Paul Beckwith, thinking WAY outside the box

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP5J3NFUjiw

Saturday Morning Essay: "Pond Scum," a New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz

Such was the title of Ms. Schulz's essay about Henry David Thoreau. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum.

She doesn't like Henry very much.  She threw the whole DSM-V (or whatever Roman numeral they're up to now) at Thoreau in her ill-tempered screed, particularly those chapters on personality disorders. It's the only thing about Thoreau I've ever read that had the word "Kardashians" in it.  Anyway, according to her, Thoreau was "narcissistic," "anti-social," "hypocritical," and a bunch of other things.

I read a rejoinder to Ms. Schulz's essay in a Sierra Club publication, which was much better written and set the record straight, including her scandalous beginning where she took Thoreau's account of a visit to the site of a shipwreck on Cape Cod completely out of context. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-5-september-october/green-life/defense-henry-david-thoreau.  After I read that corrective, I realized what Schulz was doing: she was acting as the literary equivalent, in the case of the Transcendentalists (and Thoreau in particular), as Ann Coulter is to the "Liberals."  It accounts for her inflammatory title, idiotic over-simplifications and adamant refusal to delve beneath the surface to see what Thoreau was actually writing about.  The whole point of her essay was simply to draw attention to herself.

One of her main criticisms of Thoreau is that he occasionally went home to the family residence in Concord to get his laundry done and eat some of his mother's cooking.  I've reported on that here. I realize that for Ms. Schulz this violated one of the rules of "Survivor," which I think is the basis of her analysis of Walden. What Thoreau was doing at the pond, for her, was attempting to see if he could survive out in the woods for 26 months, without exogenous sustenance or assistance.  If he didn't do that, then he should be voted Off The Island.  He cheated.  Plus, he was a "failure," because Walden was not a best-seller in his lifetime.  And nobody reads its turgid prose, she says, and I have to admit it sounded as if she hadn't.

I'm sure Thoreau was something of a prickly and difficult personality.  From what I've read, so was Sir Isaac Newton and a lot of other geniuses.  Kathryn Schulz might have parked her own ego long enough to attempt an understanding of why so many people think Thoreau was great despite his asceticism or indifference to New York cocktail parties (another of her criticisms - Thoreau didn't drink).  A lot of it had to do with his willingness to "throw away" his brief life on the development of a philosophy that ran counter to the prevailing ethos of the Industrial Revolution. That's what Walden is actually about.  If you simplify life to the point where you meet the base requirements of maintaing "vital heat," what other things do you need to add to life in order to achieve a satisfying existence, and which things (when you keep adding) result in diminishing returns?  That's pretty interesting as an experiment, don't you think? To figure it out, maybe you have to be a little "narcissistic" and "self-involved" for a while.  Why does that matter at all?  What does that really have to do with the Kardashians?

He could have been, I guess, a successful academic or maybe a hack who cranked out dumb shit for the New Yorker of his own time.  But then America would have been deprived of one of its most interesting and original philosophers.  One could similarly argue that John Lennon would probably have made a pretty clever barrister, but then he wouldn't have written "In My Life," and the English bar association would have been only marginally better.

The essay is easily forgettable and apparently it did not serve Schulz's purpose of drawing a lot of attention to herself, despite her somewhat frenzied and dishonest efforts.  The net effect for me is that the New Yorker, in allowing such a terrible misrepresentation to be published between its covers, has fallen greatly in my estimation.  To compete against the rising tsunami of internet writing, the New Yorker now hires shock-jock writers and gives them free rein to publish unedited nonsense.  In her own ironic way, Kathryn Schulz has reaffirmed the importance of classic thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and the value of real integrity.

Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent Made Glorious Summer

Encouraging news from the City of Light with the conclusion of the COP21 talks and the commitment of 120 nations to action on global warming. Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute is very optimistic about the effect of this accord, which seeks a worldwide limit of 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial baselines for global average temperatures, and the goal of gradually phasing out the use of all fossil fuels. Paul Krugman in his column today believes there is now hope for the salvation of civilization, but notes two obstacles:

Until very recently there were two huge roadblocks in the way of any kind of global deal on climate: China’s soaring consumption of coal, and the implacable opposition of America’s Republican Party. The first seemed to mean that global greenhouse emissions would rise inexorably no matter what wealthy countries did, while the second meant that the biggest of those wealthy countries was unable to make credible promises, and hence unable to lead.

Krugman never misses a chance to ding either of these favorite nemeses of his (China and the Republicans), although in the case of China, Krugman's peculiar singling out of coal as a culprit has always seemed a little off.   "Coal" is not a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.  It's a dirty pollutant, but we should not forget that China has 1.2 billion people and is responsible for 26% of all GG emissions, whereas the United States has 300 million people (5% of the world's population) yet manages to belch out 16% of all emissions.  I think this is part of Krugman's idiosyncratic belief that the solution to global warming is to eliminate all use of coal and "reduce somewhat" other fossil fuels. I'm not sure, as I've said before, where he got this formulation, although I suspect that he wonders how well his career (or legacy, at this point) as a Keynesian "growth" economist will do in an age of steady-state economics.

