Sunday, May 31, 2015

#151 / The Killing Of...



As you may have heard, Seymour Hersh says that the United States government has lied about how Osama Bin Laden was killed. Hersh's account is "utter nonsense" according to the C.I.A.

It is hard to know what to believe. I have read the Hersh article, which appeared in the May 21, 2015 edition of the London Review of Books, and the article seems plausible to me, though admittedly largely based on sources whose names are not disclosed. During the Vietnam War, Hersh was a truth teller. I am not inclined to believe he has changed his stripes. During the Vietnam War, the United States government lied to the people on a routine basis. I am not inclined to think that much has changed there, either. 

If Hersh's story is accurate, Bin Laden was not, actually, "tracked down" by U.S. intelligence. At the time he was killed, he was being held under the control of the government of Pakistan, and the C.I.A. found out about that when a "walk in" source, motivated by an offer of $25 million for information leading to Bin Laden, spilled the beans. The C.I.A. then blackmailed the government of Pakistan to let the United States kill an unarmed and undefended Bin Laden (there was no "fire fight," according to Hersh).

The U.S. government motivated Pakistan by threatening to "turn off the spigot" of U.S. military aid unless Pakistan went along with U.S. wishes. Leon Panetta (at one time a member of Congress representing the Monterey Bay Region, and who was at that time the head of the C.I.A.) is said personally to have negotiated the arrangements. Again according to Hersh, Panetta also suggested that the U.S. should claim that the information leading to Bin Laden was at least partly acquired by "waterboarding and other forms of torture." That was not true, says Hersh, but making the claim would help justify torture, which had been coming under fire, given that the United States was clearly engaged in an extensive use of torture beginning during the presidency of George W. Bush.

If you click this link, you can see a graphic portrayal of the thousands of civilians killed in Pakistan by U.S. drone strikes. You can read Hersh's article about the murder of Bin Laden by clicking right here

Click the following link for the Ten Commandments, which does include the following statement, in the Sixth Commandment: "Thou shalt not kill." 

Query whether being elected President of the United States, or being appointed head of the CIA, might give you a pass on that one!


Image Credit:
http://mrconservative.com/2014/03/36190-breaking-the-real-reason-osama-bin-ladens-death-photos-werent-released/


Saturday, May 30, 2015

#150 / Still A Good Question



Rodney King, an American taxi driver who became nationally known after being beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers following a high-speed car chase on March 3, 1991, posed this question

Can We All Get Along?
That is still a good question, in so many contexts!



Image Credit:
Private photo, taken in Big Sur

Friday, May 29, 2015

#149 / Scale Back The Hype



Economist Paul Krugman (pictured) often says worthwhile things. Here is what he said in his May 25, 2015 column in The New York Times:

At this point, the whole digital era, spanning more than four decades, is looking like a disappointment. New technologies have yielded great headlines, but modest economic results. Why? ... The answer is that I don’t know — but neither does anyone else. Maybe my friends at Google are right, and Big Data will soon transform everything. Maybe 3-D printing will bring the information revolution into the material world. Or maybe we’re on track for another big meh.  
What I’m pretty sure about, however, is that we ought to scale back the hype. You see, writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues — and an excuse for handling those issues badly. If you go back to the 1930s, you find many influential people saying the same kinds of things such people say nowadays: This isn’t really about the business cycle, never mind debates about macroeconomic policy; it’s about radical technological change and a work force that lacks the skills to deal with the new era. 
And then, thanks to World War II, we finally got the demand boost we needed, and all those supposedly unqualified workers — not to mention Rosie the Riveter — turned out to be quite useful in the modern economy, if given a chance. 
Of course, there I go, invoking history. Don’t I understand that everything is different now? Well, I understand why people like to say that. But that doesn’t make it true. 

I agree with Krugman that our much-applauded "high tech" revolution is hardly the salvation of the world (or of the economy), and that what the Titans of V.C. want you to believe is more "hype" than anything else. It's "another big meh." High-tech innovation is not a road to riches (or to the good life) for any ordinary person, no matter what the high-tech "Masters of the Universe" may tell us so "breathlessly."

I also think Krugman is right that nobody really knows in any definitive way why our economy has tended to stall out, but I do have a theory. It's called "satiation."

Krugman always wants to "boost demand," but in our individualistic world, we have been trying to "boost demand" by stimulating ever greater individual consumption. (I just can't wait for that Apple Watch!). How much more, really, can we actually consume? As individuals, I'd like to suggest that we are pretty much reaching the limit. "Satiation" is what I'd call it!

If our economy is based on runaway individual consumption, as it largely is, there comes a time, after we have "eaten the World," that we just can't get our enthusiasm up to buy any more or eat any more!

This failure of individualized "demand" could actually be a blessing. Maybe it will arrest our runaway consumption before we do "eat the World" to the degree that there is nothing left but indigestion.

