Author: RJ

Retired English prof (Ph. D., UNC), who likes to garden, blog, pursue languages (especially Spanish) and to share in serious discussion on vital issues such as global warming, the role of government, energy alternatives, etc. Am a vegan and, yes, a tree hugger enthusiastically. If you write me, I'll answer.

Jane Holtz Kay: a Voice in the Wilderness

The sun rises and sets each day, and every morning we wake anew to life’s daily rhythms. Busy with ourselves, we often miss what happens beyond our sphere, confirming Auden’s poignant observation concerning the personal nature of human suffering in his poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts”.

Take the death of Jane Holtz Kay, for example, from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease on November 5. Apart from a NYT piece (November 20, 2012) calling her “a prophet of global warming,” her death has been largely missed by media. It’s probable most of us have never heard of her. That’s been true of me.

Out of curiosity, I researched Wikipedia and came up with nothing. A google search reported her death and provided a link to a Guest Book, presently with eleven entries, written by those who knew her personally.  I checked the archives of  The Nation magazine as well, since I had learned she was its architecture critic for 30-years.  No mention of her death.

Perhaps what really matters in the context of our mortality is not who we were, but what we did.  We touched lives, bringing healing, insight, and acceptance. We left behind an ongoing legacy of wisdom and wise counsel, making the world better.

In 1997, Kay wrote a landmark book on automobiles: Asphalt Nation: How the automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.  A classic, it demonstrates not only the cost to our environment (carbon dioxide emissions speeding up global warming), but the destructive social aspect of cars themselves: the loss of historical sites, decline in public transit, suburban sprawl and, not least, the automobile’s weakening of social ties. Interestingly, she points out the Amish repudiation of cars is not because somehow the combustion engine is inherently evil, but because it dilutes proximity and, hence, community.

She had written three other books on monitoring our natural resources and managing our urban space, but Asphalt Nation, timely and passionate, may be her most memorable. She left unfinished a follow-up called Last Chance Landscape, dealing with the fallout of global warming in our immediate future.

I think she’d be pleased that coal, at least, seems on the decline in the U. S. But then there are those  troubling developments in China and India, where auto manufacturing is increasingly viewed as a linchpin to economic prosperity.  According to the World Resources Institute, 1200 coal powered plants are at least in the planning stage globally, with three-quarters of them slated for China and India (rpt. in Time, November 21, 2012). Since coal is the single, most contributing factor in accelerating global warming, we may just all be doomed if these coal plants come on-line.

Such environmental callousness chagrined Kay enormously, and sometimes she lamented that she felt like a voice in the wilderness with nobody listening. That’s what makes global warming so insidious: it seems distant, vague, not immediate, despite the increasingly savage storms, drought, flooding and record temperatures. It didn’t even emerge as an issue in the four recent election debates. It’s also an inconvenient issue when governments can’t manage their budgets

Though the earth still spins and life seems to go on, the truth is each day is lessened in its quality by our crimes against Nature’s delicate fabric.  While the world may little note Jane Holtz Kay, we ignore her legacy at our own peril.

rj

Sugar and Cancer

Sugar and cancer

I never realized just how dangerous sugar can be to good health. Not only can it lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, it can actually encourage cancer. Consider these three facts about cancer:

1. Cancer flourishes in an anaerobic (low oxygen) environment.

2. It thrives on glucose.

3. It needs iron.

The good news is there are steps you can take to prevent encouraging cancer growth:

1. Select an aerobic form of exercise to oxidate your blood.

2. Limit sugar and high fructose corn syrup

3. Avoid excessive iron levels.

But back to sugar per se. I would highly recommend you look at medical researcher Gary Taubes’ New York York Times piece, April 13, 2011, on the subject, which summarizes the findings of the highly regarded Robert Lustig of the University of Californa (San Francisco). It will change your life. Maybe even save it.

