Category: Political issues

Resisting Internet snooping


My cellular antenna, pointed at a Verizon tower for Internet service. Apple found my WIFI and its exact location, even though it’s in the boonies, in the darkness of my attic.

The dark side of the Internet is that it is a big machine increasingly optimized for the invasion of privacy. For example, my WIFI router lives in the dark up in my attic, connected to an “air card” and special antenna that connect me to Verizon for Internet access. My WIFI router is in the woods in a sparsely populated rural area, half a mile from a paved road and a good many miles from a Verizon tower. And yet I discovered yesterday, while experimenting with “location services” on my iPad, that Apple knows the exact location of my WIFI router. How can that be, since my iPad 1 does not have GPS, 3G, or any other means of determining its location?

I had to think for a while and do some research before I figured it out. A friend was here recently with an iPhone equipped with GPS. He was unable to get an AT&T cell phone signal from here, but he did connect to my WIFI router. His cell phone, I now realize, knew its exact location from GPS. It also, of course, knew the unique machine address, or “MAC address,” of my WIFI router. Because “location services” was enabled on his iPhone, the iPhone transmitted my WIFI router’s unique identifier and its exact location to Apple’s databases. Google does something similar. Apple’s and Google’s databases know the exact locations of millions of WIFI routers — public and private — all over the world. If you enable “location services” on an iPhone or iPad, you consent to this. Apple has fully “disclosed” it. Google built its database partly by having vehicles drive through the major streets and roadways, sniffing out WIFI signals, capturing the WIFI systems’ unique identifiers, and transmitting the location back to Google’s database.

So Apple has pinned me. I can’t undo it. My only recourse would be to sell my current router so that someone else is pinned with its location and buy a new, virgin WIFI router. Then I’d have to lock down my router, never use “location services,” and forbid my friends and visitors from connecting to my WIFI system. How likely am I to do that? The first thing visitors want to know these days is whether you’ve got WIFI. Guests expect it, along with clean towels and a mud-free driveway.

Still, I try to do everything that is reasonable and practical to prevent my (totally legal and benign) Internet activity from being logged in corporate databases. This kind of data, from all of us who use the Internet, is now routinely logged, cross-referenced with our names and addresses, and sold — more often to other corporations but also to government and investigative agencies.

Your Internet service provider, this very minute, is almost certainly logging all your web browsing. Your ISP knows everything you do on the Internet. This data is almost certainly kept for a long time, maybe forever.

Is there anything you can do about that?

For a good while, I’ve been looking for a trustworthy “virtual private network,” or VPN, provider that will encrypt all my Internet traffic (making it invisible to my ISP, Verizon), while keeping my IP address private. There are many organizations on the Internet that provide this kind of service, but most of them seem to be part of a shady gray market that mostly serves people who are up to no good.

I think I’ve found a VPN provider that is a respectable business, reasonably priced, with service that is good enough not to slow me down when I’m browsing. In fact, there is evidence that this VPN service actually speeds up my browsing, because Verizon is now intercepting its customers web traffic and sending it through “optimization” servers that attempt to reduce the bandwidth that Verizon customers use. Verizon intercepts only traffic on HTTP port 80, so encrypted VPN on other ports bypasses Verizon’s optimization servers. Verizon has disclosed this.

The software system I’m using is OpenVPN, and the company that provides the service is Private Tunnel. I’ve been using this service for a week now. They provide OpenVPN software for both Mac and Windows. On my Mac, the app is robust and transparent. It uses a tiny amount of CPU. I’m very pleased with it so far. I had a couple of questions for Private Tunnel’s tech support, and they got back to me immediately via email. Though this is not spelled out in Private Tunnel’s terms of service document (it ought to be), I am assured by their tech support department that, though they log incoming connections to their servers and keep those logs for a month or two, they do not log your browsing destinations. And because all your traffic is encrypted by the VPN software, your ISP gleans no data about your activity on the Internet, other than the fact that you have an encrypted connection to a Private Tunnel server.

