13th

The documentary 13th is available free on YouTube. People interested in furthering their understanding of the history of race, policing, mass-incarceration and the take over of state governments by right-wing corporate special interests via ALEC will find it useful.

Survivors

John Stewart was a popular musician when I was in my teens and twenties. He wrote lines like this one from his song Kansas Rain -

"Standing in line at the Bank of America - nobody spoke they were in the house of God..."

He also wrote in his song July Your a Woman about a time when driving with a six pack of Coors beside you and picking up hitchhikers was considered cool. In that song, the driver who has just picked up the good-looking hitchhiker in California says, "well hell I was just going to the store for cigarettes but I'll go to Seattle with ya." Something a bit wilder about those times or maybe it's just me getting old.

Anyway I was glad to see this John Stewart song re-purposed for use in our times.

SNAFU or Utopia?

We show up in this place and this time

Born never asked.

As long as we are here

Might as well

Enjoy the ride

Enjoy the struggle

Be in the fight

Things change

Humankind not so much

Read read read

Work work work

Play play play

Things ebb and flow

Humans remain human

It's all so beautiful and

Ugly and

Sad and

Maddening and

When we are lucky

Transcendent

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I was reading the essay What Makes Life Significant  by William James written in the early part of the last century. He's writing about visiting a utopian community called Chautauqua where everything is "perfect". After returning to everyday civilization he realizes how boring utopia is and decides he'd much rather live in the real world than a world where everyone is reduced to some sort of mediocrity for the sake of communal living.

After returning to the real world he writes -

So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still-this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field.

If you aren't familiar with the acronym snafu it comes from the soldiers in WW-II and was one way they (and the people back home) dealt with the nature of the world and the people in it during those particular trying times. Private Snafu cartoons were released for soldiers and civilians viewing pleasure.

The main point being that struggle, trouble and fuckedupitness are not abnormal in the human experience - they are the human experience. Whatever you do; whether it be to enjoy that absurdity, let it beat you down, or cause you to thrive - is your choice.

Teddy Roosevelt touches on this idea in his Citizenship in a Republic speech -

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

A New Ernest Hemingway Story

Hemingway speaks to a more primitive time in our country...or maybe it was more civilized..I don't know, suffice it to say - different.

If you like fishing, hunting, fighting, drinking or at least reading about that sort of thing - he's a good choice.

There's a new Ernest Hemingway story in the New Yorker called Pursuit as Happiness that is about fishing and policeman and sun and struggle and water and stuff...

It's a nice change of pace from the day to day.

ps. If you like fishing, or reading about fishing, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote some marvelous stuff.

Do Identity Politics Work?

Imagine you live in a zip code lacking good jobs, with failing schools, sub-standard housing, gang violence, poor or no health care, limited access to healthy food and no clear path out. Imagine you are young and the best job available is joining a gang, occasionally killing other gang members and participating in various petty and not so petty crimes. Now imagine you are a policeman in that zip code.

Try to imagine being a young white non-college educated person living in an area where the industrial jobs are gone, small farms are gone, small businesses, and the community leaders that used to work in those small businesses are gone. Your schools are failing, you may live in a food desert and you can't afford prescription drugs, dental or medical care. A disproportionate number in your community suffer from drug addiction, poor health and or mental illness. If TV, radio, the web, Mom, Dad, your minister have taught you that your difficult situation is somehow the fault of some segment of your fellow citizens you will be angry at those "others" rather than the system of unfettered capitalism, political leaders and judges that failed the American people and allowed the hollowing out of America over the last 40 years.

Do you change that type of scenario from the top down by addressing each individual and individual problem (war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, urban renewal, public housing, gay rights, women's rights, black rights..etc.) or do you make relatively simple changes to the economic structure of society that will accomplish what you want - faster and cheaper than all those failed programs of the past?

If you are curious about some of the American history behind this intra-class warfare Nancy Isenberg's book White Trash - The 400-Year Untold History of Class in American is informative.

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Political change requires political power. Political power comes from having a broad enough coalition of voters to form a majority.

In a society with endless divisions based on individual identities how do we form that broad coalition?

A Google search for ending identity politics results in an interesting array of hits from across the political spectrum  - from the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution to The Guardian.

Who cares?

People who want to make changes through political means - citizens who want to win elections and control governments.

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James Carville had a point when he said, "it's the economy stupid". It's not that the capitalist free market economy is "it". The truth in his statement is that the underlying economic structure controls society, culture and politics or to put it simply - the world we live in.

Assume you are part of a group that is oppressed in some way  - wage earner, person of color, woman, LGBQT, poor person, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Wiccan, Atheist, elderly, young, homemaker, business woman, educated, uneducated, city dweller, country dweller, married, single, divorced, someone with children, childless, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-gun control...etc ad infinitum.

