Those climate models…

Finding out what's in the black box!

I often wonder why the global warming doom-gloom-soothsayers have so much traction in the world.  Like right wing conservatives, they like to claim that they are victimized by a hostile establishment press, but the NYTimes, a pillar of the establishment, is certainly with them.  Check out the 230 comments on Andy Revkins DotEarth blog regarding the recent email disclosures from the CRU.  The Editors’ Selections, with the purpose of

…highlighting the most interesting and thoughtful comments representing a range of views.

includes 4 posts, all firmly in the camp of “How dare they publish this!  This is just normal science. Face it, global warming is a fact!!” So much for a range of views…but no matter.

But why do intelligent and scientifically literate people, including some who are quite reasonable, e.g., Andy Revkin, feel so confident that the AGW hypothesis has been established beyond doubt?  Frequently – check out those Selections – references are made to mountains, avalanches, piles…etc. of data that prove the point.  I think something is missing here:  I think it is the global circulation models (GCM) run on super computers that clinch it.  But there is very little peeking into those models – they are essentially a black box for most people:  numbers go in, Apocalypse comes out!

Without the models, there would be no terrifying scenarios, disturbing graphs showing steeply rising temperatures over decades to come, no tipping point doomsday model runs.  There would be some hard data (CO2 rising), a mountain of ice core, satellite, and surface data from which some would infer a clear trend, correlation, and causal mechanism;  there would be an interesting hypothesis about positive feedback amplifying the otherwise manageable temperature rise that might be caused by CO2 increases and that might or might not happen; there would be the same endless scientific haggling and argument over the way the numbers are handled by statistical routines and whether this or that presentation of the data is appropriate and meaningful; there would be no consensus.  The advocates of AGW would be a determined and inventive bunch, but they would be hard pressed to demonstrate that the rest of the world should abandon the null-hypothesis, i.e., climate and CO2 have always fluctuated- what’s so different now? -  and adopt their hypothesis.  Computer models change all that.

The GCMs give the AGW crowd the cover to say that they can predict (not with certainty, of course…) the future trend of the climate.  It gives them the supposed justification for stating that they have uncovered the “forcing function” that precisely quantifies the impact of CO2 concentrations on the climate.  It provides them with a rationale for assserting that their understanding of feedback mechanisms is corrrect and that their predictions are reliable.  This role of computer models is not often examined, rarely questioned, certainly not in the popular press.

It’s worth taking a look at the writing of Daniel Botkin, a scientist who was present at the creation of computer modeling in ecology, and who has a lot to say on the role of models in scientific investigations.  His basic point is that models are valuable tools for understanding a natural system, for trying out ideas of how changes in one thing may affect another, but they are not very good for making predictions.  His essay, Science and Soothsaying, is a good starting point.

Another critical view of computer modeling is the Pilkey’s book Useless Arithmetic.  Orin Pilkey (not to be confused with the climate scientists father and son, Pielke Sr. and Pielke Jr., also with a jaundiced view of modelers’ work) is most known for his controversy with the US Army Corps over its penchant for pouring millions of dollars into pouring sand on eroding beaches.  These wasteful projects are often supported by very impressive computer modeling.

In thinking about this topic, I keep returning to a book published almost twenty years ago, Ice Time.  In its chapter, The Machine’s Eye, the author makes the point that the study of climate had become, in large part, the study of climate models.   He traces the rise of supercomputing in the investigation of climate, and notes that it has become “big business.”   The author is relatively uncritical of the use of the models, but he focuses more on their use to understand the mechanics of the climate system rather than to predict the future.  The chapter is the only extended discussion in layman terms that I have ever seen of just what computer models of the climate do, and how they are put together.  For that, it remains a very useful discussion.

Climate-gate?

Newton/Schmidt

It was only a matter of time before the controversy over global warming, political and ideological as it is, should generate a scandal of its very own.  Can we say that day has arrived with the recent release of private emails from the Climate Research Unit in the UK?  Andy Revkin, has a story about it on the front page of the NY Times.

