Only a few more days to kill

The incoming Biden administration will, of course, overturn many of the current president's policies.  It is no secret.  So, the current administration is on a pace to do whatever can be done before Inauguration Day, 2021.

One of those that is being rushed is not one that will ever sound important to be rushed.  Only a few might believe it has a high priority.

To execute as many federal death row inmates as possible before January 20, 2021.

Federal executions were restarted only this past summer--on July 14th.  Yes, ironically, on Bastille Day--a month after the storming of the prison led to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The current administration and its staunchest supporters do not think that the powerful state using its machinery to end of life of humans has anything to do with the Rights of Man or the words humane and humanity.  And, yes, even more ironical that they are the supposedly pro-life religious party that eagerly seeks to end lives.  The late Christopher Hitchens articulated well this blood-thirst of the religious:

The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

What we do with the mighty power of the government machinery is “a mirror” on ourselves.

The reflection in the mirror is not what I want to see.

The Justice Department published a rule change, set to take effect this month, allowing federal executions by methods other than lethal injection, including firing squads or electrocution, in certain circumstances.

They are so pro-life that they want to bring back the firing squads!

These are the same anti-government people who have the utmost faith that the government is doing the right thing really, really well!

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

So, if their plans work out well, "the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump’s federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century."

All these in addition to the nearly 300,000 that they condemned to die because of a pandemic that they couldn't care about, and do not care about even now.

What a tragedy that the sanctity of the fertilized ovum is the only one that qualifies as worthy of their support!

Do corporations give birth and breastfeed?

Six years ago, in this post, I wrote about the number of women scientists who were involved in India's success with the Mars orbiter, and included the following image too:

Women rocket scientists.  How awesome, right?

I don't know their back stories.  But, chances are good that if those scientists are also mothers, then child care was never a big worry for them--because, grandparents, almost always grandmothers, took care of the young ones while the parents were off at work.  Nuclear families in which the parents, especially mothers, exclusively take care of their kids is more the exception than the rule in the old country.

Of course, that is not the case here in the United States.

And now the coronavirus has completely upended every aspect of our lives, including schooling and day care centers, which then requires parents to take care of their children 24x7.  In most cases, this huge task falls on mothers, which is a huge challenge when they are also working from home.  It is even more of a challenge if they suddenly became unemployed.

According to research from Syracuse University released last month, more than 80% of adults in the country not working in order to care for children who would be in school or daycare if not for COVID-19 are women. A recent paper published in the academic journal Gender, Work & Organization found that mothers of young children reduced their working hours four to five times more than fathers.

It.Is.A.Nightmare.

Though the following metaphor that Betsey Stevenson uses is not the best one for the context, it conveys the point:

Although young men today are much more likely to profess their belief in gender equality than those of previous generations, they are not significantly more likely to divide most household tasks equitably, from child care to grocery shopping. And COVID-19 does not seem to be changing this dynamic, Stevenson says.
“If the guy is driving toward the cliff of not feeding the children, and the woman is driving toward the cliff of not feeding the children, she pulls off first and she feeds the children,” Stevenson said. “And the problem is that if he knows that she’s going to pull off first, then he wins the game of chicken.”

If that is the situation now, what might be the long-term effects?

Child care is one of those issues where we still really think it’s a personal problem: ‘You made the choice to have those little rugrats. You deal with them.’ Compare that with elder care. We recognized it was a social issue. We built a series of nursing homes and institutional care, and we have societal grants to cover some of that through Medicaid. But with child care, we’ve said this isn’t a social issue. And I think the pandemic has revealed that it is a social issue.
Child care is not a personal issue, it’s not a women’s issue; it’s actually an economic issue. It’s an economic issue because we need to invest in children.

Again, compare with India, where not only child care is a part of an extended family issue, elder care too is part of an extended family issue.

Meanwhile, here in the US, we are leaving parents and their children behind even as we spend gazillions on supporting persons corporations like the airlines.

Come September, I don’t think that the pandemic is enough behind us that every job would be back anyhow. Can we get every job back without child care? Absolutely not. The question is, how much is a lack of child care holding us back, versus how much are people still staying at home because they don’t want to get Covid?
Even if child care is not holding us back in September or October, we are letting the whole child care system erode in such a way that it’s not going to be there for us when we are fully ready to go back.

How so?

Where I really see the child care crisis holding us back is once we are ready to have all the jobs come back and we’re really ready to recover, even though we’ll have opened the schools, opened the child care centers, the workers aren’t going to be there, the slots aren’t going to be there. At the state level, we saw this in the 2008 recession

Very depressing!

Does Professor Betsey Stevenson have a solution?

 The solution has got to be government spending on child care. It’s going to have to be government encouraging and rewarding businesses that provide employees with the flexibility they need in order to balance work and child care. The policymakers debating legislation right now need to realize that caregiving is an essential part of our economy. And it’s an investment that when they make that, they are going to see benefits in terms of economic growth.
The same folks who are happy to cut corporate taxes because they think that’s going to unleash a wave of growth, I want them to realize that if they want to unleash a wave of growth, they need to invest in the next generation so that the current generation can do their work and the next generation is prepared to do it even better.

