Obligatory Autumn Photography

Backyard Blogging

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Is there a term for that particular racket where you offer a "solution" that helps to intensify and perpetuate the problem you are (dishonestly) claiming to solve?  Medical quackery has a long history, but isn't usually sophisticated enough to actively support and prolong a malady.  (Update: though maybe medicine is growing more sophisticated after all.) Glenn Greenwald complains that the war on drugs and the war on terror are mirror images of one another in that they are not so much incompetent so much as dexterously designed to NOT solve their respective "problems".  On the contrary, it suits the architects of both drug and national security policies to have those wars ever worsening and never ending.  For them peace (or even amelioration) would be an unwelcome turn.  As Greenwald puts it:

These two intrinsically unwinnable wars -- unwinnable by design -- seem destined to endure forever, or at least until some sort of major financial collapse simply permits them no longer.

It's the perfect deceit.  These wars, in an endless loop, sustain and strengthen the very menaces which, in turn, justify their continuous escalation.  These wars manufacture the very dangers they are ostensibly designed to combat.  Meanwhile, the industries which fight them become richer and richer.  The political officials those industries own become more and more powerful.  Brutal drug cartels monopolize an unimaginably profitable, no-competition industry, while Terrorists are continuously supplied the perfect rationale for persauding huge numbers of otherwise unsympathetic people to join them or support them.  Everyone wins -- except for ordinary citizens, who become poorer and poorer, more and more imprisoned, meeker and meeker, and less and less free.

Some observers are hoping that once power is regained by the motley coalition of crazies and opportunists that inhabit the corpse of the Republican party, the exposure of their internal inconsistencies will tear it apart.  But I think the Republican Party, like the wars on drugs and terror, is not a real instrument for accomplishing anything constructive.  It has morphed into a whirling dervish of political nonsense that serves only to perpetuate itself, serve as covering fire for plutocratic looting, and to ensure that political democracy cannot function.

Is there actually a "problem" purportedly dear to the hearts of the party that Republican policies would actually solve rather than worsen?  On the contrary, except for oppressing gays and keeping Joe Public armed, I can't think of any policy in the platform that isn't exactly the kind of malignly counter-productive smokescreen quackery that Greenwald is talking about.  Immigration?  check.  Deficit spending?  check.  Abortion?  check.  Energy independence?  check.  Corruption?  checkity-check-check.

Though the Democratic Party is too conservative, too wealthy, too corrupt, too gerontocratic, and too pleased with its own timidity, it is at least still a potential instrument of administration and even sometimes, can be a reluctant servant of the public good.  The Republican Party is nothing more than a zombie institution animated by billionaire mischief-makers and their mercenary symbiotes.

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There are times when life skates upon ice that is thick and textured and three feet thick like a deep-winter Pocono lake.  You can look down into it and chart its depth and seriousness in the bubbles and fractures and scars of its own self-creation.  Lately I'm a dabbler-duck in life that is more like frozen apple sauce, which is delicious and truly one of my favorite things, but the thready little ice crystals are not exactly serious or skateable.  No, life's been a bit crunchy and fragmentary and not lending itself to long or consistent campaigns at any one thing.

At work it's been four projects about public communications (privatization, deficit spending, nitrogen pollution, farm policy) all handed around and assembled by committee.  But too many deadlines all falling together and all the back-burner matters going undone and hardening on my computer desktop like so much neglected oatmeal.  Porter is busy at school and with his burden of homework and other educational rigamarole; Nico has a lighter load, but the teachers are tempted to push him for his brightness.  Monica has been sucked deeper into the Pine Point school, her responsibilities coagulating into two half-time jobs -- one as teacher the other as driver.  At least for her second shift she can seat-belt them all in and cruise I-95 in a sound-cloud of David Byrne or Julieta Venegas.

Monica's mother Esperanza is visiting along with her aunt, Hilma.  Then quickly, the three of them headed off to Vermont on to see the fall colors - leaving me in single-parentage, neck deep in writing up our dairy ethnography research while also running some experiments on (the uphill battle of) how to educate the public on the virtues deficit spending.  Then they were back and Porter was off to the White mountains on a class camping trip all week.  And so it continues.


