Armed and dangerous ... and headed into the shit

A few months ago,  I participated in a march to express my worries over climate change and to urge action.

Very few young people were in the march.  We were a bunch of geezers.

The march went past quite a few apartment buildings where young people were partying.  A couple of them waved out to us from a balcony where they were partying.

Here we were, middle aged and older, marching to make the world a better place for young people, but the youth didn't care enough to protest!

Beer, sex, and Instagram beat climate change protests!

If that's how it is here in liberal, progressive, and green Oregon, then should we be surprised that the US has not done any damn thing about climate change?

We witnessed yet another regression in this when the fucked up party skipped town, skipped state, and went into hiding in nearby Idaho all because their elected officials did not want to do anything about climate change and were, therefore, opposed to the cap-and-trade bill that was up for vote.

Having killed the climate crisis bill, the Republican senators said they would return to their jobs on Saturday. “Our mission was to kill cap-and-trade,” said senator Herman Baertschiger “And that’s what we did.”

Source

These young people are thanking the Republicans for screwing up their own futures?  How can this be?

When you have guns, everything is possible, it seems.

Joe Lowndes, a political scientist at the University of Oregon who researches rightwing politics, said: “If the Oregon Republican party were a European political party it would be an authoritarian far-right party. It really has that character, that extraordinary truculence,” he said.
During the standoff over climate crisis, Lowndes said, Republicans “were essentially gloating about having an armed wing of the party. That’s when you cut into the structure of constitutional democracy”.

The fucked up party, not only here in Oregon but throughout the country, has become the most powerful far-right country in power anywhere in the democratic world!

the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.

It is frightening to think that this is now the mainstream party!

The difference is that in Europe, far-right populist parties are often an alternative to the mainstream. In the United States, the Republican Party is the mainstream.
“That’s the tragedy of the American two-party system,” Mr. Greven said. In a multiparty government, white working-class populists might have been shunted into a smaller faction, and the Republicans might have continued as a “big tent” conservative party. Instead, the Republican Party has allowed its more extreme elements to dominate. “Nowhere in Europe do you have that phenomenon,” he said.

Will leave it to David Roberts for the last word:

Basically, this is future-of-the-species stuff, getting decided through a spectacle that's barely even able to break into the daily news cycle. And the next time around, there may not even be the pretense of democracy. We are truly headed into the shit. 

Happiness and negative visualization

As many posts have made it abundantly clear, I walk around with my own quota of stress and unhappiness.  Life in the ashram for this hermit is not simply eternal bliss, especially in these tRump times!

The good thing is that many, many years ago, I figured that it will be very, very, very rare for a human to be stress-free and happy.  I mean truly stress-free and happy.  I have also concluded, to a large extent, that it is through unhappiness that we understand and appreciate happiness.  Happiness is something that emerges from and within the context of stress and unhappiness. I wrote, for instance, when thinking about Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:

Happy families are those that are able to be happy despite their own versions of unhappiness.

Thus, when a student remarks that I always look too damn happy in my office, he has no idea how much of a validation it is for me that happiness is like a gorgeous lotus in a dirty pond.  The stress causing agents are all around me and yet, according to that student, I look happy all the time.

Source

It seems like increasingly people are rushing around trying to figure out where that fountain of happiness is from which they can take some big gulps.

I want to tell them that the first step is a simple one that every ancient religion has stressed for ever.  And that first step?  Be careful about the frame of reference that you use.

“Our mind just happens to [pick] whatever reference point seems to be salient at the time, whatever reference point we happen to notice, and it tends to particularly [pick] reference points [involving people] who are doing better than us, which kind of sucks,” Santos observed.
But again, there are some ways to interrupt this process. One is to periodically force oneself to try living without the amazing thing one has become accustomed to. For instance, a summer night or two without air conditioning might make the rest of the season much more enjoyable.
Short of actually depriving oneself of something nice, engaging in short thought experiments can help, asking “What if I didn’t have this thing?” For instance, people might ask themselves: What if I didn’t have this house? Which friend or family member would I have to ask for help? This “negative visualization” might help them appreciate their home, even for its faults.

Try this exercise for "negative visualization": What if tRump were not the President?  You see how joyful it is? ;)

Don't go chasing waterfalls

When the context comes up--and it always comes up in any class that I teach--I remind students that they can go to a Walmart and buy whatever they can afford to, or shop online for whatever that they can afford to ... but, no retailer sells at any price something that we often talk about--happiness.

I know that my point won't register on 99.9999 percent of young people.  I am pretty darn confident that a 20-year old me would have internally chuckled at such a comment from an old, bald, and bearded man.  But, every once in a while I make such comments in class because, well, it is my responsibility.

Ok, ok, the 20-year old me was really concerned about such issues.

By then, I had read a few works of literature in order to understand life and happiness.  I was blown away with the simple and powerful opener that Leo Tolstoy had in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham provided me with plenty to think about.  And so did Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  When helping my parents clean out their old place, I came across my old friend:

All those, in addition to the Tamil literature, and the little bit of Hindu philosophy that I had picked up, gave me insights into life.  And I now distill all those when I make those remarks to students.  Too bad if they don't want to pay attention to this bald old man!

These are also why I have always been puzzled by the American idea of the pursuit of happiness.  How can one pursue happiness?  "To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness."  I know for certain that I don't pursue it.

In practice, our strategies for finding happiness are usually self-defeating. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that much of what we do to gain happiness doesn’t pay off. It seems that aiming at happiness is always a misconceived project; happiness comes, as John Stuart Mill insisted, as the unintended outcome of aiming at something else. “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

Yet, we fool ourselves into the pursuit of happiness, and "the pursuit of happiness gave birth to the consumer society."

Thomas Jefferson lived in a world of slavery and pervasive inequality; he knew perfectly well that the world was not as it ought to be. But he believed, rightly, that a world in which people were free to pursue happiness would be one in which liberty would slowly spread, until all could benefit from it. ... But there is an important difference between us and the founding fathers. They saw life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the alternative to despotism and intolerance. We now can see that a society devoted to self-gratification may, in the end, destroy the conditions of its own existence.

It has been a short descent from the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" to Instagram.

Oh, say can you see

I use Twitter in ways that it serves me and nobody else. 

If users reply to my tweets, I won't know about those replies unless they are from accounts that I recognize.  If I am curious, I have to go looking for the replies.  Which is what I did about this tweet of mine, which went viral.

It went viral because of a soccer player. A woman. Whose name I had hashtagged: #MeganRapinoe.

One of the replies is this:

Nah. She's purely a disrespectful bitch. End of report.