As to the second hurdle, the Idiot Caucus in the U.S. Congress, we may as well face it: nothing is going to change that, and "executive action" will never be enough. The "leadership gap" that Krugman laments is part of a New York Times conceit about the "indispensability" of American leadership in, well, everything.  That is a hoary and out-of-date viewpoint. The United States is a huge problem and should be one of the leaders, but it's increasingly obvious the world can handle the crisis with America as the Great Workaround.  

The European Union, with roughly the same population as the United States, emits 10% of global GG emissions.  Americans have a lower standard of living than the Germans but use twice as much energy per capita.  China is aggressively moving forward with alternative energy, and it's obvious that China, Israel and Germany will dominate the field of alternative energy while the USA continues to debate whether there is a problem, which is not surprising since we have a Congress where well over half the members disagree with basic empirical science on fundamental subjects like evolution.  The world has probably never seen such a thing since the days of Galileo.  I think it's a serious possibility that the Republican majorities in both houses mostly do not believe that the sun is at the center of our solar system.

 Despite the feeble-mindedness at the level of American federal government, our saving grace is that U.S. GG emissions have flatlined because we're broke. Gasoline usage continues to decline despite radically lower prices.  I think this is because about 100 million Americans who should be working are not working because there's nothing to do.  If you don't have a job to drive to, and no car even if you had the job, the "miles per capita" stat works in your favor.  In turn, I think the miserable state of our economy owes to the same stupidity that leads to the composition of the Congress, so the two tend to reinforce each other in a virtuous feedback loop.  By remaining stupid and too broke to drive, Americans can make their contribution to solving the dire problem of climate change, and the U.S. percentage of emissions will continue to fall.  Fighting foreign wars for no reason, for example, spends a lot of money and is energy-intensive for the military overseas, but does not translate into higher energy use by the people back home, where most of us are.  In fact, by wasting all that money that would otherwise be invested, for example, in building a new economy based on alternative energy (as Germany has done), America doubles down on its stupid economy and guarantees that we will not have the wherewithal to contribute much to GG emissions.

Thus, I agree with the Republican position that Obama should not have sent a delegation to Paris. We would have saved the marginal contribution to GG emission from flying Kerry & Co. over there, and the educated people in the world would not have had to tiptoe around the dumbest people in the room.  The biggest complaint from the Republicans was that Obama should have been concentrating on the "terrorist" problem, such as stopping the San Bernadino attack that had already happened, rather than wasting resources on an environmental problem that is not real from the U.S. point of view. Keeping our focus on "terrorism," even if we mostly exacerbate the problem by fighting unnecessary wars in the Middle East in the first place, maintains a steady flow of the national treasury to the military industrial complex, which, one must admit, is a bipartisan beneficiary of our political system, and it will be no different under Hillary.

Yet all in all, there is reason to rejoice in this holiday season. The world will move forward without us (as it has been doing for some time, in point of fact) and Americans at the individual or state level (California, for example, is very progressive on issues of climate change, such as AB 32) can do their part to join in with those in the international community who possess the intellectual capacity, and the good faith, to deal with the problem.  

Over at Fielding's Place

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

Check in with Fielding Mellish over at the other place

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

Arctic Sea Ice and Weird Weather

http://www.jennyross.com/documents/JERoss-ArcticSeaIce-OceanGeographic-201410-LowRes.pdf

Tip o' the hat to the good and great Stefan Rahmstorf.

A few notes from Mellish on 9-11 Truther

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

Happy New Year.

A Reply from Professor Oscar Pemantle

A few months ago I wrote a post on this site describing, among other things, a class I had taken from Professor Oscar Pemantle at Berkeley in the fall of 1966, and in particular Mr. Pemantle's "summary" lecture on Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground, a book which remains, I could say, a touchstone of my own philosophical development.  I took a few liberties in my description of Mr. Pemantle's flamboyant presentation without also pointing out that Professor Pemantle was a marvelous teacher and my first true introduction to the Socratic method, which he employed to  superb effect.  It took a lot of energy, patience and time to do a class the way he did, to draw the discussion of general, fumbling impressions toward finer elucidation.  The class was always packed, and I can't remember ever missing a single session.  I certainly never missed one of the summary lectures and learned that you had to get there early to ensure a seat.

One testament to the lasting effect Mr. Pemantle's class had on my intellectual development is that I can remember the books we studied, nearly 50 years later, and can remember many of the points Oscar drew from the syllabus.  The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus taught us that the search for meaning in life was ultimately futile (but make the most of that realization); Notes From the Underground, where Fyodor hilariously brought home the idea that the "man of action," the ambitious actor we are all encouraged to be, is fundamentally confused and "limited" in his understanding of what life is really about (I think that perhaps Oscar was right after all - it's about love, not accomplishments, which are the "soothing walls" we rush to crash against).  And Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, where the Viennese master told us that we don't really think what we think we think, so we better think it through again.

