The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible...Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Further, Klinenberg reports, living alone doesn't mean loneliness or isolation -- in fact, he says that single people often turn out to be more sociable that the marred. 

Still, it's a concept that takes some getting used to. Yes magazine posts a sweet video guide: 

As a boy, I lived for a time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of the people. 

If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly on the horizon -- say, while out hunting -- he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his kin be saved. 

Văclav Havel, Politics and Conscience, 1984 speech

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

Amazing. Today Mitt Romney ignores climate change, while Newt Gingrinch describes his call for action on it "the stupidest thing he's ever done," and Rick Santorum calls global warming a hoax. 

Liberals and Democrats shouldn't self-congratulate, though, because President Obama is as silent on the issue as is Romney. He mentioned climate change in the State of the Union address only to say that nothing could pass Congress on the subject. That is, he blamed the GOP for the inaction.

And "we the people" are no better, as Margolis points out: 

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

Campaign finance reform -- John McCain's other signature issue. No wonder he lost. 

For a shockingly entertaining explanation of the power of global warming, take a look at the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Jerry Meehl talking about climate change...and steroids in baseball.

Short answer: Yes. As with the rapper, Eastwood risks his credibility as an artist by selling out in order to reach the widest possible audience -- but succeeds brilliantly.   

Forty-one years ago Eastwood was Dirty Harry, the character who first and most memorably in modern times raged against the government. To have the face of anti-government rage now appropriate the language of Ronald Reagan's most famous commercial and speak for Detroit and, implicitly, the government effort to save the city, the state, and the industry...well, that's huge. 

8.44 pm. Everything this man says is a lie. He's doubling down on the big lies I tried to counter in that Newsweek piece. The president Romney is describing does not exist. Obama is demonizing and denigrating every sector of the economy? That is a pure lie. As is the repeated lie that Obama is an appeaser. Has Romney understood what has happened to the Iranian economy these past few months? Does he think Osama bin Laden thinks he was appeased?

Let me just say right now: this speech is the most dishonest, manipulative, disgusting series of lies I've heard in a very long time. And its core premise: that the president hates this country, whereas Romney believes in it. As I said: disgusting. I'm with Newt on this. The man will say anything to gain power.

David Corn tweets it simply:

Romney, in short: Obama is the other, other, other, other, other. 

How does the crack Obama campaign handle this? They try to show he's human. First, the president sings (briefly) Al Green, and Green, in the audience, declares that the prez "nailed it." Then, as New York magazine points out, David Axelrod sends out a photo of the Prez, taking good care of his dog. Inside the car. Unlike Romney's famous transportation of the family dog Seamus across New England in a crate on top of the car. (Today it's revealed that when the Romney family finally reached their destination, the Irish setter actually ran away -- all the way to Canada. Understandably.)

By contrast the Obama campaign launches a Facebook 'Bark for Obama" page, featuring loving pet owners and their cute dogs, completely with charming bumper stickers. Build that approval rating.  

Back on the trail, Romney is becoming legendarily awkward. Even right wing hawks and supporters are appalled at the geeky ineptitude of his rhetoric. Jonathan Chait has a theory why:

It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.

Maybe. But Ted Rall's idea is more fun:

In the 2012 Presidential election it will be one other versus another, apparently. 

Newspaper cutbacks are a recurring theme in your novels. How do you see them affecting environmental journalism?

They’re a grave threat, because the first things that tend to go are investigative and explanatory journalists. Everything becomes shorter and more bite-sized. Environmental journalism can be complicated. It’s one of the most important things to do, yet it’s also one of the first things they start hacking at.

Amen. I've managed to place a few longer stories in recent months, but it ain't easy, and only a fool would do it for the money. Good to see a genial man like Hiassen find a way to make it work. 

Irony is that the interview with the journalist bemoaning cuts is too short!

