A Picture worth thousands of words... can end a career pronto

Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, has insurmountable odds to overcome. An embarrassing photo can kill a career, electrocute the victim in a matter of hours. Just ask Al Franken.

Franken's career ending on a silly photo seems extreme-- and may be a case of new Puritanism causing harm unnecessarily. He acted like he was going to grasp the breasts of a sleeping colleague, a fellow performer, on a USO tour flight.

Northam has a weaker case. He complains that the photos of medical students in black face and Ku Klux Klan outfit is not him. Funny how he didn't think that when first accused. You cannot undo a picture once it has entered the psyche of the citizens. Voters rise from their couches when encountering a horrible visual image.

Somehow Donald Trump has escaped the impact of the new awareness. Call him Teflon Don just like we called John Gotti, the Mafia Don. John Gotti escaped the courtroom conviction every time until he didn't. Sammy the Bull's testimony proved too much. Hard to say if Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen of Roger Stone will ever bring such a result to the President....?

3 Photos That Changed the World

Three other photos since the late Sixties jump to mind. These consciousness-altering photos, non-sexual in nature, have influenced human awareness and political developments and hopefully do so.
Two are from the Vietnam War era and may have influenced our withdrawal from the war. The third is an image none of us can escape...;

1)The photo of a crying Vietnamese child,  Phan Thị Kim Phúc, now called the Napalm girl, as she runs stripped of clothes amid other fleeing villagers, to escape from an air attack. This is one of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War. 

2) The summary execution of a handcuffed Vietnamese prisoner by General Ngoc Loan during Tet Offensive in 1968. Another frightening photo

3) The Blue Marble, the first photo of earth taken from space. The photo has changed consciousness, made us aware that national boundaries are of miniscule importance compared to our mutual dependence.

If the earth is to survive we must go back to this third photo--- as our point of reference. We only survive if we share. Share with other people, share with polar bears, share with trees, birds, bees and flowers.

Pollution may happen over here goes over there. Global climate change is exactly that-- global!

A picture of photograph-- may be worth a thousand word, or multi-thousands-- and these words change the world.

SUVs, Scooters and Survival

GM cut 15,000 jobs this week. Said nobody wants to buy sedans any more. That’s why they’re closing factories in Michigan and Ohio and Ontario, Canada. They have no market for their Impalas, Volt, etc..

Ford Motor Company is also getting out of the sedan business. They have no market for the Taurus, etc.. 

People want to drive big SUVs, built on truck chassis, and pickup trucks have always been a staple down here in Texas. 

I see a lot of super-clean pickup trucks—Ford F-150, Chevy pickups and Dodge Ram pickup trucks. These pickups with not a single scratch in the bed and a pristine paint job indicate a lot of white collar guys with no calluses on their hands buy pickups. Many of these wannabe cowboy wish to stay connected to their salt-of-the-earth roots. Just an observation…

But, now it seems soccer Moms need to a SUV to ride high and have enough steel to make mom feel safe. Kind of like the Cold War weapons escalation from the 1960s. Soviet Union has 50 nukes, we Americans need 100 nukes. 

Translate the Cold War to the Car War escalations of today’s consumer. You get a big car, I need a bigger car, now I need a truck (SUV).

However, I do seen sedans on the road—and most seem to be either European of Japanese. Toyota sells tons of cameras. High end sedans still have appeal. Look at all those Audi and Lexus sedans zipping down the highway. GM and Ford do not bother to address this side of the equation. Their strength is building pickup trucks and SUVs and they are sticking to it.

The scooter phenomenon is a counter-weight to the rise in truck popularity. The city streets are now littered with scooters—magically arrived from some corporate source—ad placed on the sidewalks for all to consider. A credit card app gets the scooter moving. The brave then stand astride the scooter and take their chances on transportation sans protection. 

This very interesting scooter development parallels the increased use of bikes, also a risky pursuit, on our fast-moving public streets. Bikers mostly feature helmets and some use proper illumination at night. 

Scooter and bike people may be making a grand effort to save the planet. They will give you alternative explanations but I think the core idea, “let’s pollute less,” exists behind their transportation choices.

The New York Times has been tackling global climate change as a major target of their publication. I immersed myself in the recent article, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here.” 

Here is the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html

Do not let the title fool you—this is a human apocalypse, generated by mankind and foisted on all living things. The numbers of insects has declined significantly. Many other species have declined also.

The decreased insect population saddened me. We have all experienced the plenitude of nature. Maybe you have been in an apple orchard at harvest time? I have seen massive pecan crops on good years in Central Texas. 

Nature is no respecter of modest bounds. The California wildfires show us Nature’s limitless strength. Yet we have managed to throttle nature and toss it into an emergency state, a state with the intensity of cars racing headlong down the freeway, hell bent to get to work on time.

Mankind’s ambitious, restless personality, set on survival and prosperity and domination, has dwarfed even the Eden we were born into it. Look at Mars for alternate housing. Not good!

