Sharpiegate

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has not had a confirmed leader since Trump took office in January 2017. Trump nominated Barry Myers, whose conflict of interest is so blatant that the government has preferred to confirm no one at all for the job.

On May 1, 2019, a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times discussed the nomination of Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather and the brother of the current CEO, for head of NOAA. The conflict of interest is that "AccuWeather allegedly has tried to restrict [NOAA's public activities], largely because services provided by the National Weather Service, a NOAA agency, compete with AccuWeather’s business model of offering similar services for a price." In 2005, the Myers family asked Sen. Rick Santorum "to introduce legislation that would have barred the National Weather Service from issuing any weather forecasts that could be issued by private businesses. The Weather Service would be limited to forecasting extreme events such as hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis."

Myers is not even a scientist, as all but one previous heads of NOAA have been. Rather:

'Myers has built his business by taking NOAA data paid for by the taxpayers and turning it into products that AccuWeather sells,' observes Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA scientist and manager who is now director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'There’s nothing wrong with that, but he’s also pushed for the idea that the government shouldn’t compete with private business.'

While Myers had already resigned his position as CEO and divested his stock shares, nevertheless AccuWeather remains his family business, and "the overhanging suspicion of a revolving-door appointment can’t help but undermine the public’s faith that an appointee is acting exclusively in the public interest," the LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik explained.

On September 1, 2019, as Hurricane Dorian made its devastating Category 5 landfall in the Bahamas, President Trump claimed that Alabama “would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated." There was no evidence for this. Hours later, NOAA sent a memo to the National Weather Service, saying that staff should not "provide any opinion" and "only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise from some national level social media posts which hit the news this afternoon." In other words: Don't contradict the president.

A NOAA meteorologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said the note, understood internally to be referring to Trump, came after the National Weather Service office in Birmingham contradicted Trump by tweeting Alabama would 'NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.'

The same meteorologist said: “This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast."

David Titley, NOAA's COO during the Obama administration, tweeted that he didn't "know how they [NOAA leadership] will ever look their workforce in the eye again. Moral cowardice." Jane Lubchenco, who was a NOAA administrator during the Obama administration, said: "This looks like classic politically motivated obfuscation to justify inaccurate statements made by the boss." Michael Halpern, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, asked, "If we’re politicizing the weather what is there left to politicize?"

After Trump tried on Sept. 1 to prove that he was correct by showing a hurricane map that had been crudely modified with a Sharpie to include Alabama in the hurricane's path, NOAA again "sent a similar message warning scientists and meteorologists not to speak out."

For six days — during which the weather in Alabama was "bone dry" according to the chief meteorologist at a CBS-affiliated news source in Huntsville — "Mr. Trump continued his relentless campaign to prove that he was right when he predicted that Hurricane Dorian could hit Alabama regardless of what the scientists said."

On Sept. 5, NOAA's deputy undersecretary for operations sent an internal email saying that Trump's doctored map was "crazy." (The email was released four months later as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.)

On Sept. 6, NOAA's Birmingham, Alabama office took a stand contrary to Trump's position, issuing a tweet stating that Alabama would not be affected. In response to the NOAA dissent, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross reportedly threatened to fire NOAA leadership. (The pressure reportedly came from Trump, through White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, to the Commerce Secretary. Ross denies having made those threats, and the Commerce Department opened an internal investigation into the matter.) NOAA then issued an unsigned statement that disavowed the tweet by the Birmingham office.

NOAA is no longer standing by this tweet from the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service after it appeared to correct Trump's comments that Dorian was posing a threat to Alabama. (Fact check: On day Trump talked about AL being hit, the storm was turning away from AL) https://t.co/yUNrUjpqvU pic.twitter.com/MrtEs3brge

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) September 6, 2019

On Sept. 7, NOAA's acting chief scientist Craig McLean emailed NOAA leadership: "For an agency founded upon and recognized for determining scientific truths, trusted by the public, and responsible in law to put forward important science information, I find it unconscionable that an anonymous voice inside of NOAA would be found to castigate a dutiful, correct, and loyal (National Weather Service) Forecaster who spoke the truth." (This email was also released four months later as part of the FOIA request.)

On Sept. 9, New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman wrote:

At first Sharpiegate, Donald Trump’s inability to admit that he misstated a weather projection by claiming that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, was kind of funny, even though it was also scary — it’s not reassuring when the president of the United States can’t face reality. But it stopped being any kind of joke on Friday, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement falsely backing up Trump’s claim that it had warned about an Alabama threat.

Why is this frightening? Because it shows that even the leadership of NOAA, which should be the most technical and apolitical of agencies, is now so subservient to Trump that it’s willing not just to overrule its own experts but to lie, simply to avoid a bit of presidential embarrassment.

Think about it: If even weather forecasters are expected to be apologists for Dear Leader, the corruption of our institutions is truly complete.

By January 2020, the White House was tweeting fake snowflakes in Washington DC, prompting journalists to waste time debunking yet another fake weather report.

