Per Bob Audette, writing for today’s Brattleboro Reformer:

Late Wednesday afternoon, Entergy, which owns and operates Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, announced its attempts to find a buyer for the 40-year-old facility were to no avail.

What?  You mean no one wants to buy an aging power plant that’s shown repeated signs of failure, malfunction and mismanagement?

“Although we received interest from a number of companies, the conclusion of the sale process, without a sale, was driven primarily by the uncertain political environment in Vermont,” stated Richard Smith, president of Entergy Wholesale Commodities, in a press release. “The plant’s strong operating performance was attractive to potential buyers; the political uncertainty was not.”

I think it’s safe to refer to this as “the inability to find a donor for our corporate responsibility.”

But that doesn’t stop VY from attempting some deal making.  They’ve negotiated a tentative deal with the Vermont Electric Cooperative (though it still needs to be approved on multiple levels by VEC).  

But guess who’s in favor of the deal?

But Brad Ferland, president of the Vermont Energy Partnership, stated in a press release that the offer to VEC “is a great deal — and we need more like it. We encourage other Vermont utilities and Vermont Yankee’s owner to finalize similar agreements in the very near future.”

VTEP is a group of more than 90 business, labor and community leaders committed to finding clean, affordable and reliable electricity solutions. Entergy is one of its members.

So there’s no possibility of bias there, right?

Sometimes there are no words to express this:

Note: I’m posting this to more than one site, but most (though not all) of what I’m talking about concerns an overlap between multiple sites, so it seems best to just say it everywhere.

So…

I like to argue.  By “argue” I don’t mean this:

I mean debate, discuss, argue, and yes, even fight, for what I believe.

I am aggressive.  I am direct, sometimes brutally so, and when I have the time to invest in it, I can do this extremely well.  

I don’t have the time I used to have. Between work, music, photography, other work, and volunteer work, I can’t invest as much time in a solid argument as I used to, but still, it’s something I kind of love to do.

And I love being involved in high-level discussions with people who disagree with me.  And by high-level, I don’t mean this:

I mean honest discourse.  I expect when people disagree, they’ll get heated.  I expect when people disagree there will be some passion.  But I don’t expect there to be personal attacks, and I don’t expect there to be lies and misrepresentations.  

Well… no.  That’s not quite it.  

I expect those things, but I argue as though they are not going to happen.  I give people the benefit of the doubt.  I give people the option to fail, but I do not want them to fail.  I want the discourse that challenges me to be honest, respectful and fair.  I say this knowing that, as a rule, this does not happen.  But still, I try.

When people do fail to live up to this (admittedly high) standard I do, on rare occasion, falter.  I am human, and sometimes I can be rude, petty and annoyed.  Mostly, even when I annoyed, I do not go with the other two, though my directness and refusal to budge on matters of fact, combined with my willingness to point out inherent contradictions within an argument, can easily be taken for rude.  And, honestly, sometimes that rudeness is intentional, especially when I am simply fed up with someone’s deceptive claims, outright lies, or personal attacks.

But the fact of the matter is that I treasure these differences– I think we can challenge one another without attacking one another, grow from one another without belittling one another, fight for what we believe without disrespecting one another.  

Not everyone agrees with me on this.  That’s okay.  

The other day, I met Shap Smith, speaker of the house in our little green mountain state.  I was up in Montpelier for the day to do a photography gig.  There wasn’t a lot of downtime, but there was a little.  I’ve seen Shap a few times, but never talked to him other than to say hi.  I’ve attacked Smith a few times in the past.  Recently, talking about his moratorium on raising taxes (which I think I called “foolhardy”) and his involvement in Vermont’s “Challenges for Change,” which I still think is just a fake substitute for making real and serious cuts.  

The thing is, I like Shap.  I’m not always thrilled with him, but I think he’s a good speaker, and I expect he’s got a lot of forces pushing him in ways that are not at all easy or comfortable.

