You'll learn how we went from being people who bought what we needed to being people who buy (or want to buy) what we have been manipulated into desiring.
We were sold among other things; the myth of unlimited consumption, endless wars, dishonest politicians, trickle-down economics, the benevolence of corporations and...whatever else the elite who shape public opinion want us to buy.
We were taught the supremacy of the individual and the glory of greed so we would compete with each other rather than listening to our natural instincts to help each other. Why?
Partly because it's good for business to have all these "individual" consumers. More broadly it's because those that have power are not giving it up without a fight. Those who benefit most from the entrenched power-structure couldn't win a fair fight because they are outnumbered 99 to 1. The powerful have to divide the majority to maintain the status-quo that they have spent decades erecting using the best propaganda, malleable politicians and corrupt judges money can buy.
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There's another force at work which comes out of the radicalism of the sixties and early seventies. The people wanting change in that era realized they could not change the power structure so they retreated to self-actualization. This results in all kinds of gurus, cults, cult-like stuff, new-agey things like bio-feedback, EST, Rolfing - millions of self-improvement books, and to the delight of corporations massively increased consumption as each individual "buys" his or her individuality.
With all that going on the neo-liberals Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are elected by a weird coalition of ex-hippies, trusting individuals, and corporations and we're off to the races. Government, unions, taxes on the rich and lazy poor people are the enemies in the Reagan/Thatcher world. Forty years later finds the U.S. lagging almost every economically developed nation in serving the needs of the majority of citizens. So maybe time to try something else...
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It's super interesting (or maybe super frightening depending on your outlook) to think about how crude, but effective - public relations, propaganda, and advertising were prior to the appearance of digital devices and data mining.
The Delphic maxim Know Thyself has never been more crucial for anyone desiring freedom. It's a personal choice - either let others decide for you in an authoritarian world, assume you've made a decision using your rational will as most of us do in today's society, or take the road less traveled and dare to be free.
Because the richest country in the world decided about 40 years ago that government would focus the country's wealth on further enriching the wealthy and further empowering the powerful.
Everyone was supposed to be better off according to the psuedo-science/propaganda of - the trickle down theory, voodoo economics and or the Laffer curve. That was a fantastic lie and a fantastic failure - but not so much so that people aren't convinced to keep falling for it (over and over).
The next time you hear some Republican (or Democrat) pledge not to raise taxes - understand what they really mean,
"Lets keep cutting taxes on the wealthy and raising taxes and fees for the middle class." That way the middle class will be angry because they are paying a lot in taxes and fees but not seeing any benefit because their taxes are used for corporate and other forms of rich-person welfare.
You can come up with some alternate explanation but I'd read the book by Pierson and Hacker before you spend too much time doing your own research or listening to what some talking head on TV or the radio, with a vested interest, wants you to believe.
A defect of liberalism is the belief that all disagreements among people can be worked out through increased knowledge, debate and discussion.
We teach our children this. Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies.
Some would postulate that this point of view is a means to keep an oppressed class of people from overthrowing their oppressors. Others would point to Jesus overthrowing the money-changers tables in the temple to show that he wasn't teaching people passive acceptance of the status-quo.
Adam Gopnik makes this statement about J.S. Mill, an important figure in the development of liberalism -
Mill’s theory of freedom does make an unwarranted assumption—that people want a rich life where knowledge increases, new discoveries are made, and new ideas found, where art flourishes and science advances. If you don’t want that kind of society, you don’t want liberty, in Mill’s sense. Part of what makes him as touching as he is great is that it scarcely occurred to him that anyone would not.
Compare a liberal thinker like Mill with a fascist conservative thinker like Carl Schmitt and you'll begin to understand why liberalism is not in itself a vehicle for significant political change and why the far right ("conservative") ideology of fascism has resulted in drastic political change. Some "conservatives", some white-evangelical leaders, fascists, and the far-right understand that this is a battle between friends (the people on your side) and enemies (the people on the other side).
Carl Schmitt's "friend/enemy distinction" is why right-wing media, and all corporate media to some degree, is primarily interested in telling you who your enemies are.
The left has it's partisans as well but they are bounded by what their corporate sponsors will allow to be discussed or limited in their reach to nichepublications, radio shows and podcasts.
Light may be seeping in through cracks in the total propaganda facade we are subject to in modern society. These cracks in the facade are a result of among other things - our current president, his party followers, the global pandemic, massive income inequality, a quickly deteriorating economy and the climate crisis.
Sometimes events overtake politics.