Speech 1, Fall 1966, Berkeley, California, Oscar Pemantle presiding. One of the many class rooms that ringed the auditorium in the massive, old and gray Wheeler Hall.  A good place to learn in those days long ago when Berkeley was in ferment and agitation.  It's what education should really aspire to be. 

It does not surprise me that Professor Pemantle devoted his life to pedagogical excellence, as his kind letter demonstrates.  As with all of us who were up, about and doing in 1966, and still here to talk about it, the years have taken their toll on his health, as his letter suggests and which I will not elaborate upon, because it his vital force in pursuing his passions which is most interesting and most gratifying to hear about. It's also clear that this kind and gracious man was at all times himself actuated by love, for teaching and for those he taught.

******************************

Dear Mr. Willis,

 

    A friend of mine just read your interesting article to me on my class in Berkeley, my evening lecture on Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, and the nature and form of my teaching.  It was a very interesting article displaying a vivid and perfectly accurate account of the class and my view of teaching. You might wish to know what happened since those good old days.

    On leaving the University and the Department of Speech, I turned to education and its relation to the alienated political culture so well described by Dostoyevsky, Max Weber, Lukacs, and others. Reform on the level of the University was closed. So I decided to begin from the other end with reform from the ground up. I formed a nonprofit corporation called Black Pine Circle and began with a modest program called "The Arts and Sciences Workshops" offering Socratic teaching to young kids from the ages of five or six on up to eight or ten. The unexpected success of this program which I conducted for two years prompted me to found a school called BPC Day School which I organized and directed for the next twenty years. Sometime around 1994, I was hit by a car breaking my leg in four or five places and requiring some major surgery. I was forced to leave the school and took a couple of years to recuperate and get on my feet again. So, when I was fully recovered I formed another nonprofit corporation, The Institute for Active Learning, and began a program of professional education and teacher training for our public schools in the Sonoma-San Francisco region. And, sometime later I developed an outreach program across the border in Mexico, with plans for an event in Cuba perhaps in April of next year.

    The work we have done in California can be seen by visiting our website, www.instituteforactivelearning.org .  And the work we are doing in Mexico can be viewed from our website, Centro Culiacan, Centro Mazatlan, and Centro Guadalajara.  I am also enclosing an interview conducted electronically by Ricardo Tapia, a reporter for Crucial, a well-known magazine in Sinaloa. On the more theoretical or scholarly side, I am presently completing a set of six articles challenging the dominant academic orthodoxy.  They are presently being translated into Spanish and Portuguese for publication in Mexico and South America (including Brazil), Spain and Portugal, and of course Britain and the United States. Below is a copy of the list, later to be published as a small book called Contrasting Arguments: The Debate on American Education.

 

Well, that's all the news for right now, and good luck with your interesting blog.

Cordially,

Oscar Pemantle

Over at Fielding Mellish Observations

My neurotic, New York, Jewish, intellectual, atheistic alter ego weighs in on being American.

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

Politically Incorrect observations at Fielding's Place

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

A few Bananas over at Fielding's place

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

See further observations

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

Over at Fielding's place, a new post is up.

A New Idea

Try this out.  It might be fun.

The Further Observations of Fielding Mellish.

http://fieldingmellishobservations.blogspot.com/

A Note on the Pleasures and Difficulties of Blogging

I was unacquainted with what "writer's block" meant until I got into the regular habit of blogging. One way I might describe it is this: if you're in any line of work where you have to talk or explain things at length on a regular basis (law, teaching, sales, maybe leading a revolution or running for office), you've probably encountered that problem where you get sick of your own voice. You just can't stand to hear yourself say another thing.  It becomes a physical revulsion. 

I think it's because most of us who operate on a reasonably elevated intellectual plane have a certain way of phrasing and packaging our inner thought patterns into words.  We call that "writing style." It's an elusive concept, but it's real.  Style arises from your experiences and your influences, and while it  can evolve over time (usually from complexity toward greater simplicity, as you come to terms with the truism that hiding a banal idea in grandiose prose doesn't really get you anywhere), you're pretty much stuck with the way you write, after a certain amount of practice at it.  Such as regular or semi-regular blogging. 

I've never been completely clear, even with myself, what this blog is supposed to be about. I began it eight years ago with the very naive assumption it could make some sort of difference.  It does not and it cannot.  I will say this for that realization: it's at least learning something.  Part of the phenomenon of uselessness is the sheer volume of writing available in the Internet age.  There was a time, not so long ago, when we left writing to the journalists.  They established reputations by moving up the ladder of major newspapers and winning the trust and respect of the general reading public.  Some of them were very fine writers, and some were complete hacks.  If you blog yourself about some of the same things as the current events writers write about, you become more attuned to and discerning about this dichotomy.  In general, I would say that the writers who made their reputations through the blogging channel (such as Glenn Greenwald, for example) write every bit as well as the bona fide journos such as Tom Friedman, although that's a poor example because Friedman is such a crummy writer. With his penchant for travel, he really would have been better off doing something like selling time-shares.

