cheese it, the cops!

i am still a bit mystified by kathleen parker's persona, and even by her politics. but that's maybe a good thing. anyway that's the best treatment on the op-ed pages of the stewart-obama interview. so, larry summers did a "heckuva job." nabbed by stewart with incomparable swiftness, he said "pun intended." first that is in nowise a pun. and second, if it was intentional, it was a vicious slam of summers. but parker has the right take: instead of bristling with defensiveness, especially because he was in the uncomfortable (and unusual) situation of not being the swiftest person at the desk, he could easily have defanged the thing with a second of self-deprecation instead of doubling his misery. or maybe he really does think, as he appeared to assert, that larry summers is to the american economy what brownie is to disaster recovery. larry summers tends to piss people off, i note.

i do love "yes we can, but..." too bad the actual world doesn't bend to our will like a key twisting by the sheer force of uri geller's personality. (by the way, if obama wants to bend keys, he should talk to jay sankey.)

i watched how to train your dragon the other day with ten-year old jane. well i'll be damned. the story was cute etc. but the animation just floored me. i keep thinking that cgi isn't quite there: still the motion doesn't look quite right; there is a lot of ingenious compensation for the not-quite detailed renderings; you'd see an amazing mass of tiny people and weren't supposed to quite realize that they were moving mechanically, or that they were basically cut-and-paste iterations of a few figures etc.. here the detail is almost unbelievably replete. the treatment of cloudscapes, fire, water, is not only convincing; it's breathtakingly beautiful. you know i've always kind of laughed off the idea of virtual reality a la matrix on the ground of the incomparable richness of real reality. this was an element of my "bone-head realism": there's nothing like a real world! now i'm not quite so sure.

honestly, we've got to get beyond the issue of what people are permitted to say. it's just ridiculous and useless, and unworthy of a people who pretend to be free. i can't criticize someone's outfit, or express doubts about the super-excellence of islam without getting fired, suspended, etc. "inappropriate" to these people is the most intense possible expression of moral condemnation, and i assume that eventually we'll understand that what's wrong with serial killers is that they have behaved inappropriately. all it means more or less is that you just said something that challenges our smug consensus. well no not our consensus because no one actually believes the things it is appropriate to say; the enforcement of the informal yet incredibly narrow speech code can make everyone produce the same chains of sounds, but sadly it leaves your little head free to think inappropriate thoughts. don't worry though because pretty soon we'll be able to adjust you from within. meanwhile, the point is just to get us all chanting the same meaningless pablum. i sort of thought we were getting beyond that, but i guess there's no transcending the 70s. after awhile that is all solidarity or justice mean: we are appropriate!

i'm teaching kierkegaard's fear and trembling, and i have often listed sk as my favorite philosopher. one issue that always comes up: all his most famous books were written under pseudonyms, and he famously declared that those works should be attributed to the pseudonyms not to himself. this is an absolute field day for a certain kind of academic, and provides a lovely way to fuck with the conception of authorship, or to treat authors as characters - fictions - within the book, and so on: you can read out whole literary theories from this, and people do. they spend books working through the pseudonyms. they think the preudonymity (?!) is the most interesting and salient feature of kierkegaard's work, or at least an extremely interesting and salient feature.

i don't think so, actually. the pseudonyms, of course, aren't serious attempts at disguise; rather they're comic flourishes: johannes de silentio, johannes climacus, johannes anti-climacus, constantin constantius, nicolas notabene, hilarius bookbinder: honestly these are jokes. trying to tease out the distinctive point of view of hilarius bookbinder by a massive hermeneutical inquiry is a waste of time, and somewhere both sk and hilarius are snickering. in completely different ways, of course.

