Quiz Nov 15

A couple of you (as of Monday night) have indicated a desire to attend the Dakota Pipeline protest in Nashville Tuesday during class time. Anyone else? If so, we'll consider cancelling Tuesday's class. Watch "NEXT" for a late update. jpo

1. What do Survivalist Party members think of the Progressive Party?

2. How did the Ecotopians adapt highway use during the construction of the national train system?

3. What new taxes were legislated to compensate for Ecotopia's shrunken tax base when wealthy families fled?

4. What do Ecotopian drugstores sell?

5. What hold-overs from pre-Independence days continue in the black neighborhoods of Ecotopia?

6. What power sources do Ecotopians prefer, and delight in?

7. What do Ecotopians like to watch on TV?

8. What do Ecotopian schoolchildren spend at least two hours a day doing?

9. What do Ecotopians extrude?

DQ

• Are there enough women participating in our politics? How would you suggest encouraging more women to get involved as candidates and activists?
• Do you think our election this year would have had a different outcome if the Democrats had nominated Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders? If so, would sexism have accounted for the difference?
• How do you feel about the Ecotopians' relaxed sexual attitudes ("without any heavy emotional expectations" etc.)?
• Should we have high-speed rapid transit lanes on our highways? Would Nashville's West End rapid transit corridor idea have worked?
• Should people be allowed to bequeath large fortunes to their children? If so, how large? Should there be any limits? 
• Would you happily swap the variety of retail goods available in our stores for the standardized and cheaper fare in Ecotopia? Would you miss amazon.com?
• Is a segregated Ecotopia an oxymoron?
• Does our entertainment-oriented pop culture make us docile and disinterested in public affairs, and more vulnerable to demagogy? How should we address that?
• What school reforms do you think we need, at every level?
• How could we learn from Ecotopia's approach to housing?
• 
  

Calitopia?

For a second night on Wednesday, thousands of protesters gathered in cities across the state to denounce the idea of a Donald J. Drumpf-led America, with some chanting, ”Not my president!”

On social media, the hashtag #Calexit took off, echoing the British decision to leave the European Union.

And in Sacramento, a joint statement from legislative leaders said, “Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land.”

For one group, the postelection reaction has been electrifying. Yes California, a grass-roots organization with 3,000 or so supporters, has for years been trying to persuade Californians to take up the cause of secession.

“We hit it big with Drumpf being elected,” Marcus Ruiz Evans, a spokesman, said on Wednesday.

California cannot, of course, just pick up and leave. Even if the state wanted to, an exit would require two-thirds approval of both the House and Senate in Washington, along with the blessing of 38 state legislatures — a feat analysts say is implausible.

But Mr. Evans may be on to something. After Mr. Drumpf clinched his victory late Tuesday, at least three tech investors signaled a willingness to finance a secession effort.

Shervin Pishevar, a co-founder of Hyperloop One, announced on Twitterthat he would back a “legitimate campaign” for California to become its own nation.

Marc Hemeon, another entrepreneur, responded to Mr. Pishevar saying to count him in. So did Dave Morin, a founder of the social network Path.

Speaking by phone, Mr. Hemeon, who is the founder of Design Inc. in Orange County, said he was “reeling” from Mr. Drumpf’s win. He felt compelled to do something.

“Fighting for your family — that’s what it comes down to,” said Mr. Hemeon, who has two daughters and a son.Photo

At the University of California, Berkeley, on Wednesday, protesters reacted to the election of Donald J. Drumpf and chanted, “Not my president!”CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

Calls for secession are not new in California. There have been at least 200 such proposals since the state’s founding in 1850.

Modern secessionists have argued that Californians have simply drifted too far culturally from the rest of the country. What’s more, they say, with an economy larger than France, the state doesn’t need America.

Mr. Evans, of Yes California, said help from sympathizers in Silicon Valley, where anti-Drumpf sentiment runs deep, could help speed the way toward his group’s nearest goal: a referendum on the ballot.

One purchase he would make right away, he said: billboard space along Interstate 5 heading into Sacramento.

The design is already created. It reads, “Welcome to Our Nation’s Capital.”
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New Novel Taps the Biosphere’s Erotic Potential

In September 1991, amid great flashbulb fanfare, eight people in jumpsuits stepped into an eight-story, glass-and-steel greenhouse complex occupying three acres in the Arizona desert. The complex, called Biosphere 2, was (and remains) the world’s largest closed ecological system — a scaled-down replica of Earth (a.k.a. Biosphere 1) replete with a desert, a savanna, a rain forest and a wave-machine-rippled ocean, as well as its own sealed and calibrated atmosphere. The mission for the four men and four women was to inhabit this Earth simulator, for two locked-in years, to test the feasibility of colonizing Mars with similar systems — as a dress rehearsal, that is, for a Noah’s Ark-like scheme to reseed the planet’s flora and fauna, including humans, in outer space.