Now.... collective or community based efforts could "boost demand" in the economy, but that kind of new demand is not going to come in the form of new high-tech "apps" and more individual consumption. That kind of new demand will come in the form of (1) homes for every person in our society; (2) community parks; (3) schools and school teachers in every neighborhood; schools that you can get to by walking; (4) new solar and other renewable technologies, on a distributed power basis; (5) massive reforestation efforts...

It's a partial list....


Image Credit:
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/01/paul_krugman_none_of_the_current_presidential_candidates_have_the_one_key_trait_necessary_for_the_job/

Thursday, May 28, 2015

#148 / We Know Know How You Feel



It turns out that the McCann-Erickson Ad Agency, featured in the AMC series Mad Men as the "bad guy" agency that ultimately takes over the "good guy" firm of which Don Draper is a principal, is actually a real ad agency. In fact, it has been for a long, long time

McCann-Erickson may well be the world's most well-known and prestigious ad agency. But who knew? Well, probably most people! Shows how closely I follow advertising (not much)! 

Just to let you know how good McCann is, their tag line is "Truth Well Told." Can you beat that? Right, Coke is good for you, and all that sort of thing. "Lies Well Rendered" might be more accurate, but as an advertising slogan for an advertising agency, "Truth Well Told" does deserve a prize.

I am actually digressing, displaying my genuine surprise that I am truly so out of touch with a reality of which I presume most were aware. McCann-Erickson is real! I honestly did think, up until just a few days ago, that McCann-Erickson was a well-drawn figment of the imagination of Matthew Weiner. I hope I am not going to learn that Don Draper was an actual person, instead of a character in a television drama, and that Mad Men  was first conceived of as a biopic to run on the History Channel. Wikipedia, at least, thinks Don Draper is fictional!

Well, now on to what I wanted to say under the heading "We Know How You Feel."

I found out about the real existence of the McCann-Erickson Ad Agency from an article assigned to my students in the Legal Studies class I am teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The class is titled, "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom," and I assigned the students a New Yorker article titled "We Know How You Feel." Somehow, I missed the reference to McCann-Erickson the first time I read the article, but I caught it when I re-read the article prior to last week's class session. That was probably because I had just watched that last segment of Mad Men, which I hated to see go. 

At any rate, The New Yorker article was not about McCann-Erickson but about another company in the advertising business, Affectiva. Affectiva is the company that "knows how you feel." They use facial recognition software to map the emotional responses that people experience as they watch something. Affectiva started out as a company that had beneficent objectives in mind. They were going to try to figure out how to give autistic persons an ability to read other persons' emotions, so that they could make the  proper response, thus helping those suffering from autism to be able to function better in the "real world."

Pretty quickly, the principals of Affectiva decided they could make a lot more money telling advertising agencies about the emotional responses their ads were generating. So, that's their business now. Forget autism; Affectiva went for the gold.

The main software program that Affectiva uses is called Affdex. You can browse the Affectiva website to learn more, and you can even try out the Affdex program, if you'd like to do that. 

Before you do any of that, I recommend that you read The New Yorker article. A program that helps advertising agencies sell you Doritos or Coke (they are both bad for you) is one thing. That's bad enough. But a program that "knows" what you think, and what you feel, can have many much more nefarious purposes. Just try getting a job, or getting admitted to a graduate program, or finding a date, if the program doesn't show the kind of "true" emotions that whoever is talking to you is looking for. 

"Freedom" (that's one of the topics I'm covering in my class) is based on the idea that the reality we inhabit can be transformed, and that we can genuinely change both our actions and our reactions to whatever may now exist, as we take steps towards creating something genuinely new. 

Filtering our view of the world through Affdex - taking its results as reflecting the "reality" of what we really feel - isn't going to help those who want to change the world!


Image Credit:
http://www.amc.com/shows/mad-men/exclusives/downloads

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

#147 / Your World



Chelsea does it on the cheap (comparatively speaking). Bill and Hillary Clinton receive an average payment of $250,000 for every speech they make, with some speeches apparently pricing out at $700,000. Chelsea's price is $75,000 per speech, and that goes to the Clinton Foundation, not directly into her private account. 

Advice from Chelsea will soon be available at a more affordable rate, as she is just about to release a new book, aimed at children, It's Your World.

Here's what Chelsea is advising: 

Get Informed
Get Inspired &
Get Going!

I think that's good advice. My only suggestion is that Chelsea emphasize that "Your World" is the world that human beings create, and that we need to be careful not to tear apart the World of Nature, upon which "Our World," "My World," and "Your World" ultimately depend. When we "get going," we better know where we're going to end up.

Maybe Chelsea has that message in her book. We will find out in September!




