The election campaign is now under way in the country I live in. The way it works here is the Prime Minister takes a trip off to Buckingham Palace, tells her Majesty it’s time for an election, and she dissolves Parliament. Then everyone goes home and campaigns for exactly four weeks, and then if the voters still have any energy left, they go out to vote. I find I always need to point out that no one actually gets to vote for Prime Minister—you just get to vote for your Member of Parliament (and, if the local elections are being held the same date, as they will be this time, your local councilors). The leader has already been determined because he (or she) is the leader of the party. So now we have Gordon Brown of the Labour Party, David Cameron of the Conservatives, and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats all criss-crossing the country like mad, kissing babies, eating strange foods, doing the usual things that party leaders generally do during actual election campaigns, and pretending to look happy about it. This is particularly gruesome in Brown’s case–when he tries to smile, the results are mildly terrifying. Full story »

Over the last decade or so, scientists have tracked a significant loss of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS). While some of that loss has been as a direct result of surface melting, most of it presently appears to be a result of warmer ocean waters melting the ice tongues that stretch out into fjords. Essentially, the warmer water melts the bottom of the glacier and makes it more likely to break up, and as the ice tongue breaks up, the glacier behind the tongue starts to move faster, dumping yet more ice into the ocean.

There has been a significant amount of study of the GIS, and multiple independent lines of evidence have shown that Greenland’s glaciers are thinning and thus losing mass. These include satellite radar altimetry, the GRACE gravity mapping satellites, and both airborne and satellite laser altimetry. Now a peer-reviewed paper published in March shows that another analysis of GRACE and new GPS data has found that mass loss has spread from the warmer southeast coast to the comparably cooler northwest coast, significantly increasing the amount of Greenland coastline affected by mass loss. Full story »

Lilac, lovelace / remind me of / your true grace

About four years ago I tripped across a band called The Lost Patrol. Since then I’ve noted their work a number of times: they made my best CDs for 2007 and 2008 reviews; their music served as a key element in a piece on the nonlinearity of influence; and they were the subject of a TunesDay post on the band’s “epic retro-futurism.”

Their lead singer when I found them was one Danielle Kimak Stauss, a woman whose hypnotic vocals haunted Steven Masucci’s vast, empty musical landscapes with an ice-cold passion that bordered on the transcendent. After 2007′s superb Launch & Landing Stauss and the band parted ways, and while LP has produced two wonderful CDs in the interim (featuring new singer Mollie Israel), Danielle was nowhere to be heard. Full story »

You may have caught the story last week. Augusta National Chairman Billy Payne stomped the balls off Tiger Woods for … well, if you need to be told what for, then you probably don’t know who Tiger Woods is in the first place. Or Billy Payne. And you probably don’t know what the Master’s is, or where Augusta is, and you may not even have heard of “golf.” So you can safely skip ahead to the next article.

Are Billy’s remarks about Tiger true? Maybe. Probably. Are they in-bounds, given what Augusta is? Sure – why not? Full story »

You know, I try to keep my blogging on absolute stupidity to a minimum—there are other people, on this site and others, who do a better job, and I don’t have the time anyway. There’s just too much stupidity out there—I’d never get any work done. But when the Governor of Virginia and the Governor of Mississippi both state pretty unequivocally that slavery wasn’t such a big deal with reference to the Civil War—well, how can I resist?

First up, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who has issued a proclamation celebrating something called Confederate History Month. Well, that might not be so bad—all those Civil War buffs who like to recreate various battles on those old battlefields probably want some sort of official validation, or something. But he managed to leave out that anti-slavery language that one of his predecessors had inserted, on the grounds that slavery wasn’t one of the issues that was “most significant for Virginia.” Like one of his predecessors, the always stimulating George Allen, McDonnell’s proclamation refers to the Civil War as “a four-year struggle for [Southern] independence and sovereign rights.” Full story »

“Be glad of life,” my student’s Facebook status said, “because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.”

The quote comes from American clergyman and author Henry Van Dyke, but the sentiment could’ve come from me.

I love looking into the night sky and being filled with wonder at the vastness of it all. Fewer things strike me as more beautiful, fewer things feel so profound, as when I look up and see infinity. On some nights, I can see a million stars. There are so many, maybe it’s a million million.

That’s an exaggeration. I know that astronomers have actually figured out how many stars are visible from earth with the naked eye on a clear night. I don’t remember the figure.