I am on board with this.

I was/am never a fan of government-subsidies for adults to have children.  But, I have also always believed that subsidies for human issues are far more important than subsidies for corporations to screw our lives.  However, as long as we have a party that is committed to protecting the life of abstract "persons" that corporations are, and with their party faithful committed to defending the "life" of a fetus in a petri dish while not caring about investing in life that is already here alive and suffering, we are doomed.

So ...

Vote accordingly.

Lynching's stepchild

The President and his attorney general, who couldn't care less about the rule of law, beat their chests and proclaim themselves to be defenders of the constitution only when it pleases them.  The death penalty is one of those instances.

After nearly two decades, the federal government resumed capital punishment.  Yes, resumed, and in the middle of a pandemic that is also killing people aided by the federal government's willful inaction.  The Supreme Court refused to stop it:

Hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute legal-challenge on a 5-4 vote, the Justice Department put a 47-year-old man to death for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years.

A left-of-center person throughout my life, I have always opposed capital punishment.  But, as a secular liberal, what do I know compared to those god-loving Republicans who favor the death penalty!  I am sure that Jesus said torture and kill those who harmed you, right?

My earliest post on the awful Republican pursuit of the death penalty was in 2011, well before tRump became a darling candidate for the hate-filled Republicans.  I quoted Christopher Hitchens there when linking the religiosity of the country (especially Republicans) and the support for capital punishment:

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

The Jesus-loving, Bible-thumping, pro-life party wants the government to kill.  Whether it is the support for war or the death penalty, these ardent supporters are pro-death.  These proud pro-life people are maniacally pro-killing!

Dahlia Lithwick noted the unfortunate irony that most of the ardent supporters of the death sentence are simultaneously the same ones denouncing the role of government, and their primary reason is that the government can't get any damn thing right:

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

They have such remarkable confidence that the government is awesome when it comes to killing people!

There is one more dimension that is exceptional to the US among the advanced liberal democracies that have otherwise done away with capital punishment--the continuing effects in a society that once enslaved human beings.  Capital punishment in the United States is linked with "its history of racially motivated lynchings in the South."

Southern legislatures shifted to capital punishment so that legal and ostensibly unbiased court proceedings could serve the same purpose as vigilante violence: satisfying the lust for revenge.

The Equal Justice Initiative reported on this:

The death penalty in America is a “direct descendant of lynching.” Racial terror lynchings gave way to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing Black people for cheering audiences was undermining America’s image and moral authority on the world stage.

The reality is that we the people are not in favor of the death penalty; "a majority of Americans say that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty is."

As with the results of the 2016 election, the majority opinion does not count here too :(

Republicans are one of the rare groups in society to indicate a preference for the death penalty over life imprisonment. Political conservatives (51%) are another.
Democrats and political liberals (77%) are two of the subgroups most likely to believe life imprisonment is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty.

There is only one way to get rid of capital punishment--vote against the pro-death Republican candidates in November 2020, and throw tRump and his toadies out of power.

And yet it moves.

63 million Americans were fooled by a con man and they don't even know it.  Their Dear Leader is fooled time and again.  If only all of them understood something that is fundamental: "nature cannot be fooled."

Scientists have always worried that nature cannot be fooled, which is why some of them spent a lot of their time, energy, and money worrying about the next global pandemic.  Viruses abound in nature--I read somewhere that there are more than 500 strains of viruses in bats alone!--and they cannot be easily fooled by humans.  They do what they do in order to survive and prosper, just like any other life form does.

But then the 63 million couldn't care about science.  They actively engage in denying the very science that has made their lives also fantastic.

They denied, and continue to deny, the global climatic changes that have happened because of human actions over the past 200 years.

They denied, and continue to deny, the natural selection and evolution, and, therefore, the idea of mutation that makes possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans.

Nature cannot be fooled.

Now, 7.8 billion humans are terrified of a virus that we cannot see.

In this blog, and elsewhere, I have long been worried about the willful ignorance of the ideological crackpots who are adamant deniers of scientific understanding.  Every once in a while, some of those deniers have exhausted me (like here) by trying to debate on this issue--and this was not the kind of time-wasting that I like.

My faith in science is not like the blind faith that the 63 million--including this person--have in their Dear Leader.  My faith in science is based on logic and evidence.  The facts--not the alternative facts that the 63 million believe.

In my case, the faith is tested every day--the scientific method doesn't care for holy cows.

the word faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.” You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out. You have faith in your doctor because, presumably, she has treated you and others successfully, and you know that what she prescribes is tested scientifically.

I wouldn't deny the evidence in front of me that the science-denying maniacs are in control of our lives.  But, this is not the first time that science-deniers have held the power.  It used to be way worse.

Thinkers like Galileo learnt from the experiences in the past and understood how important it was for scientists to be political in order to make sure that science trumps denial.

