Kindling

Posted on February 28, 2009 by WorldWideWeber

Some quick impressions of the Kindle reading device after two days of use:

It’s smaller than I expected. The screen is larger than those on several PDAs I’ve used heavily to read on in the past, but not as large as even a small-format paperback. The small size is good and bad, of course. It’s incredibly thin, but it has a good heft to it, allowing you to feel comfortable handling it (i.e., not feel as if you’re going to break it). The keypad is correspondingly small, and at first I felt I was going to keep hitting two keys at once; but after getting used to it, and not being worried about pressing hard, I’ve managed to type decently well without typos (I’ve never had a phone/PDA with a keypad, so this thumb-typing is new to me).

The “electronic ink” performs as well as the hype: incredibly clear type and very nice grayscale images (when the device goes to sleep, the text is replaced by pictures of famous authors and old engravings). The type is scalable to six sizes, and I’m finding the second-smallest puts the most comfortably readable text on the screen. (One thing I didn’t like about reading on the PDAs was the scant amount of text per screen. I tend to circle back in my reading a lot, and it’s nice not to have to page back to get at the text.)

You really need adequate light to read on the Kindle. The surface is moderately nonreflective, so glare is pretty well under control. Coming from the PDA world, where I could read Great Expectations in low light (or no light), this will require a change in my lighting habits. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that the “paper” is an unexpectedly deep shade of gray, but it’s mainly due to the fact that the Kindle isn’t self-illuminated like a PDA or computer monitor.

Downloading new material from Amazon via the built-in wireless (“Whispernet”) is incredibly fast, as advertised. It’s almost too easy to buy new stuff—purchases go through Amazon’s One-Click checkout without the need to key in any personal information. The Manage Your Kindle page at Amazon is nicely designed, so it’s easy to keep track of your purchases and subscriptions.

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Wasabi

Posted on January 21, 2009 by WorldWideWeber

I was looking forward to “crazy” on Tuesday, but didn’t expect so much of teh stupid.

Up until late Monday, Laura and I planned to head down to the Mall at a not-too-unreasonable hour and see what we could see of the swearing-in. We are, after all, just ordinary folk. But a former neighbor (and extraordinary guy) stopped by Monday evening, offering two tickets to the standing-room area of the Capitol lawn. The tickets had a nice purple border, corresponding to the area designated for our humble presence.

But like a one-way sign that is no guarantee you won’t be run over by a car going the wrong way, this pretty ticket—signed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC)—didn’t mean we’d actually get to stand in the purple area and watch Barack Obama be sworn in from a few hundred meters away. Due to a complete breakdown of crowd control and security management, we were among the tens of thousands of ticket holders who never made it through the purple, blue, and silver gates.

The details of this mess are now being sorted out in the proper places (e.g., within minutes a Facebook group was created, “Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom”) and in the mainstream as well. So I’ll spare the details. Just Google it. I’m tired of the whole thing. As I said in a comment I dropped somewhere, I don’t feel sorry for myself. Despite the subfreezing temperatures and idiocy of standing around for three hours (some stood around for twice that and didn’t get in), I’m glad we went down there. We met some great people from all over: Michigan, Florida, New York City (Queens); even a guy from my wife’s hometown in Wisconsin—a quiet gentleman in an impressive black fur coat, who works for Racine’s most renowned and community-conscious employer, Johnson Wax. Those are the folks we felt bad for, people who were our guests in the District of Columbia and who were treated so shabbily. Unfortunately it’s a moot point whether those in charge will learn a lesson from this fiasco: the inauguration of Barack Obama was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and they blew it: the JCCIC, Capitol police, and Secret Service (which unpredictably closed off streets that were supposed to be clear, creating a fluid maze and ensuring that lines would turn into mobs—although, as I said elsewhere, these were the most docile, genial mobs I have ever been part of).