Image Credits:
(1) - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/us/politics/chelsea-clinton-follows-parents-lead-as-a-paid-speaker.html?_r=0
(2) - https://news.yahoo.com/chelsea-clinton-book-world-coming-164123368.html

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

#146 / Spiritual Capital



David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times, has posited that "most children are born with a natural sense of the spiritual." In his May 22, 2015 column, Brooks wrote:

If they find a dead squirrel on the playground, they understand there is something sacred there, and they will most likely give it a respectful burial.

Brooks' column (worth reading, I believe), was stimulated by a book authored by Lisa Miller, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. Miller's book, The Spiritual Child, traces spiritual awareness through a child's growing up period, finding that those who retain a sense of the spiritual dimensions of reality are less depressed, and better able to face the challenges that accompany their teenage years, during which there is often "a loss of meaning, confidence, and identity."

Brooks urges a concerted effort to cultivate spiritual capacity: 

Innate spiritual capacities can wither unless cultivated — the way innate math faculties can go undeveloped without instruction. Loving families nurture these capacities, especially when parents speak explicitly about spiritual quests. The larger question, especially in this age of family disruption, is whether public schools and other institutions should do more to nurture spiritual faculties. 
Public schools often give short shrift to spirituality for fear that they would be accused of proselytizing religion. But it should be possible to teach the range of spiritual disciplines, in order to familiarize students with the options, without endorsing any one. 
In an era in which so many people slip off the rails during adolescence, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring a resource that, if cultivated, could see them through. Ignoring spiritual development in the public square is like ignoring intellectual, physical or social development. It is to amputate people in a fundamental way, leading to more depression, drug abuse, alienation and misery.

Without venturing to advise on school curriculum, I would like to suggest that the "natural sense of the spiritual" that Brooks believes is a reality among young children (however anecdotally substantiated in his column) reflects, in a very real way, a young child's intuitive understanding that we belong, ultimately, to a larger World, beyond human creation, upon which we ultimately depend for everything, and most especially for life itself. 

Having just been presented with the wonder of being alive, a young child might naturally be more aware of his or her origins in such a Natural World than those who, now older, have become beguiled with the world of human creation, which they increasingly take for the only world that counts. 

Brooks titles his column "Building Spiritual Capital," but the gist of his commentary isn't about "building" such capital, it is about making sure that we don't lose what we are born with. 

An appreciation that we are ultimately and radically dependent on the World of Nature, the "World That God Made" is what Brooks is denominating as "spiritual," or "sacred." 

We can come to believe that what is important is what we do, the world we human beings create. And that world is important, but it's only one of the Two Worlds we inhabit, and while the human world of our own creation is immediately what grabs our attention, and binds our allegiance, it is the World of Nature upon which we all, ultimately, depend.


Image Credit:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/573364596285519877/

Monday, May 25, 2015

#145 / Memorial #5



Civic holidays are my favorite kind. The Fourth of July, for instance, is directly tied to the Declaration of Independence, and to the American commitment to self-government. I place a pretty high priority on self-government, with my consistent admonition being that “self-government” means that we have to get involved ourselves.

Memorial Day (and that’s today) is also on my list of worthy holidays. At one time called “Decoration Day,” this holiday is dedicated to the memory of all those who have died while serving in the nation’s armed forces. Veterans Day honors all veterans. Memorial Day honors those who gave up their lives for their country, who gave their “last full measure of devotion,” to use the words of Abraham Lincoln.

Now, the following observation is somewhat philosophical, but I want to suggest that authentic, non-heroic, ordinary self‑government also requires us to "give up our lives" in a very real way. Each of us has a “life,” which is “our life,” and that is the life we choose for ourselves; "our" life is what we choose to do with our time, energies, and talents. 

To be truly involved in democratic self-government, we must be willing to give up at least part of “our” lives, so that we can spend our time, energies, and talents in the governmental decision making process. That’s what it means to be involved in self-government “ourselves.”

Think about that concept the next time you hear about an important public meeting, or you think to yourself, "something needs to be done" about an important public issue.

And have a great holiday today! 

But seize the time while you have it. The next time that Memorial Day falls on a May 25th, the date will be May 25, 2043. That's twenty-eight years from now, and I may not be around to renew my suggestion! 


Image Credit:
http://7-themes.com/6951168-abraham-lincoln.html

Sunday, May 24, 2015

#144 / V.C.



When I was younger, "V.C." meant the "Viet Cong," the military patriots of North Vietnam (not generally recognized as patriots by most in America), whose commitment to their country ultimately led to the United States' most significant military defeat, ever.

Nowadays, "V.C." means "Venture Capitalist," or sometimes "Vulture Capitalist" by those not greatly enamored of persons who make their living investing huge sums of money to benefit (above all) themselves. The V.C. have as their main habitat the fertile and porous soils of Sand Hill Road, located in Menlo Park, California, which is generally held to be the "center of the V.C. universe."

Pictured above is a much admired V.C., Marc Andreessen one of the principals in Andreessen Horowitz. This V.C. firm insists, on its website, that "Software is Eating the World." The New Yorker is calling Andreessen "Tomorrow's Advance Man."

