Glynn Wilson

Alabama Power’s Miller Steam Plant on the Locust Fork River emits more mercury into the air than any other power plant in the country.

Under the Microscope
by Cliff Griggs

Back in 1971, the environmental movement was just a dream in the minds of people who wanted the governments and the corporations of the world to respect the planet that we all live on.

In other words, quit setting off nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, and quit spewing toxic chemicals into our air, our water sources and on our land. Back then we still had lead in our gasoline, with Los Angeles and other big cities covered with air so toxic it was literally killing people.

Our national forests were being treated as a piggy bank for the large lumber firms who clear-cut the forests and turned them into agricultural plantations, row after row of straight lines that wiped out most of the forest eco-systems. Our rivers were used as dumping grounds for chemical manufacturers, fouling our drinking water and poisoning any living thing that lived on or near it. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio actually caught fire.

An awareness of those problems led to the first Earth Day, and to passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, as well a host of other environmental regulations that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Hint: The Conservative South is Less Happy Than the Rest of the Country

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Only in America, a country founded on the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is there a statistical measure of “well-being” where highly paid social scientists spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out just how happy we are as a people.

Unfortunately, we don’t have data from July 4, 1776 to gauge how we compare with our ancestors on that score. There were no pollsters in those days, and only a few newspapers and a primitive voting system to gauge public opinion.

There are some important lessons to be drawn from such measures of public opinion, however, if you look deeper than the basic numbers.

It should come as no real shock that the happiest people in the happiest state in the country live in Hawaii, a dreamy set of tropical islands where the climate is wonderful all year around, the unemployment rate is only 6.3 percent (compared to 8.9 percent nationally) and only 8 percent of the population is uninsured (compared to 17 percent nationally).

According to the latest Gallup well being scores, the people of Hawaii expressed the highest wellbeing among states with a score of 71 out of 100.

It is sort of sad, when you think about it, that even in the happiest state of them all, the score is only a C on any standard academic report card. The country as a whole only averages a D score of 66 percent on Gallup’s well-being index.

Was there ever a time when the country was closer to being 100 percent happy? Maybe in the 1960s or the 1990s, times when the economy was booming and the future looked bright? Unfortunately, Gallup was not conducting these polls then, so we will never know.

As I sit here sipping my coffee and pouring over the data this Sunday morning, I’m wondering what it would take to improve these scores? There are some clues in the numbers. More on that in the end.

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“There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown (1835)

“Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
– William Faulkner, from Light in August (1932)

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

It seems almost inevitable that about this time every year, while joining the rest of the press in searching the world over for a good man or woman to highlight as the person of the year, I sort of feel like Diogenes the Cynic, who you may recall from the story, supposedly walked around naked and homeless in ancient Athens, Greece — holding up a lantern looking for an honest man.

While none of Diogenes’ writings actually survive from his time of about 400 years before Jesus trod the earth, the tale has been passed down through history in many forms over the generations. The story of Diogenes is remembered as a lesson in ethics. He mocked the idea of finding true human virtue and even the idea that we could ever really know the truth about human nature.

The most famous such search in the modern media, of course, is Time magazine’s cover story on the person of the year. For 2010, the magazine named Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives.”

As a recent convert to Facebook myself, I can see why the editors made that choice, although it clearly remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg’s creation will ultimately be used for good or evil. It allows for some amazing connections to be made and helps citizens bypass traditional barriers to knowledge, but it also has a couple of serious down sides. The loss of individual privacy for one.

Then, it is another tool that continues to allow the hyper concentration of wealth into the hands of too few people, a problem that will plague this country until enough people face the facts and fight to turn the tide. Perhaps we can use Facebook to do just that — unless they screw it up and corporatize it, which seems to be the direction the Internet is going like every technology that came before.

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“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke

“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.

In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.

Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?

I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.

There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.

Glynn Wilson

Click on the image for a larger view…

Muir never saw this exact spot, and for that he missed one. But he passed through these mountains on the Georgia side as surely as DeSoto. (See map below).

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
A very smart drinker…

If you like to drink and party and think you are smarter than the average American or Brit, it turns out you may be right.

According to a national child development study in the United Kingdom and a national longitudinal study of adolescent health in the United States, more intelligent people consume alcoholic beverages more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent people.

In the case of the British, “very bright” children grew up to consume a fair amount more alcohol than their “very dull” cohorts.

Even controlling for demographic variables such as marital status, parents’ education, income and childhood social class, the findings were the same: Smarter kids grow up to drink more than dumb kids.

Oddly, according to Psychology Today, the hypothesis behind the study is based on evolution and the results disprove social, cultural factors.

“It means that it is not because more intelligent people occupy higher-paying, more important jobs that require them to socialize and drink with their business associates that they drink more alcohol,” the social scientists conclude. “It appears to be their intelligence itself, rather than correlates of intelligence, that inclines them to drink more.”

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Five Years Ago Today, this Web Press was Born to Counter the Fourth Estate

Brooks Boliek

The Boliek house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where this site was started five years ago today…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

THE BUNKER – Five years ago today, I huddled in front of a little apple red iMac computer in a friend’s kitchen in Tacoma Park, Maryland, near Silver Spring. It was there I wrote the very first Sunday column for this alternative, independent news Web site, there in the pouring rain with the jazz down low on the radio.

By that time, George W. Bush had been sworn in for a second term, so we knew he would be with us for another three and a half years. There was not much hope for stopping all the damage he would surely cause in that time, but somebody had to try to warn the public.