Do you need something like this? You do only if you don’t want corporate America to collect and resell data about your Internet activity. Also, if you use a laptop or notebook at a public WIFI hot spot, this encryption prevents snoopers at that hot spot from intercepting and stealing passwords, etc., from any unencrypted data that you transmit through that hot spot.

The New Yorker in Mayberry


Snappy Lunch in downtown Mount Airy

It isn’t often that urbane institutions such as the New Yorker find themselves in places like Mount Airy, North Carolina. In the September 12 issue of the New Yorker, George Packer has a must-read piece on how the United States has deteriorated — in almost every way — since the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The article is “Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot.”

This piece is available on the New Yorker’s web site to non-subscribers, here.

This article is not in any way condescending toward Mount Airy. It’s hard to nail down the gist of an article this long and thoughtful, but these two paragraphs come pretty close:

While the media were riveted by the spectacle of celebrity wealth, large areas of the country were—like Surry County—left to rot. The boom had been built on sand: housing speculation, overvalued stocks, reckless deregulation, irresponsible deficits. When the foundation started to crumble with the first wave of mortgage defaults, in 2007, the scale of the destruction became the latest of the decade’s surprises. Hardly anyone foresaw how far the economy would fall; hardly anyone imagined how many people it would take on the way down. Even the economic advisers of the next Administration badly misjudged the crisis. The trillions of dollars spent and, often, misspent on wars and domestic bureaucracies were no longer available to fill the hole left by the implosion of the private economy. Reborn champions of austerity pointed to the deficits in order to make the case that the country couldn’t afford to spend its way back to health. And, like the attacks that were supposed to change everything, the recession—which was given the epithet “Great” and was constantly compared with the Depression of the nineteen-thirties—inspired very little change in economic policy. Without effective leadership, the country blindly reverted to the status quo ante, with the same few people making a lot of money, if a little less than before, and the same people doing badly, if a little worse.

This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, élites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change.

Book review: German propaganda in WWII

The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Jeffrey Herf, Harvard University Press, 2006.

I finally got around to reading a book on Nazi propaganda. As I’ve mentioned before, I have long been interested in the black art and dark science of propaganda. Nazi propaganda is an important — if not terribly interesting — part of the history of propaganda. Why is it not interesting? Because of its sameness and dullness. I’ll get to that in a moment.

I was born three years after World War II ended. Cold War propaganda, however, is not so mysterious to me. I grew up during the Cold War. I was 11 years old when Nikita Krushchev, on Oct. 12, 1960, angrily banged his shoe on the podium at a meeting of the United Nations. Americans were shown that film over and over. We also were often reminded that Krushchev had said, “We will bury you,” and we were encouraged to believe that Krushchev had something murderous in mind. Actually, that was a line that Krushchev used regularly with Westerners, and he took care to explain what he meant (though American television never bothered, as I recall, to explain what Krushchev meant). In a speech in Yugoslavia in 1963, Krushchev said: “I once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.”

I also used to do a lot of shortwave radio listening — the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Radio Havana, the BBC, and so on. The English broadcasts of Radio Moscow in the 1970s were anything but threatening. The broadcasts largely were concerned with building on the prestige of Russian literature and Russian music. Radio Havana, as I recall, was extremely dull, with tedious and detailed reports on the number of tons of this and that being harvested. It didn’t make for good radio, but, given the long embargo against Cuba and the importance of local agriculture in Cuba, the priorities make sense.

It is extremely difficult to see Nazi propaganda as sophisticated. It was crude. It really had only one theme, a violent anti-semitism. There was no evolution of this propaganda before or during the war. There was only the repetition of that central theme, as though Nazi propagandists feared that straying too far from their central theme would cloud the message. As the war turned against Germany, and as Germany began carrying out “the final solution,” they doubled down on the anti-semitic theme, but the propaganda did not evolve or change.