It turns out he knew me already.  We’d e-mailed once or twice, but I didn’t realize he’d recognize me.  We chatted, briefly, and I found myself just being extremely direct with him– I think what I said was that I know how hard a position he must be in, but I also know how important it is that he gets pushed just as hard from the left as he must be from the right, and that I see that as part of my job– to push him, sometimes extremely hard, to do the right thing.  

Politics is a tricky business.  It gets personal.  It gets ugly.  But it’s the way of things.  

I know I’m being a little vague here about the backstory behind this.  I’m doing that for two reasons: first, I don’t want this to descend into a “who was right” argument over things that happened in the past.  Second, though this springboarded from some recent interactions I’ve had, it’s really not about that any longer and I don’t want it to be about that.

So.

I’m going to ask: when we argue with one another, when we disagree, can we do this without attacking on insulting one another?  Can we do this without making unfounded accusations, but instead focus on facts and evidence?  

And to be clear: I’m not talking about the people who are waging war on us.  We don’t need to sit down and have a respectful conversation with Randall Terry.  We don’t need to attempt high minded conversations with Scott Walker.  These are people who have abandoned all pretense of working towards finding solutions, and I’m not talking about people who come here trolling in order to disrupt.

I’m talking about us.  

I’m talking about people who have similar (though probably not the same) goals, but are focusing on grievances and personal matters.  I’m also not talking about liking one another or agreeing.  I’m talking about the most basic level of respect required to have normal human discourse.

So who’s in?

One of the first things he told me when we met was that he had been in the Hitler youth.  

The oddest thing about this was how casually he mentioned it.  My first week in College and all the 1st-year students were expected to meet with their advisors for an introductory lunch.

And here I was, face to face with a man who was part of an organization which would have willingly and obediently murdered me for my ethic heritage.

I didn’t understand why he did this at the time.  I did understand that he wasn’t proud of it.  He wasn’t telling me this to promote himself or to show me what it meant.

I knew that he had been a child at the time, and likely had little choice in the matter, but even so, I found it odd that he began a conversation with this, as though it weren’t something to be ashamed of, as though it weren’t something to hide from, to run from.

It was a few years before I really understood what was going on, and it took another story for it to make sense to me.

This is not a story about history, though it is tied to it.  It is a story about today, and what comes next.  It is a story about what we do when we finally acknowledge what we’ve been part of, what it says about our humanity and how we chose to respond to it.

My social psychology instructor, in a class I took some time later, told us a story.  I’m going to render it in first person for dramatic effect, and I’m telling it from memory, so I probably don’t have the details down, so this is the basic gist:

A few decades ago, I took a job on a fishing boat off of British Columbia.  It was difficult work and we were pretty isolated.  We’d spend most of our time out in sea, and most of that time was spent fishing.  

We would joke a lot and socialize, because there was nothing else to do.  There was only one man on that boat that I ever thought of as a friend, and he didn’t speak to me other than to give one- or two -word instructions for the first five months of this work.

When we finally did have a conversation, he told me about his history.  He’d been a soldier in Hitler’s army: a foot soldier; a grunt.  He didn’t understand the bigger picture.  He just knew that he was a soldier and it was his job to fight for his country.  He didn’t know about the concentration camps, the ovens, etc.

When he finally did realize what he’d been part of, it was just before the war had ended.  And he just walked away: he threw down his gun and left his army and left his country and just kept leaving it.  He took job after job, saying as little as possible to avoid having to discuss his German accent.

By the time I’d met him, he’d managed to make it across the Ocean and across Canada.  We didn’t talk about him having been a Nazi much.  It was clear that he was ashamed of it.  It was clear that he didn’t think there was redemption for it.  So he just hid: from himself, his history, the first twenty-five years of his life.  I don’t know why he told me.  He hadn’t told anyone else.  For whatever reason, I think he just knew I was someone who wouldn’t judge him.  