The Internet destroyed major newspapers of course, and with their destruction we also wrecked the idea of investigative journalism, which requires time and an operating budget. So instead of that, we've moved to a system of "access journalism," where the journos capitalize on their close relationships with power brokers in politics and the world of high finance  (our two power centers).  Thus, the so-called "adversarial press" needed to become buddies and co-celebrities with the very people they're supposed to be "covering."  This was the only operating space left, however.  The world of current events writing is absolutely inundated with amateur writers who, as noted, frequently write as entertainingly as the pros.  Sometimes the amateur writers are actually pros in another and useful field, such as Glenn Greenwald's background as a constitutional lawyer, which means his writing is informed, whereas Tom Friedman's background is in writing with no substantive, structured expertise whatsoever.  To compete in this maelstrom, the pros have to sell their access, and to keep their access the pros have to become the buddies of their sources.

In such a culture, propaganda thrives, which is why utterly insane courses of action, such as almost the entirety of U.S. foreign policy, or to allow planet Earth to become uninhabitable through climate change while we wage war to defend our access to oil, can be treated with a stupefying respect and gravity by the mainstream media.  If it strikes you as nuts that the United States would be firing up another war in Syria, for reasons no one can figure out, or doing everything it can to engender bad relations with Russia, it isn't that you're crazy.  You are simply holding things together in your mind calmly and seeing the picture whole.  You are not trusting the organs of information in the MSM because you have come to realize that they are, almost to a man and woman, completely corrupt and mendacious.

So that's really why I blog.  It's personal.  I do it as an act of mental hygiene.  I do find that by wrestling intellectually with current events I work through them in a way different from that employed by more casual observers.  Writing about something "captures" it in your mind and organizes your thought processes.  It lets you see where you've been and probably where you're going.  It's the "diary of ideas" that George Orwell recommended.

Sunday Morning Sermon: We've Always Been at War with Mideastasia

Brought to you by Peet's Garuda blend...

The text for this morning's homily is furnished by Andrew Levine, who frequently writes amusingly and disparagingly about the incumbent President:

Now that Barack Obama the dove has metamorphized into Barack Obama the hawk, the President and his people are more than usually in over their heads.  It isn’t just that their past and present enemies in Iraq and Syria – Iran and the Assad government – are now also their de facto allies; or that those “Syrian moderates,” who haven’t exactly panned out in past iterations of American meddling, are now, again, their great Islamic hope. They are so confused by the situation they helped bring about that, at first, they couldn’t even decide what to call their enemy.  Nor could they figure out whether to call this latest phase of the Bush-Obama perpetual Middle Eastern war a “war” or something that public opinion might find more congenial.

Yes, that sounds about right. I was, as always, utterly bewildered by last week's prime time speech by Mr. Obama, where he informed the American public that we were going to bomb ISIL or ISIS or IS or the Islamic Bad Guys or whomever.  And if we have to, we'll bomb them in Syria (heh heh), because these terrorists, you see, they can run but they can't hide. This last bit was a more or less conscious repetition of Bush's old "smoke 'em out of their holes and get 'em running," but then Bush would finish with "and bring 'em to justice."  How far we've come.  Justice is now meted out by the Drones themselves, thus freeing up valuable docket time in the American court system. Also, not incidentally, we now have the "casus belli" for conducting overt war operations in Syria, which we abjured last year because Vladimir Putin came up with the preemptory tactic of convincing the despotic Bashir Assad to dispose of his chemical weapons, the ones we were going to use as an excuse to topple him which we wanted to do because he's friends with Putin, and as you know, we don't like Putin anymore.  Anyway, if we can get the right stooge in power in Syria then that Arab natural gas pipeline through Syria can be under our control and we can pry Putin's death grip loose from Europe's gas meters. 

Does any of this sound like it could really work? You see what Mr. Levine means about the Obama Administration exceeding its competence.  We need to "destroy and degrade" ISIS/ISIL so that it doesn't threaten the Iraqi government which we just installed to replace the failed replacement government of the prior-installed Ungrateful Nouri al-Maliki, who was moved in to take over from Saddam Hussein, whom we toppled for as yet unspecified reasons.  Destroying and degrading ISIS/ISIL will probably breathe second life into the despotic reign of Assad in Syria, since ISIL is also his enemy, but that's okay for now, because we'll get around to toppling Assad in due time and replace him with a group of new religious fanatics, although the question arises: can that be done without boots on the ground, the very boots that Mr. Obama said emphatically would never touch the bomb-cratered sands of the Levant?

As Mr. Levine notes: are the Syrian "moderates" really a reliable Great Arab Hope?  Do they actually exist in Syria, a country of 22 million people where 9 million are now displaced refugees because of the civil war that's been raging since 2011?  Can anyone be moderate in such a place?

