12-18, Tuesday

Weather

We’ve had a couple of chilly mornings and a single cooler than normal afternoon so far this winter. Looking back through NWS data I see we’ve had a total of 2 mornings below freezing so far. Seventy-three afternoons topped 90 this past summer, leading to 4 consecutive months with above average monthly temps and with a December currently 5 degrees above normal, a cool couple of days notwithstanding.

Not a good season for rain, either. We remain half-a-foot below annual averages and our rainy season was equally divided between months with above and below normal rain totals. Warmer and dryer, the opposite of what I prefer.

Weather is a hot topic these days in Florida. The Florida Chamber of Commerce is in a war of words with environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund. They have issued dueling reports on the effect of greenhouse gases on Florida.

The EDF reports that

If Florida and the globe continue business as usual, the report predicts, by 2050 tourism will decline, sea levels will rise 23 inches, insurance and electricity prices will soar and the economic cost to the state will be $92 billion.

”We’re on an escalator that’s headed down,” said Frank Ackerman, one of the report’s authors. “The status quo is not an option that is going to continue.”

while the Chamber of Commerce suggests that

If Florida adopts policies pushed by Gov. Charlie Crist to meet his climate change projections — such as lowering greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2017 and 1990 levels by 2025 — every Florida household could see costs increase 82 percent by 2020.

What’s worse, says the report written by economists at CRA International, ”a massive change in Florida emissions only leads to a small global change,” the report said. “No matter how well policies are designed, there will be a significant overall cost to Florida of meeting the caps.”

Meanwhile, local citizens refuse to believe there is even anything called global warming as seen in this letter to the editor by a well-informed citizen:

Has the Times-Union bought into the global warming myth? It would appear so, as not one fact from climatology scientists refuting this controversy was cited.

Also, the report on the U.N. summit on emissions reduction in Bali was so lacking in facts that it was laughable, if it had not been so serious. Then, I saw that it came from the Los Angeles Times, a bastion of liberal-think.

Yes, ice is melting in the Arctic. It has had ice melting and reforming for thousands of years.

Greenland used to be lush with tropical growth, then it started to freeze over again. Now, it’s melting again.

Real scientists have discovered this fact in core samples of the ice and frozen tundra all over the Arctic.

Where was the report that the Antarctic is in the midst of a growth in ice? There is absolutely no scientific evidence that what is going on in the Arctic is anything but a continuing cycle of heating and cooling caused by the sun and the elliptical angle of Earth to the sun.

If the Arctic points closer to the sun, it will heat up. Likewise, if the Antarctic simultaneously points further away, it will cool.

We have sound evidence that the Earth has cycles of worldwide tropical heat followed by an ice age. Why? The sun pulsates with its heat emissions. It has done so for millions of years. It has nothing to do with man. This phenomenon has been going on long before man appeared on the Earth.

Greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide) existed long before man. Today, they can be measured; .0038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere contains carbon dioxide.

The warmest year on record was in 1983. The warmest this decade was five years ago.

Eighteen top scientists on climatology reported to the Bali conference that the whole issue of global warming being caused by greenhouse gases is junk science. Has that been reported?

Not one shred of evidence points to man as the cause for so-called global warming. This is a worldwide hysteria propagated by people who want to slow the American economy. We should not buy into it.

This letter is especially noteworthy by its consistent application of inaccurate information about global warming and the current discussion of global warming.

Definitely getting too warm for me.

Way Too Warm

Even on Halloween. Way back in October we went to a showing of the original Dracula at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

MOCA faces a park that is quite lovely if you can manage to look past the legions of homeless parked permanently on its benches and grassy areas.

We even met Dracula himself inside MOCA, although he was dressed in a lightweight cloak in deference to the warm weather (the high was 80 on Halloween).

The movie, with a new score by Philip Glass, was great fun. Movies we are used to seeing on TV always look better on the big screen

Goodbye, And Keep Cold

Robert Frost wouldn’t have been happy about a warming earth.

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
And cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call
I’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an axe-
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.

———-Goodbye, and Keep Cold, by Robert Frost, in Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays 

12-17, Monday

Public Schools and Religion

Republicans in Florida continue to push tax-funded vouchers enabling children in public schools to attend private schools on the taxpayers’ ticket. Not satisfied with the McKay Scholarship program and the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program, a school choice advocate and former Governor Bush aide is attempting to convince a Florida tax commission to enable the use of tax dollars to send Florida students to religious schools.