There’s an old belief that truth will always overcome error. Alas, history tells us something different. Without someone to fight for it, to put error on the defensive, truth may languish. It may even be lost, at least for some time. No one understood this better than the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei.

Therefore, the "scientists putting their careers, reputations, and even their health on the line to educate the public can take heart from Galileo, whose courageous resistance led the way."

Those amongst us who have faith in science may have lost a battle or two, but we shall win the war against deniers.

This miraculous life!

The anti-vaccination, climate-change-denying, anti-evolution nutcases in the Republican Party teamed up with white supremacists and misogynists and collectively delivered tRump as the President.  And now, we--yes, including all of them who cheered "alternative facts"--are compelled to deal with the reality of the science behind a global pandemic.

If only the candidate who spoke about science, facts, and policies had won in November 2016!

Instead, we have a President who forces upon us a reality horror show in which he is the ultimate villain.  “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear," he declared just over three weeks ago, on February 27th.

There is a world of a difference between the sociopath who masquerades as the President when he talks about "a miracle" versus the truly and sincerely faithful when they refer to divine interventions.

Like my father, who truly believes in miracles, and who often quotes Tennyson's "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of."  

I remember all too well how as a faithful young boy everyday I waited for miracles to happen.  The older I got, and the more I understood science, I figured that there are plenty of things wrong in interpreting the happenings via miracles. 

As the polymath physicist Alan Lightman writes in this essay,

Miracles, by definition, lie outside science. Miracles are incompatible with a rational picture of the physical world. Nevertheless, even in our highly scientific and technological society, with most of us profiting enormously from cell phones and automobiles and other products of science—indeed depending on the consistent workings of science—a large fraction of the public believes in miracles. Most of us do not ponder that contradiction. One of my aunts was certain that her dead father visited her house and spoke to her every few months, and she got a tape recorder—a device of science—to document his voice. (Thereupon, the ghostly visits ceased.)
Miracles come from the world of imagination, of dreams, of desire; science from the world of practicality, of logic, of orderly control. I’ve always been fascinated by our ability to live simultaneously in these two apparently opposing worlds. Each in its own way, they reflect something deep and essential inside of us.

That excerpt gives away why I was drawn to that essay.  Through a number of posts in this blog, I have been trying to understand the simultaneous existence of people, like my father, in "two apparently opposing worlds."  For a number of years now, I have asked quite a few science-educated people, including one who has a doctorate in astronomy--about their "faith" and how they reconcile the two. 

I have also come to understand via this maniacal inquiry that people believe in their gods because it gives them that concise narrative of why we are here.  Without that clear narrative, we will be forced to think about questions like: who am I? What does life mean? What happens to this "life" after death?  Why is there death?  How did all these come about?  Those are all troubling questions.  Religious narratives, whether it is Buddhism or Catholicism or Scientology, provide answers to those questions. 

And that is exactly what Alan Lightman also says:

Belief in a spiritual universe, I would suggest, arises to a large extent from a human desire for meaning, meaning both in our individual lives and in the cosmos as a whole. While science provides the psychological comfort of order, rationality, and control, it does not provide meaning. Such deep philosophical questions as “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” “What is the meaning of this strange cosmos I find myself in?”, and such moral questions as “Is it right to kill an enemy soldier in time of war?” “Is it right to steal in order to feed my family?”, cannot be answered by science. Yet these questions are vital to our mental and emotional lives. We turn for answers to the spiritual universe, the realm that contains eternal truths and guidance, the realm that has some kind of permanent existence, in contrast to the fleeting moment of our mortal lives. In such a realm, logic, rationality, and regularity are not even part of the vocabulary.

I believe that father has also understood my profound appreciation for this universe that is awesome, beautiful, and mysterious. Which is why sometimes he even says things like "you refer to that as the cosmos."  To me, a wonderfully sunny day in fall is a miracle. So is the sparkling river, a rainbow, the blue waters of Sahalie Falls, the loving lick of a playful puppy, the unadulterated joyous laughter of a three-year old,  ... Which is why I so easily agree with Lightman's concluding comments:

My wife and I spend summers on a small island in Maine, far from any town. At night, the skies are quite dark. Sometimes, when there is no wind blowing and the tidal flow is small and the ocean is very still, I can see the reflection of the stars in the water near our dock. At such moments, the water looks like a dark carpet with a million tiny sparkles of light, which gently bob and ripple with each passing wave. Even though I know all the science, I am totally mesmerized and awed. For me, that is miracle enough.

Have yourself a miraculous week, especially during these extraordinarily challenging times!

In sickness and in health

A few Decembers ago, when I was visiting with my folks in India, the maid came a tad later than usual and set about her tasks.  She started coughing.  My father told her that it was ok not to show up for work as long as she called and gave them a heads up.

But, there is a reason that maids and other workers report to work even when they are not well, or well enough: In most cases, they will suffer a cut in their earnings if they don't show up for work.  It is only a fraction of the labor force in India that has the benefits of sick leave and paid vacations.

