tracked, with catastrophic consequences. Two hours before the explosion a pressure test showed “a very large abnormality” and was ignored. I’ve mentioned the deposits of methane in the earth’s surface. A vast cloud of methane — natural gas — rippled up from the bottom and settled over the area around the rig. The methane made the rig’s diesel engines rev wildly. There was an almighty explosion and inferno that incinerated eleven men.

British Petroleum had once rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum. That was in the days when the company was run by John Browne, who from 1997 tried to rebrand BP as a “green” energy company. He may have been part visionary, but the company was already cutting corners, and Lord Browne lost his job after a 2005 Texas BP refinery fire that killed fifteen workers and for which BP was found willfully negligent.

But — that 2010 incident. For weeks the oil flowed into the Gulf. BP’s early public estimate was 1,000 barrels a day, but the number was revised upward: 5,000, 30,000, 80,000. How could anyone measure accurately at such great depth? As vast plumes of oil formed below the surface and oil began to flow into the critical Gulf Stream, the public got a revelation about what President Obama would call the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the government agencies that were meant to regulate them. The Bush-appointed head of the Minerals Management Service, Chris Oynes — an old friend of former Vice President Cheney — announced that he was going into “retirement.” Many might have wondered whether he should have beeing going into prison. BP, it turned out, had been given a waiver from having to conduct the required environmental assessments prior to undertaking the project. MMS is a division of the Interior Department. Sixteen months into the Obama Administration, Oynes was still there. The corruption-plagued Interior Department had changed too little. President Obama had just announced his support for offshore oil drilling, insisting that America needs the oil. The Republican Party, together with its “Tea Party Movement,” had already distinguished themselves with the phrase “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and now the GOP blocked efforts to raise limits on oil companies’ liabilities for oil spills, while mustering not a single sponsor for climate legislation (like the severely anemic Kerry-Lieberman bill, currently under debate).

Meanwhile, the world learned that BP had been operating another deepwater rig since 2007, The massive BP Atlantis platform, without proper up-to-date and engineer-approved documentation. Its location: 150 miles out of New Orleans, in an area known as “hurricane alley.” The water depth is 7,000 feet — 2,000 deeper than the Deepwater horizon. Most subsea piping and instrument diagrams, critical documents for operating the platform, were never approved by engineers.

It came out that an MMS scientist had complained to his bosses of catastrophic safety and environmental violations, but MMS had already granted at least five final approval permits for new Gulf drilling as recently as the time of the Deepwater explosion. Despite warnings from whistleblowers and members of Congress about BP Atlantis, MMS refused to act.

To mitigate the mess, both BP and the government are employing two types of a “dispersant” brand called Corexit, a chemical that was originally developed by Exxon and is now manufactured by Nalco Holding Company, a company in which BP has a financial interest. EPA data seems to say the dispersants are more toxic and less effective on South Louisiana crude than other available dispersants. More than a decade ago, both were removed from a list of dispersants approved for use in the United Kingdom, according to Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. The precise chemistry of the product is “proprietary,” but it’s known to contain 2-butoxyethanol, a harmful toxic. Corexit was used after the Exxon Valdez incident, resulting in public health problems including resperatory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders. But it comes with EPA approval. Many experts are concerned about this use, which adds additional toxins to the ocean and may lead to longer-term ecological problems. As of this writing about a 750,000 gallons of toxic dispersant have been pumped into the Gulf waters — on top of the millions of gallons of oil.

If dispersants protect the coastline and its ecosystems, the chemicals and the oil remnants will damage sea life, poisoning virtually everything that lives in the sea, and depriving it of oxygen. The combination of dispersed oil and chemicals is more toxic than the oil alone, and it can also spread out farther in the Gulf, according to Jacqueline Savitz, director of pollution campaigns at the oceans advocacy group Oceana. A 2005 National Academy of Sciences report on oil spills and dispersant chemicals found that the combination can kill fish eggs and impair development of surviving fish, and accumulate in shellfish like mussels.

Oh, and the Times, did I mention? Here it is, in the May 16, 2010 Auto section: a rave review of the Twin-Turbo Ford Flex SUV, “blissfully turbocharged, 355-horsepower EcoBoost V-6.” Reviewer Lawrence Ulrich gushes that the “federal mileage rating of the Flex with EcoBoost, 16 miles per gallon in town and 22 on the highway,” allows Ford to boast that “the power lunch is free, at least at the pump.” EcoBoost? The lunch is free?

If that is why the President thinks there must be offshore oil drilling, the soul of the nation is very, very sick indeed. It would be hard to say much more for the President’s moral clarity.