I liked The New Yorker article, but it didn't make me love Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz, or what might be called the "V.C. project." The ultimate objective of all those involved in V.C. is described this way in "Tomorrow's Advance Man":

Venture in the Valley is a perfect embodiment of the capitalist dynamic that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Weissman said, “Silicon Valley V.C.s are all techno-optimists. They have the arrogant belief that you can take a geography and remove all obstructions and have nothing but a free flow of capital and ideas, and that it’s good, it’s very good, to creatively destroy everything that has gone before.”

"Eating the world," right? My world. Your world. Our world. "Arrogant" does seem to capture the essential element of the V.C. project.

Once those Venture Capitalists eat it, it's "their" world. 

Which kind of explains the increasing income (and other) inequality that results when those with money "destroy everything that has gone before."


Image Credit:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man

Saturday, May 23, 2015

#143 / Defib This



I saw a sign in downtown Santa Cruz the other day, posted high on the backside of what used to be the PG&E Headquarters. "DEFIBTHIS" is what it said. 

It turns out that the sign was advertising a business (Defibthis.com) that provides emergency response training. That's great!

However, I had hoped that the sign indicated that someone was trying to eliminate the fundamental mendacity that seems ever present in our society today, from the statements made in advertising cons, to the misleading information from banks and financial institutions that brought on the 2008 economic crash, to what our government and politicians have to say about "technology, privacy, and freedom," those topics I am addressing with the class I am teaching in the UCSC Legal Studies Program. 

Oh, well! When the lying ways of our trusted institutions and political leaders give us a heart attack, we can only hope that someone trained by Defibthis will be around to provide some lifesaving intervention.


Image Credit:
http://www.trademarkia.com/category-in-education-and-entertainment-services-041-page-7-starting-d

Friday, May 22, 2015

#142 / Ray


Pictured is Ray Glock-Grueneich. This photograph was taken as Ray was speaking on "religion in China" in the Meeting House of the Santa Cruz Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Ray gave that talk just last Sunday, and it was both informative and moving. I was very happy to be able to be there, and to hear Ray, and especially because I had been thinking about Ray even before I heard that he was going to be speaking at the Meeting House.

Not long ago, I attended a basketball game at the Kaiser-Permanente Arena in downtown Santa Cruz. One of my students from UCSC was playing, and it turned out to be an exciting game. Unfortunately, the UCSC team lost by one point in overtime, but the student from my class was definitely the star of the show. It was a very pleasant evening, seeing old friends and enjoying some exciting college-level women's basketball.

However, that basketball evening turned out to be particularly special for me because during the half-time I was approached by someone who was about my own age, whom I didn't recognize, and who said, after introducing himself, that he wanted to thank me, more than forty years later, because I had been his defense attorney in a draft prosecution, in 1972. Because I was successful in defending him, he didn't have to go to jail!

Well, my father and I defended a lot of draft resisters and conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, and we never lost a case. A huge share of the credit for that, however, goes to Ray Glock-Grueneich. He absolutely was, as the Wikipedia article says,  an "expert in Selective Service law." 

Actually, the article says Ray was a "recognized expert," and while I suppose Ray's expertise was recognized by those who knew, I don't think very many people actually knew what a great thing Ray did during the war. The person who approached me at the basketball game, for instance, certainly attributed the successful defense of his case to me. I was the attorney of record, but I can almost guarantee that it was the behind the scenes work that Ray did that probably led to the success in that case. 

This posting is just my simple statement of appreciation for Ray Glock-Grueneich. I am just passing on the plaudits given to me at that basketball game. Ray is truly an extraordinary person. There are others, like Ray, who do amazing things for others, and who are often unrecognized for their contributions. Anyone in that category should get a shout out for what they have done, even if that shout out comes more than forty years later. Thanks to all, but let me say, especially: Thank you Ray! I don't know anyone who is a smarter, more sincere, and more effective non-violent fighter for justice.

And by the way, as I learned from that presentation last Sunday, Ray is now teaching in China, and is still doing those amazing things!


Image Credit:
Gary Patton personal photo

Thursday, May 21, 2015

#141 / Our Right Relationship To Nature



On the other hand ...


Right relationship with life and the world is both a personal and a collective choice, but it is a choice that we must make. It can support and inspire people struggling to find a foundational base for the development of productive societies and a healthy human–earth relationship. Opting for healthy human and ecological communities is a decision we can make that will require us to find new ways to live and to run our economies. Of course, “right relationship” is simply another way of expressing similar precepts found in many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. The reductionist science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed ethical ideas by removing, for many people, their theological foundations. Now, the relationship science of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is beginning to change human perceptions of reality, particularly in terms of human duties to the other life forms with which we share life’s prospect.


