World’s best magazine – National Geographic

As the new year began, I found myself finishing up the January, 2011 edition of National Geographic. This is not a magazine to be merely scanned. In my experience, National Geographic deserves its own special time. It needs to be read slowly so that its exquisite prose and photography can be deeply appreciated. Every minute invested is paid back tenfold, and National Geographic has been written in this high-quality way for as long as I can remember. So… If you're going to put me on a deserted island and I can only have one magazine subscription, please make it National Geographic. The cover story of the current issue is "Population 7 Billion: How Your World Will Change." In the introduction, the Editor notes that "the issues associated with population growth seem endless: poverty, food and water supply, world health, climate change, before station, fertility rates, and more." Therefore, it would seem that we would insist on discussing the carrying capacity of Earth. We talk about the capacity of motor vehicles and houses and hotel rooms and conference centers, because we can't deny that human animals take up space and use up resources. We can't put 12 people in a boat that is designed to carry four, because it would cause a disaster. Yet many of us simply refuse to consider whether there is such a thing as a carrying capacity of the earth, and we utterly refuse to attempt any sort of quantification of the carrying capacity of the earth. Therefore, as we are approaching 7 billion people on earth, it is preordained by many people that population is simply not a problem, even though societies all over the earth, rich and poor, traditional and modern, are exhausting the resources that are available to them.

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What 2010 Meant

The Lame Duck Congress has ended the year with a Marathon of Epic Legislation.  I can't help being impressed.  Obama said he wanted Congress to do with Don't Ask Don't Tell, to repeal it legislatively, and not have it end up as a court-mandated order.  I can understand this, especially given the rightward shift of the judiciary.  But the way in which he went about it seemed doomed and certainly angered a lot of people who thought he was breaking a campaign promise.  (The puzzling lunacy of his own justice department challenging a court-led effort must have looked like one more instance of Obama backing off from what he'd said he was going to do.)  I am a bit astonished that he got his way. A great deal of the apparent confusion over Obama's actions could stem from his seeming insistence that Congress do the heavy lifting for much of his agenda.  And while there's a lot to be said for going this route, what's troubling is his failure to effectively use the bully pulpit in his own causes.  And the fact that he has fallen short on much.   It would be, perhaps, reassuring to think that his strategy is something well-considered, that things the public knows little about will come to fruition by, say, his second term. (Will he have a second term?  Unless Republicans can front someone with more brains and less novelty than a Sarah Palin and more weight than a Mitt Romney, probably.  I have seen no one among the GOP ranks who looks even remotely electable.  The thing that might snuff Obama's chances would be a challenge from the Democrats themselves, but that would require a show of conviction the party has been unwilling overall to muster.) The Crash of 2008 caused a panic of identity.  Unemployment had been creeping upward prior to that due to a number of factors, not least of which is the chronic outsourcing that has become, hand-in-glove, as derided a practice as CEO compensation packages and "golden parachutes," and just as protected in practice by a persistent nostalgia that refuses to consider practical solutions that might result in actual interventions in the way we do business.  No one wants the jobs to go overseas but no one wants to impose protectionist policies on companies that outsource.  Just as no one likes the fact that top management is absurdly paid for jobs apparently done better 40 years ago by people drawing a tenth the amount, but no one wants to impose corrective policies that might curtail what amounts to corporate pillage.  It is the nostalgia for an America everyone believes once existed that functioned by the good will of its custodians and did not require laws to force people to do the morally right thing.  After a couple decades of hearing the refrain "You can't legislate morality" it has finally sunk in but for the wrong segment of social practice. [More . . . ]

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A Refreshing Retelling of a Classic Tale

As a story is passed along, it evolves. With the advent of writing, the rate of change slowed, but still continues. I was reminded of this by a delightful retelling in modern form of a story traditionally told in staid structure. Here is a chuckle-worthy modern take on the arrival of Jesus. As always, this vernal event is traditionally pasted over the older pagan winter solstice Yule festival. This retelling in modern paradigm also embraces the evolution of the Bedouin shepherds to Zoroastrian wise men to Kings, and somehow skipping l33tspeak but keeping the Renaissance garb. This tale is usually full of anachronisms and inconsistencies. But it still makes a good yarn.

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The story of American Religious tolerance

According to this article at the Smithsonian, America is not quite the bastion of religious freedom that it is so often portrayed to be, and it never was.

America can still be, as Madison perceived the nation in 1785, “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion.” But recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step. When we acknowledge that dark past, perhaps the nation will return to that “promised...lustre” of which Madison so grandiloquently wrote.

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Old photos

I co-founded a band in 1973. We called it Ego, and the 8 of us (sometimes nine) played the music of Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Doobie Brothers and many other types of music. Many of our arrangements were our own. The trumpet player for Ego (Ron Weaver) recently sent me some photos from our band days 35 years ago, and I'm astounded at the emotions that the photos have triggered. At this point (see below--I'm the 3rd from the left), we ranged in age from 16 to 20 years of age. We were all going to school and most of us were working other jobs too. Yet playing with Ego was our passion. The proof is that we were willing to split our $200 fees eight or nine ways. I'm now three times the age that I was back then, but I felt like an adult even back then. I was studying in a pre-med program, totally unaware that I would switch paths and end up practicing law. Totally unaware that I would be raising 10 and 12-year old daughters 35 years later. I could have never imagined giving up music, and I haven't, though I have never played with a large group since Ego. Several of the other players still have careers playing music, two of them (Charles Glenn and Kelly Durbin [not in the above photo]) on a high level. It was a lot of work to organize a band in 1974, given that this era was pre-email and pre-cellphone. We wrote out much of our own music with pencil and paper, including detailed brass parts. None of this could have happened without everyone pitching in, and the band was filled with talented and hard-working people, all of whom had good senses of humor. Somehow it all worked for more than two years before we went our separate ways, pulled by a variety of things, none of which I can clearly articulate at this point. There's nothing like an old photo to bring these memories flooding back. In fact, I'd never before seen this photo, so seeing it was like stepping into a time machine. This photo makes me want to jump back in time to play Chicago's "Make Me Smile" with the group or to struggle once more through an original tune we wrote in 7/4 time. It is such an amazing gift to see this photo so many years later (and to be alive to see it 35 years later). It is such an amazing thing that the mind, though it forgets so many episodes of the past, clings for decades to emotionally-embedded memories. This photo also makes me wonder whether it was the hard work of co-running and marketing a band that might have prepared me for resolving many of the conflicts I encountered later in life. There was a lot of improvising that was required back then and only some of it involved music. Much of that improvisation involved logistics, like how to afford necessary equipment, how to build our own mixer and lights and how many of us needed to convince parents yet again that we needed to borrow the family station wagons to make it to the gig. This photo also reminds me of that wonderful tired feeling, at about 3 am, when we had finished working and finished unloading the equipment back home, when we knew that we brought some joy to the audience, and that we would have a chance to do it again a day or a week later. In case it's not obvious, I'm really proud of what we accomplished as teenagers. If a parent asked me to suggest a way for their own teenager to grow into a responsible adult, I might blurt out: "Tell them to run a band." It's not the only way to come of age, but for me it was a terrific path. This photos is packed with emotion for me, and looking back at it, the emotion was the logic of what we did. Whoever says that humans are primarily rational rather than emotional creatures has it so very wrong, indeed.

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