At a little after noon, after hearing the distant cheer of an unseen crowd and the echoing booms of a 21-gun salute, we left the area near 1st and C Streets NW, but not before Laura banged on the temporary fence and got one of the cops to come over. (It must be said, they did a most excellent job of ignoring us for three hours.) While she tried to get an explanation from the guy, I leaned against a tree with my eyes closed. When I opened them, one of our new friends from Michigan was taking my picture. I smiled wanly, and she said, “To help remember the day.” Earlier she had gently scolded me when I called out through the fence: “Thanks for nothing!” She said they were just doing their jobs. I said, if that’s true, their jobs were pretty pointless. I said I was letting them know I’m disappointed since I’ll never be face to face with whoever designed their “plan” and set it in motion (or did neither). She said, rightly: “That’s not what this day is about. Let’s be grateful and enjoy that.” How could I disagree with this lovely African American woman who had traveled so much further than I and whose feelings about the new president most likely run deeper?

Laura and I started walking toward a Metro station, encountering hundreds of vendors hawking tacky memorabilia and noticing the trash collecting like snowdrifts against curbs and buildings. We started down into the Gallery Place station, took one look at the crowd at the turnstiles, and turned around. We walked up to Faragut Square and had lunch at a place Laura has wanted me to try for some time, Wasabi. As the name implies, it’s Japanese, but with a twist: little plates of food move along a conveyor from the kitchen to the other end of the restaurant and back. There are booths along one side and bar seating on the other. The plates are color-coded* by price and labeled; if you see something you like, you just take it off the conveyor. When you’ve eaten your fill, they tally up the plates. Delicious and fun.

When we finished, we kept walking north on 18th, which was basically taken over by pedestrians north of K Street. It’s always a liberating feeling when the people take over the streets, so my spirits soared a bit a this point. We ended up walking all the way home, sparing Metro two additional riders on their record-breaking day. (We had taken the Metro from Tenleytown to Judiciary Square in the morning—a crowded but boardable train appeared within two minutes. They actually were running on the rush-hour schedule, as advertised.) We watched some of the TV coverage and called it a day.

And that’s the way it was, January 20th, 2009.
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*Color-coded! The irony just now hit me.

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Auguration

Posted on January 17, 2009 by WorldWideWeber

Far be it from me to try and predict how the Obama presidency will turn out. Many of us had a feeling the Bush years would be bad, but did any of us dream it would turn out as disastrous as it did?

I saw a teaser today at the New York Times saying that David Brooks is “satisfied” so far with Obama and that Gail Collins is “worried” (didn’t bother to read the article). I’m a bit of both, which says a lot about both Obama and myself; but it’s the possibility of agreeing with the self-satisfied, strange-thinking Brooks that really has me worried.

Show Some TeethA lot of people are having fun making their own pseudo-Shepard Fairey posters at Paste Magazine. I hope Barack likes mine.

I’m looking forward to seeing how crazy it gets down on the Mall on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll get a nice photo of me next to Obama (i.e., a Jumbotron Obama). Last week I saw a truck hauling about twenty pedicabs into town, and WABA is sponsoring bike valet parking at two locations. Other than that, I have no idea how people are going to get around. We may end up walking to the Mall from Tenleytown (and back) if Metro is swamped.

Then again, maybe temperatures in the low thirties Fahrenheit will keep the crowds down—maybe only a couple million. We shall see.

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Sundries

Posted on December 24, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

The year is rapidly drawing to a close, and activity here has dwindled to a trickle. The world outside continues to undergo sundry shocks and transformations, while life in the basement has become more inward.

After all the excitement and anxiety of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama is off to a solid start. He has already disappointed some of his most ardent supporters in choosing Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. I sympathize with those who are angry at this apparent betrayal, but if this is the worst decision Obama makes in his presidency, we should all be very happy indeed.

What I want from Obama are three things: implementation of a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine; universal health care; and a reversal of the US policy of projecting its military might around the globe. He can have Howdy Doody give an invocation for all I care, if it offers the possibility of fruitful dialogue between progressives and puppets.

I’ll note in passing a story that has pretty much been ignored in the mainstream press: the sudden death of a person with a key role in the alternate (nongovernmental) e-mail system used by Karl Rove and other White House operatives to evade official archiving and other inconvenient things. The news knocked loose a memory of blogging by Thomas Nephew on the subject back in April 2007. And a chain of clicks led me to Larisa Alexandrovna, who intends to stay on the story, since the deceased had been a major source for an investigation she has been conducting.

But let’s end on a happy note, shall we? Back in September the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, paid a visit to Armenia to watch a soccer match. Although his route to the stadium was lined with protesters, Gül said he was pleased with the reception. This incipient thaw in relations between Armenia and Turkey is very welcome indeed.