My conversion to the Left

Let me tell you of my conversion to the Left

1.  The Great Recession:  Our worst economic crisis since the stock market collapse in 1928, its genesis clearly lies with Wall Street speculators and the banking industry.  With dollar signs for eyeballs, they lured many home buyers, often minorities, into high end mortgages fabricated by a bubble market swelled by over investment.  Subprime and adjusted rate mortgages flourished.  Ultimately, there were too many houses out there, reducing home mortgage values and, boom, the stock market debacle of 2008.  I believe government banking reform might have preempted this crisis.

2.   The transfer of wealth:  Whatever gains in wealth we’ve made over the last 30 years have largely benefitted the wealthy.   The collapse of the housing market is just one  recent example, with middle class buyers exchanging their already limited capital for long-term indebtedness on over priced homes.  While they may think they own their own homes, the reality is the banks own them for up to the next 30 years; in most cases, at huge profit.  Just do the math.  Ironically, the financiers responsible for the collapse have gotten away with their greed, some of them bailed out with tax payer money, even as they show no such charity towards those who default.  Their current vogue is to buy up these foreclosures for potential investment, particularly by foreigners.  Meanwhile, millions of other below-water “homeowners” struggle to honorably meet their monthly payments on houses no longer worth their purchase price in states where they have no recourse.

3.  Tax inequity:  Is it fair that a candidate for the presidency worth $240 million, owning several mansions, and with $100 million invested for his sons,  should pay at a tax rate of only 14% on his income in the last two years while many of us with median middle class incomes pay proportionately more?  This is but one example that surely could be multiplied by the thousands privileged to enjoy loopholes you and I can’t access.  Even social security gets rigged in their favor, with the salary max for social security taxes on 2012 income capped at $110, 000.  Talk about a windfall for the rich!

4.  Deficient health care:  Even the progressive Health Care Reform Act (to be fully implemented in 2014),  fails to remedy what ails us–the lack of a single payer system such as Canada enjoys with consequential lower costs and universal access.  As a fallout, you and I pay more for health care than in any of the developed nations,  concurrently with limited options.  I’m a retiree on Medicare, for example, yet must pay out of my pocket fully for eye glasses and hearing aids.  And then there are the ever escalating medical costs for all Americans far in access of annual inflation.  I say we can do better.

5.   Foreign policy:  We’re meddlers strutting our imperialism with a Daddy knows all approach.  We lavish more on the military than all the world’s countries combined, including Russia and China.  We’re beholden to Israel, an apartheid nation that would happily snare us into waging their conflicts for them and is busy killing Gaza civilians as I write.   In America, every decade seems to threaten a new war.  Now there’s pending trouble with Iran.  Our children bleed and die.  Iraq was a terrible folly and Afghanistan seems increasingly pointless.  We got our man.  Let’s go home.  Now!

6.  Environment:  Those on the Right simply laugh off or prove indifferent to climate change, some even proclaiming it a hoax.  For them, it’s business as usual, with profits their end-game.  As such, they remind me of those anti-evolution die-heads of years ago, still latent in today’s creationists.  While a few may admit to climate change, they downgrade its human component.  More coal, more oil.  Now their rage for Keystone. For the sake of a wounded Earth and for future generations, I cast my lot with the Left in its vibrancy as to what’s at stake..

7.  The crazies:  Conservatives, neo-cons, tea party devotees–they make me shiver–all those tirades against pro-choice, gays, immigrants, stem cell research, health care reform;  denigrators of the UN, deniers of global warming, the need for cap and trade, alternative fuels, they wed themselves to the past.  I dislike, too, their moral politics fettered to a religious view:  the creationists conflating theism with science, the zealots for capital punishment while decrying abortion; the unfeeling purists on death with dignity legislation, which they defeated in my native state of Massachusetts two weeks ago.  It’s company I choose not to keep.  I  prefer the affirmers, not the deniers; those who foster fairness and reconciliation, not callousness and division; those who champion change, not stultifying tradition; those who embrace optimism, not pessimism.

While I love my country dearly,  I think it can do better.  Like Bruce Springsteen, I’m proud to be born in the USA.  It’s a really great place. That is, if you’re on top.