Beyond the dueling news-bytes (“will backfire on the skeptics…shows the integrity of the scientists” vs. “not a smoking gun – it’s a mushroom cloud!”) is the real story, in the details that will no doubt be publicized as people go through the tremendous cache of documents.  As one pro-AGW scientist rightly said, it “will be great material for historians.”

Note:  Thanks to one commenter on Revkin’s blog who pointed to this blog that traces one controversy through the emails – very illuminating.  Too bad we have to get this stuff from right-wing fans of George Bush, but facts are facts.  Certainly, Revkin is not tracing the threads in this stuff.

The advocates of the AGW point of view often like to associate themselves with the greats of scientific history – Newton, Darwin, Einstein – and to claim that their critics are destined for history’s dustbin along with the foolish people who refused to accept the validity of these scientists’ greatest work.  Along these lines, Gavin Schmidt, at RealClimate.org defends the tone of the email exchanges – often rude and quite impolite about critics – by saying

Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him.

Well, Feynman was quite a character, and could be quite short with others, but as far as I know, he had a deep understanding of and commitment to the scientific process, and the free-wheeling openess and criticism it requires.  Newtown, on the other hand, towering genius that he was, had a sense of self-worth approaching the delusional, and he was an absolutely arrogant S.O.B.  His efforts to scuttle the reputations of competitors, to suppress their work, his endless litigations to quash recognition for others, and his generally secretive behavior did nothing to advance the cause of science, and may have hindered it temporarily in some areas.  Great scientist, but not quite a role model for today.

My guess is that nothing much regarding the science will be found in these files that hasn’t been pointed out already by detail-oriented critics of the AGW position.  Focusing on the “gotcha lines,” such as one writer’s use of the word “trick” to describe another scientist’s success at smoothing out a discrepancy in the data is fun for bloggers, but is irrelevant.  Practitioners of all kinds have  informal ways of talking about what they do to save time and keystrokes.  Outright fraud is not likely to be discovered, I think.

What is clear, however, is that the scientists working to support the AGW point of view don’t seem to care about openess and transparency, they comprise a rather closed community of researchers with contempt for those who disagree, and they are willing to do what they can to cook the peer review process in their favor (check out this email at the searchable online database of the emails), not the least by withholding information, because, after all, they know they’re right and the fate of the world depends on it.  This undermines their credibility and it should be publicized as such.  The first commenter on Revkin’s blog sums it up nicely, see below.

The Editor’s Selections, highlighted comments that the Times considers especially thoughtful and valuable, and supposedly representing a range of views, so far includes only one from an academic specializing in the  sociology of science who pooh-poohs the whole thing.  Notably, he concludes his dismissal with the familiar claim that the theory of AGW is beyond dispute.

Raven – no. 1 comment on A. Revkin’s blog, DotEarth

Canada

November 20th, 2009

8:22 pm

The ‘privacy/illegal activity’ argument is ultimately a partisan one and therefore irrelevant. If someone believes such disclosures help whatever political position they have then they will argue the public good trumps the wrong. If the disclosures hurt their position they will argue for privacy to be respected.

Most of the people protesting privacy violations today would be gladly ignore such concerns if the email exchanges were between executives at oil companies.

I think the media needs to focus on the bits that do undermine the integrity of the scientific establishment. Specifically the attempts to manipulate the peer review process and the willingness to delete data in order to prevent it from be analyzed by ‘unfriendies’.

Frankly, I do not see anyone can seriously argue that the peer reviewed scientific literature is an unbiased source of information on climate change at this time and that revelation has huge implications for public policy.

How safe is safe enough?

  

We don’t do very well at dealing with risk and uncertainty. Maybe because it’s so darn scary!  Risk means danger, and uncertainty only adds to our fear, even if the risk, as a quantitative value, is very small!  Here we have an example of small risks attacked with big solutions that cost lots of money!