Now, superimpose on such a framework the possibility of a viral disease. An epidemic, like COVID-19.  The scenario easily unfolds in your minds too, eh.

The US is only marginally better.

Service industry workers, like those in restaurants, retail, child care and the gig economy, are much less likely to have paid sick days, the ability to work remotely or employer-provided health insurance.
The disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19, harder to contain in the United States than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave, experts say. A large segment of workers are not able to stay home, and many of them work in jobs that include high contact with other people. It could also mean that low-income workers are hit harder by the virus.

It is a large labor force without sick leave:

For many workers, being sick means choosing between staying home and getting paid. One-quarter of workers have no access to paid sick days, according to Labor Department data: two-thirds of the lowest earners but just 6 percent of the highest earners. Just a handful of states and local governments have passed sick leave laws.
Only 60 percent of workers in service occupations can take paid time off when they are ill — and they are also more likely than white-collar workers to come in contact with other people’s bodies or food.

And, yes, they are the ones who interact a lot with other humans, unlike the app-developing software engineer who tries his best to not deal with fellow human beings!  The low-wage and part-time workers in the US are, thus, in a situation similar to that of the maid at my parents' home:

for the average worker without paid sick-leave access, the lost wages associated with staying home for about three days would amount to their household’s entire monthly grocery budget or monthly utilities budget.
The outlook can be similarly bleak for gig workers for, say, a rideshare company or food-delivery service — many of whom aren’t eligible for benefits that would allow them to stay home and receive health care when they’re sick,

It is not difficult to understand how the virus has already spread far and wide, right?

Can anything be done?

Expanding the law to include pandemics as major disasters – as some lawmakers have urged – would make it possible for the president to make sure individuals affected by an outbreak have the support they need.
It would only take small changes like these to make the unemployment insurance program more useful to those sick, quarantined or temporarily idled during a pandemic.
While this will not solve all the economic problems caused by COVID-19, or the next pandemic disease, it would give American workers and the broader economy a lot more breathing room.

Giving workers a lot more breathing room is what I have often argued as the urgent need to rework the social contract and implement a stronger safety net.  If only 63 million Americans cared!

Source

The future is ours!

There is plenty to depress me on a daily basis.  But then, I tell myself the same thing that I often tell students in my classes: Look at the trajectory, and we will see that life has only gotten better.  However true that is, it is not easy to overlook the unpleasantness that we run into day in and day out.

I am not referring to the unpleasantness of things mundane, but--and especially--about issues that are political that then translate into everyday life.  It is disheartening, for instance, that 63 million voters have enabled a sociopath to turn this country into a banana republic.  They have ensured that our policies will not empathize with the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore."  It is a long list.

And then there is the trajectory.  The moral arc of the universe that MLK believed bends towards justice.

And what an evidence of that arc is Pete Buttigieg!

A gay married man continues in the Democratic primaries even as many other wannabes have quit the race altogether.  The person that I favored the most has long been gone.  Buttigieg is still in the race.

While other high-altitude candidates such as Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris followed an Icarus-like trajectory, Buttigieg kept flying above the tree line. ...
Butigieg has been in the upper ranks of the Democratic contenders for so long that we forget how unprecedented his ascent has been.

Indeed!

In the days ahead, Buttigieg will face a series of tests that approximate the pressures of the presidency.
Can he come across as a compelling presence in two debates within six days (the other is in Charleston, South Carolina, next Tuesday)? Did he build a political organization from scratch that can stand the rigors of the 3 March Super Tuesday primaries in 14 states? And will he continue to keep a cool head as the campaign inevitably grows ugly?

Against the well-funded Bernie campaign, the cash-drained Buttigieg will have a tough time ahead.

Whatever happens from here (and only the foolhardy would dare to predict), Buttigieg has made history with his campaign. And maybe the greatest accomplishment of this former South Bend mayor has been the seeming ease with which he has done it.

Whatever happens, we will look back at his candidacy and appreciate the trajectory that made it possible for a gay man, who openly and proudly kisses his husband in the public, to be a plausible candidate for the presidency.  The 63 million, who gloat over their short-term scorched-earth victory, cannot bend this moral arc to their will how much ever they try. 

Anger, anxiety, and adolescence

When I was a kid, then a tween, and then a teen, I was angry and anxious about a whole bunch of things.  There was one issue that was a non-issue.  It never even blipped in my radar.  There was simply no need to.  It is like asking me whether I was addicted to Instagram during my high school years.

That non-issue is a huge issue for many of today's kids, tweens, and teens: Climate change.

Young people, absorbing the gravity of these warnings, have become the defining face of the climate movement — marching, protesting and berating their elders for bequeathing them an uncertain, unstable future. Underlying their anger, though, is another a-word: anxiety. And it’s something they’re increasingly voicing. Teachers hear their students talk about panic attacks when wildfires break out, and psychologists face young patients weeping about their fear of never having a family.