Recently a petition has appeared on the web, initiated by a group of Turkish intellectuals, apologizing for the Armenian genocide (without actually using the word “genocide”). The petition reads: “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathise with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologise to them.” Some Turks immediately took umbrage, and others probably made more of the petition than it could logically bear. It was as much about the Turkish government’s attempt to control debate as it was about the Armenian genocide per se. According to Hürriyet Daily News, Cengiz Aktar, widely considered the architect behind the petition, said the petition was not “a campaign about the genocide debate.”

“This is about private individuals, citizens, acting according to the voice of their conscience, and apologizing for the last 90 years this topic was not even discussed,” said Aktar, a Bahçeşehir University academic. Pointing out that the topic had always been a taboo, but still so far 13,500 signatories have broken it, he said. “It has never been discussed like this before. Next time it comes up, everybody should take into account the 13,500 people who feel this way.”

Providing an odd cherry on top of this delightful confection, a member of the Turkish parliament has declared that President Gül’s maternal grandmother is of Armenian descent (making him a “crypto-Armenian,” as a Turkish journalist sarcastically put it), and that’s why he’s “supporting the Armenians.” What makes this delicious to me is that the Turkish word gül (“rose”) is part of my wife’s name, along with the Turkish word for “white.” I guess that makes my Armenian “white rose” a crypto-Turk!

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Anticipation

Posted on November 3, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Shepard Fairey's Obama poster from OBEYFor someone who keeps asserting that the presidential contest is proceeding pretty much as expected, and who spends much of his time trying to calm the nervous Nellies, I have been spending an awful lot of time lately at FiveThirtyEight.com, watching for signs of disaster. By and large I have been made happy by what I’ve not seen: any serious movement in the polling that would indicate trouble for Obama on November 5.

So, tomorrow I vote, the voting ends, and someone will be elected president. Naturally, I hope it’s Barack Obama, but my vote in the District of Columbia will have scant effect on the outcome. It would be nice if I could vote in Ohio and make more of a difference, but until we decide that “place of birth” can be substituted for “current residence” in registering to vote, I will continue to merely pad the results in a place of little consequence, as far as the Electoral College goes.

Before we leave this campaign behind, I can’t help taking note of a particularly ridiculous mantra that the McCain camp has recited for the last month or so. While patiently explaining his tax proposals to a Republican “man in the street” in Ohio by the name of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, soon to morph into a cartoon character called Joe the Plumber, Obama said the tax plan would “spread the wealth,” specifically to the “Joe the Plumber” of early times, when he wasn’t on the verge of cracking the $250K barrier (which, it turns out, he wasn’t anyway) and could use some financial encouragement in the form of lower taxes. In the retelling by GOP operatives, this became “redistribution of the wealth,” and to support this stronger version of what Obama didn’t say, they dug up a radio interview from 2001 in which law professors were discussing an old and generally discredited and unused theory of redistributive mechanisms in the hands of the courts. In the course of the scholarly discussion, Obama expressed skepticism that the courts were configured for that sort of activity. This the McCain camp waved around as evidence that Obama is a “socialist.” Later, as is their wont, they upped the vituperative ante to “Marxist.”

It’s all nonsense, of course, and a sign of the desperation that descended on the McCain campaign in October. The Obama campaign dealt with this junk moderately well, at times with a welcome dose of humor. But they never said the obvious: McCain apparently does not like to see wealth spread around. McCain and his party prefer to see wealth concentrated.

It took an old Republican operative and Reagan staffer, David Gergen, to put the lie to the McCain campaign’s tomfoolery:

Gergen suggested that the Democrats should invoke the example of Teddy Roosevelt, who was both a Republican and one of the greatest advocates of progressive taxation in the years immediately preceding the enactment of the current income tax.

Gergen also noted that the Reagan administration was responsible for enacting the Earned Income Tax Credit, an extremely successful redistribution program which returns money to the working poor.

“Sometimes they get so carried away that they don’t realize the realities of what we’ve been going through,” Gergen added. Apparently referring to McCain’s promises to “create more wealth,” he explained that “the wealth over the last 30 years has been redistributed—it’s been redistributed upwards. As we grow, the top one percent’s getting a disproportionate share.”

