A Change in the Wind
The political pundits haven’t noticed, probably because they habitually put the health of the planet at the bottom of their list of concerns, but this week on national television David Letterman pointed out that the Current Occupant of the White House is trying to present himself as an Environmental President.
It’s a struggle, as you can see.
This week I happened to stumble across a couple of dazzling looks at Bob Dylan, perhaps our favorite warrior of thought. Thought I put them up for your bemusement. With luck, sometime soon I’ll have a chance to review his latest, Modern Times, but for now, let me call on a poet John Hodgen:
When Dylan Left Hibbing Minnesota, August l959
Not even Dylan then, more like David the Blue-Eyed Shepherd Boy Giant Killer instead,
the way he must have looked in those Golden Book Illustrated Bible Stories we never read,
the ones with the pictures of the prophets, each with a gold record stuck to his head,
or like the Classic Comics Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov rocking and rolling on his bed,
heading on down the highway out of St. Petersburg, the landlord’s axe still in the shed,
throwing stones at all the stop signs a-bleeding in his head.
Wasn’t he a singing terrorist then, slaying us in the aisles, knocking us dead,
like some wild-eyed kid from Fallujah now, his machine gun guitar slipped over his head,
his ass in a sling, his mind full of dynamite, his righteous streets turning red,
his only song his heaven’s door, toward which he runs, arms outspread.
Oh, Zimmerman, we never heard a single word you ever said,
from Ararats to ziggurats, from alpha down to zed,
our heads cut off, our tongues cut out, no words left to be said,
all the things we’ve ever loved, dead, dead, dead, dead.
And from the National Lampoon, back when it was funny…
The political pundits of this fall have not forgotten last year’s biggest news event, it appears, as they’re comparing the upcoming mid-term elections to a political Katrina:
In the National Journal, Chuck Todd used athe metaphor to describe the Republican party:
The GOP’s hurricane shutters are state of the art, but sometimes even "state of the art" isn’t enough to stop a storm from creating all sorts of havoc.
A bipartisan poll conducted by Bill McInturff and Peter Hart found equally distressing news for Republicans, and phrased it the same way. Hart compared the upcoming elections to a Category 4 or 5 storm. He said:
"Simply put, the low lying areas are [going to be] under water."
It’s biological.
According to Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist, MacArthur genius, and all-around wit at Stanford, from the years of eighteen to twenty-four, individuals in our species are curious, eager to try new things (such as music)…but by the time we are forty, more than ninety percent of us know what we like and are uninterested in anything new, be it music, food, or body piercing.
A wonderful story on NPR explains why Sapolsky became interested in this question, and how he researched it.
Here’s the nickel version: a few years ago, Sapolsky noticed that his office assistant, a student named Paul, was driving him a little crazy. Not because of his work, which was excellent, but because of the absurdly wide range of music he listened to at his desk.
On Monday, it would be Sonic Youth. On Tuesday, Bavarian polkas. On Wednesday, pgymy love songs. On Thursday, Puccini operas. And so on. Sapolsky liked music too–Bob Marley, basically. But even though he once listened to more than Bob Marley, now hearing every possible kind of music was driving him nuts. He set out to find out if his experience was unusual.
Sapolsky called up fifty radio stations, talked to the station manager, and asked the same two questions: What is the average age of the listener, and the average date of the song release that they liked?
It turned out that the linkage between age and taste is so well-known in the radio business that they have a phrase for it: "Breakthrough minus twenty."
Take the decade in which the artist broke through (say, Billy Joel in the l970’s) and subtract twenty years, and the listeners who like Joel will almost certainly have been born twenty years before.
Or, as Homer Simpson put it: "Music achieved perfection in l974."
Sapolsky had Paul call sushi restaurants in the Midwest and found something very similar. A vanishingly small number of people will try sushi after the age of thirty-nine if they haven’t tried it before, and they’re far more likely to like it if they tried it during those experimental years of 18-24.
He asked about body piercing too: Same thing. One tattoo artist told him: "If you don’t have tongue studs by twenty-two, there’s a ninety-five percent chance you won’t."
Why?
"There’s something much more deeply biological than just psychological about this," Sapolsky said, alluding to lab studies that showed a similar bias towards experimentation in other species. "I think once you get older, solid footing becomes real comforting," said Sapolsky.
Two business professors, Robert Schindler and Morris Holbrook, found a similarly deep-seated explanation for nostalgia. As Steven Zeitchik said of their work last year in the Wall St. Journal, "we all have a particular period when we think that the culture was at its most enjoyable–and it’s almost never the present."
This has important implications, because there is good evidence that our political preferences are formed as firmly as our musical tastes–and at about the same time. Here’s a graph from the NYTimes (based on a huge study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press) that makes a complex point about as clearly as possible.
To put it in a nutshell: If you’re a Republican, chances are you came of age during the Reagan or Bush I admnistrations, when Republicans were riding high. If you’re a Democrat, chances are you came of age during the Nixon or Ford administrations, when Republicans were in the toilet.
