How Not to Save the Planet – Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything”

Globalization. Trade. Market Economics. Capitalism. Corporations. Economic growth. Writer Naomi Klein hates it all. Her book, This Changes Everything, argues that global warming’s terrible effects require junking that “neoliberalism,” for a different and more humane economic model. What, exactly? Don’t know.

Kleinites think globalization, trade, and capitalism worsen poverty and inequality. That’s just as factually wrong as climate change denialism. In the previous century – despite all its upheavals, the Depression, world wars, Russian and Chinese craziness – worldwide average real dollar incomes rose five-fold – 500%. The average person wound up five times better off than at the start. Poverty ranks plummeted. That didn’t happen through socialism.

Klein believes the only thing trade, capitalism, and “extractive” industries produce is profit – the only reason they exist. It’s just “greed.” There’s no recognition that industry produces stuff people want. Fossil fuel extraction is profitable because it creates energy we need and use (which Klein hates too).

She demonizes free trade without understanding it. Yes, it does make some people richer – a lot of people. Trade happens only when both sides benefit. That spreads prosperity. Freer trade enables poor people in developing countries to sell their products in richer ones. Protectionism keeps them out – and poor. So does “buy local.”

Partly, Klein hates trade because of what’s traded – our “wasteful, materialist, consumerist lifestyle.” (“Consumerism” is buying something someone else disapproves.) Consumerism, extractivism, and economic growth are what cause climate change. We’ve heedlessly raped the planet, and global warming is our “comeuppance.” We’ll be cooked, and drowned by rising seas, unless we stop making electricity with fossil fuels, driving gasoline cars, flying planes, etc. The political right, Klein says, realizes this, and hence rejects climate change science because it blows up their ideology of market economics and unrestrained capitalism. (While Klein loves climate change because it feeds her ideology of blowing up market economics and capitalism.)

Yet science tells us that blowing them up won’t halt climate change. If tomorrow we stopped everything – cut carbon emissions to zero – global warming would continue, only slightly slower than if we do nothing. Klein acknowledges this.

So does she welcome other approaches? No. Klein sees any answer that smacks of technology as just “doubling down” on what got us into trouble in the first place –  like geo-engineering to remove carbon from the atmosphere, or cool the planet by blocking some sun radiation. Replacing fossil fuel power generation with nuclear? That’s so capitalist/industrialist. And if global warming will hamper food production, how about genetic modification techniques that boost crop yields? GAAAA!

While bashing right-wing science denialism, Klein does acknowledge denialism on the left – mentioning the anti-vaccine movement – but denies the science telling us genetic modification is safe and beneficial. And nuclear energy is such an obvious no-brainer in terms of climate impact that many greens are finally embracing it. Klein is actually somewhat persuasive that geo-engineering is problematical, but urges banning further research. Who’s anti-science?

Further, if climate change will mean big trouble, wouldn’t having more money to deal with it help? But Klein hates economic growth, writing zingers like, “having more money won’t help you if your city is under water.”

Ha ha. Well, actually, it would. In fact, Klein bemoans that richer people can escape warming’s ill-effects. The Netherlands has already started raising buildings in anticipation of higher sea levels. Such efforts are costly, and Klein foresees trillions needed. Without economic growth, where will the money come from? Simple: guilty energy companies must pay. But she also says they should be stopped from drilling – so their trillions in future earnings won’t exist.

Klein’s hatred of economic growth (shared by climate zealot Bill McKibben) is also bizarre in light of their anguishing about inequality, poverty, and human deprivation. Growth does make the rich richer, but makes the poor richer too. How can they expect to beat poverty without a bigger economic pie? Just by redistribution? Seriously? With a billion or so people still living on less than $1 a day, I have no patience for those with cushy lives who superciliously call for ending economic growth. (And they are the ones charging capitalists with callousness.)

