Mark J. Heinicke – Page 15 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

What’s in a Name? from Romeo and Juliet to the NIH

The Power of Names, Like It or Not

In the August 24 Washington Post, we hear that ESPN yanked an unfortunate Asian-American from broadcasting a University of Virginia football game, the sportscaster’s trespass being that he bore the name: Robert Lee. Elsewhere in the same issue, Dana Milbank skewered ESPN (and ludicrously overdone Political Correctness in general), with a satire that suggested we should ban from the public eye Bruce Lee, Tommy Lee, Harper Lee, Spike Lee, Bobby Lee, Lee Majors, Lee Jeans, etc.

We are all familiar with the epigram, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Really? What if the flower were named Kerblunkanoo? Ratstikittel? Skrutabucket? Wine critic: “This chardonnay has a complex aroma, a fusion of pears and peaches with a delicate hint of skrutabucket.” OK—it could become catchy. But that doesn’t change the fact that names shade perceptions. People named Hitler can attest to that. Racial, ethnic, gender, and religious slurs attest to the demeaning power of names. Actors and actresses acquire stage names to spin their personae, perhaps the most famous being the name Marilyn Monroe to replace the decidedly unglamorous Norma Jeanne Mortenson.

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Robert E. Lee Cooling the Fires – All for Naught

Robert E. Lee Echoing Lincoln

In the August 25 Washington Post op-ed page, Eugene Robinson revealed a side of Robert E. Lee that runs against the grain of many who wish to celebrate his memory with public statues: after the Civil War, the general warned against erecting Civil War monuments in Gettysburg (one may infer that he referred to both Union and Confederate monuments): “I think it wiser,” said Lee, “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

Echoes of Lincoln, right down to the metaphor of wounds to the body politic, ring uncannily. In his second inaugural address—made less than a month before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—Lincoln urged, “let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds. . . .”

This softens the picture of Lee, who was, by any definition of treason, a traitor to his country. A traitor, moreover, who chose to defend a government founded on the monstrosity of slavery.

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O Magnum Mysterium – Prayer without Boundaries

I thought of spilling a lot of superlatives (ooh did I ever!) about this song but didn’t want to contaminate it. Judge for yourself. Just be in a quiet space for 8 minutes. Even if you’ve heard it before. . . well, you know. Don’t worry about the religious part – it’s for anyone whose heart is not made of stone.

O Magnum Mysterium, Kings College

There’s a synthetic version by John Serrie that I sort of like just as much, but it’s less organic. So listen to Kings College first.

Ungovernable? The Curse of a Ruling Faction

Factional Fury

In the July 29 Guardian, Michael Goldfarb laments the debacle of the Trump presidency to date: Goldfarb on Ungovernability

However, the recitation of one Trumpian travesty after another is not the core of Goldfarb’s message. It’s just to get your attention and whip up a little outrage. What he’s really getting at is deeper and more troubling. It’s the danger of factionalism, in particular that “the Republicans are no longer a political party but a faction, a much more dangerous thing.”

He goes on to quote James Madison’s definition of “faction” and summarizes Madison’s concerns as expressed in the Federalist Number 10

Madison’s paper itself makes for fascinating if laborious reading—the man had a knack for prolixity in the service of exhausting every possible angle of a subject (research topic: how did the other Constitutional Conventioneers restrain Madison from making the Constitution as long as the Sunday edition of The New York Times?). Nonetheless, if you read the whole thing you get the sense Madison was more concerned about a ruling majority faction rather than the minority faction (in terms of numbers of voters) that the current Republican Party has turned out to be. Nevertheless, Goldfarb’s argument applies, since the Continue reading “Ungovernable? The Curse of a Ruling Faction”

Greening Big Chem – Will Millenials Save Us from Ourselves?

Yes! Some good environmental health news for a change. And evidently driven, on the demand side, by millenials. See:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-du-pont-results-health-idUSKBN1AC2ZP

Sure, you have to view the apparent changes in Big Chem cited in the Reuters article as grudging concessions supplemented by greenwashing. Nevertheless, minimally incremental progress toward the good is better than no progress toward the good. And I am happy to see that those socially mediated young people are moving the consumer goalposts on at least one critical issue.

