Wednesday, January 07, 2009

The Cobra's Back & She's Got Caroline's Back

[x YouTube/Jaysnest57 Channel]
"Sweet Caroline" (1969)
By Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond performed at the Pyramid Stage in Glastonbury (England) in July 2008.

If this is the (fair & balanced) greatest campaign song ever, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Sweet On Caroline
By Maureen Dowd

Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country.

After a lifetime of shying away from the public spotlight, Caroline Kennedy asked herself what she could do for her country.

Her soft-spoken answer — to follow her father and two uncles and serve in the Senate — got her ripped to shreds in the, you know, press.

I know about “you knows.” I use that verbal crutch myself, a bad habit that develops from shyness and reticence about public speaking.

I always thought that Caroline and her brother, John, had special magic capital in America because of their heartbreaking roles in the Kennedy House of Atreus.

Joe Kennedy, the wily patriarch of the clan, had pioneered the use of Hollywood glamour in pursuit of Washington power. With his glossy pop-culture political magazine, George, John reversed that equation, using his stature as an American political prince to persuade Salma Hayek to pose on the cover of his magazine.

I wrote a column once saying that it seemed like a frivolous use of his time. I thought he should run for office and employ his special clout to make life better for Americans. He died before he had the chance.

So I found it bizarre that when Caroline offered to use her magic capital — and friendship with Barack Obama — to help take care of New York in this time of economic distress, she was blasted by a howl of “How dare she?”

People are suddenly awfully choosy about who gets to go to the former home of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Robert Torricelli.

Although Americans still have enough British in their genes to be drawn to dynasties, W. has no doubt soured the country on scions. And the camps of the other two New York dynasties — the Clintons (still bitter about Caroline’s endorsement of Obama) and the Cuomos (who’d like that Senate seat for Andrew) — have certainly done their best to undermine Caroline.

Congress, which abdicated its oversight role as the Bush crew wrecked the globe and the economy, desperately needs fresh faces and new perspectives, an infusion of class, intelligence and guts.

People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God.

The press whines that she doesn’t have a pat answer about why she wants the job. I’ve interviewed a score of men running for president; not one had a good answer for why he wanted it.

Robert Duffy, the mayor of Rochester, complained that when the would-be senator visited the Democratic headquarters there recently, she did not respond to pictures in a conference room of her father, mother, brother and herself as a little girl. Isn’t it creepy to expect her to emote on cue? Isn’t it more authentic to want to keep some of your most private feelings to yourself?

I know Caroline Kennedy. She’s smart, cultivated, serious, and unpretentious. The Senate, shamefully sparse on profiles in courage during Dick Cheney’s reign of terror, would be lucky to get her.

And believe me, she talks a whole lot better than the former junior senator from New York, Al D’Amato, who once wailed that he was “up to my earballs” in some mess, and another time complained to me that those “little Jappies” bring over boats full of cars and then take the boats back empty.

Anyhow, it isn’t how you say it. It’s what you say. Hillary Clinton is a great talker, but she never stood up in the Senate to lead a crusade against any Republican horror show, from Terri Schiavo to the Bush administration’s dishonest push to war.

Sitting in the Senate gallery on Tuesday as senators were sworn in by Dick Cheney, I saw plenty of lawmakers who had benefited from family.

Two Udalls were being sworn in, under the watchful eye of Stewart Udall. Mark Begich, the new senator from Alaska, is the son of a former Alaska congressman. The classy Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, son of the late Gov. Robert Casey, was there in a festive pink tie. John McCain, whose wife’s money and Arizona pull made his Senate election possible, looked on with a smile. Hillary, whose husband paved the way for her to join this club and run for president, chatted with colleagues. Jay Rockefeller wandered about, as did Chris Dodd, son of Senator Thomas Dodd. And Teddy Kennedy, walking with a cane, worked the room with his old brio.

It isn’t what your name is. It’s what you do with it. Or, in the case of W., don’t. ♥

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Her second book followed in 2005: Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. Dowd earned a bachelor's degree from DC's Catholic University in 1973.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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Green Me Up, Scotty?

Bloggers worry a lot. Now, the issue of "carbon footprint" intrudes upon a blogger's reveries. Is this blog a waste of energy? If this is a (fair & balanced) self-fulfilling prophecy, so be it.

[x Slate]
The Green Lantern: Green My Blog
By Jacob Leibenluft

Q:
I have a blog. It's just something for my friends and families, but I imagine it still sucks up a lot of energy. After all, Web sites have to bounce around servers and computers all over the place. I've seen some blogs with tickers to calculate their carbon footprint. Should I be concerned about mine?