But for me, looking up at the heavens, science doesn’t matter one single bit. The sky is filled with a million million stars. It’s what infinity looks like. Full story »

Can a gay man, raised an Anglican but descended from a Shepardim immigrant father, write a great novel about the Christian faith and the power of redemption? If the author is Michael Arditti and the novel is Easter, the answer is a resounding yes. Easter was, in fact, published about ten years ago, but I just got around to it this, um, Easter, and now I’m wondering what took me so long. This is a magnificent work—a social satire on the scale of Waugh, occasionally sexually graphic, frequently Dickensian in its panorama of modern London, and often wildly funny. And it also has the virtue, increasingly rare these days, of being extraordinarily well written. It’s a chronicle of a modern London church seen through the lives and thoughts of a group of people associated with the Parish of St Mary-in-the-Vale in Hampstead, at Easter (and in the interests of full disclosure, I live in Hampstead, and the church does not exist, although the Vale of Health, where the church is supposedly located, actually does). Particularly the vicar, who seems to be having a crisis of faith, and his younger curate, who learns that he is HIV positive. And what a chronicle it is. This is the best novel about faith, and its testing, that I’ve read in years, even decades. And what does the testing is AIDS, of course. For Arditti, the question isn’t so much “What sort of God would allow AIDS?” as “What sort of faith can survive AIDS?” Full story »

I don’t think I’m alone in believing that members of Congress — as a species — have devolved instead of evolved. The Perpetual Political Conflict™ that has stymied improvements in government of, for, and by the people has become a loathsome barrier to resurrecting the American Dream for whose who have lost sight of it. Voters get that. Folks in the street get that. But Congress critters, as a herd of panicked horses wearing blinders, don’t.

As a journalist, I’ve known many politicians — as individuals — at all levels of government in my professional lifetime. I’ve liked many of them, too. My favorite, the late Silvio O. Conte, who served 17 terms in the House, was my Republican congressman when I lived and worked in Massachusetts. He’d drop into the newsroom unannounced, wearing his Red Sox cap and jacket, just, he always said, to visit. But he was a politician, and he had a reason for every word he uttered and every action he took. And he’d take my newsroom godfather, statehouse reporter Neil Perry, aside … and promptly give Neil The Conte View of The Political World. That benefited Neil — but it surely benefited Silvio, too.

Conte had a receptive soul and a large Italian heart. His constituents knew that. That’s why they elected him repeatedly. His House colleagues knew it, too. That’s why Conte was an effective legislator.
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Welcome to Sneak Preview Saturday at S&R. This TunesDay we’ll present the Scholars & Rogues Interview with Danielle Kimak Stauss of Rabbit Velvet, and we can tell you in advance that it’s a fascinating look inside the craft of an extremely talented artist that you may not know. Yet.

To whet your appetite a bit, here’s the video for “Right Now,” the lead track on Crows and Doves. Enjoy.

In 1990, I was a language arts teacher at Whitthorne Middle School in Columbia, Tennessee. One fine April morning, I strolled into the office and found our principal heavily engaged with an irate mother. She screamed, she spat, she cursed, she took a swing at both of us before slamming the office door and taking her fury out into the parking lot and beyond.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“Well,” said the principal, wearily, “She’s still upset about that house that fell on her sister.”

And that remains the greatest insult I have ever heard. Full story »

The arrival of The Beatles in February of 1964 and the subsequent cultural changes they fostered (whether consciously or not) paralleled momentous changes in the American social and political landscape. From 1964-70 Boomers found themselves awash in powerful cultural currents coming from, it seemed, every direction:

• The civil rights movement, which had reached its zenith with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial after the March on Washington in 1963 had seen some fruition in the passage of landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. But that movement had begun to move in a more radicalized direction, partly as a result of police brutality. Even as a “loyal opponent” such as Malcolm X was assassinated by members of his own religion, younger, Boomer-aged black leaders emerged such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton calling for a new approach to race relations that reflected more the beliefs of Malcolm X rather than Dr. King – an approach based on a concept they called “black power.” Full story »

It’s time to take a look at the books our Scrogues have stacked on their nightstands. Get ready to thumb through books on monopoly capitalism, a history of thought and invention, the adventures of a boy and his stuffed tiger, biographies of the number zero and of Josef Stalin (plus a metaphor of Stalin-as-farm-animal), a case for God, some Gonzo journalism, a couple good old-fashion pot-boiler thrillers, and more!