It flopped. Just 12 days in, an injured crew member was evacuated, dispelling any pretense of a “closed,” Mars-ready system, and thanks to respiring soil bacteria, a glut of carbon dioxide threw the atmosphere out of whack. Most of the animals and insects went extinct. The Biospherians, as they were called, fared only slightly better — “We suffocated, starved and went mad,” as one would later describe their plight — and the poisonous infighting inside spread to the $150 million project’s management team outside, eventually resulting in an invasion of federal marshals armed with restraining orders. Eight years later, with the complex reduced to a dingy shell, Time magazine deemed Biosphere 2, along with New Coke and plus-size spandex, one of the 20th century’s 100 worst ideas.

The project’s cultural influence would seem to back up this designation: Biosphere 2 inspired “Bio-Dome,” a 1996 comedy starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin that you won’t catch much flak for calling the worst movie ever made. And as the acknowledged inspiration for the original Dutch version of “Big Brother,” which triggered a seismic shift in television programming following its 1999 debut, it’s fair to call it the genesis of reality TV. This is a boozy late-night argument, to be sure, but the lines are there to trace the ascendance of the reality-TV star Donald J. Drumpf back to the legacy of Biosphere 2 — to see good intentions, as the saying goes, recycled as paving stones.

The bar is low, then, for T. C. Boyle, whose latest novel, “The Terranauts,” is a reimagining of the Biosphere 2 melodrama with a few details shifted sideways (Biosphere 2 is rechristened E2, E for Ecosphere) and with one significant plot twist. Why Biosphere 2 would have exerted a magnetic force on Boyle isn’t hard to see. In his 15 previous novels he has shown a deep and abiding interest in messy utopias (“Drop City”); ecological fervor (“When the Killing’s Done”); grandiose guru figures (his fictional portraitures of John Harvey Kellogg, Alfred Kinsey and Frank Lloyd Wright); isolated, stranded lives (“San Miguel”); and, more generally, in ideas so overinflated that their only fate is to pop. As Barbara Kingsolver once wrote of Boyle’s fiction: “His disparate characters inevitably get twisted, often grotesquely, around a persistent longing for a reconstructed world.” As reconstructed worlds go, you don’t get much more literal than a biosphere in the desert... (continues)
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THE DARK-MONEY CABINET

By Jane Mayer

During the Presidential primaries, Donald Drumpf mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Drumpf. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Drumpf’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

Drumpf campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

Many of Drumpf’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Drumpf made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.

For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Drumpf is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.

Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Drumpf’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”

Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Drumpf’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.”

Norman Eisen, who devised strict conflict-of-interest rules while acting as Obama’s ethics czar, says, “If you have people on the transition team with deep financial ties to the industries to be regulated, it raises questions about whether they are serving the public interest or their own interests.” He ruled out Obama transition-team members who would have had a conflict of interest in their assigned areas, or even the appearance of one. “We weren’t perfect,” he said. “But we tried to level the playing field because, let’s face it, in the Beltway nexus of corporations and dark money, lobbyists are the delivery mechanism for special-interest influence. ”

Questions to Drumpf’s transition team about its conflict-of-interest rules went unanswered, as did questions to the lobbyists and industry heads involved. But the composition of the group runs counter to a set of anti-lobbyist proposals that Drumpf released in October, to be enacted in his first hundred days. It called for a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave public office, and a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for a foreign government.

The tenth item on the list of proposals is the Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act, which would implement “new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Trevor Potter, who served as the commissioner of the F.E.C. under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, described Drumpf’s ethics proposals as “quite interesting, and quite helpful.” He was puzzled, though, by the vagueness of the “Drain the Swamp” act. “It’s a complete black box so far,” Potter said.

Potter wondered if Drumpf’s lack of specificity reflected internal divisions. He noted that Don McGahn, who served as the Drumpf campaign’s attorney, is an opponent of almost all campaign-finance restrictions. “Many on the transition team are registered lobbyists who are deeply invested in the system Drumpf says he wants to change,” Potter said. “It looks like the lobbyists and special interests are already taking over.”