I used to regard BP as the most ecologically friendly oil company, as if any oil company can be seen that way. At the time of the Exxon Valdez outrage, I'd publicly destroyed by ExxonMobil credit card. Ever since I've bought not an ounce of Exxon or Mobil petrol. I will run out of gas before I'll do that. I'll now be driving past all BP stations, too. You and I get to decide whether or not to reward the parasites who run these corporations. Our money is an extension of ourselves.

So are our votes. In the United States, I've generally regarded third-party votes as wasted votes. I'm re-thinking that. Corporations driven by a culture of reckless greed don't have an awful lot to fear from our political leadership, who seem to be owned and operated by those corporations. And all of this is fed by the demands of a public that seems to have decided not to believe the science — science which is better reported, and more urgency, in the British and European press (I daily read The Guardian and The Independent) than in ours. Even the Times, which, most of the time, keeps the news about our climate emergency off the area above the fold on page one and hides it well inside. To a public that doesn't want to think this is real or important, such downplaying of "environmental" news is a comforting narcotic,

Tonight, the "top kill" procedure is underway. There's a fair chance it will stop the flow of oil that has gone on now for 38 days. The ruined marshes, the young salmon that will eat the globules created by the dispersant and oil and die, the Gulf coast seafood industry, — this list could go on, and on — we will need a way to mourn all these, intentionally and seriously. And when we have done that, to undertake a change of course. And that change will have to be one we, and those who come after us, can believe in.

A genuine apology for the long time lapse since February. To amplify the effect of my having disappeared, this website went down for a few days (oop, missed deadline to renew the domain name, an expensive mistake).

It's been a tough time, one of disappointed hopes. A month ago I learned from the search committee of a wonderful congregation I was quite excited about that I'm not their choice. Pre-candidating weekend went splendidly well, as it has for four years running. And for four years running, no cigar.

Some of you served as references, and some of your have done that repeatedly during these four frustrating years of the UUA's brutal search process -- and for this, I'm extremely grateful.

It doesn't seem to me that it makes sense to go through this again (or to keep asking you to serve as references!). And if I did, it would be as someone who, a year from now, will have been out of work for way too long. Interim ministry doesn't make a lot of sense, either, not for me. I've undergone the hair-raising, underfunded uprootings necessary to serve interims at North Easton and at Orlando — which I'm certainly capable of doing, but my best gifts aren't what's called for there, and "hit-n'-run" isn't how I want to work. The tasks now would seem to me to get that book published, and to take my workshop on the road — "The Transcendentalist Spirit and an Evolutionary Spirituality." Maybe I'll resume "Spirit," my radio show (though that doesn't pay anything!). And who knows — maybe form a new congregation somewhere. Maybe here. It's come increasingly to look like a good idea.

It's tempting to feel keen disappointment. But that's a construction of reality I don't have to choose. It's easy because what has been denied is something recognizable — I know what it is, I can imagine it. It's harder to recognize the patterns in the light radiating from between the familiar dark. But I remember what the great cultural philosopher Jean Gebser said of a very early experience in his life — a plunge into the unknown that took his fear away so that for the remainder of his life he faced the unknown with confidence. Then, years later, a profound experience of meditation and enlightenment filled him with a sense of "invulnerability, a primal trust." Which reminds me of Emerson, in the Divinity School Address, who spoke of the person who has awakened to their deepest, highest, most essential identity beyond ego. If you know, as the Chandogya Upanishad puts it, that "Thou Art That," that is, you are not other than or separate from the Divine, then it is that "the safety of God" enters into you. I'd always been struck by Emerson's statement but only in recent days has its significance become clear to me. Sometimes I feel awfully exposed. But I get to interpret the reality that is before me. Face it, avoid nothing, and choose not to see it darkly, see in it something foreboding. I can't promise I'll always succeed at that, but it's my intention.

It's been way too long since the last post — as illustrated by today's view of the same tree. Few dead limbs . . .

.

Apologies for neglecting the blog — lots going on!

Meanwhile it's been snowing again. You're looking west up Stage Road:

You have to agree that the Roman rendition of 2010 looks very cool. I believe I shall write it on all my checks this year. Wonder if anybody will know MMX is 2010?

Well, we've had another bomb attempt on an airliner. So, to prevent further attacks, we do what? Thom Hartmann suggests it will be just as effective to make everybody get naked at airport security, and hand them a towel to wear until the last your of the flight, when the towels would be collected. You get it back to walk through the airport.

And he points out that daily, somebody is taking substantial quantities of drugs through security, hidden somewhere in their body. They can do it with explosives, too, and even the expensive machines won't find it. Still, the machines are better than some of the silly procedures we're hearing about.

After 9/11, I said we must have the courage to ask why they hate us out there; what is behind the rage. This is not to dignify the violence, no, not at all. But desperate people do desperate things, most of them stupid.

