The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 34, January 3, 2021: Welcome to the Next Year
Barry Lopez, Lyrical Writer Who Was Likened to Thoreau, Dies at 75, Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, 12/26/20
Barry Lopez, a lyrical writer who steeped himself in Arctic wildernesses, the habitats of wolves and exotic landscapes around the world for award-winning books that explored the kinship of nature and human culture, died on Friday at his home in Eugene, Ore. He was 75…
In a half-century of travel to 80 countries that generated nearly a score of nonfiction and fiction works, including volumes of essays and short stories, Mr. Lopez embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir.
He won the National Book Award (nonfiction) for “Arctic Dreams” (1986), a treatise on his five years with Inuit people and solitude in a land of bitter cold and endless expanses. There he found that howling storms could craft mirages — a hunter stalking a grizzly bear that, as he approaches, turns into a marmot, or a polar bear that grows wings and flies away: only a snowy owl.
Charles Simic and Barry Lopez, on a Roadtrip, 1972: A Conversation Between Greats, When They Were Unknown, Barry Lopez, Lithub, 3/21/19
The following interview took place at night, in the back seat of Charles Simic’s Volkswagen on Interstate 5 in Oregon. Mrs. Simic was driving and the Simics’ five-year-old daughter, Nicki, was asleep in the front seat. Mr. Simic had just finished a reading in a Salem sorority house and was on his way home to Hayward, California, where he had a class to teach the next day. Interviewer Barry Lopez joined Simic in Salem and rode south with him on the Interstate to the T&R Truck Stop, where the interview was concluded over coffee. After the Simics left, the waitress pointed to the tape recorder and asked if Mr. Simic was an important personality. Told he was a poet, she said “We get all types in here.”
…
BL: Perhaps the freshness of good poetry derives from that timelessness, that sense ever-present.
CS: Yes. The freshness comes because poetry, after all, is an essential human activity, arising out of an equally elemental human condition. We still have our bodies to contend with, we still live in the same way, we still get tired, we still eat, screw and puzzle over these things.
The poet wishes secretly to be a philosopher—in other words, to understand the universe fully. But poetry differs from traditional philosophy in that it realizes that ideas have to be tested in daily existence, in simple ordinary human experiences. You sit one evening and string together a series of beautiful statements about life and go to bed kind of sublime, moved. Next morning one wakes up and, usually forgetting all that, goes his very grumpy way through simple daily tasks. Later on in the day, one remembers the ideas he had before and somehow . . . there’s some great gap. We don’t know how to incorporate it into our daily existence.
Let’s put it this way: philosophy is an intellectual activity, poetry an activity of the emotions. The ultimate aim of the emotions is to digest ideas. To take a great idea, a great proposition about the universe and feel what it means in relation to life on earth—well, that’s quite another matter.
Ideas very often try to explain feelings—explain from the outside and they are very arbitrary, they don’t penetrate. We find periods of history where there is a great desire to eliminate feelings from rational discourse, today they are not precise, they cannot exist in our scientific universe. The problem with philosophy is that it generalizes about everything including feelings, but poetry has no choice. It has to particularize. Actually, its magic comes from that faith in the concrete.
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Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy, Robert Reich, The Guardian, 12/27/20
Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.
The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.
And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.
11 More Republican Senators Join Josh Hawley’s Authoritarian Sedition Caucus, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, 1/2/21
“Eleven Republican senators and senators-elect said on Saturday that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory next week when Congress meets to formally certify it, defying the results of a free and fair election to indulge President Trump’s futile attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.
[…]
The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and also includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
Together with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who announced this week that he would object to Congress’s certification of the election results, they bring to nearly one quarter the proportion of Senate Republicans who have broken with their leaders to join the effort to invalidate Mr. Biden’s victory. In the House, more than half of Republicans joined a failed lawsuit seeking to overturn the will of the voters, and more are expected to support the effort to challenge the results in Congress next week.”
The theory of Hawley, Cruz, et al. is that urban voters, disproportionately voters of color, must be disenfranchised so that white rural voters whose candidate lost don’t feel disenfranchised. That’s it, and it’s Jim Crow logic in its purest form.