And here's a picture I took, of a young biologist named Chris Kahler, of VC Shorebirds, and his friend and fellow volunteer Walter Fuller, in his beachside office. How Walter explaind his job to me:

“I’m the gatekeeper at one spot, and the property caretaker for the area, and it’s a big property!” he laughs, referring to the roughly two-mile stretch of white sand and dunes between Port Hueneme to the north and the Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu, to the south.

“It’s like I’m taking it on as my responsibility. When I’m out on the beach, I’m watching for injured birds or dead birds; and when the gate’s open I’m watching the parking lot, and if I see any break-ins I notify the appropriate authorities."

Great guys. 

Warm and bright, the valley was spanned by fibrous bows of white cloud, heated masses of air from currentless ovens of chambered and bushy rocks lifted by newborn winds and bourne whole or in fragments about the open gulf of the valley...the richness of the light of these days recalls our best mellow autumns and springs. 

John Muir, January 24-26, 1869    

(via my new Twitter stream, Muirtweets)

(image from an astounding HD video posted today on YosemiteBlog)                                                                                        

Michael Sutton, one of two California state Fish and Game Commissioners at the meeting, called for a consideration of a seasonal closure during spawning season to allow the two species to repopulate. “Fishing spawning aggregations is a really dangerous practice,” he said. “If a seasonal closure would alleviate that, we need to consider that. A seasonal closure would have a significant impact on the industry, but so would a ban of fishing these species for several years.”

No one else at the hearing backed Sutton's idea, as far as I could tell, though it appears to be the idea that most likely to allow the beloved barred sand bass to repopulate. Here's a Fish and Game chart of where the barred sand bass are caught off the SoCal coast: "hotspots" (spawning grounds) in red:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Amazing more people weren't killed. Some of the survivors intend to move away from tornado country, just months after the last visited by record-setting storms, the likes of which destroyed Joplin.

In eastern Alabama, a suspected twister splintered trees and demolished mobile homes at a pair of housing parks near the Auburn University campus. Less than seven months ago, a massive tornado roared past the campus of archrival University of Alabama in the western part of the state. It was the worst bout of weather for the state since about 250 people were killed during the tornado outbreak in April. Both campuses were spared major damage this time.

Jeff Masters: The calendar says it's the coldest month of winter, but today's weather is more typical of March, as a vigorous spring-like storm system has spawned a rare and deadly January tornado outbreak

No small storm system, that -- almost looks to deserve a name. 

Willard Romney lost it. 

Newt Gingrich will deny it, but the South Carolina vote was really a referendum on Romney. He lost it because he is slipping in the area that was previously his one selling point: electability. The Bain mess and his absent tax returns were compounded by the overturning of his “victory” in Iowa. Without the illusion of being unbeatable, there is no reason for conservatives to vote for Romney. Crucially, they told exit pollers that they now believe Newt is more likely to win against Obama than Mitt in November. That’s an illusion, too. But when you hate someone as much as some sections of the Tea Party hate Romney, you don’t see them as they really are. Poor Romney has become, unfairly, a stand in for all the elitism and bad faith of the Republican establishment. He has a tough fight ahead.

What can Romney do? How can he connect with the public? Election experts agree that he remains the best-funded, least offensive, and most-likely-to-succeed candidate for the GOP.

But like Richard Nixon, no one seems to actually like the guy. He needs to show something human that people can latch on to and trust emotionally. Hell, even Richard Nixon had to do that. 

Won't be easy. The joke on Romney is that he's either just boring (SNL) or actually a robot (from Rall, Drum, and others).

The Romneytron 9000 as Kevin Drum put it. 

In the South Carolina debates, Gingrich successfully turned attacks on his character into attacks on the press,  and more importantly, in doing so connected with the audience. They thrilled at his fiery attack on "elites" -- meaning the likes of handsome, well-paid, well-educated, intelligent questioner John King. 

(Curiously, in his looks John King is almost exactly as stolid and Ken-like as Mitt Romney.In a dramatic sense, they are worthy if slow-moving opponents, in an Megatron vs. Optimus Prime sort of way. And as mentioned below, Prime got a terrific shot in on Megatron in the last battle over Megatron's income tax returns.)