— #MAGA Chris (@thaCDP) June 26, 2019

The "MAGA" patrol is on the prowl!  Calling a woman a "bitch" is par for the course for them, given how their Dear Leader boasts about grabbing pussies :(

Or, consider this reply:

yes thats brilliant
now im going to go and take a shit

— Conservative Values (@saynotoliberal) June 26, 2019

"saynotoliberal" is the ID.

Meanwhile, their Dear Leader took to his favorite mass broadcast medium and let loose against the soccer star.  Does he not have way more important issues to be concerned about?  Like the trade wars? Or the prospect of real wars?  If course he does not care about those--he knows how to constantly stoke his base, and there are few issues that get his base more excited than when he beats up on women.

Why are the "maga" maniacs so angry at a soccer player, who is integral to the team winning the World Cup? 

Because ... "she declines to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with her teammates."

After Colin Kaepernick began his kneeling protest three years ago, Rapinoe became the first prominent white or female athlete to do the same before a Seattle Reign match in September 2016. In response to her protest, the National Women’s Soccer League and U.S. Soccer Federation have spelled out their policies and tried to curtail Rapinoe’s acts. But she has continued to express herself in various forms. Standing tight-lipped during the anthem is essentially a compromise, but the image continues to look rebellious.

And you know how much the Dear Leader makes literal the adage that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Her stances don’t make her different from her teammates and a detriment to this great soccer program. They verify that she is a product of a revolutionary tradition.

I would never have imagined an American revolution being born in the soccer field!  That kind of a revolutionary spirit is how we will truly make America great again, after the Dear Leader is thrown out of the White House.

Caption at the source:
Megan Rapinoe celebrates one of her two goals against Spain in the Women’s World Cup round of 16 on Monday. 

Shame on us! :(

Earlier today,  I sat in silence after looking at the photograph below and the story behind it:

Source

A father and daughter. Migrants. Drowned. Dead. At the border.

The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments. 
The searing photograph of the sad discovery of their bodies on Monday, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils faced by mostly Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States.

We are bloody messed up. Way fucked up!

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to U.S. authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria. 
He set her on the U.S. bank of the river and started back for his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, but seeing him move away the girl threw herself into the waters. Martínez returned and was able to grab Valeria, but the current swept them both away.  

Even as I read the news, I was reminded of the little Syrian boy who was lying dead face down in the water:

Source

We are fucked up. Way fucked up!

Government is for losers. Exactly!

In this post from October 2010, I wrote about a golden rule from India: the "dharma" of a rich person is to create a lot of wealth, and to donate wealth to charity.

The old Indian wisdom recognized that creating wealth is not only ok, but is the duty for some.  But, what comes after that wealth .... something like the "noblesse oblige" in the Western contexts.  Here is one:

संपदो जलतरंगविलोल
   यौवनं त्रिचतुराणि दिनानि ।
शारदाभ्रपरिपेलवमायुः
   किं धनैः परहितानि कुरुध्वम् ॥

- सुभाषितसुधानिधि

Wealth is as temporary as a wave on still water. Youth is just a matter of few years. Our life it self is as uncertain as a cloud of Sharat month (where clouds could get formed and dispersed in a matter of minutes. No rain.) What is the use of all the wealth that you accumulate? Spend them in a way that is helpful to others.

That golden rule is from way back in time, well before the modern concept of countries and governments.  In those bad old days, with wealth and power concentrated with a few, while the overwhelming majority toiled away, charity helped, and helped a lot.  Perhaps charity also helped in the small geographic areas within which the rich and powerful lived.

Now, the rich and the powerful have international reach.  But, our collective problems are way beyond the neighborhood.  Take climate change, for instance.  No amount of philanthropy can tackle that kind of a challenge. Or public health in these times when infectious diseases can easily spread not merely within a country but also across countries.

Philanthropy is no match against the machinery of the government.  However, for the government to address these challenging collective issues, well, the rich and the powerful need to pay up.  And for them to pay their share Republicans need to first acknowledge that our collective challenges, like climate change, are for real and are not some elaborate hoaxes!

If they acknowledged these collective challenges, then they would automatically realize that individuals and charities cannot fight carbon, for instance, and that a well-funded government will be needed for such huge campaigns.

For now, the head in the sand racist party can only keep chanting "tax cuts".

Writing in the NY Times, gazillionaire Eli Broad argues:

I’ve come to realize that no amount of philanthropic commitment will compensate for the deep inequities preventing most Americans — the factory workers and farmers, entrepreneurs and electricians, teachers, nurses and small-business owners — from the basic prosperity we call the American dream.

He continues:

I invite fellow members of the 1 percent to join me in demanding that they engage in a robust discussion of how we can strengthen a post-Trump America by reforming our tax code.

But, the racist party and their Dear Leader that 63 million voted for, which loves to associate with the far-right, will perhaps merely associate Broad, who is Jewish, with their favorite target, who is also a big time philanthropist--George Soros.

Let's see what happens in November 2020.

There is no good news

Of course, only bad news makes news.  If it bleeds, it leads.  But still ... the bad news about the natural environment and climate change is not merely because such bad news sells.  It is not fake news either.

The bad news is for real.

So real that it has become surreal even here in Oregon.  The state that the rest of the country and the world imagines is populated only by tree-huggers and hipsters, is unable to move forward with a bill that would modestly address climate change.  We--even those of us who are not hipsters or tree-huggers--are being held hostage by the GOP!

Even when we think we might be able to do something, however small it might be, well, we are stuck going nowhere.

In my old country, the city where my folks live is running out of water.  Polar bears are rummaging for food in urban dumps.  The Sahel is now facing serious climate-change problems.  And then there is plastic.

The official tRump-toady #1--the Vice President--engages in some fantastic political verbal dance about all these:

Mike Pence declined repeated invitations to say the human-induced climate crisis is a threat to US national security.

He doesn't think it is a threat to anybody.  In fact, those of us who are alarmed by it all are the threat, according to him and his party of idiots:

“What I will tell you is that we will always follow the science on that in this administration,” the vice-president said, in answer to CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper’s first posing of the question.
Tapper responded: “The science says it is.”
“But what we won’t do,” said Pence, “and the Clean Power Plan was all about that, was hamstringing energy in this country, raising the cost of utility rates for working families across this country.”
Tapper interjected: “But is it a threat?”
Pence did not answer the interjection

When the country's executive leaders don't care, and are actively involved in spreading incorrect and misleading narratives, what can one do?

Saving the planet requires not racing to the moon again, or to Mars, but to the White House and up the steps of the Capitol, putting one foot in front of the other.

It is a long, long way to walk one foot in front of another until it is November 2020!

