Remember The Others

“The free must remember the forgotten.”  Amnesty International

On this Independence Weekend, take a moment to think about all those who do not have your freedom.  The forgotten prisoners of conscience across the world.  There but for the grace of happenstance and fortune go you.

My Daughter Inadvertently Gave This Extra Father’s Day Message

My daughter follows the news of terror incidents against black Americans.  For the question, particularly appropriate today, of “How hard is it to be an African-American father; what does he—what CAN an African-American father—tell his kids?”, my daughter’s conversation provides some insight:

My daughter and her friend were talking about foreign travel.  Her friend:

“I don’t think I’d feel safe in foreign countries.”

My daughter:

“Oh, so you know a little then of what it feels like to be black in white America.”

To Forget and To Not

It is the little help and heavy plague of many foreign cultures that they cannot forget.

It is the little help and heavy plague of American culture that it almost always forgets.

The Oppression of the Individual

Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1987: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Revolting to think she is idolized, as that hyper-individualistic worldview has brought ruin for 500 years.

Seth Rogen AGAIN

It’s no comfort, but my post of 6/29/14 (and maybe 6/15) on this subject was prescient.  While I am repulsed by North Korea’s attack against Sony, and it’s (and/or surrogates’) threats against theaters and moviegoers are highly reprehensible, and I understand George Clooney’s wanting actors, directors, and studios to take a stand against a chilling blow to artist freedom, there is a core element to blame.

Rogen’s idiocy in making the film, and Sony’s decision to back it/release it (rescinded at the last moment), need to be condemned in just as harsh terms.  A film that promotes, even in comedic terms, the assassination of a living, present leader of another country?  A country that is nuclear armed, volatile, and willing to use violence?  And from a film distributor that is at the core Japanese?  With all that would mean given the terrible history between Japan and Korea in the last 200 years?  And with the actors in the film actually coached by real CIA agents?

The sort of uninformed, brash or even arrogant stupidity displayed by Rogen/Sony is appalling but becoming too common.  Yet if it has even ANY elements of a CIA attempt to snub, warn, or make nervous North Korean leadership through a film vehicle, that’s even more disturbing.

"Con! Con!"

Wait, that’s not what Kirk meant when he said that in Star Trek II? :)

Neo-cons.  They believed their own simplistic drivel, neither seeking nor caring to truly know about the world.  They saw the world through narrow eyes, and refused to accept contradicting evidence, even as it mounted.  They are testament about why America shouldn’t ever turn things over again to their myopic, delusional, self-centered, unexamining asses.  Certainly we shouldn’t listen to them, about the same sector of the world that they screwed up so royally.

Or maybe they were conning, pun intended, from the very first, intent only on enriching themselves and their friends, and driving the govt into weakness and unable to oppose them.

Either way, that the American corporate media still showcases them serves as ample evidence of who actually controls what.  An alien outsider would comment that no rational people not in servitude to another class would give credence to the discredited.  

Vacuousa a la Roma

The ethical decline of selfish “elites,” and the spiritual vacuousness of the West in general, and the US in particular, are demonstrated in how many non-elites are willing to join anything with a sense of surety, even if that surety comes with a violent and regressive nature, as with the Islamic State group.  If that surety is also trying to overthrow the often corrupt and often self-serving Western and Western-supported order, it finds even more attraction.  Those willing to join have morphed from Middle-Eastern related people to people of all kinds.  Will this cause the West, and especially the US, to look at itself?  Unlikely.  What is more likely is that the West will merely escape into more diversion, denial, and blind reaction.  A foundational crisis—already in motion from environmental and other factors—could be in the offing, and failing to meet that crisis would signal the decline and fall, however slowly or quickly, of Western civilization.  Ironically, just as much of the world wants so many elements of that civilization. 

Rather like Rome less than 2000 years ago.

Help With The Head Scratching

The new pan-Arab Muslim caliphate in forming seems to have thrown the establishment and everyday Americans for a loop.  While far too complex to delve into in a few lines, here’s some points to consider, although, like many such ponderings, it might make you uncomfortable:

1.     When populations are kept in poverty and ignorance, the simplistic appeal of those with certainty and determination/fanaticism will increase.  It isn’t all about terrorism or fear.

2.     When divisions and sectarianism predominate, “us against them” can get a population to overlook much.

3.     When “Great” powers are content with, or even foment, local strongmen or the corrupt instead of justice, they earn the disdain of the oppressed.

4.     When “Great” powers intervene, and especially when they intervene arrogantly and with little knowledge, care, or respect, let alone whether the intervention is even warranted, the second and third order effects they create can sometimes be gargantuan and disastrous.