How do you form a broad coalition to use the political system to reduce your oppression?

By finding common interests.

People with these various identities have one thing in common - the economic structure of the society they live in.

Any group trying to instigate real and lasting political change has to focus on the economic structure. To accomplish this focus, a language is needed that hasn't been co-opted by the powerful to divide the powerless. That is a language that uses the good ideas from Marx, socialism, democratic socialism, capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, pragmatism and other isms that prove useful - but can't be easily turned into a scary cartoon for corporate media or a string of scary boogey-words for right wing hate radio to use to keep the wealthy wealthy, the powerful powerful and the poor* fighting each other.

*In this instance I've defined "poor" as being someone earning less than $500,000 a year since that seems to be the cut-off point for where the GOP starts to want to use the government to help you. If this sounds like an erroneous statement or confuses you - look at the charts for who benefits from the midnight Tax act of 2017 passed in secret by the GOP.

I'm not sure what could make this more clear than when the current leader of the GOP and occupant of the White House spilled the beans by saying the quiet part out loud and claimed during the debates that, "not paying taxes makes me smart." The fact that shortly after saying this he denied having said it only adds to the stink of a decayed party and it's leader.

The skeptical side of me thinks whatever Joe Biden and the corporate-captured democrats come up with will be almost as bad in pandering to the ultra-rich and corporations...but not as blatant. In 2003 Susan Sontag said during a C-Span interview, that when considering what happened to the Democratic party during the Bill Clinton/Newt Gingrich era, "Sometimes I think we only have one party, the Republican Party, and it has a branch called the Democratic Party." Contrary to what you may have heard on TV or radio, or read on the interwebs - there is no left or liberal party in the United States. Barack Obama is considered a conservative by U.K. political standards. I really hope young people start taking over by getting informed, voting and being involved in politics soon.

It's a simple deal, not scary and not new - fair progressive taxation, reduction of government waste, respect for the dignity and diversity of humans, support for organized labor, recognition of and planning for the climate crisis, labor involvement in corporate decision making, excellent - public education, health care and social safety nets. It can be called the "simple deal" or "fair deal" because it is simple, fair, and has been done in various countries.

Keeping it simple will allow people to build up an immunity to the rhetorical rock throwers who have all sorts of focus-tested words to frighten and alienate voters into supporting the status-quo which serves the ultra-wealthy and powerful while those voters live their lives of quiet desperation wondering if they can keep their job, pay their bills, provide for their children, afford to see a doctor (without going bankrupt) when they need to...etc etc etc.

When this simple fair deal is implemented we'll find that many of the injustices or dissatisfactions attributed to identity disappear, or are reduced in their significance as people's basic needs are addressed, or begin to be corrected because there will be sufficient resources to devote to addressing these injustices in an economy that serves the people.

Before any of that happens the first and hardest thing to do is to get people to recognize what they have in common while they are being bombarded with messages from those with power intended to keep them divided and weak.

The Century of the Self

The Century of the Self is a four part BBC documentary by filmmaker Adam Curtis that was released in 2002.

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.

The Most Shocking Fact About the United States of America

This fact comes from the 2016 book “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper” by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker.

Not to keep you in suspense any longer but the shocking fact is,

Americans are no longer the tallest people in the world.

Why?

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.

You Gotta be in the Fight

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 niche publications, 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?

Then you can decide which side your on.

They'd Seen Too Much to Believe Too Much

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...).

I still haven't got "the answer" or even the question nailed down but I got a feeling.

Skepticism, compassion, as much joy as you can find, and a sense of equanimity are probably appropriate responses to a complicated world.

Oh but it's still good to dream...

Happiness - A Poem by Carl Sandburg

The Poetry Foundation website description of Carl Sandburg states,

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.

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967).
From his collection Chicago Poems 1916.

Capitalism and The American Pandemic Response

Why American Healthcare is The Worst in The Developed World

Stereotypes Make Complicated Things Simple

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

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.

For Want of a Nail

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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.

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A Voice from the Heartland

Iris DeMent lives in rural southeast Iowa.

Monarch Magic

If you are moved by the beauty and strangeness of this world - the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García 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. García 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.

In Praise of Curiousity

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."

 Matthew 18 NIV

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The Virtual Road Less Traveled

Bob Doyle the information philosopher has, as one might expect, a lot of information on his website and YouTube channel.

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.

Maybe this quote helps. It's from the chapter, Ordinary Language and Formalized Language, in the book A History of Western Philosophy Volume V by W.T. Jones

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."  

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Sweet Dreams From 1995

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.

From the talk "Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny" given by Tim Berners-Lee, on 12 October 1995 -

"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.   

James Stockdale

Who is James Stockdale?

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 -

Stockdale on Stoicism I - The Stoic Warrior's Triad

Stockdale on Stoicism II - Master of My Fate

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.