Be well,

rj

Gov. Jerry Brown confronts global warming skeptics

The election may have ended two weeks ago, but it’s back to business as usual as politicians weigh-in on those crucial bread and butter issues like the environment.

Earlier in the week, our President, usually more astute on global warming and its serious implications, said he’d not prioritize environment over job generation in a down economy.  Two days later, a bipartisan delegation met with the President, urging he approve the Keystone pipeline, a project currently in delay mode pending rerouting to protect sensitive habitat such as Nebraska’s Sandhill Crane Sanctuary.

In all of this, I have to pinch myself to see if I’m awake.  I had thought Romney lost the election!

I can’t speak for you, but I created Brimmings to speak out candidly, come hell or high water, on the salient issues affecting the quality of life for all of us.  As for politics, I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise at these Capitol happenings, given the inveterate chicanery of that sector.  It’s just that I desperately want to find a window I can open to escape the foul air of political expediency bent on kicking the can down the road when it comes to the insidious challenge of climate change, a quandary that isn’t going to vanish simply by ignoring it.  The debates themselves, four of them, yet not one question on the implications of global warming on public policy!  I think the media just plain fell asleep at the wheel.

Occasionally I do find a leader such as California  governor Jerry Brown, willing to open a window on a new vista.  This isn’t a new thing for the governor who has spoken boldly and consistently in cadenced rhetoric on the cruciality of facing-up to this Gorgon that  ultimately threatens to swallow up both Man and Beast.

In August, the Brown administration launched a web site (see under Blogroll/Climate Change), replete with data to refute those denying global warming or our contribution to it.  Find me another governor who’s done something like this.  Find me one Senator or Rep who’s spoken out so boldly, apart from Al Gore, our should-have-been president, now vaporized from the political scene.

Buoyed by the California election results of November 6, which daringly called for a tax increase to reduce the state’s bruising deficit, Brown acknowledged to attendees at last week’s Greenbuild Expo in San Francisco that while “dealing with the environment seems more a luxury than a necessity, my message is the two go hand-in-hand.”

Brown might have equivocated on green issues such as California’s cap and trade legislation, now under legal challenge by business interests in the state, but he did not, again setting him apart from the political herd.

When it comes down to the bottom line, authentic leaders excel in what Vergil called Pietas, or virtue based on self-discipline. I would add ethos, or integrity, a sensibility for total commitment.  I just happen to think Jerry Brown defines these leadership virtues, not just by words, but through example.  This is the governor who, after all, declined residing in the governor’s mansion.

And now, Mr. President, back to you, since the ball’s in your court.  You’ve won a second term, which means you can focus on your place in history, joining a handful of great presidents who chose to lead and hence transform this great nation.

Open a window for us, Mr. President.  Stand fast.  Stand tall!

rj

How timing affects your health

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” (Ben Franklin)

I think we’re missing something in all the wise counsel we’ve been getting lately on our TV talk shows about improving our health   You know the litany, most of it pertaining to food:  less fat, sugar, salt, and processed food.  Less meat and more fruits and veggies. Along with diet change, thirty minutes of aerobic exercise five times weekly.  Lately, the added caveat of reducing stress.

All well and good, but not good enough.  Somewhere we’ve forgotten to add timing to the list.  By this I mean doing things, whenever possible, at the same time and in the same way.  Our bodies actually dislike surprise. They prosper from routine.  Here are a few tips, and you can probably add your own:

1.   Sleeping: The body replenishes itself when we sleep, restoring hormonal balance (homeostasis) provided we get enough of it, usually 7-8 hours for most adults.  This means setting a time to retire.  I’ve been getting to bed at 10:30 p.m. and usually fall asleep within minutes.  Morning comes early, or at about 5 a.m.  But I’m not tired.  I’ve had my quota.  By the way, don’t use the weekend to cheat.  As I said, your body doesn’t like surprises.  You don’t really have to fly across time zones to feel jet lag.  Research shows that just the loss of one or two hours of sleep can reduce your daytime alertness by a third.  Strange, but there also seems to be a relationship between a lack of sleep and obesity,  and even depression (David Agus, The End of Illness).