It's hard to blame poor people, Obama, Mexicans or black people for everything...but the propagandists will keep fiddling that tune while the nation (and the world) burns - because that's their job. When money buys power people with more money get more power (look at the criminal justice system or our tax laws for two glaring examples) until they have so much money and power that they are absolutely corrupt no matter how much their apologist ministers and talking heads on TV and radio may beg to differ
You need to figure out which side you are on but before doing that you need to know what the sides are.
At a gross level you can phrase the two sides in varying ways...
The haves or the have nots
Owners of capital or wage earners
Owners or workers
Powerful or powerless
1% or the 99%
Bourgeoisie or proletariat and the ever increasing precariat
If you accept that "politics" and "political movements" dirty and ugly, or fantastical and utopian, as they may be - are part of the human condition...you'll have less occasion for disappointment when you try to understand why we can't all just get along.
It's also good to know that the battle isn't between individuals but rather groups - nothing personal, just business and politics. Before you decide which side you are going to fight for it's good to know which team you belong to.
It would be good to make it clear that when I talk about battles and fights that I am speaking metaphorically and rhetorically. The people that control the police and military will win any real world battle and any unprovoked violence (or maybe even provoked violence depending on your point of view) will only aid the oppressors and harm those being oppressed.
The slickest trick in politics is to use propaganda, emotion and pervasive human ignorance to build and maintain political, economic and social structures that serve the minority at the expense of the majority.
Selling soap, snake oil, or political voodoo it's sadly much too easy to get a significant number of working class (mostly white) people to support whatever policies work for the owners and have faith (since proof is lacking) that whatever crumbs fall off the table will suffice to keep the workers from revolting (no matter how revolting you may find said workers when discussing worldly affairs at the country club).
We just want a fair deal. I'll pay my taxes you pay yours. I don't want my tax dollars used for stupid wars, a bloated military industrial complex or for other forms of corporate welfare. We want good public schools, good public medicine, and a good social safety net for those too sick, too under-educated or too old to fend for themselves. Most economically developed nations succeed at these things - the question you have to ask your self is why in the so-called richest country on earth are we doing so poorly for so many people?
I've been reading Will and Ariel Durant's books on philosophy and civilization and ran across the quote, "they'd seen too much to believe too much."
The quote is referring to traders from Athens around 490-470 B.C. whose travels gave them a sense of the variability (and similarity) of humans, their beliefs and cultures. This greater sense of the world around them made these traders immune from some of the orthodoxy of various sects that eventually led to events like the inquisition.
I think the quote appeals to me because at my advanced age I also have the feeling I've seen too much to believe too much.
After the events of 2015-2016 I devoted a lot of time to trying to understand what happened in our country that led us to that place. I kept stepping further back in history until I ended up devoting more time to figuring out what happened over the last 2000 years than the last 20 years (days, minutes...).
Poet Carl Sandburg was born into a poor family in Galesburg, Illinois. In his youth, he worked many odd jobs before serving in the 6th Illinois Infantry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He studied at Lombard College, and then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked as an organizer for the Socialist Democratic Party from 1910 to 1912.
The Wikipedia article on Carl Sandburg has an expanded description of his life and works.
Many are familiar with his poem Chicago. One of my favorite Carl Sandburg poems is this possibly less familiar one...
Happiness
I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I
was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the
Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their
women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
If you have the capability and want to live in the world as a free, thinking, individual it's useful to recognize complexity and thereby realize that whatever your "worldview" may be - it is most assuredly incomplete.
Unless you happen to be one of those mythical infallible individuals many things we think we know are just stories with varying degrees of fact mixed with fiction.
It's always tempting to stereotype people or groups of people to simplify, or eliminate, thought - but it's a dubious bargain to trade certainty, for freedom and growth as an individual and for society.
It takes a certain amount of courage and inner stability; to admit - I don't know, we don't know, to have faith that as a species we have the capacity for compassion, creativity and beauty while also recognizing the never ending human capacity for ignorance, greed, evil and violence.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Minor changes in initial conditions can cause dramatically different future outcomes in complex systems.
I know that sounds boring as heck but bear with me a moment...
What is a complex system?
Complex systems contain too many interrelated variables to allow formation of precise (or sometimes even imprecise) rules describing expected behavior.
One complex system you may be familiar with is your self - other complex systems include; weather, ecosystems, pandemics and traffic flow.
Complex and complicated systems are not the same. A complicated system may contain many interrelated variables but the interaction of those variables is understandable and predictable. This is why we can build complicated systems ranging from automobiles to global positioning systems.