While Klein wants to dismantle “the system,” her alternative is never clear. But it is clear that stopping the industrial market economy and consumerism would (far from her dream of ending inequality) drastically shrink the economic pie, creating mass unemployment and impoverishment. Klein fantasizes that unemployment would actually be solved with all the new clean energy jobs. How those jobs would be supported, without a consumer economy, is a mystery.

By the way, poorer people tend to have more children – and higher populations are bad for the environment and climate.

Klein faults most environmentalists for misleading people that some modest lifestyle tweaks will suffice. But, reviewing the book, science writer Elizabeth Kolbert (though generally sympathetic) says Klein peddles a similar “fable” in failing to explain just how much energy consumption and consumer spending would have to be cut. Kolbert references a Swiss study predicated on a target “2000 watt society.” Americans currently use 12,000. The only hypothetical person in the study under 2,000 was a woman living in a retirement home with no TV or computer, traveling only rarely, by train.

So Klein’s program is really to give up modern life; while she vilifies politico/economic “austerity” policies, the austerity she herself advocates is far more draconian. What writers like her (and James Howard Kunstler) seem to want is everyone living on small farms, growing their own food, eschewing manufactured goods, and riding bicycles. Probably 80% of today’s Americans would literally die. Pre-industrial farm life was no bucolic paradise.

But in the end, Klein recognizes that de-growth is just not plausible, perhaps even “genocidal.” Yet still she envisions mass movement resistance overthrowing capitalism and extractivism, in favor of what she finally calls “regeneration.” Kolbert calls it “a concept so fuzzy” she “won’t even attempt to explain.” But she quotes Klein: “we become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.”

That sounds nice.

We have not heedlessly or foolishly raped the planet. Extracting and using energy was necessary for lifting billions out of squalor into decent lives, and still is. There’s no free lunch. Everything has a cost; economic growth does degrade the environment and climate. We will deal with that. Economic growth will help us do so – making life better in spite of warming.

My Unconscious Racial Bias

I bridle when I hear talk of persistent American racism. Sure, there is some. And, yes, after-effects of past racial injustice. But real racists today are marginal to U.S. society. The bigger picture I see is one of astonishing social change over a very short period – my own lifetime.

I grew up in a society that was indeed very racist (no, not the South), and I imbibed that myself. It took a while for me to grow out of it.

Most whites today see themselves as non-racist. But admittedly, psychologically, true color-blindness is still almost unattainable. Mainly I think this is because race continues to be a focus of issues – Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, etc. – so we’re unavoidably conscious of it. And scientific studies have shown that even most whites who think they’re color-blind have different perceptual, neurological reactions to black and white faces.

I see myself as antiracist (the converse of racist). Knowing too well our racial history gives me more sympathy than antipathy toward blacks. I like seeing them prospering, integrated into society. I try to practice personal affirmative action by treating blacks I encounter nicer than whites. On election night in 2008, even though I didn’t vote for Obama, I felt good for America’s blacks. When the result was declared, and TV showed a black woman jumping up and down, shouting “God bless America! God bless America!” I wanted to hug her. That still chokes me up (despite the disaster Obama has been). And see my post about the “great migration.”

Well give me an award.

So why, the other day, thumbing through the local paper, and glimpsing a photo of a black man and woman, did my brain have a little frisson of negative feeling? Little, fleeting, but definite and discernable. Whoa, I said to myself, What was that? Would I too, after all, flunk one of those scientific tests for unconscious racial bias?

Now, I know I react negatively when seeing anyone – black or white – who, for one reason or another, seems to display some unpleasant characteristic. That’s merely natural. But that didn’t apply here. The black man and woman were well-dressed, serious professional-looking people, seemingly the kind of black success I celebrate.

The photo (John Carl D’Annibale, Times Union)

Or do I, really? Was my subconscious mind making a different judgment?

Well, I’ve thought about it, and here’s my conclusion. I think my negative brain frisson was political, not racial. Though I didn’t know the pair were state legislators till I later read the caption, the photo was evocative of such a political context, and I could have guessed it. Black politicians in New York are overwhelmingly Democrats, and my blog readers know my opinion of New York’s Democratic political establishment. That’s what I think my brain saw, and reacted against, in the quick glimpse of the photo – not race, but politics.