The potential good news? Young people–age twenty to twenty-four–are more likely to be Democratic and less likely to be Republican than ever before. The Currant Occupant of the White House is souring an entire generation of Americans on Republicanism.
Just another evening at Kirk Creek in Big Sur. Sunset magazine calls this site, on a bluff off Highway 1, the prettiest campsite in California. For car camping, I’d have to agree. The irony is that the five of the best sites are reserved for hikers and bikers, but if these sort of brave souls haven’t arrived by sundown, the camp host opens the area to car campers willing to hoof it for a few feet. In which case they can find themselves in a spectacularly beautiful campsite with, it seems, no one around. And sunsets like this one…
The drugs most commonly prescribed today for Alzheimer’s Disease have no effect on the underlying cause and are no more effective against agitation and aggression than placebos, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
By contrast, a drug that now shown to reverse the accumulation of Alzheimer’s-causing plaques, at least in the lab, is effective, according to the Journal of Neuroscience, but illegal, according to the laws of the land.
"Innaresting," as Neil Young would say.
Bonus fact! Tumeric also appears to help, according to researchers at UCLA, which may be why the rate of Alzheimer’s is much lower in India than in other countries.
All that curry!
That’s from Mahatma Ghandi, via Subhankar Banerjee‘s knock-out site. (You might recall that Banerjee’s photos of the Arctic National Wildlife Refugee became controversial–too beautiful, perhaps–when they were posted at the Smithsonian.)
Here’s one to hold your attention, while I’m off up the coast for a couple of days.
I exaggerate, but not all that much. After many rounds of job cuts in the last ten years–and the elimination of numerous regional editions, such as the Ventura County edition, which is still missed–the corporation in Chicago fired the publisher in LA, Jeff Johnson, because he refused to cut an estimated 200 or more jobs in the newsroom. No doubt we’ll be seeing more reporters out soon.
Local fatcats, including David Geffen, have repeatedly offered to buy the paper, even at an estimated price of $2 billion. It still throws off substantial cash yearly–$225 million last year, according to Businessweek–and still is one of the best papers in the country. But that’s not enough for the Wall Street analysts and Tribune stockholders.
An on-line editor suggests if Geffen or Eli Broad really wants good journalism in L.A., instead of spending billions on an existing paper, they could spend a fraction of that on an on-line version.
Contrary to the attitude of some within the Times building, many blogs and independent websites feature smart, original reporting. And many more would if they could cash a check from the likes of Eli Broad to support their efforts.
This is partly true. But as much as I would like the chance to get paid for my work here, I have to express my doubts about this theory. Look at the Hufftington Post, for example. It’s the most expensive site I know of (believed to have cost $2 million to launch) and has been a huge success, I gather, but it has approximately zero reporting.
Who but a big newspaper could fund this incredible story from the most polluted spot on earth?
Who else would be able to send a photographer and a writer to live with an immigrant family in the Central Valley for months, as for this stupendous story, The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman?
Who else would be able to put an experienced reporter on an epidemiological story for the weeks it took to document with precision and warmth how authorities (and parents!) traced the most recent fatal outbreak of e. coli 0157 to spinach?
Get real, folks.
The answer is: no one.
As much as I love the Internet, this kind of reporting is not going to be done by unshaven twenty-two years on laptops in their bedrooms. (Again, I exaggerate, but not too much.)
Here’s an example: a picture of a Russian man, Mikhail Lychmanyuk, who knows he will soon die because he cannot afford an operation to repair his heart, severely damaged working for a copper smelter. It was the only job in town, and Mikhail knew it was killing him even as he worked it.
"I’ll wait for the end," he told reporter Kim Murphy. I fear she may have heard this line with all too much resonance…
This past week the paper for which I often write, the VC Reporter, launched blogs on their website…and in an editorial singled out this particular blog as an example of how to do it.
I don’t get a chance to pat myself on the back often, so indulge me this once:
Great blogs exist already in Ventura County — longtime VC Reporter contributor Kit Stolz’s environmental blog, http://www.achangeinthewind.com, comes to mind. This is the perfect example of what a blog can be — Kit isn’t writing about whether he had Fruit Loops or Cheerios for breakfast; he’s writing about climate change and other environmentally related topics, and he’s creating a dialogue with his readers. This is what we eventually hope to do.
Can’t argue with that; or at least, I wouldn’t want to!
Except for one thing: that word "environmental." Hate that word. Here’s why.
A nice graphic from JPL of the central Pacific from September 1997 and September of this year. It’s easy to see why Bill Patzert and his colleagues are predicting a mild event. Rain for the Southwest, they say we’ll likely see, but nothing like the disastrous year of l997-l998.
But we had a mild El Nino condition in 2005, and record-breaking storms. And in the discussion with Patzert posted below, he notes that this year’s began late, and could be on a track comparable to the El Nino of ’68-69, which led to huge storms in this area. Guess we’ll find out soon enough…
Kit Stolz