Grounds For Optimism December 30, 2021 Top 10 Wins For the Planet in 2021 – These Will Turn Anyone Into an Optimist Well, maybe not anyone; that may be overly optimistic. But it’s a great read. Go, mankind, go! With regard to America’s mess and the global struggle with autocracy, I’m not so much “optimistic” as hopeful. And as for notes of pessimism some of you have detected (as in my constant refrain that “Putin is winning”), I’d say what you hear is not pessimism — it’s alarm. One calls for gloom; the other for action. I would argue we should all be alarmed — but hopeful. We need to make this story turn out right. Starting now, because waiting until the fall, as most people do, is a prescription for failure. Join your local chapter of the League of Women Voters! Join Field Team 6! Join Vote Forward! Fund the Party! Those of us who own PRKR have watched it sink of late, dipping below 70 cents yesterday where I bought some. My theory: that people were selling to take tax losses; that tax-selling pressure should end Friday; and that in the weeks to come, the stock might bob back up. It’s no sure thing, of course. But after the market closed yesterday, Seeking Alpha sent confirmation that at least one guy was selling for a tax loss and planning to buy the shares back (after waiting the required 31 days).
You Don’t Have To Be Jewish To Be Jewish December 29, 2021December 28, 2021 Growing up back in the Mad Man era, there was a famous ad slogan: “You don’t have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s real Jewish Rye.” Turns out (more or less), you don’t have to be Jewish to be Jewish! https://andrewtobias.com/wp-content/uploads/Trygve-Maseng-Fly-Fishing.mp4 BONUS? Marjorie Taylor Green on Mitch McConnell. How has our country come to this?
Secret Santa December 28, 2021December 27, 2021 But first . . . Anybody know Merrick Garland? If so, please forward this. (Sure, he’s probably already seen it; but still.) And now . . . It’s hard not to love this heartwarming story of Secret Santa handing out C-notes. But anyone who does find it heartwarming, it seems to me, should be supporting initiatives like Build Back Better that would greatly reduce the need for charity. A Secret Santa so rare he makes the national news — or even ten thousand of them who don’t — can’t possibly make a dent in the struggle so many of our countrymen and their children face. The pendulum has swung too far in favor of the ultra-rich at the expense of the working poor. Seeing the difference $100 bills make in their lives just makes vividly clear how urgently justice — and our success as a nation — demand we get that pendulum swinging back toward shared prosperity. Even if it means corporations and billionaires have to pay income tax at rates similar to what you and I pay. BONUS The Boys, by Ron and Clint Howard. I never watched either the Andy Griffith Show nor Gentle Ben, but what a warm, absorbing story their child stars, now 67 and 62, tell.
The Glass Just Might Be Half Full December 27, 2021December 27, 2021 Biden’s Economic Performance Has Proved Unbeatable No first-year president going back to Carter comes close to matching the current White House occupant’s No. 1 or No. 2 ranking in each of 10 key measures. Ok? There’s loads more to be done — like somehow breaking the spell of those who’ve been made to believe the Earth is flat, Covid is a hoax, and Trump won — but . . . U.S. financial markets are outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century, and with good reason: America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion. Biden Won Big With a Bad Hand Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. By George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum . . . Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021: $1,400-per-person direct payments, $350 billion in aid to state and local governments, an extension of supplemental unemployment-insurance benefits and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. He signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. He signed some 75 executive orders, many of them advancing liberal immigration goals. He’s also won confirmation for some 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan, and twice as many as Donald Trump confirmed in his first year with a 54-vote Senate majority. . . . Perhaps it’s not the nature of Democrats to appreciate the glass half full. But half full it is. The Democrats have a year remaining in the present Congress. That’s too little time to waste on recrimination, but time enough to secure voting rights, to accelerate the shift to carbon-zero fuels, and to complete and publish the investigation into the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. A rebuff is not a retreat. It’s a sign to proceed in a different direction. Have a great week!
