John McQuaid

NASA photo of oil slick off Louisiana coast

Is there any more beautiful, yet over-exploited, abused and benighted place in America than the Louisiana Gulf coast? Okay, maybe Appalachia. But today we’ve got to give this tragic distinction to the delta, where a massive, growing, seemingly unstoppable oil slick is now impinging on its vast, fragile marshlands.

I’ll never forget my first visits there. Drive out through cypress swamps and pass strip malls you might see anywhere. Then you’ll enter small communities organized along bayous, former Mississippi River tributaries whose banks provide high ground and traditional living space. The people are mostly energy industry workers and fishermen. Hundreds of shrimp boats line the channels. Keep driving, and the homes and seafood shacks finally disappear and there’s nothing but marsh grass and water seemingly going on forever. In winter, especially, the light is pale and gorgeous. (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

Responding to my “death of accountability” post, Shoq says I don’t lay enough blame on the conservative establishment of think tanks and media operations, which exploit traditional media customs of fairness and “objectivity” to advance ideological and/or Republican Party agendas:

I have been railing about the collapse of accountability for years. This article sniffs around the edges of the problem, and makes some important points, but it completely misses the role that right wing think tanks like Heritage, Media Research Center, and of course, Fox News and the broader corporate media have played in the deliberate deconstruction of accountability and social responsibility.

When the public is convinced that there are no empirical facts, and that one version of events is as valid as any other, they become desensitized to the reality of most crimes and their consequences, and are far more compliant and forgiving of those accused of abusing a trust, principle, law, company, office, nation, and population. (more…)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

A recent Frank Rich column dealt with the almost complete lack of accountability for … well, almost everything. His primary evidence was Alan Greenspan’s retrospective performance evaluation: right 70 percent of the time. Maybe, but that other 30 percent was a killer. Rich continues:

This syndrome is hardly limited to the financial sector. The Vatican hierarchy and its American apologists blame the press, anti-Catholic bigots and “petty gossip” for a decades-long failure to police the church’s widespread criminal culture of child molestation. Michael Steele, the G.O.P. chairman, has tried to duck criticism for his blunders by talking about his “slimmer margin” of error as a black man. New York’s dynamic Democratic duo of political scandal, David Paterson and Charles Rangel, have both attributed their woes to newspapers like The Times, not their own misbehavior.

Rich treats this as a natural consequence of today’s overheated, short attention-span media culture; basically, if you commit a giant screwup, but can spin the media to give you a pass – at least until it moves on to the next crisis, which won’t take long – then you’re in the clear. Your place in history is safe. And this works! (more…)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

No, I don’t think Steve Jobs is evil. Nor do I think the iPad OS and app store are going to result in a walled-off Internet. But if Apple wants to leverage its brilliantly-designed devices to wield more influence over web navigation and content, and make money from it, it’s going to have to loosen up and recognize some realities. Starting with the existence of satire.

This week, cartoonist and animator Mark Fiore won a Pulitzer Prize for the animated political cartoons he does for the San Francisco Chronicle’s website. Neiman Lab’s Laura McGann reports that Apple rejected cartoonist Mark Fiore’s proposed iPhone app last December – not the first time it’s kicked a political cartoonist to the curb. Here’s the relevant graphs from the letter he got: (more…)

Barge in backyard, Lower Ninth Ward

An all-star lineup of GOP pols has gathered in New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. But do they have any idea where they are?

Here’s what J.C. Watts told the conference-goers:

“Some might think that George W. Bush had his shortcomings,” said Watts, “but let me tell you something — history’s going to be kind to George W. Bush.”

Just up the street from the GOP’s venue at the Hilton Riverside is the New Orleans Convention Center, where tens of thousands of people gathered in the days after Hurricane Katrina and waited in stifling heat without food or water for rescuers who didn’t know they were there. Even though they were on TV.

That was probably the low point in a catastrophic breakdown of government capacities at all levels – local, state, and federal. (more…)

Image by Getty Images North America via Daylife

Everybody loves – loves! – the iPad. The downside is that Apple’s new device may also be an anti-democratic force. The app-based touchscreen interface allows the creation of elegant media-consumption experiences. But it also grants the big media producers a lot of control they don’t enjoy on the open web, and limits our ability to talk back and share. At least this is what Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer, and several other sophisticated commentators believe.

Here’s Jarvis:

It’s meant for consumption, we’re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue’s review, that this is our grandma’s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I’ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny’s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.