He never left fishing after that.  We continued to write from time to time, and eventually the letter stopped coming.  I heard later that he had died doing that work.  I don’t know whether it was suicide or an accident, but I don’t think he expected to ever do anything but die on that boat.  He never did learn to face what he’d been involved in and that fear of his own past pushed him to become a shadow of a man, someone who could never move beyond it.

It was then that I finally understood my advisor: he knew that what he had been involved in was horrendous and that it was largely viewed as mass inhumanity, the worst of his generation.  And he knew that there was no easy path to redemption from that.

But one way of dealing with it, for him, was to be unflinchingly honest about it: never let anyone know him without knowing what he was part of first.  Never let anyone even get to know him without first knowing who he was and some of what he had done.  For him, he chose not to run or to hide, but he chose to never allow him the simple pleasure of meeting someone new without being seen through a specific filter, one connected with unrelenting evil and horror.

One man chose to flee from his past, separating himself from almost all social interaction, retreating into himself, and having few human contacts.  Another chose to face his past, looking directly at it and not giving others the choice but to face it as well.  

So what are our own soldiers going to chose?  When those who engaged in atrocities come home, what are they going to do?  Hide?  Retreat?

What sort of psychological damage will it do to them, long term, to have been put through this?  If they had a clear mission with a moral clarity behind it, it would be different, but they have no clear idea as to what their mission was for most of their time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I read GregMitch’s diary, Why did soldier kill herself,  after refusing to torture? and one passage sticks out, with one woman talking about her experience after witnessing torture on the part of her fellow soldiers:

“It also made me think,” Williams says, “what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in the right situation.”

Imagine this: being put through something that not only challenges your sense of morality, but places you in the position of not being convinced about your own humanity.

What do you think that does to a person?

While our soldiers come home, will we have a way of helping them deal with this?  Will we help them know what is and is not right and good?  

Will we help them face their past and learn to acknowledge it and move forward, or will they just retreat out of fear, living a life of quiet desperation, retreating from their friends, their families and their lives?  Will we embrace them and give them the opportunity to heal or will we just see the emptiness in their eyes and turn away, afraid of what it reflects in us?

Will we acknowledge our own complicity in the torture that was committed in our own name, in the violence that we helped fund?  And if we do, will we be able to handle it?

I don’t have good answers to any of these questions.

Does anyone?

An extinction burst is a concept from behavioral psychology.  It involves the concept of elimination of a behavior by refusing to reinforce it.

The best example of this is a child’s tantrum.  Parents react to tantrums, which is why they often work, but the point of the tantrum is primarily attention.  So when the parent reacts, it reinforces the tantrum and increases the frequency of it.  What many parents fail to understand is that even a spank or yelling is still attention and still helps to reinforce the tantrum.

What is generally very effective about reducing tantrums is not attention, but a complete dearth of it.  As difficult as it is to do so, the tantrum will generally go away once the attention is removed.  

But first there is the extinction burst.  

The extinction burst is basically what happens when the tantrum’s not working any longer– it actually gets worse for a time before it fades away.  If you’ve ever seen kids throwing a tantrum, you’ve probably seen this — some more informed parents will let the tantrum go and they don’t actually look like good parents when doing it– they look kind of mean and uncaring, but it’s often the right thing to do despite appearances.  

So what happens is that the kid just starts ramping up that tantrum– thinking “I just need to try harder.”  And sometimes this works– the parent relents, gives the attention (which may be yelling or a slap, but it’s still attention) and the kid gets rewarded for the tantrum and gets rewarded for making the tantrum worse.

I want to reiterate that the tricky part of all this is that it’s hard to do the right thing here.  And in most cases, the right thing is to ignore it.  So the problem is twofold:

1. How can I be sure that ignoring it is the right thing?


2. Even if I’m sure, how do I find the resilience do do it?

Unfortunately, the answer to both is “not easily.”  Ignoring it is often the right thing, but in some cases, the tantrums are not there in order to get attention but masking something more serious.  You still need to listen to your kid and pay attention, even if your kid is being a major pain.  That doesn’t mean you give in to the kid’s demands or react inappropriately, but you do need to understand the little hellspwan, whether you like it or not.