I would think that most of these kids are not from Republican families--after all, their Dear Leader comforts them that there is nothing to worry about an issue that is nothing but a hoax!

As climate change continues unabated, parents, teachers and medical professionals across the country find themselves face-to-face with a quandary: How do you raise a generation to look toward the future with hope when all around them swirls a message of apparent hopelessness? How do you prepare today’s children for a world defined by environmental trauma without inflicting more trauma yourself? And where do you find the line between responsible education and undue alarmism?

For years, when I have discussed in my classes impacts on the natural environment, I have suggested to students that it will be an issue through their lives and not mine because I will soon check out.  I have also reminded them that the issue is not about the science but is all political, which is why students have a much greater responsibility in working on this outside of the classroom.  I often remind them about this:

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.

Almost always, I end up talking about carbon pricing.  But then, who listens to me, eh!

Source

"“Eco-anxiety” or “climate depression” is playing out in real terms among young people, sometimes in extreme ways":

Sarah Niles, an 18-year-old from Alabama, told me that her fears about climate change have simply become a part of her life. “I feel like in my peer group, you just go right from talking about polar bears dying to ‘Did you see what Maya posted on Snapchat?’ Nobody has a filter to adjust,” Niles says. “It’s like, the ice caps are melting and my hypothetical children will never see them, but also I have a calculus test tomorrow.”

Frankly, I have no idea how to be encouraging to kids, tweens, and teens!  I do my best to remind them that they have immense power to effect change--as consumers in the marketplace, and as citizens in the political domain that also has the power to regulate the marketplace.  But, like Sarah Niles, most students seem to operate along the same lines of talking climate change and Instagram and midterm exams all in the same breath.

As much as a cynic I am, and a decorated General Malaise I know I am, I am far from being an alarmist when I talk with students.  If anything, my faculty colleagues seem to think that I am one of those right-wing Republican nutcases who doesn't worry about social issues!  In my classes, I often point to a range of solutions. Not pie-in-the-sky ones, but feasible solutions.  Which is why I agree with this professor's approach:

This past fall, she added a second lesson about solutions, highlighting the drop in the cost of renewable energy and improvements in battery technology for storing clean energy. It’s a strategy Duffy says is necessary for any climate communicator, but especially one working with young minds. “There’s a danger in having the instruction emphasize climate catastrophe,” she says. “It’s tempting to say how bad things are, how much we need to stop it. But at some point you’ve accidentally said this is a foregone conclusion. We can overemphasize how scary it is to the point where people feel hopeless and panicked.”

Yep.  One of my favorites is to show them how rapidly the energy sources have changed in a mere 150 years.  I encourage them to extrapolate from those trends.  And boy that seems to change their frameworks!

The kids are alright.  We older adults are the ones who have created problems for them.  Especially the really old adults in one major political party here in America.  They will, forever, stand accused!

Bomb,bomb, bomb | Bomb, bomb Iran

Ever since tRump started campaigning, I have been blogging here and telling anybody who wanted to listen to me that he merely crudely distills the same message that most of the Republicans have always expressed more euphemistically.  Every once in a while, even those "statesmen" let their guard down and adopted a tell-it-as-it-is, which is tRump's winning electoral approach.  One of those was about Iran.

Unlike President Obama and the Democrats who wanted to to work a way out of the hostilities, most Republicans were hell bent on bombing Iran back into the stone age.  It was such a sentiment that then candidate Senator John McCain expressed when he sang about bombing Iran.  Recall that campaign moment?

tRump is making that Beach Boys cover song come true!

As a wimp, a wuss, a pacifist, war is never on my mind.

Of course, as most young boys are, I too was once fascinated by wars and battles.  Back in grandma's village, I eagerly listened to what later turned out to be exaggerated accounts of an extended family elder's service in the military during the Indo-Pak war that birthed Bangladesh.  As a teenager, I read books and watched movies that were set in the context of WW II.

And then I grew up.

It started with the excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front that was required reading in school.  Suddenly, war began to make no sense.  Mohandas Gandhi's pacifism appealed a lot more to me.  But, it was not any immediate Damascene Conversion to pacifism.  I continued to oscillate back and forth through my late teens and early twenties.

By the time of the Iraq War during the first Bush presidency, I was a committed anti-war nutcase.  And have been since.

Reading Ernest Hemingway and re-reading Joseph Heller and others cemented my pacifism.  War is hell. So much so that even movies that featured violence appealed less and less to me.

But, wars continue. Wars are good for business and politics.  There are now new chants for yet another war against yet another country in the Middle East that has been in the Republican radar for a long time.  That context compels me to blog about war and peace.  There are others who tweet about their direct experiences, like this lengthy thread (and the comments there that I urge you to read.)

19/
They thank us, but they bite for war-hawks that want to put us in harms way for various, often very murky reasons. Before you get hung ho for war, consider that the human costs aren’t only tallied in death or injury but also in destroyed families and the theft of joy.

— JAFERD, MD (@Supermansings) January 4, 2020

Are you a Parrhesiastes

Record high day time temperatures. Record high night time low temperatures.