[ed. note: It is difficult to overstate the danger posed by what these Senators and their equally seditious colleagues in the House are doing. I did not think it would be possible for me to be more angry and disgusted than ever with the Republican Party that has spawned and nurtured this authoritarian anti-democratic strain in American politics, but I am. And also fearful. With Trump encouraging his Brown Shirt Proud Boys to stand up on January 6 in Washington, D.C. and the messaging from these elected officials, there has to be real concern that while it is unlikely their unlawful coup attempt will succeed, the damage they are doing to the polity of our country is real. Hitler’s rise to power was marked by similar actions. Democracy in America is being weakened from within, perhaps with encouragement from outside actors. It does not seem accidental that the Russian hack of American government and corporations, which is far more extensive than has been reported thus far, comes just at this moment in time.)
The lie that Biden stole the election is now official GOP dogma. By the same token, it is not a coincidence that the Republican Party is ignoring the deadly pandemic (if not actively spreading the virus) while they try to overturn the Constitution. They feel they can safely ignore the welfare of the American people, because they are not accountable to them. —Ryan Cooper, The Week, 12/12/20
SolarWinds hack may be much worse than originally feared, Kim Lyons, The Verge, 1/2/21
Microsoft has said the hackers compromised SolarWinds’ Orion monitoring and management software, allowing them to “impersonate any of the organization’s existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts.” The Times reports that Russia exploited layers of the supply chain to access the agencies’ systems.
The Times reports that early warning sensors that Cyber Command and the NSA placed inside foreign networks to detect potential attacks appear to have failed in this instance. In addition, it seems likely that the US government’s attention on protecting the November elections from foreign hackers may have taken resources and focus away from the software supply chain, according to the Times. And conducting the attack from within the US apparently allowed the hackers to evade detection by the Department of Homeland Security.
Microsoft said earlier this week it had discovered its systems were infiltrated “beyond just the presence of malicious SolarWinds code.” The hackers were able to “view source code in a number of source code repositories,” but the hacked account granting the access didn’t have permission to modify any code or systems. However, in a small bit of good news, Microsoft said it found “no evidence of access to production services or customer data,” and “no indications that our systems were used to attack others.”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia), ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Times the hack looked “much, much worse” than he first feared. “The size of it keeps expanding,” he said. “It’s clear the United States government missed it.”
The last (plastic) straw: How one Santa Cruz woman helped launch a movement to save us from an ocean of plastic, Freda Kreier, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 12/26/20
A straw is not just a straw. According to Jackie Nuñez, it’s a symbol of a world gone blind to plastic.
Nuñez is the founder of The Last Plastic Straw, a project dedicated to changing the way people think about plastic that gets used once and then thrown away. Her campaign began in 2011 as a single Facebook page urging people to refuse straws at restaurants. Now, nearly a decade later, these same ideas are being shared at corporate meetings and in legislative chambers.
It all started when a server handed Nuñez a glass of water in 2011 at Santa Cruz’s Ideal Bar and Grill. Then a 46-year-old kayak guide, Nuñez was dining with friends when she noticed a single plastic straw sitting in her glass. It looked just like the dozens of straws she had picked up on local beaches as part of a volunteer project for the environmental nonprofit Save Our Shores.
It was a jarring realization for Nuñez. “It was literally in front of our noses,” she said. “And we were not taking stock.”
At that moment, Nuñez said she knew plastic straws would be a “tipping point issue” inspiring action against a product that on one hand seems very small and simple — but which represents a far larger threat.
Plastic is everywhere. It encases our food. It cushions our online purchases. It wraps our medicine in individual packets. For better or worse, plastic is an essential part of modern life.
Can geothermal power play a key role in the energy transition? Jim Robbins, Yale360, 12/22/20
With mandated renewable energy targets in many locales and the Net Zero campaign — a commitment by many countries to decarbonize their economies by 2050 — interest in geothermal energy is growing rapidly. Many experts see it as an essential component of the world’s green-energy future because it could provide carbon-free heat and around-the-clock baseload power to compensate for the intermittency of wind and solar. Iceland, which sits on an active geological fault line, perfected the technology with its ubiquitous geothermal district heating systems. And China is embracing the move to geothermal power, currently developing more geothermal district heating systems than any other nation.
