All the light that does not blind resides within the soul

And that’s when I embraced middle age, wearing both a cell phone holster and a dog treat bag on my belt

dogs love jazz

Who do you make art for? You certainly can't make it for the living, as they can't hear, and can't see

 

 

The Wokeness Trials

Money is cheap

What is the price of seasonality? Hundreds upon hundreds of trillions?

Blogging in Obscurity

The Great Smartening

The opportunity of the present is what I would call The Great Smartening. Or perhaps The Great Flattening. Meaning, anything we now want to do, we can just go and do it. If we want to install a new toilet, we watch a video. If we want to have better sex, there's a very effective Netflix series for that. If we want to cook or bake better, there are a million and one how-tos on Instagram. Anyone can make anything they want. It is all within reach. There are no more black boxes. It's not a question of success and failure, because whatever we want to do, we can do it. And as Anna Jaffe says, we can't fail, because the world is on fire.

Seven Bowls

 

Catching up

 

Throwback to February 2020

March 2020

Dumpster diving

 

Distillation of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/02/10/lost-illusions-israel-palestine-david-shulman

Camp Alton Alma Mater

"We hail thee night and day,

Praise to thee, Alton,"

"Thy stately pines so tall,

Heighten thy splendor"

"God keep you safe we pray

Praise to thee, Alton"

"Rugged men of strength and courage"

"We thee adore"

 http://campalton.com/index.php/all-things-alton/alton-classics/188-camp-hymn

To the people in your teens and twenties: There is no plan

Lawrence Lessig: The Corruption of Democracy under Minority Rule

 https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/12/10/why-the-us-is-a-failed-democratic-state

What We Knew (Climate Change)

  https://www.nytimes.com/shared/opinion/world-on-fire/climate-sos.html

What did we know? What do we know? I've been spending some time doing some writing on the deficiencies of mammalian brains, overpopulation, climate change, and so forth. Things are not looking good for human civilization. Due to collective action problems, it is likely that the world will not hit temperature targets for 2050 and runaway global warming is a certainty. There are a host of ills that will come by 2100. Extreme weather will be common, and large swathes of the globe will become uninhabitable. We don't need any more proof or science to know that this is the case. Deniers are clearly self-serving capitalists that have more short-term monetary gain in ignoring the obvious and smearing those that fight for change.

I feel like Moishe the Beadle from Elie Wiesel's Night. Without having gone anywhere physically, I have come back from the future to tell those of the present the ghosts and horrors of what could be.

What are our opportunities? What are our choices?

1. We've learned from Covid that individual choices do not work to move aggregate population health decisions. Not enough people will voluntarily make changes like using masks or vaccinating to prevent disease and death. As a result, mandates have been the only successful option worldwide. I see the fight to mitigate climate change as ultimately a public health decision. As with Covid, it might seem costly or unpractical to mandate universal changes, but failing might result in the collapse of civilization. Essentially, do you want to pay more? As a result, rich nations like the US, those that have military power, should mandate immediate and severe carbon limits globally that not only slow global warming, but go well beyond it to attempt to halt or reverse it if that is even possible anymore. Those nations that do not immediately comply should face financial and military consequences.

2. Because I'm not a politician, and I have virtually no power to make #1 a reality, I'm also thinking about what to do at an individual, and family level. The history of my people, the Jews, is one of wandering, often forced wandering to find places where we would not be persecuted, always towing our torahs, talmuds, and rituals from place to place. If I was to move my family somewhere, it would be important to take not only money, but our learning, knowledge, science, technology, just as the Jews have taken their torah which is literally just a collection of ancient stories to study and debate and instruct. More than money, which has come and gone over time, has been the power of knowledge. I like to think of this as creating one's own Schindler's List. Who is on the list, and what is on the list, and what do you take if you have to move and uproot, and how do you re-create democracy in a 2.0 (3.0?) version that is more human, more sustainable, and protects against demagogues, megalomaniacs, tyrants, or oligarchs?

A completely fucked situation

 Food Lion on a Sunday afternoon

 "We have to overcome it because the planet is on fire." 

- Sarah Jaffe on capitalism

Trauma, Childhood, Relationships

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/style/modern-love-he-cared-so-i-broke-up-with-him.html

 If you should eat well, and drink well, all your life, you will have done better than almost all your ancestors and possibly all of your progeny.

 you don't choose your family and you don't choose your customers and you don't choose your staff.

The rise of the bourgeois

I've been reading a good bit of classic literature through the pandemic. Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Marx, Henry James, Austen, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Thoreau, Emerson. It makes me realize how many good books were left out in my high school, undergrad, and grad education. The other realization is that these books (across nationalities) really hold up a mirror to the experience of the newly produced bourgeois class at the time. Never in the 1700s or before were there as many wealthy and literate people as in the 1800s, and as leisure, quality of life, and more widespread access to education increased, we find this explosion of writers chronicling the experience for us. Affairs have existed in literature since the writing of the Bible, but never the bourgeois affair as so majestically and satirically portrayed in Bovary. The bourgeois affair is a product of its time, and likewise each of these writers comment in their own way on the rapidly shifting economic landscape brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Politics, economics, sociology, and literature all see an explosion in the 1800s that lays the groundwork for the modernism of the early 1900s. Now we are in a fully postmodern age, where bourgeois pleasures (so many couches, so many TVs!) are taken for granted, and everything is worthy of snark and bite, but to see the lineage through to the 1800s is instructive. Our broad-based, high quality of life is only ~200 years old. Our highly technologized lives are only ~30 years old. We act as if we've had iPhones since forever. The global and historical awareness of the human remains still so narrow. No wonder older cultures had highly ritualized ceremonies commemorating life, death, war, and even the weather and the seasons. There was no other means of recording but of the ritual. Thank goodness we have these books to remind us who we were, and where we came from.

If you drink a glass of Edward every day, you will never die.