"ABC’s World News Tonight spent more than seven minutes reporting on the birth of royal baby Archie in the week after he was born — more time than the program spent covering climate change during the entire year of 2018." https://t.co/FZldGxo4xS

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) May 21, 2019

You can't always get what you want. You get what you need, oh yeah

Tom Cruise's character keeps talking about an "Ellie" in the movie Vanilla Sky. Thanks to a therapist, we then get to find out that it is not a woman's name, but L.E., which refers to Life Extension.  I don't want to reveal any more about the movie in case you have never watched it.  (It is not any classic; shrug your shoulders and move on!)

We humans seem to be increasingly obsessed with extending our life spans.  Keep in mind that the life span is different from life expectancy.  My favorite example to highlight this is Socrates--the philosopher, not the soccer player.  Socrates lived 2,500 years ago, and died at about 71 years of age.  He would have lived for more years had he not been given the death sentence.

Over the past 2,500 years, and especially over the last 200 years, we have dramatically increased the average life expectancy across the world.  More and more people make it to old age than ever before.   The life span revolution is only beginning:

[It] may be possible to lengthen lifespans further if improvements in health at the highest ages can be realised and if high quality elderly care is widely available. Indeed, if this is so, then the human longevity revolution is set to continue for some time still.   

I am in quite a minority when I look forward to the end at 75.  At some time, we have to die.  How much farther do we want to push this expiration date?  (And that is explored in Vanilla Sky.)

If the life in your years is supposed to matter more than the years in your life, it might feel like modern humanity has backed itself into a corner.

With an extension in our life span, with more years in our lives, what are we going to do with that time?  Catch up on sleep that we missed out on when working like a dog in the younger years?  Watch stupefying entertainment in three devices at the same time? Travel to the moon?

“The time has arrived in our modern era to stop trying to make us live longer ... Instead, we should just focus in on health extension rather than life extension.”

Makes sense to me.

Be careful about what you wish for:

"You don't want to live to be over 100 years old if the last 20 years of your life are spent in pain and sickness," Olshansky said. "Ideally, you want to compress the years of decay and disease -- what I call the 'red zone' -- into as few as possible at the very end of life. We should not continue to pursue life extension without considering the health consequences of living longer lives."

After 75, the probability of the "red zone" vastly increases, I would think.  Would you prefer to be in the red zone for a few years rather than exiting?

Nothing to see here in Oregon. Thanks for not visiting.

I watched In Bruges soon after it was released. A dark comedy that was well done.  The city and the architecture called me.  I figured that if life unfolded well, then I surely will go to Bruges some day.  That continues to be the plan.

As if that was not enough, a couple of years ago, a student was chatting with me about the summer he spent in Europe with his girl friend (who later broke up with him!)  He said they loved Bruges.

However, people in Bruges are not happy that there are millions of people like me who want to go there.  They are getting sick and tired of the tourist mob.

Last week the mayor, Dirk De fauw, elected in October under the slogan “Go with De fauw”, announced that the municipality would no longer advertise or promote day trips to the city. Measures would also be taken to cut back the number of cruise ships able to dock at nearby Zeebrugge from five a day to just two. Cruise companies will also be asked to dock during the week rather than at weekends to help spread the crowds.
“We have to control the influx more if we don’t want Bruges to become a complete Disneyland here,” De fauw told the Flemish TV channel VRT

I can certainly feel his pain; it is no fun when "travellers outnumber residents in Bruges city centre by about three to one."

Bruges is but merely one place where tourists are becoming a pain.  As the world has gotten affluent, domestic and international tourists are everywhere.  I witnessed this in India too. 

The magnitude of tourists is of serious worries to places all around the world.  Overtourism is a real problem for the locals, the natural environment, and for tourists too:

So if we think that you want to get your perfect selfie with, you know, Christ the Redeemer in the background because you're in Rio, you're talking about in some cases literal square meters of space that hundreds, even thousands, of people are flocking to get these photographs, and this has led to really, really crazy phenomena. So you know, for instance, during the California poppy super bloom this year, there were thousands of people descending on literal individual fields in certain small towns. And that's not really something that had occurred 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago.

We are victims of our economic progress.  Here in Oregon, we have come up with an awesome vaccination against tourists: We continue to spin tall tales about how awfully rainy and wet and miserable the conditions are.  This way, we can keep those pesky tourists away and enjoy the landscape all to ourselves ;)

Such gorgeous sights on gorgeous days can never happen in rainy, cloudy, Oregon.
So, head to Bruges instead ;)

Climate change and American consumerism

In a commentary that was published back in 2007, I wrote about a strange way of life here in the US, which I referred to as "an American solution to an American problem."  I wrote then:

Well, a few weeks after I came to this country for graduate studies, it was nearing Thanksgiving and the television ad for Alka-Seltzer that I watched then is what I refer to as American solutions to American problems. In this ad, the audio commentary and the pictures presented all the wonderful foods that the viewer would end up eating at Thanksgiving, which then resulted in stomach aches and heartburn. And, presto, Alka-Seltzer to the rescue! My reflexive thought was simple: if the problems came from overeating, then why not simply advise the viewer to eat less? Of course, as I have come to realize, to consume less is not American. (Yes, I, too, am an American!) Instead, the American way is to consume more, and then when problems develop savvy entrepreneurs provide solutions to facilitate further consumption.

It doesn't take any smarts to figure out that we consume a lot in the US.  I mean a LOT.  And I don't mean just about food. Anything. Everything.

This consumption is a problem. A big problem.  It is our consumption that is the cause of climate change.

Think about it for a minute.  And you will soon arrive at this framework:

Transportation (cars, buses, trucks, and planes) leads in greenhouse gas emissions, while electricity (coal and natural-gas power plants) is a close second. Industrial goods and services are third; buildings, fourth; and agriculture, fifth.
This way of measuring blame, however, misses something crucial: people. These industries are spouting carbon because customers demand their products: travel, electronics, entertainment, food, all sorts of stuff.

We like to travel. We like the latest smartphone. We like air conditioning. We like Netflix. We like stuff. A lot. We consume. A lot.

We demand, and the market delivers.

So, why are we always pointing at Exxon and Walmart and China as villains?  Maybe because it lets us off the hook?

There will be little incentive for businesses and governments to make these changes, however, if the people who support them—with dollars and votes, respectively—aren’t also making change a priority.
“Individual consumers cannot change the way the global economy operates on their own, but many of the interventions proposed in this report rely on individual action,” the report reads. “It is ultimately up to individuals to decide what type of food to eat and how to manage their shopping to avoid household food waste. It is also largely up to individuals to decide how many new items of clothing to buy, whether they should own and drive a private car, and how many personal flights to take.”

