Tag Archives: climate change

Usual Rubbish

Back pages.

Looks like rain again. And forty, maybe fifty degrees. You call this winter? I call it bullshit, man. Fifty years after the blizzard of ’66, and it’s like freaking April out there in the middle of February. Freak. Ish.

Right, I know. Don’t start a blog post by talking about the weather. Very well. But I should add that, even though the weather’s been less than frightful, we’ve been sticking pretty close to home this winter. Old habits die hard, I guess. And while the sun shone over these past few days, we’ve occupied ourselves with digging through the vast Big Green archive, looking for rare nuggets of a glorious past that never was. The odd gig poster. A broken guitar string. A broken guitar. A broken guitar case. (Interestingly, I found those all together.)

Some will remember that my first instrument was the bass guitar. (And when I say “some”, I don’t mean anyone reading this.) When Matt and I started playing out in the late 70s, that was my axe, for the most part, though I started banging on my brother Mark’s Fender Rhodes piano fairly early on. Matt and I spent more than a few years in the wilderness, putting together bands and watching them fall apart. First we couldn’t hold on to a guitar player. Then it was drummers – before John White picked it up, we hopped from one player to another. After that, it was guitar players … I think we had three in the space of two years in the early nineties. Big Green was invented in 1986. It Yep. Busted. kind of came up in our alphabet soup while we were hanging out in Ballston Spa, NY, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Okay, so … if you look around my basement, you’ll find my P-Bass, still virtually unplayable (just like it was thirty years ago). If you look hard, you’ll find Mark’s Fender Rhodes. We’ve got some recording from those early days, but they’re spotty at best. I may post one at some point just for laughs. We popped into a studio in Utica back in 1981 and recorded some live tracks, including a couple of originals. It’s a pretty good snapshot of where we were musically back then – rushed, tired-sounding, no sense of parts or arrangement. We were a mess! Kids those days!

God damn, I wish it would snow so that I wouldn’t feel as thought I’m just wasting my time down here. (That’s right, friends … it’s all about me.)

Political Rants

New year, old bottle.

Here we go headlong into 2016. It feels as if we’ve already had the year, since pop culture obsesses over the horse-race aspect of elections even if it rarely delves into the substance of what’s at issue. Truth be told, the talk shows have been talking about 2016 since 2012, the day after election day. Evidently, it’s an eyeball magnet for them, so they’ll never stop talking about it, particularly now that we’ve entered the age of Trump. Good television will always trump (no pun intended) good politics, hands down.

So, what are the substantive issues that we should be grappling with in this election year? Same ones as in practically every other year, and you can name them as credibly as I can. Here’s my list:

Cheap eyeball magnetCapitalism’s Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 2008, and we are still living in the aftermath of that disaster. Yes, the government can point to select data points that indicated a modest level of recovery, but the fact remains that an economic system that has consistently failed the vast majority of the population over the past 30 years has entered into an entirely new phase of failure. Most working Americans are toiling at the only job they can find, earning an inadequate rate of compensation. Our major cities are choked with legions of homeless people. This system is broken; it only serves the top one percent. We need to take a hard look at this, sooner rather than later.

Phony Wars. Our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are entering a new year with no end in sight, and we’re building up presences in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. These conflicts spawn other conflicts, inspire retail terrorists, and generally create havoc. I’m not hearing a lot of meaningful discussion about this from the current herd of presidential candidates. Let’s hold their feet to the fire this year.

Climate Change. While it is snowing like hell today, this has been the warmest and most snowless late fall – early winter in upstate New York in my experience. And while we have the Paris accord, very little is being done to reduce emissions and prevent this ongoing climate disaster from becoming an unmitigated catastrophe and a threat to human survival in the decades ahead. We have the means to move the needle on this; now we just need the will. That’s totally up to us.

Black Lives Matter. With the failure to indict the Cleveland PD officers who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year, it is clear that we need to set new standards for law enforcement methods and accountability. That said, the problem evident in these deadly interactions runs much deeper than what can be corrected through police reform. Law enforcement methodology reflects the values of the society it serves; namely, white society in America. There are deep historical, economic, and cultural reasons for this, and we need to address these at their root, not simply prune the unsightly branches.

The list goes on, but we would do well to inject these issues into the election year discussion, preferably in a manner that draws connections between all three.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Mount denial.

Another one of those weeks. Seems like there have been a lot of them just lately. In any case, it was notable that the President spent part of the week up in northern Alaska, getting his picture taken in front of melting glaciers. This represents political jiu-jitsu of positively Clintonian proportions, as it was only last week that Obama’s administration gave the nod to Gulf Oil to start drilling in the arctic – a region so remote that even the inadequate remediation services available in places like the Gulf of Mexico are unavailable. Gulf’s business plan, I assume, relies on a lot of good luck (as well as a steadily warming climate). Their disaster response plan is probably the same boilerplate bogus document BP used.

Somebody should do somtehing ... Right, so … Barry let Gulf oil start drilling in ocean recently freed up by the effects of burning hydrocarbons, but that’s okay, because he renamed Mount McKinley and talked about how we’re not moving fast enough on climate change. Yeah, no shit, Mr. President – there’s an obvious solution to that, of course. Stop dragging your own damn feet. Obama’s efforts to address the impending climate catastrophe are progressing so slowly that those glaciers he visited seem speedy in comparison. He should have named that mountain “Denial-ly”.

I’m not sure what’s more aggravating, a right-wing politician (name pretty much any one) who champions climate change skepticism or someone like the President, who obviously knows better but lacks the will (or perhaps the spine) to do what needs to be done – to propose solutions appropriate to the scale of the problem. This eight years may turn out to have been the last best hope for putting the worst effects of global climate change in check. My guess is that Obama knows this, but if so, how can he not at least try to take the necessary steps, not the usual scrum of half-measures?

Climate change will not be blown back by rhetoric. It doesn’t yield to compromise solutions. We have to stop thinking in terms of short-term political expediency and realize that when it comes to survival on this planet, half-measures won’t do.

luv u,

jp