Image Credit:
http://www.gocomics.com/wumo/2015/05/17

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

#140 / The Upside Of Utopianism



Acknowledging the problems with "utopian" thinking, it does strike me that the human world we build is, ultimately, a world that is responsive to our choices and actions. That means there is a place for "utopianism." There is no inevitability in the world we create, which means we can always change the realities we confront today and construct new realities for tomorrow. At least, that's theoretically so!

The above observation applies only within "our" world, note, the "human world." Different rules apply within the World of Nature. The World of Nature is precisely the place where "inevitability" prevails. 

Too bad we forget that most of the time!

The image above is from a Diego Rivera mural. I found it on a blog called "Philosophers For Change."

My father was kind of a philosopher. Or so he seemed to me. He often said, "Unless you have a dream, you can never have a dream come true." That was way before I signed up for that "Utopia" seminar at Stanford, which really got me started on my utopian predisposition!


Image Credit:
http://philosophersforchange.org/writers-articles/

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

#139 / My Utopian Disability



My early inculcation into utopian thinking has stayed with me. I consider that this is really a "net positive," but I do admit that my predilection for bringing a "utopian" analysis to various social, political, and economic questions can become a kind of disability. 

Because "possibility" is my main category of choice, I have a hard time really believing that there is nothing we can do.

Image Credit:
http://www.sensusnovus.ru/analytics/2011/05/25/7872.html

Monday, May 18, 2015

#138 / Tufekci Talks



Zeynep Tufekci, pictured, calls herself a "techno-sociologist." She has been talking about some important things. One of her "TED talks" discusses online social change, and is well is worth watching. It reinforces my own thoughts on this topic

Tufekci has also made a rather scholarly paper available online, in which she talks about how "big data" and "computational politics" may be undermining our democratic system. I have assigned the paper to the students who are taking my course at UCSC on "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom." Feel free to read that paper, too! Tufekci relies upon, and expands, the analysis presented in The Victory Lab, a book I have written about on this blog, and that Politico calls "Moneyball for Politics."

Bottom line? 

If we want a politics responsive to real people and their real concerns, we are going to have to meet face to face, and go from there. "Clicking" our way to democracy and political effectiveness is a dead end. In fact, it's a trap. That "computational politics" that Tufekci is talking about is a politics that takes your "likes" and turns them against you. The more the the "clickmasters" know about what you "like," the more they will use that information to manipulate you. 

By the way, as a kind of footnote, here's a fact about those Facebook "likes" that surprised me. It may surprise you: 

As of last year, Facebook was processing about 2.5 billion pieces of content, 2.7 billion “like” actions, 300 million photos and, overall, 500 terabytes of data every day.


Image Credit:
http://www.allamericanspeakers.com/speakers/Zeynep-Tufekci/393520

Sunday, May 17, 2015

#137 / The Empowered Consumer


Verizon bought AOL. That's big news in the business world! I read all about it in the May 14, 2015 edition of The New York Times. According to that Times article, this could be a very good thing for you and me. Alberto Canal, speaking for Verizon, says this: "There's been an epiphany here that we live in the age of the empowered consumer."

Well, maybe so! The Economist, as you can see, seems to have that same idea. All power to the consumer, and life is good. Right?

Well, maybe so! But just to provide a different perspective, let's think about putting the emphasis on the "consumer" part of this description, instead of on the "empowered" part. 

The modern economy, having reached an "epiphany" in its realization that we need to "empower" the consumer, is relying on the fact that these consumers (you and I) are being empowered to ... consume!

Life is good, right?

Well, maybe so! But make way for ducklings, consumers!

Consider the fate of those ducks and geese subjected to that empowered form of consumption known as gavage.  

Are we, as empowered consumers, more or less playing the role that those ducks and geese play in the production of foie gras? You know, the ducks and geese get to consume, to fatten their livers, and those livers are then are torn out of their bodies to be eaten by fancy diners around the world. Some people call them the 1%'ers.

Lots of people think this process should be classified as animal abuse. We probably need to think about that analogy before we celebrate too much about our increasing and ever more "empowered consumption."



Image Credits:
(1) - http://alexdc.org/2005/04/the-newly-empow.html#.VVTbYmRVhBc
(2) - http://animaux.l214.com/foie-gras/gavage/frayeur-du-gavage

Saturday, May 16, 2015

#136 / Urban Light - An Obituary





Pictured above are two different views of an installation by Chris Burden, a performance artist who died on Sunday, May 10, 2015. The pictured installation is titled "Urban Light," and was first illuminated in 2008. Because of its permanence and its prominence (it is located at the main entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), it will undoubtedly be the work for which Burden is most remembered. 

An obituary by Adrian Glick Kudler, published in Curbed Los Angeles, observes that: 

Before "Urban Light," Burden's most famous work was 1971's "Shoot," for which he stood in a gallery in Santa Ana and let a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle from 15 feet away. In an appreciation for Burden published yesterday, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz writes that the piece turned the artist's body into "A living sculpture come to dangerous life in the blink of an eye, sacrificing for his work while enacting a complex sadomasochism of love, hate, desire, and aggression." Burden's early art was full of violence, mostly self-directed; he made the agony of artistic creation literal, and public.