“It is ultimately up to individuals to decide."

I have joked forever that I am yet to meet an environmentalist who refuses a pay-raise.  Environmentalists also want the pay raises in order to travel. To get the latest smartphone. For air conditioning. To stream Netflix. For stuff.

In order to fight the Nazis, Americans sacrificed. With blood, sweat, and tears. Through rations. Fighting climate change will require different kinds of sacrifices.

We will have to fly less, drive less, Uber less. We will have to eat less red meat, drink less dairy, waste less food, and generally buy less crap that we don’t need.
A lot of Americans won’t want to do this!

We won't. But, we will, however, talk about climate change. A lot.

Loving the learning

My childhood friend and classmate Vijay, who died almost two years ago, was better than me by a whisker in the formal academic subjects in which we earned the marks and ranks.  It didn't show really in the scores because I couldn't care much about marks and ranks.  I had plenty of other things to worry about.

But, there was no comparison between Vijay and me when it came to the arts and humanities.  I couldn't draw even an egg, whereas Vijay could easily draw portraits and animals and .... He could act. He could orate. He knew books and authors.

Thankfully, we didn't have tests and exams on those because I would have failed.  And failed miserably.

My high school academic achievements or anything later on life too doesn't immediately reflect where I might have sucked.  And boy do I suck in almost everything in life!

I grew up in that kind of a system.  A system in which we never really had a choice and were stuck into pre-defined formats.  A choke-hold from which some of us had to work hard to flee, Vijay included.

The higher education structure in which I now work is one that provides students with plenty of opportunities to learn about different aspects of life.  Now, most of us are not like Vijay who excelled in everything.  Even if we are exceptional in a few areas, chances are pretty good that we might be just about average somewhere else.  Right?

Which means, now students have an option.  They could try to minimize the chances of being in classes where they might not do well, and maximize their grades elsewhere.  Thus, a math- and science-phobic person might completely avoid even a basic introduction to chemistry because that course could ruin their GPA.  Or, the worry that learning a foreign language might be difficult leads many to turn to the other forks in the educational road.

Students, thus, end up graduating with high GPAs.  But, what exactly does that mean when it comes to learning in which choices meant always taking the easy road?

The outliers like Vijay aside, do you care about students with high GPAs that resulted from a risk-minimizing learning strategy, or students with decent GPAs who pushed themselves outside their comfort zones and earned those C and B grades?

I have my preferred answer that is quite obvious.  But it is nothing but my preferred answer.  You have your own preferences.  Is there a correct answer?

I have the luxury of the furlough to think about such important issues.  I hope you too will pay attention to what it means to be educated in the 21st century, and what teachers like me have to think about..

A Sunday for Fathers

Oddly enough, I forgot to call and wish my father on Father's Day, and I got nothing from my daughter either.

Neither my father nor I will care about this omission.  Life is far greater than formal wishes on a single day. 

My favorite philosopher, Calvin, offers an insight, as he always does, into fatherhood.

Source

Fathers--and mothers too--make mistakes in plenty.  We try our best not to, but we err a lot.  There is, unfortunately, no "undo" ever in parenting.  Thankfully, whatever mistakes my parents made must have been only insignificant; we siblings have turned out alright.

Chances are that as children we made serious mistakes every single day.   Parents overlook most of them.  Sometimes, we also do what Calvin does:

At times, or perhaps lots of times, fathers and mothers can be, ahem, controlling:

They did what they had to do so that we could then enjoy being a kid:

It is not just kids who get to do nothing in the summer; some of us fathers who are on furlough also look forward to the long days of sun and warmth and doing nothing.

Happy Father's Day to me.  Oh, ok, to you too ;)

Would you rather have imperfect ways to grow more food, or let people starve?

I read this BBC report on "the man who helped feed the world."  And, yet again, I was blown away by the man's contributions to making the world a far more peaceful world by making sure that the people are fed.

The man is Norman Borlaug, whose work I have often noted in this blog and have also talked about with students.

As I have often remarked in this blog and elsewhere, a primary trigger for me to get to doing what I do now was the context in which I grew up--born into relative privilege with a great deal of material deprivation all around me.  I did not know how I could ever contribute to help in reducing that deprivation; but, I wanted to at least understand it.

Thus, even in the early semesters in grad school, I was impressed with how much people had invested their time and energy into not only understanding many of those issues but even doing something about them. 

One of those was Norman Borlaug.

In 2019, especially in the obese and overweight US of A where we routinely waste food without giving it a second thought, it might be difficult to imagine that not too long ago there was a real threat of food shortages. And famines.  While there were political reasons, such as Mao's crazy policies, the threat of undernourishment was real.  Which is where Borlaug's contributions in developing better varieties of staples take on remarkable weight.

In graduate school, it was a shock when I also read works that were intensely critical of Borlaug's work.  The volume and magnitude of his criticism seemed to increase with every passing day, especially over genetically modified (GMO) crops.

Borlaug was well aware of his critics even when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  In his acceptance lecture, Borlaug said:

Some critics have said that the green revolution has created more problems than it has solved. This I cannot accept, for I believe it is far better for mankind to be struggling with new problems caused by abundance rather than with the old problem of famine.

He didn't stop there; he added:

One must ask: Is it just to criticize the green revolution, with its recognized accomplishments, for failure to correct all the social-economic ills of the world that have accumulated from the days of Adam and Eve up to the present?

India's farmers, for instance, continue to face immense problems not because of the Green Revolution but because of atrocious politics, which was demonstrated yet again in the latest round of elections.  If the socio-economic structure were different and better, then the rewards of the Green Revolution would have been distributed a lot more equitably than is currently the case.

Above and beyond the Green Revolution, thinking about Norman Borlaug makes me wonder if the bright minds of today are dedicating themselves to the urgent human problems all around, especially in the less affluent countries.

There is a lot more research and development work on the rich people's problems than on the poor people's problems. Viagra is a poster-child for this! The apathy towards malaria and Ebola, always worry me.  Where are the Borlaugs of today?

And in a world in which the United  Nations and its agencies like the FAO, which actively supported Borlaug, have been terribly weakened no thanks to the United States, we are left to the small mercies of philanthropic foundations who tinker at the margins.

There once was a man named Norman Borlaug!

The existential ambivalence that haunts immigrants

I have often wondered, in this blog too, on what home means in such a modern world where moving around is not unheard of.  Though we relocate and make our lives in completely alien settings, we more often than not forget that this is a new practice in human history.  Through her first forty-plus years, my father's mother barely got around to even forty miles away from her birth place.  Forty miles!  And her parents knew a world that was even smaller.  And here I am ten thousand miles away from all those settings.