Already we sacrifice more than $50 million of corporate tax dollars to send 16,200 public school students to public schools and more than 17,300 special education students trundled off to private schools at a cost of $119 million. In Florida more than half of all private schools are religious. As our budget continues to erode under the downturn in home sales. The National Governors’ Association reports that

Total year-end balances—ending balances and the amounts in budget stabilization funds—are a critical tool states use to balance their budgets during downturns. For fiscal 2008, however, the report shows an expected decline. Total balances in fiscal 2006 were $69 billion—a very healthy 11.5 percent of expenditures; in fiscal 2007 total balances were $62.7 billion—or 9.6 percent of expenditures. In fiscal 2008, balances are projected to decline to $47 billion—or 6.9 percent of expenditures.

The NGA’s Fiscal Survey of the States charts the downturn in state revenues and expenditures but Florida chooses to amplify this loss by modifying property tax rules that reduces revenue by $2.2 billion this year and an estimated $4.2 billion in 2010-11. This reduction on top of the falling revenue. Falling revenue means less money for schools and the property tax changes may cost school districts several billion more over the next several years. Vouchers remove another $170 million. Now Republican choice advocates want to remove even more money from public schools by expanding choice.

Not that people are particularly concerned about religion in schools. The Pew Research Center asked a sample of Americans in 2006 if “liberals had gone too far in keeping religion out of schools and government”. 69% agreed that they had, indeed, gone too far. One-third of respondents believe that the Bible should be the greatest influence on U.S. laws.

Public education sacrificed to political and religious ideology, from my perspective.

Movies We Have Seen

This weekend we saw

I Am Legend. Will Smith is a very likable protagonist in this latest adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel. The director does a remarkable job of creating a vacant Manhattan slowly deteriorating: weeds growing in Times Square, abandoned cars everywhere, skyscrapers devoid of people. Smith wandering around Manhattan managing a life alone with his very personable dog takes up the first third of the movie. The second third develops the suspense of those with whom Smith shares Manhattan and the last third descends into the standard cheap scare Zombie movie.

Something Marian and I have noticed recently: the number of movies with endings where main characters die and the movie transitions to some hopeless future. These movies include

No Country For Old Men based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. A novel focusing on character and fate, the protagonist is murdered in ambiguous circumstances and a primary character is unable to prevent murders of innocents or the obliteration of any sense of decency or order.

The Mist, directed by the director of The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption. The director actually changes the Steven King ending by killing his primary and most sympathetic characters. The movie ends with the protagonist sobbing about the death of his son and the most resourceful characters as the events illustrate that their deaths were completely unnecessary. The director, Frank Darabont, deliberately changed the ending from King’s far more hopeful end to make his movie bleak and hopeless.

Lions for Lambs, a cynical exercise in current events, where political ideology overcomes all inertia as it crawls inevitably towards its own short-term goals

12-10, Monday, Late

Back From Work

The last time I wrote I had just started my part-time job at the local community college.  Now I have been working there for about 2.5 months.  Most of the work I do there now is either with new immigrants trying to learn English and trying to do something about the abysmal state of their computer systems.

Immigrants

We expect to see a flood of immigrants arriving in ports-of-call such as Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, or Tampa.  But northeast Florida is a far cry from those areas. Nevertheless, every day we see refugees from Burma, Albania, Bosnia, all over South America, Scandinavia, Russia, Asia, Morocco, Nigeria, and so many other places.   But they are here and I help get them into the language courses they need at the appropriate skill level.  And then I monitor and test their progress over time.

 All The Others

Besides immigrants I work with new students just starting out or trying to finish high school before beginning college.  Certainly a slice of society with which I have had no experience up till now.  But it is rewarding work, offering the tools necessary to rekindle their academic life and, perhaps, become better skilled and so better paid members of the American workforce.

Jekyll Island

This past weekend Marian and I joined my former workmates for our annual Christmas Party at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel.  We’ve been holding our Christmas parties there for most of the last decade and we’ve gotten to like it an awful lot. The automation staff has diminished over time so the training staff and the automation staff have teamed up for the annual party.  When I joined the automation staff at the end of 1991 we had more than a dozen people at work.  Now there are a total of six.  Soon the staff will diminish to five.

This is what the hotel looks like. A lovely, restored 19th century building originally a club house for the ruling elites of the 19th century robber barons.

Looking from the porte cochere which is in the right-hand corner of the picture above, is the graceful turn of the hotel annex.

  Hidden inside the hotel facade is this courtyard decorated for Christmas.  With the fountain tinkling in the background and the birds singing, it was a lovely place to have a light breakfast on the deck overlooking the courtyard before heading back home.

On Sunday morning Marian took her normal 7.5 mile run and I did my slower 4 mile walk and saw some lovely sights on Jekyll. The island government developed some very nice walking trails where I saw this at sunrise:

The sun was rising in the east as I walked north along the walking path.  This photo doesn’t really do the richness of colors justice but it is quite lovely nonetheless.