you can sort of find differences if you want; the books, though, are less different from each other that the average author's various works. anyone who has read these books knows they completely share in the same ultra-distinctive, entirely individual voice. i don't think that, even if you had never heard them attributed to kierkegaard, you'd ever be in doubt for a moment that they were written by the same person. truly and obviously, such works as concluding unscientific postscript, stages on life's way, philosophical fragments, fear and trembling, the sickness unto death, the concept of dread, etc, embody and work toward precisely the same point of view: which of them denies or doesn't centralize the idea that faith is total commitment to a paradox or a radical absurdity?

maybe sk wrote under pseudonyms because he doesn't want to claim the faith he describes. on the other hand the pseudonym says just that in each work; that is, they have exactly the same humility in relation to the infinite as sk. stylistically and in terms of content, these books embody as distinctive and continuous a body of work as can be found in the history of philosophy. or literature. (though, we might as well say it: there's much too much of it and it's extremely repetitive. well, that's one form of continuity. on the other hand: the funniest philosopher in the western trad by a long way. and at his best the most profound in my view: a devastating combination.)

i don't think it makes any more sense to take the pseudonyms as a profound indication of something than it does to take him seriously when he says (or when a character says) he found the manuscript of either/or in a secret compartment in an antique desk. 

they are written, i believe, in kierkegaard's authentic individual voice. now of course "authentic," "individual," and "voice" are all problematic notions in the litcrit approaches of the last few decades. well, tough luck, because...there it is!

 

of course, i do find some of these candidates of concern. take sharron angle or tom tancredo: angle is mind-numb. the screeching anti-immigrant thing is crazy-wrong, and obviously has nothing to do with a libertarian orientation etc. hard to believe that they could poised on the edge of victory, and i pray they lose. christine o'donnell, however, is sheer fun. i just want to see her in the senate. put her on the judiciary committee and let her cross-examine supreme court nominees!

here's an interesting piece. i know you want it to turn out that tea party types are merely racists, that their opinions are entirely manipulated by the chamber of commerce, and so on. but at its heart this debate is a genuine debate about the scope of government power. you might not like the fact that these folks keep tossing around 'socialist.' but i tell you they have a point. it might seem ironic that three quarters of the people here are receiving government checks, and that to a large extent they oppose the programs that are sending them the checks. but you know, your own dependence can be a source of resentment. and when you're stuck in a situation where dependence is constantly encouraged, in which there are no other viable options because government has absorbed whole sectors of the economy, of social life, of education, of media, and so on, both the dependency and the fact that you can't escape it can be sources of shame. one thing these people resent is their own dependency, in other words, and they try to imagine a life with less of it, a life that gives them more dignity. they yearn for more autonomy, more self-reliance. but they also need the checks, in the context that has been created around them. perhaps that takes the form of a kind of nostalgia, "conservatism." how about this:

"We used to take pride in what we done in Eastern Kentucky around here," said James Barrett, 56, who owns McKee S&T, a hardware store on Main Street. "But now, everybody just wants checks. It's very sad. There is no pride anymore."

i think if you can't understand this, you've gone way too far down the golden path of progress.

i've done this before, but in light of recent events and exchanges, i want to again propose the definition of terrorism as military-style action (a liquid concept i admit, but, you know, automatic-weapons fire, high explosives, etc) aimed primarily at non-combatants. so for example, if you blow up cia agents in a war zone, that is not terrorism, even if accomplished by suicide bomb. on the other hand, by this standard, you'd have to regard blowing up hiroshima and nagasaki and covering them in a radioactive cloud to be terrorism, even though it was performed by "state actors." those are consequences i endorse. now it's worth saying that terrorism isn't the only bad thing. a military attack on a military target in which the perpetrators fundamentally don't care about civilian casualties is a war crime etc but it is not terrorism if the basic idea was to take out an enemy's installation. sometimes states go to war for horribly wrong reasons. people murder each other in crimes of passion etc. bad bad stuff but not exactly terrorism in my book. i think it is a useful term - though massively problematic, and horribly abused, for example, by the bush administration. but it does mark a particular kind of completely deranged (as well as evil) action, where you get to the point of killing any given a because you don't like b. a particular moral abyss... 

