Libertarians will be the death of us

A New York Times article describing unvaccinated Americans quotes one fellow who is adamant he will never allow himself to be vaccinated against CoViD-19:

“It has to do with my civil rights,” he said. “The United States government’s main job is to protect me from foreign and domestic enemies. Not my health. I’m in charge of my health.”

First off, I have to note that the article profiles several others before him who are, to varying degrees, more flexible on the subject. In other words, not all unvaccinated people are as adamant as this fellow. Thank goodness for that.

As for this fellow, who, according to the piece, "identifies as more of a libertarian than a Republican", I can only say that he reinforces my exasperation with libertarianism (which I've repeatedly expressed).

Presumably this guy would object to his neighbors contaminating his water by letting their sewage drain into it. Presumably he's grateful for water lines, water treatment plants, and sewers (he lives in Houston so I assume he benefits from them all). These conveniences of modern life don't fall into his tidy little categories of protecting him from "foreign and domestic enemies". Indeed, they are part of protecting his health, something he claims government shouldn't do.

I'm sympathetic to some of the concerns people have over the CoViD-19 vaccines: they were developed in an unprecedentedly short time and we obviously can't yet know if they have any long-term side effects. I think the fact that millions have been vaccinated without widespread bad consequences is good enough real-world evidence that they're safe but your mileage may vary.

But if you're just a stubborn cuss who can't be bothered to think beyond "I ain't letting anybody jab me because freedom", you get no sympathy. You're so obsessed with your favorite buzzword that you have no regard for others. "Freedom" is all about what you want, not about what anyone else might need.

How about thinking about more than yourself for a change?

Start by finding out why it's called public health, not just "health".

Turn away from rage

French president Emmanuel Macron spoke at the Arc de Triomphe today, explicitly rejecting the brand of "America First"-ism embraced by Trump.

There's nothing wrong with being a hard bargainer, with trying to win the best advantage for your side in a negotiation. If that were all Trump was doing by turning the country's back on treaties and agreements — NAFTA, NATO (sometimes), the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty — his actions would be defensible, if still regrettable.

However, that's not what Trump is about.

He wants to ride the populist wave he rode into office for as long and as far as he can because that's how he keeps his power base. As long as he holds the Republican Party in his grip, he keeps his own grip on the White House. If Republican lawmakers in Congress were to find that they could defy him and keep their seats, Trump would be out of office faster than you could say "impeachment". Those lawmakers would much rather put the drama behind them under a Pence presidency.

So Trump upends the status quo and vilifies anybody he doesn't like because that all delights his supporters. They like that he's manifestly enraging his opponents with his every word and deed. They also like that he's giving them plenty of people to hate and despise: Democrats, liberals, illegal immigrants, Latin Americans fleeing violence in their homelands, women who object to being treated as second-class citizens, non-heterosexuals, African Americans ... frankly, the list is too long to enumerate. His opponents, meanwhile, have tried to turn the popular discomfort with him — and yes, the rage at him — to their own advantage: thus the midterms.

All this rage, though, isn't good for us.

We can reject policies without vilifying one another.

We can disagree without despising one another.

In the end, living in rage and fear (fear is another emotion Trump has great success fostering) isn't just bad for our health, it's contrary to who we are as a nation. As a nation we're about looking forward.

Trump is all about looking backwards. For him, making America great again means resurrecting an America of an indeterminate past age, back when everything was just fine — for men like Trump. That everything wasn't "just fine" for a lot of others doesn't matter to him. And he has convinced more than forty percent of the voting population that it doesn't matter to them, either.

No matter what he says, though, Trump can't turn the clock back. He can't change the actual state of the world, or even of the country.

He can, however, repeat the mistake made by those who let him become president.

That mistake: ignoring those who disagreed with them in favor of rhetoric that sounded good.

That was the mistake made by two generations of D.C. politicians in both parties. They sang paeans to the free market, all while ignoring the costs to working people. The job market became a crapshoot, with all the ugly consequences that come with betting against the house. And make no mistake, employers are the house, and the rest of us are the gamblers.

White nationalists are Trump's most loyal supporters but it was economic uncertainty and fear that motivated everybody else who voted for him in 2016.

Stoking rage and fear among his own supporters gives them (and him) a temporary emotional high, but it doesn't do anything to fix the broken economic system that prompted the fear. Those among his supporters who aren't virulent white nationalists, then, will see no help from him.