This, in essence, is the storyline behind Nazi propaganda from the late 1930s through 1945: The Nazis want peace, but war was necessary to stop the Jewish plot to destroy German culture and murder the German people. The Jews are criminals, and they manipulate the puppet strings that control the West. The plutocrats of the United States and Britain, and the Bolsheviks of Russia, are really no different, because what they have in common is control by the Jewish string pullers. Both Churchill and Roosevelt are Jew-lovers surrounded by Jewish advisers who force the United States and Britain into a war to annihilate Germany and kill all Germans. The Jews are guilty. Only Germany has awakened to the Jewish plot, and Germany is justified in war and the annihilation of the Jews because Germany is only doing to the Jews what the Jews are trying to do to Germany.

That storyline never really changed, though, after 1943, Hitler in his speeches more often used German words for “annihilate” (Vernichtung) and “exterminate” (Ausrottung) in talking about the Jews, though the Nazi elite never spoke openly about “the final solution.”

There were two key players in Nazi propaganda, though Hitler himself was in control of the propaganda message until the very end. The key player, of course, was Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of propaganda. Herf, in this book, emphasizes the importance of Otto Dietrich, the Reich press chief who, unlike Goebbels, had an office near Hitler’s and spoke daily with Hitler.

Though the Nazis’ propaganda delivery systems seem primitive now, they were state-of-the-art for the time, and they never skimped on the propaganda budget. There was no free press in Germany under the Nazis. Unfriendly editors and newspapers were purged, and the assets were sold cheap to members of the party. Uncooperative journalists were harassed and arrested, and party members were put in their place. Confidential weekly press directives from Dietrich were distributed to all newspaper publishers, listing the talking points and telling editors how to frame events. The Reich produced a weekly newsreel that was seen by millions. Radio was used extensively. Herf, in this book, puts a lot of emphasis on an important form of propaganda that everyone in Germany saw and read but which were poorly known at the time outside Germany. This was a weekly “wall newspaper,” a kind of poster that was posted all over Germany so that almost the entire population had a chance to read these posters as they went about their daily lives. You can find a lot of these posters online by searching for “Word of the Week,” or “Parole der Woche.” Goebbels’ order was that these posters should be simple and emotional: “Form and color must correspond to the primitive emotions of the masses.”

Herf lists some of the guiding principles of propaganda as given by Friedrich Madebach in 1941:

Madebach drew on Mein Kampf to arrive at “basic laws” of mass influence: intellectual simplification, limitation to a few key points, repetition of those points, focus on one subjective standpoint to the exclusion of others, and appeal to the emotions and to stark contrasts between good and bad or truth and lies, rather than to nuance and shades of gray.

Herf briefly alludes to an interesting question. Did the Nazis believe their own propaganda? Apparently there is no consensus on the answer. Before I read this book, I think I would have assumed that the Nazi’s did not believe their own propaganda, because the propaganda is so crude, and the Nazi leaders were elite (Goebbel’s had a Ph.D.). But after reading this book, and some of the entries in Geobbel’s diary and accounts of private conversations with Hitler, I now find it plausible that the Nazis did believe their own propaganda.

This book discusses one chilling set of facts that I was completely unaware of. That is that Nazi propaganda had a measurable effect on Americans. Polls by the Opinion Research Corporation attempted to measure anti-semitic sentiment in the United States. The polling question was, “Do you think the Jews have too much power in the United States?” Here is a table of the number of Americans who said yes:

1938: 41 %
1940: 42 %
1942: 47 %
1944: 56 %
1945: 58 %

In other words, anti-Jewish sentiment was growing in the United States even as we fought a war with Germany. Here’s another one. The polling question is, “What nationality, religious, or racial groups in this country are a menace to America?” In eight polls between August 1940 and June 1945, Jews always polled as the greatest menace, except for a poll right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese were seen as the greatest threat, and a poll in February 1942, when German submarines were sinking ships off the United States’ Atlantic coast, when Germans were perceived as the greatest menace.