Or am I just whitewashing myself? Maybe it isn’t that simple. Certainly race and politics are inextricably entwined. I do welcome black political involvement – but not when black politicians divisively play the race card. I see that too often (one black local pol in Albany was a repeat offender). Al Sharpton’s ubiquity doesn’t help. The guilty shouldn’t tar the innocent; but maybe the unconscious isn’t given to such fine discriminations. If not biased against blacks in general, perhaps I do have a reflex bias against black Democratic politicians.

Last night we watched a documentary about the comet landing; a woman scientist was speaking. And when I registered that she was black, I perceived in myself another frisson, this time a positive one.

Now that’s more like it, I told myself.

 

Boy, Was I Wrong – Nonvoters Rule!

Before the election, I said “Obama might be forced to get serious about accommodation with Republicans, on such urgent issues as tax reform and immigration, to avoid his second term being even more conspicuously a failure than it already is.”

I should have known better.

In his news conference, the President refused to acknowledge the obvious, that Republicans won not due to their popularity, but his unpopularity. Instead, he said, what voters really showed is that they want both parties to get stuff done. Then he proceeded to do all he could to make that impossible.

This is the hallmark of Obama’s presidency, beginning with his first campaign promising some sort of post-partisan politics with old divisions put aside; then even before taking office, closing Republicans out of his putative love-in.

And so it continues. What Obama really means by working together is Republicans just giving in to him. His news conference resembled the bumper sticker, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” Just substitute “I” for “God.”

So, after over three years of slow-walking the Keystone XL pipeline, conducting reviews, reviews of reviews, and reviews of those reviews, paralyzed between economic benefits and the environmentalist scolds in his base, Obama finally seems set to coddle them and veto it.

The re-re-reviews have shown no material environmental problem, with the economics clearly favorable. Obama could, perfectly reasonably, give Republicans at least this one thing. But no. Instead, with dubious justification on the merits, he must stick his thumb in their eye.

Likewise with immigration. I actually favor the measures Obama is readying. But doing it by executive order is the political equivalent of suicide bombing. It is simply declaring war against the Republicans – when they’ve just decisively won an election* and will control both houses of Congress. Obama’s action (subject to reversal by a future president) will kill hopes for a permanent legislative solution, which might otherwise have been promising. (And, while perhaps not palpably unconstitutional, such a far-reaching policy initiative without congressional consultation savages the spirit of our republican system.) This will furthermore poison the air for cooperation on any other issues.

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson says Obama’s action will bring about exactly what voters hate: “overreach, backlash, deadlock, threats and lasting bitterness.” (Just like with Obamacare.)

Meantime, Obama and Democrats are whining that the election results shouldn’t much count because of all the non-voters who would have voted Democratic. Of course, it’s chutzpah to presume how they would have voted; paternalistically taking people for granted. Dems made gigantic efforts to get their (presumed) supporters to turn out. But many didn’t turn out because they weren’t turned on, by what Democrats were selling. That resounding silence of voters Dems thought were theirs ought to tell the party something. Instead, they continue to act as though these voters belong to them, even though the voters withheld their votes. In a sense they were voting by not voting, conveying a message Obama and Democrats refuse to hear.

Anyhow, in our democratic country, voters rule. Not non-voters.

* Far more so than the supposedly “decisive” 2012 result which, in fact, was just 51% for Obama, with a bunch of key states won by razor-thin margins.

“Edge of Tomorrow” – Groundhog Day All Over Again

The space invaders have already conquered Europe. Humans hope to stop them with a reprise of the D-Day landings – complete with paratroopers (though using bungee cords rather than ‘chutes).

Major Cage (played by Tom Cruise*) is an effete PR officer who, before D-Day, meets with the commanding general – and is brusquely told he’ll be sent into combat. Why? It’s never explained.