The marvelous water supply system of New York City supplies some of the best tasting and safest drinking water in the world to nine million people, mostly in the city’s five boroughs.  It directs nearly 1.5 billion gallons per day (bgd) from a reservoirs system in upstate New York,  90% of which from the Catskill-Delaware systems about 90 miles from Manhattan.  The City is now spending approximately $3 billion to build an ultraviolet disinfection plant for the water supply, and to build a cover over the Hillview Reservoir, one of the last holding points for the supply.  That’s a lot of money, even in NYC!  What are we getting for it?

Except for the 10% from the East-of-Hudson reservoirs just north of the city, the water is unfiltered.  It is of such high quality, and spends so much time in enormous reservoirs, that it does not require cleaning.  Cities that draw their water from the ground or from rivers, gaaaggg!, must carefully filter the water.  The water is disinfected with chlorine to kill harmful bugs (pathogens), like the ones that used to cause cholera and typhus epidemics.  The water is safe!  Why the UV plant?

With the advance of public health science, new “disease vectors” have been identified.  In water supply, the latest are cryptosporidium and giardia, two very tiny critters that can cause intestinal disorders in humans, and if the victims have compromised immune systems, possibly lead to death.  These bugs are not killed by chlorine, but people can protect themselves by drinking boiled water.  They are very rare in NYC water.  There has never been a documented outbreak of any public health risk in NYC due to these bugs.  They can be serious risk in many small and improperly run water suppliers, especially those in agricultural areas, where farm animals produce lots of manure with the bugs that may get washed into water supply areas.  UV sterilizes the tiny bugs, preventing them from reproducing, which is as good as killing them.  Nobody has found a good way to kill them, other than boiling them, which is obviously impractical for 1.5 bgd.

So, we are spending $1.4 billion on a UV plant to eliminate a bug that is rare and impossible to monitor, which has never caused a disease outbreak in NYC, and from which the few at higher risk can protect themselves by drinking boiled water?  There was a serious outbreak about ten years ago in Milwaukee, but that system had a malfunctioning filter (which would normally capture the bugs) and happened during an extreme weather event that would not have a similar effect on NYC’s huge system.  In addition, NYC has a strict watershed protection program in place, which is why the US EPA does not require it to filter most of its water. 

Well, if you were at risk, you would certainly want to have that UV plant online!  But then, looking at it from the public health perspective, $1.4 billion would buy an awful lot of work in preventing TB, AIDS, veneral disease, and other sourges that are killing people now.  What’s the cost-benefit?

The story with the cover is much the same.  Birds pooped in the reservoir, the presence of E coli bacteria spiked, the EPA noticed it in the report and ordered a cover.  The problem was pretty much eliminated with other programs to frighten away and discourage birds, change the way water was withdrawn, etc, but the ruling was kept in place.  No exceptions.  $1.6 billion to build a cover for a reservoir that will not appreciable improve the lives of anyone but engineers and contractors working on it. 

Ahhh…but we can all breathe so much easier, knowing that at least the risk has been reduced to nearly zero!

Sugar tapping into the bit-stream

Sometimes in my job, I feel like I’m in a bad science fiction movie.  The one in which a technocrat is speaking to a well-heeled audience about some new computer gismo that is going to change all of our lives – for the better – while disaster looms outside…

I attended a conference today, in the grand interior rotunda of a university library, about the use of  “geospatial” technology – that’s my field, maps, GIS, location data,  etc. - and disaster preparedness planning.  One fellow, a doctor and a tireless worker in various international NGO’s, talked about all the great, whiz-bang Web locational stuff that is helping him and his peers “save some lives.”  I’ve no complaint with that!