on the other hand, if rand paul was pres and paul krugman was in the senate, i don't think you'd see a lot of krug the non-partisan reaching across the aisle. why? because paul krugman has extremely definite views on things like tax policy or deficit spending. he'd want to represent those views, as well he should. he'd want to keep the country from going down a disastrous path, etc. i think non-partisanship makes sense in many situations or for some figures, and many of these pin-heads (and here i would include pelosi, for example, as well as mcconnell) are ultimately wedded to their own aggrandizement, or have lost all sense of anything except loyalty to and power for their party. but there is also principled partisanship, important partisanship, partisanship that is central to a representative system. 

live by the sword, etc. kind of an interesting series of events! i wonder what the point is supposed to be. maybe live by the sword, etc.

update: well i guess they think it's a disgruntled marine. how could a marine have a grudge against the marine corps? incomprehensible, har har.

i just want to point out that this is the opposite of terrorism: rather than shooting non-combatants because we're hallucinating, we shoot inanimate objects that are bits of the war machine.

funny i've been sort of dissatisfied with my music lately; i need a new phase or something. i've been listening to a lot of mellow bop: gerry mulligan and sonny rollins, for example. anyway got a little discovery for you: the love me nots, specifically the albums in black and white and detroit. you'd call it garage rock and connect it to white stripes or other neo-trad types. i am a sucker for a farfisa organ, and here it just rolls through many excellent riffs. the lyrics are actually interesting ("i can't hear you over the voices in my head," e.g.), which you would not necessarily expect given the style. i hear the singer - nicole laurenne, who, remarkably, also plays the killer keys - has breast cancer, but i hope there are many other albums in the future. 

speaking of kleptocracy, it would be worth, for example, looking how former senators are living, or comparing how they're living now to how they were living before they made it to the senate. if you're expecting modest homes in middle class neighborhoods, i think you'll be surprised! assuming they weren't fabulously wealthy already, they come out smelling like a...rose.

really before we use science to derive a moral system or something, we might want to police it a little bit for extreme silliness. the gap between the self-image and the reality is, at least, kind of hilarious. it would be redundant to punch holes in a "study" like that; it comes with the holes pre-punched. at any rate, arguing with people who are entirely irrational and detached from reality is useless and unkind. rather, one should merely condescend.

ok ok! i'll punch one hole: the left/right spectrum, liberal/conservative way of thinking about the political spectrum is at most 250 years old. our political genes must be mutating pretty quick! tell me that this study does not constitute essentially a congratulation by the "scientists" to the people doing the funding in virtue of their political positions, and a self-congratulation of course.

it would shock me if american liberals were liberals in virtue of their adventurousness and willingness to take chances and have new experiences. now if there were a gene connected to nodding somnolently along with the banal wisdom of large groups...wait there is! that's how frances de waal gets morality out of evolution.

one good thing about the tea party, problematic though it is in many respects, is that it broadens the almost unbelievably narrow and unimaginative range of viable american political positions. there are people here (rand paul, e.g.) who are actually capable asking fundamental questions, or of critiquing what john boehner and barack obama have in common, the assumptions they share. i believe i would say the same if a far-left viable movement were to emerge; if, say, dennis kucinich or someone farther out than that suddenly appeared in an effective role. i just want to see a broader and more challenging political discourse. this would entail, for example, the collapse of the two-party system, which just has got to go if we actually are committed even vaguely to democracy.

i think, overall, the left's disillusionment with obama - beautifully captured in stewart's interview, in which obama, surprisingly, really floundered - is a good thing. now maybe they're disillusioned unanimously, which would recapitulate the problem. but if they splinter this at least would force them into a critical posture and attenuate their continual mutual backslapping (=self-congratulation) for their super-intelligence.