Meanwhile, as long as his opponents drum up support by vilifying him and/or his supporters, they, too, offer no help to fix the broken economic system that got us into this polarized mess.

Trump will be defeated (electorally) by someone who offers an alternative vision of our national future — one that appeals to our desire to look forward. That's especially true right now because so many of us want to look anywhere but right here, because right here and right now are so ugly thanks to Trump.

Until that person comes along, we can lay the groundwork by rejecting Trump's all too sure talent for fomenting rage. Whether you support or oppose him, just stop letting him wind you up. It'll be better for you, and better for the country.

Be resolute

One of the smarter pundits around, Josh Marshall, put into words a sentiment that has been percolating, wordlessly, in my head for a month or two: "The Case for Not Being Crybabies".

Donnie is President. A majority of us didn't want that to happen, and we're frankly aghast at the appalling reality of it. But it's more than past time to get over it — not in sad resignation, but in calm determination to contain the damage.

Marshall's piece addresses his fellow journalists, who, as I've complained before, have done an embarrassingly bad job of handling Donnie by letting him handle them. He bluntly reminds them:

We know Trump's MO. He will bully people until they're cowed and humiliated and obedient. He'll threaten to kick the reporters out of the White House and then either cut a 'deal' or make some big to-do about 'allowing' the reporters to stay. These are all threats and mind games meant not so much to cow the press as make them think Trump is continually taking things away from them and that they need to make him stop.

But all the brouhaha about "access" profoundly misses what journalism is all about and what journalists are supposed to be doing.

That access isn't necessary to do their jobs. And bargaining over baubles of access which are of little consequence is not compatible with doing their job. Access can provide insight and understanding. But it's almost never where the good stuff comes from. Journalists unearth factual information and report it. If Trump wants to turn America into strong man state, journalists should cover that story rather than begging Trump not to be who he is.

Marshall speaks for me when he writes:

I've been surprised at the extent to which right-thinking people are all but threatening themselves with what Trump might do to, collapsing into their own sense of powerlessness.

For the press, the remedy is simple:

Trump wants to bully the press and profit off the presidency. He's told us this clearly in his own words. We need to accept the reality of both. The press should cover him on that basis, as a coward and a crook. The big corporate media organizations may not be able to use those words, I understand, but they should employ that prism. ... Trump is a punk and a bully. People who don't surrender up their dignity to him unhinge him.

That's smart advice not just for journalists, but the rest of us.

Don't surrender your dignity. Don't let Donnie goad you into forgetting who you are.

Keep your eye on what matters: "Ignore everything Donnie says. Pay attention solely to his deeds." And don't let him distract you. As I wrote more recently, "Work toward a better future in spite of him".

Most of all, be resolute. We are going to have a rough time of things on the political front for a long time. We already have a hostile administration and Congress; we are going to have a hostile Supreme Court majority as soon as Donnie and the Senate act. A lot of bad governmental actions and inaction are coming down the pike. We can (and should) decry these things and work to change them, but we have to keep our spirits and our strength up to do so. We know how to live with integrity and honor and decency. Don't let Donnie and the troubles these times will bring change our hearts. We are better than him and the worst impulses of his followers.

So are a lot of his followers, too: don't forget that. They are our neighbors. To change the country, we have to reach out to them. We must see their humanity, and help them to see ours. Then we have to learn how to talk to each other again. That is the great challenge of our time. We're never going to have functional electoral politics until we find common ground on which to call ourselves "Americans".

Be resolute in the face of trouble. We're going to get through this.

Corruption is the key

Bill Curry penned a compelling piece in Salon.

Our government is so corrupt it is odious even in the eyes of patriots. In a Gallup poll measuring reputations of professions, nurses finished first; 80 percent judged their integrity to be high. Members of Congress finished last at 7 percent, a full 14 percent behind lawyers. Even these numbers don’t capture the depth of public anger. If the anger turns to cynicism millions will walk away from politics. Millions already have. If it finds a voice we may have an Arab Spring of our own, maybe as soon as 2016. If so, the less-prepared party will be blown away. As things stand now, that would be the Democrats.

However, Curry thinks the problem goes way beyond the Democrats. The Republicans, of course, are just as culpable but don't give a damn about corruption in government because they're not interested in good government. But it's not just the overtly political establishment: he holds up the New York Times' ethically-challenged decision to "partner" with the author of Clinton Cash as an example of the "soft corruption" that the sociopolitical elite considers acceptable.

