ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
Much ink has been spilled over the Reflecting Pool disaster, so excuse me for adding to the torrent. My partner discovered this picture on Facebook, and it does have its appeal (even if it never gets built) principally because it gives the finger to Trump. Continue reading “Maybe This?”
There is a new book out that I want very much to read. It’s an anatomy of capitalism: The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson. Capitalism plainly dominates the world’s economic and social life. “An economy predicated on infinite accumulation, mass consumption, and fossil-fueled industrialization is not reconcilable with a finite planet.” Continue reading “Capitalism Exposed”
Matt Ford (TNR): The raw spectacle of Trump tearing a hole in the White House to hang out with his rich friends is already a potent symbol of his presidency—almost ham-fisted in a way, as if it were drawn by a third-rate political cartoonist for a fourth-rate newspaper. At every level, the entire project may be the perfect summation of what his administration has been like for the country. Continue reading “All that glitters is not gold.”
It’s pretty quiet today in my house, though I have some Bach playing in the background. Bach in Mexico is as incongruous as the Fourth of July is here. Not many Mexicans care about Bach, though a few do. The cultural values are just different, viz., tacos and hot dogs. Like so many other holidays, the Fourth has lost its original purpose, celebrating the independence and founding of the USA. Today it’s the Big Holiday: three days off from work, barbecuing, drinking, the beach, family time. Fireworks are the only symbol of Independence Day left that makes sense.
And there isn’t much unity left in the old federalist vision of a mutually united United States, is there? Maybe there never was. I thought for a minute about comparing Trump to George Washington, a man of reason, humility and integrity. Well, no need to go further with that.
There are pockets of Americans in Mexico who do celebrate the Fourth—in places like Cabo and Cancun. But the American Fourth is quite different in tone and style from Mexican Independence Day on September 16th which features marching bands, parades, street food and folk festivals.
For me, American holidays have lost most of their meaning. I know that’s true for many of us whether we live at home or abroad. Big holidays are mostly about time off and Black Friday sales. Much has been written about the dessication of our holidays over time. It’s true even in my lifetime. The old parades and the fire trucks showed the kids some hometown spectacle. My mother used to call Memorial Day Decoration Day, its former name. Some still lament the commercialization of Christmas. Holidays are now major economic events, and that’s also becoming true in Mexico.
As the world has become more money-driven, it’s also turned more authoritarian, which implies a denial (or transmutation) of most historical values and traditions. I wish you a Happy Fourth of July anyway, and you might try putting on some Bach.
The stage is now populated by Trump’s insane tariff scheme. Its advocates proclaim grand consequences, while Democrats yammer about adopting populist economics and finding a leader. In the back row of the theater two old Greenies, thus far silent, rise to point out the madness of ignoring climate change. Continue reading “The Dinosaur in the Room is Climate Change”
Today I wanted to write about the transparently psychotic Trump. His revenge-filled speech at the Department of Justice last Friday really set me off. But finally, this was a fool’s errand because my blog readers already know most of the evidence. Just repeating this does nothing to keep us from cowering to a wannabe dictator. There is so much more behind the Trump phenomenon. Continue reading “Trump the Pig Farmer”
It’s going to be neurotic and tense for gringo transplants. We probably have much the same reactions here as our U.S. counterparts, at least so far. The difference is that we have a partial refuge from the madness here. And most of us here are older, which may give us a different perspective. Continue reading “Living in Mexico under Trump”
“Hey man, how ya doin’? How’s your life?”
“Fine. It will be over soon.”
National Library of Medicine on Aging (NIH): “The anterior-posterior, dorsal-ventral, and proximal-distal axes are sequentially specified and involve interactions between different compartments in the imaginal discs.”
“Rishi Sunak is coming to dinner.”
2025: President Harris could put Trump in jail.
2025: “President Trump paid me to kill you.”
Boeing Stock has “45% Upside, According to 1 Wall Street Analyst”
Jill Biden’s kindergarten tone after the debate: “You answered all the questions, you knew all the facts!”
Sean “Diddy” Combs
Tesla
Saks Fifth Avenue will acquire Neiman Marcus
One opinion in Newsweek: “Israel Must Target Iran at the Same Time as Hezbollah”
AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: “We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045.”
Antisemitism is a powerful drug, but the three presidents saw their duty as defending the open market on thought. They upheld, though very badly, the core notion of academic freedom, which is free speech. But when free speech becomes hate speech with the threat of violence, what then?
Can you put conditions on advocating for antisemitism? Maureen Dowd expressed it this way: “Not since Bill Clinton was asked about having sex with Monica Lewinsky and replied, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” has there been such parsing.”
I spent a lot of years in academia, teaching at NYU, City College and the University of Wisconsin. There were things about it that I loved, but not the sense of moral superiority which infected some of the faculty and administration. I finally found academia to be constricting because it was often smug and self-satisfied. Yes, there were other reasons that I left, but I found more freedom outside the ivy-covered walls.
Now we have the spectacle of Ted Cruz and Elise Stefanik accusing the Harvard president of “intentionally fostering an environment that allows rampant and dangerous antisemitism.” We should not be surprised that she and her colleagues are just continuing their regular attack on liberal institutions. The GOP is very good at confounding issues that have no necessary connection—such as linking aid to Ukraine with the border mess.
But of course she was right to go after the three Ivy presidents. I guess they were advised by their lawyers to give legalistic answers, waffling over what should have been an obvious and strong response. The schools ought to be teaching the real and complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not defending an abstract standard.
Academia is sometimes guilty of parsing the simple truth.
It’s not easy to imagine the mental state of climate deniers these days. The magnitude of recent fires, floods, storms, ocean warming, melting ice, intolerable heat, collapsing ecosystems (what have I forgotten?) has affected almost everyone on this globe. The deniers can no longer address these events as natural or normal.