He talked about a sugar tapper in the rainforest of Indonesia, a bona fide member of a head-hunting tribe, who has the right to tap twelve trees in this jungle, and how he was able to double his income once he received some global positioning (GPS) tools.  Since the same person spoke about how local people serve as guides to internationals because only they can find their way around the forest they have lived in all their lives, I wondered why GPS made a difference to this guy.  Born and raised to the area, wouldn’t he have all sorts of low-tech, traditional ways of keeping track of where his trees are and when it was time to visit them to collect sugar?  Isn’t that the sort of indigenous knowledge we techno-nerds of the West are always rhapsodizing about when we get bored with our toys?  I asked exactly that question, and the answer was simple.

The tapper had no problem finding his trees and organizing his work, but by selling his sugar as Certified Organic, he was able to abandon smuggling as a livelihood and enter the global market for “green” agriculture.  In order to gain access to this market, he had to produce lots of paperwork and keep detailed records, and for this, GPS, digital maps, spreadsheets, and various plug-ins and plug-outs are invaluable.

I am happy this man is able to support himself in this sustainable way, and glad that the local university is involved in helping his community overcome the technical hurdles to entering this market – it seems like a good local development effort on their part.  It is important to keep in mind, however, exactly what problem was being solved.  The farmer had no technical problem running his sugar operation.  The problem was in being accepted into the global network of selling.  How you feel about his success here depends on what you think about globalization, capitalism, organic agriculture, and a lot of other things.  I do get the feeling, though, that in these breathless presentations on the value of hi-tech spatial technology that we are often looking for ways to solve problems that the same technologies have created.

Another speaker, a professor who also runs this outfit, talked about how four or five infrastructure providers are collecting data each day on phone callers:  from where and when they place a call.  These corporations are looking for ways to use this data, “creative business opportunities, or societal-beneficial stuff ” he said.  Presented with this mass of data – the problem – they search for meaning, and create solutions to extract it.   At one point he said that using this data, we can tell who and what we are by virtue of our co-locating.  That is, you know something about people by knowing where they meet and with whom.  Except that this data just tells you where and when pretty much…

One such exercise involved graphing the volume of commuters to the financial district of San Francisco against the Dow Jones.  We see that people tend to go in to the office early when the market isn’t doing too well.  They come in later when the market seems to be trending upwards steadily.  Surprised?  Imagine, you could develop “smart advertising” targeting those people by changing digital ads in real-time on  trains, buses, and billboards! – my idea, BTW, but only in the particulars.  Unusually heavy early traffic going into the city?  Cue the bromo-seltzer and beer ads – it’s going to be a bruiser of a day on the trading floor!

I know that technology has wonderful and humane applications, but stuff like this is enough to make you a Luddite.  Part of the idolatry of the computer, and the relentless drive to draw us all into the web of the International Work (and buy) Machine.

Now, this leaves open only one question:  How do I get the four or five hundred people who visit this blog each day to pay me some money!!  How much would you pay for the privilege?

The Wave

As I posted earlier, I have been venturing into Japanese flower arranging.  The pull of the Japanese minimalist aesthetic is very powerful for me, and I was first introduced to it in college when I took a survey course on Japanese art.  I have thought about it a lot, and I decided to write my professor a thank-you note about it – thirty years late.  It took a bit of doing to locate her – her name has changed – and in searching, I came across a talk she gave about this famous print by Hokusai, “The Great Wave.”  [Complete talk  here:  Totebags, Teeshirts, and Tableware: The Domestication of Hokusai's Great Wave.]

In her talk, she addresses issues of the commercialization of art, mass reproduction of images and commoditization for the consumer economy, cultural appropriation of icons, and the history of japonisme in Western art.  The latter has been known for a century among art scholars as an important influence on Art Nouveau, Impressionism, and other trends, but it was brought to the fore in the public mind with one of Thomas Hoving’s first “blockbuster” exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Among the ironies Professor Guth points out is that in Japan in the 1970s, Hokusai, and the Ukiyo-e genre in which he worked, was not exactly a universally lauded high point of Japanese culture.  Indeed, he was considered a practioner of a rather disreputable art form, and not a member of the high-art pantheon, not the least  because he worked in woodblock prints, a medium intended for popular mass consumption.  Ukiyo-e, the floating world, is the culture of the pleasure district, if not the red light district, and one of his more kinky essays in that direction is shown here:

Imagine this on display in a high-profile exhibit of loan works from Japan during its heyday as the International Bogeyman of the American economy!