As long as corruption is acceptable, society pays — in dollars and in that quaintly old-fashioned conceit, "moral fiber". Curry's prescription:

The only way to put ethics where it belongs, at the center of the political debate, is for progressives to mount a full-bore, grass-roots anti-corruption campaign.

But he wants us not to focus on Citizens United and campaign finance, but on how government is run. His specific proposals, which start with a number of unkept Obama promises, emphasize transparency. They're good proposals, but they don't address the problem that not enough people pay attention to the process. Surveillance cameras don't deter crime if the criminals know nobody's watching.

We, the people, have to be engaged enough in our own governance to keep an eye on it.

(Most of us don't have the time or energy to be so engaged. How do we fix that? I think it will be a combination of inculcating civic virtue in each person, and rethinking the safety net so as few of us as possible are too wrapped up in making ends meet to do anything more.)

The cancer that is Cliven Bundy

It turns out that Cliven Bundy is not just a liar and a deadbeat, he's also a bigot. I thought about quoting him, but his remarks have gotten so much play it doesn't seem necessary. The New York Times piece quotes him, and Media Matters found the video. (He also self-interestedly misconstrued MLK and Rosa Parks for CNN.)

As a handful of high-profile politicians and pundits scramble to distance themselves from his appallingly racist remarks (proof that rurals can be as unbelievably ignorant of urbans as urbans are of rurals), they're keen to argue that his racism has nothing to do with his fight against the Bureau of Land Management.

They're right. You don't have to conflate the two, and you shouldn't. It's possible to condemn Bundy for being an armed deadbeat and a bigot.

And you should. He's a contemptible lout.

Bundy's not contemptible because of his politics. He's contemptible because with every utterance, he proves himself to be the most ignorant man in the country, and he's impervious to fact, reason or logic. He's also convinced he's on the road to canonization as a patriotic saint in the mode of Thomas Paine.

His self-delusion would be pathetic were he not armed and completely indifferent to everybody else. His lack of concern for other people, a logical if deeply regrettable extension of his libertarian impulses, is sociopathic. The full weight of the justice system needs to fall on him because the rest of us can't afford to indulge people who have absolutely no interest in their duties as citizens. And yes, you have duties as a citizen, the chief of which is to follow the laws that are set up for our collective benefit. If you think that's "socialism" or somehow tyrannical and unfair, as I suspect Bundy and his ilk do, you are opposed to civil society, and like I said, the rest of us can't afford to indulge your sociopathy. You know what we call people who don't follow the minimal duties we ask of citizens? Criminals.

By the way, if you do business with Bundy, stop. That's the way to make him understand that it's not just the federal government that is pissed, it's all of us. The entire nation. Bring the pain to him in ways that his weapons can't stop. Show him that he isn't as self-reliant as he'd like to think, and that the rest of us expect — no, insist on — a minimum standard of civil behavior.

[UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf makes one of the points I tried to make a lot more clearly than I did in his Atlantic piece, "Villains Can Be Right, You Know (Even If Cliven Bundy Isn't)".]

This is why we can't let libertarians run things

In an article on Talking Points Memo about the Newtown, CT, school shooting, the comments raged — and I use the term advisedly.

One of the commenters, "John Pidaras", is a strong advocate of gun ownership as the only cure for shooting rampages. To another poster asking whether teachers should be armed (itself an exasperated response to multiple back-and-forths with Pidaras), Pidaras replied:

To answer your question, one for every teacher should suffice. Make it a requirement for teaching. The same standards that you want to impose on gun owners should be imposed on teachers, rigorous background and psychological tests as well as firearms competency and safety training. That is, only if we are interested in preventing school shootings, which of course is not the goal here. The goal here is to ban guns, not make schools safer. If it was to make schools safer then you would overwhelmingly support my idea.

Elsewhere Pidaras claims to oppose "pretty much all wars including the drug war and all forms of corporatism", so I'd say that puts him in the libertarian camp. There's something appealing about libertarianism to a nation weaned on the romance of the Western; even I, who dislike Westerns thoroughly and am convinced this country could stand a lot more consideration for the community in its politics, have been seduced on occasion by the individualist's siren song.