General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sees the possibility of boots on the ground, even if his nominal superior doesn't like the idea.  Suppose, for example, we want to take Mosul back from ISIL?  Can we rely solely on the 250,000 Iraqi troops we spent $25 billion training not so long ago to defeat ISIL, which has nearly 1/8th as many troops?  Of course not.  So as General Dempsey told Climate Change/Reality Denier Senator James Inhofe at a recent hearing (do you see how hopeless this all really is?):

It's good when subordinates set the record straight.  Mr. Obama wasn't being serious, after all.  Of course we're going to use combat troops; did you see those beheading videos?  If that ain't a casus belli, then George Bush ain't a pickup-driving brush-clearer.

Pundits even more cynical than Andrew Levine suggest the real "strategy" is to make the Middle East and all of North Africa into such a chaotic mess that the conditions are somehow more advantageous for American control of its natural resources.  I don't completely follow that; it seems another Rorschach reading of a bumbling Administration that is simply trying to appear tough and militaristic to avoid a Republican takeover of Congress in the fall, which will probably happen anyway because, after all, it's time to change again back to the other system that doesn't work.

Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in a Time of Global Warming

The following is copied from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! Blog (h/t: Dan):

“Unjust laws exist.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” The naturalist and pacifist asked, “Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” His answer was simple: “I say, break the law.”

One hundred and sixty-four years later, on May 15, 2013, Ken Ward Jr. and Jay O’Hara did just that. They navigated a small lobster boat, named “The Henry David T.,” to a point off the Massachusetts coast near the enormous Brayton Point Power Station, a coal-fired power plant built in 1963 that is the largest source of carbon emissions in the region. They dropped anchor and blocked access to the pier, preventing a cargo ship from unloading 40,000 tons of coal. They suspended banners from their boat reading “#CoalIsStupid” and “350,” a reference to the international climate action group 350.org. Three hundred fifty parts per million (ppm) is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists feel is the maximum level that will allow the planet to avoid catastrophic human-induced climate change.

Ward and O’Hara succeeded in blocking the coal shipment. From the boat, they reported themselves to the local police and were later arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard.
O’Hara, a Quaker and a sailmaker on Cape Cod, explained, “We were charged with ... disturbing the peace, conspiracy to disturb the peace, negligent operation of a motor vessel and a failure to act to avoid a collision of a boat.” They faced years in prison.

They decided to mount a “necessity defense,” admitting that they broke the law, but claiming that they did so only to prevent a much greater harm, i.e., the burning of coal that increases global warming. Last Monday, Sept. 8, they finally went to court. Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter offered them a deal. He dropped all criminal charges against them in exchange for a guilty plea to a civil offense and a fine. D.A. Sutter then went a step further — a few steps, actually, to the plaza in front of the courthouse, where he shocked the two defendants and close to 100 of their supporters with a short speech:

“The decision [we] reached today ... certainly took into consideration the cost to the taxpayers in Somerset, but was made with our concern for their children, the children of Bristol County and beyond, in mind. Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced. In my humble opinion, the political leadership on this issue has been gravely lacking ... we were able to reach an agreement that symbolizes our commitment at the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office to take a leadership role on this issue.”

Sutter’s incredible demonstration of political leadership is timely, indeed. This week, the World Meteorological Organization released its latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, packed with dire statistics about the accelerating threat of climate change. “The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high in 2013,” the WMO reported, with current concentration of carbon dioxide at 396 ppm. The WMO also warned, ominously, “The current rate of ocean acidification appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years.” Defendant Ken Ward, a former deputy director of Greenpeace USA, noting the urgency he feels for the climate, told me, “We should ... be taking emergency actions everywhere we can. And the very first emergency action is to stop burning coal.”

Henry David Thoreau is best known for his book “Walden,” in which he describes the year he spent living in a cabin he built on Walden Pond, near Concord, Mass. Thoreau opposed the 1847 U.S. invasion of Mexico. He was a staunch opponent of slavery. To protest these violent policies, he decided he would not pay taxes. When he was jailed for his protest, he was visited by his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is said that when Emerson asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there,” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience was one of the first modern articulations of the resistance tactic of nonviolent noncooperation. His words and actions have inspired millions, among them Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

The People’s Climate March will happen in New York City on Sunday, Sept. 21. Organizers expect it to be the largest march for the climate in history. The march’s slogan: “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.” Sam Sutter says he’ll be there, as will the two activists he prosecuted. I asked the district attorney and the defendants if they would be marching together. They all smiled. Prosecutor Sutter said, “It’s certainly possible.” Jay O’Hara concurred, “Sounds like a plan.”

Sunday Morning Essay: The Oligarchy Strikes Back

Now that I have my tin foil hat correctly oriented to pick up elusive frequencies, I'm back in business. We have ousted the despised (although once favored and even celebrated) Nuri al-Maliki from his position as Prime Minister of the "democracy" in Iraq for the grave, although completely understandable, sin of outfoxing our "special" President, George W. Bush.