And we have to ask why this rage. But we know the answer, don't we? It's time we stopped fueling the rage with our own stupidity. Get the American military out of Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca. Let Afghanistan be its miserable self because we cannot bring it into the 21st century, or even the 18th. And face our own addiction to consumerism and especially oil. We will have to change. Maybe we will have to lead the change in global perspective. That takes courage.

The ordinary people on the street holding signs about "No Blood for Oil" were right. Are right. If we have to will to change, we will find exhilarating things to do and to employ our people. High-speed trains. Hell, any trains. Massive conversion to sustainable energy. Adjusted expectations of what it is we have "every right" to do and have. I am not proposing reversion to an earlier, simpler world. I am proposing that we leave behind a world that could never work, and create the possible future. The brilliant possible future, because humanity possesses almost inconceivable powers to do this.

We could make of this MMX a marvel, a joy, and a triumph. But not by pursuing the same wretched means that have gotten us to this precipice. Let us not have another 2007, 2008, 2009. May we all have a blessed MMX.

Just heard, on BBC Radio 3, a climate-emergency drama worth listening to. "The Contingency Plan."

You can watch videos streaming from the Copenhagen conference at One Climate.net. You can follow the conference at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website. The Conference section has a link to watch web streaming.

Also excellent:Yale's Environment360 site, There are dispatches from Copenhagen.

Astounding (or maybe not), but almost no daily newscast is originating there but Democracy Now is, and Amy Goodman is using her daily hour well to keep you informed.

As usual, the British newspapers are doing circles around American reporting. The Independent is always good on environmental reporting, but on Copenhagen, the Guardian has a clear edge. Here's a link to the Guardian's Environmental reporting.

A few others: Climate Progress, 350.org, the website of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the site of the Columbia University Earth Institute, and, of course, Friends of the Earth, which offers videos from Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, from the front window, while the snow falls again today, my old maple tree.

Snow! On the roofs (above) and the view from the dining room (below).

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen. The nations of the world (and many of its scientists) are gathered for what is probably the most important — the most urgent — gathering ever. Low-lying lands (far-flung places like the Nile Delta where most of Egypt's people live, Bangladesh, the East Coast of the United States among them) will be under water before the century is out — unless. What? Science says our carbon emissions have to drop something like 80 percent. The European Union is offering, for starts, a 30 percent cut by 2020, but they don't want to be alone in putting out. China, where they can't see much beyond their block because the air is so bad, is offering 45 percent and has opened a vast technological front on its carbon footprint. Every nation of the world is basing its figures on a comparison with 1990 levels. Except one.

President Obama has the unhappy disgrace of having to offer, on behalf of the U.S., a measly 17 percent reduction — based on a comparison with 2005. What that comes out to when figured back into the 1990 base of comparison is pathetic 4 percent. And that's before the inevitable fudging and finessing the numbers. I have to believe he must have yearned for something better to offer.

We will have to change. We will have to take this seriously, and right away. Of course, we know how. The technology is either already here or not too much for human brilliance to achieve. That's not the problem. It's a spiritual crisis, isn't it?

See how they lie. See how we, ourselves, hedge and pretend.

And today, more Americans believe they're protected by angels than believe we're causing global warming.

Meanwhile, observed changes are way outstripping the scientists' predictions. And we know this process isn't something slow & smooth & gradual. No, it hits tipping points and the situation plunges into something more dire and irreversible. Humans have an enormous capacity for changing the subject. Still you hear people talking about how "last summer was really chilly so obviously this isn't happening." Well, if you want to base your climate science on what happens in your own hometown, you might think so. The facts say there has been no cooling — speaking globally — over the past decade. Only warming. 2010 will probably set a new heat record. It's very cold and very windy out there tonight. But even tonight, inhabited lands are sinking under the waves, and the glaciers go on shrinking and the sea ice goes on thinning; and crop zones are moving north, leaving vast regions of scorched earth cannot produce crops.

So the United States has an announcement. It is prepared to contribute $1.4 billion to an international climate change fund! Even while we lavish $30-$40 billion on a very foolish war in Afghanistan. Did you get that? The bill for the Iraq war is probably going to come to $3 trillion. The Obama Defense budget request is $687 billion. This new Afghanistan surge comes to $30-$40 billion. A million bucks a year for each soldier. Is anybody figuring the ongoing costs of the horrible injuries and mutilations that will result?

Where are the high-speed trains? the massive national conversion to sustainable energy sources? Where are they? Does any of this disturb you? Ring a little phony? Have they no shame? Apparently not.

Deep in snow; wet, heavy snow that was a bit too much for my poor snow-blower. So I spent a lot of time shoveling today and will no doubt be quite sore tomorrow. Warmed up a bit later on today and the snow turned to rain. Tonight it all freezes very hard. Oh oh. But Scooby had such a good time tramping about in it today that it's all worth it.