The thing is, libertarianism allows only the barest outline of a civil society to exist. Libertarianism requires the greatest self-sufficiency of any philosophy of governing, and a populace accustomed to fending for itself for the most part isn't going to be easy to unify, or to keep unified. Libertarians insist that no government should dictate how they should live their lives, and that's admirable in principle, but what if a group of like-minded folks decides to impose its views on a smaller group? What is the smaller group's recourse?

In a society in which "individual defense" was the watchword — a society in which, for instance, teachers were armed to protect their students (and in some places, I'm sure, to protect themselves from their students) — what would civil society be like? Could you even call it civil society? Wouldn't it simply be an atomized aggregation of millions of mutually suspicious people, or a collection of fiefdoms created by local strongmen who aggregated power by opportunistically creating the biggest gang first?

A libertarian society, it seems to me, could only survive if the populace was extraordinarily moral. Otherwise, the inclination to dominate would eventually leave everyone under the thumb of the most aggressive.

In such a society it might be the norm for teachers to be armed, as much in their own interest as in the putative interest of their students' safety. However, this is not a norm I want to see. It comes from a gun enthusiast who cannot understand that some restrictions on gun ownership and gun capability are rational and not the first stumbling steps down a slippery slope. It comes, in other words, from a raging ideologue who doesn't live in the real world. Kind of like a lot of libertarians, really.

Amazon charges California sales tax

Amazon started charging California residents their local sales tax today. Evidently a lot of people were dismayed by the change: news reports breathlessly claimed that people had scrambled to make large purchases on Amazon before 15 September so as to avoid the taxes.

These people seem to have forgotten the ruckus of almost a decade ago, when state officials warned us that we were responsible for California sales tax on our online purchases even then. State tax forms include a box to report the total amount, and Amazon, at least, allows its users to tot up their purchases from the previous calendar year.

I'd be curious to know how many others were like me and actually honored that long-forgotten warning by paying the additional sales taxes on their returns. How honest and law-abiding are we, really?

Brooks on elites, take 2

My earlier entry on David Brooks' New York Times opinion piece started out well enough, but soon got sidetracked onto what I acknowledge is a hobby horse of mine: I started railing against the conservative crusade against government and taxes. Brooks, however, wasn't just talking about elites in government service (and he didn't say anything about taxes): he was talking about elites everywhere in our society.

Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.

Though he mentioned government there and once elsewhere in his piece, he touched on "Wall Street" and "finance" five times (six, if you count the reference to "the Libor scandal"). Clearly, he had the financial services industry on his mind when he wrote this piece.

I still think the libertarian-leaning conservative elites who have done so much to sway the country's thinking in the last three decades must take a lot of blame for the rotten attitude Brooks detects among today's elites. But when Brooks claimed, "Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this", he inadvertently touched on another shortcoming of Wall Street's that he failed to mention but that I think contributed even more prominently to the industry's disgrace. Wall Street may hire the young and brainy, but what about the men in charge of those young and brainy hires? If those new hires were deficient in the virtues department, wasn't it their managers' job to inculcate those virtues?

Oh, you say, but Brooks' point was that the WASP elites had those virtues, but the new, politically correct elites don't. Yet even if you grant this contentious point, why weren't those WASP elites able to pass along those virtues to the allegedly more meritocratic youths they hired who, apparently, lacked those virtues?

Those WASPy elites were not snatched away by angels (or demons) all at once. There was a transition period, during which they and their meritocratic successors rubbed elbows. Institutional cultures do not change overnight, nor do they generally change without the acquiescence of upper management. So those legendarily virtuous WASP elites fumbled the ball when they passed it along to their meritocratic and apparently non-WASPy replacements. Or maybe the elder elites weren't quite as virtuous as Brooks thinks. Or perhaps all institutions were subjected to societal forces that no elites could have resisted, WASPy or not.

It's comforting to assume that "those people" were raised wrong, and that to fix society all you have to do is to fix "them". Yet this kind of thinking, besides being too conducive to pointless class warfare, is liable to distract one from bigger problems. For instance, if our elites lack certain virtues, isn't it at least possible it's because our society as a whole lacks them?

Or are you saying, Mr. Brooks, that becoming a member of the elite in this country inescapably leads to a loss of moral fiber?

(I'll admit that when I contemplate a Sheldon Adelson or David Koch, I wonder if that might not be true.)