Richard Nixon had a somewhat similar problem, when he was running for Governor of California in the early 60's. People just didn't like him. After a bad loss, he lashed out at his famous "last press conference." In true bitterness he said: 

"You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentleman, this is my last press conference." 

In a practised, familiar, move, Newt Gingrich turned his negative into a positive, by blaming the press for his situation. Will Romney try something similar? 

Surely it's too late to play "me too" -- Newt's all but patented that move.

Maybe he'll find a way to tug at the heartstrings, such as Richard Nixon's infamous Checkers speech?

No -- no one can pity the billionaire unable to buy his wife the coat she wants.

Romney has been accused of being Nixonian -- by his neighbors, in fact. According to a story in the New York Review of Books:

When I ask locals about their impressions of Mitt, I get a recurring response: Nixonian. “The overriding passion of his life seems to be to become president,” a conservative economics professor tells me. “I can’t think of a single issue over which Romney would risk reelection in order to stick to a principle.” A University of Massachusetts journalism professor puts it more positively: “He can be as cagey as Nixon, and he can be almost as smarmy, but he is also able to think strategically.”

Romney may be able to think strategically, but can he act strategically?

That appears to be his challenge. Can he pick up the mantle of Reagan -- or at least, Nixon -- and make some sort of emotional connection with the electorate? 

What are the chances? Hasn't managed it yet, near as I can tell.   

Dreamed in the sunbeams, when the sheep were calm, the plan of a hermitage: walls of pure white quartz, doors and windows edged with quartz crystals, windows of thin smooth sheets of water with ruffling apparatus to answer for curtains. The door a slate falke with brown and purple and yellow lichens. And oh, could not I find furniture! My table would be a grooved and shining slab of granite from the bed of the old mountain glaciers, my stool a mossy stump or tree bracket of the big dry, stout kind, and a bed of the spicy boughs of the spruce, etc., ad infinitum. 

John Muir, January 21, 1869 [from John of the Mountains]

[Robinson] Jeffers celebrated the "transhuman magnificence" of nature, the beautiful things both vast and near that can provide even a 21st century reader with solace, even if we are often a muddled, ugly species and even if all things, as they do, fade away. 

Don't often hear poets extolled on the editorial pages of a major newspaper. At the heart of the essay is a quote from a poem written late in Jeffers' life, after he had suffered many grevious losses:

Cokinos writes:

Jeffers goes on, considering what is gone (his beloved wife) and what remains (trees that herons nest in, the material universe as a kind of divinity). He still "can feel the beautiful secret/In places and stars and stones.../I wish that all human creatures might feel it./That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler — as a handful of wildflowers."

The beautiful secret...  

As Romney failed to live up to his father's example, the crowd actually turned against him.  

Romney had to know the question was coming, but could not have expected that King would so artfully juxtapose Mitt's furtive secrecy against his father George Romney's open disclosure. As Andrew Sullivan said -- brilliant. 

Willard got terrible reviews for his evasive answer from across the political spectrum, and now the Washington Post picks up the gauntlet and in an editorial repeats the reporter's question. 

THURSDAY NIGHT’S Republican presidential debate produced more equivocation from former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney about when he would release his tax returns and how many he would release. He was asked by moderator John King if he would follow the standard set by his own father, George, the former Michigan governor who was the first presidential candidate to release his tax returns. He put out 12 years’ worth in November 1967, as he prepared to run for the White House in 1968 — a point also being made in a Democratic National Committee video. All Mr. Romney could muster was an awkward “Maybe.” Wait until April, he said.

More disclosure, sooner, would be better, as is already obvious even to such supporters of Mr. Romney as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

Give King credit for asking a great question (and doing Newt and us all a great favor). And wonder what is in those tax returns that the Mitt-bot is so reluctant to reveal.