Guth takes a broad minded view of the inevitable mixing of art and commerce, tracing the ways in which museums aided the transformation of The Great Wave into one of the most recognizable images of Japanese art today.  She dismisses the attitude of one critic whom she quotes early on as saying that museums must hold the line between art and mass-consumption, accepting the situation of today.  After all, anytime you put a person in front of art, you never know what kind of experience they will have.  An opposing view, whether from the right or the left of the political spectrum, decries the degeneration of cultural capital in favor of profit, spectacle, kitsch…etc., sharing a remarkbly similar lack of confidence in the power of ordinary people to evolve imaginative responses of their own to art works.

I became aware of the ubiquity (highlighted at this blog) of the Hokusai print myself when I noticed the logo of a clothing line with which my son was obsessed during his skateboarding phase.  I don’t think I have seen another example of the appropriation of the image through abstraction.

The Wild Ass’s Skin (Peau de chagrin)

The Wild Ass’s Skin is the weirdest novel by Balzac I’ve read to-date.  It was his second major novel in his vast Human Comedy, and it features several characters who reappear later in the series, albeit not always in a consistent manner. In it, we have Balzac’s pseudo-science, fascination with magic, some romanticism such as I’ve never read in his work, the usual thrilling and cynical dissection of social structures, and sex portrayed with an abandon and explicitness from which he usually refrains.

The premise of the plot is magical:  A down on his luck, impoverished aristocrat, Raphael Valentin, looses his last coin gambling, and resolves on suicide.  To pass the time until an opportune moment arises, he visits a vast antiques shop and meets its strange proprietor.  He is shown a strange piece of leather, an ancient scrap of an ass’s skin, embossed with eastern script.  The skin has the power to grant him his every wish, but each time it does so, it shrinks, and with it, so does the lifespan of Valentin.  Another twist on the old theme of making a deal with the Devil.

The novel also has three parts, and they don’t seem to fit together all that seamlessly.  The first part describes Raphael’s coming into possession of the magical skin and his first orgy; the second is an extended flashback describing his impoverished life while he was in love with a completely heartless and drop-dead gorgeous society woman; and the third describes his agonizing descent to his inevitable end.

At one point, Valentin enlists the help of the greatest scientists in France to see if they can stretch the skin back to its original size, after he has grown fabulously wealthy by its power, and watched horrified as it diminished in size.  The great mechanical engineer gives a discourse on Pascal, motion, and hydrostatic pressure, and then watches stupefied as the skin resists the force of his engines and causes them to explode under the strain.

“Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,” continued the man of science, “there is an abyss confronting human reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell.

A chemist is nonplussed, and can find nothing to make the slightest change in the skin.  At a forge, in a scene that seems a combination of and Joseph Wright and John Martin, the men try to incinerate the hide, but it emerges from the flames cool and untouched.  The scientists have a laugh – the mysteries of the universe never end!  Raphael is not amused.  He visits some doctors to see if they can determine why his life force is ebbing away, but they just argue amongst themselves.

“What is the good of science?” Raphael moaned. “Here is my recovery halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between Dupuytren’s bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe’s prayer…Shall I live? They have no idea. Planchette [the engineer] was more straightforward with me, at any rate, when he said, ‘I do not know.‘”

When Raphael first takes possession of the skin, he wishes to be at a stupendous banquet and orgy – and then he sees the skin shudder and shrink a bit.  Next thing we know, he is whisked to a phenomenal debauch by two friends he stumbles upon in the street.  The tale is one of Balzac’s philosophical studies, and it dissects the psychology and practice of excess and orgies,  depicting them with great realism and in detail.