Winer:

It’s definitely not a writing tool. Out of the question. This concerns Jeff Jarvis, rightly so. This is something my mother observed when I demoed it to her on Saturday. Howard Weaver writes that not everyone is a writer. True enough, and not everyone is a voter, but we have an interest in making it easy for people to vote. And not everyone does jury duty, but easy or not, we require it. Writing is important, you never know where creative lightning will strike. And pragmatically, experience has shown that the winning computer platforms are the ones you can develop for on the computer itself, and the ones that require other, more expensive hardware and software, don’t become platforms. There are exceptions but it’s remarkable how often it works this way.

I don’t have an iPad – at least, not yet – but I identify with these concerns. (more…)

"The only flowers of her youth," photo by Roman Vishniac

I’ve been struck lately by how history – defined as the way that we collectively perceive the past – is a plastic phenomenon. Almost nothing about the past – as experienced by those living in it – is truly accessible to us. Things that seem incredibly significant now may not turn out that way. “History is written by the victors,” of course. But the power over future interpretations may come down to the efforts of a single person.

Take a look at this fascinating New York Times Magazine piece reappraising the work of Roman Vishniac, the photographer did more than anyone to shape a collective image of pre-Holocaust shtetl life, a culture that was, of course, virtually wiped out. Whether you’ve leafed through his most famous book, “A Vanished World,” or not, your perception of that world was likely shaped by his stark images of pious Hasidim and gaunt, fearful shopkeepers with few wares on the shelves. (Well, those and “Fiddler on the Roof.”)

But this is an inaccurate view:

Jewish life in Eastern Europe, especially in the interwar years, was roiling and diverse. All kinds of people — secular and religious, urban and rural, wealthy and poor — consorted freely with one another in all aspects of what many of us would consider the pillars of a modern society: a lively and contentious political culture, a theater scene that rivaled those of most major European cities, a literary tradition comprising not only Yiddish and Hebrew work but also European fiction and a thriving economic trade that successfully linked cities and countrysides (one of Vishniac’s unpublished pictures shows a store in a tiny Eastern European town selling oranges imported from Palestine). Even Hasidic life, so easily caricatured as provincial and isolated, was nothing of the sort: yeshivas, like today’s universities, often attracted students from all over Eastern and Central Europe. The concentration of poverty and piety in Vishniac’s pictures in “Polish Jews” created a distinct impression of timelessness, an unchanging, “authentic society” captured in amber.

As it turns out, Vishniac was a bit of a fabulist. (more…)

Blasting at a mountaintop removal project, West Virginia

For years, coal companies have destroyed Appalachian mountain peaks while government agencies either impotently bickered or looked the other way. The Bush White House did much to weaken an already weak regulatory system and encourage the practice of mountaintop removal. And for a while, it wasn’t clear if the Obama administration’s stated opposition to MTR was merely rhetorical.

Thursday’s announcement that the EPA will crack down on mountaintop removal should put those doubts to rest. The White House is serious about this, and its approach is firmly grounded in science and the law.

The EPA is focusing on one of the most serious problems posed by MTR: valley fills, which are what the name implies – mountain valleys filled up with debris from demolished peaks. (Destroy a mountaintop, and the “footprint” of destruction will be twice as large because you have to dump the debris somewhere else.) Valley fills have many pernicious ecological consequences. By far the worst is the poisoning of mountain streams with various heavy metals and other minerals liberated from all that crushed rock.

In recent years scientists working for the EPA, other agencies, and universities have devoted serious study to the unique, upside-down environments created by MTR and valley fills, and found that the damage is far worse than previously thought. In January, a group of scientists rounded up the evidence and published a paper calling for a moratorium on mountaintop removal permits.

The EPA’s crackdown is a vindication of this effort, and of science-based decision-making in general. I have to admit, I’m surprised. They were getting tougher – but mostly on a case-by-case basis that seemed to lack the broader agenda that requires White House backing. And given the Obama White House’s caution and moderation, I don’t think anyone expected them to follow through – and, effectively, put a stick in the coal industry’s eye.

But it’s pretty straightforward. Mountaintop removal makes a mockery of laws such as the Clean Water Act. By acting now, the EPA has begun to do its job of enforcing that law. This shows that the environmental regulatory system, purposely degraded under Bush, is getting some of its bite back. Of course, this is just the beginning; we’ll see how it plays out.