Trying to stay out of the weeds here - but there's a distinction between complexity theory and chaos theory. Chaos theory may be thought of as a subset of complexity theory, but we'll leave that aside for this essay because it's not particularly important in making what I think may be my point ;-)
If these sorts of things interest you BBC Radio 4 has a podcast on Complexity and one on Chaos Theory with some experts.
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You may have heard of the so-called butterfly effect where a butterfly flapping it's wings at some distant place and time sets off a series of events that has effects on a tornado at some future time. This idea comes from the work of the American mathematician, meteorologist and founder of chaos theory - Edward Norton Lorenz.
That ecosystems and pandemics are complex would seem to be self-evident if we consider all the unintended consequences of humankind's actions on our planet and our health. If you are not aware of those unintended consequences - congratulations on making it to Earth-2. Also make sure you actually are living on another planet and not just watching too much Fox news or counting on the Wall Street Journal for the straight skinny...cause otherwise you may be in for some unpleasant surprises when old Ma Nature opens up a can of whoop ass to show you how much she doesn't care.
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Where was I? Where am I?
The final example of a complex system is traffic flow. If you live in an area where there are a lot of traffic jams on the highway you may have asked yourself - why is traffic slowed down for no apparent reason? There may have been some initial condition - an accident or breakdown, that is long gone - but traffic flow is still stop and go.
Why?
Because many drivers are alternately applying their brake pedal and then gas pedal to try to maintain the closest distance possible to the car in front of them, apparently thinking that this will get them to their destination faster. Because they are following so closely they have to use the illumination of the brake-lights on the car in front of them as a signal to apply their car's brakes. After braking, they then accelerate to retain the minimum separation and the process repeats over and over - which contributes to the turbulent (as opposed to smooth) flow of traffic. You can experiment with eliminating the herky-jerky by maintaining multiple car lengths between you and the car in front of you. This smooths out traffic and allows everyone to get where they are going faster, but may also cause varying degrees of road rage...so be careful.
Finally -
Perhaps the most important example of varying initial conditions, in a complex system, causing dramatically different future effects is in the area of raising and educating the complex systems we call children.
People who have had a teacher, coach, friend or parent who did some small thing(s) in their early life that made a huge positive difference in their later life are living examples.
If you are moved by the beauty and strangeness of this world - the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez has some impressive writing about butterflies and magic. It's been years since I read that book, but here's what one reviewer had to say about it -
"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. Mr. GarcÃa Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." — William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review
B took some beautiful photos of a Monarch chrysalis in northern Minnesota but I can't locate them right now. I'll go look for my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and see what pictures that brings to mind as I read it.
One of the best things any parent could do for a child's future is to foster the child's inborn sense of wonder and unknowing...their curiosity about themselves, the world around them, the people, machines, plants, flowers, trees, rivers, mountains, animals, insects, the moon and stars...the whole shebang.
On the other hand (I have many hands ;-)
We live in an age where everyone knows everything about everything thanks to the ever present Google machine.
or
We live in an age where the life-preservers of nature, love, meaning and wisdom are in short supply while we drown in a sea of inanity, commercial or political propaganda, and fantasy.
I'd subscribe to the latter. It's not that you can't learn from the web, radio or television but rather that they are filled with noise.
I am using the word noise both in a signal processing sense and in the interior human sense of a mind filled with noise. The noise described by the Buddhist concept of monkey mind which can be quieted by meditation and paying attention to our breathing. We can also use the Christian concept of contemplative prayer to quiet one's mind to hear that still small voice inside us. Not to get too far afield, but the little old ladies that prayed the rosary when I was an altar boy had this figured out but I was too immature to understand that at the time.
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Individuals need a good filter (analytic ability and some sort of mind-quieting techniques) to separate out the signal from the noise, and convert that signal into useful knowledge.
What I mean by analytic ability is the process of isolating parts of some thing for inspection. It's a process that vending machine repairmen, analytic philosophers, motorcycle mechanics, software programmers and scientists use regularly.
For all of us but particularly for those of us who like me, may be a tad to sure of what we know, or those who don't have the time, inclination or ability to hone our analytic or meditative skills it would be good to practice some humility when it comes to our certainty of knowing anything other than what we experience directly in the world (and maybe be a bit skeptical about that too because we are experts at fooling ourselves into believing what we want to believe).
In summary - if adults could realize they know less than children do about the important stuff we might find many of our human-caused problems would be much easier to solve. This is not a new idea and is in some ways an invitation to joy..or at least a lot of fun.
"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me."
He's a technologist and a philosopher which makes him somewhat unique in our age of STEM obsession.