Easier to Worship Than To Emulate December 24, 2021December 23, 2021 There’s so much to love about Christmas. And about each family’s traditions. Ours involved my father down in the cellar each Christmas Eve trying to get the strings of lights to work as we decorated the tree upstairs; and my mother writing rhymes to go with each gift she and Dad wrapped after the tree was done (the best one ever!), after my brother and I had gone to sleep — tiny literary works as filled with love and amusement as they were devoid of art. (Not that I’m anyone to judge a poetry contest.) None of us believed in a literal Santa Claus, just as none of us believed in a literal God . . . but we sure believed in the spirit of Christmas, and in the spirit of that very special sermon, and — switching temples for a second — in the spirit of tikkun olam. So the safest thing is probably to leave it at that, giving the last word, as I usually do, to Tiny Tim. Merry Christmas! For those not easily offended, though . . . scroll down scroll down scroll down . . . I thought I would share the Christmas essay that my classmate Stephen Mo Hannan sent out this week. (Mo was nominated for a Tony for his role in creating CATS . . . played opposite Kevin Kline in THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE . . . and starred as Captain Hook opposite Cathy Rigby. He co-authored and starred as Al Jolson in off-Broadway’s JOLSON & COMPANY, a performance that blew me away.) Some of what follows flies over my head, but the fourth graph deserves a highlight (mine, not Mo’s). “Easier to worship than to emulate,” indeed. “Who’s That Baby?” December is off and running, darkness extending while Nativity scenes proliferate. Despite being raised Jewish (Orthodox, even), I’ll soon join an interfaith crowd of medieval music lovers for a concert of Christmas hymns, praising Mary the Virgin and at her breast the Holy Child who came to save the world. In a Park Avenue church, no less. I will bring my customary questions: Why does the world need to be saved, and Who’s that kid, really? COVID currently demonstrates something the world needs to be saved from, but not why, nor why that celebrated baby is part of the saving. Since childhood, I’ve viewed the recurrent annual ritual with an outsider’s curiosity, ultimately reducible to What’s all this really about? Above all, I remain mystified by how Bible stories inspired so many centuries of unquestionably great art and music in Christian Europe despite kinship with so troubling and, to me, bizarre a belief system. There’s some truth in it somewhere, I have to assume, right? Some powerful grasp of human psychology at the heart of a doctrine of sin and salvation which also includes a radiant mother and a clueless baby smelling wet straw and animal dung in a hovel. A grasp two thousand years old, somehow encompassing love and its fragile reach in this world. Of course I realize that the baby doesn’t say a word about either sin or salvation, but blink and he turns into a grown man preaching a radical slant on traditional Judaism in an Eastern Mediterranean province of the Roman Empire. We are expected to assume he is the same as the aforementioned baby in Bethlehem because they have the same name. But we’re free to imagine whatever we like about his interim adolescence, except that he ever got an erection or did any- thing to relieve it. Thus he retains the purity of the newborn, but as an adult rabbi he begins to advocate a different, more ample take on what purity might be. Purity might be a cultivated psychological state akin to mental clarity, to serenity, a self-conception freed from anxiety or resentment. He refers to it as the Kingdom of Heaven, or of his Father, but to think of it as a place with a spatial dimension misses the actuality. No compass can find it, above or below. He defines it by its key attribute, the impulse to love: to recognize oneself in others. He repeatedly points out how much more whole it makes you feel. How kindness improves living. He persists in advocating for this Kingdom, via an inner experience that anyone can access, a claim he makes despite much evidence to the contrary. Pharisees of his time (and our own) could cite the widespread human failure to access this so-called Kingdom, proving that only strict obedience to fixed rules will curb our tendency to malevolence. Can this failure have some bearing on the need to be saved? If we all remained as innocent as baby Jesus—or any baby, come to think of it—a savior wouldn’t be necessary. There would be no contempt, no deception, no malice to relieve. But here they are, worldwide, and the more they prevail, the more an interior nagging tells us that relief is necessary. Grownup Jesus points the way. Turns out it’s ourselves we need to be saved from, our fixation on a fallen world marred by human weakness (usually that of others). Jesus invites us to see the world differently, using the faculty of imagination. To examine the possibility that our life could have gone another way, or maybe still could. To allow that we could have done something, if not everything, better. Glimpses of a best self we could have tried more persistently to express. As imagined by Grownup Jesus the Zen master. To admit error is one thing, but the choices awaiting us when guilt interferes are two. We can heed either the Ego or Whatever reaches beyond it. Guilt being a sorrow that gnaws at our attention, we can on one hand choose to reflect on our mistakes, seeking to understand and transcend them, and eventually put into practice the attitudes and behaviors Grownup Jesus promotes. Ego, on the other hand, prefers the transactional option of expiation. Reflection requires Ego itself to step aside and be seen for what it is: a