Meanwhile, as part of the sputtering re-boot of my personal philosophy into some hybridized blogostani bourgeoise-pagan-doomerism, I had signed up for a "food preservation" course with Sharon Astyk, but have pretty much been failing at it.  Heading off to Minnesota in the middle didn't help.  I did manage to jar 5 pints of applesauce and I've set sauerkraut into motion. (Kimchi will be next, but I thought I'd start simple.)  I'm eyeing the quince for jelly.  Tiling the bathroom, painting the bulkhead, washing the windows, framing out a root cellar, stacking the two cords of firewood in the driveway, and so on have been gently and futiley fluttering mothlike against the window of my inattention.


Mom and Dad made a sudden road trip and campered in the driveway for a couple of days.  We planted some native plants Dad'd brought for me, and went hiking at Ninigret Pond, talked about the sorry state of politics, and Mom helped me hang pictures around the house that had been languishing in corners and atop the armoire since the summer wall-painting project.  We were all glad to have them for their short visit, though the date of my eventually getting back upon thick ice was knocked further down the paths.
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One of the things I've always loved about Germans (even when I don't) is that earnestness that so often manifests as bluntness.  A lot of Germans have great difficulty in understanding why they should dissemble in social situations, or why the circumlocutions of politesse should take any precedence over the clarity of an undecorated statement of accurate fact.


So I just want to hug the Germans this week for knocking the first real cracks in the conspiracy of silence that reigns among the world's leading nations, when it comes to both climate change and the end of cheap oil.  First was the leaked military report that demonstrated that, public rhetoric aside, the German government is drawing up contingency plans for the end of the cheap oil era.  It forecasts nothing short of the end of the global capitalist system.  And now Deutsche Bank releases an assessment of it's thinking on investments that is equally blunt about the head-in-the-sand attitude that the US government epitomizes about the changes coming down the pipeline.

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I'm no militant when it comes to native plants versus exotics, but here's my take on it. 

Most garden shops stock all sorts of exotics, because the exotics tend to remain unblemished and un-gnawed upon. But they remain untouched precisely because they're not part of the local ecosystem. Nothing eats them and nothing uses them. I've know I've adjusted my own aesthetics to see beauty not in the plant that stands pristinely aloof, but in the one that shows all the scars of actually being part of it all.

A case in point: I have a small, but slowly growing patch of a fuzzy little native plant, pussytoe, growing in the yard. I've stopped mowing that part of the property so it's been able to flower and go to seed in peace the last couple of years. Well this summer, the most common butterfly around the garden has been a gorgeous little thing I managed to identify as a Pecks Skipper. And according to the field guide the larval foodplants for this skipper are everlastings and pussytoes. So for a few square feet of unmown lawn I get a vigorous population of beautiful and energetic pollinators. Those kinds of inter-relationships are happening invisibly all around, but most intensely with the native plants and their co-evolved creatures.

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Welcome to the world, Leonardo.

You've got a big sister,

and even bigger cousins.

That'll help.

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Monica headed off yesterday morning toward Pennsylvania to fetch the boys back for Tuesday's start of school.  She left in the morning before any breath of Hurricane Earl had reached this far north.  It was supposed to be my task this week, but there are suddenly 5 research projects all in play at work, or maybe 6.  We had a last torrent of research on nitrogen pollution, but also getting rolling on an ethnographic project in New Mexico and Wisconsin on the dairy industry and a couple of message testing projects for Ford Foundation that we're going to fall behind on, and one we've already fallen behind on for a California policy institute.  And a bunch of other stuff I haven't have time to be in the loop for.  So I couldn't get away, despite the impending arrivals of Earl (the hurricane) - and Leo (the new nephew).


Mom was already in Kutztown helping out with Cathie's new baby, so the boys were with my Dad.  So Monica headed out before the storm, and drove the empty highways along the coast.


It began raining around 11 a.m. on Friday.  But the north Atlantic sucked the life out of Earl, and while he brought a few downpours, there was no real wind.

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Marking 5 years since Hurricane Katrina, Ed at Ginandtacos writes about the stages of "issue attention cycles."  From the pre-crisis stage, where, "All of the conditions exist for a crisis, but no one is interested. No attention is paid to the underlying, obvious, and persistent problems that will eventually become the crisis. "  Through alarmed discovery of the crisis and euphoric enthusiasm for solving it, on to realizing the true costs, followed by declining interest and the post crisis stage.  The last, according to Ed, "is misleading because nothing about the crisis has been resolved, but in the public mind it is history. We all did our part by pledging $25 to the Red Cross, and since the stories are disappearing from the TV and newspapers we can only assume that the problem has gone away."