Just one of the things that don’t make sense in this 2014 sci-fi action movie, Edge of Tomorrow. Another is that any aliens capable of reaching Earth would be so technologically advanced that our battling them would be ridiculous (more so using a WWII playbook). (Am I too didactic?)

Cage is a pussy who tries to squirm out of his reassignment. But next thing you know, he wakes up in handcuffs, demoted to a combat unit en route to the D-Day beach, where they’re all killed in minutes.

End of story? No, Cage wakes up again in handcuffs. Seems he’d gotten a splash of some special alien blood that puts him in a time loop, reliving the previous day over and over. He soon teams up with Rita, a hero woman warrior; and with each repeat of the sequence (often via her killing him to reset the loop), learning from his mistakes, he ups their game.

How is this not a total rip-off of Groundhog Day?

By the way, the title, Edge of Tomorrow, just lays there. Its “tag-line” – Live. Die. Repeat – would have made a far better title. But what do I know? I’m no highly paid Hollywood marketing maven.

Cage and Rita realize that the alien “soldiers” (good special effects on those weirdies!) are mere extensions of the “omega,” a central mind thingie whose destruction would be a coup de grace. Isn’t it always something like that? The human commanders don’t get it; maybe they haven’t viewed enough of these movies, such as Pacific Rim (see my review. We watch them in order to provide you with droll reviews like this. I hope you appreciate it.)

Anyhow, Cage and Rita set out to find and kill the omega; with each death and resurrection, Cage gets closer to the goal. Then an unsought blood transfusion ends his ability to loop back. So now he has one last chance to complete the mission, the hard way.

The logic of all this seemed shaky – especially with the omega being able to “control time” (whatever that might actually mean). If you play with time, you get tangled up. Furthermore (and typically for such flicks – see my recent review of Transcendence), most of the denouement was shrouded in darkness, punctuated by a lot of shooting, explosions, and sound effects. I had little idea what was going on. (I later googled a plot summary to find out.)

My wife and I had a disagreement. She thought the problem was with our TV, and that had we seen the film in a theater, all would have been clear. Nonsense, said I. What do you think? (One critic did call the final sequence “visually murky.”)

The Omega (best I could tell)

Anyway (spoiler alert), the omega gets whacked (with hand grenades, I kid you not), and its army melts away. Cage gets a fresh dose of alien blood, dies, and loops back again to the previous day – this time into a world wherein the aliens’ defeat is already being celebrated. Huh? Wouldn’t that not have happened yet – ?

A triumphalist news announcement breathlessly declares that Russian and Chinese troops are sweeping across Europe.

“That’s nice,” I said to my wife. I wonder if the film-makers put in that line with a sense of irony. Seems doubtful.

*I’m no fan of Cruise, who fronts for Scientology – a crypto “religion” not only having doctrines sillier than the usual, but a ruthless predator upon hapless victims in its clutches – scarier than any of Cruise’s movies.

When I Was a Kid America Was Like Africa

Waiting for the TV news,
I caught the end of “Homework Hotline.”
A little girl called in;
She said she’d come from Africa.
So the host asked her:
“How does Africa differ from America?”
“Well,” the girl explained,
“In Africa your mom lets you
Walk to school by yourself.
And your mom lets you go out
And play with your friends,
All by yourselves.”

When I was a kid, America was like Africa.
I walked alone to school,
We played in the street,
With no parental bodyguards;
And lived to tell the tale.
Today kids are driven everywhere,
Sequestered in their homes;
A South Carolina woman was arrested,
And her nine-year-old taken away,
For having left her in a playground.
Talk about the Nanny State.

Each year a quarter million American kids
Are hurt or killed in car crashes,
Many while being driven to school;
Whereas, based upon statistics,
To be abducted by a stranger
A child would have to be left
Out on the street
For seven hundred and fifty thousand years.