skillful navigator, but also the mastermind of contempt, deception and malice. Unfortunately, expiation, by whatever deal Ego contrives, seldom lasts beyond the inevitable return of whatever fault it was supposed to expiate. Reflection, though more effective, takes more time, in fact is a lifetime effort. Ironically, without death there’s no need for reflection and Ego could get away with murder. Never wasting time on regret, it would replace benevolence with unchecked self-gratification. The worst features we see in babies, without the redeeming helpless innocence. It’s the apprehension of death, a unique gift of our species, that checks Ego’s onslaught. This supreme mental facilitator, seemingly in charge of all our choices and explanations, at a significant point in its existence confronts its inevitable end. The helplessness, no longer innocent, of utter disappearance. The fragility of the entire enterprise. The electrifying recognition of mortality shocks us beyond the loss of innocence. A warning siren of accident, a guarantee of extinction, the tyranny of fear, in legendary terms the expulsion from the Garden (with a Father more vengeful than the radical rabbi imagined). Worse, shared throughout a population, the dread of death fosters attitudes and behaviors at extreme odds with the instructions of Grownup Jesus. A frightening, intimidating world that, like the person who imagines it, needs to be saved. And it’s Death’s fault! The irony of Christianity is how it morphed from its origins by exalting the guide above the guidance. In circles where the modification of thought and conduct at the heart of his doctrine seems too strenuous to go viral, Jesus gets transformed into the barely human symbol of love and goodness, our designated driver to the afterlife, easier to worship than to emulate. His ego, if he had one, would be having the last laugh at all the lip service. All the daily dying souls who confront death and dodge punishment merely by affirming belief, praying double hard to the instructor they should have just listened to when they were alive. But fear not, Christmas is coming and that baby is back. Despite knowing he ended up nailed to a cross, we rejoice in his birthday. This baby is said to be special because he has God for a father, but don’t they all, if you construe God as being whatever it is that keeps perpetuating life in forms both male and female. Furthermore, this baby is said to possess magical godlike powers, chief among them the ability to cleanse the sins of persons existing many centuries after the baby has gone. There is some evidence for this, which, like all magic, is part trick, part genuine astonishment. The trick part is to reinforce the concept of sin as a coordinate of guilt. If enough people make a prison of their mistakes, they can be collectively convinced that a prison of still greater torment awaits after death, unless they make the “right” choices. Unfortunately, the fear this concept generates tends to favor the wrong choices, which in turn generate more threats of torment and so on. Round and round the cycle goes, but once a year when the world is darkest we stop and look toward light returning. In this world of straw and dung where humans misbehave individually and collectively with equal vehemence, behold! One look at this baby revives the dormant innocence we thought was lost. We come into this world just the way that baby does, blameless. We contain the same miracle. Sin is a myth. Heaven is real. That’s the astonishment. Baby Jesus arrives to save the world by freeing us from the fear of death. Not by swapping cultish adherence in exchange for a proposed post-terrestrial immortality, but by looking at the world fearlessly, lovingly, with sustained wonder and welcome. Without words the baby invites us into a mode of perception that decades later Grownup Jesus among many others will elucidate for the ages. And that baby is perpetual. © Stephen Mo Hanan Amen.
Five Minutes Not To Be Missed December 22, 2021 Amy Jo Hutchinson’s perspective . . . . . . as the nation considers how much is too much to tax corporations and the wealthy . . . . . . how much is too much child assistance to offer the working poor . . . . . . how much is too much to raise the minimum wage . . . . . . and so on. (Thanks, Robert Hubbell, for boosting this.)
SNL’s Christmas Show December 21, 2021December 20, 2021 West Virginians are more reliant on government handouts (if you want to characterize them that way, which I normally wouldn’t, but as Republicans like to do) than the citizens of any other state. Maybe Senator Manchin will find a way to explain to his constituents why continuing to get this help, so they can feed their kids — and perhaps getting even more of it — is something to favor, not scuttle. And because he cares about the deficit, maybe he should drop his resistance to taxing the ultra-rich, many of whom pay little or no federal income tax. Speaking of which, from Facebook: For more on Senator Manchin’s constituents: Sen. Joe Manchin’s position on Build Back Better reflects the reality of West Virginia politics. The last line is hopeful. Part of the Senator’s problem is an apparent lack of concern in West Virginia over the desertification of California, the submergence of Florida and Louisiana, and monster tornados in Kentucky. But at the end of the day, I think it’s a mistake for West Virginians or anyone else to gamble with the habitability of the planet, even if the floods, fire, and whirlwind spare West Virginia at first. So here’s what I found amazing about SNL’s COVID-accommodating Christmas Show this past Saturday: A climate-change sketch re-run from 30 years ago. Thirty years! Tax the rich. Tax carbon. Enjoy a FireBuzz. Have a great day.