The second?  Well that really just takes strength of conviction, which doesn’t always come easy.  It’s also a lot harder when there is more than one parent and one’s not so good at handling this.  The weak link can cause all sorts of problems.

Kids, as a rule, are smarter than we give them credit for.  Not all kids, of course.  I mean, yes, there are Lisa Simpsons out there, but there are also Ralph Wiggums.  But I’m talking about how most kids in general, are not stupid– they learn their world and they know how to work it to their advantage, so they’ll take any opportunity they can find to get what they want, and if that means playing parents against one another, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Because, really, it’s not about morality or what’s right at that point in their lives.  It’s all about them.  That’s not their fault.  They’re just not mature enough to understand morality yet.

And sometimes the hard lesson they need to learn is that just because their parents love them doesn’t mean their parents will do what they want, and just because they choose to start screaming and shouting in the middle of a Kay-Bee toy aisle in front of everyone doesn’t mean they get that new toy they’ve been craving ever since they first saw it twenty-seven seconds ago.

One of the problems with extinction is the inability to know when you’re truly extinguishing a behavior as opposed to letting it fester and grow in the background.  Why, for example, would Orly Tatz at this point be basically a joke to the few people who know her name while Sarah Pain continues to get attention and coverage?

The sad fact is that there’s no way to always tell– when the tea party first started going off the deep end before HCR was passed, I advocated for allowing them to ride out their extinction burst, letting them get it out of their system before acceptance.

Obviously, if that did work, it was on a larger arc than I realized, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest I had that completely wrong.  

Let’s take another example: The Westboro Baptist Church thrives off of attention and interest, and we’re pretty much ready to give them that whenever they come calling.   I remember when no one knew who they were, back when no one cared about them because they were only going after gay people and not soldiers.  I think their problem was that they weren’t getting enough attention to thrive when they were just expressing a more extreme type of homophobia than the rest of the country so they had to escalate to the point of pissing off pretty much everybody.  But imagine what would happen if we simply ignored them and treated them like the powerless anachronistic fools that they are?  Would they be able to do much of anything to anybody?

Now, part of the problem (and we see this with Sarah Palin) is that some reinforcements happen without our participation and we can’t really control them.  If you are the parent who’s always refusing to reinforce the child’s tantrums but there is another caregiver for whom the tantrums work, you can’t actually extinguish the behavior.  There needs to be agreement.  So when we advocate for ignoring Sarah Palin completely, but she still has an internal reward system that we can’t control, we can’t actually stop her by ignoring her because she gets enough attention (and money; let’s not forget the money) to sustain her existence as a political hack and sloganeering performance artist (did I mention the money?).

I don’t have a solution to this or clear answers to these questions– but I do think we need to have a better understanding of the psychology that fuels or fails to fuel some of these movements and individuals.   The only reason the Westboro Baptist Church is known at all is because people choose to cover them.  Palin’s a different story, but in order to understand whether or not she, like Michele Malkin, Randall Terry or Ann Coulter, is worth attacking or addressing at all, we need to understand the power of the extinction burst, what it means, and when it can be applied.

Note: I originally wrote this in 2007, so some of the commentary is dated, but much of what I wrote about then still applies today

Sometimes it’s complicated to talk about creativity in terms specifically of activism.  So today I’m going to talk a bit about creativity of other sorts: artistic inventiveness, creativity and exploration, with a nod towards the end about how it applies to activism and political work.

But first, about the picture.  There is no Photoshop effect at work here.  This is a light sculpture (see Eric Staller’s work for the original concept of light sculptures– the man’s a genius) which I created through a fairly simple process using long exposure shutter work.  For technical explanations of long exposure work, I’ve written two pieces, one for digital SLRs and another for non-digital SLRs.  The much shorter explanation is that you set the camera up in very dark settings and leave the shutter open for a long time, allowing the light that hits the camera’s film to take prime focus in the frame.