To recap the clever manipulations of The Ungrateful Nuri:  GWB the Younger, as you'll recall, took us into war in Iraq on false pretenses.  The war was, first, last and always about one thing and one thing only: access to Iraq's huge oil reserves.  We want 'em, Iraq's got 'em.  The Iraqis are a simple, backward, Third World people who don't need that oil like we do.  It's only fair.  Yet as the Iraq war turned into an utter disaster, even GWB started feeling remorseful about what he'd done, and in an impulsive moment he agreed with Maliki, whom we had installed as our preferred Piece of Shiite, to withdraw ALL American combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. As the Great Schnozz would say, what a revoltin' development that was.  Nuri stuck to his guns, and pulled his hole card on Obama when negotiations over a new SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) broke down because Nuri refused to grant the customary immunity from local prosecution to American GI's, who are in turn accustomed to running wild when stationed abroad (just ask the local Japanese in Okinawa).

This was tantamount to admitting that we'd brought about the deaths of one million Iraqis for nothing, not to mention our own casualties and one trillion bucks down the drain. The ruling Oligarchs must have wondered: what's the use of controlling politics in America if this is the kind of thing they're going to pull?  And where's my fricking oil?

Fortunately, history smiled upon us.  Thanks to our feckless meddling in Syria where, for a while at least, we talked as if we wanted that numbnuts Bashir al-Assad (I do not understand why all these Arabs have the middle name "Al") out of power, we supplied, in the style of the great Milo Minderbinder, 1st Lieutenant and Chief Mess Officer, Catch-22, money and war materiel to our mortal enemies, al-Qaeda, which in due course found its way to the "folks" (Obama's, as with Bush, favorite group descriptor) at ISIS, the New Caliphate people who are anxious to take the Arab world all the way back to the 7th century, instead of mucking about in the 12th century, or however far they've gotten.

God, who watches over fools and drunks, then sent ISIS on a rampage across the Sykes-Picot Imaginary Boundary between Syria and Iraq, where the ISIS folks began a program of crucifying, beheading, raping and in general causing great mayhem wherever their travels took them.  It also spooked the "democratic" leadership of Iraq in Baghdad, including the Ungrateful Nuri, who began to wonder whether that clever ploy where he refused American GI's immunity from the mullahs was such a brainy idea after all, especially when the Ungrateful One, on awakening in the increasingly heavily fortified Green Zone every morning, would first check to see whether his head was still attached to his body.  ISIS, meanwhile, would take a break from crucifying and decapitating to seize oil fields and Iraq's largest dam and reservoir.  Finally, they were preparing to storm Baghdad itself.

The Oligarchy's front man, President Obama, kept his cool during these developments and let ISIS have its way, promising American military assistance so long as certain "modifications" were made in Iraq's democratically-elected government (the one Obama had bragged about in Brussels not too long ago, you'll recall, when he pointed out the difference between the American incursion into Iraq, where we brought Jeffersonian ideals to our Arab friends, and the evil Putin, who instigated a completely illegal plebiscite in Crimea).  But I digress.  Obama maintained his disinteresed aplomb just long enough for Nuri to see the better part of wisdom and step down, as democratically-elected American puppets are supposed to do.  We then began bombing the shiite out of ISIS and talk resumed about returning "some" ground troops to Iraq, where the monster military bases we've already built there are waiting to fill up again with oil field security guards.  We could bomb ISIS back to the Stone Age, but, of course, they never really left.

So there you have it.  The U.S. will defeat ISIS, a ragtag group of barbarians completely dependent on our weapons and fighting vehicles, with one hand of Obama's wrapped around a 5-iron at Martha's Vineyard.  We may have to join forces with Assad, whom we hated last year and were about to bomb till Putin got in the way, in bombing the enemies of Assad, namely, ISIS and the al-Qaeda affiliates we were arming and assisting in their anti-Assad revolution.

As Milo Minderbinder would say, it's all for the Syndicate and everyone gets a share.

Saturday Morning Essay: Sublimation Time and the Livin's Too Easy

Brought to you by Peet's & Its Exploitation of Juan Valdez...

I am not necessarily claiming that this is an apothegm worthy of Heraclitus, that amazing Greek sage who gave us "character is destiny."  Yet still...after reading, again, Civilization & Its Discontents, that masterpiece written by the guy I consider the first Jewish standup comedian, the dour Sigmund Freud, laugh-a-minute chain cigar smoker, I think I may be on to something.

Civilization condemns us to a lifelong, low-grade dissatisfaction with our existence.  That is because civilization, in the final analysis, is a boring tradeoff between existential security and the forfeited instinctual drives, which were and always will be the only possible sources of true joy and ecstasy.  As Sigmund said, the attempt to satisfy the primordial urge with a sublimated, ersatz replacement, will never be the same as the "real thing." 

Thus, during an online chess game with my old neighborhood buddy, we were congratulating ourselves on the "wisdom" of older age, and it occurred to me: of course, we have never learned a single thing.  If we avoid some of the "problems" caused by the greater hormonal and energetic flux that drove us in the years that are gone...it is simply and only because we're now too tired to get into the same kind of trouble. 