Before "Shoot," Burden performed the "Five Day Locker," described as follows and pictured below: 

Medium: Performance at the University of California Irvine
Dates: April 26, 1971 - April 30, 1971 
At the University of California, Irvine, Chris Burden locked himself in Locker Number 5 for five consecutive days. He rigged the locker above him to hold five gallons of bottled water, while the locker below him held an empty five gallon bottle ... Five Day Locker marked the beginning of Burden's early body works, where his performances centered around physical feats putting his own body under duress.


"Locker" was counted as Burden's 1971 graduate thesis. I think I might have been tempted to call that "Locker" piece by a different name: "Just Passing Through." While the piece does, perhaps, convey a message worth pondering, I am personally pleased that Burden emerged from the dark of that five-day lockup, survived his shooting, and then left us a monument with a different message. 

We may, ourselves, be simply passing through. But when we go we can leave light behind.


Image Credits:
(1) and (2) - http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/05/the_story_of_chris_burdens_urban_light_los_angeless_first_great_landmark_of_the_twentyfirst_century.php
(3) - http://www.complex.com/style/2013/10/chris-burden-art-new-museum/five-day-locker


Friday, May 15, 2015

#135 / Critical Thinking



Critical thinking is critically important! In fact, most colleges require that critical thinking be taught to every student in some form. Taking that critical thinking course is a graduation requirement. My wife, who has taught college students for more than twenty-five years, has let me see her favorite book on the topic: Becoming A Critical Thinker - A User Friendly Manual. I liked the book. 

The illustration, above, isn't from the book; it's from a website maintained by someone who seems to be an escapee from the Scientology cult. Anette Iren Johansen thinks critical thinking might have saved her from a long detour in her life, a detour that she calls "my bridge to ruin."

It is easy to assume that "critical" thinking requires that we be "critical" of others, that we not let ourselves be taken in, and that we debunk their (quite likely erroneous) ideas. There is something to that, of course, but I have another perspective to present. Not to denigrate the importance of being a "critic," that quality of empathy I mentioned in my last couple of blog postings has a big part to play in critical thinking. At least, that's what I would like to suggest.

Effective critical thinking requires, the way I see it, that we be somewhat "critical" of our own assumptions, and it is "empathy," not "criticism" that may be our greatest help in getting there. 

I was pleased to see, in that book my wife recommended, the following statement, attributed to Arthur Costa, in his article, "Teaching For Intelligence":

Some psychologists believe that the ability to listen to another person, to empathize with, and to understand their point of view is one of the highest forms of intelligent behavior.


Image Credit:
http://anetteiren.com/how-to-resist-manipulation-part-2/

Thursday, May 14, 2015

#134 / Empathy #3



In yesterday's posting, I identified the empathetic and mutual support that can be found in small groups as an essential necessity for effective political action. 

My reflection on this topic was sparked by The Wall Street Journal's obituary of Jean Nidetch, one of the co-founders of Weight Watchers. But the fact that the word "empathy" was used to describe the "secret" of the Weight Watchers' program made me think about "empathy" in more general terms. 

Thinking about empathy, I was reminded of an Ellen Bass poem that I recently read. A blessing to read it. It would be hard to find a better way to make "empathy" come alive, though Bass never uses the word in this masterful portrayal of human compassion:


If You Knew 
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the lifeline’s crease. 
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die. 
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
they’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk. 
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
by Ellen Bass   

Image Credit:
http://www.distinguishedartists.org/our-artists/inna-faliks-ellen-bass/

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

#133 / Empathy #2



Jean Nidetch (pictured) was a co-founder of Weight Watchers. She died on April 29, 2015, and I read about her "yen for cookies" in an article in The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times ran a nice article, too. 

I didn't (and don't) know much about Weight Watchers, but I was struck by the following statement in The Wall Street Journal article:

Ms. Nidetch, a perpetually overweight housewife, discovered an important weight-loss tool that was missing from traditional diets: empathy.

The article went on to report that the "secret" to the effectiveness of the Weight Watchers program was the "weekly meetings where members could draw support from one another..."

That strikes me as the secret to almost any kind of effective action, including effective political action.

Hannah Arendt identified small groups of people as the engines of democratic revolution in her seminal work on the subject, On Revolution. According to Arendt, the fact that a revolution is underway is evidenced, more than anything, by the spontaneous coming together of such small groups, the Committees of Correspondence in the case of the American Revolution, the communes in the French Revolution, and the soviets in the Russian Revolution

Small groups, providing empathetic and mutual support, are the route to real change - individual and collective!