Just how these anti-semitic attitudes in the United States came to be intensified during World War II would be an interesting historical study in itself. Mostly this is a mystery to me. Fortune magazine, in February 1936, devoted an entire issue to the subject of Jews in American business. Henry Ford financed the publication of the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ford also wrote articles in the Dearborn Independent that, according to Herf, “fanned the fires of anti-Semitism in American life.” Charles Lindbergh in the late 1930s and his ideological allies kept saying that it was Jews who were driving the United States to intervene in Europe. In 1939, Look magazine reported that there was 62 organizations in America distributing material that came from Hitler’s propaganda ministry.

This is a piece of history that is no fun to read. Now I need a good science fiction adventure to clear my mind. No wonder we dream of other worlds.

2011 garden, R.I.P.


Pumpkin vines in 99-degree heat

I haven’t posted lately because I’ve constantly been in a foul and angry mood. I’m afraid my mood is not going to get any better until it rains and the weather turns cooler. And of course it’s not just me made miserable by the weather. This heat wave is affecting something like two-thirds of the country. Thousands and thousands of acres of crops and growing things are being scorched.

Every summer has been like this since I moved here from California in 2008. I’ve been going over the nearest local data from the National Weather Service. In June, July and August, daily high temperatures have been substantially above normal almost 75 percent of the time. I don’t even know how normal is defined anymore, since we’re almost always above normal. Scorching summers are the new normal. That’s clear.

With a practical, data-hungry and reality-modeling mind like mine, what can I make of this? For one, I’ve had to consider the possibility that I simply bought land in the wrong place. I was years behind the curve in understanding just how much the climate has changed. I’ve realized that, not only am I not living in the North Carolina of my childhood, I’m not even living in the North Carolina that I left when I moved to California 20 years ago. This land, which fed generations of people including my ancestors, is now no longer capable of supporting a summer garden without irrigation. I can’t explain how awful it is to face that fact. Sir Walter Raleigh’s men, surveying inland North Carolina in 1585, called it “the goodliest soile under the cope of heaven.” Now it would be dangerous to live here (as in most places) without the cheap energy that makes modern agriculture and long-distance food-hauling possible. If people were smart enough to understand this and let it sink in, I’m sure they would panic. Most people assume that the grocery stores will always be there for them, and that food will always be cheap. My practical, data-hungry, reality-modeling mind knows better than that.

But where could one go where a tiny farm can still operate the way they used to operate? I took a trip last week up to the mountains, westward toward the Tennessee line, where temperatures are lower and there is a bit more summer rainfall. The altitude varies from about 2,400 to 3,500 feet. They do indeed have thriving gardens and beautiful fields of cabbage up there. But to move now is not practical for me, and there are many downsides. There are even some compensations. For example, the growing season is longer here. Less energy is required to get through winter. And the hillbilly culture in those places makes Stokes County seem sophisticated. No, I’ve got to rethink some things and make some changes at Acorn Abbey.

As part of that thinking process, I read Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, hoping that the book might contain some specific, practical ideas for adapting. But I was disappointed. This is not necessarily a criticism of the book, because the book does make it quite clear that there is no single answer and no single strategy for adaptation. As we relocalize and adapt to climate change, we must each relocalize according to our own locations, our local resources and our local problems.

Before I made the decision to move back to North Carolina, I did check the climate models for this area. They showed (and still show) a slight increase of 2 to 3 inches in annual rainfall, in addition to higher temperatures. But what I failed to understand is that water evaporates from the soil much more quickly in high heat. The equations for water loss from the soil are differential equations that look as complicated as the equations for launching a spacecraft toward Mars. I don’t understand the equations, but one thing has become obvious: The soil dries up much more quickly in a run of 98-degree weather than in a run of 88-degree weather. It’s that fact more than any other that has made the summer garden so difficult. I think that’s why people in the mountains north and west of here can still garden in the summer. It’s cooler there, just as it used to be cooler here.