(Note that Gergen includes the Reagan years in his criticism.) Wealth redistributed upward—i.e., concentration of the wealth in a few hands. Progress will entail active efforts to reverse the trend to oligarchy and plutocracy in the United States of America.

Perhaps the first step will be taken tomorrow.

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Georgious

Posted on October 30, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Not many notes have been emanating from the basement recently. A lot has been happening upstairs, but the excitement generated there is unlikely to be of particular interest to you. And of course something big is afoot in the world outside, yet whenever I’m on the verge of writing about an especially funny or shocking or disgusting or seminal episode in the presidential campaign that is finally, finally coming to a close, I find that someone has already said it, and the urge passes. By and large I have been content to let everyone else do the talking online, and stick to kvetching and comparing notes with a few folks in person or in our venerable family forum—which, again, concerns you not.

And so, to kill some time between now and Tuesday, and to get a post in for the month of October, I’ll cobble together a personal, far from comprehensive, somewhat belated roundup of Russian news.

In late July one of my brothers gave me a T-shirt, for no reason other than the fact it had Russian writing on it and he figured I might like it. I do like it, but as luck would have it, I couldn’t wear it for a while.

Kiss Me, I'm Russian

It says, “Kiss me, I’m Russian!” (In the States, anyway, you come across such stuff all the time—“Kiss me, I’m Italian,” “Kiss me, I’m Lithuanian,” etc., etc.) Just the thing to wear during my bicycle commute, since my other T-shirts are getting ratty. Unfortunately, in August the Russians invaded Georgia, and my commute takes me past the Russian embassy, where the Georgians picketed for several weeks: “Russian tanks … out of Georgia” was the chant I heard the most as I pedaled by. I resisted the urge to congratulate them on having a president who is just about as reckless as ours. Speaking of whom, how could a person not laugh when George W. Bush, with no trace of irony (of course), criticized Russia’s “bullying and intimidation.” He said “Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.”

The Russia bashing started in earnest, as prescribed by our fetid foreign policy conventional wisdom—even Barack Obama felt the need to join in, unfortunately. One could find scattered attempts in the US press to put the conflict in context, but the tenor of the coverage was Cold War redux. Here are a few pieces I found evenhanded or sympathetic (gasp!) to the Russian point of view:

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Bespoken

Posted on September 30, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

And now for a quick roundup of bicycling news.

The city of Washington, DC, finally launched its long-heralded bike-sharing program. It proved to be a smash hit, and plans are afoot to expand it. Within days, an attempt was made to steal one of the bikes from its very public parking place. You didn’t expect that, did you? The bike was fatally damaged, but unstolen. So there, you bad person!

From sunny Racine, Wisconsin, our favorite resort town on the slate-gray shores of Lake Michigan, comes news of a new outlet for the competitive urges of devotés (and devotées—let’s not be sexist) of the derailleur: the Tour de Racine. This is long overdue. Racine is, after all, a French name. Whether it respectfully evokes the renowned writer of that name, or is an arch reference to the river that runs through it (viz., the Root River), or both, I do not know for sure. Perhaps the devoted reader does.* Who won, you ask? Some guy from Winnipeg. Winnipeg! The one in Manitoba, presumably. Did he travel all that way just for the Tour? (Tour? Actually, a dizzying number of laps around a 0.78-mile stretch of downtown Racine.) Or did he just happen to be in town? Do I care enough to research it? No.

Speaking of Canada, good news from Toronto: the bicycle thief is caught. Not just any bicycle thief (like the sad sacks in De Sica’s movie). No, this guy stole around 2,800 bikes. He was a Bicycle Thief. And not just. This guy, Igor Krenk, “was something of an informal social worker, … giving work to street people and outpatients from a nearby mental health institution. Of course, the police say some of that work involved stealing bicycles.” The funny thing is, for a long time Torontoans strongly suspected what was going on—some of the victims of bike thievery would actually buy their bikes back from him. (Did I mention he ran a bike shop?) The cops needed to catch him red-handed, apparently, so they set up a sting. And lookee here: he’s Slovenian! What an intrepid race! What an impressive bike-stealing record! Here’s a more personal take on the whole biking vibe up in Toronto, and I provide this link only to show what a handsome Slovenian dude Igor Krenk is when he’s cleaned up a little.