I think what he's writing and talking about sounds important, interesting and challenging (based on watching this video and noodling around his web pages for an hour or so). I stumbled upon his work while I was trying to learn something about Gottlob Frege's ideas on the limits of language.
The title of this blog post refers to the fact that Bob Doyle's YouTube channel has about 1,500 subscribers and the video I watched has about the same number of views. In contrast this is the top trending YouTube video as I write this, with over 7,000,000 views (as I edit this) on a channel with over 18,000,000 subscribers.
I don't know what that popular video is about but I think it's trying to sell something, maybe makeup or a life - so caveat emptor.
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The future is calling.
It needs some people capable and willing to carry the flame of wisdom before it's extinguished in a sea of idiocy, hate, sensationalism, and self glorification.
Some people need to keep the wisdom and beauty of humanity alive as we enter a new and unfamiliar world due to the climate crisis. There is always hope because no matter how much the world changes there is always space for individual courage, love, and acts of kindness.
I started thinking about this when Bob Doyle says in this video that Tim Berners-Lee's biggest concern about storing important information on the web was the lack of a persistent archive. We all see how changing technology makes persistent storage of things important to us (home videos, photos, essays, stories, letters) very difficult.
You could put all your important stuff on a digital storage device but there is no guarantee that you or anyone else could retrieve it in a few years or decades.
I think the best solution may be a Socratic one. Socrates distrusted the written word and believed that the way to communicate meaning is through speech. If not for his student Plato writing things down we would only have many different (or perhaps no) stories of what Socrates had to teach us.
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Who cares?
We all should. Human nature changes little over thousands of years. Great thinkers have invented the wheel so to speak and unless we want to reinvent the wheel over and over it would behoove us as a species to save and review what wise people before us had to say about being in the world.
Perhaps instead of trying to create and save a digital archive of our individual existences it makes more sense to share stories with those we care about.
One can make a case for speech being the preferred means of communication for what is truly important to us as humans - love, companionship, hope, wisdom...one could also make a case that music, dance or painting are better than language - but I digress.
Meaning is highly dependent on body language, eye contact, tone - all lacking in the written word. This lack of face to face contact is one reason why people writing about imprecise things like religion or politics fail to communicate meaning and often end up with misunderstanding and hurt feelings.
In our analysis of "failure to communicate" we could also consider those of us who repeat something we heard on television, radio or the internet without having much, if any, understanding of what the words we are repeating signify in the real world considering context, completeness and individual levels of knowledge or ignorance.
Another reason people fail to communicate either in writing or verbally, which I find fascinating, is that words have no meaning.
To be more precise words have no meaning, other than what we as individuals assign. Parrots can say words without having any consciousness of their meaning. It might be more precise to say parrots make sounds signifying nothing. Humans share this ability with the exception that we can think we know what we are saying and assume others do as well.
For words to have meaning they must signify something to the recipient. What words signify to any individual recipient we cannot know with any accuracy.
A good example of this is our use of words like conservative or Christian - absolutely meaningless - without context (and a lot of it).
Thinkers like Frege, Husserl, Russell, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein explored the limits of language and either attempted to create a precise language based on mathematics and logic, or gave up on language for communicating what is truly important and turned to faith. This is a gloss but my words are limited.
The promoters of formalized language, as opposed to everyday language, believed that humankind's ills could be cured if we truly understood what other people are communicating. Utopian no doubt but also empirically evident when we consider the ability of humans across cultures, nations and times to collaborate using scientific/mathematical terms.
A weakness of ordinary language is that it is multifunctional; it does much more than merely make assertations that are true or false; it commands, pleads, requests, suggests, attempts to deceive, entertains, bores, and so on. As a cognitivist, Frege was interested in language that is capable of conveying information about the world, not in language that implements some social aim of the speaker such as "setting the hearer on the right track."
Dreamers can assume that their dreams will be fulfilled because humans share a common body of knowledge and values. Although possibly a worthy goal, this assumption is by necessity - nonsense.
"Perhaps I should explain where I'm coming from. I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out. I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together we can come to better understandings. If misunderstandings are the cause of many of the world's woes, then can we not work them out in cyberspace. And, having worked them out, we leave for those who follow a trail of our reasoning and assumptions for them to adopt, or correct."
The abstract of the talk states -
"Bush considered the plight of a researcher deluged with inaccessible information. He proposed the MEMEX, a machine to rapidly access, and allow random links between, pieces of information. Networks and computers have since allowed us to exceed even that far-sighted vision in terms of speed and convenience. However, we have not seen dramatic advances in our ability to solve political problems, to manage large organizations, or to magnify our group intuition.