There was always the hope of impeachment.

That story never did grow legs, or at least not long enough to ever be considered a real threat to the corporate state pulling Bush’s strings.

As the rain poured with the jazz in the background, I read about the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, and thought of my good friend Spider Martin, who had given up the ghost two years before, also by self-inflicted gunshot wound.

You’ve just about got to be a big picture kind of writer to make sense of moments like that — in an hour or two of reading, thinking and writing. That’s about how long it takes to produce an average newspaper-style column of about a thousand words.

The problem was, everywhere you looked over the Internets on the World Wide Web at that time, there were these things called “blogs” popping up all over the place like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a summer rain.

In the face of that kind of fast-paced change, what was an experienced, real journalist to do in these times, five years after the heralded advent of the new millennium?

There was all this anonymous defamation on some sites; on others, it was mostly self-congratulatory navel-gazing, like reality TV. Ugh!

Could the Free Press and American Democracy survive both Bush — and blogs?

Gawd only knew.

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

A conservative professor of politics at the University of Virginia has written a column in Sunday’s Washington Post asking the question: Why are liberals so condescending?

In the setup, he writes, “Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.”

Later on, he adds, “This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.”

Rather than posting a comment on the Post‘s Website to point out how the professor has it so wrong, let’s take his argument apart here.

First of all, he starts out with an obvious bit of false spin, just like the conservative commentators on TV he seems to try to defend.

“…even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives.”

On the wane? President Barack Obama’s personal popularity is the same as Ronald Reagan’s after one year in office, and the Democrats still have a majority in both houses of Congress. Just because TV pundits are saying the Democrats may lose a few seats in the mid-term election in 2010 doesn’t mean their fortunes are totally “on the wane.”

In fact, it has been pointed out over and over again that the Republican Party is all but dead, except among white males mostly in the South. Just because one Republican won a Congressional race in Massachusetts doesn’t mean the Republicans are about to take back the country tomorrow. The election is still 10 months away. Anything can happen and probably will.

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What about the press and politicians?

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

As the 2010 election season gears up around the country and in the state, as a trained and credentialed public opinion researcher as well as a journalist who has covered public opinion research for about 30 years, I am always looking to see what the data shows versus what political candidates and the media are spending time talking about.

Economic development is always the number one issue to the press in Alabama and politicians running for office here, a fact that is left over from the post-Civil War industrialization as our society moved away from an agricultural society to a manufacturing society. Of course in the years following the Civil War, we called the businessmen who came South “Yankee carpet-baggers,” but over the years, their reputations became less sullied as they provided jobs for an increasing number of citizens, many of whom moved off the farms to the cities.

And in these economic times, when the nation and the state are still suffering from the results of the Bush recession that started in 2007 even though we didn’t find out about it from the media until January 2008, the economy is still the number one concern of voters, according to the Gallup Poll and other research.

Twenty-nine percent of the American public name the economy in general as the number one problem facing the country. Second to that is health care, however. Twenty-six percent of the people say health care is the number one concern, while 15 percent name unemployment.

Other studies show a high correlation between issues being covered prominently by the media and issues identified by the public to be important.

While the environment only polls from one to three percent on the number one problem question, when asked about their personal worries on environmental problems facing the country at this time, the public overwhelming names polluted water as number one.

According to Gallup, a majority of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about four different environment problems involving water: 58 percent are concerned about pollution of drinking water, 53 percent worry about pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, 52 percent express concern about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, and 51 percent worry “a great deal” about the maintenance of the nation’s supply of fresh water.

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From the economy to the environment, success depends on commitment…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Now that Alabama’s achieved the ultimate success by winning the national football championship, and everybody by now should be aware of coach Nick Saban’s famous mission statement about “excellence” that made it possible, don’t you wonder what it would take to translate that lesson into other aspects of life in this state and country?

How about our stumbling economy? Our bumbling political system? Our ineffective energy and environmental policies?

Tom Campbell

A Saban Hoodoo Wink?

Since there’s no good place available on the Web through Google to find a full text version of Saban’s mission statement for the Crimson Tide, and in case any of our readers who are not football fans missed it, I’ve grabbed it from here and retyped it to post below so anybody in the world can find it.

“Our mission statement here is to create an atmosphere and environment for everyone to be able to succeed, first of all as a person. We want players to be more successful in life because they were involved in our program, by the principles and values that we’re able to develop with them so that they can be successful relative to the character and attitude they have as a football player here at this institution.

“The second thing is we want to be successful as students. I always tell players in recruiting, there’s two things that we want you to do here, you’ve got two careers: one on the field, one off the field. The one off the field means you got to graduate from college. That’s the one that’s going to have the greatest impact on the quality of your life forever. We want to have a great academic support program. We want our players to succeed as students.

“The third is this. We want them to be the best football player they can be. We want every guy to reach their full potential as a football player, play together as a team, know how important it is to be a part of a team and fulfilling your role to that team.

“The last thing is to use all the resources this institution has to help everyone launch their career when they have represented this institution, when they leave this institution, so they can be the most successful in their life because of their association with this university and the people that have made this university great.”

Saban didn’t come up with this philosophy over night. In 2004, he wrote a book called How Good Do You Want to Be?

In the how-to memoir, Saban shares his winning philosophy for creating and inspiring success, revealing things that would help anybody succeed at work and in life. He says “excellence” doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from hard work, consistency, the drive to be the best and a passion for what you do.

Some of the insights include:

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