i was talking to my student alex yesterday, who's thinking about an honors thesis in philosophy of education. he told me that several of the people he went to high school with have died in various ways: murder, od, accident. and then he said he thought one thing that was sad about these lives is that they were largely spent in american educational institutions. there was never a moment that encouraged reflection on their own lives or what they wanted. there was never a moment where they even decided what they themselves wanted to learn. there was only a mechanical, standardized inculcation, entirely instrumental, entirely preparatory; not a moment was supposed to be lived for itself; there was no notion that learning could be engaged in as a pleasure or an intrinsically meaningful activity. this is one thing to ask yourself: how would you want your kids to be educated if you knew they'd die at 18? (of course, if you succeed in your program - if the kid successfully capitulates - he'll be intellectually dead by then anyway.) 

one thing that is really important: childhood is not a mere preparation for adulthood. it is intrinsically meaningful in its own right. the idea that the basic reason kids should learn is to outcompete the children of china or something is bizarrely, horrendously wrong: a deeply evil approach, betraying only the inner emptiness of the people who put it forward, their negation of human life.

in all honesty, if i could, i would erase american education: kill its ideologies, level its buildings, vaporize its books and examinations, free its subjects, put its teachers in houses of detention (wait they're already in houses of detention; talk to teachers a bit and you realize they regard themselves as detainees). i'd use michelle rhee as a club to beat arne duncan to death. i actually sincerely believe we would be much better off after that.

the lecture i gave last night at gettysburg college: 'don't mean sheeit': on the necessity and impossibility of meaning for life.

as i think about my prejudices and how to rank them, i ask myself: islamophobia or homophobia? it's a very hard choice. to which am i more opposed, the burqa or broadway show tunes? between total fabulousness and suicide vests there is little to choose, really: these are closely related fashion statements. indeed were i the handler of suicide bombers, i'd get isaac mizrahi designing the explosive garments. and of course even through this amazing era of toleration that we've been in, i've fought hard to maintain my misogyny. well really it's been kind of effortless; i actually do know some women, after all. i tolerate all persons of course, though just barely, and only because i have no choice. 

At the bottom of the 178 countries Somalia scored 1.1, just below Afghanistan and Myanmar (1.4) and Iraq (1.5).

surely someone somewhere is actually worried about the fact that the countries we invaded and 'liberated' are two of the four most corrupt in the world. we said we brought you this and that: freedom, democracy. what we actually brought you - and i want to say, not entirely by accident - is sheer continuous theft. we liberated you from all your possessions. no matter what he does, no matter what, we back the karzai regime. it doesn't matter if his brother has deposited the gdp in a swiss account. it doesn't matter if he runs entirely crooked elections. it doesn't even seem to matter that iranians are literally plopping bags of cash on his desk. if you think in the long run this is a promising strategy for winning marts and hinds, you're out of freaking mind. it's all gotten much worse and more obvious during the obama administration. everything has disintegrated except our enthusiasm for kleptocracy. maybe we can put one together here; i note that we're dropping down the rankings. wherever in the world people aspire to be robbed and exploited, and in the other places too if there are any, we will be there to make damn sure they are.

well, exactly. but i do want to point out that 'it's not my fault' is perhaps the most characteristic human utterance. we are the blame-shifting animal, distinguished from all others in the order of nature by our innate refusal to take responsibility, and our innate need to find someone else to blame. only one conclusion is possible: it must be the result of natural selection!

gregory isaacs is dead. not a political artist, or a deeply rasta religious artist, etc. but still a delightful pop reggae singer of the 70s etc.