His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the table sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal banquet was spread–the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the nervous fibres of the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among beautiful women in full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders, with flowers in their hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling eyes, attractively and fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish jacket, which displayed the alluring outlines of her form; one wore the “basquina” of Andalusia, with its wanton grace; here was a half-clad Dian the huntress, there the costume of Mlle. de laValliere, amorous and coy; and all of them alike were given up to the intoxication of the moment.

His only salvation from an early death is to arrange his life with mechanical regularity so that he need never give rise to an utterance of “I wish that…” and so never invoke the power of the skin.  He becomes a recluse.  His faithful servant, fearful that he is wasting away, and minding the doctor’s orders to “keep him interested…” arranges a special treat for him which he at first takes for one of his opiated dreams:

As Raphael’s death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet. The voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women, produced their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires. Delightful music, from unseen players in the next room, drowned the excited tumult in a torrent of harmony–the whole strange vision was complete.

Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman’s white, youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was Aquilina’s. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion like the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a dreadful cry, slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant a blow in the face.

Contrasted with this infernal decadence, there is the scene he encounters when he flees to the mountains, searching for a serene resting place in which to live out his days without desires:

As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right to left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the yellowish or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms of the heather,–everything was either brought into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of all with the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite peaks, and the sky were all faithfully reflected. Everything had a radiance of its own in this delightful picture, from the sparkling mica-stone to the bleached tuft of grass hidden away in the soft shadows; the spotted cow with its glossy hide, the delicate water-plants that hung down over the pool like fringes in a nook whereblue or emerald colored insects were buzzing about, the roots of trees like a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above grotesque faces in the flinty rock surface,–all these things made a harmony for the eye.

Such a romantic, pastoral scene, so unlike Balzac’s usual settings of village interiors or urban apartments.  And in the two locales, he encompasses the twin extremes of Romanticism:  the diabolic, and the idyllic.

In the end, Raphael is united with Pauline, who loved him when he was poor, and now that he is rich, has herself come into a fortune.  They live together, planning to be married, and Balzac describes their lives together as one of erotic bliss, although Raphael is doomed.  When Pauline realizes Raphael’s situation, she resolves to kill herself so that they can die together:  there is a frenzied embrace, he bites her breast violently! – is it consummated? .. and they die.

Not surprising that Balzac loved the novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

Antidote

Is this the way out of that mess of phantastic dreams I fall into so often?  I am taking a class in Ikebana, Japanese flower arranging.  The allure of its simplicity and focus on natural beauty is very powerful.  These lines from Wikipedia sum it up well:

More than simply putting flowers in a container, ikebana is a disciplined art form in which nature and humanity are brought together. Contrary to the idea of floral arrangement as a collection of particolored or multicolored arrangement of blooms, ikebana often emphasizes other areas of the plant, such as its stems and leaves, and draws emphasis towards shape, line, and form.

The artist’s intention behind each arrangement is shown through a piece’s color combinations, natural shapes, graceful lines, and the usually implied meaning of the arrangement.

Another aspect present in ikebana is its employment of minimalism. That is, an arrangement may consist of only a minimal number of blooms interspersed among stalks and leaves.

In the realm of myth…

…we are everywhere at home.

Still riffing…

… on the sphinx…

Google-herd

Should Google-herd be a new word in our lexicon?

Citysense is an innovative mobile application for real-time nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody going right now?”

…and why should we follow them..?

File this under the expanding portfolio of hi-tech computer applications intended to capture your money.  GIS cum position (al) technology, like GPS, is now a growing element in marketing.  Companies like this collect historical and current data on where people have gone, process it according to the latest market segmentation categories, and try to sell the service to other companies and us, the individual consumers.  Making it easier for us to spend our money, find those things we really want, find the people who are just like us!

Is this bad?  No.  Is it evil?  No.  It’s just business, and it’s pretty dumb. What gets me is the breathless tone of the selling that makes it sound like it’s something more than new technology being used to make a standard selling tool sexy. Gads, I hate hearing marketing stuff described as sexy. What does that say about our culture?