And that, of course, is nothing to crow about.

Sunday Morning Essay: Meme Along With Me

One highly regrettable aspect of the rise of the Internet and social media in particular is the "participation" of the general public via Twitter, Facebook, e-zines, comment threads and the virtual world in general in every criminal case that possesses the right meme-worthiness to sustain itself for the 3 or 4 day attention span (liberally speaking) of the American populace.  One such story, following along lines similar to the Trayvon Martin case, was the very recent shooting in Ferguson, Missouri of one Michael Brown by a police officer named Darren Wilson.

The MSM had everything they needed to generate a Tweetapalooza with this one.  The clean-cut young African-American on his way to college gunned down in the street by a brutal, "militarized" police.  Another young life destroyed by out-of-control cops.  The Huffington Post poured it on, cable news had a field day, the streets of Ferguson erupted in violent demonstrations (along with opportunistic looting and general vandalism).  It was Watts and Rodney King all rolled into one.

I feel obliged to observe that the problem of police brutality and militarization of local police seem like very real problems.  They are what you might call broad social issues which have everything to do, no doubt, with the USA's bad habit of fighting wars nonstop in Muslim lands for no discernible reason and to no apparent advantage.  This has been going on now for 13 years.  Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have served in miserable theaters of war where death can come at a moment's notice from innocent-looking locals.

It would appear that the military-industrial complex just can't help itself.  Among other problems, such as national bankruptcy, this Sparta-like approach to foreign policy tends to produce vast numbers of ex-soldiers who are understandably on hair trigger after spending years expecting the citizens on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul to suddenly blow themselves up or pull out a concealed weapon and open fire. These soldiers come back to a lousy jobs market, but they are expertly trained in patrolling the streets in a certain way, and law enforcement seems like a natural continuation of their previous work.  And the Pentagon has even been thoughtful enough to furnish the local cops with the same kind of up-armored, humongous hardware, such as MRAPs and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, that these guys already know how to use.

Chalmers Johnson told us it would come to this a long time ago, but of course he was "radical." Maybe not so much.

So the Michael Brown story was perfect for dealing with the "militarization" of the police and police brutality in general.  Eric Holder, who is apparently still the U.S. Attorney General, aroused himself from his customary comatose state to say something.  President Obama took a break from the 4th tee in Martha's Vineyard to weigh in.  This was the issue du jour: what are we going to do about these militarized police and police brutality?  Well, Mr. Obama is the Commander in Chief, and Eric Holder is some kind of top lawyer, apparently, so one idea would be: how about the Pentagon stops furnishing the local Mayberry gendarmes with all this Army surplus?  Just a thought.

But solutions aren't really the idea when the Tweets are screaming at the 140 decibel range and the Facebook pages are erupting, and Arianna Huffington, the Zsa Zsa Gabor of serious political pundits, has gotten hold of something that even distracts her from "Gaza" for a couple of beats so she can run 50 point red fonts in her headlines:  "FERGUSON!"

It was all perfect.  Then the local police chief, the (always-described-as) "embattled" Thomas Jackson, releases a convenience store surveillance video of Michael Brown on the very same day Jackson identifies the police officer involved.  The video was taken a few minutes before Michael Brown was fatally shot:

I saw the police chief being interviewed yesterday.  In a moment of unintentional hilarity in this sad and tragic episode, the chief was grilled and subjected to hostile cross-examination by a suddenly aroused press corps (some of them from big national outlets) on his highly questionable decision to release the video without being able to prove that the cop in question had known about this "strong arm robbery" at the time of the shooting.  Chief Jackson seemed pretty calm and collected about the whole thing. He offered the somewhat lame reason that the video had been the subject of many FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, and he knew he had to release it eventually.  So he did it now. The chief did not make much of an effort to prove the shooter cop knew about the robbery; the apprehension of Michael Brown was because Brown was walking down the middle of the street and did not cooperate with Wilson.

When you think about it for a moment, though, it's pretty extraordinary that such a surveillance video should exist of an event that happened within moments of the fatal police-citizen altercation, and to conclude, as the MSA are anxious to conclude, that there is no connection between a strong-arm robbery in which the decedent was the perp (and this is the correct legal definition of the heist Brown pulled off - it was larceny accomplished by force, ergo, robbery) and what happened a few minutes later.  But the real problem for the MSM and the Big Meme Machine in general is that this video makes Michael Brown look pretty damn bad.

There's just no getting around it.  In the longer versions of the video (taken from different perspectives) Brown takes his time pawing through cigars (as if he owned the place, you might say), loads up on a lot of smokes, and then insouciantly strolls toward the front door.  The proprietor, a diminutive Asian, attempts to restrain Michael Brown.  Brown, who was 6'-4" tall and over 200 pounds, uses his left arm to shove the owner away with considerable force.  And then when the owner has the temerity to come toward Brown again, the felonious Mr. Brown "rises up" over him in a display of dominance and intimidation, then turns and walks out the door.