The South Carolina case was real (click here). We let pass parental conduct far more dangerous than leaving kids in a playground – like driving them to school. Walking would be not only safer but healthier, while inculcating independence and self-reliance. Furthermore (as the linked article notes), a child is far likelier to be molested or brutalized with a single mother’s boyfriend hanging around than being left in a public park. Yet it’s the latter that freaks people out and gets a child taken away.

Here the “nanny state” is almost literal: government decreeing how to parent your kids. In some places even smacking a child is criminalized. I was liberally smacked as a kid, and the conventional thing to say is that I wasn’t harmed. Well, it did teach me one lesson: never hit your kid. But should it be illegal? That goes way too far.

As did the South Carolina case, with the child actually taken away by the state. That itself is far likelier to harm a kid than being left in a playground – the whole foster care system is a snakepit for children. In most cases they’d be better off left with even lousy parents. The worst mom of all is government.*

We want government to protect people, but that requires power, and it’s hard to draw the line. And giving it a little power often morphs into a lot.
* See also my review of Carl Strock’s book, showing how government’s “child protective services” do more harm than good.

November 9 – 25 Years Later – Save The Wall

1962

I was a kid when I went by myself one time to the 1964 New York World’s Fair – I lived nearby – and wandered into the West German pavilion. There was a film about the Berlin Wall (erected in 1961). I was stunned. Until then I hadn’t truly grasped the evil. It made me a cold warrior.

Twenty Five years later. Remodeling at my office had resulted in a stupid partition blocking my window view. In chatting with my wife about my efforts to get it removed, I called it “The Berlin Wall.”

Then one day when she walked in, I greeted her by saying, “The Berlin Wall came down today.”

“The one at your office?”

“No,” I said. “The real one. In Germany.”

Shortly before, I had switched on the evening TV news, and saw people dancing atop the wall. I will never forget that moment, and the pictures of people flooding through those gates, whooping with exhilaration at the freedom they’d gained. It was November 9, 1989 – the world became a new and better place. It was an unambiguous triumph of my dearest beliefs. Life doesn’t give us too many like that. There are tears in my eyes now, writing this.

A lot has happened in the ensuing 25 years, and some pessimists believe the world is now worse. Well, it sure ain’t perfect. But the great sweep of history is the titanic efforts of human beings to make things better. November 9, 1989 was a milestone in that eternal struggle.

My wife later gave me, as a gift, a little box containing a souvenir – a chunk from the Berlin Wall. Then we visited Germany, and I could actually stand, upon a patch of rubble where once the wall had been, and raise my arms in triumph.

At first the Germans left a little of the wall intact, for remembrance. But now even that bit is under threat of demolition. Some people are saying, “Save the Wall!” and I agree. This should be kept as a monument to the evil it represented – and a monument to the human beings who overcame it.

In 1964 I could not foresee the day when that wall would come down. And I certainly could not have imagined the day, 50 years later, when I’d write a blog post saying, “Save the Wall.”

The Earth Moves

Early peoples might be forgiven had they viewed the stars as just a kind of wallpaper, without significance. Yet we always sensed something important out there, and struggled to understand it.

It was not stupid to think the heavens revolved around a stationary Earth. A few early theorizers saying otherwise were considered crackpots, and for sound reasons. If the Earth moved, why wasn’t everything on it jostled? And wouldn’t something thrown straight up fall at a distance? But the killer argument was parallax. If the Earth travelled, the stars should appear at different perspectives at different times. Yet they didn’t! Nobody realized how vastly distant the stars are, making the parallax effect infinitesimal.

While the heavens appeared to revolve in unison, a few stars didn’t follow the program, instead moving in seemingly crazy patterns. They were called “planets” (Greek for “wanderers”). This anomaly really bugged the ancients.

Eventually the Second Century astronomer Ptolemy came up with a model with the stars moving on fixed spheres, but the planets using some complicated extra circles (“epicycles”) to account for their oddball movements. It was actually brilliant. But unfortunately, as astronomical observations got ever better, the scheme had to be continually rejiggered, growing ever more convoluted.