On a personal note, I finally did what was necessary to bring my Trek 750 out of mothballs (or, more precisely, the road dust and cobwebs of garage level three at my location d’emploi): new cassette, new crankset, new chain, new rear wheel, new brake pads, and, in an unexpected development, a new shifter cable. It’s good to be back on the good old Trek, and it always feels good to have done the work yourself. As usual, I picked up a new tool or two along the way. And I’ve become a chain fanatic, or chain evangelist, or whatever. Chain obsessed. That new chain-wear tool will see a lot of use. Sick of buying drivetrain components.

I read that some employers are taking baby steps toward incentives for bicycle commuters. That’s all—not much to this yet. I know I ain’t getting anything from anyone for biking to work.

Finally, and sadly, a bicyclist was killed this summer in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington. A trash truck traveling westbound on R Street turned right onto 20th and nailed a young woman who was biking to work at the Middle East Institute. The DC police have yet to release a final report. The Washington Area Bicyclist Association placed a ghost bike at the site of the accident and is staying on top of it. She may have made a fatal mistake, or it may have been the driver, or both. But it goes without saying we need to make the streets safer for bikes.
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*Wikipedia says the latter (sans the “arch” part), but begs the question: What was the Root River named after? Is that what “chippecotton” means? Or “kipikawi”? Or “ot-chee-beek”? Or was there some white man named Root who named it? More questions than answers, as usual. [back]

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Felicitaciones

Posted on September 18, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Congratulations, Gabrielle and Alejandro! (The rest of you—beat it!)

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Apostasy

Posted on August 31, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Last week two prominent Republicans spoke at the Democratic National Convention, eloquently explaining why they will be supporting the Democratic ticket this fall.

Former US congressman Jim Leach of Iowa said “it is clear to all Americans that something is out of kilter in our great republic,” and went on to describe four “great debates” in our nation’s history, showing how both Democrats and Republicans made positive contributions to them. “In troubled times,” Leach said, “it was understood that country comes before party, that in perilous moments mutual concern for the national interest must be the only factor in political judgments. This does not mean that debate within and between the political parties should not be vibrant. Yet what frustrates so many citizens is the lack of bipartisanship in Washington and the way today’s Republican Party has broken with its conservative heritage.”

The devoted reader of these notes may recall a post from March of this year that took conservatives to task for allowing the Republican Party to become a radical force serving special interests, undermining the Constitution, and poisoning the political atmosphere in this country. I cited a few bright exceptions—specifically, several who support the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Whether or not Leach supports impeachment, he is clearly one of the moderate Republicans I recall fondly from my youth and who seem to have become extinct in post-Reagan America.

Leach went on to make his case for change in November:

The party that once emphasized individual rights has gravitated in recent years toward regulating values. The party of military responsibility has taken us to war with a country that did not attack us. The party that formerly led the world in arms control has moved to undercut treaties crucial to the defense of the earth. The party that prides itself on conservation has abdicated its responsibilities in the face of global warming. And the party historically anchored in fiscal restraint has nearly doubled the national debt, squandering our precious resources in an undisciplined and unprecedented effort to finance a war with tax cuts.

America has seldom faced more critical choices: whether we should maintain an occupational force for decades in a country and region that resents western intervention or elect a leader who, in a carefully structured way, will bring our troops home from Iraq as the heroes they are. Whether it is wise to continue to project power largely alone with flickering support around the world or elect a leader who will follow the model of General Eisenhower and this president’s father and lead in concert with allies.

Whether it is prudent to borrow from future generations to pay for today’s reckless fiscal policies or elect a leader who will shore up our budgets and return to a strong dollar. Whether it is preferable to continue the policies that have weakened our position in the world, deepened our debt and widened social divisions or elect a leader who will emulate John F. Kennedy and relight a lamp of fairness at home and reassert an energizing mix of realism and idealism abroad.

The portfolio of challenges passed on to the next president will be as daunting as any since the Great Depression and World War II. This is not a time for politics as usual or for run-of-the-mill politicians. Little is riskier to the national interest than more of the same. America needs new ideas, new energy and a new generation of leadership.