 

 

one rick gekoski, mourning the supposed fact that we don't all read the same books anymore, lists books every literate speaker of english had to have read, circa 1974:

 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953) 

JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1953) 

William Golding, The Lord of the Flies (1954) 

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955) 
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956) 
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956) 
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) 
Norman O Brown, Life Against Death (1959) 
RD Laing, The Divided Self (1960) 
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) 
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) 
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) 
Pauline Reage, The Story of O (1965) 
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967)
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1967) 
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)
Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) 
Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream (1970) 
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1971) 
Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycling Maintenance (1974)

first of all, it's funny to think that today's old fuddy-duddy, today's grumbling old reactionary bemoaning today's kids and their loose ways, was yesterday's freewheeling counter-culture hipster, as the titles make clear. and second: doesn't this list indicate that there's a problem with everyone reading the same books? janov as a touchstone of shared culture? that old shyster castaneda? i personally would whine about golding's totalitarian/hobbesian fable, but i guess you could hold some kind of torch for its modest literary merits, and for its propaganda value in making sure every high school student capitulates to authority without further ado. there are a few good books in there, but a lot stuff that had a very short shelf-life (and a lot that deserved to but didn't because we all read it in 1974). really it's great that y'all (well me too) shared these psychological fads or half-baked theories, now entirely superseded or discredited.  but really we'd have been much better off deciding that there is absolutely no reason that we should all read the same books, and very good reasons we shouldn't: for example that peer pressure elevates slop into official ideology. 

ok ok! i love one flew over the cuckoo's nest and the autobio of malcolm x. i don't doubt that the second sex is good and important, within limitations. marcuse and heller are defensible.

 

 

in the latest publicity wave, they keep describing elton john as a great soul singer. leon russell seems to think so. here's what i want to know: "goodbye yellow brick road" or "daniel": do you think the singing or the overall style of melody or arrangement or lyrics is more like sam cooke or otis redding? who's the more intense soul shouter, who's really got the gravel, ej or wilson pickett? whose music is more connected to the american black gospel tradition, ej or solomon burke? it's not that the answers reflect badly (well, extremely badly) on elton; it's that you've completely got him in the wrong world. go back and start again. otherwise you're not going to be able to defend his importance or excellence. now there may be no world on which elton john's body of work is defensible. but if there is, it ain't the world of soul.

so the iraq war leaks show, among other things, that the military covered up the extent of its killing of civilians throughout the war. (right, cb?!) at the same time, it's not that -the fact that it reveals their own profound evil - that causes the pentagon to condemn the whole thing, but...risks to civilians! (i.e. their informants, or the members of the shia death squads deployed by our man maliki). oy, the irony! really, nothing is more comical than the machinery of death.

It added that "more than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents," going on to say that "US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities."

And the Guardian said the "numerous" reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, "describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks."

It added: "Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death."

Al-Jazeera concluded that major findings included a US military cover-up of Iraqi state-sanctioned torture and "hundreds" of civilians deaths at manned American checkpoints after the US-led invasion of 2003.

etc etc. thank you for your service! and in all seriousness thank you, bradley manning, for yours, to humanity and to the truth.

most muslims are not terrorists. but most terrorists are muslims. there's very little chance that any given muslim is sporting a suicide vest, an extremely good chance that anyone sporting a suicide vest is a muslim. i don't know: create a google news alert for "pakistan suicide bomber" and see what comes in today. the attacks are continuous; no sign that they're running out of volunteers; they throw them away by the dozen. there are serious operations in many locations on every continent except antarctica. they're successfully recruiting in minneapolis, for example, and not among the buddhists. not only that, but the motivation is directly religious. the groups are 'islamist.'

now are there anti-terrorist muslims, as well as elements of the teachings of islam that appear incompatible with killing people at random? of course. now the pc idea is that muslims with sympathy for terrorism constitute a tiny, an infinitesimal, minority. however, i think you'd find a pretty widespread sympathy in various muslim communities here and there, or at least you'd find a lot of condemnations hedged about with qualifications. wrong, but...understandable. you might want to think about how the organizations are funded, what sort of relation they have with the communities from which the terrorists emerge, and so on. no movement is this widespread and potent without a whole background of support of various kinds. the taliban had support widespread enough to throw the soviets out of afghanistan and run the country until invaded by a foreign army. all over the middle east, the biggest domestic issue for the governments is how to deal with their islamists, often more or less the most potent political force in the culture (cf muslim brotherhood in egypt) outside the state. draw the wrong cartoon, and there are angry mobs all over the muslim world, screaming "death" or issuing fatwas with sentences of immediate transmission to the afterlife.