We must do more than empower the individual. We must allow people and machines interacting together to behave in new ways as a mass. Now that we can make trails though our information, we must create a substrate in which these trails will grow into an increasingly meaningful whole, rather than a tangled mass. We and our documents are capable of operating together as a large machine but not as a large mind. Groups of all sizes must acquire gifts of intuition, correlation and invention which we associate normally with people rather than machines, before we can rise to Bush's challenge to mankind to "grow in the wisdom of race experience", rather than "perish in conflict"."
I've been interested in machines since I was a little boy and like most little boys I love machines. As I grew up I came to understand that machines are made useful or harmful by the humans who design and use them.
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Humans are not genetically programmed to consider future effects of current actions. We know this to be true considering the current pandemic, the climate crisis, and a myriad of other examples both individually and as a society.
The good news is that no matter how dire current events may be, any person becomes the person they want to be.
This is not to say that you can become a great athlete, businessman, painter, inventor, musician or scholar. What you can choose to "be" is happy, sad, mad, curious, helpful, selfish, honorable, dishonorable, honest, dishonest...etc. etc. etc.
In other words you have complete control over how you will respond to the external world. You can choose to be happy, friendly, helpful or you can choose to be angry, mean and selfish. We all have set-points for these characteristics but humans are extremely malleable and you can train yourself to be whatever you want to be.
Some events in the external world call for anger, fear, sadness or grief but if we live with those feelings for too long we end up hurting ourselves physically through increased stress hormones and mentally by giving up our ability for quiet reflection and increasing wisdom.
To be is to exist as a human on this rock. It is who you are irrespective of your job, how much money you have, how much education you have, where you live, how you dress, what you eat...and so on.
You can choose to exist as a happy, helpful, honest, and kind person in this world. Like all good things this is hard and takes work every day. I fail at this every day but taking a clue from Sisyphus start over and over while enjoying the effort of trying. None of us have time on this earth to complete this project but it's a worthwhile endeavor for a life well lived.
You may remember him as Ross Perot's running mate in the 1992 election. Some people made fun of him for introducing himself at a debate, with Dan Quayle and Al Gore, by saying, "who am I, why am I here?" As I read more about James Stockdale it's clear that one thing he shows us, is the importance of having a sense of humor - even for someone like him who literally went through hell for seven and a half years. More on that later.
In 1992 I was interested in Stockdale and his running mate presidential candidate H. Ross Perot as an alternative to Clinton or Bush in that election.
Ross Perot was a smart guy and a successful business man. One of his most famous statements was when he said in 1992 that we'd hear a "giant sucking sound" as jobs went from the U.S. to Mexico if NAFTA was enacted. Here's the quote -
"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
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So much for the errors of the past, who was James Stockdale?
The introduction to a lecture James Stockdale gave at the U.S. Naval Academy (links below) provides this description -
"Vice Admiral Stockdale served on active duty in the regular Navy for 37
years, most of those years as a fighter pilot aboard aircraft carriers. Shot
down on his third combat tour over North Vietnam, he was the senior naval
prisoner of war in Hanoi for seven and one-half years - tortured 15 times, in
solitary confinement for over four years, in leg irons for two."
"When physical disability from combat wounds brought about Stockdale's
military retirement, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer
in the history of the U.S. Navy to wear both aviator wings and the Medal of
Honor. Included in his 26 other combat decorations are two Distinguished
Flying Crosses, three Distinguished Service Medals, four Silver Star medals,
and two Purple Hearts."
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James Stockdale, has some things to say that are relevant to any time but in particular these trying times.
I just started reading his book Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot. In the beginning he's writing about how he survived his experience as a prisoner of war and writes the following -
"I distilled one all-purpose idea, plus a few corollaries. It is a simple idea, an idea as old as the scriptures, an idea that is the epitome of high-mindedness, an idea that naturally and spontaneously comes to men under pressure. If the pressure is intense enough or of long enough duration, this idea spreads without even the need for its enunciation. It just takes root naturally. It is an idea that, in this big easy world of yakety yak, seems to violate the rules of game theory, if not of reason. It violates the idea of Adam Smith's invisible hand, or ideas of human nature, and probably the second law of thermodynamics. That idea is you are your brother's keeper."
Mr. Rogers taught us something similar when he said that his mother taught him that in times of trouble we look for the helpers and know there is hope when we realize how kind and generous human beings can be.
These are links to pdf files of two lectures James Stockdale gave at the U.S. Naval Academy -
If you are at all interested in what Stoicism can teach us in difficult times, I'd recommend signing up for The Daily Stoic.
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And finally...
This Dave Dudley classic to remind us of all those truck drivers who keep this country running.