“Geothermal electricity is always on ,” said Tester. “It can provide fully dispatchable power or heat and is scalable in the same way other renewables are.”
In a recent report, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) predicted the output of geothermal in Europe could increase eight-fold by 2050. And a 2019 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report — GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet — refers to the “enormous untapped potential for geothermal.” By overcoming technical and financial barriers, the report says, generating electricity through geothermal methods could increase 26-fold by 2050, providing 8.5 percent of the United States’ electricity, as well as direct heat.
[Ed note: this is a longish piece with a lot of valuable insights, worth reading in full]
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Covid-19 Was Consuming India Until Everyone Started Wearing Masks, Eric Bellman, Wall Street Journal, 12/31/20
In September, India was reporting almost 100,000 Covid-19 cases a day, with many predicting it would soon pass the U.S. in overall cases. Instead, its infections dropped and are now at one-fourth that level.
India has brought down its virus numbers, despite often being too crowded for social distancing, having too many cases for effective contact tracing and an economy that isn’t well equipped to weather long lockdowns.
One of the main reasons, Indian health officials say, is that the country has managed to encourage and enforce almost universal acceptance of masks without much debate.
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The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb: There is much we don’t know about the new COVID-19 variant—but everything we know so far suggests a huge danger, Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic, 12/31/20
A more transmissible variant of COVID-19 is a potential catastrophe in and of itself. If anything, given the stage in the pandemic we are at, a more transmissible variant is in some ways much more dangerous than a more severe variant. That’s because higher transmissibility subjects us to a more contagious virus spreading with exponential growth, whereas the risk from increased severity would have increased in a linear manner, affecting only those infected.
Increased transmissibility can wreak havoc in a very, very short time—especially when we already have uncontrolled spread in much of the United States. The short-term implications of all this are significant, and worthy of attention, even as we await more clarity from data. In fact, we should act quickly especially as we await more clarity—lack of data and the threat of even faster exponential growth argue for more urgency of action. If and when more reassuring data come in, relaxing restrictions will be easier than undoing the damage done by not having reacted in time.
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The past twenty years brilliantly summarized by historian Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 12/30/20
“In America, the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980.
In that era, political leaders on the right turned against the principles that had guided the country since the 1930s, when Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt guided the nation out of the Great Depression by using the government to stabilize the economy. During the Depression and World War Two, Americans of all parties had come to believe the government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure.
But reactionary businessmen hated regulations and the taxes that leveled the playing field between employers and workers. They called for a return to the pro-business government of the 1920s, but got no traction until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when the Supreme Court, under the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren, unanimously declared racial segregation unconstitutional. That decision, and others that promoted civil rights, enabled opponents of the New Deal government to attract supporters by insisting that the country’s postwar government was simply redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to people of color.
That argument echoed the political language of the Reconstruction years, when white southerners insisted that federal efforts to enable formerly enslaved men to participate in the economy on terms equal to white men were simply a redistribution of wealth, because the agents and policies required to achieve equality would cost tax dollars and, after the Civil War, most people with property were white. This, they insisted, was “socialism.”
To oppose the socialism they insisted was taking over the East, opponents of black rights looked to the American West. They called themselves Movement Conservatives, and they celebrated the cowboy who, in their inaccurate vision, was a hardworking white man who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone to work out his own future. In this myth, the cowboys lived in a male-dominated world, where women were either wives and mothers or sexual playthings, and people of color were savage or subordinate.”
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New Year’s Resolution? Slim Your Carbon Footprint by a Tonne in 2021, Umberto Bacchi, Thomson Reuters Foundation News, 12/29/20
Giki Zero, a free online tool, provides users with an estimate of their carbon footprint based on a questionnaire about their lives including how often they drive or fly, what they eat and how much electricity they use.