Read It And Weep December 20, 2021December 19, 2021 You know the expression, “fraying my last nerve?” The happy gene is not a nerve — it’s a gene — but Joe Manchin is fraying mine. I mean really: how tragic. Not least for the people of West Virginia, who need the Build Back Better investment more than just about anybody. Only four states rival West Virginia in child poverty. And their own senator won’t let them have it? Won’t tax the rich a little to cut the cost of child care? To cut the cost of insulin? To help the elderly poor get hearing aids? To deal with the climate crisis? To give the working poor a boost? Read this extraordinary White House statement. I like to think Manchin will reconsider and that compromises will be reached, first on Build Back Better and then, even more important, on voter protection. They just HAVE to be . . . . . . because: The Autocrats Are Winning. (The Anne Applebaum piece I linked to last week.) Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun. (The Bart Gellman piece.) And . . . How Civil Wars Start. (Just out. A must-read conclusion to this trilogy.) U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.” Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war (six points in three years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter writes. “A country standing on this threshold — as America is now, at +5 — can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.” Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report last month. “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said. And a new survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17 percent of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39 percent favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively. It’s not a long piece — and so worth reading in full. As is that White House statement on Manchin. I think we will get through all this. At the end of the day, we have so much common ground. But talk about a cliffhanger. Have a great week!
Fifteen Minutes of Your Weekend December 17, 2021 I am embarrassed not to have read — and shared — Anne Applebaum’s story last month: The Bad Guys Are Winning. If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. And what a story she tells. This one is must read. Have a great weekend!
There’s Good News. You May Need A Drink Anway. December 16, 2021December 15, 2021 I hope you have a FireBuzz handy, because . . . . . . while the Omicron variant may wind up no more threatening than the ordinary flu — have you gotten your flu shot yet? have you gotten your COVID booster? . . . . . . Log4j is here. Security pros say it’s one of the worst computer vulnerabilities they’ve ever seen. They say state-backed Chinese and Iranian hackers and rogue cryptocurrency miners have already seized on it. The Department of Homeland Security is sounding a dire alarm, ordering federal agencies to urgently eliminate the bug because it’s so easily exploitable — and telling those with public-facing networks to put up firewalls if they can’t be sure. The affected software is small and often undocumented. Detected in an extensively used utility called Log4j, the flaw lets internet-based attackers easily seize control of everything from industrial control systems to web servers and consumer electronics. Simply identifying which systems use the utility is a prodigious challenge; it is often hidden under layers of other software. The top U.S. cybersecurity defense official, Jen Easterly, deemed the flaw “one of the most serious I’ve seen in my entire career, if not the most serious” in a call Monday with state and local officials and partners in the private sector. Publicly disclosed last Thursday, it’s catnip for cybercriminals and digital spies because it allows easy, password-free entry. . . . But while we have our drink in hand, let’s also toast to the new Pfizer pill. Between that and the booster, can we all begin to exhale? Literally? And there’s other good news. We rescued the American economy (how quickly we take that for granted) . . . we’ve finally set out to revitalize the nation’s physical infrastructure (decades overdue) . . . we’re about to invest in our social infrastructure in a landmark, game-changing way . . . we’ve rejoined the community of nations that oppose autocracy and torture . . . we’ve restored competence and integrity to the top ranks of the federal government. These are not small things. And this week, we carved out a filibuster exception to raise the debt ceiling past the mid-term elections . . . . . . amid growing pressure to do the same for voting rights. Watch the magnificent Senator Warnock making that case. The urgency of this cannot be overstated. We are this close to losing our democracy and with it, the rule of law. If you doubt that, consider that in the face of Mark Meadows’ clear contempt of Congress, only two Republican House members, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, voted to hold him in contempt. The rest concluded that — although he had been subpoenaed and blew it off — that was okay. He was above the law. Above the law, too, in their view, is their leader, who, they pretend to believe, won re-election by a landslide, as he continues to claim, and as most Republican voters have been misled to believe — and as not a single judge, including his own appointees, has affirmed. For the first time since 1812, the Capitol was breached. For the first time since 1832, a former member of Congress was found in contempt of Congress. For the first time since our nation’s founding, a defeated president has rejected the peaceful transfer of power that defines democracy . . . and that up until this last election, had for more than two centuries been a model for the world. Yes, it was a coup attempt. And it remains underway: TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN. January 6 was practice. We need to get this right. We haven’t got much time. (Same with climate: but there’s only so much one can be alarmed about in a single column. Come back tomorrow.)