One thing that’s clear is that, next year, I must irrigate. As I’ve said before, I am opposed on principle to irrigating with well water. Well water is simply too precious to be pumped out and used for irrigation. That’s what rain is for. My steep roof is not suited to gutters. Snow avalanches would rip the gutters off. The most practical plan I can come up with is to buy one of those 275-gallon tanks in aluminum frames that are used for shipping industrial liquids. They sell for $100 or less. I’ll buy a gasoline powered water pump from Harbor Freight, about $150. The tank will fit on my utility trailer, and, using the Jeep, I can take the tank down to the stream and fill it up. Then I can park the tank and trailer above the garden and attach a hose to drip-type fixtures in the garden. I also plan to get a local grading guy over and see if there’s a spot where I could make a very small pond. However, I don’t think that’s likely to work.

In any case, this year’s garden is now in salvage mode. The tomato crop, which should have been extensive with more than 30 tomato plants, was very poor. The plants were constantly water stressed, which led to bottom rot. I got small, tasteless tomatoes instead of plump, juicy ones. The tomatoes were simply starved for water and for the nutrients that come up from the roots with the water. The squash dried up and died almost two weeks ago. The peppers barely produced. The corn did fairly well. I had some decent green beans. The cucumber crop was excellent. I may get a couple of pumpkins and one or two watermelons and canteloupes if there’s any rain within the next few days. I’ll have to say this, though. Even with the miserable, dry weather, I don’t think I’ve spent more than $15 on produce in the last three months — some garlic, two or three avocados, a couple of canteloupes. The garden has fed me well and saved me money. But there was not nearly enough of anything to freeze or can.

For those of you who may be reading this blog because you’re planning projects similar to my Acorn Abbey project, I’d urge you to put a lot of thought into your sources of water. It also takes a few years to get your gardening skill — and your soil — up to speed. Even if one had enough land and enough help, I think it would take years to learn what one needs to know to truly become self-supporting. But every little bit helps.

Climate change, under our noses


Temperature data for Greensboro, NC, June 2011

If the American people were rational, rather than cracked up on right-wing propaganda, they would suspect that the same people who are lying to them about climate change also are lying to them about other things. But there is something about right-wing minds that makes it easy to deny what is right in front of their noses if it conflicts with some belief or prejudice.

Just over a week ago, NOAA released new 30-year temperature normals, revising average U.S. temperatures up by .5 degree F. These 30-year averages are kept lower by data that is up to 30 years old, of course. We’re actually, on average, even warmer than that now. “The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s,” NOAA’s director of climate data said. We’re not talking about models, or predictions. This is official observation data.

The chart at the top of this post shows temperatures for June 2011 in Greensboro, NC. That’s the station closest to me with official weather data. If you do some scouting on the NOAA web site, you’ll be able to find similar data for your state.

There were those who thought I was just being subjective — and just plain wrong — about this summer’s weather being much hotter than when I was a boy. But look what the chart above shows. There were 24 days in June when the temperature was above normal — often far above normal. There were 12 days when the temperature went above 95. There were only three days during the entire month of June when the high temperature was in the normal range. There were only five nights in June when the temperature went below normal, and only slightly below normal at that. So far for July, every single day the temperature has been above normal.

Not only is this miserable, it is making dry weather and droughts much more dangerous to crops and other growing things. A drought with normal temperatures is one thing. A drought when temperatures are running 10 degrees above normal is deadly.

Anyone who is not terrified by this is in a state of denial. This changes everything, for ourselves and for our children.

And we’re doing nothing about it, because of greed, denial, and the right-wing mind.

Jefferson the foodie


Monticello

Salon magazine has a nice article about how Jefferson was America’s first foodie.

I sure would like to know what the sources are for all this information about Jefferson. My guess is that it’s scattered throughout Jefferson’s letters and diaries. I’ve read two biographies of Jefferson in the last year, and though there are passing references to Jefferson’s vegetable garden, there’s not much else.

Of the founding fathers, Jefferson is my favorite. He was a Southerner and proud of it, but he didn’t let that close his mind to the larger world. His values were Enlightenment values, not the Puritan values that stank up the political environment then, as now. He loved languages. He loved science and technology. And best of all, he never stopped being rebellious. He was as much a rebel when he died (at age 84) as when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson’s cuisine was a fusion cuisine: Southern comfort food fused with Mediterranean, and wine rather than whisky.