2.   Eating:  Eat the same time everyday:  I think My bichon, Truman, has a clock for his stomach.  Come 4 p.m. and he gets fidgety, as if to say, “Hey, dude, where’s my grub?” I really have to laugh.  Impatient with my delay with writing this blog, he’s gotten his bowl out right where I can’t miss it. Dogs  provide wonderful examples of nature’s blueprint, with set times for feeding and elimination, which makes housebreaking them possible. They also can get sick if their food changes suddenly.  Humans are likewise plugged into schedules and foods as any traveler knows.  That’s why our tummies often revolt when we travel abroad.  This doesn’t mean ruling out variety on occasion.  Just use common sense.  While I’m at it, snacks call for the same regimen as to what and when.

3.  Exercise:  The research is very clear–the body thrives on exercise.  It does even better when it happens by the clock.  I’m a morning person, so I take on the elliptical machine between 10 and 11.  The dividend is I get it done early and when my body seems eager.  But whatever works for you.

4.   Bowel regularity:  The tell tale signs the body’s out of  sync are constipation and diarrhea.  Changes in food, or wrong foods, or interruptions of elimination times lead to biological stress.  Watch what you eat, how much, and the sanitation in its prep.  When you “need to go,” don’t put it off.  It’s amazing how just getting out of the pattern can disrupt body rhythms and take time righting.

5.  Downtime:  Sometimes your body just likes to rest, and don’t forget, body includes mind.  Because our modern lives are often hectic, you’ll have to make sure to sometimes dropout of the race.  This takes scheduling.  I like yoga, or soft music (especially the sounds of nature), meditation (though I still have difficulty routing the mind chatter), doing a puzzle like sudoku, taking up a calming read, tending my garden.  Whatever form it takes for you, choose something you enjoy and, remember, do it everyday, same time.

In a nutshell, good health comes down to not only what, but when.

Be well,

rj

When culture turns tyrant

The voices of authority in many guises, abundant and strident, relentlessly prey upon us.  To be fair, they aren’t always sinister voices, as they sometimes serve as the glue holding a society together, establishing the ground rules by which we all get our turn or fair share.   Often they transmit the legacy of  experience, minimizing the social anarchy that results when people play by their own rules.

But frequently these voices, of tradition or culture, inhibit us from finding our best selves when they assume tyrannical shape, demonizing new ways of thinking and doing, frequently to protect a vested interest.  Often they cloak themselves in religion and demonizing politics.  We don’t hang witches anymore, but we do have Jihad abroad and demogogues at home, who would deprive women of choice and the undocumented from participation in the nation’s agenda.  Culture turns deadly when it becomes ideology, resorting to reductionism, fear and bullying.

On the other hand, healthy societies are always dynamic, open to change, adaptive to new exigencies.  As such, they exhibit similarity to the evolutionary laws that assure biological survival.  Take our bodies, for example, that slough off the old and degenerative: a new skin every month; every six weeks, a new liver; every three months, new bones (David  Agus, The End of Illness, p. 106).   Healthy societies are like that, casting of the ineffectual and regenerating themselves.

Dynamic societies know when it’s time to change their wardrobe.  In this regard, the advanced industrial nations have taken-on some remarkable transitions that, in many instances, transcend those achieved through technological savvy in contributing to well-being.  It’s one thing to have airplanes, cars, television and, now computers.  It’s quite another to abolish slavery, emancipate women, enfranchise minorities, including gays, and promote human dignity.

Material progress never guarantees the latter, anyway.  Take Saudi Arabia, for example, where a woman can’t drive, unless accompanied by a family male.

When I think about it, I sometimes find it hard to believe that American women just got the right to vote less than a hundred years ago.  Swiss women gained that right only a few years ago.

Presently the emancipation of gays is underway and in future years I’m betting our children will look askance at our malice based on custom’s insatiate dislike of divergence.