It's a depressing cycle in which nothing is learned about the underlying causes to our crises, and the stage is simply re-set for the next one.

From the comments:

Ladiesbane: Do you think Thomas S. Kuhn read this, prior to writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions chapter on paradigm shift in 1962? Or that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross read either prior to her model of the stages of grief in 1969? Each might have been formulated each separately, but all seem to touch on the same stages of "Doobie-doobie-doo…what?-No!-Damn.-I guess so.–Doobie-doobie-doo…."

Andy Brown: So, we have two obvious choices, join the mealy-minded masses in (to paraphrase ladiesbane), the cycles of doobie-doobie doo interruptus, or sit in our theater chairs like Alex de Large with his eyelids pried open, witnessing, but ultimately helpless to change the spectacle no matter what we do. And Beethoven gets ruined. Where's our third choice?

jazzbumpa:  As ladiesbane rather obliquely points out, this is just human nature.  We are fallible creatures, ruled more by emotion than logic, with short attention spans and no coherent understanding about what is actually good or bad for us over any time span longer than what's-for-dinner.  I'm not at all sure coming down from the trees was a good idea.

Andy Brown: JzB, [regarding coming down from the trees]  It wasn't our idea. The trees died out and left us ground-bound on the savannah, blinking in the sun. So at least we're consistent.

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I remember when I first saw the Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense.  I was in Munich so it must have been the winter of 1985-86.  I don't recall so much the film, as walking the city afterwards with my friends and feeling unutterably happy.  I was in love, I was abroad, I was young and infinite, and David Byrne was brilliant.  It was good to be human.


This week some friends had given Monica some garden loot, and so I made tzatziki with yogurt and garlic and cucumber.  And Monica made spicy kebobs from Scott's beef, and a salad of tomatoes, olives, feta, cucumber, red onions and vinegar.  We put pitas in the toaster until they swelled into steam-ful spheres.  And though I failed to find retsina, the Toasted Head Chardonnay rose to the occasion.


And we watched the movie and god-dammit, it was still good to be human.

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After a long, wearying week of trying (with only mixed success) to plant the cognitive terrain of Americans with new information about nitrogen pollution, I was happy that Monica's colleagues at the nature center were pot-lucking the end of summer out on Mason's Island.  The long chain of weekly summer camps had finally played out -- though weeks too soon for the disgustingly tanned and fit Monica, who's not looking forward to trading her khaki shorts and water bottle for the slacks and lesson-plans of Señora Gallego, Spanish teacher and van-driver.  


People gathered at the old family house of the director -- if you can call a house old that's been erased by hurricanes in 1938 and then again in 1954.  The foundations at least have stood along the water for over a hundred years.  The weather was beautiful after four dreary days of rain and the sun set gaudily out over the water.  Herons and gulls and osprey cruised.  Kids pattered up and down the dock and I was glad I had none of my own there -- if kids fell in, got pinched by crabs or stung by jellyfish, well the kids weren't mine.  Steve set a couple of the older ones up with rods and they landed good-sized sand sharks.


The food was fantastic - much of it fresh from gardens - like edible works of art that filled one's veins with vitality and will to live.
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John Holdren, via Climate Progress sums up the situation when it comes to the global experiment in heat-trapping:

We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.

What's terrifying all the climate scientists now is that we seemed to have ruled out mitigation altogether -- that is, we are going to do nothing to try to reduce the intensity of global climate change.  (Changing lightbulbs, adjusting mpg requirements, and building every 10th building "green" doesn't count.)   If worst case scenarios don't get realized, it will not be because humans suddenly decided that future generations deserved a habitable world, it will only be because the experiment in endless growth and triumphal materialism crashed to the ground prematurely.

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Ed over at Gin and Tacos is collecting tales of travel woe, so I didn't resist adding one, vintage 1986.

If it's a question of helpless travel suffering . . . I remember my friend and I were on an overnight train through Yugoslavia (back when there was such a place) and 5 local workmen piled into the compartment made for 6. And settled in, kicking off their shoes, the fumes from which immediately drove all oxygen from the train, or would have if the window had opened, so maybe the oxygen just died. Even the cheap Russian cigarettes that someone was always smoking, couldn't compete. Propped by the entryway door we at least got the occasional welcome whiff of diesel exhaust, but couldn't even pass into unconsciousness, because the 5 guys only had 4 tickets between them, so somebody had to climb over us and go hide in the bathroom whenever the clairvoyant one thought the ticket taker might be coming.