Copernicus

Copernicus thought of trying a radically different construct. If the Earth were a planet, circling the Sun, a lot of the complications went away. But he was reluctant to publish (he first held the book in his hands the day he died in 1543), partly because the calculations still wouldn’t work out. That was because Copernicus still assumed circular orbits.

Then Johann Kepler took up the challenge. Kepler was obsessed by “the harmony of the spheres” — that in God’s perfect Heaven, everything went round in perfect circles. With access to Tyche Brahe’s immense store of accurate astronomical observations, for a decade Kepler bashed away at it, trying to somehow make the circles work. And then something truly amazing happened. Kepler realized he was wrong. He went back to it — and teased out the truth. The planets travel not in circles, but ellipses; their speeds vary with their closeness to the Sun; but for equal time intervals, they sweep out equal areas of their ellipses. (See picture.)

It was beautiful; it finally perfectly explained the movements; and it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck to think that Kepler, despite craving a different  answer, could transcend his own preconceptions and figure it out.

Meanwhile, Galileo’s telescope proved Copernicus right about the Earth circling the Sun. The Church — having in 1600 burned the philosopher Giordano Bruno alive for saying so — browbeat Galileo into publicly denying it. “And yet it moves,” he supposedly grunted under his breath. And the Church was unable to suppress his book, Sidereus Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger”) which persuaded intelligent people who was right.

But we were not done yet. Why did the planets move as Kepler showed? What made them move at all?

Aristotle had theorized that anything moving had to be somehow pushed. But why a thrown object kept moving was a vexing puzzle for two millennia. Eventually, Galileo and Descartes developed the idea of inertia — anything moving keeps on moving unless something stops it (commonly, friction). And that movement would be in a straight line, unless something deflects the path. But why then didn’t the planets fly off in straight lines? What was deflecting them?

It was a 23-year-old Isaac Newton who, in 1666, finally put it all together. What reconciled the theories of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was yet another new idea — gravity. Of course we’d always known apples fall downward; but had never guessed this force was universal, acting even on planets. Newton worked out that gravity is proportional to mass and diminishes with the square of the distance between objects; and, voila, that this explained Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

And so, at last, those little creatures who’d gazed with puzzlement at the cosmic wallpaper punched their way through to understand it. Again my neck hairs stand up.

Of course, even today, we still don’t know everything. Not even, in fact, why gravity does follow Newton’s law. Einstein got us closer, with the idea of mass bending space; you’ve seen the illustrations, with bowling bowls on mattresses. But that seems to me more metaphor than explanation; and physicists continue struggling to integrate gravity with the other fundamental forces to produce a “theory of everything.”

Yet the story I’ve told is the story of humanity growing up: our evolution from a mentality shaped by myth and superstition, steeped in mystery, to one of dispelling mystery by application of reason to observed reality. I’ve read about it in Richard Tarnas’s eloquent book, The Passion of the Western Mind. And he points out that the new modern mindset was not just limited to science. Just as the old cosmology, tethered to religious dogmas, was replaced by a new rationalist view, so too everything in civilization, previously grounded in tradition-bound ideas of divine sanction — absolute monarchical power, aristocratic privilege, arbitrary laws, exploitive economics, etc. — could likewise be supplanted by new and better systems founded upon rationalist concepts of independent human dignity. And so it is coming to pass.

Midterms, Obamasis, and Cuomosis

Tomorrow is Election Day. Republicans may well take the Senate, mainly because President Obama is so unpopular. That unpopularity, unfortunately, is justified. He is extremely cerebral, but it seems to make him smugly feel he needn’t bother to actually assert leadership. As Leon Panetta, his former Defense Secretary, writes in a new book, Obama has trouble making decisions, let alone gutsy decisions. And he wants to have everything both ways – as with his declaration of war against the Islamic State – without actually fighting a war, in a conventional sense. Aiming to have the best of both worlds – victory without blood – we’ll likely end up with the worst of both – blood without victory.

