Kit Stolz

Who was the first great blogger?

A debate rages:

The New York Review of Books suggests Emerson:

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” In this respect the bloggers of our age have more Emersonian genius in them than our analytic philosophers, for good or ill.

The Los Angeles Times nominates Twain:

Having created a quintessentially American brand of humor and style of literature, Mark Twain (1835-1910) can now add to his myriad accomplishments the title of America's first blogger. No matter that the "Autobiography of Mark Twain," edited by a team led by Harriet Elinor Smith, weighs in at more than 5,000 pages.

And Andrew Sullivan picks Montaigne:

Sarah Bakewell reiterates what I've long argued, that the greatest blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne:

Once upon a time to be a blogger was to be declasse. Now it's to be ahead of your time.

Why is Facebook so bland?

Zadie Smith has an idea:

Here’s my guess: [Mark Zuckerberg] wants to be like everybody else. He wants to be liked. Those 1.0 people who couldn’t understand Zuckerberg’s apparently ham-fisted PR move of giving the school system of Newark $100 million on the very day the movie [about Facebook] came out—they just don’t get it. For our self-conscious generation (and in this, I and Zuckerberg, and everyone raised on TV in the Eighties and Nineties, share a single soul), not being liked is as bad as it gets. Intolerable to be thought of badly for a minute, even for a moment.

Didn't think a generation could be more self-conscious than the Boomers, but if you look at the movie — which begins with rejection, and circles back around to it in the end — it makes sense.

The nihilistic American voter

As a couple of veteran Washington observers have recently noted, the American voter of today is something of a nihilist.

He doesn't really know what he wants, but he sure as hell knows what he doesn't want: what he's got.

Here's Doyle McManus, in an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times today, on the subject of a past president now almost universally rejected, by everyone from the Tea Party to the angry left:

It was only by distancing themselves from the Bush presidency and its failures that the GOP won control of the House. That strategy, though, leaves a central problem: They have defined themselves mostly by what they are not. They have rejected both Obama's government activism and Bush's high-cost "compassionate conservatism," but they haven't detailed what their promise of tough fiscal conservatism means beyond repealing Obama's healthcare law.

And here's Tom Toles, in his wryly witty way, a day or two ago from his sketchbook:

Should be an interesting next couple of years.

Climate scientists not pushing back against denialism, says American Geophysical Union

A story Sunday in the Los Angeles Times reported that climate scientists were joining in an effort to "push back" against a rise tide of climate change denial. The story said that Monday the American Geophysical Union would announce an effort by 700 scientists to "speak out as experts."

But today the AGU said no, they were organizing no such effort, simply making climate scientists available to answer questions by email, as they had last year, and would again.

"In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate sceptics or congressional conservatives," [said] Christine McEntee, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union.

But the story got a ton of publicity: Maybe the public (or the media) wants such a push back?

Hardly Working: The economy today, by Steve Brodner

Steve Brodner, one of the hardest-working and most-talented pencil artists of our time, is moving away from his once-lovely Drawger site…but he's still putting up fascinating work on his own site.

To wit — Hardly Working, his depiction of the economy for lots and lots of us:
http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Obama in trouble, lefties and righties agree

From conservative David Brooks, on public radio Friday, when asked — as the President suggested — if it's true that President Obama has a communications problem:

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, maybe the Titanic had a communications problem with the iceberg. You know, I just think it's a wrong diagnosis. You know, 60 or 70 percent of this election was the economy, no question about that. But when you take a look at your four major initiatives: cap and trade, health care, bailouts, stimulus bill and they're all unpopular, well, usually when parties promote unpopular things, they suffer in the next election.

To lefty Ted Rall, disgusted at Obama for his lack of action on unemployment:

When both sides of the political spectrum agree that the President is fooling himself when he blames his messaging and not his actions…you know he has a real problem.

What The New Yorker wants in a fiction photograph

Will Steacy, a photographer in New York, reveals some of the requests he's gotten from The New Yorker over the years for a photographic images to go with their stories:

-A man walking a white pit bull in the city – ideally with one front leg missing
-A woman hiding behind a door – ideally with a red umbrella
-A charred grilled cheese sandwich – the bread is blackened, but the cheese hardly melted.
-A man smoking a cigarette outside looking at the stars
-A woman’s shoes covered with snow standing on a braided rug
-South end of the strip where there are cheap motels, fast-food, pawnshops, bail bonds, storefront churches, sprawling parking lots – kids hanging out there
-A table with handmade animals for sale – including a giraffe, and a Noah’s arc.
-A woman in her 40’s – details of aging skin on the face, pale, drawn, covered with too much makeup – heavy blush, dark lipstick – deep reds and purples
-A boat crossing a lake (ideally Prussian blue), either in rain & rough weather or good weather
-A chainsaw in a forest
-Details of female hands drinking coffee in a diner
-A cigarette extinguished under a silver high heel
-A sexy scene seen through a keyhole
-A woman’s hand extended with a blue pill
-A tall, skinny red head outside in the snowstorm in the beams of a trucks headlights – the snow catching in her red hair glowing in the backlight like a halo
-The hotel receptionist behind the bright green glow of the computer screen and with blue lacquered fingernails
-A woman in a wraparound red dress & red heeled toeless sandals on a dusty Irish road
-A Holiday Inn sign in a snow storm on the side of a road – both with and without a “No Vacancy” sign – dark or dusk
-Red roses on a coffin

Below, a snapshot from Steacy, cropped to fit this space…

Looks a little like a Hopper painting.

As one can imagine, he loves getting these assignments.

“The world is filled with redundant roosters”: Susan Orlean

From Susan Orlean's utterly charming New Yorker blog Free Range:

The rooster problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon. I’m no zoologist, but I’m guessing that the hen to rooster ratio is probably one to one, but the desirability ratio is about twenty million to one. The world is filled with redundant roosters.

Amen.

“We will not leave our problems for our children unresolved”: Marco Rubio

Senator-elect Marco Rubio gave a fascinating speech Tuesday night in Florida. It's been widely broadcast, major portions even on All Things Considered, but hasn't been available in print on the Web (not that I have found, anyhow).

So here, as a public service, let me present the two-edged sword of Republican idealism and denial.

Americans believe with all their hearts, the vast majority of them, and the vast majority of Floridians, that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind. But we also know that something doesn’t seem right. Our nation is headed in the wrong direction and both parties are to blame.

Yes! Leaving aside the reflexive jingoism, it's easy to agree with Rubio. It's just that global warming is "the wrong direction" to go, and the solid block of Republican denial in the Senate on the issue likely to our make our lives on that road worse. Or, perhaps more accurately, the lives of our children and grandchildren, since the effects of global warming are just beginning to be felt in this country.

Which, interestingly is a subject — the future — much on Rubio's mind.

What America is looking for are people who will go to Washington, D.C., to stand up and confront the great challenges of our time. To say, as those who came before us did, that we will not leave our problems for our children unresolved. We will not allow them to inherit our debt and our mistakes. But rather, we will do whatever must be done to ensure that for them, life will be better than for us. That for them, our country will be better than the one we inherited.

It's easy to agree with him rhetorically.

It's just that here on the ground, a future of droughts, heat waves, migrations, and rising seas is not a going to be better for our children and grandchildren.

Where is the "greatness" in that, Mr. Rubio?

[chart below from a review of the science on drought by National Center for Atmospheric Research, called "Drought under Global Warming." Click to enlarge.]

Climate change and income distribution: real change vs political

The big changes underway in this country are not political, despite the headlines.

Divided government: What a shock! Never would've seen that one coming.

A much bigger change has taken place in the nature of our economy, and in the nature of our atmosphere, and these are changes the Tea Party can't face, and thus deny even exists. (And profits from).

As Steve Bennett, a Ventura County supervisor, said in a board meeting yesterday:

Income distribution in this country has changed dramatically since the l960's. One percent of the people received eight percent of the wealth in the l960's. In 2007, one percent of the people received twenty-three percent of the wealth. That's a dramatic change in income distribution.

Combine that with the recent Supreme Court decision, the Citizens United case, (And by the way, the way the Citizens United decision was written, only 10% of the money that is being spent on campaigns is identified. Ninety percent of the time, we don't know where the money is coming from.)

We have to be concerned that those people at the top can use those resources in an unlimited way and have a significant influence over these elections. I think someday this Citizens United case will be viewed like the Dred Scott decision of l857, when the court ruled that African-American slaves were not human beings, they were property.

Then of course we have the climate change already underway in this country and around the world which has been excruciatingly well-documented, despite the deniers.

To wit, from the US Global Climate Research Program:

Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow. Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow.

Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged. Agriculture is considered one of the sectors most adaptable to changes in climate. However, increased heat, pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production.

Threats to human health will increase. Health impacts of climate change are related to heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents.

But I like the way Tom Toles put it, with his usual blend of anger and wit:

It appears the chances of addressing [climate change] have been set back even further than they were, due to a staggeringly successful campaign of Machiavellian lies. The votes are in, but unfortunately the climate doesn't work by poll, or even election. What we are doing is I think the gravest folly of my lifetime, and possibly in all of human history.

Makes me thankful for the sanity in California. Yes, sanity. A 60% win for AB 32.