In corporate America generally, including Wall Street, I think we can ascribe a great deal of reckless and sometimes criminal behavior to the emphasis on short-term profits that at some point took precedence over long-term strategic management. I've heard (sorry, no citations at hand) that on Wall Street at least, this was a consequence of formerly private, closely-held companies, often partnerships, going public. I also wonder whether shareholders' patience was greater in past decades. Perhaps, too, they didn't expect such large profits over such short intervals. Our corporate elites would have been free to focus on different priorities that redounded more to the credit of their companies and themselves.

Is it a lack of virtue that accounts for concealing huge losses in your risky investments, as JPMorgan Chase traders are alleged to have done? Or could such behavior be the foreseeable and logical result of engaging in risky behavior that goes against your best instincts, but which is required by your management chain, which in turn is under pressure from impatient shareholders?

You can always find someone else to blame, of course, and I'm not saying Brooks is wrong to hold the very prominent elites who are nominally in charge of things accountable for their actions. Yet we should be careful not to assume that their failings solely arise out of moral shortcomings peculiar to them. If we're wrong, we might shoot the elites (this seems to happen in the wake of most revolutions) but find ourselves in exactly the same fix once the dust has settled.

It's stereotypically liberal to insist that extrapersonal, social forces be considered when trying to explain people's misbehavior, just as it is stereotypically conservative to look for our faults not in our stars, but in ourselves. As a rule, I believe in the primacy of personal responsibility, and when it comes to the misdeeds of big business I'm especially in favor of frying those who were at the helm. Nevertheless, if "institutional failure has been the leitmotif of our age", as Brooks contends, it's hard for me to believe that such widespread failure is the product of the immorality of our supposed "elites". It's more plausible that there's something about how society has oriented itself — something about the priorities we've chosen and the values we've decided to esteem most — that has created perverse and unhealthful incentives, leading not just our elites, but all of us, down the wrong path.

"What is the American Dream?", James Gustave Speth

It's almost a cliché now that consumerism, or the mass consumption of consumer goods, is not the key to happiness. The question arises, though, what is? And what did the colonists really mean by "the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration of Independence? The latter is the question answered in "What is the American Dream?: Dueling Dualities in the American Tradition", an entry on the Center for a New American Dream's blog.

Speth traces Jefferson's use of the phrase "pursuit of Happiness" back to

... two very different notions: the idea from John Locke and Jeremy Bentham that happiness was the pursuit of personal pleasure and the older Stoic idea that happiness derived from active devotion to the public good and from civic virtue, which have little to do with personal pleasure.

Speth himself thinks a third man, James Truslow Adams, introduced a third facet to the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America.

I believe James Truslow Adams' vision of the American Dream is at least as compelling as that of Lincoln. Adams used the phrase, "the American dream," to refer, not to getting rich or even especially to a secure, middle class lifestyle, though that was part of it, but primarily to something finer and more important:

"It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

Yet another interpretation of "the pursuit of happiness" comes from what Andrew Carnegie called "the gospel of wealth". Carnegie tied "improved conditions" for all Americans to "material development", which in turn was due (of course) to the unhindered operation of competition and the free market.

As a nation we've given ourselves over to one understanding of "happiness", the understanding promulgated by Carnegie. Speth thinks there's compelling empirical evidence that this deeply libertarian and individualistic pursuit of happiness through "material development" isn't actually making us happier.

I've never thought of myself as a Stoic but I do find myself increasingly repelled by the modern compulsion to consume. I've had to fend off friends and family who urge me to replace my TV, for instance, it being a (seemingly) ancient cathode-ray tube model. My counterargument is, it still works and it's good enough for my (evidently, comparatively simple) needs. More and more, I see ads on the Web for goods and services I just don't need, and I wonder: what am I missing, that so many other people seem to want them?

Clearly, I'm getting older ... but maybe, just maybe, it means I'm getting a little wiser, too. At least I've discovered that for me, "the pursuit of happiness" requires more than buying stuff. What exactly that is, I'm not sure. I'll keep looking, I guess.

For the rest of you, maybe it's time to reconsider whether resurrecting the overheated, consumption-based consumer sector is the best way to return this country to something like its former greatness -- or the best way to seek your own personal happiness, for that matter. Focusing on consumption at the expense of everything else is, after all, how we got ourselves into our current economic tar pit. It also hasn't made a lot of us happy, has it?

She threw stuff too

I don't know whether to believe this or not, but that woman who wouldn't shut up on Amtrak is also reported to have threatened and thrown things at other passengers in the course of her self-involved ride.