Giki measures individual footprints against global targets and offers a choice of more than 120 steps people can take to shrink their contribution to climate warming.
These range from "easy peasy" to "hardcore", with options such as using shampoo bars instead of hair products in plastic bottles, cycling to work, going vegetarian and switching to a green power provider.
Users can pick their battles and track how the changes they make affect their overall carbon output.
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Which Seafood Has the Highest Amount of Microplastics, Healthday News, 12/28/20
Those mussels, oysters and scallops on your plate may come with a secret ingredient: microplastics.
Researchers at Hull York Medical School and the University of Hull in the United Kingdom reviewed more than 50 studies (from 2014 to 2020) to investigate the levels of microplastic contamination globally in fish and shellfish.
The investigators found that mollusks (such as clams, mussels, oysters and scallops) had the highest levels. Mollusks collected off the coasts of Asia were the most heavily contaminated with microplastics. The researchers suggested that these areas are more heavily polluted by plastic.
Scientists are still trying to understand the health implications for humans consuming fish and shellfish contaminated with these tiny particles of waste plastic, according to the report.
"No one yet fully understands the full impact of microplastics on the human body, but early evidence from other studies suggest they do cause harm," said study author Evangelos Danopoulos. He's a postgraduate student at Hull York Medical School.
Atlantic Discovery: 12 New Species Hiding in the Deep, Victoria Gill, BBC News, 12/28/20
Almost five years of studying the deep Atlantic in unprecedented detail has revealed 12 species new to science.
The sea mosses, molluscs and corals had eluded discovery because the sea floor is so unexplored, scientists say.
Researchers warn that the newly discovered animals could already be under threat from climate change.
Carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean is making it more acidic, causing coral skeletons in particular to corrode.
Some key Atlantic discoveries from the mission:
New species: "At least" 12 new deep-sea species. The team also found approximately 35 new records of species in areas where they were previously unknown
Climate change: Ocean warming, acidification, and decreasing food availability will combine to significantly shift and reduce the availability of suitable habitats for deep-sea species by 2100
Hydrothermal vents: Scientists discovered a field of these sea-floor hot springs in the Azores. Hydrothermal fields are important areas of relatively high biological productivity that host complex communities in the midst of the vast deep ocean
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Covid-19 and Climate Change Will Remain Inextricably Linked, Thanks to the Parallels (and the Denial: Covid-19 has been described as climate change in fast motion. Climate activists hoped it would underscore the threat. But for some, it may have done the opposite, Ilana Cohen, Inside Climate News, 1/1/21
Whether or not people accept the science on Covid-19 and climate change, both global crises will have lasting impacts on health and quality of life, especially for the diverse and low-income communities they’ve already hit hardest.
The Covid-19 pandemic acted “almost like a heat-seeking missile,” homing in on the same communities most vulnerable to the effects of a warming world, said Robert Bullard, an author and professor at Texas Southern University who is widely known as “the Father of Environmental Justice.”
Even worse, Bullard said, the pandemic represented only the “tip of the iceberg” for what such communities could face.
In many ways, the United States’ struggle to control Covid-19 has painted a picture, part hopeful and part harrowing, of how the climate crisis might play out in the decades to come.
Many climate activists and progressives hoped—at least at initially—that the death and illness associated with a worldwide pandemic would make it easier for people to take distant climate threats more seriously.
It didn’t take all that much imagination. The parallels were everywhere.
As Bullard noted, the same communities were being disproportionately affected in each crisis.
And the same fine particle air pollution, known as PM 2.5, caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, was shown in an early Harvard study to be linked to higher Covid-19 deaths rates among people living in polluted areas.
Climate change is also responsible for the proliferation of zoonotic diseases, like Covid-19, as drought, flooding and extreme weather force food production to encroach on habitats populated by bats, monkeys and other virus-carrying wild animals.
But while Covid-19 has raised some people’s consciousness about the urgent need to act on climate change, it has had the opposite effect on others. At least in the United States, the president and much of his base have embraced the same science denialism that has for years greeted climate change, even as deaths from the coronavirus soared.