In this case, I was in a parking lot that had very little light surrounding it and pulled out a couple of those glow-sticks you see people selling at fireworks displays and similar events (believe it or not, I keep some in my trunk for just such an occasion).  I moved them into different positions, would hold them there for a moment to get the exposure, and then move them again.  First I did them around my head, curving them, and then straightened them out to do form the lattice work grids.

My intent is to do a lot more of this, using all sorts of light sources: sparklers, torches, light-up toys.  There are tons of possibilities here and lots of room for experimentation.  Winter is perfect for this: when the nights are long, the darkness is my friend for this sort of shot.

So how does this apply to politics & political movements?

There’s a concept I teach my students called “functional fixedness.”  The idea is that we often think of what we’ve got in front of us as being fixed and rigid in its purpose.  A butter knife is for a specific set of tasks, but when you find yourself without a screwdriver, it might do in a pinch.  A lot of us simply don’t think of this, because we don’t think beyond the obvious.  Realizing that I could use a camera to take pictures not only of what’s there at the time I click the shutter and what’s going to be there ten seconds later has transformed my sense of what photography is.  My camera is no longer a way to document and capture moments.  It’s a way to render the passage of time; not through animating images but instead through capturing the whole path of light, and the way that light reflects off of mist, and how that light curves and bends.

In the picture shown, I captured the same light source multiple times, in different positions.  You see very little of the movement of the light because it’s such a low-strength source that it wouldn’t capture it except when still for long enough to show up on the image.  In politics, we often can’t see the effect that what we’re doing is happening.  We don’t know how much of an impact we’ve had until we see the whole picture.  But with experience, we can get ideas as to what works and what doesn’t.  

With politics, however, our greatest enemy can be the expectation that comes with experience: not knowing how to move beyond expectations because we’re so used to them.  A variation on that functional fixedness keeps us from thinking of new and different ways to approach people about issues.  

And before I continue, I will explain that I fully admit to bias here: I’m personally oriented towards creativity and my willingness to expand my own ideas beyond the obvious is probably my primary survival skill.  For a living, I find ways to take complicated concepts and integrate them in fashions which make them clear to people who don’t need to fully understand them but need to understand the basics.  I’m one of the few people I know who can translate easily between geek and non-geek.

So for me, being creative is key to everything.  I’m drawn to works that challenge my assumptions and I’m drawn to works that inspire me to create new material.

So, to politics: as activists, we’re often stuck in a bad situation: we have numbers, but not nearly the resources of large, multi-national, corporations.  We can’t afford to launch high-profile PR campaigns and because we’re smart people who like to think, we don’t just fall into line with daily talking points, so it’s harder for us to get a coherent, specific, and simple message into the media meme the way that conservatives (who, preferring to just repeat the same talking points over and over again, because it presumably shouts out the screaming voices from deep inside the recesses of their blackened, dying souls) are able to do.

But here’s the thing: if we approach these problems with enough inventiveness and creativity, we don’t need to act like conservatives in order to get our messages out there.

Three years ago, global warming was viewed by the mainstream media as just a theory but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in climatology to realize that when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, it really did change things for people.  It didn’t do this through just providing good, solid, information.  It did this through providing it in an creative and engaging fashion.

Think about that for a moment: people paid money to go see a lecture about climate change presented by a guy who, when he ran for President in 2000, was just not a particularly engaging presence on the campaign trail.  Don’t get me wrong: I like Gore, but prior to an Inconvenient Truth, I would never have thought I’d be able to sit through more than ten minutes of Gore speaking without falling asleep.  