There remains much to do, both at home and abroad.  Several challenges come to mind, and I think you can add others::

  1. Electing a woman president of the USA.

2.   Abolishing capital punishment.

3.   Equitable taxation

4.   Death with dignity legislation

5.   Immigration reform

6.   Population growth

7.   Resources management

8.   Animal emancipation

9.   Child abuse

10. Single payer healthcare

You may not like some of my priorities.  I’m okay with that, so long as it isn’t custom driving your censure.  Perhaps the insidious threat custom imposes is that it drops upon us like the weather and,  seemingly everywhere and always, it is what it is.  We get used to it, accepting the pattern as the norm.

Unlike the weather, we can do something about culture gone wrong.  It takes vigilance and means asking questions.  Why this and not that?  As Michael Pollan astutely observes, “Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s still exerting its hold on your culture” (In Defense of Food, p. 51).

Because societies can and do evolve, more so in a world of diminishing boundaries,  initial conflict is likely to ensue as universals find themselves confronted  by newly introduced alternatives.   Paradoxically, in this dissonance lie the seeds of healing, as history confirms such exchanges enrich rather than diminish.

In this new world, or global village, we might even “shake hands” as Pete Seeger sings it, and “study war no more.”

Imagine!

Be well,

rj

Veterans Day


Today is Veterans Day.  It’s a quiet Sunday morning as I write, but quieter still for those who’ve given their lives in supreme sacrifice to their country.  Not so for the many maimed physically and psychologically by war who must live daily with its ravages.

I think more recently of Iraq and Afghanistan, those strange sounding names of  places so far away most of us scarcely knew they existed, save a chance photo spread in National Geographic while waiting in a doctor’s office.  Places now as familiar as weekday names.

Something intrudes, one of those ghosts that inevitably haunt heavy thinking.  It takes shape in a poem I’ve read and taught for so many years to young adults on a college campus:  Robert Lowell’s poignant “For the Union Dead,” reminiscing the decline in enthusiasm for any cause,  military, political  or otherwise:

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse…

The stone statues of the abstract Union soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year__
wasp-wasted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns. . .

There are no statues for the last war here:
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe,  the”Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast.
. . .
Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward  ;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

A decade ago I visited our war dead at Colleville-Sur-Mer, where the elevated resting place of our Normandy heroes overlooks that once bloodied Omaha Beach.  Ten thousand, row upon row, their graves facing Westward to their homeland, their life threads severed early.  They would not see America again or wed or become parents or enjoy the rarity of a warm November day.  Mortality is our collective lot, but for these, the shades were drawn early.

12 p.m, and the malls have just opened.   Veterans Day, like Memorial Day, now serves as commercial fodder, or like the Mosler Safe in a culture that’s found new servitude in the material quest.

Nixon ended the draft back in 1971. So now it’s become easier to forget those who defend, bleed and die for us.  I was a young fellow, a former veteran, during the Vietnam era of national division over a far-off war, spilling over into public defiance and, sometimes, violence at home.  Vietnam was a very long war. Until Afghanistan. Where are today’s protestors? How much easier to rent surrogates.

It’s a beautiful fall day, an  Indian Summer day, the autumn maples ripe in their red dress. The malls will do well.

rj

The food revolution is all around you!

Have you noticed the food chain stores are increasingly offering alternative foods these days, replete with burgeoning natural food isles, stacks of organic fruits, and freshly washed veggies, hermetically sealed?  Why I even saw locally produced corn for sale this past summer at my local Krogers.

Now don’t think for a minute the box store groceries, a $32 billion enterprise, give a hoot about keeping you healthy.  You can believe that when they stop promoting their sugar drenched sodas, sodium laced dinners, fatty organ meats, and, and….

What they do care about is market share, better known as making a buck. They can read the tea leaves.  A food revolution is underway and they’re wanting their cut.

Some, though not perfect, do a better job at marketing healthy foodstuffs.  Think Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Good Foods.  The long dominating chains have taken notice, except for Walmart, surprisingly, which remains tethered to largely traditional fare, despite its widely hyped transitioning to a green energy infrastructure.