here's the usual line: people don't blame christians in general or christianity for, say, oklahoma city. on the other hand mcveigh's self-account was not primarily religious. the killings of abortion doctors are a better example, and people definitely use acts like that to condemn christianity, or large swathes of it. listen to rachael maddow on this topic, and the way she connects such killings to much more mainstream evangelical christians, or even to the right/religious wing of the republican party or fox news. that's not insane, and i would think about the history of violent and fanatical christianity for a few moments. it's not edifying. does it have anything to do with the teachings of jesus?, a profound man of peace, who said "His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire." that's...typical. think that might help you justify your crusades or giving people a choice between conversion and impalement, demonstrating the effect of impalement with extreme vividness? these things set half the world on fire in their day.

but attacking christianity is actually compatible with pc standards. attacking islam, or even making any kind of assessment with a vague connection to reality, is completely unacceptable. it's sort of understandable because if we end up in a completely polarized religious war, we're all in trouble. but on the other hand you can't address the problem very effectively if you're not even permitted to examine or describe the problem. but juan williams wasn't even saying all that.

at any rate, i'm just against strategic assertion. there's not a lot of real benefit to "let's pretend." and yet that is all there is to these formal and informal pc speech codes. alright. enforce your little forms of words. you can't be puzzled, though, if i have no tendency whatever to believe what you say, or even believe that you believe it. start insisting that everyone manifest your favorite set of fraudulent beliefs (fraudulent in the sense that they are not actually beliefs) and you create a la-la land of non-stop lying. or it doesn't even really rise to the level of lying; it's just enforced unanimous noise, like a flock of geese or something. if what you say is not about reality, but about expressing your solidarity or trying to appear to be a good person by the standards of a given moment, then what you say loses its meaning, in a very clear way. the words no longer have their customary reference, or even any reference at all. to believe something is to take it to be true, not to take it to be nice, or sweet, or even necessary to express under the circumstances. people who make and enforce speech codes, in other words, do not believe what they're saying, and neither do the enforcees. but it's even worse than that. 'islam' in their vernacular does not refer to islam; it refers to a set of possible effects of the utterance itself, etc.

no doubt the reason that the military freaks on wikileaks is because they are concerned with the safety of their informants and soldiers, obscure or speculative though any such such endangerment might be. (i want you to show me some of the many deaths that y'all predicted with the utmost confidence from the afghan leaks. obviously assange is a murderer. ok who did he kill?) it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they do not want you or the iraqis etc to know what the u.s. military actually has done. indeed, if people knew things like that, they might cease to support the war effort. that is, it would be bad for morale. patriotism, as robert gates has so often asserted, or perhaps merely implied, can only be maintained under conditions of utter delusion. and are we not patriots?

hey next tuesday, oct 26, i'll be giving a talk on the topic of the meaning of life (eep!) at gettysburg college. the title is "'don't mean sheeit': releasing life from significance.' actually, though, i've pulled back just a bit from that abyss. 7PM, though i'm not sure exactly where!

 

here's a brief illustration of what i mean on environment: biosphere 2 (earth was supposed to be biosphere 1). the idea was to create a completely enclosed ecosystem, a sort of model for the way they thought about the earth, or perhaps the way they thought about various local ecosystems: as essentially isolated, balanced, stable systems. they tried to simulate the balance and stability supposedly displayed by nature before man's depredations. not to put too fine a point on it, the thing was a miserable failure by that standard: they actually never effectively sealed it: the inside was continually leaking out and the outside in. to the extent the could seal it, it started to die and became non-viable. e.g. all the pollinating insects died, which would have compromised the whole thing if they hadn't started importing stuff. they couldn't achieve a stable oxygen level, even with all their plants. etc. eventually they just gave up, and the thing came to be regarded as a boondoggle. in short, unsustainable.