It was creativity that took this presentation of his and turned it into something much bigger.  It was looking beyond the message itself and thinking about the delivery system that changed things.  Now we’ve got a transformed debate.  No one’s pretending its not real any longer.  We’ve got people pretending it’s not bad but now no one’s pretending it doesn’t happen.  

For me, what this boils down to is that we’ve got a lot of really smart, clever and sophisticated people on our side.  But we don’t use those skills well enough.  We write.  We argue.  We fume.  We seethe.  But what are we going to do that’s going to step outside of the comfort zone?  What are we going to do that draws attention to big issues in a way which engages people without scaring them off?

There aren’t easy answers to this but it does sometimes involve a lot of patience.  Daily Kos started small, and started primarily because Markos and his merry band of Orange Heathens were willing to speak truths that no one else was willing to do at the time.  They were representing a voice which was seldom heard at the time.  This separation from the norm helped garnish enough attention and power to be derisively attacked by Bill O’Reilly.  Admittedly, being attacked by O’Reilly is a low bar, but clearly he’s in some fashion threatened by ‘Kos.

And really, although I joke about it, it’s pretty amazing that this site has attracted some major attention from high-profile (even if insane) media figures.   It’s not because ‘Kos is backed by large finances or a strategic ad campaign.  It’s because ‘Kos set up something which gives people the ability and choice to contribute in whatever way they see fit and allows us the choices to promote, recommend and/or ignore whatever content we so desire.  We use it to get informed, to inform others, to share ideas and it’s free to use for those of us who don’t chose to purchase a subscription.

There’s something revolutionary about this that pushes it to a new level of creativity.  Anything we can place online we can include in Daily Kos.  Think about  the youTube video that Ms Laura posted which outlines the writers strike.  It’s simple.   It’s clear.  But it’s funny and clever.  And I know about it because of Daily Kos.

Back to art: how many of you viewed this diary because of the unusual photo on the preview?  I included partially to talk about art and creativity, but I also included it because I knew it was something most people don’t see every day and I knew it would intrigue some people.

This isn’t something surprising or original; I used a hook.  The only unusual part is that I’m not trying to sell anything.  I’m just trying share my own experience and hope that someone finds it useful.

I think, for me, it’s that I see so many people who are afraid of trying things that will make them look foolish– I see us all wanting to find ways to create change but not having the resources to do so.   We’re stressed out, tired, not sure where to turn and our representatives capitulate to the Bush administration too often. We try things and fail and we get discouraged.

All of this is valid and understandable.  But sometimes we try so hard against those brick walls without thinking that maybe we’re seeing a wall where it doesn’t exist or that it just doesn’t look like it really appears.  We push and get frustrated and discouraged and feel isolated.  We get lost in the morass of corruption and insider politics and don’t know how to break through to the people who are supposed to be representing us.

And we forget to give ourselves the room to look at problems in new light.  We forget to give ourselves the mental space to find new and creative ways to look at the world around us.  We get so caught up in the day to day struggles that we forget that so much change happens through art and exploration and that change happens in subtle ways that aren’t obvious on the surface.

Look at that picture again.  Each of those lines of light that appear in it took time.  No one watching me create that picture would have imagined what it would look like after the fact.  I wasn’t even sure myself.  I was experimenting.  And out of the two dozen experiments I tried that evening, that’s the only one I liked enough to post.  People watching would see me hold a light then move and then hold it somewhere else.  Over and over again.  People watching would probably think I’m a bit odd and have no idea what the hell I’m trying.  But that’s because you can’t see the big picture when you’re in the day to day struggle.  

So we work.  And learn.  And experiment.  And explore.  And sometimes it works.  But when you try to get a message across, and do so in a creative fashion, somewhere with someone it probably takes hold.  That makes the message more available to people the next time they hear it.  And then when it gets presented again in a different fashion from another venue, they’re a little more ready to hear it.  And again, they may not be ready to take it in yet.  It takes time.  