Hence, I stand before you proud of my party’s contributions to American history but, as a citizen, proud as well of the good judgment of good people in this good party, in nominating a transcending candidate, an individual whom I am convinced will recapture the American dream and be a truly great president: the senator from Abraham Lincoln’s state—Barack Obama.

The other Republican who spoke last week at the Democratic convention is actually now a former Republican, and not just any Republican: it’s Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower. A few days before her speech, she explained her decision to leave the Republican Party:

I have decided I can no longer be a registered Republican. For the first time in my life I announced my support for a Democratic candidate for the presidency, in February of this year. This was not an endorsement of the Democratic platform, nor was it a slap in the face to the Republican Party. It was an expression of support specifically for Senator Barack Obama. I had always intended to go back to party ranks after the election and work with my many dedicated friends and colleagues to help reshape the GOP, especially in the foreign-policy arena. But I now know I will be more effective focusing on our national and international problems than I will be in trying to reinvigorate a political organization that has already consumed nearly all of its moderate “seed corn.”  And now, as the party threatens to trivialize what promised to be a serious debate on our future direction, it will alienate many young people who might have come into party ranks.

My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to the nation that McCain and this Bush White House have learned little in the last five years. They mishandled what became a crisis in the Caucasus, and this has undermined U.S. national security. At the same time, the McCain camp appears to be comfortable with running an unworthy Karl Rove–style political campaign. Will the McCain operation, and its sponsors, do anything to win?

Eisenhower explained why she switched her party affiliation to “independent”:

As an independent I want to be free of the constraints and burdens that have come with trying to make my own views explainable in the context of today’s party. Hijacked by a relatively small few, the GOP of today bears no resemblance to Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower’s party, or many of the other Republican administrations that came after. In my grandparents’ time, the thrust of the party was rooted in: a respect for the constitution; the defense of civil liberties; a commitment to fiscal responsibility; the pursuit and stewardship of America’s interests abroad; the use of multilateral international engagement and “soft power”; the advancement of civil rights; investment in infrastructure; environmental stewardship; the promotion of science and its discoveries; and a philosophical approach focused squarely on the future.

The decision was not an easy one, “since politics, like religion, is something learned on the knee of one’s parents and grandparents.” But there will be some joy in her new status, since she will be able to speak for herself, and “not as a member of a party that has, sadly, lost its way.”

Eisenhower mentioned Rove—here’s an update on the Rovian legacy in John McCain’s campaign, giving a sense of how nasty things will probably get. Part of me wants to go to sleep for two months and wake up on November 5 with Barack Obama the elected president. But most of me wants to be ready to dive in when the rumble really starts.

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Bioduress

Posted on August 1, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Just as a neighbor and I began talking seriously about putting up a bat house to attract these amazing mosquito-eating creatures to our mosquito-infested backyards, we learn that, like the honey bee, the bat is in trouble. It may not be for the same reason(s), but it’s disturbing nonetheless:

“This is the worst crisis I’ve ever seen,” says Merlin Tuttle, founder and president of Bat Conservation International. “I think anytime you have animals as ecologically essential, and as distantly related, as bees and bats dying en masse, it should send a canary-in-the-coal-mine signal.”

We look to science for answers, but if you listen to Scott Darling, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, science has been asleep at the wheel:

Cracking the mystery is proving particularly challenging because scientists know so little about healthy bats. “We haven’t known much about basic bat biology before this,” Darling says. “That is science’s little secret: We really don’t know a lot of what people think we know, or what people think we should know.”

One might worry that we’re seeing the beginning of a long and ultimately anthropocidal cascade of ecological disasters—ever accelerating species loss with ever expanding and cross-amplifying ripple effects. The overarching question is: Are we screwing up this place, or is all this “nature’s way” and it just looks bad to us because … because … well, because we’re so special?

Addendum 2008.08.02: Another canary in the mineshaft: jellyfish. Not that it means anything, but at the Outer Banks a couple of weeks ago I experienced a stinging sensation on my thigh after I’d come back from the beach. Eventually I discovered a little glob of sticky black goo in the pocket of my trunks. A piece of jellyfish. There were a few days when the kids reported a jellyfish problem, but this has happened just about every year we’re down there, and the jelly-in-the-trunks trick could’ve happened any time. The Times article is worrisome, though:

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.

“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,'” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

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