(Also check out the piece on Walmart and consumer preferences that follows the Big Chem piece. When it comes to buying American, the price is not always right—despite consumer professions of patriotic buying practices, when the actual purchase is made, patriotism takes a back seat.)

How Cheating Starts, and the Path to Oligarchy

Breathing an Atmosphere of Lies

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last two years, you can probably guess why lying and other forms of spreading untruths fester with new virulence in the minds of the public (that is, that portion of the public who is paying attention to public life).

Communicating untruths, whether deliberate lies or “alternative facts” mistaken for truths through ignorance, is a very broad topic. There are polite lies, “white lies,” or lying to protect a loved one, all of which are in a different moral universe from evil lies. The latter are the kind that constitute Fake News as well as other kinds of dishonest villainy.

If a lie inflicts harm on somebody’s Bad Guys, then justifying it may depend on whose side you’re on.

Subverting the system with lies is OK if you win. That’s where we stand in the days of rank partisanship.

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The Creep toward Autocracy – Real or Imagined?

Crossing this line is worse than uncivil, and is no joke

In the face of more and more ominous signs that the President of the United States is inciting violence against journalists, what voice among Republicans has been lifted against him? In any substantive way: none.

Now that Donald Trump has crossed a line by tweeting a cartoon of himself physically bashing a CNN journalist, it is time for some high-ranking Republican to denounce this behavior as WRONG—not merely inappropriate or tasteless or even “loathsome,” as they are euphemistically calling it, but flat-out wrong, and not just morally but in the sense of a threat to the free press and therefore Western democracy (such as it is).

Administration spokespersons are asking why Trump detractors “can’t take a joke.” Well, it was a joke when posted on Reddit—probably as satire—but not a joke when appropriated by the President himself. Anyone who minimizes it has put himself or herself on the wrong side of an increasingly dangerous line.

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Knocking Bicycles – Again!

Washington Post Sounds the Alarm on Bicycle Accident Medical Costs—Loudly

When I bicycled in DC and suburban Maryland more than a decade ago, I got used to the Washington Post’s editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor being, on average, biased against bicycles. Now the Post has knocked cycling again by publishing a story headlined: “As bike commuting soars, so do injuries. Annual medical costs are now in the billions.”

(The byline was Ariana Eunjung Cha, and I’d put money on a bet she doesn’t commute by bicycle. But I wouldn’t put money on the likelihood of her having written the headline; that was the work of some editor in the vein of “cycling is a pain in the ass” Washington Post editorial culture.)

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Ransomware as Camouflage, and More Diversions

[Dear Reader: please note that The Guardian has no paywall (yet), so if you read the article linked to below, you should really think of making a donation. All the more so since journalists are under serious attack.]

The uproar over the somewhat-misnamed “Petya” ransomware attack has largely drowned out the near-certainty that the “ransom” part wasn’t the half of it. Experts point to many clues that imply the malware was most probably a destructive virus disguised as ransomware—and its primary target was the government of Ukraine. See this article in The Guardian, and scroll down to the part titled “Who is behind the attack”:

Rescuing Mud, Battling Carbon: Not Commensurate

It’s Sedimentary: Rethinking the Role of Mud

Sediment starvation is another slowly building crisis, but at least this one has more tractable solutions than Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) from Greenhouse Gases (GHG). Check out this piece in Yale Environment 360 that sketches out the problem and the solutions:
Sediment Loss and Restoration

As the article says, Southern Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles of land and 20% of its wetlands since the 1930’s, when the Army Corps of Engineers set upon the Mississippi River with all the water-taming tools at its disposal. Throughout the world, 57,600 large dams and innumerable small ones are trapping sediment which would otherwise enrich downstream ecosystems.* Robin Grossinger of the San Francisco Estuary Institute likens it to “starving” the ecosystems of “nutrients, minerals, and vitamins [that] these systems need to grow and adapt.”*

Read the article in Yale Environment 360 linked above, for a look at ongoing and potential ways to redistribute trapped sediment, even without necessarily dismantling dams.

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