Restaurants remain a problem and constitute virtual feed lots for human slaughter with their huge portions of “ain’t good for you foods”.  What a shocker when you scrutinize the online menus of some of these chains for their nutrition content to learn an average entree like Applebee’s bourbon street steak nets you 1067 calories along with 71.6g in fats.  By the way, you should always study the fat to total calorie ratio of any food you buy at the store or consume in a restaurant, remembering that fat grams are converted to calories by multiplying each gram by 9, unlike carbohydrates which follow a  1g x 4 formula.  The rule-of-thumb is that you should try to minimize your fat calorie ideally to no more than 10% of total calories and at max no more than 20%.   With Applebee’s entree, that comes to around 107-214 calories.  Converting in your head those 71.6 fat grams using the simple conversion formula I gave you gives you more than 630 calories of fat intake, far exceeding the parameters.  Hey, death trap!

Many of us have had enough of the food industry’s manipulating our health by prioritizing profit.  Even their efforts to repackage items under the aegis of “natural”should ruffle your feathers.  Have you taken a look at your Quorn chicken nuggets box lately for its serving content?  Believe me, it’s typical.

You can say no to all this and trade your knife for a fork.  Millions have and the more who do help make that decision easier for the rest of us.  Think Whole Foods, organic, local produce via farmer markets, growing your own veggies.  Healthy alternatives are sprouting like spring grass everywhere.

By the way, the neatest eating tip I ever got comes from just maybe the best book on nutrition out there, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008):  “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.”

The food revolution’s begun.  Don’t miss it!

Be well,

Let me count the ways I love Twitter

In recent weeks I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter.  In, fact, it’s now a daily staple, or something like that fast pick-up you get with that morning coffee. Forgive me, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but let me count the ways I dig Twitter:

  1. It connects me to a whole lot bigger world to rattle my culture and routine beliefs against.  If I can shed defensiveness, Twitter helps me grow aware and thus become more tolerant.
  2. I like that a lot gets said in very few words.  A few sips gives you the flavor.
  3. I relish following people and trends I find interesting.
  4. It flatters my shameless ego every time someone follows me. I  understand now why my Bichon likes being petted.  Hey, you can pet me anytime!
  5. It grows my interests as I come upon how many there really are out there.
  6. It feeds my fly-on-the-wall instinct to spy on newsmakers, starlets, celebrities and sports icons.  Secretly, I hope they’ll tweet me back!
  7. It saves me on subscription costs as I get free admission to the big mags and splendid articles.
  8. I like how it puts you in real time as things happen and people get impacted; take Syria for example and its freedom fighters or at home, recent Sandy.
  9. I admire its uncensored access.  Here you’ll find the good, bad, and ugly: the saints and anarchists; tolerant and militant; the sane and, yes, the crazies.  It’s like waking up in San Francisco.
  10. It helps my blog.  I can see what interests and find outlet for my own.

Twitter,  I can’t really number all the ways I’m fond of you, but suffice it to say,  Je t’aime!

Do well.  Be well!

rj

A Green’s after thoughts

In every election it’s a given someone loses.  My candidate, Jill Stein, didn’t win, but I’m not disappointed.  Four years ago, I couldn’t vote the Green Party option.  It wasn’t a ballot alternative in Kentucky.  This year, the Green Party appeared on 38 state ballots.  Just 12 more to go.

America needs a third party alternative to provide focus on pivotal issues commonly overlooked by Democrats and Republicans relying on expedience rather than principle on issues that include global warming; alternative energy; single payer health care;  corporate and banking reform; tax equity; the growing income gap; immigration reform; and budget management.

On a related front, the Green Party needs to expand its canopy to include support of “Death with Dignity” legislation.  My keen disappointment is the narrow loss of this humane initiative in my birth state of Massachusetts.  In a genuine democracy, personal sovereignty should be a given.  Thus, I had high hopes for Question 2 in a progressive state like Massachusetts.  Its narrow defeat by largely religious interests, however, suggests it will ultimately succeed.

This long campaign, often harsh in its rhetoric, has finally come to its close.  However our candidates fared, we need to seize the higher ground in relentless resolve to fully realize the American Dream of   “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I wish Obama well.

rj