Whether or not the Covid-19 pandemic ultimately bolsters or hampers the prospects for U.S. and global climate action, the two crises remain inextricably linked. At least for the foreseeable future, any effort to meaningfully address the root causes of one will involve confronting the other.
Shondaland’s Regency: On Bridgerton, Patricia A. Mathew, LA Review of Books, 12/26/20
For those of us weary of romantic stories that pair hapless young white women with savvy black ones whose sole narrative purpose is to help them navigate the world, Bridgerton will be refreshing. Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynervor) is innocent but she’s not weak. The youngest of the Featherington daughters Penelope (Nichola Coughlan) adores Marina, but she does not rely on her to understand the world. Marina, in other words is not Jolene, the Black, streetwise orphan played by Moses Ingram to Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit. She gets to have her own journey from her innocence to experience, and this poses interesting questions about what a Regency-era bildungsroman looks like through this contemporary lens. This is not to suggest that I think Bridgerton gets everything “right” when it comes to its Black and mixed-race characters. I don’t really know what “right” looks like for Black characters in an England that in 1813 had abolished the slave trade but not slavery. The act to abolish slavery was passed in 1833. But emancipation was not freedom, freedom is not equality, and the presence of Black people among aristocrats and as monarchs is not my idea of equity. Further, race in this adaption is tricky. There are moments between white characters in the novel that gave me serious pause. But when those moments were recast between Black and white characters, they made me furious. This is not a didactic fairy tale with princes and princesses. Despite the quest for love, this is a hard market and its characters are less than ideal mostly, I think, by design.
What is exciting about Bridgerton is that there’s a world of fans and cultural critics waiting to watch it, revel in it, debate about it, and critique it. There will be fans of Regency-era cosplay who will balk at seeing a London depicted with Black people, especially in the aristocracy. It’s not as far-fetched as they might think, and I wonder about their persistent need to cling to this fantasy. Those predictable arguments will be lobbed at the series; credulity will be strained along the lines of racial representation. People will, and I think should, debate the fate of a mixed-race heroine. There are communities like Bonnets at Dawn, a reading community and podcast co-hosted by a white British woman who lives in Bristol and an African American woman who lives in Chicago, that have been thinking and wrestling with race and its absence in nineteenth-century literature for years. They are going to have a lot of fun with this series, and it’s comforting to know that in this particular moment there is a Black audience who will see and read this series in a variety of entertaining and passionate modes. KQED contributor Bianca Hernandez, an avid Austen fan who is “fighting for a more inclusive Jane Austen community,” is already leading the charge about how to make sense of Shondaland’s multicultural Regency.
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Inside the Park
For a second at second
you glance out at the outfield.
The ball is rolling
still rolling...
You push your head down
and find another way to pump
your legs.
During the Great Migration
Black people headed north
from the field to the factory.
When your spikes touch third
you're a good paycheck from
home.
You're inside the park
sliding into America
not knowing if you're out
or safe.
—E. Ethelbert Miller
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Pandemic Panic
If we don’t
go any
where
do any
thing
there will be
nothing
to write
home
about
—David Wilk
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Recommended reading:
A frightening and important book: Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby documents the powerful role of women in contemporary white nationalist movements.
Neil Peart: The Illustrated Quotes. The great drummer from Canada’s most famous rock band, who recently passed away, has something to say to us.
Poet Lewis Warsh passed away November 15, 2020. A leading light of the second generation of New York School poets, winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English and many others, his wonderful poems, stories and art continue to vibrate in the light. Out of the Question, Selected Poems (1963-2003) is a great representation of his work.
Thanks to all of you who have written to me about what The Weird Times has meant for you. I hope this weekly collection will continue to provide value in 2021.
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Diamonds, roses, I need Moses
To cross this sea of loneliness, Part this red river of pain
I don't necessarily buy any key to the future or happiness
But I need a little place in the sun sometimes Or I think I will die
—Patty Griffin, Moses (1996)
Fantastic issue, David Wilk. This one outdoes the last one, and the last one was a beauty. Thanks much. Michael Wolfe