but the experiment could have been regarded as a success in this sense: it disconfirmed (not decisively of course) the picture of what an ecosystem is and what makes it workable with which they started. the earth itself even as a whole is not an integral self-contained system. start, um, with the source of light (including the sudden blast of solar flares etc), or the role of meteor impacts on species and evolution. but there is certainly no ecosystem on earth that's not in constant interchange with those surrounding it. even island ecosystems do not maintain precisely the same species etc through long periods of time, but which i mean hundreds or thousands, not millions of years. we have this fantasy of nature as a stable underlying reality which we are disturbing; this is false both about those systems and about us.  

the environmental movement still has this idea of nature as wise (and it is a wisdom to which we must return). it's like a fantasy mother, lovely and harmonious; we are her straying children, though through "sustainability," for example, we could simulate in ourselves her ideal condition. whatever this may be, it is not an empirical result; actually it's almost bizarre in its detachment from our real experience or natural history. no doubt nature does display various spatially and temporally limited relative balances, or is relatively stable in some places over significant stretches of time. the mutual interdependent adaptation of creatures is astonishing. right. but all of that is in the context of an extremely volatile, radically unstable system constantly subject to change from within and without, and exquisite adaptations lead to sudden mutual extinctions because of weather, or warming or cooling, or microbes suddenly wafting in from south america, or strange ducks crossing the pacific. we are such ducks.

 

i do think that keith richards is an avatar of taste. he never went, let's say, where the beatles went; john lennon never stopped asking how he could make his music more pretentious or less sensible. at any rate, this assessment of richards is well-supported by his own assessment of allen ginsberg: "an old gasbag." and though allen ginsberg wasn't always old, he was always a gasbag.

yes it's true: airstrikes save lives. it follows that the more people you kill with airstrikes, the more lives you save. indeed, if we want to save as many lives as possible - which of course we do, for we believe in the preciousness of every human life - the best or even only approach is to kill absolutely everyone.

cb's got me thinking environmentalism. so i guess more criticism! i think that much, anyway, of the environmental movement, has a wrong view of ecosystems or what makes an ecosystem a good ecosystem. so it just can't be in terms of balance, equilibrium, sustainability, stability. there are no static ecosystems or ecosystems in equilibrium. so the ecosystem around my house (yes: it's waldenish! but with a wal-mart pretty close): it's filled to overflowing with the alterations of man. centuries of farming, e.g., structures in various stages of collapse and disappearance. obviously another alcoholic lived here before me: there are hundreds of whiskey bottles in piles all around the woods. there are more invasive than non-invasive species, insofar as i can do a census, and english ivy and sparrows are everywhere. but it is incredibly alive. there are myriads of insects of al kinds, vines growing luxuriantly over everything. a meadow surrounded by berry-briars, all kinds of trees from all over the world: chinese chestnuts for example. the poison ivy is extremely impressive, as if one plant had takn over the whole region. there are layers of birds, from hummers to little peepers, to bluejays, and ascending through kestrels, sharp-shinned and red-shouldered hawks, to turkey vultures. i means 'layers' literally. there are feral cats everywhere; i saw a black one just before dark tonight. also coyotes, deer, bobcats, foxes, squirrels, chipmunks, voles etc etc. the whole place is just deliriously alive. that is a good enough ecosystem for me, and i contribute to it by mowing, throwing my old mops back into the various middens that have sprouted up here over the decades, chainsawing, burning, gardening. i brought my cats and my axe. at any rate, i think that one might see climate change differently just by a full acknowledgement that ecosystems are dynamic, we participants. this would be my standard: is it vital? is it full of life? then you know it doesn't need us to fantasize a return to some never-real pristine condition.