The two book reviews that I did recently completed were also about the lives of people making a home for themselves in places far away from the Subcontinent.  One book was about home here in the US, and the other was about the Caribbean.

Life is not always easy when we are far, far away from our original homes.  There are moments, yes, when it hits me hard that I am an immigrant. The reminders coming through remembrances of things past, of places and people and foods and music and everything else.  As the author of this essay notes:

Still, no matter how settled, a queasy unsettledness, an existential ambivalence, haunts the immigrant.

An existential ambivalence.  How wonderfully she has articulated that emotion. Damn these writers who can write so well!

The author is no novelist. She, Ruth Behar, is an academic. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan.  A daughter of Cuban immigrants, Behar writes:

I have surprised myself by ending up becoming more of a rooted creature than I ever imagined I’d be. I have held on to the same job, the same house, the same address, the same husband (I, who never expected to marry). I gave my son, my only child, who is now the age I was when I thought I was never going to settle down, the gift of an immense stability – firm and steady ground on which to stand.
But when I travel and a stranger asks if I’m from Michigan, I immediately reply: ‘I live there, but I’m not from there.’ I feel compelled to tell everyone about my immigrant past: ‘I was born in Cuba, my ancestors were Jews who spoke Yiddish and Judeo-Espanyol, and I grew up in New York. I live in Michigan because it’s where I work.’
I suppose I fear that people might get a mistaken impression of me if they think I am from Michigan. It’s a desire to tell the truth of who I am, to assert I am a person of many diasporas, I come from somewhere else, I don’t have a firm allegiance to any single place. I am passing through, grateful for a place to rest my wings.

This existential ambivalence might not understandable at all to those who have not moved around a whole lot.  But, it is real.  It is an everyday struggle even if one has merely moved from "home" in one part of the country to another.

When I lived in California, an acquaintance missed her home so much that she quit her job and returned home to Chicago.  She missed the "home" that Chicago was, even though it was merely a couple of hours of flight away.

The existential ambivalence can haunt one in other ways too, like with the "descendants of enslaved people in the Americas."  The author of that essay writes about her sense of belonging after taking "a heritage-focused trip" to Nigeria and Ghana.

There are many ways to nurture a healthy cultural identity, but a journey “home” — to a place that makes you feel that you truly belong — is an especially effective one. 

We are people of many diasporas struggling in our ways to deal with the existential ambivalence.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them"

One of the many movie lines (almost) that Ronald Reagan used was the one about the most terrifying words in the English language: "'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

His party loyalists cheered him.

The reality is far from that.  In fact, it is closer to what Maya Angelou said: "When someone tells you who they are, believe them."  Almost always, except when the chief executive is from the GOP, the government is here to help.  Under the GOP Presidents, it seems true that those are some terrifying words.

Back when tRump was merely one of the contenders in the GOP primary, when he launched his blitzkrieg, his supporters cheered him on and some even defended him by saying that the media and his critics were taking tRump literally but never seriously.

But, those of us who adopted the Angelou guideline, took him literally and seriously.  How could we not?  He was so obvious. So transparent in what he said and did.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them."

And here we are, when the President and his government machinery cruelly turns away the asylum seeking desperate people!

Caption at the source:

A protester holds a sign during a demonstration outside of the James R. Browning United States Courthouse on June 11th, 2019, in San Francisco, California. Dozens of activists staged a demonstration in support of restoring protections for asylum seekers.

tRump proves that reagan was right about the terrifying words in the English language.

The good thing is that the majority of my fellow citizens will not play his cruel games.  We may not be Jesus-loving Christians, but we practice a lot more of Jesus's preaching than they do when they support tRump.

A majority of my fellow Americans are like the jurors in the recently concluded trial in Arizona, where Scott Warren was accused as being a danger to the country all because he is a humanitarian. A Good Samaritan.  He provided water and food to migrants in the harsh desert.  That was his crime.

In the closing argument, the US Attorney--from the government to help us--said this:

“He gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay...He did a bad thing.” -- Anna Wright, @USAO_AZ in her closing argument that #ScottWarren should be convicted. pic.twitter.com/jm67RYlzX1

— No More Deaths (@NoMoreDeaths) June 7, 2019

He did a bad thing, for which the government wanted to send him to prison for 20 years!

The jury didn't buy that argument.  It ended in a mistrial.

For now, at least, tRump and his terrifying government have been held under check.  My hope is that the reign of terror will end soon.  We will return to the days of a helpful government.

Separate and unequal

As I grew older, I stopped being a sports spectator. Investing time, money, and emotions on people playing does not appeal to me anymore.  Yet, I follow the news about major sporting events because, well, it is news after all.

When I read in the news that a losing semi-finalist at the French Open cried, I couldn't but laugh.  Crying over losing in a sport?  A sport?  At least the Tom Hanks character was dealing with a player crying in a bygone era; but in 2019 a professional cries about losing in a sport?

There is also the soccer World Cup going on.  It is not much talked about though, even by soccer fans, because, well, it is the women competing.  A sport really matters only when men play. That's why the women playing in team America get paid only 38 cents on the dollar compared to the men's team.  Does it matter that the men's team has never won the championship but the women have?  Three times the World Cup champions American women soccer teams have been.

But, nobody cares, and they get 38 cents on every dollar the loser men get!

During the last World Cup, the men's team did not even qualify for the tournament!

And, oh, the women's team has practically ruled at the Olympics ever since it became an official sport there.

You can see why the news interests me.  What women do and accomplish matters very little:

this summer marks the 20th anniversary of the legendary 1999 World Cup final in which the U.S. women’s national team defeated China on penalty kicks before 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The '99ers remain American sports icons, but they also epitomize U.S. Soccer’s neglect. The team returned victorious from that World Cup as national heroes poised for huge commercial success. An outline of Brandi Chastain on her knees in exultation after her winning goal could have become a logo as ageless and commercially valuable as Michael Jordan’s Jumpman.

Such is the state of the world!  The high ranking for the team does not translate into prestige and money:

Serena Williams, asked by reporters to comment on the women’s soccer team’s lawsuit after a second-round victory at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., called the pay discrepancy “ludicrous,” adding, “I think at some point, in every sport, you have to have those pioneers, and maybe it’s the time for soccer.”

A rational person would think so!  But, the soccer-loving men simply don't want the women's tournament to be shoved down their throats!

Oh well ... What do I know anyway! ;)

To be happy where you are

I have not been on multi-day cruise ship vacations.  I hope that I won't ever do it.  Or, in the worst case, it will happen way, way, way later in my life.