I will end this with a summary of a story that most of us know, to show just how presentation can change how it impacts our recollection of the story:

A work of fiction which was written, which has been presented as a musical, has shown up in many movies, has experienced many parodies on sitcoms, has appeared as multiple plays, including a one-man play in which Patrick Stewart plays every part:

When Scrooge was first visited by Marley, he was unable to take in what Marley had to say.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, he chose to ignore his history and did not want to hear it.  He left the better part of himself behind, unable to learn from his mistakes.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, he was affected, but not enough to influence change.  He still resisted.

When he was finally visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, he was forced to come face to face with the direct consequences of his own behavior and his own choices.  It wasn’t until that path was drawn for him that the connections were made.  

What we’ve done that can not be changed.

What we’re doing now that we can change.

What will happen in the future should we refuse.

And what happens to others when they make the wrong choice.

Until we find ways to tie these messages together in ways that the rest of our country can understand, we’re still, as a nation, heading towards an abyss.  But we can influence the messages.  We can convey to our people that there is no question that waterboarding is torture.  We can communicate to our friends and colleagues that with our decisions on the environment come consequences that we’ll only escape by not surviving long enough to bear witness to them.

We can learn from our mistakes, but we have to be open to learning and we have to be open to finding new and unusual ways to communicate those mistakes to others and draw on the motivation that comes from wanting to change.

And when we harness that interest in change, we have to be ready to present real and meaningful alternatives.  In “An Inconvenient Truth” we were not just presented with information about the horrors of global warming.  We were presented with alternatives and things we can do right now to reduce the damage to the planet.  When we find creative ways to change our world, we also need to present ways that people can tap into that change and be part of the solution.  

What’s all this take?

Creativity.

Per Think Progress:

The Republican-led Iowa state House is considering a bill that would allow Iowans to carry a weapon openly or concealed in public without a license, permission from a sheriff, background check, or any training. The bill is known as “Alaska carry,” or the “Alaska bill,” because Alaska was one of the first states in the country to implement it. Arizona and Wyoming have similar laws.

The problem?  Aside from this being completely, over the top and insane, the Iowa Republicans know it’s insane.  

Witness as the Speaker of the Iowa House refers to it as “The crazy, give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic bill:”

But really, this is what happens when you treat the 2nd amendment as a religion, as opposed to dealing with it as an integral element of the Bill of Rights that needs to be understood and interpreted.  I have no objection to the right to people to own weapons, but I have a problem with them being able to own high-powered weapons in secret and I have a problem with them being able to do so without any sort of background check.  It’s a recipe for danger that has no real basis in the constitution.

In other news, blogs are scary.

Per VPR / John Dillon:

House Speaker Shap Smith has given lawmakers their marching orders: don’t hike taxes, even to save social programs from budget cuts.

And that’s pretty much where our problem lies.  Our economy has been severely weakened by the Douglas administration.  And now we’ve got commandments from on high telling us that we can’t invest in the tools that will improve it.

Unemployment insurance, which funnels money back into our economy.  Money to refund LIHEAP, which funds programs that keep Vermonters in work.  

Strong, powerful, social programs, such as subsidized child care, such as assistance for the mentally ill, such as support for medical care for low-income Vermonters?  In what possible twisted, upside down, ridiculous world, are these things less less important than, say, raising taxes a small amount on people who make more than $200,000/year?

Raising taxes a small degree won’t bankrupt anyone.  Refusing to take necessary and important steps to stimulate the state’s economy can do real, serious and lasting damage.

I don’t know why I keep thinking we’ve got Democrats in charge.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen barred owls twice in very unexpected places.  The first was in our yard itself.  The second was in a downtown area in Bellows Falls, VT.  

Owls are not generally friendly with people.  They avoid us, and with good reason.  Most owls are nocturnal and have the advantage of silent flight for hunting down prey.  The Barred Owl is no exception.  Our yard is mostly away from people, though it is near a road, and we do see these magnificent birds in our area from time to time.  

But the other owl?  It was sitting on a post on a public street in Bellows Falls, VT.  