But, the damned Republicans won't even allow the two word phrase "climate change" to be uttered!  How fucked up are they?  Don't they have children and grandchildren whose futures they worry about?  Do they believe that they can somehow live in a bubble, like how they lead lives insulated from us browns and non-Christians?

Scientists being scientists, well, in their reports they don't use words like "fucked up."  Instead, they carefully phrase it like this: "natural causes are not sufficient from our data to actually cause the spatial pattern and the warming rate that we are observing now."  And what we are observing now is unparalleled.

The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years, researchers say.
They show that famous historic events like the "Little Ice Age" don't compare with the scale of warming seen over the last century.
The research suggests that the current warming rate is higher than any observed previously.

If only the fucked up party, aka, the GOP, would read and listen!  And if only 63 million hadn't voted to power a mad sociopath!

Even if the sociopath is removed from the White House through impeachment, 2020 becomes a critical time:

The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.
"I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival," said Prince Charles, speaking at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently.

Why so?

One of the understated headlines in last year's IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5C.
Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit. Right now, we are heading towards 3C of heating by 2100 not 1.5.
As countries usually scope out their plans over five and 10 year timeframes, if the 45% carbon cut target by 2030 is to be met then the plans really need to be on the table by the end of 2020.

We all remember how the sociopath withdrew from the table, thanks to 63 million irresponsible people!

Speaking truth to power--which is where the big word in the title of this post comes in--has made very little impact.  Despite the track record of defeats, a few activists like Greta Thunberg soldier on.  Good for them, and for us.

Earlier this month Opec declared Thunberg, and with her the other young climate activists, the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. Thunberg tweeted them her thanks. “Our biggest compliment yet.” Hers is a voice totally unlike the world’s usual power-cacophony: clean, simple, inclusive, the voice of someone refusing to beguile. She talks ethics to politics without flinching. She cuts through the media white noise and political rabble-rousing to get to the essentials. This is a communal voice and Thunberg is its lightning conductor, and no wonder: when you hear her speak or you read her speeches you know you’re in the presence of the opposite of cynicism – of a spirit, in fact, that rebuffs cynicism and knows that the way we act, every single one of us, has transformatory impact and consequence. “The real power belongs to the people.”

I hope that we the people will quickly and decisively demonstrate that we have the power.

Source

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. 

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

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 :(

Murderous Masturbating Men!

A few days ago, I tweeted this:

#SNL has an awesome #Election2020 bumper sticker for #Republicans who are opposed to #abortion:
"Life begins at erection"
🤣🤣🤣
And, oh my, Cecily Strong as Susan Collins is phenomenal!https://t.co/wcmGyelQGi#tRump #ShootsOn5thAvenueAllTheTime

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) May 12, 2019

It kept nagging me that I have seen "life begins at erection" before.  But, simply could not track that down.

Today, I did.

I found that at my own blog! 

A post that is almost seven years old included this cartoon:

We men have it easy.  A few minutes of pleasure, and we move on. 

Now, should one of the sperms crack through the egg, then it is the women who has to deal with a fetus inside her for 280 days.  And then give birth.  And then feed and clean and ...

Yet, as The Guardian put it:

Source

CNN compares Alabama's move with the rest of the world, and I find this that shocked me:

Countries with more liberal laws include Finland, India and Japan, where provisions for abortion are made not only in cases of rape or risk to the woman's health, but also on socioeconomic grounds.

India? Do mOdi and his toadies know about this?

Commentators are educating us about what happened in Romania, when the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu completely banned abortion and contraception.

Prior to 1966, Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world. But, desperate for population growth, Ceaușescu issued Decree 770, essentially nationalizing Romanian women’s wombs. Both abortion and contraception were criminalized for all women age 45 and under who had not borne at least four children (later increased to five). The only exceptions were for rape and incest, high-risk pregnancies, and cases in which the fetus could contract a hereditary disease from either parent. The law was strictly enforced. The Romanian secret police, the Securitate, registered suspected pregnancies and kept tabs on women until the birth of the child. It was the kind of natalist authoritarianism that US "pro-life" advocates have long dreamed of.

The sharia comes to Alabama. And to Georgia, to Missouri, to ... Orgasmic times for a good chunk of the 63 million!

"The ultimate challenge"

I have been a fan of carbon tax.  I have blogged about it, talked about it, discussed it with students.  And I followed with interest the ballot initiative in the neighboring state.

It is, therefore, depressing to agree with David Leonhardt about the political reality of pricing carbon--won't happen.

What is the political reality?  As I quoted in that blog-post, "any Republican Presidential candidate who supported a carbon tax or regulations “would be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process.”  This Republican reality has become a nightmare in this hyper-partisan tRump time:

The G.O.P.’s radical turn means that climate activists can no longer search for a compromise between the two parties, in the hope that their leaders will try to sell it to skeptical voters. Republicans have made clear that they will instead stoke the skepticism for their own ends. Doing so pleases the oil and coal industries, which are generous campaign donors. It also helps win elections.