Postscript - I didn't realize until I watched this video a few times that the truck at time 1:05 is the Peterbilt 281 used in the 1971 movie Duel. If you haven't seen that movie, it's about a "bad" truck chasing Dennis Weaver who's driving a car that really needs a tune-up. In any case it seems unlikely Earl Green had an evil truck in mind when he wrote this song. I still like the pictures of trucks, the song and the honor of hard work.
The couple Hollis and Nancy, and their dog Bing Bing have hundreds of helpful videos about container gardening, raised bed gardening, backyard gardening, larger scale gardening, building, cooking, and raising poultry. They are interesting, relaxing to watch, and may help us think about alternative ways to help feed ourselves and other people.
Victory gardens were promoted by the agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and used in WW-I and WW-II to supplement the food supply and boost morale in various countries.
This video isn't from Hollis and Nancy but the lady who made it seems to know her stuff when it comes to making a sourdough starter. At the end she makes a loaf of sour dough bread and it looks delicious. I've fiddled around with sourdough starter before but didn't realize it took so much care and feeding to get it going. It might be a fun project for someone at home to spend 7 or 8 days taking care of a sour dough starter and then make some tasty sourdough bread or pancakes (like taking care of your Tamagotchi except you get to eat it at the end).
If you have some young bakers or scientists at home the book Bread Lab from plant researchers at The Bread Lab at Washington State University in Mount Vernon, might be of interest. The book is targeted at K-Grade 3 but I'm sure some younger or older people might like it.
On this Palm Sunday and throughout the weeks to come I hope that people are finding the resources they need to stay calm, strong, and resourceful. Our Saviours Lutheran Church, here in Everett, has been providing online services that I've found to be helpful in coping with these challenging times.
I think the long-term political and economic outcome of what we are going through now will be positive or negative depending to a great extent on public opinion.
If we are encouraged to see this disaster as an opportunity to address some inhumane aspects of our political and economic systems it will be a net positive. Providing at least some semblance of equal opportunity, as well as quality education, housing, nutrition, and medical care doesn't seem like an insurmountable task for the "richest" country on earth. It will require a spirit of "we are all in this together" and some redistribution of wealth.
Given that those consumed with material wealth have been opposed to redistribution since money was invented it's likely (as we see currently) that the greediest will try to get us to blame each other so they can continue to exploit the poor, working and middle class.
So...really it's up to us. We can work for a better future for all of us or we can fight one another until eventually all of us lose.
Having said that, I have to say that if anyone were to read this blog they might assume I just like to throw rocks across the ideological fence at Republicans.
I see merit in many of the ideas the Republican party at one time in our history stood for. Individual responsibility, family values, efficient government, localized government to the greatest extent possible, the critical role of markets, respect for tradition and the importance of small businesses to a thriving economy - are all practical ideas.
When I criticize the Republican party I'm not talking about the Republican party of Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon. I'm criticizing a party that Republicans who are informed by history and reality, know has drifted very very far from what it once was.
As a Democrat married to a Republican I can speak from personal experience to say that my wife and my individual values have not changed since we met in 1972. The Republican party on the other hand has changed so drastically that as a famous Republican once said - I didn't leave the party it left me.
We need yin and yang, conservative and liberal, we need two viable parties to work together and keep each other in check. Let's all hope that the Republican party finds it's way back to the great party it once was.
Why do I keep banging my head against this brick wall?
Because it feels so good when I stop.
That's how I feel sometimes when reading about the Republican party, it's enablers and leaders. This article describes what's happening and going to happen in Florida because of ex-Governor Rick Scott's dismantling of unemployment insurance in that state. Here's a quote from the article -
Privately, Republicans admit that the $77.9 million system that is now failing Florida workers is doing exactly what Scott designed it to do — lower the state’s reported number of jobless claims after the great recession.
“It’s a sh-- sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”
Rick Scott is currently a U.S. senator from the great state of Florida. In an earlier incarnation he was the CEO of a health care company where he oversaw what, at that time, was the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history. His company Columbia/HCA was fined 1.7 billion dollars for Medicare fraud.
Given Scott's background of ripping off the Federal government, taxpayers and in particular seniors who depend on Medicare - one might ask how he could then be elected the Republican Governor and then Republican U.S. Senator from Florida?
Lots of reasons of course - greed, ignorance, hate, fear, deep-seated tribal and familial ideological indoctrination. On the other hand, a person living through, and looking at, what the GOP has done to this country over the last 40 years with a clear eye can see that their actions have harmed the majority of people in our nation.