On the way back toward the hotel I took a slightly different route where, when turning east toward the rising sun and saw the sun filtered through both the fog and the tree limbs.

A very lovely walk. A wonderful way to begin the day.

More tomorrow.

12-10, Monday (My Birthday)

Well, today I am 58 years old. Marian baked me a cake last night and I opened my presents as well since I am working tonight. 4 books of poetry, a sociological study of current American society, a new album by James Taylor, and a new pair of pajamas. Very nice.

The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines our Prosperity by Robert Kuttner. The title telegraphs the theme of this book, written by the publisher of the liberal magazine The American Prospect. Here is what Publishers Weekly says about this book

As Keynesianism has been surpassed by a resurgent free market ideology, many of the policies, institutions and regulations of the New Deal have been abandoned in favor of a more business-friendly orientation. Kuttner argues that these changes have further enriched the already wealthy at the expense of America’s lower and middle classes, exacerbating inequality and systematically weakening the economy. The controversial American Prospect editor favors a form of soft capitalism, in which the vicissitudes of the market and the risk to which it exposes ordinary Americans are tempered by government intervention—or, as he colorfully puts it, public regulation of the market’s self-cannibalizing tendencies. Bringing a wealth of historical knowledge to bear on the problems of financial regulation, Kuttner compares the causes of the Great Depression and other economic crises to behavior patterns evident in our market system today, with unfavorable conclusions. However, much of the argumentation may be too technical to hold the interest of a nonspecialist for very long. While some of Kuttner’s statistics are dubious and some of his policy recommendations have been thoroughly and universally discredited (e.g., reregulation of the airline industry, bringing the Federal Reserve under presidential control), his book is a useful corrective to more extreme libertarian works.

The theme is very similar to Robert Reich’s new book, Supercapitalism, which describes quite ably the changes in the American economic marketplace over the past 75 years. I am very sympathetic to Reich’s argument. I look forward to reading Kuttner’s book.

Marian also gave me four poetry titles from Copper Canyon Press, one of the most active poetry publishers around today. They are:

Delights & Shadows, by former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Ted Kooser.

Oddly enough, one of his poems is titled Happy Birthday, which describes my own approach to his book:

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Precisely so, I thought.

Also,

Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison, that immensely talented writer of novels and poetry. He takes his tough-guy novel style into his poetry and fashions some remarkable images. Apropos of a birthday he includes the poem

Water

Before I was born I was water.
I thought of this sitting on a blue
chair surrounded by pink, red, white
hollyhocks in the yard in front
of my green studio. There are conclusions
to be drawn but I can’t do it anymore.
Born man, child man, singing man,
dancing man, loving man, old man,
dying man. This is a round river
and we are her fish who become water.

Water is his version of the ashes to ashes trope but given a voice unique to Harrison’s own concerns. And mine too. We exist in this round river slowly becoming what we started as.

Mars Being Red by Marvin Bell. He is a veteran poet, this being his 19th book of poetry, and he writes in a confident style, ranging across a vast array of topics. He is not afraid to confront contemporary political topics but attempts to provide some perspective rather than just allow a shallow shrillness. You can see it in these poems where Bell writes:

…I am, like you, a witness
to the coffins that were Vietnam and Iraq,
to a political machine that came up three lemons…
i am the big ears and the wide eyes
to whom time happened. I lived in stormy weather
writing songs of love because, tell me
if you know, who can help it?

Wow.

The Roads Have Come To An End Now by Rolf Jacobsen. The publication of this book was a labor of love by three translators (Robert Bly, Roger Greenwald and Robert Hedin). They wanted to expose the English-speaking world to this Norwegian poet’s work. And it is wonderful. Jacobsen writes of his wedding day during World War II in Barbed Wire Winter:

Road to the church was blocked with barbed wire.
I remember we clambered over the rail fence of the parsonage.
-Hey, your dress is caught
-no, not there-over there.
We tramped the furrows of an ice-crusted
potato field, up to the minister
who was in his surplice and had
the Scriptures ready.
-Love is a path you must walk, he says. Yes, we said.
But my lord what muddy feet we had!
When we got in bed that night
we cried a dab-both of us. God
knows why.
And then the long life began.

And the book includes a poem about his wife’s death (Jacobsen himself died in 1994), Room 301:
…(Your hand, your small hand.)
The other one they’ve laid on your breast,
curved around a rose. Red on white. A bride
but not mine.
The the time is up. Someone’s waiting…

Lovely. Looks like a very able translation. I look forward to going through all of these books. Thank you, Marian.

I’ll do some more catching up tonight.