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People are strange creatures.  They talk a lot.  Not just to exchange information, though they do.  Not just to posture and jockey for regard or status, though they do.  Not just to craft a persona or witness a crafting, though they do.  Nor just to form a connection, to entertain and be surprised with laughter or pique, to learn about another's limits or the histories they traverse, nor just to elicit a reaction, to make the empty air something human, to make or tell a story.

Wednesday Monica had spent the day with her young campers in the mossy brooks, and I'd spent mine prospecting in the internet for memes and analogies and arguments and rhetorical constructions about government privatization, and Iuri had turned mice marrow green for tracking proteins through the brain/blood barrier, and Sarka had dwelt on her new unemployment and her children away off on another continent.  We gathered at the Dog Watch Cafe and we talked.  We talked through the beers and bouillabaisse at the restaurant, and  dockside we talked through more beers as the sun set like molten gold behind the still masts of Stonington Harbor.  We talked under the stars and satellites, and around the kitchen island that Sarka cluttered with foods and sauces from the refrigerator.  We talked until it was the next day and it was too late to go home, what with another workday stalking up, and so they went up to their bed and we went below to the guest bed and we all stopped talking for a few quiet hours.

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My sources with televisions tell me there is much debate among the stupid about whether Muslims ought to be shamed or intimidated into not worshiping (or playing basketball) too close to the 9-11 site.  Punditiots, politicians and their lazy media barkers making people stupider and stupider.

It's not so much that they have murdered democracy, it's more that they have tortured it into imbecility, let it befoul itself with its own feces, then put a funny hat and clown shoes on it. You can't help but turn away.

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I am not really interested in spending a fortune on a Prius or one of the industry's new coal-powered cars like the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf.  So it warmed my environmentalist heart to see the New York Times talking up the movement toward updating the 4 cylinder engine.  Our 1997 Saturn station wagon, may be lacking in glamour (and missing some paint), but it still gets 34-35 mpg.  New smaller, lighter, non-sci-fi cars, likewise might not be a glamorous solution to our ecological problems, but in the short-term it's certainly likely to be a bigger help then Chevy's $40,000 bauble.

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Buckwheat Zydeco were playing a free concert along the Thames in New London, so I  went down to Bank Street with friends (who're also momentarily kid-free) to holler and take in the cajun music.  Monica joined us later looking good in an orange and black dress that got compliments from drunks and sober alike.  After, as we had beers along the bustling street we felt that we had discovered an oasis of urban life.  

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I've been research director on some communications projects focused on sustainability -- trying to get the public to understand the concept. It's easy to get fooled into believing that people understand what you're talking about, only to discover later that their perceptions were quite different from what you thought. There are certain parts of the sustainability story that are easy to tell -- resource depletion or economic viability, for example -- and then there are parts of the story that are nearly impossible to tell. One of these is the relationship between diversity and resilience (especially when it comes to sub-optimal, even maladaptive, traits and forms).  Across the long term a diversity of imperfections makes whatever system more resilient and ready for changes.   

Evolutionary biologists have the best grasp on it, since non-optimal forms are the stuff that evolutionary change is built of.  People who take the long view, ecologists like Wendell Berry or meta-farmers like Sharon Astyk, understand that this applies to our food system as well.  At the moment our tendency toward monoculture, genetically narrow breeds, and our one-size-fits-all approaches make us vulnerable to any kind of change (whether it’s a new pest, climate weirding or the declining availability of cheap fossil fuel).  Things always change eventually, and when change comes we'll want more rather than fewer varieties to choose from.

But Americans tend to believe there is always a "best" variety, and it is very, very hard for most people to really see the value in having a system full of waste and noise and inefficiencies (that is, diversity).  

Backyard Blogging

Bergamot brings the bees.

A Pearl Crescent butterfly in the shadows of the
Brown-Eyed Susans.

I remember the month that I first started eating raw tomatoes and olives.  Traveling in Greece in March 1986.  I could subsist on a fair amount of souvlaki, fries and Amstel, and I'd discovered moussaka.   But a body also needs to eat a little lighter sometimes, and there wasn't much fresh to eat at that time of year.  But there was the salad -- always fresh tomatoes, red onion, olives, some fresh herbs and a dash of olive oil.  Some bread and tzatziki on the side.  If I ever start growing tomatoes it'll be a result of those Greek salads.