This is only the latest symptom of Obamasis. The first was to blow off the recommendations of his own Simpson-Bowles commission. That’s not some arcane inside-the-beltway matter. It was probably our last best chance to avoid long run fiscal disaster. Don’t be lulled by transitory deficit declines. A growing imbalance between Americans productively employed and those collecting various benefits puts us on an unsustainable path.

Another, of course, was Obama’s drawing a “red line” on Syrian chemical weapons use, and then making a fool of himself when it was crossed – shredding America’s international credibility.

As Panetta’s book elucidates, while of course one must carefully weigh the consequences (and unintended consequences) of action, inaction equally has consequences.

Meantime, as my blog readers know, I’m no great fan of today’s Republicans. One particularly ugly thrust of theirs is voter suppression – making it harder for disadvantaged citizens (assumed to favor Democrats) to vote, through restrictive ID requirements and the like – on the blatantly phony pretext of preventing (almost nonexistent) voter fraud. I wish Republicans would think harder about how to attract voters than blocking them. This is not a strategy that befits a serious political party.

The conventional wisdom (on the left, anyway) says that a Republican Senate would just worsen gridlock. But I doubt this. No longer could Harry Reid be blamed for political paralysis. Obama might be forced to get serious about accommodation with Republicans, on such urgent issues as tax reform and immigration, to avoid his second term being even more conspicuously a failure than it already is. And if Republicans hope to win the White House, they might seek to avoid an image as masters of dysfunction.

A word about the campaign. With much of the electorate divided between immovable partisans, close elections come down to battles over the others, who tend to be much less politically sophisticated; resulting in campaigns, via TV ads, that insult intelligence and demean our democracy.

Everyone decries negative ads, but virtually all candidates (in contested races) use them, because they work. And the standard for what they feel they can get away with, in abusing truth, continues to fall, a real race to the bottom. Ohio actually passed a law banning inaccurate political ads, which was overturned in the courts – thankfully – I take a dim view of any governmental regulation of political advocacy. But I would like to see some public service announcements, on billboards, buses, and the airwaves, something like this:

VOTERS BEWARE! TV ADS SLAMMING POLITICAL CANDIDATES ARE OFTEN VERY MISLEADING! THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY!

Here in New York, exactly as I predicted, our loathesome Governor Cuomo has blanketed the state with ads smearing his opponent, Rob Astorino. Also as I predicted, the New York Times and Albany Times-Union, despite previously excoriating Cuomo, held their noses and endorsed him, being congenitally incapable of backing a Republican. For my case against Cuomo, see my 9/7 blog post.*

The T-U did at least urge a “no” vote on the phony redistricting “reform” on the ballot; though while lamenting Governor Cuomo’s “settling” for this cynical charade in lieu of genuine reform, could not bring itself to call this a black mark against him. In fact it’s a smelly disgrace.

Though I rarely vote for any incumbents, let alone Democratic ones, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has earned support. He has shown himself a straight-shooter, and seems immune from infection by Albany’s political culture. He has come out strongly, in an op-ed, against the redistricting referendum. Cuomo seems to despise DiNapoli. That should certainly recommend him.

Anyhow, even if you do see all politicians as rotten scalawags – vote. And remember that voting for a minority no-hoper is not “wasting” your vote. You waste a vote if you bestow it on a candidate you don’t actually prefer. This is not a game, of trying to pick a winner; there are no prizes for that. And your vote doesn’t really have more weight if cast for a major candidate. We don’t participate on the theory that one’s individual vote will actually affect the outcome. Rather, this is our one great communal civic sacrament.

My wife’s Halloween selfie. Has nothing to do with this topic, but I enjoyed the picture so much I’m posting it anyway.

* I forgot to mention there Cuomo’s egregious statement that “right wingers” have no place in New York State. I would say that people with that kind of intolerant attitude have no place in America. Meantime, progressives see Cuomo as pandering to them while actually selling out to moneyed interests who fatten his campaign war chest. T-U columnist Fred LeBrun baldly calls Cuomo a “fraud.”