Image Credit:
http://www.quotessays.com/jean-nidetch.html

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

#132 / Naturally



Michael Pollan (pictured above, with lettuce) writes about food. In an article that appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May 3rd, Pollan also wrote a little bit about the law. His article, which is very much worth reading, is headlined "Altered State" in the print edition. The article references "some 200 class-action suits...filed against food manufacturers, charging them with misuse of the adjective 'natural' in marketing." Pollan's article explores what "natural" means in this legal context, and what it means when that word "natural" is applied to food, and when the word is used in other contexts, too (for instance in the context of a discussion about marriage equality).

I was struck by Pollan's claim, made early in his article, that the "most incoherent" of our explanations of "natural" is "the notion that nature consists of everything in the world except us and all that we have done or made." Anyone who has been following my posts in this Two Worlds blog might well think that this is exactly the distinction that I accept as my basic premise. 

Actually, that would be pretty close to being right, but I am not sure that Pollan and I are really at odds. I posit our existence as occurring in "two" worlds, a world of Nature, in which we ultimately reside, and a human-created world in which is we live most immediately. Pollan is clearly talking about one world only. Since we live most immediately in the human-created world, any mention of, or discussion about "the world" almost always means the world of our human-created reality. Our human-created world is, indeed, comprised of "all that we have done or made," so using the word "natural" to designate anything within that world is, in fact, rather "incoherent," as Pollan states, and maybe even disingenuous.

My "Two World hypothesis" is intended to avoid just the problem that Pollan is addressing in his article, by highlighting the fact that there is a part of the reality that defines our existence that is different from "all that we have done or made." There is a world of Nature that is ultimately the world that contains and limits all we do, and we, ourselves, are actually creatures within that "natural" world. It would be "incoherent" to think that we have created ourselves. God, or evolution, or the laws of nature have brought human beings into existence, and the rest of the reality we inhabit is then largely created by what we have done or made. Pollan notes that the word "natural" means something different when that word is applied to biology than when it is applied to human behavior (or to any of our human creations, I would say). 

Pollan's article does a good job of arguing against claims that something is "natural," and thus "good," because it is "usual," or "normal," or "traditional." Human beings decide what is "usual," "normal," or "traditional," and whatever we decide, there is nothing "natural" about those decisions. Thus, "natural marriage" is a non-sequitur, as Pollan properly states. Human institutions are defined by humans, and we can change our mind, and change the rules. There is nothing "natural" about how we choose to provide and prepare the foods we eat, either. All of those activities pertain to the world of human creation, a world in which  there is no inevitability or necessity, and what is "good" is what we decide should be called good. Pollan and I don't disagree about that!

At the very end of his article (again, an article very much worth reading), Pollan makes this statement, a statement very much worth pondering: 

Nature, if you believe in human exceptionalism, is over. We probably ought to search elsewhere for our values.

I am no fan of claims of "American" exceptionalism. I am no fan of claims of "human" exceptionalism, either. That claim for human exceptionalism is, within the way I characterize our "two worlds" existence, a claim that the only world that counts is the human-created world that consists of all that we, humans, make or do.

Ever more often (and ever more stridently), this claim of "human exceptionalism" is being seriously advanced. To the degree that human beings forget that they are radically dependent on the World of Nature, a world we do not and cannot create ourselves, we ensure that our human civilization will progress forward to its ultimate demise.


Image Credit: 
http://archive.azcentral.com/food/articles/20131001michael-pollan-food-tempe-author.html

Monday, May 11, 2015

#131 / Highlander



That "Communist" training school that Dr. King attended was the Highlander Folk School, sometimes called the Highlander Center, founded by Myles Horton. Horton was called the "Father of the Civil Rights Movement" by none other than James Bevel. In view of his own role in the struggle, Bevel ought to know. Rosa Parks was trained at the Highlander Center before she helped initiate the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Other subversives came around periodically, too. People like Pete Seeger

As it turns out, there is a local connection for those who call Santa Cruz County home. Bill and Karen Cane, who began a non-profit corporation called IF about forty years ago, met up with Myles Horton in Nicaragua. The Canes knew of Horton from Page Smith, a revered historian who made U.S. history come alive in his eight-volume People's History of the United States. Smith was also the first Provost of Cowell College at UCSC. 

According to the latest edition of Integrities, IF's quarterly magazine, "Page loved the story of how Abraham Lincoln influenced Jane Addams, and Jane Addams influenced Myles, and Myles influenced Rosa Parks (who was sent to him by Martin Luther King, Sr.). One hundred years of US History, from the freeing of the slaves to the Civil Rights Movement, Page mused, and we can trace a spirit being passed from person to person, from Abraham Lincoln all the way to Rosa Parks!"

If you'd like to link yourself to the chain, you might want to sign up for IF's Latin America Dinner, which is being held on Saturday, May 16th, at 7:00 p.m. It's a benefit, with the proceedings helping to support nonviolent social change work in Mexico. You can register online, but you have to do it by May 14th.