Oh what I would give if it were possible for Thomas Jefferson to write an op-ed in today’s New York Times, wielding his rhetorical light sabre against the Puritans, corporatists, Philistines and know-nothings who have bought the government.

Know your farmer? Not if she can help it…

There is no creature in the U.S. Congress more vile, more black-hearted, more ignorant, and more determined to horse-whip us all back to the Dark Ages than Virginia Foxx. I am ashamed to say that she represents my district, the 5th District of North Carolina.

She’s always up to no good, in service of corporate greed and pandering to the fears and prejudices of the ignorati. Her most recent deed was to introduce an amendment that would shut down a U.S. Department of Agriculture web site known as the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative. Though the web site has no real budget to take away, its purpose is to lend a little support to small farmers and local markets. Foxx thinks that’s a bad idea, you see, because she doesn’t want any competition for corporatized, industrialized agriculture. There’s nothing that free-marketers hate more than any attempt by groups of citizens to band together to supply their own needs. Consider, as an example, the right-wing North Carolina legislature’s recent approval of a new statute that would prevent rural communities from setting up their own broadband systems. When groups of citizens dare to “compete with the private sector,” these libertarian types elected with corporate money just pass a law against it.

Tom Philpott blogs about this at Mother Jones.

Foxx is from up near Wilkes County, which is one of the largest producers of factory chickens in the United States. It’s this proximity to factory chicken farms, apparently, which qualified Foxx to sit on the agriculture committee, including a poultry subcommittee.

Here’s a link to the web site Foxx wants to shut down. Foxx does not approve of its mission: Support local farmers, strengthen rural communities, promote healthy eating, protect natural resources.


Where corporate chicken comes from

A meteorologist's roundup of wretched weather


My ever-empty rain gauge

The high temperature here today was 94 degrees. The normal for this date is 86. In the last month, I’ve had half an inch of rain. Lots of things are turning brown. Even the squash are wilting. High temperatures alone wouldn’t be so frightening, if there was rain. It’s the combination of hot and dry that is life-threatening. Crops will grow in hot and wet. Crops won’t grow in hot and dry.

Under these circumstances it’s a depressing time to read this roundup of extreme weather by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground. These are not climate predictions that right-wingers can say are lies. It’s just real, measurable weather, compared with the weather we used to have. Last year, remember, tied with 2005 for the hottest year on record.

From Masters’ post:

“The pace of incredible extreme weather events in the U.S. over the past few months have kept me so busy that I’ve been unable to write-up a retrospective look at the weather events of 2010. But I’ve finally managed to finish, so fasten your seat belts for a tour through the top twenty most remarkable weather events of 2010. At the end, I’ll reflect on what the wild weather events of 2010 and 2011 imply for our future.”

Mobs?


Greece, this week (Der Spiegel)

Yesterday, while browsing for books at Amazon, I came across the title of Ann Coulter’s newest book: Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

I have long been a student of propaganda, but reading an Ann Coulter book is farther than I’ll go. Besides, ideologues like Coulter are easy to model because their ideologies are always so black and white, so cut and dried, and so predictable. Look at what the title alone tells us. The authoritarian right-wing mind demonizes what it fears, literally. And it always, always sees a threat.

But insofar as I understand the point Coulter is trying to make from reading a few reviews, she’s actually right — if you’re on the side of authority, the status quo, and ruling elites who won’t allow justice without a fight. As Voltaire said, “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire died in 1778 and so did not witness the French revolution, but he understood what the revolution was about. Coulter sees in the French revolution the roots of today’s “liberal mob.” What kind of knots of revisionism she ties herself in to make the American revolution sacred and the French revolution evil must be a thrilling and instructive piece of propaganda production, but I’m still not going to read the book.

In any case, Coulter reveals the deepest fears of the authoritarians who have now nearly completed their takeover of the American democracy. Having bought and captured the institutions of the American democracy, now all they have to fear is the mob.

I’m afraid they’re right.