Win elections.  Win them at any cost.  Screw the damn liberals!

Why then don't initiatives succeed, even in blue states like Washington?

Carbon pricing puts attention on the mechanism, be it a dreaded tax or a byzantine cap-and-trade system. Mechanisms don’t inspire people. Mechanisms are easy to caricature as big-government bureaucracy. Think about the debate over Obamacare: When the focus was on mechanisms — insurance mandates, insurance exchanges and the like — the law was not popular. When the focus shifted to basic principles — Do sick people deserve health insurance? — the law became much more so.

Which is how tRump also won, right?  While Hillary Clinton talked like an expert on the mechanisms to make things better for Americans, tRump merely provided flashy simplistic slogans and rhetoric.  She, for instance, talked to coal miners, about how she will support programs to re-train them, while he even mimed a cartoonish version of coal-digging.  And he won!

This reality is also driving a new way of looking at the climate change issues--the Green New Deal:

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar, works for the think tank New Consensus and helped design the Green New Deal. When I spoke with her, I was struck by her sense of political realism and how different it was from the old definition. For a long time, environmental activists have shown an almost compulsive — and in many ways admirable — honesty. They have chosen policies, like carbon taxes, that emphasize the downsides: Energy prices will rise. The Green New Deal and the recent clean-energy ballot initiatives do the reverse. They emphasize the benefits of clean energy and minimize the downsides. “There is a lot of anxiety and uncertainty in America today,” Gunn-Wright said. “Any solution that is tied to tangible economic benefits is going to have a better chance of passing.”

The truth, but not the whole truth.  Which is any day infinitely better than tRump's and the GOP's bullshit.

Leonhardt sums it up well:

The sad truth is that climate politics are probably not going remain as they are today. The future will almost certainly bring increasing harm, through more extreme weather. Eventually, some Republican politicians, especially in coastal states, may be willing to break with party leaders on the issue. Eventually, Americans may decide to punish politicians who deny or play down climate change. By the time a price on carbon took effect, it might not be so unpopular anymore. But we can’t wait for the politics to change to begin taking action.

The darker brother ... and sister too

It was a coincidence, and a tragic irony, that the previous post, on the first day of Black History Month, was in a series on Jill Lepore's book and ended with a note on lynching. 

As I have noted many times in this blog, I am simply amazed that young blacks are not pissed off with an anger that the world had never seen before.  It is to their credit that they are this non-violent.  I am confident that had I been born into a black family, my anger and emotions would have ended my life a long time ago!

Source

To mark the month, which I have done in the past as well, the following is a re-post from last year.

About eight years ago, after the "Tea Party" activists essentially took over the GOP, as the anti-Obama approach became the only guiding principle for that party, and with the intense opposition to Obamacare uniting all factions within that party, I started worrying about the meaning of the "take the country back" that the maniacal Republicans were mouthing off.

It was in that context that for the first time ever I blogged about Langston Hughes' poem.

Since then, Republicans have made it crystal clear what they meant by taking the country back.

Thus, during this Black History Month, it is most appropriate to re-read Hughes.

I, too, sing America.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
 

I, too, am America.

The end of history

Nope, I am not referring to Francis Fukuyama's best seller from nearly three decades ago.  it is the end of History as a subject that we study that I am worried about now.

Back in the old country, if ever a 18-year old said that she was studying history, well, the immediate--and only--interpretation was that she was an academic weakling who could not get into anything better and so was stuck in the condemned majors like history.

Whatever history I have learnt about India or anything has been despite the virulent anti-history educational framework back there.  It has been quite a struggle to learn history on my own, to learn to write on my own, to appreciate poetry on my own, to read up on philosophy on my own, to appreciate the arts on my own ... This listing adds up to something, right?  That something is liberal education, dear reader!

Liberal education is under attack on all fronts, and all over the world.  In this attack, even history is rapidly bleeding students.  As I noted in my reply there, the story is not just about history, but about liberal education.  Apparently, we, too, want to become like China, where higher education is not about the dangerously subversive liberal education.

My, and our collective, failure in understanding history came about in a rather interesting way last night when we watched a Netflix show.  Yes, a show on Netflix.  It was about the history of the people in the present Americas and the Caribbean: John Leguizamo's Latin History for Morons

There were lots that I was already familiar with.  But plenty that I had no idea about.  Especially these two: The repatriation of Mexican-Americans when Hoover was the President, and the lynching of hundreds of Mexican-Americans.

This was a well-prepared one-man show.  I was, therefore, confident that he was not making things up.  How come I never knew about those two things, which are not trivial footnotes by any means?

Late into the night, I read up.  I was shocked.  Mitt Romney's comment during his presidential campaign that the undocumented should self-deport took on a new meaning.