For one, I hate to be stuck with no exit.  It is tough enough to fly all the way to India.  In the plane for hours that feel like days!

And then the all you can eat whenever you want to eat.  A big pile of food in front of me is a huge turnoff.

The forced, staccato, conversations with strangers will drive me insane.  To disembark at touristy places with their touristy gift shops and their touristy cafes and their touristy people to serve will make me want to take the final plunge from the tallest deck!

Dana Gioia has authored a poem in The American Scholar, in which he writes about the cruise-ship carnage.  He writes that it will give him mal de mer.

Gioia has more to say.  Something more profound.  The poem is not merely about cruise-ships.  It is about happiness.

Gioia writes:

I feel no need to vacate my own existence.
Isn’t the point to be happy where you are?
But so little in life is about being happy.

"So little in life is about being happy."

In our daily lives, very little apparently gives people happiness that travel is to get away from it all and to seek that happiness somewhere in the middle of the ocean, while drooling over:

iced pyramids of rosy shrimp and crab claws,
slabs of smoked salmon, lattices of fresh cut cheese,
ripened tomatoes, artichokes with aproned sous-chefs
slicing pink roast beef

"Isn’t the point to be happy where you are?"

If one is not "happy where you are," then the end of the vacation will also be a shell-shocking return to the reality of unhappiness.  On the other hand, when we are happy where we are, travel makes life that much more enjoyable.

My horoscope says that there is travel happening in less than a month.  But, it won't be on a cruise ship. No mountains of food. But, it will be plenty of fun and memories.

Do monkeys take long showers?

Here at home, I usually take long showers. Because I can. We live in an area of abundance of water.  So rich in water that we know that it is only a matter of time before we get climate-change refugees 'streaming' into our state from the east and south.

But, when traveling, especially in India, it is always a quick "bath," as they say in the old country.  My father is always surprised at my quick turnaround.  This past trip too it happened.  "You are already done?," he asked me. I told him that Uncle RM, who was known for his "காக்கா குளியல்" (to mean that he had very, very quick baths) remarked that the less we bathe the better it is.

Bathing less is better.  Sounds contrarian, right?  But then he was a contrarian.

Anyway, I continued with my father my explanation of some ways in which RM was right.  Bathing, with or without soaping ourselves, dries up the skin.  I then quoted my doctor's advice, that most of the water and soap should be only for a few specific parts of the body.  You know well what they are, correct?

As it always happens, I didn't get no respect ;)

Think about it.  We humans are animals.  How often do you see other mammals taking leisurely baths?  Most would rather not go anywhere near water other than to drink it.

I don't mean to suggest that we stop showering.  Hell no.  But, if we start from that point of departure that the largest organ--the skin--needs to be treated with care, then we will think about showers also very differently.

There’s no hard and fast rule for this although dermatologists agree that as a society, we shower too often.
Many of us douche daily, however, if you’re not doing anything too strenuous, you can shower every other day, not smell offensive and ensure your skin retains those vital oils that too much washing depletes.

Perhaps I now have your attention.  How about washing clothes then?  Changing the linen?  How frequent should these activities be?

Aha, got you thinking, eh!

I tell ya, even the underwear you can rethink:

While the thought of reusing your undergarments for days on end might make some people shudder, an underwear line from Danish company, Organic Basics, has certainly grabbed our attention. The company claims that you don’t have to wash a pair for weeks as its products kill bacteria and odours, leaving you feeling fresh and clean.

For once, an ad that doesn't use female models but only objectifies men, eh ;)  What is with the tattoos though?

Yes, there is a reason for this post--it is getting hot here.

Source

We are under a heat advisory!

The heat makes me sweat. Don't worry--I will shower!

From The Tamil Kitchen

The other day, we watched the first episode of Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat. A few months ago, I bought Preeti Mistry's The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook as a gift after reading about her in the NY Times.  And, oh, how can I forget Yotam Ottolenghi or  Nik Sharma or ... This a glorious time for cookbooks and food shows, it feels like.

And there are kitchen gadgets galore.  A few minutes even in a small little kitchen store leaves me dazed, and wondering about my rather primitive kitchen where even the knives are not sharp, very much like me!

Yet, home cooking is becoming equally rare.

Not only is cooking at home a rapidly dying tradition, the foods that people eat are far from healthy--despite all those cookbooks and shows and all the scientific evidence that is touted every day.  Here in the US, and seemingly everywhere.  The global food revolution "has overwhelmed traditional diets pretty much everywhere in the world, and at an astonishing speed. This revolution is making massive numbers of people fat and sick."  I agree that "Cooking isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill."

Most of us "traditionalists" who cook at home will agree with this author who writes:

Here’s why I cook:
I like the way that closely following a recipe can alleviate pressure after a long day of having to make all the decisions.
I love how a dish that worked, or a meal that everyone liked, has the power to change my day.
I like that pulling off a good meal when you least expect it is the fastest way to feel victorious, even when real life does not.
I like the way that, even when I’m standing over the stove, cursing the recipe writer who suggested that onions might caramelize in 10 minutes, I’m totally absorbed. I’m not on group texts. I’m not following the outrage of the moment on Twitter. I’m getting a brief, needed respite and refuel from fretting over our democracy or forcibly separated families or any of the other horrible things humans do to one another. 

Indeed.

Well, except the part about "closely following a recipe," which I don't.

Last night, it was a table for four at The Tamil Kitchen ;)  Good times were had without junk food, without recipes, and without complicated gadgetry.  We had salt, fat, acid, sugar.  And laughs.

Jallianwala Bagh. Tiananmen. Gezi Park.

I was in graduate school, when the protests gathered momentum in Tiananmen Square.  As a news junkie, as one who always wondered whether India or China had a better development model, and as one who was increasingly devoted to individual rights and democracy, I had been reading news reports about the student demonstrations and getting pumped up myself.  The sight of something like a Statue of Liberty in the middle of the protests was remarkable and inspiring.

Though there were a number of students from China, I always hesitated discussing such sensitive topics with them.  It was almost an unwritten rule that any troubling aspect about China was off limits.

Once, I accidentally crossed that line and asked a classmate, Rongsheng about Tibet.  He sensed where I was going and immediately made it clear that Tibet is, and always has been, a part of China and that the government would, therefore, take every possible to step to keep the country whole.  Case closed. End of discussions.

I felt it was a tragedy that I could not engage with Chinese students and get a sense of how they perceived the Indo-China war of 1962, or about Mao's disastrous experiments, or the then contemporary events at Tiananmen Square.

Only a couple of days after the quickly assembled statue of the lady with the torch went up, the Chinese government sent in the military.  I watched on television the tanks rolling in.

