cheese it, the cops!

so i am going to start noting cases in the media of extreme, redundant, or incomprehensible qualification. i notice this with regard especially to contemporary politicians: they will issue a decisive-seeming sentence with three qualifications which make the actual assertion amount to nothing at all, or reduce it to sheer gobbledygook. ok first case, daily beast:

For years critics have claimed Edgar Bronfman Jr. is a buffoon managing his family company, Seagram, and taking over Warner Music, but a new book proves that he might be the man to save the music industry.

now there could be cases in which you could prove that something might be the case: that ducks can mate with humans, for example: i didn't know that was possible! even that is not the parallel case. this is more like proving that barack obama and lady gaga might be the same person, which would follow - if it does follow - from metaphysical speculation rather than any actual facts. at any rate: to prove that i myself might be the person to save the music industry is unnecessary and trivial: to prove that i am the person to save the music industry will be extremely difficult until i actually seize control of the music industry, which, you know, i can prove might be possible.

headline: forty salads that can kill you. and then devour your decaying corpse.

sorry for slow blogging. i'll try to pick it up! anyway, quote from john terborgh's piece, in the new york review of books, on caroline fraser's book rewilding the world: "The movement to rewild the earth benefits from the virtue of common sense - we should restore the processes that sustained nature before humans disrupted them." now to me this is a pretty crisp expression of a basic point of view that i think is...unsustainable: nature is a stable system that is external to human beings and which we have disrupted or are destroying. though it is filled with self-loathing, this view (obviously) deploys a supernatural vision of human beings; it's, um, cartesian. this sort of thing, i must say, is how we got into this pretty pickle.

that terborgh could refer to this view as 'common sense' is revealing: it is a consensus among, i suppose, environmentalists. but of course it's wrong. nature is an extremely volatile system, not an equilibrium. we are nature in one of its manifestations, and the alterations we impose are natural.

one little spot of this attitude is the idea of "native" and "invasive" species. now of course species have been spreading around the world since there was life, and they use whatever is at hand to do it. invasive species are especially species introduced by human action: like in my woods multi-flora roses and english ivy are everywhere. but human action is just a mechanism that some species can use to reproduce. whatever species you have where you are, few of them originated in that place. but on the other hand i think my woods are a perfectly workable ecosystem: always developing and shifting, of course, but workable. i'm interested in seeing what happens, not in pulling out all the english ivy.

we have got to learn to try to learn to let things be, or love reality or nature as it really is, a little. the environmentalism that views human interaction with the environment in terms of destruction, preservation, restoration, is just more technology. it demands that we transform the world, again and again. i tel you this: we will hate and radically reconsider these alterations fifty years from now. we have got to view the relation in terms of participation.

today's songs of protest:

the educational (or if you prefer "educational") aspect of teaparty-type politics is pretty interesting and all things equal admirable. glenn beck is running through the founders with various biographers and so on, or going clause by clause through the constitution. everywhere people are taking classes on the founding documents and founding figures. now of course there is a particular ideological slant, but i think this "return" is also, in fact, a compelling critique of leftism, if one actually does have any affinity or commitment to the framers' frame. it is a god contrast for one thing to the cosmopolitanism or internationalism of an obama/kerry/gore-type politics, though it also has a universalistic undertow of course. at the least it makes or ought to make everyone aware that the ever-growing government is not self-evidently desirable.

i think the left's discovery of the horrors of judicial activism is as disingenuous as the right's in the last goround. or really, moreso. do you think if the current court had a liberal majority, or was limiting campaign financing by corporations in some total way, for example, that the left would be howling? the thing is usually, at least, just a stalking horse for one's own political agenda. i'd like to see a leftist attack judicial acticism of the left and the right attack jusicial activism of the right: that's the only way you seem even vaguely sincere.

headline:mexican singer dies hours after denying he was dead

yesterday's protest songs. actually the blue scholars was back home (embedding disabled). thanks hena: didn't know these folks.