If you love the planet and share even a modicum of goodwill for all the other species, the Times article should get your attention.

What matters?

                                                                                

Which of these stories matters the most to you?
* Hope Hicks, Communication Director leaves Trump's White House
* Jared Kushner loses Top Secret security status
* Barbra Streisand cloned her dog
* Arctic temperatures surge-- in the dead of winter

You can probably guess which one got my attention. Read these three paragraphs from The Guardian:

Arctic warming: scientists alarmed by ‘crazy’ temperature rise

by: Jonathan Watts Global environment editor

Tue 27 Feb 2018 10.15 EST

An alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic is causing blizzards in Europe and forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.

Although it could yet prove to be a freak event, the primary concern is that global warming is eroding the polar vortex, the powerful winds that once insulated the frozen north.

The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 - more than three times as many hours as in any previous year.

Back to the blog…

You have got to admit there is cause for concern. Each of the three paragraphs tells an amazing story—more interesting, alarming and cause-for-concern than all the Jared Kushners… Hope Hicks and Barbra Streisand puppies combined.

We gravitate to the mundane, the minutiae, the Trumpian drama, the politics and gossip of the moment while our world crumbles, or melts, around us.

There is a psychological condition to explain this behavior, no doubt Call it “denial” or call it “rationalization” … but don’t call it late for dinner. That’s a little humor.

The Parkland, Florida horror deserved our attention. Even if nothing changes.

Or maybe the young people can make a dent in reality—and will influence the debate. Their protests will have to match Vietnam-era revolutionary action to have a chance to budge the corrupt congressmen and senators. I’m not sure the AR-15, scary as it is, threatens young people the way Vietnam threatened the health and well being of that generation.

Trump is an attention-grabber, maybe the best in the biz. But this Arctic story posed no threat to Trump. Because nobody cared. Nobody asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders about Arctic temperatures. She would tell us something along the lines about some days are hotter than others. Maybe add “Just like in Arkansas.”

We’re not in Arkansas anymore.

Hurricane Harvey: the good, the bad and everything in-between

Hurricane  Harvey set a new standard for natural disasters in the United States due to rain events. I heard a monsoon deluge in India and Bangladesh has been much worse in terms of loss of life, with deaths estimated at 1000. The Harvey death toll is at 45 casualties as I write this on Friday night.

My home in Austin, Texas has been spared the powerful rains and flooding experienced in Houston. We are only 150 miles from Houston but gained protection from a high pressure system in the atmosphere. The high pressure system from the west formed a wall which kept the storm parked over Houston, stalled in place and dumping monumental amounts of water on American's fourth largest city.

The near non-stop television coverage tells the story of Hurricane Harvey and  with great poignancy. Video footage of entire families wading through waist-deep water or being picked up by Good Samaritans in flat bottom boats reveals the best side of humanity. The outpouring of love and support across America has been a source of hope on the future our our nation. The cooperative effort to assist in Houston's recovery has transcended race, ethnic, religious, political and economic divisions. The Houston story may not provide an easy way out of our political partisanship, but the flotilla of citizens rescuing Houstonians in boats makes a powerful contrast to Charlottesville, Virginia, and its hurtful image of neo-Nazis muttering racist chants.

We can also learn much about our own bad habits from a storm most often referred to as "unprecedented." Unprecedented means never happened before. That's a key concept. We must try to explain how 50 inches of rain get dumped on a city. Houston's previous Biblical-style deluge, the Great Flood of 1935, produced only 15 inches of rain. Something has changed in 82 years, meteorologically speaking. We have turned the Gulf of Mexico into a much more efficient rain-making machine. Modern man loves his mechanical toys, many of them carbon producing, and has managed to raise the temperature of the oceans. Not an easy feat, and mainly accomplished in a century or two of industrialization.

There doesn't seem much hope for changing man's carbon-burning habits. I've heard about electric cars, etc., but I ain't that impressed. Sorry Elon Musk. One thing Democrats and Republicans agree on wholeheartedly is a passion for the automobile. With Port Arthur, Texas, home to the biggest oil refineries in the United States, temporarily shut down,  people form lines at Texas gas stations. The fear of going a day without gasoline is palpable and real.  I would not call the collective anxiety at near-panic levels a high level of consciousness regarding climate change.

If we locate an escape mechanism from mankind's deeply ingrained habits, the answer must lie in our better angels-- the side of humanity animated by the spirit of Houston. We need to rescue ourselves; the stresses of global climate change endanger us all though the poor seem to suffer the most.

No amount of money can refreeze a melted iceberg. The challenges lie ahead are daunting and Hurricane Harvey and Houston's suffering may work as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, our powerful message of warning. The coal mine analogy may add an element of ambiguity when it comes to understanding climate change-- coal mines only add to the problem. But we would do well to hold on to hurricane images: Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and now Harvey, images of cities turned into lakes. Not sure if it will be the fire next time or Noah's ark... but let's respect nature's ability to surprise and overwhelm us or the unprecedented will become all to common.