Yep, just file this under, International Work Machine, crank, gripe, and complain.

Obama electric!

I had one of my occasional dips into the democratic political process today – I attended a rally in Newark, NJ for the reelection of Jon Corzine as governor of New Jersey, with Loretta Weingberg, from my town, as Lieutenant Governor.  The wait outside was tedious, but we got to the head of the line with three lovely young ladies we happened to meet, all of them dressed to the nines, and with VIP tickets.

Eventually, we got in, and we watched the entertainment while we waited.  We ended up sitting next to the girls, all of whom are from Kenya it turns out.  Loretta, Cory, and Jon gave their stump speeches, and then the main attraction was on -  Barak Obama.  The crowd went crazy – it was electric!  I had to laugh when he walked out – amazing to see him in the flesh rather than as a flickering image of a political celebrity.  We were only 150 feet away at the most.

He gave a good speech – a mixture of popular politics with some wit and humor.  He manages to weave in important ideas in a way that makes them seem popular, not something for only an elite.  He commented on how Corzine (and he) are mopping up a mess left by the previous administration, and that they don’t really mind doing that, except why do they (the Republicans) have to stand around and say things like:

“Uh, can you mop faster?  You’re not holding that mop right.  Why do you have to use a socialist mop?”  I thought that last bit was a good dig at the GOP, quite witty for an American political speech.

Dressed to the nines!

How much longer?

Working the crowd

Still waiting.

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark

Entertainment

The Media watch

Jon Corzine, Gov. NJ

Obama

Making a point.

Vote for Jon!

Gov, Lt. Gov, Prez

As Obama was led out, people formed a crush to shake his hand or just touch him.  One big fellow was walking towards us, his hand held out – “I shook his hand, I shook the brother’s hand!  Amazing!” – probably never so excited since Christmas morning as a little boy.  My wife shook his hand, the hand that shook the hand …

Fiasco II – The horror, the horror…

I finished Zola’s novel The Debacle, and I feel as if I barely survived.  The book is absolutely harrowing in its depiction of the horror, gore, and sheer terror of war.  The graphic detail – heads blown off, entrails flying, hideous and ghoulish atrocities – are the sort of thing we expect in movies and books about war today, but in the 1890s?  I wonder if this marked a first.

Zola, of course, was known for doing his research, and he visited locations, interviewed scores of participants, and reviewed the literature.  In many ways, the book reads as an historical chronicle as much as a novel.  But it soars, or descends, into great, infernal poetry in scenes such as the days immediately after the disastrous defeats, when Jean and Maurice, solid peasant and educated bourgeois, fight for life in the great charnel house and prison that the countryside has become inside the Prussian encriclement.  The apocalypse seems to have arrived – corpses exploding and stinking, the river choked with dead men and animals, and wild herds of lost and starving cavalry horses charging madly about, destroying everything in their path in a frenzy of hunger and madness.

The deadly bitterness of occupation and civil strife are depicted as well. The murderous fury of the French against the collaborators recalls scenes I dimly remember from Marcel Ophul’s film, The Sorrow and the Pity.  (I went to see that with my parents as a kid – hardly understood any of it – but boy, did it make an impression!)  The bloodlust rises to epic stature as one woman conspires to murder the father of her child, watching as the guerillas truss him up, slit his throat, and bleed him dead like a great pig.

At the end, Maurice, now a crazed and fanatical communard, and Jean, fighting with the forces of reaction, simply because he wants everything to be gotten back in order so he can return to the land, meet again in a Paris that is recapitulating the Fall of Babylon.  An orgy of destruction, madness, and atrocious murderous rage is burning itself out.  Zola was a liberal who detested left-wing revolutionaries.  He tries to fathom in Maurice how an educated man could throw his lot in with such people as a result of the deep humiliation of the war, the frantic desire to destroy everything in the hope that something better will replace it, and the end-game of months of war, besiegement, hunger, and isolation:

Just previous to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him?