This short film has a lot of meme-killing elements.  Number one, Michael Brown comes off as a thug and a bully.  Second, the diminutive Asian is just all wrong for his part; after all, he's another minority and Michael Brown is oppressing him, which is something our clean-cut and college-bound victim/hero should not be doing if this story line is going to work.

So naturally the media gave Chief Jackson the business.  How dare he release this video!  Naturally, there were instantaneous allegations that the chief was just trying to "smear" Michael Brown, but let's face it: Michael Brown, the star of the video, does a pretty good job of that all on his own.

Was Michael Brown gunned down in cold blood by an out-of-control police officer in broad daylight for no good reason?  I don't think we know the answer to that question yet. I found a very long and in-depth analysis in the Washington Post which made that point.  The only real eyewitness is Michael Brown's friend and accomplice in the convenience store robbery.

The problem for the Meme Machine in an encounter like this is that it's anecdotal and full of idiosyncratic factual circumstances  The media do not like this.  Michael Brown needs to be a college-bound nice kid, not a thug shoving a little Asian around in the Asian's own convenience store.  Darren Wilson, the cop, needs to be a cold-eyed killer who shot Michael Brown "execution style" not a cop on the beat who was perhaps himself subjected to Brown's brutality and sociopathic behavior. There are parts to be played here, dammit.

Zsa Zsa Huffington loves the phrase "cannot be unseen" when she runs photos of weird things on her screed-zine.  This is the problem for the MSM and the Meme Machine generally: the video of Michael Brown cannot be unseen.  It's unthinkable that the video wasn't going to surface in the near future.  It's clueless and disingenuous to claim that it's "irrelevant."  It's a reminder that these sad incidents always involve very specific facts, that the protagonists are not actually acting out assigned roles in some greater "social drama," but just going about their lives.  Maybe someday we'll find out what really happened, and long after the one or two elements of the original story that were used to build a national controversy have faded into obscurity in favor of the next outrage.

Saturday Morning Essay: Where there is no solution, there is no problem

Brought to you by Peet's nuclear fusion strength dark roast...

An old friend from the neighborhood called yesterday afternoon, out of the blue, a fellow I hadn't talked to for years.  Because of the office and the requirements of a guild I belong to (the State Bar), I'm one of those increasingly rare people with a listed land line.  So you can always find me.  Ready or not, here you come.  Anyway, an interesting conversation ensued.  This guy (a little younger than your bloggerspondent), has always somewhat overrated my, what would you call it?, my insightfulness, but I had a tendency to do that myself with certain key people in my life, and not much harm comes of it.

We talked for about an hour.  This conversation followed on the heels of an e-mail I received recently from another friend with a "life calculator" attached that allowed you to figure out certain things about yourself based on your date of birth.  For example, I had never thought of this but I was conceived in 1947, with a guesstimate of the actual night of sperm-meets-ovum of May 25, 1947. I realize that what they're doing here is assuming a couple of things, that human gestation is 280 days from commencement of last menstruation to birth, and ovulation on the 14th day, and normal full term.  Recent research, I discovered after googling around a little, indicates that "normal term" varies a lot, and tends to get longer as mothers get older.  My mom was 30 when I was born.

But May 25, 1947 is okay.  The event of most note of that day (besides the parents' get-together on a balmy spring evening in upstate Alabama) was a coal dust explosion in New Mexico's Centralia mine which killed 111 miners.  Also, Karen Valentine was born May 25, 1947.  Two of my best friends from Berkeley days were born in 1947, one in April and one in July (as you may have gathered from a recent post).  With respect to April, of course, there was no overlap, but as to July it's interesting to consider that I was a work in progress even as he emerged to view the stars (cf. Dante).  But a birth on July 12, 1947, of course, implies coital origins in the latter part of 1946.

We've all been around, in other words, somewhat longer than perhaps we commonly think.  Whether you want to date yourself from the gleam in your father's eye or the water slide event itself 266 days later (thereabouts),  a fantastic amount has changed during the lifetimes of my contemporaries.  Consider that when I was born, there were 131 million people in the United States. I read yesterday that Lagos, Nigeria has a problem with the ebola virus and the CDC is worried about contagion because 21 million people live in Lagos, and the country has a population of 170 million, which is to say, many more people than the United States on the day I was born.

The old friend and I talked about the coming inundation of the old neighborhood where we grew up, which is constructed on bay fill.  The guess is that in 40 to 50 years, it will be under about 5 feet of water.  Well, San Francisco Bay is only about two-thirds the size it once enjoyed in pre-industrial times and I guess it's going to reclaim its former extent and glory.  I imagine the steeple of old St. Timothy's church, where so many of my neighborhood friends used to attend catechism, will still be visible above the dark waters of the Bay as it rises, so I will use that as an excuse to add Debussy's piano piece about an engulfed cathedral of legend, which was always one of my favorites of Debussy's strange creations.

The power of exponents.  I sometimes wish I had paid more attention to algebra and those silly graph functions we used to draw.  You know, parabolas and stuff.  That's the story of everything now.