Is there any comparison between the GOP and the Democratic party when it comes to the scope of corruption, greed and harm to the powerless? Absolutely not.
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If I could give a homework assignment to United States voters I'd ask them to read this incredibly damning United Nations Human Rights Council Report on extreme poverty and human rights in the United States of America.
What did the GOP do about this report?
They took their ball and went home mad as heck at those pesky people who cite facts to describe reality. Specifically they removed the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council and fired up their radical right-wing billionaire-funded think tanks to spew propaganda.
The GOP claims 250,000 Americans live in extreme poverty while the U.N. report says 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty. This Washington Post article has a quote that rings true to me,
“You can spend all day arguing about how many people are living on $2 a day vs. $4 a day,” said Kristin S. Seefeldt, of the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. “But if you spend any amount of time in poor communities in the U.S., it's obvious there's still a lot of deprivation and 250,000 is a ridiculously low number.”
Of course people are angry and hurting - and the GOP has used that anger and pain to obtain and retain power for decades. Trump (and the Republican party) love the uneducated and the ideologically possessed for the simple reason that if that segment of the population ever figures out what's been done to them - the pitchforks and torches will be rampant.
If you like to read and maybe learn something new, the book, "American Amnesia: How The War On Government Led Us To Forget What Made America Prosper" is a well-researched book about how anti-government, anti-education, anti-press, pro-greed forces managed to reshape a system, that worked well for working class Americans from the New Deal era until the Reagan devolution, into something that left a whole segment of our population struggling to get by...while the rich only got richer.
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Tracking this Republican president and his administration's response to the Covid-19 pandemic confirms that the decades of anti-science, anti-education, anti-free-press tactics the GOP has used to obtain and maintain power are now causing devastating harm to our nation.
A few days ago, Jared (not the Subway Jared the other one) told us that the federal stockpile of emergency medical supplies isn't meant for the states. This understandably caused a lot of push back from "the states". The next day the White House, in the cult-like Orwellian revisionist ways of the GOP - revised the HHS web page to try and align it with Jared's version.
There are literally hundreds of these God-awful stories about the GOP and the Trump administration that one could cite but why bother?
How about this one from the LA Times which has this tidbit -
Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
If you don't get it by now - you ain't never gonna get it. For those of you who have been fooled again (and again) I feel compassion for you and all the people your ignorance will harm. I feel anger and disgust at those who know better, but take advantage of you because of their greed and will to power.
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Chris Hedges has a point of view that contains some truth about how our society became so dysfunctional for so many people. He's not an optimist but he tries to be honest. Among other things, he's an ordained minister who holds classes for people in prison. He reminds me of an old fashioned fire and brimstone preacher telling us we are all going to hell if we don't change our ways.
I have to admit I'm afraid that some of his cures (shutting down corporations) would be worse than the disease. On the other hand if we listen to scientists, consider the existential threat to our ecosystem and it's living inhabitants due to CO-2 emissions in the decade(s) to come - it's obvious that we are going to hell if we don't change our ways - fine for you and me...but what about our kids and their kids?
Of course this administration is doing just what the Reagan administration did decades ago to ensure greed prevails over the future of our children and our planet by rolling back mileage standards on motor vehicles.
The GOP anti-science anti-fact response to the Covid-19 pandemic is the same as their anti-science anti-fact response to climate change. The major difference is we are seeing how our federal government reacts to a quickly evolving emergency in this pandemic whereas the damage done, and to be done, by climate change happens slowly enough that we can pretend that ignoring the problem (or some future technology) will make it go away.
Who knows South Korea better than anybody? If you're scratching your head at that question, here's an easier one - who would say, "I know South Korea better than anybody."
Yeah - that guy, the guy who goes on to state with authority that 38 million people live in Seoul.
10 million people live in Seoul.
It isn't what you say it's how you say it - which is part of the reason why some people think this bullying fool is trustworthy.
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It is and was all a lie.
Stuart Stevens is one of the most successful GOP operatives of his generation having helped dozens of Republicans be elected to office. He is now the author of the book due to come out in September, "It Was All A Lie - How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump".
According to the publishers website, Stevens, "helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground."
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Stevens isn't the first to stray from the herd.
Justin Amash showed his courage earlier this year and the GOP abandoned him for speaking truth. Mitt Romney had the courage to be the only Republican senator to vote for one of the articles of impeachment. You can see what the people who own; the GOP, it's politicians, and state run TV - thought about that by looking at the headlines created by Fox News.
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."
I bolded that last sentence because we are seeing in life and death terms how true it was - as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United States without adequate testing, critical medical supplies or any semblance of organization in (or from) the federal government.