But what's going on with healthcare "reform"? Does anybody know? It looks to me like this: despite tireless effort by progressives, the Democratic Party has failed the public badly. The Republican Party has cemented its new identity as a deeply poisonous factor in public life. We began with a huge compromise on progressives' part: the real solution to our healthcare scandal, single-payer, wasn't even on the table. Now, a meaningful, robust public option appears to have been defeated. Getting creative, Democrats have come up with something almost good: expanding Medicare to those 55 and up. Could be brilliant, since that would seem to be a return to the single-payer concept. But.

There's nothing for you if you're under 55, and, oop, nothing until sometime in 2011 for those over 55, and — don't fail to note this — there's no premium subidy until the "exchange" kicks in, when? 2013? 2014? Ever? Result: participation by those under 65 will, meantime, be very expensive, and certainly pose no competition to the greedy, abusive insurance industry. Instead we'll get a Christmas present for the industry that deserves no present. Of course, that's how it looks at the moment. And then the conservadems will join Maine's useless senators to kill it anyway, at least if there's anything like expanded Medicare in it.

I'm disgusted, as you might possibly have guessed. The United States Senate has distinguished itself as a pretty much useless institution that cannot bring itself to give up its precious filibuster. Couldn't even bring itself to bring the threshold down to 55. Many feel betrayed by this, by the continued reliance on militarism, by the Administration's failure to deliver on the President's profession to be a "fierce advocate" for gay people. By an economic policy that left the brains and vision the nation needed — Krugman, Stiglitz, Reich, Shiller — out in the cold and instead placed stewardship of the economy in the hands of some of the very fools who got us into this crisis. The ironic result? The latest poll shows Obama's popularity tied with Sarah Palin's.

Meanwhile, far more importantly, the nations have gathered at Copenhagen. And besides Saudi Arabia, there seems no greater obstacle to urgent action than — still — the U.S.A. This is depraved. And the Washington Post decides to run an op-ed piece on climate science by Sarah Palin. The press has, of course, contributed to our climate emergency. It is no coincidence that more Americans believe in angels than believe humans are responsible for global warming. Why is the American public so deluded? We all delude ourselves when we can, when the truth is inconvenient. And when the press buries the most important story of our time below the fold on page one (if it ever even makes page one), people can reassure themselves that it isn't really so important. Certainly not as important as the affairs of a popular athlete. So — the New York Times editorializes correctly, and you can find at least some of the reporting in its pages. But it doesn't turn up in the headlines — quite unlike what Brits see when they pick up, say, the Guardian or The Independent.

So far, this is going to have read rather depressingly. What's missing? Well, read the sermon (from the main jaydeacon.net page, click on Sermons), "Context: A Higher We — The Farthest Possibilities of Congregational Life." In times like these, the essential factor is going to be spiritual communities like that. The future depends on it. And our own meaningful, passionate, ecstatic, and joyous living depends on it.

Last night I was up very late following the numbers from Maine as they came in on the website of the Bangor Daily News. The issue, of course, was the new law extending the right to marry to same-sex couples — and the Roman Catholic Church's deceptive, bigoted campaign to defeat it by getting it on the ballot for public vote. Let the majority vote on the rights of a minority — yeh, right. Finally it was clear that 52.7 percent had voted to repeal the right to marry, to 47.2 percent to keep it. That, on top of the defeat of a wonderful (if not at all charismatic) governor in my state of origin, New Jersey by a fairly shady right-wing Republican — had me down.

I spent some time in Bangor in the mid-80s, serving the Unitarian Church in Bangor. They'd called me after one of their members was murdered in a queer-bating hate crime. His name was, of course, Charlie Howard. The anti-gay hate thundered from many quarters there, most especially the Bangor Baptist Church, founded by its pastor Buddy Frankland, who was later found to be having an affair with a married choir member whose wedding he'd once refused to perform inside the church because she'd once had a divorce. The story is far jucier than that, but that will have to do. When Charlie was murdered by three Bangor High School students, the Bangor Daily News ran a mind-numbing editorial titled "Not a Martyr." I remember writing a response, driving down to the newspaper, and marching in to the editor's office, pressing my piece into his hand and uttering something bitter.

So I looked again at the numbers. And I thought: yes, and the Bangor Daily News editorialized in favor of same-sex marriage and against Proposition 1. And the vote in Bangor went in favor of same-sex marriage. Meanwhile Portland affirmed same-sex marriage 20,085 to 7,242. And Belfast, and Camden, and Bar Harbor, and Saco, and many more communities. Yeh, the Catholic Church did what it does — it lent its spokesman to be the voice of the anti-gay campaign. (Why do any self-respecting gay people remain in that institution?) Yeh, the inland little towns aren't there yet. But great god — how far we've come since the mid-80s! And of that, I am very glad indeed.