Pennsylvania Beautiful

Yesterday I was angry about a brouhaha ongoing in the state where I live. A part of that anger had to do with the local impact and the rest the national implications of it. Anyhow I was mad. I need to correct a few things in yesterday's post.

The first is the date; it was actually posted in the early morning of Sept. 16 not Sept 12.

Second, I need to be clear that I do not impute the integrity of Jan Jarrett and Penn Future.

I wrote a letter to the Governor of the state, but was sensible enough to put that aside for a while before sending it, knowing that in my anger the email would sound stupid. I also sent an email to Jan Jarrett president & CEO of Penn Future. The truth of the matter is I don't know an awful lot about the organization. Here's their thumbnail description of themselves:

An organization of citizens committed to a vision of the future that places the conservation of our natural resources at the center of a vibrant economy.

In the USA there are many organizations something like Penn Future. They are not affiliated with political parties and don't endorse candidates but do the hard work of trying to figure out sound public policy and then work to get policy enacted.

Different groups have particular perspectives and often those perspectives don't always match my own. The Sierra Club is a well-known national environmental group with local chapters all over the USA. I agree with the mission of the Sierra Club, but I linked to the Wikipedia article because there's always going to be talk about one stance or another. Organizations can do good without everyone agreeing about everything, and sometime the disagreements are important.

Penn Future works on environmental issues. There are other groups who work on different issues for example improving education. There is a difference between citizen groups and professional groups with citizen groups often taking into account a more diverse views. Sometimes civil society groups can be downright annoying to me, but they play an essential part in public policy here.

The long and short of all this: my email to Jarrett was offensive because I implied impropriety on her part. I re-read what I wrote at this blog yesterday and I don't read what I said here as impugning her integrity. Still, I want to be clear that I never intended to do that, and nobody should take anything I say about her or Penn Future as an attack on them. The work they do is vitally important and I appreciate it.

I won't go into the contents of Jarrett's email replies except to note that she was outraged by the State contract with ITRR, as I was.

The third issue has to do with ITRR (Institute of Terrorism Research and Response). I referred to it online as an Israeli Company. After I posted I went to the newspaper I read at home, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online and read this story. I suspect there will be further information coming out, but the PG reporters did a good job figuring out about ITRR and my take "Israeli Company" is wrong. First of all ITRR is a not-for-profit corporation. The co-director of ITRR is Michael Perelman who is also principle of Perelman Security Group, which seems to be a for-profit company. The paper writes:

Mr. Perelman was a member of the York police department for 20 years. His business partner is Aaron Richman, a former Israeli police officer.

The business and the non-profit aspects of ITRR raise red flags, but I have no evidence that there is anything illegal involved. While ITRR claims offices in Israel and the US, ITRR is not a "company" but a not-for-profit corporation here in the USA and registered in Pennsylavnia. I have no idea how it is registered in Israel, nor whether the Perelman Group is licensed as a corporation in Israel as well as the USA.

I went to FlickrCC a site to search for pictures at Flickr with Creative Commons Licenses. I was looking for a photo that showed something of what it looks like here in Pennsylvania. Photo Credit: Nicholas T found at Flickr here published with a CC 2.0 License. Nicholas T has hundreds of wonderful photos taken in the state posted.

I love Pennsylvania. There are many very beautiful places on Earth, but I live here and am often bowled over by the beauty of the landscape. There are also many deep scars on the environment visible. Many of the scars are from the legacy of coal mining. In the late 1960's and 1970's efforts began in earnest to reclaim some scarred lands and polluted waterways from coal mining damage.

There are too many interconnected policies to describe important to this effort and there still is much to do. Nonetheless part of the reclamation is tied to present day mining. I may not have it exactly right, but one of the conditions for present coal mining is companies must post a bond for the reclamation of the land before mining can proceed. I've lived mostly in Pennsylvania since 1970 and the reclamation efforts have made a big difference.

The issue of Marcellus Formation gas exploitation involves mitigating permanent destruction of the local environment. In a way what I hope is Pennsylvania can avoid some of the mistakes of the past extraction industries. There a long history of gas wells in Pennsylvania. The deep well drilling presently being done is something new. The regulations for this kind of drilling are not yet on the books. So right now regulation is loose and already the visible costs to the commons are adding up quickly.

It's very hard to get people to agree in politics. Regardless of politics most of us here in Pennsylvania love the land and want clean water.

Passion is a rather unruly emotion. It seems so potent that surely shared passion can bring people together. Alas, it doesn't really seem to work that way. Our feelings are so peculiar and we have to map them onto the various ways we see the world. Sometimes passionate anger overwhelms our capacity for empathy. I think it is empathy more than passion upon which mutually beneficial politics can happen.

But, hey, I'm not the only hot head in the world. I still am angry about the subversion of the political process by state actors in the name of "national security" and the whole can of worms.

There's a paradox: anger can motivate, but empathy is what works. That's something I'll have to keep trying to puzzle out.

For those who can watch videos there's a cool RSA Animate video of Jeremy Rifkin speaking about empathy. RSA Animate's YouTube channel is here. RSA is of course the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. I'm thinking the mere mention may make the 27th Comrade slightly ill, but shouting out to him as I think picking anyone of the animated lectures and waiting for it to download may be worthwhile. The David Harvey Crisis of Capitalism RSA Animate got attention and efforts to answer Harvey's Marxist critique. The animation of these talks is very clever.