The sight of tanks was ominous, and echoed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that we had read about and watched with tears rolling down the dramatization of those events in the movie Gandhi,

Political structures that do not respect and value individual rights and lives have always gone to extremes to squash protests and eliminate dissent, even if that means killing many even with the world witnessing.

That is now unfolding now in Sudan.

Nicholas Kristof, recalls what he witnessed at Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, and concludes with this:

One day I believe we will witness the arrival of freedom in the world’s most populous country. In my mind’s eye, I envision a memorial erected on Tiananmen Square to the heroes of 1989, perhaps taking the form of a weeping rickshaw driver with a wounded student.

I hope Kristof's vision comes true. 

I, for one, have no hopes that individual rights and democracy will become the basis for China's politics and, therefore, do not envision a memorial at Tiananmen Square.

Caption at the source:
In Tiananmen Square in 1989, a symbolic Statue of Liberty named the "Goddess of Democracy" was erected during the protests.

Making Topophiles out of Navigational Idiots

I was a FOB graduate student when I heard people all jazzed about something called a "monarch butterfly."  I simply could not understand the hullabaloo.

This was back in the dark ages before Google and Wikipedia and the rest.  One had to talk to people or search for information in the library in order to get questions answered.  I chose the easier route and asked a few people what the deal was with the monarch butterfly.

When they explained it to me, well, I too was jazzed, and I too started talking about it.  And, during my one and only camping experience ever, I even got to see a few of those butterflies.

What is so special about them?  This butterfly migrates. Over thousands of miles.  A tiny butterfly!

We knew little about this remarkable feat until relatively recently, when the Canadian entomologist Frederick Urquhart made his discoveries. After searching for hiding places where his country’s monarchs might be hibernating, and not finding any, he got the brilliant idea of tagging 300,000 butterflies with a number and a request (obviously in minuscule writing) to let him know where the animal had been found. He eventually learned that Canadian monarchs travel all the way to Texas and Mexico. They get there by orienting to the sun’s position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. In 1976, Urquhart made front-page news with his announcement of an overwintering site in the Mexican mountains. Since then more such sites have been discovered, always at high altitude, each one packed with millions of butterflies.

NPR's Ari Shapiro asks David Barrie, who has authored a book on Supernavigators whether humans have  "innate abilities to navigate the way that other animals do."  To which Barrie says:

Well, I believe we do, but we have to cultivate them. The trouble is that we've been civilized now for a little while, and we've become more and more dependent on technology. You know, 800 or 900 years ago, the magnetic compass came into use, and then we had, you know, the sextant and the chronometer and so on. Now we've got GPS.
GPS is a marvel. I mean, it is an astonishing technological achieve, but our increasing and exclusive reliance on it is turning us into kind of navigational idiots. We're losing the ability to exercise our natural skills. And from my perspective, almost more sadly, we're being more and more cut off from the natural world as a result. We no longer look up from our little glowing screens and observe the world around us. And I think we may discover that this has quite profound implications both for our physical health but also for our spiritual health, too.

There is more and more evidence that ditching GPS is good for our brains:

In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.

Given that such brain research is new, and a smartphone GPS is even newer, there is much yet to be understood:

What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

There are plenty of other benefits, big and small, tangible and intangible:

Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical observation and problem-solving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to the world. And by turning our attention to the physical landscape that sustains and connects us, we can nourish “topophilia,” a sense of attachment and love for place.

Aha, I can now call myself a topophile too!

What about the seven ages of women?

When driving to work in the morning, I spotted a mother and child walking to the neighborhood school.  The tot who looked like a first-grader had a pink backpack on her, and was holding on to her mother's hand.

I wondered though if she was indeed holding her mother's hand, or if the mother was dragging her to school.

I was then reminded of Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" soliloquy, in which the bard describes the whining schoolboy and his satchel.

But that got me thinking that the entire soliloquy is only about the boy/man.  Even though Shakespeare sets up the world as a stage where "all the men and women" are merely players.  After that set up, all he describes is the seven ages of man. Not of a woman.

When this revelation hit me, I could not understand how I had missed it all these years of talking and blogging about the world being a stage with all of us having our entrances and exits.  I wondered then whether girls and women have always sniggered at this soliloquy as nothing but a male's perspective.  And, even more, I wondered what the female equivalent might be.

I am confident that there exists in this world at least one such feminist take on this, with a soliloquy that describes the world as a stage in which a girl grows up into womanhood and then on to old age "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Here is Shakespeare describing the seven ages of "man":

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

I am on a diet ... really!

Consider the following excerpt from here:

 A satiating diet includes foods that are high in protein (such as fish),; high in fiber (whole grains, for example) and high in fruits and vegetables. It contains healthy fats, such as the polyunsaturated fats found in avocados, and includes dairy products such as yogurt. Perhaps surprisingly, it might also include capsaicin, the substance that makes jalapenos and other peppers so hot.

Guess what?  That pretty much is my diet too. Except for the fish.

Foods with protein? Check. (rarely ever animal protein though.)
High in fiber? Check.
High in fruits and vegetables? Check.
Healthy fats? Check.
Capsaicin? Check.

Of course, this is not anything new.  It is, for all purposes, a healthy Indian vegetarian feast.

I present to you the dinner from last night--home-cooked, of course:

Spinach cooked with seasoned cumin seeds and red chili flakes, and then gently boiled with coconut milk and shredded coconut, to which I added cubes of paneer that were cooked in ghee (clarified butter) ... this was served over white rice. 
The side was a salad with cucumber, onions, tomatoes, cilantro, tossed with freshly squeezed lime and then freshly and coarsely ground black pepper. 

Cheese and ghee? Yep. Healthy.  Coconut milk? Yep. Healthy.

What is so special about that combination?

What’s so special about these foods it’s that each of them possesses specific characteristics that benefit our health either by decreasing hunger, reducing body fat, lowering blood sugar, improving blood pressure or increasing metabolism. For instance, yogurt contains protein, calcium and lactic acid bacteria, which are the live and active bacteria that help with the growth of good bacteria in the gut. A healthy gut microbiome has been found to help control body weight and improve other aspects of health.

Scientists being scientists, they "don`t have the answers yet, but we are planning further studies that we hope will address these questions."

Seriously, why do scientists even bother doing these expensive studies when I could have provided them with the answer for a fraction of that cost! ;)

I have always believed that healthy eating can/should also mean eating tasty foods.  It never ever has to mean any big sacrifice.  A satisfying full meal where we don't deprive ourselves of the fat and salt and sugar.  If we deny us those, then that is exactly what we will end up dreaming about all the time, which does not contribute to good mental health, leave alone the physical part.