Selma, Alabama, 1965


Berlin, 1989


Tianenmen Square, 1989


Poland, 1980


White Night, San Francisco, 1979


India, 1931


Kent State, 1970


Kent State

Unbearable weather


Panting chickens


Wilted beets


Dying cabbage

I try to honor a policy of never posting when I’m angry. Once again my anger has got the best of me.

After a cool, wet May, soon it will be three weeks since I’ve had any rain. During this time, day after day, the temperature has gone into the 90s. Today the high was 97F. A storm appeared out of nowhere up in Virginia yesterday evening, and it moved south and gave Surry County to the west of me a nice soaking, but I didn’t get a drop. That alone makes me angry — when I watch thunderstorms on radar that miss me by a few miles.

But it goes beyond that. Weather varies wildly from year to year and month to month, and always has. I know that. But this simply can’t be normal. When I was a child in the Yadkin Valley, I was around crops and gardens every summer. Sure there were dry spells and lost crops. But I don’t remember gardens drying up and dying every year, summer after summer. Because of the hit or miss nature of summer thunderstorms, some people will have good luck and others will have bad luck. But increasingly I’m afraid that no one will be able to garden consistently and successfully without some source of irrigation. I’d happily irrigate from a pond or a stream if I had one near enough. I don’t. I’ll use well water sparingly to revive the celery or keep a newly planted shrub alive, but well water is not the answer. It’s just wrong, and it’s unsustainable.

I expect next year’s weather in the U.S. will be just like this year’s: some places will flood, and others will parch. Some places will dry up, others will blow away.

My beets, cabbages, celery, and kale are done for. If I spritz them with water in the evening, they perk up enough to be harvested in the morning, so it won’t be a total loss. If it rains soon, most of my tomatoes and squash will survive, but the tomato leaves are starting to curl, and the squash is starting to wilt.

This morning Thomas Friedman — who as far as I’m concerned has devolved into a stopped clock when he writes about foreign affairs — has a pretty good column with the headline “The Earth Is Full.” He interviews Paul Gilding, an Australian who recently published a book, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World. Gilding gathers data on the brutally excessive demands we’re making on the earth’s natural systems.

Gilding is optismistic. He says, “We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

Oh we’re not, are we? I beg to differ. Americans are incomprehensibly thoughtless and ignorant, and they show no signs of rethinking their lifestyles or levels of consumption. Just the other day I gritted my teeth as one ignoramus said to another ignoramus at the gas pump, “We’ve got enough oil for 2,000 years.” The other replied that all we needed to do was get the environmentalists off our backs so we could do more offshore drilling, and that would solve the problem. I know where they hear this stuff: from the shouting heads on television who are paid handsomely to retail corporate and right-wing propaganda. One good thing about the current recession is that consumption is down. But if we ever pull out of this recession, Americans will expect to go right back to their old levels of waste and consumption.

Ken recently quoted Lew Rockwell, a libertarian and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, a right-wing propaganda tank. Rockwell said:

“I spritzed some hairspray at the sky (not having enough hair to justify pointing it at me), used up a whole roll of paper towels, turned the refrigerator thermostat down, mixed newspapers with my garbage, filled up my car at an Exxon station, turned on all the lights, and took my daughter to McDonald’s for cheeseburgers, since they still had those nice, clean styrofoam containers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t cold enough to wear my fur hat.”

And:

“Chicken or chicory, elephant or endive, the natural order is valuable only in so far as it serves human needs and purposes. Our very existence is based on our dominion over nature; it was created for that end, and it is to that end that it must be used — through a private-property, free-market order.”

That last idea, of course, is a religious idea, and it comes from America’s dominant religion. And his rabid anti-nature attitude isn’t just ignorant, it glories in its ignorance. The appeal this kind of talk has for the American ignorati and the blindly religious is enormous. And those masses of Americans, of course, are exactly the target the propaganda is designed to reach.

I wish there was some other planet for those people to go live on. Then we might have a chance at saving the Earth.

Our sorry species doesn’t deserve a beautiful water planet like Earth. If we left it to the chickens and the chicory, the elephants and the endive, they’d take care of the Earth. They’re not as stupid as we are.