The Green Lantern A:
Given all the equipment it takes to run the Internet and how quickly it is growing, it sure seems as if the Web would have an enormous environmental impact. Indeed, some folks now estimate that information technology accounts for a larger carbon footprint than that bugaboo of global-warming scolds everywhere, the airline industry. According to a recent government report (PDF), data centers—the rooms full of servers and network equipment that power the Web—account for about 1.5 percent of U.S. electricity usage per year. Journalist Nicholas Carr even suggested that the average Second Life avatar consumed as much energy as the average Brazilian.

But the Lantern believes these stats exaggerate the contribution of the Internet to global warming. At the peak of the Internet boom, some warned that the growing network would produce an untenable demand for electricity. Those claims—including the notion that an old-school Palm Pilot used as much electricity as a refrigerator, just to access its wireless network—have been rather thoroughly debunked. Moreover, it takes far less energy to transmit data than it does to move atoms. In other words, downloading an MP3 takes less energy than buying a CD, posting a book online allows readers to use less resources than printing a physical copy, and watching a conference online emits less carbon than attending in person. (For the Lantern's earlier take on reading newspapers online, click here.) Meanwhile, computers and computing equipment are getting substantially more energy-efficient every year.

The environmental impact of accessing a single article or song may have gone down, but people are now getting many, many more pieces of information. After all, most of today's bloggers weren't posting their thoughts on cafe bulletin boards 15 years ago. Even if it's more energy-efficient to post or download data online, that advantage could be overwhelmed by the massive amounts of new information.

Jonathan Koomey, the energy researcher who challenged the Palm Pilot theory, has now estimated how much energy it takes for one gigabyte of data to travel over the Internet. Along with another consultant named Cody Taylor, Koomey added up the electricity needed to run the servers hosting the data, the Internet backbone over which those data travel, and the network connections through which the data flow. (Their numbers don't include the energy used by end-user equipment—like home computers and wireless routers.) In total, they estimate that in 2006, it took, on average, between nine and 16 kWh of electricity to transmit a gigabyte of data. (Koomey and Taylor's research—published here [PDF]—was sponsored by an online-advertising firm.)

What does that mean for your personal blog? In terms of direct pollution, the impact is likely to be pretty small. To provide a reference point, the popular blogging site WordPress said it transferred about 161,100 gigabytes of data last year across 3,132,606 active blogs. Do the math, and that adds up to only about 51 megabytes of data transferred per blog per year—a tiny amount. Of course, a given blogger's bandwidth will be much higher if he or she receives lots of traffic or posts large images and videos. But even those whose sites transfer a couple of gigabytes a month would be responsible for just a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Using somewhat outdated stats from the Department of Energy, that would put even one of those larger blogs somewhere in the range of the average household's microwave.

What kind of environmental impact does Slate have? Compared with a personal blog, our carbon footprint is pretty hefty. Slate's average daily bandwidth is somewhere around 280 gigabytes. Using Koomey and Taylor's 2006 numbers—which are simply Internet-wide averages—that would mean Slate's traffic is responsible for somewhere between 650 and 1,700 tons of CO2-equivalent per year. (That would be equivalent to the footprint of perhaps 50 Americans or one Material Girl.)

If the carbon footprint of your blog keeps you up at night, it's possible to make a few changes for the better. Koomey and Taylor estimate that cooling and ventilating servers accounts for about half of the energy needed to power the Internet, and a whole range of "green" hosting services has sprouted up to mitigate the carbon impact of these operations. (Many of them buy renewable-energy certificates, as opposed to cutting down on energy use in the first place.) CO2Stats, a startup that estimates a site's carbon footprint for a fee, advises developers on how better to encode their sites for more efficient data transfers. But even on your own, you can make simple changes like posting fewer or less bulky pictures, cutting down on the electricity needed to access your musings.

Of course, none of this takes into account the energy required to power those computers used by your faithful following to read and comment on your blog. If your readers use desktop machines with CRT monitors and other electricity-hogging accessories, they may offer the best hope of reducing carbon emissions—something worth mentioning on your blog. ♥

[Jacob Leibenluft is a writer from Washington, DC. He was editor in chief of the Yale Daily News (2004-2005) and graduated from Yale College with a BA in history and economics in 2006. In addition to Slate, Leibenluft has written for the Christian Science Monitor and Foreign Policy.]

Copyright © 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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