I usually ignore stuff like this, but it’s literally the first time in more than 20 years that Washington has had back-to-back 70-degree days in January. What is even the point of this lie? https://t.co/cy5ZSobDGt https://t.co/JSUEcplKId

— Kimberly Atkins (@KimberlyEAtkins) January 13, 2020

I don’t want to sound like Alex Jones here but is this some sort of secret communication? Racking my brain to make any sort of sense of this. It nearly hit 70 degrees in DC today. https://t.co/aLwOz5HKVD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 13, 2020

Hurricane Helene

On September 30, 2024, Trump said of Hurricane Helene, which had just killed over 200 people: “It’s so extensive, nobody thought this would be happening, especially now it’s so late in the season for the hurricanes.”

HuffPost corrected the record: "It is currently slap-bang in the middle of hurricane season." The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) itself says: "The Atlantic hurricane season is June 1st to November 30th." Trump and his allies have big plans to dismantle NOAA.

"Asheville was supposed to be one of those places where people were safer from climate disasters." Climate advocate and Asheville resident, Melissa Hanson, describes the horror of Helene -- a very unnatural disaster www.scientificamerican.com/article/hurr...

[image or embed]

— Aimee Witteman (@aimeewitteman.bsky.social) October 4, 2024 at 1:02 PM

Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘They Can Control The Weather,’ Promoting Conspiracy About Hurricane Helene: Right-wingers have long promoted wild theories about weather control, and Greene, a Donald Trump ally, gave them a big boost. Christopher Mathias, HuffPost, Oct 4, 2024

The entirety of Greene's tweet was: "Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done." She didn't say who "they" are, which was surely intentional vagueness on her part. If someone really could control the weather, it would be important to say whom. Greene is happy to blur assumptions of "the Jews" and "the Democrats" and anyone else the right-wing is currently maligning.

Quotes: What is the effect of television on culture and on self-understanding?

Rene Dubos, writing in 1974, observed that a person living in safety can spend a lot of time watching journalistic reports of catastrophes in faraway places, yet still feel that their own life is lacking. This is because television reports may not necessarily impart a sense of gratitude that nothing terrible is happening to them; rather, the time they have wasted in front of the television has prevented anything interesting from happening to them, and this lack of interestingness is what stirs within them. But is this simultaneous lack of interestingness and lack of gratitude a fault of the television, or is it a fault of the person watching the television?

Dubos wrote:

In 1973, a young female college student published a book in which she presented 'a chronicle of growing old in the sixties.' On her own account, the most significant influence in her life had been that before she was twenty she had spent more than 5,000 hours watching television. She had witnessed on the screen John F. Kennedy's assassination, civil rights marches, student riots, the Vietnam war, space shots, moon landings — in short, all the spectacular events of the present era. Television thus had made her knowledgeable about the contemporary world, but it had not given her a real feeling for what she had watched on the screen. Although she had grown up in a comfortable and safe environment, she felt that her childhood had been more 'traumatic' than that of most other people because of 'the eventlessness' of her life. Apparently television watching did not make her realize that misery in the American slums or the tragedies of Vietnam had been experiences incomparably more traumatic than the emotional emptiness of her own life. She had watched television as a voyeur, not as a person really involved in the human pathos of world events. Learning about the world through news reports, talk shows, television broadcasts gives the artificial thrill that comes from the illusion of proximity to events without the necessity of being involved in them; it does not elicit an organic interaction and therefore gives at best a trivial quality to the experience of the global village.

Many people do not experience it as a choice. When television is ubiquitous enough, it may seem that there is no other choice than to watch it and whatever is on it, as well as to go along for the ride with whatever else is happening in life. Some people do not experience life and culture as a choice. A novelist put it:

Most days the orderlies would just line the three of them [the severely brain-damaged patients] up in front of the TV. They'd shit their pants and piss on themselves. If they was lucky, somebody would turn the channel. In some ways it wasn't much different than how half the people in the fucking world lived. And whether they believed it or not, none of them, not Ben or the other two, or all the rest of the motherfuckers in the world, had a choice.

It is a rare eccentric who can compartmentalize and ignore television and claim that it is not part of the real world, not part of the immediate culture that surrounds them.

He [British physicist Peter Higgs] doesn't own a TV, but not because he lacks interest in the outside world. 'I don't regard television as the outside world,' he offers dryly. 'I regard it as an artifact.'

People used to gather, sing, and meditate, said Zen teacher Alan Watts, before there was television. Jon Kabat-Zinn in his classic Wherever You Go, There You Are (published in 1994), said that television (as well as newspapers) can destroy the silence and space in which to listen to the world and to ourselves, and thus impede our attentiveness and inner peace. Kabat-Zinn wrote:

We watch television at the end of the day, a pale electronic fire energy, and pale in comparison [to a fireplace]. We submit ourselves to constant bombardment by sounds and images that come from minds other than our own, that fill our heads with information and trivia, other people's adventures and excitement and desires. Watching television leaves even less room in the day for experiencing stillness. It soaks up time, space, and silence, a soporific, lulling us into mindless passivity. 'Bubble gum for the eyes,' Steve Allen called it. Newspapers do much the same. They are not bad in themselves, but we frequently conspire to use them to rob ourselves of many precious moments in which we might be living more fully.