Then it flew across the street to the pine trees lining the street outside a Rite-Aid Parking Lot.

There were two specific events in common before both these sightings.  

This, by the way, is the one that hung out in our yard all day:

Generally speaking, when you see a bird out of its expected area, there’s a reason.  It might not have enough food and is therefore required to expand its range to a more unusual location.  

But sometimes there’s something else at play.  In both these cases, there was an ice storm the night before.  My theory is that these owls had roosting spots they preferred, but the ice drove them down.  For an owl to perch on a post in a populated area as this one did…

…suggests that it was either ill, injured or just needed a break.  The bird could fly.  I wish I’d had a picture, but it was too fast– it flew very gracefully directly across the street.    I’ve seen owls fly up close before.  It’s pretty incredible.  And then it just settled down in the tree.

I think the answer here is simple– the bird may be slightly malnourished– it’s been a very tough winter, but no one’s seeing these birds routinely– they only seem to show up after ice storms, which implies that they just get fed up with trying to hunt for the night, and just give up, find the first convenient spot they can and take a break.  

I might be wrong about this.  Owls sometimes get sick.  They die.  Both these owls, I think, are juveniles.  Not all juveniles survive the winter and we’ve had a particularly harsh one, and seeing a dead owl is kind of heartbreaking.  

So you do what you can.  You leave the owl be, let it get its rest, and hope it has a better night the next time.   When you take pictures, you make it brief and at a safe distance.  

And then you let it go, and just hope.

A little explanation here– when comments are particularly odious here, they can be hidden from the general public as toxic to the overall environment.  This is community moderation, not something we tend to exercise as editors of the site.

That said, since we’ve been talking about some of the personal attacks engaged in by pro-nuclear bloggers, I thought it might be worthwhile to highlight an old comment that got hidden.  This comment was posted in this piece.  In response, Howard Shaffer, who’s been going after Arnie Gunderson in public some, made his own comments here on Green Mountain Daily.

I don’t know where Mrs. Gundersen gets her info, but she may be open to a liable suit.  Meredith Angwin, with whom I collaborate, doesn’t get paid to blog. She won’t because it would hamper her independence. In fact we are both trying to get some paid work.  In the meantime we are supporting nuclear power for our grandchildren’s sake.  See our website coalitionforenergysolutions.org and Meredith’s blog Yes,Vermont Yankee.

This fairly reckless and silly attempt at intimidation also included some other personal comments directed at Maggie and Arnie Gundersen (the original comment can be found here if you’re a GMD member in good standing, but I wanted to highlight this particular comment because it says a lot about what’s being attempted here.  

For the record, by the way, as an aside, this was my response:

1. it’s my experience that threatening a lawsuit means the person making the threat doesn’t have a case.  People who have a case actually sue.  People who don’t have a case bluster;
2. as a general rule, a claim of libel requires that the statement in question be a falsehood.  I notice that you aren’t pointing to any actual lie on the part of Maggie but instead making a claim which does not contradict what you’ve said;
3. if you’re going to try to harass or intimidate someone, you should know how to spell “libel.”

We’re talking about individual people going up against a group of extremely powerful corporations with very deep pockets.  As noted recently:

How he dared even go there after Howard Shaffer’s claim to state of VT that Mr. Gundersen is not a nuclear engineer & should not be allowed to make the claim failed so miserably is curious.

Anyone who has watched the ongoing debate over continued operation of Entergy Louisiana-owned Vermont Yankee & related events unfold, has witnessed an astonishing display of disinformation. Information dispensed by those who support continued operation has been inaccurate & misleading in their description of the issue & related issues. It has been an eye opener to say the very least.

I wanted to draw these two things together to show a history here, one not visible to registered users of the site or search engines– the smear tactics we’re discussing here have been going on for a long time and though it was appropriate to hide that comment in the context of the discussion, I thought it necessary to bring it back out to the light again.