I guess it's Lakeysha Beard's world: the rest of us are just supposed to suffer her interminable blabbering in dignified silence.

Yakker yanked

A woman spent sixteen hours talking on her cell phone ... on a train ... in a designated "quiet car," where cell phones are not allowed and conversations are to be kept at a low volume. That, apparently, led to a confrontation with other passengers. According to one account,

Lakeysha Beard of Tigard was charged with disorderly conduct after police said she got into a “verbal altercation” with passengers on the train. The other passengers complained she refused to put down her cell phone, even after train staff made repeated announcements for passengers to not use cell phones, according to police.

When a passenger confronted her about her loud talking, police said Beard got aggressive.

She was removed by police from the train in Salem, Oregon.

She claims to have felt "'disrespected' by the entire incident."

You gotta be kidding me.

Lady, you don't know what disrespect is until you've been forced to endure somebody else's inane conversation(s) for sixteen straight hours.

If it's physically within your power, just shut up.

Last year's model

I stumbled across an intriguing-looking badge on a blog and clicked through to Last Year's Model, whose motto is, "Saving the planet through sheer laziness." The point is to encourage people not to buy new gadgets if they have perfectly functional ones that are slightly older.

It's an idea with which I was already on board a long time ago. My only quibble is, "last year" is such a short horizon. I think shooting for five years is reasonable. (I know, I know: just contemplating being behind the technology curve for that long would make some trendinistas' heads explode.)

Life's short, yes, but just because you can buy something doesn't mean you must.

Amen, Kottke

Jason Kottke on walking while texting. He has a couple of suggestions for making the streets safer, but he's bewildered by the phenomenon:

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people?

I agree. You're relying on the rest of us to watch out for you. Uh, no: you're not five-year-olds. Stop acting like it or we'll have to find adult supervision for you.

Cooks Source, crooks source

From The Guardian, via Daring Fireball, comes an article about theft of intellectual property, aka plagiarism, that takes my breath away.

Student Monica Gaudio found one of her online articles published without permission in the print publication Cooks Source. Gaudio demanded an apology on Facebook and in the magazine, plus a small donation ($130) to the Columbia Journalism Review. Considering she caught the magazine dead to rights in an act of thievery, you'd think it would count itself lucky to get off so lightly.

Not Cooks Source. According to the article, here's the emailed reply from its editor:

But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!

The magazine's Facebook page is filled with angry comments, none of which, from my cursory examination, supports the editor's position. What a shocker.

Anybody with a normal IQ and a normal ego understands why this is wrong. I don't know if the editor, who appears to be someone by the name of Judith Griggs, is mentally disadvantaged or narcissistic. Her attitude in that email and in the one comment I saw from her on the Facebook page, though, makes me wonder if she ought not to visit a mental health professional.

Or I suppose she could just be scum.

More hope the world is changing

A while back I suggested that changing the world starts with us. Not my idea, of course: that thought has been around forever. Proof that other people are thinking the same way, though, is welcome. Here are a couple of instances, one little, one big:

• The actor Vincent Kartheiser chooses to get around Los Angeles on transit. Give him extra props: L.A. is not exactly known as a transit-friendly town.
  
• The U.S. military is seeking to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
  

The second piece noted an interesting catalyst for the military's action:

Concerns about the military’s dependence on fossil fuels in far-flung battlefields began in 2006 in Iraq, where Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life.

Given the military's penchant for wargaming and planning for future battle scenarios, this was a surprisingly late wakeup call. Didn't anybody involved in strategic forecasting see this was going to be a problem? Didn't the term "non-renewable" filter up the chain of command? Why hasn't research along these lines been going on since, say, the 1970s, when OPEC first flexed its muscles?

That article also references a white paper published by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in 2008. The document, entitled "Department of Defense Seeks Alternative Fuels," is sometimes refreshingly blunt:

Energy reform in both military and civilian sectors is likely to occur if increased public awareness and attention to the issue is an indicator. This awareness, in turn, stimulates attention given to alternative energy policies by the government.

I'll bet this truism was known back in 2001. It explains former Vice President Cheney's refusal to discuss any aspect of his energy task force's deliberations at that time. Any publicity might have drawn attention to the antediluvian direction of the George W. Bush administration's so-called energy policy.

The same paragraph goes on:

The issue of alternative energy has always been politically charged. Politicians are aware that alliances could be called into question if renewable energies are too heavily researched and pursued, putting the United States into a position where oil could not be as easily obtained. If our oil supply were to be limited, the country’s security could be called into question if alternative energy sources are not available.