Brian Angliss

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Full story »

The Boomer generation’s view of war and the purposes of war was and is the result of United States involvement in Vietnam. Unlike subsequent generations, Boomers (at least males and  tangentially females) were directly touched by the conflict. And almost every Boomer, male or female, is drawing upon memories of how Vietnam divided our generation from our parents.  And, how its memory eventually divided our generation and our nation against itself. Whether Boomers participated in the war, protested against, the war  tried to avoid the war, or later turned radical (either liberal or conservative), it almost all came in response to memories of Vietnam.

During the summer of 1964, while most Boomers were tweens and teens awe struck with Beatlemania or dancing their little hearts out to that Motown sound, LBJ and his military advisers were trying to find a way to increase America’s presence in South Vietnam. LBJ, despite his better angels (he was pushing the Voting Rights Act and other important civil rights legislation through Congress and his “Great Society” was already on the  drawing board  – Medicare/Medicaid, Head Start, VISTA, anyone?) had bought LeMay and Westmoreland’s bullshit about the communist threat in SE Asia and the need to “save” South Vietnam to prevent a “domino effect” of government overthrows by communists in countries such as Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Full story »

Hmmm, thought I put this up last night. Better late than never.

Ceci n’est pas Pink #@#@^&%$ Floyd…

Historians often argue that dates should not be the focus of history. Hell, much of the last quarter century has been dominated by intellectuals arguing that history doesn’t matter.

To understand the Boomers, however, it’s essential to focus on both history and significant dates in history. Truth is, two dates in the personal histories of Boomers matter so much as to have become mythic:

• November 22, 1963: Boomers lose the president they most closely identify with, John F. Kennedy, to an assassin’s bullet;
• February 9, 1964: The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, on television (see Boomers, part 2 for discussion of  TV’s validating power) and proceed to take the generation by storm, unleashing pent up emotion and energy that will spin out of control over the next ten years and change America profoundly – for both good and ill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…. Full story »

Today I wish I lived in Palm Beach County, Florida. The temperature is floating in the high 70s, the humidity in the low 40s. Here, in western New York, it has been raining and partly cloudy.

Yep, nice weather down south. But, more importantly, I could vote today in a special election in House District 19 to replace Rep. Robert Wexler, who resigned in January to run a think tank that ponders deeply about the Mideast.

If I moved to northern Georgia, in House District 9, I could vote on April 29 to replace former Rep. Nathan Deal, who resigned March 1 one step ahead of ethics charges to run for governor. (I wouldn’t vote for him, though; at least one group considers him among the most corrupt members of Congress.)

If I lived in House District 12 in southwestern Pennsylvania, I could vote May 18 in a special election to replace earmark king Rep. John Murtha, who died in early February.

Sadly, I live in rural western New York, in District 29. I have no representative in Congress because Democratic Rep. Eric Massa self-destructed in early March because of aberrant behavioral traits not seen by voters (and certainly not by me, who supported him).

So I need to persuade the governor of the state of New York to call a special election to replace Massa, because he has not done so.
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This week saw a fine example of political gamesmanship from the Obama administration. He let down his base yet again by opening up certain portions of the U.S. coast to offshore petroleum drilling in an attempt to undercut his (supposed) foes across the aisle, and upped CAFE standards. The former has gotten a lot more press than the latter. Neither are quite what they seem.

All the opponents he hoped to undercut with the announcement are still unsatisfied, because he left some areas untouchable. That’s not going to make his environmentalist supporters feel any better, but no matter as the administration seems to believe that there is an infinite amount of room under the bus.

So to make them feel a little better, he tossed them a bone by raising CAFE standards. This man knows hollow, political gestures like he was born to make them. CAFE sucks. It’s a system designed to be gamed, and this grand announcement doesn’t change that.
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Richard Powers is one of the most interesting mainstream American novelists working today. I threw in “mainstream” there because much of Powers’ fiction is concerned with science and its role in human affairs as both an institution and as a philosophical conundrum to be explored in trying to make sense of the human condition—which is what novelists tend to try to do. As a result, much of Powers’ best fiction—Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark come to mind—are elegant meldings of genuine novelistic achievement and a finely honed understanding and appreciation of the dynamics of contemporary scientific issues. For that matter, much of Powers’ work is pretty indistinguishable from the work of some writers who are forever consigned to the “science fiction” section of your friendly bookstore, although Powers’ work won’t show up there. This is ironic, because in some ways Powers’ most recent novels—The Echo Maker in 2006, and now Generosity, published last year—exemplify the (occasionally justified) criticisms that critics and writers often have of science fiction—the indifferent characterization of the protagonists of the novels, the clumsy and often unbelievable plotting devices, the stereotypical and flat narrative style. Which makes me wonder what’s going on.
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