From an early point in TV history — 1961 — even those working in the industry itself have felt that the broadcast content is a "wasteland".

Fifty years ago next month, I stood before the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters for my inaugural public address as President Kennedy's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. My first objective in the job was to clean up the agency and the industry, which before I arrived had been embroiled in quiz-show, payola, and agency scandals. My second was to expand choice for viewers, by advancing new technologies in the belief that more choice would result in more and better content.

* * *

Television, I said, was too often a 'vast wasteland.'

I knew broadcasters would not be happy. My favorite response was from Hollywood producer Sherwood Schwartz, who named the sinking ship in Gilligan's Island after me. The 'vast wasteland' was a metaphor for a particular time in our nation's communications history, and to my surprise it became part of the American lexicon. It has come to identify me. My daughters threaten to engrave on my tombstone: ON TO A VASTER WASTELAND. But those were not the two words I intended to be remembered. The two words I wanted to endure were public interest.

Kurt Vonnegut called television an "eraser" because it replaces its viewers' ideas and images with material of its own.

It even eats the culture, as Ron Powers put it in 1990:

It was the Eighties in which American television peeled itself away from its remaining adherences to external norms, scales, and restraints, and asserted itself as a primary, generative force in the culture. In its brokering of three Presidential elections (not to mention countless other political campaigns); in its transformation of news and information; in its desanctifying of the Protestant liturgy; in its usurpation of text as the basis of education in many public schools; in its unrestrained celebration of majoritarian, corporatist values; in its merging with the technologies of data storage and of surveillance; in its radical destabilization of typographic culture; and in its invention of a pervasive, sui generis idiom — the decontextualized idiom of MTV — television in the Eighties finally fulfilled the worst nightmares of a half century: It devoured its host culture.

A technology that has potential to broaden cultural engagement and foster diversity instead is used to homogenize public opinion. Much of what television teaches is through its advertisements; it teaches the centrality of consumerism to society. Its materialistic values contribute to frustration and maybe even violence.

Amin Maalouf wrote:

Sometimes it's thought that with so many newspapers and radio and television channels likely to be available we shall have access to an infinite variety of opinions. Then the reverse seems to be true: the transmitters are so powerful that they merely amplify the currently prevailing opinion, drowning out any other point of view.

Jim Wallis:

The credo of modern consumerism screamed at me from the bumper sticker: 'I Shop, Therefore I Am.' This contemporary version of Descartes's old maxim, 'I think, therefore I am,' momentarily took my breath away, with its stark truthfulness about our materialistic age. The same week I saw the bumper sticker, another murder occurred in my neighborhood — this time over basketball shoes. * * * The portrayal of overconsumption as a deserved right has emptied human life of meaning and turned us into increasingly violent creatures. When people are told on their televisions that they deserve all the goods of American life and then are denied their attainment, more and more resort to just taking the stuff.

Jeremy Rifkin felt the 'pounding' and 'assault' of information even in 1985, before the Internet's impact on society; in that era, the information came largely from the television, which the average American watched for five hours a day. He wrote:

Today we are bombarded with information. Advertising, the mass media, our educational system are pounding on us with thousands and thousands of messages every day. from the time we get up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, we are literally assaulted with bits of information. The advertising industry alone spent over $47 billion last year 'educating' the consumer. The average American is subject to the one-way flow of information from the television set for over five hours every day. Economic historians like Daniel Bell assert that our economy is now making the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial mode, where communication and information systems will dominate the economic activity of the nation.

Sources

Rene Dubos, Beast Or Angel?: Choices that Make Us Human. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. p 86-7

James Frey. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. Gagosian Gallery, 2011. [Kindle Edition.]

"The hermit physicist." The Week, Dec. 27, 2013. p. 8. Citing Decca Aitkenhead's article in The Guardian (U.K.)

Alan Watts. Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation. Novato, California: New World Library, 2000. p 68.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, p 174

"A vaster wasteland." Newton N. Minow. The Atlantic, April 2011, pp. 50-51.

Kurt Vonnegut. Timequake. New York: Berkley Books, 1997. p 221.

Ron Powers, The Beast, The Eunuch, and the Glass-Eyed Child. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. p xiii.

Amin Maalouf. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. (1996) Translated by Barbara Bray. (2000) New York: Penguin Books, 2003. p. 111.

Jim Wallis. The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left". New York: Harvest, 1995. pp. 151, 156.

Jeremy Rifkin (with Ted Howard). Entropy: A New World View. London: Paladin Books, 1985. p 184.

When the planet is "cognitively trapped" as "the environment"

In 2022, I moved this article to Medium: "Re-envisioning 'Environment'"

It's not about "the environment." Stop using this phrase. It's about whether life on Earth collapses into a shadow of its former magnificence. It's about whether humankind thrives and evolves, or descends into a long and brutal dark age on a less habitable planet.

— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) October 8, 2022