5.     When those who are dismissed as merely fanatics or terrorists get basic services (electricity, water, transportation) to consistently and reliably work for a population, you don’t have to have in-depth knowledge of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to understand why a populace might give tacit support.

6.     Movements, even deeply flawed or questionable movements, don’t grow by terrorism and fear alone; look to the above for some reasons why they can be strong and why those who oppose them may not be.

DoI

As I reread all the Declaration of Independence reprinted in the newspaper yesterday, I had a thought:  How many people, in how many countries, that we have been in in the last 60 years, would read those words and think, “how bitterly ironic.”

Seth Rogen Addendum

How timely my recent tirade against Mr. Rogen’s “work.”  He has incensed North Korea to the point that it is making strong threats against America.

How is Rogen so clueless that he thinks the North Koreans would have a sense of humor?  And how could anything about someone presently alive (and a head of state at that!) being the target of assassination be acceptable, let alone amusing?

More grist for the mill about how he comes across as truly clueless, classless, talent-less.

The Richness of Our Knowledge and The Impoverishment Of Our Actions

It is hard to see how we could be more utter failures about poverty than we are.  We KNOW what to do about it, we HAVE the resources, we UNDERSTAND the second and third order effects of poverty, we COMPREHEND WELL that reducing poverty actually REDUCES overpopulation.

And yet we throw up our hands every year.

Or attach some ridiculous precondition on any real effort.

We could not be much farther away from Jesus’s words and actions.

The privileged should have to trade places for a week with the markedly unprivileged.  Much would change. MUCH.

A Lost Generation?

Those who follow the Professor & The Housewife blog know that I had the flu.  I am back.

Today came a report from top world economists that income inequality and lack of real opportunity for the mass of people in much of the “developed” world is a millstone around the world economy recovering sufficiently. There is real concern that we are creating a “lost generation” of the young who should be attaining work skills and experiences to make the economies strong for the future.  A bad trend.

The social breakdown of too many young—especially young men—with too much time, too little real opportunity, and too little guidance, or worse, the wrong guidance, is insidious.  That general pattern has the potential to have the same explosive effects here as elsewhere.

The Selfish Man Who Pokes His Own Eye Condemns Others For Living In the Dark

Fools think that if the world is clamoring for “stuff”—Iphones, cars, CDs, soft drinks, fast food, retail, etc.—that that is a sign of prosperity.  We might have the largest aerospace company (Boeing), the largest biotech (Amgen), largest retail (Walmart), largest petrol (Exxon), largest software (Microsoft), comm equipment (Sisco), and heavy equipment (Caterpillar), but what does that mean, and is it always an advantage for the country?

We do have universally appealing attributes of pluralism, economic opportunity, and cultural openness, but much of that has become brittle or façade-like anymore.  The asymmetric threats we presently face might not be existential ones, but if they sniff our weaknesses, we are more vulnerable than thought.

Because while the medieval, unmodern, unconnected chauvinist power mongers of the terrorist world may be off base, so are we.  They can be wrong, but not all the way wrong.  And we can be overall “right,” but with enough wrong that we give power and motivation to our enemies, and self-weaken what should be our strengths. 

Fix ourselves, and we will go far in dissolving the drive, power, and allure of those terrorist organizations.

A Single Life

Every time I read or hear about helicopters and teams sent out, often dangerously, to search for and rescue someone, I am on the one hand amazed and humanely pleased that we care so much, and on the other hand, appalled at the economic (and probably unsustainable) imbalance. Historians of the future will marvel at how much resource expenditure went into trying to preserve, save, or rescue ONE human life, and how this philosophy diffused from the US and the West to the rest of the world.  The search and rescue, the humanitarian aid, the life support.  We take it for granted, but shouldn’t.  Previous civilizations would have said, “tough $%#@!”

See It

“The Act of Killing”

Heroes

Are we an educated people, or an easily directed and emotionally-malleable one?

We readily identify with the emergency-related “heroes,” the police and first responders whenever some “incident” occurs, and that’s fine.  But there are heroes of other sorts.

How many people know who Yuliya Tymoshenko is?  Her bravery in fighting a thoroughly corrupt and often evil system that wants to see her dead goes unnoticed outside of Europe and a few State Department people.

And where are all the Ayn Rand lovers when the relatively unknown in America Mikhail Khodorkovsky is their John Galt?  