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Decades ago David Brock was a right-wing propagandist for the Republican party. He had a change of heart and created Media Matters for America and wrote a variety of books critical of the Republican party including;
People who survive trying times do so in part by not having false hope.
Creating false hope can break our hearts and our spirits when our hopes and dreams collide with painful reality. James Stockdale says it better than I can. When asked who didn't make it out of the POW camp he was confined in he answers,
"Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."
Life is full of surprises. Some are good, some bad, some magic, some tragic. In any time there is pain in the world for some, in our current time of unimaginable pain for many people we look for comfort and search for meaning.
Like
any individual I have a unique outlook when it comes to matters of
faith. I've created my own religion of sorts made up of pieces
of Catholicism, Lutheranism, Buddhism, various philosophers and
thinkers from a variety of faiths or no faiths at all.
It's been a winding road. I was a little over two years old when my thirty-two year old father was killed in a construction accident. When I was twelve my thirty-six year old step-father was killed when the plane he was flying crashed. I was in need of figures to look up to and try to emulate as a young person. I found those figures in family, friends, teachers and books.
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What
I wanted to talk about was a trait that was ingrained in me by my early
exposure to Catholic ideas about evil. I was taught that Satan is a
real presence in this world. I picked up the phrase "satan get thee behind me" from my mother and use it to this day when confronted with evil, which generally involves me thinking something that my conscience tells me is wrong i.e. cruel, mean, selfish, hurtful wrong.
A visceral belief in evil may help to counter the banality of evil
that Hannah Arendt wrote about. In other words - if you believe there
is an evil presence in the world attempting to overcome good hopefully you are less inclined to let evil acts become everyday events. The challenge is to figure out what "good" and "evil" mean.
People can do, or allow to be done, incredibly cruel things to innocent people in the name of good. Some think it's good to take children away from parents who are in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Some think the proper response to the homeless, or addicted or poverty stricken or incarcerated is to blame them and deny that but for the grace of God (fate if you like) there go I. Some thought it was good to take away Native American's land and put them on reservations. Some thought it good to enslave people. Some thought it was good to try and exterminate the Jews...
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There are many reasons to reject the idea that religion helps us to decide what is good and what is evil since we could point out historical, and current, events where just the opposite was/is the case. The problem is we need some "authority" to decide between conflicting ideas of what is good and what is evil. If everyone accepted (including many Christians) the teachings of Jesus in the beatitudes as an authoritative source we would live in a perfect world...maybe some day.
Another interesting look at combating evil comes from the writer Eyal Press in his book Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times. What stuck with me from that book was the idea that a person or a group of people can inflict barbaric acts on faceless and nameless members of a group, but when forced to confront individual people, see their faces and hear their stories our compassionate natures come to the foreground.
Do I believe there's a devil with horns and a tail tempting people?
No - only that there are evil forces that shape human events. To make the point as clearly as possible I'm proposing that ignorance is evil and also pervasive throughout human history. Sometimes this ignorance is harmless other times it can cause devastating impacts to humankind.
The capacity to inflict evil is correlated to a person's power. In general a powerless individual can inflict evil acts on a relatively small group - a family, child, a spouse. As an evil (ignorant) person obtains more power the more their capacity to inflict evil grows - a boss, minor politician, major politician, President all have an increasing ability to bring good (knowledge) or evil (ignorance) into the world.
Knowledge is the opposite of ignorance. But knowledge of what? Math, science, batting averages, how to change a tire? Nope.
Since this is an ethical discussion of good vs. evil and we've defined evil as ignorance then we need to define good.
Good is understanding.
Understanding what?
Understanding the highest Good.
We'll
chase our tails all day with that circular reasoning so we need to
appeal to some authority. Jesus can help with this because he provides us with the understanding that the highest good is...you know this already - Love.
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If
you want to believe, you can convince yourself - or be convinced, that
literally anything is true. You could convince yourself, or be convinced that this guy represents Christian beliefs for example. I have to remind myself to feel compassion for the sinner no matter how much I hate the sin.
In a perfect world we would all want to
believe in loving - our neighbor, our enemies and in some ways the most
important of all - our selves.
In our imperfect world the best we hope to do is live in the light and work in small ways to push forward that ideal from one generation to the next.
We lose things that we love and the tears we shed soften are hearts. Loss reminds us to be less prideful of our ability to go-it-alone and more accepting of the fact that everything is connected and we are all in this together.
If nothing else, loss reminds us to appreciate what we have while it's here in this moment, and faith gives us assurance that after the darkness there will be a dawn.