These alliances are especially difficult due to the instability of the Middle East, as well as the hypocrisy of being allies with certain countries that run contrary to U.S ideals and foreign policy goals. This can be seen most vividly in the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, a non-democratic country that is a strong human rights violator. Heavy reliance on such a volatile region could lead to numerous problems if a back-up plan is not created.

What a Catch-22.

Perhaps it's time we little people demanded a solution from the free market, sidestepping the politicians. (I never claimed government had or could have all the answers.)

In the meantime, we could all give the researchers time by reducing our energy footprint, like Kartheiser. The trains and buses are running anyway, people: make each gallon count for a little more.

Unfortunately, the white paper is distressingly wrongheaded in spots. It strenuously advocates nuclear power, glowingly describing its advantages (including completely omitting the following from its "environmental impact") and framing its disadvantages as perceived rather than real:

Nuclear energy also has some pronounced disadvantages, although in reality the problems associated with nuclear energy are actually not an issue of safety, but rather public perception. In regards to the environment, nuclear energy creates radioactive waste material that must be stored for thousands of years. Today, this waste is stored throughout the United States in concrete or metal bunkers in solid form. Currently this poses no risk to the public.

This is a brazenly cavalier attitude. Of course a newly minted, properly designed and manufactured storage container poses little (I wouldn't say "no") risk to the public. The problem is when the container is a hundred years old. Whether or not the United States is still a political entity at that time (and in a hundred years, who knows?), those containers will pose a threat: little that our civilization builds is designed to last for a century. Even if the U.S. is still a functioning nation, who knows if the political resolution will exist to maintain or to refurbish those containers? The political will to fix our aging water and electrical infrastructure seems to be in short supply today, and we're incomparably richer now than we were a hundred years ago.

Thinking about the future demands more than short-term thinking when the problems are known to be long-term. We have a responsibility to our descendants not to dump our unresolvable problems onto them if we have a choice, and in this case, we do.

At any rate, the military at least recognizes there's a problem and is taking steps to deal with it. So is Vincent Kartheiser. The rest of us should follow their lead.

It starts with me

Like everybody else, I get overwhelmed by the world sometimes. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is: the world doesn't accord with it, and as a result, it's going to pot, or to seed, or to hell.

A lot of the problems we face will force us to make decisions about how we direct large amounts of money and time, and it's proper that those decisions be hammered out in public debate about what our government should or should not be doing.

However, we residents of the U.S. need to look a lot harder at the decisions we make at the individual level as well.

Do you think about how you live your life? Do you think about whether you could live it in a way that is less costly, both to yourself and to society at large?

Here's a trivial example of behavior that bothers me by its lack of reflection. Alton Brown, a Food Network personality, frequently recommends using large amounts of aluminum foil for convenience while cooking. The food-stained foil can be thrown out at the end of the cooking process, saving you the trouble of washing up another pan or sheet.

Alton, that's a nice consideration if you're coping with a water shortage. But have you ever considered that it takes a lot of energy to mine that aluminum? That the aluminum doesn't break down quickly in the landfill, and therefore can be considered unrecoverable in ours and our children's and our children's children's lifetimes?

We produce and we consume, but we don't have a closed cycle for most of our manufactured goods. What we dispose of is effectively lost to our civilization forever.

Consider that in nature, nothing is lost. Dead plant life is broken down and nutrients restored to the soil for other plants to use. Dead animals feed bacteria and insects and sometimes larger scavenger animals. Rock is eroded or melted, eventually to become rock again.

The waste byproducts of what we consume, by contrast, have a limited future of repurposing at best. Plastic bottles can be shredded to produce carpeting, we are told. That's nice, but what happens to the carpeting at the end of its useful lifetime?

Even those things we can recycle more or less endlessly can fall victim to our laziness or our failure to establish clear routes for recycling. You can't recycle a glass bottle or an aluminum can if it winds up in the landfill because you tossed it in the garbage can rather than finding a recycling bin.

Fixing this problem will require rethinking our entire way of life; it's a massive problem that will require a massive effort and it will involve government (sorry, libertarians). Until we find the intelligence and the will to make this effort, the best we can do is to rethink how each of us lives. Little decisions can have a big effect if enough of us make them.

Thomas Friedman wrote a column that sums up where we are and where we need to go.