What I've Learned So Far

Two kids, one trip around the block in a low-traffic neighborhood, and you get this . . .

Note my son’s hand holding up the Lemon Heads for display. As we were rounding the block, he said “Wow, this is so much candy! This is getting heavy!”

My daughter is now making a graph showing how much of which candy she got. “I got two Baby Ruths! . . .  The most popular Starburst was red. . . .”  My little scientist!

Sir Nicholas Stern of HM Treasury has issued his report on the likely impacts of climate change on the economy of the United Kingdom. Here’s Sir Nicholas from the related press release:

“The conclusion of the Review is essentially optimistic. There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally. Governments, businesses and individuals all need to work together to respond to the challenge. Strong, deliberate policy choices by governments are essential to motivate change.

“But the task is urgent. Delaying action, even by a decade or two, will take us into dangerous territory. We must not let this window of opportunity close.”

We can hope for “strong, deliberate policy choices by governments” — especially the governments of the United States and China. Meanwhile, we can hope that the British will lead the way in this as they did, say, in the abolition of the slave trade.

“We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart, in its cunning, quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.”

–Henri-Frederic Amiel

(Hat tip to Randy Kirchhof, who has a great quotations page here. He’s the same person who wrote the leaving-Kinky e-mail I quoted in the previous entry.)

Thanks to a friend who pointed me to Charles Kuffner’s post about it, I can point you to an open letter from an erstwhile Kinky Friedman supporter. The whole thing (and its addendum) is good reading, but I’d like to pull this out for special attention:

Listen folks, I was a true believer. I’ve played benefits for Kinky. I knew about the campaign months before it was publicly announced. I (among others) suggested him for the keynote addresses at more than one music festival. I’ve blogged about him. I talked him up. I made phone calls on his behalf. I “saved myself” for the campaign and signed the petition.

He had two years to get his act together and study the issues and formulate policy. He didn’t. And he does not deserve my vote.

‘How hard can it be?’ indeed. Apparently too hard for the Kinkster.

If the Kinky campaign wants to make a difference and be more than a laughingstock, it can pull out of the race now and endorse Chris Bell — and the then-former candidate can spend the last two weeks of the season campaigning his ass off for Chris Bell.

Amen. Texas deserves better — better than Friedman, better than another term of Rick Perry.

Chris Bell for Governor.

I’m always heartened by antipoverty initiatives that take a smarter approach than classic direct aid. Don’t get me wrong: sometimes the direct application of food or medicine or cash is just the ticket for helping out people in need in the developing world. But in general, I tend to think that those efforts work best in cases of emergency. For the long haul, we need better, smarter, durable methods that foster sustainable changes driven by the recipients themselves.

A great example of this is discussed in this TED Talk by Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen Fund. This is what you get when people who are savvy to Western business and philanthropy are willing to let the recipients of aid help to build the process by which the aid is administered. Novogratz’s story of native entrepreneurship around bednets in Africa is exactly what the world needs more of.

I’ve been enjoying the WorldChanging blog ever since I started reading it. (They just launched a spiffy new site update, too.) Now the team there is coming forth with a book full of practical ideas on how to change the world for the better. I’ve seen good reviews of it, and the design of it looks beautiful.

I was all set to order mine, but I’m going to wait two days, so I can help the WorldChaging book shoot up the Amazon.com rankings. The WC folks explain their rationale here.

Join us, won’t you?

I had missed Slate’s story in March on the Katrina Cottage, so I was happy to come across this post about the design at Inhabitat. Marianne Cusato’s design for charming and dignified frame cottages to take the place of ugly FEMA trailers — at the same price! — shows what a good designer can do in the face of a real design challenge.

(Inhabitat, by the way, is quickly turning into a regular destination for me. It seems tilted toward a female audience, but I love it’s blend of environmentalism with design sensibility. There’s no reason for the two to be mutually exclusive.)

Politicians manipulate words all the time, just like marketers do. In fact, it’s part of the job description. In this context, it’s interesting to note how the Big Dichotomy of politics — “conservative” versus “liberal” — has morphed over time in different settings and in different countries. Once upon a time, for example, the political mainstream of the U.S. associated “liberal” with “freedom-loving” and “progressive” rather than “effete”.

Well, the one that gets under my skin even worse is the use by modern members of the political right of “conservative” to mean . . . well, I don’t want to write “reactionary, schoolmarmish, and prude”, but that’s the direction I’m leaning. Conservatism is supposed to be about looking to tradition for answers, and about preserving what’s best out of a heritage as we go forward.

As this FP post points out, the White House would like to raise the specter of a tax-and-spend liberal/Democratic Congress, which would, it is implied, balloon federal spending. Except that the nice folks at Foreign Policy have pointed to some lovely charts worked up by the bleeding hearts of the Heritage Foundation, who show clearly — in inflation-adjusted figures and everything — how federal spending has gone up in one Congress after another, regardless of which party held the majority.

For your reality-based viewing pleasure, I point you to:

• Total Federal Spending, 1962-2006, with Congressional Leadership
• Percentage Growth of Federal Spending and Inflation (Consumer Price Index), 1992-2005
• Total Federal Spending Per Household, 1962-2006

Here’s the deal: let’s all agree that the federal government is bloated. Let’s set a goal of reducing its size by five percent during each Congress — that is, every two years. And let’s all agree that we’ll do this by making hard compromises (I give up something, you give up something) rather than easy ones (I use taxpayer money to give you something, you use taxpayer money to give me something). This is going to mean big philosophical arguments about where the money should go, as well as down-in-the-trenches fights over the details of spending bills. Good — let’s do it.

And by all means, please let’s give up the fiction that this President, this Congress, or the leadership of the Republican Party as a whole is dedicated to fiscal probity. The numbers show clearly that they are not.

“Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing subject to profound laws, and if he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of things happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then his whole situation drops from him as from a dead man, although he stands in the very midst of life.”

—Rilke

The other day I mentioned Susan Casey’s disturbing Best Life article about plastic pollution in the oceans. At that point, I had skimmed the article. Now that I’ve read it thoroughly, I’m far more disturbed by it than I was before. All this week, I’ve been seeing plastic everywhere, and especially the plastics that may enter our bloodstreams via contact with our food.

Next step for me: Getting a glass- or ceramic-lined travel mug that I can use at the local coffee shop instead of ever drinking another hot beverage from a polystyrene (e.g. Styrofoam) cup.