Left of Correct

 Although I am usually revolted far more by the misinformation and disinformation of the “Right,” who have been and are far more powerful where it counts, there is plenty on the “Left” as well.  Some examples:

1) Revisionist thinking about North Vietnam being this splendor house of noble characters.  While they may have looked okay compared to their insanely murderous or corrupt neighbors (China, Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, South Vietnam), both their motives and their processes were FAR from pure.  And I don’t mean just because they tortured American prisoners of war.

2) Dropping atomic weapons on Japan.  While it is a false and covering myth that they were used to make an invasion unnecessary and “save a million American lives” (would have been closer to 25,000, and unlikely to be needed since Japan was on the ropes primarily because of the blockade), the Left’s condemning of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in absolutist terms is shallowly considered.  Dropping the weapons did several things, some intended and some unintended (but with benefits): a) Get Japan, who was reeling from the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviets and the quick defeat of their best Army, the Kwantung Army, by the Soviets, to surrender to us first and primarily, not the Soviets.  No mean feat, given we had been their primary enemy and had just committed what outside observers would probably consider acts of terror (the firebombings). Having Japan surrender to the U.S. was important for post-war situations and the setup of the Cold War. b) Show that America both possessed weapons of enormous power and was willing to use them—and not just once. This had considerable deterrence effect, and not just immediately. c) Gave a hard shove to developing anti-militarism in Japan, and helped seed future pacifistic sentiments there, all from the horror and shock. d) Gave the world a truly terrible look at destruction on such a scale and such a soul-sucking horror, that it never wanted to go down that road.  There would be no need to demonstrate (as was felt necessary in WW1) their general use before combatant nations—even greatly malevolent ones—forswore their desire to use them again.  In that way, the bombings perhaps saved far more lives and suffering than they cost, and so were “worth” it.

3) Absolutist condemnings of collateral casualties in the fight against terrorists.  While there is reason to question some tactics, methods, and targeting—especially ones whose effects end up doing more harm than benefit—and there are insufficient answers to questions of constitutionality, some collateral casualties are unavoidable.  And one prime reason: terrorists purposely put women and children—often even their own—in harm’s way, thinking we will hesitate long enough to lose opportunity.  Precisely because we want to make this a useless tactic for them, we strike anyway.  In this way, we show the futility of such “human shield” tactics, and perhaps save more innocent lives in the future by making such tactics irrelevant and ineffective.

The Long Lens

War is failure.  Failure of statesmanship, failure of leadership, failure of a people or peoples and their humanity.  It MAY be a failure of only one “side,” but it is more often a failure of all sides.

Better

What should become part and parcel of our character, and first and foremost on our minds? Simply this: To make it a better world for more of us than for fewer of us.

It Can't Last

It can’t last.  The truly aware know it, and even the vaguely aware sense it at some level.    But they don’t know how to get from here to a better world.  They’re afraid of the pain.  Too late for that, Americanos.  You f’d the relatively “painless” escape valve up a long time ago.

We are in Doom Drift on a near-endlessly wide river.  If we drift all the way to the Fall(s), we go over the edge—Civilization Doom.  A strong, wrenching, all-out exertion by us can avert that, but we have to jettison a lot to have a chance at success—and to our detriment we continue to let the selfish, shortsighted, and criminally foolish be in control, as they have been for decades.

The other likely possibility is that a violent storm blows us way off course, and we smash into uncharted territory.  Many of us may perish in that, and many more as we struggle to survive in a harsh new reality.

I think this is a reason that books like World War Z (and obsession with “zombie apocalypses” in general) are so popular.  Like the sleepwalking populations of past political-economic entities such as the Roman, Ottoman, and Austrian-Hungarian empires, we recognize the signs of decay and the lack of any real measures by “the elites” to stop it.  In fact, we recognize that those elites are prime center of the decay.  Whether war, revolution, plague, famine, or disaster of some kind, wrenching change becomes acceptable to the populace at some level, even if not desired.

[By the way, World War Z is, in addition to widely informed—and worldly in the truest sense—insightful social commentary, it offers glimpses of possibility for a better future out of catastrophe, even while it condemns our present sloth and illusion embracing.  Maybe it is a best seller for more than just zombies. :)]

If drought continues, if climate change and its resultant destruction really does proceed past the tipping point (as many in the scientific community fear), if national economic and fiscal criminality proceed, if resource consumption accelerates while environmental destruction and pollution continue, if we at the same time remain married to finite fossil fuels and the ills that flow in every direction from them, then the cascade will have begun. 

We are doing next to nothing to recognize these interlocking threats (of which I have mentioned but a few!) and change course.  Will history—and our descendants—curse us?