…

And so Maurice went on leading an idle, vagabondish sort of life, in a state of constant feverish agitation. He had ceased to be tormented by hunger; he devoured the first white bread he got with infinite gusto; but the city was a prison still: German guards were posted at the gates, and no one was allowed to pass them until he had been made to give an account of himself. There had been no resumption of social life as yet; industry and trade were at a standstill; the people lived from day to day, watching to see what would happen next, doing nothing, simply vegetating in the bright sunshine of the spring that was now coming on apace. During the siege there had been the military service to occupy men’s minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical. He did as others did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little bedroom, and looking out over the city, he would still beguile himself with dreams of victory; would tell himself that France and the Republic might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace remained unsigned.

from the Project Gutenberg text:  The Downfall

Karl Marx, and revolutionaries everywhere, revered the Commune, but the picture that Zola paints of it is of a disorganized, opportunistic, delusional, and fanatical group of die-hards who reduced the city of Paris to ashes.  Not that he thinks well of the forces of reaction either.  Ultimately, they serve the masters who brought on the entire debacle, by starting the war with Prussia.

In the end, France will have to be rebuilt, born anew, as in his great novel Germinal, through the simple and unstoppable drive to live and flourish in peace that Jean, the simple peasant, represents.

Everywhere at home??

One of these days, I’m going to visit the strange Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo, Italy. If I go, will I be greeted and led to the Hell’s Mouth by a sultry nymph with delightful long legs like this one?  Will my wife, and all my family obligations and history melt away, my middle age fly off to leave me youthful and desirable, my heightened emotions and vigor to be quenched in a unique, bizarre, erotic embrace within some weird grotto?

Not likely…This renaissance (Mannerist) oddity is nicely photographed and discussed in this fine book which I own.  I’ve known about the park for a very long time, but it seems that it was forgotten by Europe for centuries, until being rediscovered and somewhat restored by the efforts of Salvidor Dali and Mario Praz.  Popularity followed, and now it’s a “family destination” for tourists.

The image is from a catalog for Schneider’s of Austria, a clothing manufacturer, that was all shot in the garden.  What is going on here?  Their slogan is “Everywhere at home.”  This reminds me of the classic formulations of kitsch consciousness, i.e., that everywhere kitsch-man goes, everywhere he looks, he seems himself.  Thus, he is never open to new, genuine, experience.  Do I believe this?  Ich bin ein kitschmensch!

Fashion advertisement, and in this case, a pretty high-end, classy example of it, trades on all sorts of moods, half-understood cultural allusions, snobbisms, innovations, cultural quotes, etc. to endow the product, the look, with a feeling, a cachet.  Moody, hip, sophisticated, mannered, mysterious, cultured, refined and esoteric, sooo European…These are a few of the things this catalog has to say about Schneider’s clothes.  And you know what?  I buy it, all of it!  I want that raincoat I saw in Century 21!!  I’m a pretty unremarkable dresser, and I don’t think my appearance turns any heads, but I look at other people’s looks a lot.  Sometimes I become fixated on a woman’s coat, a man’s shoes, a purse, a pair of glasses…okay, it’s probably 80/20 when it comes to the time I spend on women/men – it’s not just fashion that catches my eye.

I’ve never been able to figure out or come to terms with exactly what is going on here.  It feels dreadfully superficial, even childish or stupid in a way.  On the other hand, it feels totally human and natural.  Does there have to be a moral evaluation involved?

I told my wife once about an incident when I was twenty years old, and I saw a Panama hat in a window of a shop in Europe during my summer travels there.  The “vision” of that hat stayed with me for days.  On the long train ride, I imagined myself wearing it in all sorts of situations – how it would make me feel all sorts of ways just by being on my head.  (Hats – the mediator of the man-sky interface.) She rolled her eyes.  That’s one reason I married her.  She keeps me somewhat tethered to reality.

Bring on La Maniera. Hail to La dolce vita!