How people bear with and try to process climate change is the subject of a recent article by Jia Tolentino. I recommend it to you. As conditions have become so unmistakably and dramatically appalling, the deniers have not pulled their heads from the sand. Tolentino says, “And the worse things get, the less we seem to talk about it: in 2016, almost seventy per cent of one survey’s respondents told researchers that they rarely or never discuss climate change with friends or family, an increase from around sixty per cent in 2008.”
The media plays up our climate disasters without apparently changing many minds. Warnings, threats and the pressing timetable of climate change are all over the news, but there isn’t any easy answer to the question of “when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.” Simple reporting on climate disasters won’t change people’s minds. What will?
Wikipedia offers a lengthy, informative piece on climate denial here—it’s complicated, of course, and with a long history. There have been tremendous institutional efforts over time to deny climate change. You know how the tobacco industry covered up its poisons and worked its wiles for years to keep people smoking. Some of its same operatives are now doing the devil’s work for climate.
I think of it as a kind of conspiracy theory to keep fossil fuels alive. The vaccine deniers use similar nutty anti-science arguments to allay their followers’ fears. But if you believe Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you do so at your own peril. One vast conspiracy after another makes up the world of the deniers. And there are lay deniers, scientific deniers, and political deniers.
There are also active deniers and passive deniers. Most Republicans, as you are no doubt aware, actively oppose climate remedies: “In the 2016 United States election cycle, every Republican presidential candidate questioned or denied climate change, and opposed U.S. government steps to address climate change as has the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate.”
Climate change must be addressed globally and politically. That’s obvious. Bill McKibben has pursued this subject for years. Recently he cited Canada’s continuing backwater on climate change, but he noted also Biden’s commitment to offshore drilling leases and his “giant oil and a giant L.N.G. project, in Alaska.” Obama also opened new sites to drilling, caving to the vast economic pressures of the oil industry. Even climate concerned presidents can’t resist creating that kind of cognitive dissonance.
Is climate denial another form of lying? Or is it just another way to ward off the pressure of reality, an uncomfortably obvious dodge? In the political arena, it seems like deliberate lying, just as Trump’s popularity owes itself to a mountain of lies. Time Magazine and Jeff VanderMeer, to their credit, recently castigated Ron DeSantis and the Republicans for their appalling record of environmental failures in Florida. An interesting note: “More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.”
Such articles are not just a warning for Florida, a state that’s been environmentally abused forever. They are a warning about the disease of denialism, with “environmental decisions based on pay-to-play, punishing perceived enemies, climate denialism, a reliance on fossil fuels, and a fundamental misunderstanding of core issues and their effect on the future.”
One more thought: I don’t read David Brooks in the New York Times very often. But he wrote a reflective piece on his growing fears about AI. He is on the fence about whether AI will violate “the essence of being human.” I thought, if humans can’t begin to deal with climate change, how are they going to deal with all the unknowns facing us with AI? Will we be entering a stage of total denial?
The submersible Titan’s loss was no Greek tragedy. We had no hero with a tragic flaw; there was no grand discovery or revelation; we had, however, plenty of reversal of fortune (peripeteia). What we saw in the last week was a tragedy of spectacle, which humans always enjoy and which the media willingly provide.
At the same time, we and the media are guilty of giving short shrift to the thousands of desperate migrants now being lost at sea. A boat off Greece capsizes and hundreds die in the water. Viewers happily cut back to the more uncertain fortunes of the Titan. Its ending, predicted by some, was the anticlimax of a week-long deathwatch that drew millions of viewers. Few, I’m sure, wanted to think that the human drama was already over. Fewer still wanted to contemplate those hundreds dead in the Greek waters.
The four lost Titan passengers each paid $250,000 to die a quick, unsolicited death. An enormous air-sea search costing millions—as we will no doubt learn—was really a wasted effort since the sub imploded near the Titanic just an hour and 45 minutes after launch. Where was the effort to rescue the Greek immigrants?
Stockton Rush, the idiot savant who led OceanGate and piloted the dive, pitched the unimportance of safety and preferred innovation over proper testing and certification. The company will now be facing perhaps years of lawsuits. Rush already had a couple before his last and fatal dive.
I was immediately struck by the happy hubris of this guy in interviews. Well, how could sane people believe in someone who used off-the-shelf video controllers and RadioShack parts in vessels like this? An uncertified carbon fiber hull? Is the urge for perilous adventures so strong as to confound rational thinking? Two of the five passengers on board were experienced, smart, capable Titanic divers. They still bought in to this ride.
James Cameron, the seasoned ocean explorer (and “Titanic” filmmaker) was one of the few who spoke out about the disaster. He has made more than thirty successful dives to the Titanic. “OceanGate,” he said, “didn’t go through certification. It wasn’t peer-reviewed by other engineering entities, by any of these what they call classing bureaus that do certification for vessels and submersibles and things like that. That was a critical failure.”
I watched his interview on CNN. Toward the end he remarked on the supreme irony that both the Titanic and the Titan disaster were caused by hubris, that arrogant pursuit of power that goes against nature, the gods and human reason. So far, he’s the only commenter I’ve heard to use that word with regard to what happened in 1912 and what happened last week.
Titanic fascinates us because it seems like such a colossal failure of some kind of system back then, and 1,500 people paid the price for it. . . . The warnings were not heeded. They were warned about the ice, they had radio, Marconigrams, the Titanic captain was handed multiple warnings of ice ahead [yet] he steamed full ahead into a known ice field on a pitch dark night with no moon. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.
It took just over a hundred years to prove once again that when the fates align, humans are their mindless victims.