Blog Conversations

I feel bad not having responded to recent blog comments.

Dave Winer and Jay Rosen have a Podcast called Rebooting the News. On a recent episode Winer made the observation that blogs aren't conversations, rather blogs are publishing. He's got a point, but comments still mean a lot to me.

First of all regarding computer talk, I'm about the last person who ought to be writing about it as I know so little.

A friend who commented uses a Mac. As he's an artist and illustrator that choice makes so much sense for him. Not that he mentioned it, but there is a subtext perhaps to his comment regarding free and open source software. Linux is not pirate software and in fact there are various business models for making money related to the operating system.

I don't know enough about Linux to be a fanboy. I love OSX from what little I've played around on it; heck I love XP. There seems to me much that's interesting about the Linux operating system, but I'm looking at what I've written below and it doesn't seem interesting, so I'll delete it. What I really want to say to my friend Pingting is I love that you create wonderful art using a Mac.

Daisy wrote:

"This is a very, very serious political moment right now. Fascism is the bull at the gate..."

The 27th Comrade in Uganda sees the seriousness of the present here in the USA too. How to respond to Daisy in particular gives me a mental block. Fascism is the word I think but out of habit do not say.

I don't know how to respond.

Today's top story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette made me so agitated and angry I could barely sit still. Local radio station WDUQ offers additional reporting on the story. The gist of the story is that the Director of State Homeland Security Col. James F. Powers--no relation--contracted with an Israeli company ITRR to

"inform state police and homeland security about 'credible threats to critical infrastructure' around the state, meaning potential attempts by terrorist to destroy roads, bridges, buildings, power facilities or other important facilities."

What the company actually did was to disseminate "wrongful and improper reports" about "environmental groups, tax protesters, people at gay and lesbian rallies and even supporters of more funding for education."

We all know how dangerous people at gay and lesbian rallies are and those dastardly people concerned about education can be--rolls eyes. The part that's made me so angry has to do with the politics of the exploitation of Marcellus Shale Gas which is a huge political issue right now. ITRR was providing "wrongful and improper" reports to Gas companies. Our lame-duck Governor says he's embarrassed but will not discipline Col. Powers over the matter.

Jan Jarrett, President & CEO of PennFuture a civil society group which advocates on behalf of the environment said that she is satisfied with Governor Rendell's apology over the matter.

Her satisfaction sticks in my craw. The recently appointed State Department of Environmental Protection head is John Hanger and he was former head of PennFuture. The organization is lobbying in favor of passage of a severance tax on deep natural gas drilling by October 1st. I'm supportive of this effort. I'm less sure of my support for various options floating around the Legislature for what to do with the money, mostly because reporting on it has been weak.

National elections are coming in November and the Tea Party is well represented by candidates for the highest offices--yes Daisy I know it's not just a Southern thing! So I see the bind that Jarret is in: Governor Rendell is more or less aligned with PennFuture's position, and the organization has the ear of his administration. But on the other hand that the Governor has offered an apology to Jarrett means that "wrong and improper" reports have been disseminated concerning the thousands of PennFuture supporters to gas companies, who oppose this legislation. The Governor is clear that he intends to take no action to redress this horrendous violation of state power. Jan Jarrett may be satisfied with an empty apology, I am not.

The trouble with me is I'm not so good with conversations, I rant. I've been ranting about Newsweek Magazine to my father for years now. He finally let his subscription lapse, just at the time the magazine was sold. Newsweek International editor, Fareed Zakaria wrote an important piece for September 11th, which I didn't get to see in print, What America Has Lost: It is clear we overreacted to 9/11. This business in Pennsylvania is just a tiny piece of a overwhelming juggernaut. Here's another piece, The Surge in Defense Spending: What Did The Pentagon Do With That Extra Trillion Dollars?. Even as bad as the US media is, and it's plenty bad, there's no shortage of evidence that we're seriously lost as a nation.

My dad watches TV so in the background I hear political ads and they fill me with rage. But I know that my rage does more harm than good; people just think I'm nuts. I hear you Daisy, but not so clear as to what I ought to do with the bull at the gate.

I stepped outside for a moment and heard a coyote howl. I've been hearing coyotes for a couple of years around here, but hadn't seen one until this Sunday. The coyote was walking along the road along the field in front of the house. A friend told me they're in the corn fields because turkeys are feeding there, "Every day is Thanksgiving for the coyote." Once the corn is cut my friend assures me the coyotes will hide once again. I'm fond of coyotes because of the beautiful oeuvre of Native American coyote stories. The trouble is coyotes are known to kill cats.

The picture is of our cat Sam who is no longer alive. Pingting gave me a photo scanner and I tested it out with that photo of Sam. He was a cat of great distinction. One of the current resident cats here is Barney a black "tux" cat. When I'm outside Barney will call to me and make his way over for a pat. When Sam was around and our paths would cross he would glare at me as if to say, "Don't bug me when I'm working." Here's a Youtube of Little Village performing a song with just that title.