Oh, there was a finishing piece to the dinner.  This:

Source

And in between I drink ... Black coffee

Most of the time at home, I operate in silence.  Other than the low-decibel traffic-noise or bird-chirping, or the occasional loud gardening sounds, it is mostly a quiet home.  Even most ashrams in India aren't this quiet, I would think.

When I want to have music in the background, I love to play one of the few vinyls that I have purchased over the years from the used-stuff-stores.  Or, the mix-tapes from the old days.  Or the CDs.  And, yes, sometimes I also stream Pandora or YouTube.

There is something magical about lifting the turntable arm, placing the LP, and the sounds then filling the home.  Like the magic of starting with vegetables and grains, and ending with tasty dishes with the aroma filling the home.

These days, it seems like fewer and fewer people prepare meals in their kitchens, and even fewer play music with LPs, CDs, and tapes.  Music is streamed.  Straight into one's ears, while the rest of the home can be a quiet zone.

But, the ability to instantly stream any music from anywhere has also completely devalued music itself.  NPR's Ari Shapiro notes that "It feels to me like as we go from purchasing physical things, like CDs, to purchasing MP3s on iTunes to now just streaming, the connection to the music we listen to has become weaker."

Shapiro's guest Amy Wang agrees with him:

So that's the hypothesis for why live events are growing so much. And people want to go to concerts and festivals more than ever because if you can stream things so easily and so openly every day, then you want to crave that emotional connection to an artist that you can get maybe in person or via some other means rather than just buying their music. 

The connection to the music is weaker.  Music is not merely about the notes.  It is about emotions.  The emotional connect is now weaker.  Which is why the old and the young want to go to live concerts.  The old go to concerts where the even older musicians are far from their best selves, and sometimes are unable to hit the notes.  It does not matter for the audience, who are there for the emotional connect.  They would even sing along and drown out the musician!

What an irony!  My father has stories about his younger days when live concerts were the only way one could listen to musicians.  And then the radio came to his village.  A few rich people who had radios played them loud enough for the poorer neighbors also to listen.  The record-player and then the big-fat spool-tape players made listening at any time possible.  Over the next couple of decades, we rapidly moved to compact cassette tapes and CDs.  All through these, the listener could still emotionally connect with the musician.

Streaming killed the emotional connect.  We humans die for the emotional connect.  And we now can't wait for the live concerts.  I am sure my father wonders about such craziness that he has been witness to.

Whether it is music, or food, or sex, or talking, or whatever, ultimately there is nothing that can substitute for the real, live, experience.  The sooner we realize this, the healthier we will be.

Maybe I will break the silence by playing the Sarah Vaughan LP.  Meanwhile, you can listen to her Black Coffee.

The inglorious anti-intellectualism

Consider this:

[Folks] can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree

If you are nodding in agreement, then chances are that you are a tRump supporter thinking that your Dear Leader said this.  I am  also surprised you are here at this blog!

On the other hand, if you feel outraged by that statement, and are ready to fire off yet another Facebook post on how stupid tRump is, well, chances are that you were so maniacally supportive of Bernie Sanders that you still don't understand how you were a part of the reasons why tRump and not Hillary Clinton is the President.

tRump didn't say that about art history.  He cannot be bothered about it.  Right now, he is more concerned about how nasty Meghan Markle is!

It was Obama who dissed art history.

Beating up on liberal education is awesome bipartisanship!  Soon after Obama's remark, the editor of Inside Higher Ed even provided a chart on such bipartisan statements!

But, yes, Obama is no tRump.  He immediately realized his error and then even sent a handwritten apology.

However, the bipartisan beating up of liberal education continues.

Little defense of liberal education for an enlightened citizenry has been heard from any prominent political leader — even Democrats such as Barack Obama, whose education, two books written before his presidency and speeches were more steeped in liberal arts than any president in memory, but who as president caved in to lobbies for STEM education and school privatizers.

Take Mayor Pete, for instance.  With his awesome resume and accomplishments, he is a perfect example of what liberal education can do.  At Harvard, he majored in history and literature.  Kamala Harris majored in political science and economics.  Do I expect them to go rah-rah about the importance and value of liberal education? Nope.  Because it will be a vote-losing "elite" talk, in contrast to the lessons from the Coriolanus story--his life became a mess because he thought he was too good to seek approval from the masses.

So, everybody gangs up to beat up on liberal education. It is not good for democracy, and not good for progress.  It is already getting to be late for any course correction; RMS Titanic meets a white floating thing :(

Have you ever seen an obese turkey vulture?

After the long, dark, days in these northern latitudes, when life all around slowly seems to shut down, spring does provide a wonderful rebirth of life.
Plants shoot up from the ground.
Trees blossom.
Birds fly and tweet.
Animals run around everywhere.

Before moving to this valley that has now been home for 17  years, I had never witnessed such a cycle of life.  There is a rhythmic beauty in it, along with a profound message of the cosmos being far grander that we can possibly imagine.

It is also the time for nature's scavengers.

In the winter months, the red-tailed hawks sit there on telephone poles and tree branches, with a good view of the action down below.  They don't worry about the rain or the cold, it seems.  But, I rarely ever see them down the ground pecking away at their favorite carrion because, well, there is not a whole lot of life running around and dying.

Now that we are well into the spring, with the first day of summer only a few days away, the hawks are rarely ever on the telephone poles and tree branches.  They are down on terra firma--a word that I learnt from an old high school friend who has made his home in Czechia--feasting away on the rotting flesh.

The turkey vultures gracefully glide in spirals that make me dizzy watching them.  They seem to dance to a waltz that I cannot hear.  While soaring above, they look so beautiful, but when they are on the ground and relatively close by, the birds with their small little faces makes me wonder if somebody mistakenly glued on a wrong head from a different toy!

I don't ever imagine anybody calling up the public health authorities reporting a dead deer. Or a dead skunk.  There is no need ever.  Nature's scavengers seem to be on the job 24x7.  I saw a hawk pecking away at the deer.  Fresh, organic, food for the raptor, which seemed to be in a rapture over the abundant food.

Yet, the birds do not get obese from these feasts.  When was the last time I ever saw a hawk or a turkey vulture so out of shape that it could not fly?

I suppose we humans are the only animals who live to eat, and to eat in excess, while the other animals eat to live and then spend the rest of their time sitting at telephone poles watching us crazy humans obsessed with doing things oblivious to all the transcendent beauty that is all around us.  The gracefully gliding turkey vulture witnesses us rushing about in mad pursuit of whatever it is that distracts us from whatever it is that our lives should be about.

If only we would pause and ponder about our lives and make it something above and beyond a simple scavenger hunt!