The latest Integrities quotes Horton, who has some good advice:

You should begin by doing something instead of just having a lot of meetings discussing something. If you have too many meetings, you will simply talk yourselves out of doing anything!

Image Credit:
http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2015/01/school-for-subversives-and-communists.html

Sunday, May 10, 2015

#130 / Ex Machina



Ex Machina (the movie) is still playing at the Del Mar Theatre, right downtown in Santa Cruz. The movie is about artificial intelligence. 

Ava, the artificially intelligent robot, is pictured in the center. Her creator is pictured to the right. Young Caleb, sincere and brilliant, is on the left. He has been brought in to a very remote location to take part in a "Turing Test."

Wikipedia provides this helpful definition: "A Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human." Ava passes.


It's a movie worth seeing.

It's a topic worth thinking about!

Image Credit:
http://screenrant.com/ex-machina-2015-trailer-reviews-preview/

Saturday, May 9, 2015

#129 / Our GAFA Problem



Joe Nocera asks the question, "Have you heard the term Gafa yet?" Nocera, who writes a column for The New York Times, bets you haven't. He also predicts that the term will probably not really "catch on" in the United States. You can read what Nocera has to say on this topic by clicking this link

According to Nocera's column, which ran in The Times on Tuesday, April 28th, use of the term "Gafa" is big in Europe. "Gafa" stands for "Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon," and and the term "Gafa" conveys the growing economic domination of these huge, American-based high-tech firms. One European columnist, quoted by Nocera, says that Gafa firms "encapsulate America's evil Internet empire."

Worries about Gafa in Europe seem largely to be worries about the economic independence of the various nations in Europe, considering the growing economic dominance of Gafa. 

But I think the United States has a Gafa problem, too.

I am currently teaching a course in the Legal Studies program at the University of California at Santa Cruz called "Privacy, Technology, and Freedom." The students in the course are studying governmental intrusions on individual privacy and freedom, and the impacts on privacy and freedom of "Gafa," and similar high-technology firms.

We have problems in both areas, but in the arena of governmental abuses (made clear by the document releases of Edward Snowden), we at least have various Constitutional rights that provide tools to counteract governmental spying and personal profiling.

No such Constitutional guarantees apply to Gafa, and we don't really have any privacy "rights," either, vis a vis the firms that provide us our gateway to the Internet. Whatever privacy protections these firms may afford us (and they are generally between scarce and none), such protections are based upon, and governed almost entirely by, adhesion contracts that set out whatever privacy protections we may be granted. 

When we press the "I Accept" button, and are thus cleared to use whatever Internet services we may be trying to employ, our "rights" are at that moment limited to those spelled out in the agreement we just approved, and that most of us never even read. Frankly, reading these agreements doesn't really do anyone much good, since our choice is to accept the terms of the agreement as presented by the provider, or not to use the service at all. More and more, that may not actually be a realistic choice.

It is becoming virtually impossible to participate in modern life without an almost constant access to the Internet, so our practical choice, at the present time, is to surrender whatever privacy the companies want to take from us, or (on the other hand) simply not to have access to any of the programs that provide us our functional connection to civic society.

As I have been telling the students in my class, it doesn't have to be that way. We can achieve actual privacy protections that will be of significant benefit to us, vis a vis Gafa and similar firms, but we can't do that through individual negotiations. We need to do it collectively, by legislation. 

So, Americans have a Gafa problem, too. And the solution to that problem...

Is politics!



Image Credit:
http://www.cedricdeniaud.com/gafa-transformation-digitale/


Friday, May 8, 2015

#128 / The Seduction Of Secrecy



If I want privacy, then why shouldn't the government get that, too? Isn't governmental secrecy, in fact, a real benefit to us all? If the government really had to tell the citizens what it was doing, how could it ever be effective in doing what needs to be done?

Questions like these are addressed in a new book by Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr.Democracy in the Dark. I haven't read the book. I did read a review. The review I read was published  in the April 29, 2015 edition of The Wall Street Journal; it seems to indicate that Schwarz comes down firmly on both sides of the issue. Sometimes governmental secrecy is bad. Sometimes it's good - or at least justifiable. 

Speaking as a citizen, there is a big problem with governmental secrecy, and with giving "privacy rights" to our government, with respect to what the government is doing in our name.

What you do is your business. What I do is my business.

What the government does is OUR business.

So, we have to know what the government is doing, or we can't effectively be in charge of the government. We can't be in charge of "our business" if we don't know what our employees are doing. 

What we are called upon to do, as citizens, is to be in charge of the government. That is what "self government" is all about. 

My simple (but I think not simplistic) response to claims that the government is entitled to secrecy: No it's not!

Government doesn't get to keep what it does secret. Not if we care about having the government work for us, rather than the other way around!

Image Credit: 
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Dark-Seduction-Government-Secrecy/dp/1620970511