This essay begins with an eerie comparison of the current President with Hoover:

It was a time of economic struggle, racial resentment and increasing xenophobia. Installed in the White House was a president who had never before held elected office. A moderately successful businessman, he promised American jobs for Americans—and made good on that promise by slashing immigration by nearly 90 percent.
He wore his hair parted down the middle, rather than elaborately piled on top, and his name was Herbert Hoover, not Donald Trump. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under the president’s watch, a wave of illegal and unconstitutional raids and deportations would alter the lives of as many as 1.8 million men, women and children—a threat that would seem to loom just as large in 2017 as it did back in 1929.

And that is just the beginning!

Now to understand the lynching of Mexican Americans.

Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes.

I was one those unaware.  Not anymore.

From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming. 

Who cares about history, right?  Close down all the history departments, and put an end to liberal education.  Teach students programming and be done!

Today's California and yesterday's Bengal

One of the main reasons that I had a fascination for Calcutta was this: I had been exposed forever to "what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow." 

Though it was in the context of independence struggle to kick the bastards out of India, even after the country became free, it seemed like many of the leading intellectuals came from there.

And, of course, my commie teenage sentiments also favored the principled leftists like Jyoti Basu.

Throughout history, different regions have served as the leading lights, diffusing their ideas through other regions.  Here in the US, in recent years, it has been California.

To outsiders, California might come across as a liberal (as in left-of-center) state.  Which is not entirely true, if one pauses to think about it.  Two easy exhibits that everybody can relate two: Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.  But, there is more.

When I landed in Los Angeles, George Deukmejian was the governor.  He was a Republican.  Yep, a Republican governor, and for two terms.

His successor was also a Republican--Pete Wilson.  By the time Wilson ran for the office, I was well versed in California's and America's politics, and I hated the thought of him becoming governor because of his crazy ideas, and how he and the GOP were beating up on immigrants.  He successfully fueled an anti-immigrant hysteria.  The asshole continued to influence the political scene in the state, and helped another entertainer--Arnold Schwarzenegger--become another (perhaps the final ever) Republican governor.

What California thinks today, USA thinks tomorrow!

The epicenter of 2018’s version of conservatism, and of American Trumpism, isn’t Washington, DC. It’s California.
Breitbart News was founded in Los Angeles, and its headquarters remains in the city’s Brentwood Heights neighborhood. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, met former White House adviser Steve Bannon in LA. Ben Shapiro, whom Breitbart mentored and who worked at his eponymous publication, now runs his own conservative media empire, DailyWire.com, out of a nondescript office building in LA.
The Claremont Colleges, located on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, were the birthplace of intellectual Trumpism and the “Flight 93 Election” — an influential essay published in the Claremont Review of Books that stated that electing Trump was the only way to save the country. The author of that missive, Michael Anton, went to the University of California Berkeley and Claremont Graduate University, and then went on to work in the Trump White House, alongside White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a native of Santa Monica, and Trumpist trade adviser Peter Navarro, who taught at the UC Irvine.

trump and his party are playing the California tunes from two decades ago.  Since then, California has moved on.  Its current demographics, economics, and politics, appear to be the key to the future.  Which means, if California continues to think today what the rest of the country will think tomorrow, well, the party of Reagan will die the same way that the party of Wilson has died in California.  And that is one hell of an awesome thing to celebrate! ;)

"A bad hair day" in Pittsburgh!

Way back in May 2016, in writing about the looming dark clouds, I worried:

It starts with a swastika and 1488 etched on a bench on a bridge over a river :(  Here is to hoping that we will end it all before it even takes hold.

It has taken a firm hold!

A mere two weeks ago that I wrote in this post:

When the President says all the horrible things that he says on a daily hourly basis, it reflects an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy. 
It is not any surprise when he makes even tragic situations only about himself. Or, talks about the most nonsensical things like how a boat ended up in some guy's yard.  A lack of empathy means that the asshole-in-chief can never behave like the comforter-in-chief that Presidents are expected to be in the face of tragedies. 

Through his incendiary rhetoric, this President created the monsters who marched around shouting "Jews will not replace us" and shooting at the faithful who had assembled for Shabbat prayers.

True to his personality, which he never hid from the 63 million who voted for him,he could not be bothered with being presidential:

Now, after a week of fear, with pipe bombs being sent to a list of people whom President Trump has said horrible things about, and to CNN, which he consistently targets, 11 Jewish citizens were slaughtered in their place of worship on the Sabbath. Trump’s response? He joked that he almost canceled an event because, after having to speak to reporters about the shooting in the rain, he was having “a bad hair day.”

I agree with the author:

This president will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation. It’s not in him. When questioned after a tragedy, he will always be glib and inappropriate. So I have a wild suggestion: Let’s stop asking him. His words are only salt in our wounds.

Instead, "Let’s instead remember that the people in our daily lives are hurting too."

Shabbat Shalom.

In the 48 hours since the Pittsburgh attack, POTUS tweets:

- RTing D'Souza interviewed by the NRA
- going after Tom Steyer
- the press is the Enemy of the People
- calling Andrew Gillum a thief
- the caravan https://t.co/GSzqmDUjj6

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 29, 2018