Note: This post inspired by #OpDeathEaters, about which you can learn more here, including bona fides from the ivory tower.
Students from Pathfinder K-8 walked out today to protest gun violence against kids (source)
Lifelong learning is something we should aspire to; adults often act as if they’ve got it all figured enough, but as the latest school shooting shows, we have a lot of work to do, particularly in confronting head on the awful things that happen to kids — and addressing them.
From regular learning to social emotional learning
Imagine elementary schoolkids practicing reading on a classroom computer. They get points upon finishing a book, and then their next book is at a higher reading level: it’s more challenging to decipher, with bigger words, longer sentences, and new punctuation marks. In contrast, adults often assume they’re finally on thrones forever, at a permanent level of knowledge and fit to judge anything that passes before them. If a difficult-to-read text comes their way, these lordly adults presume the writing must be poor and put the book down. How could it possibly be that their reading level still could improve further?
The same is true of ear-training. Little schoolkids are sometimes taught to recognize the sound of a major chord versus a minor chord. They’re awed to observe their auditory perception of music improving, much like someone with bad vision putting on a pair of corrective eyeglasses for the first time. But when adulthood arrives, well, exhausted wage-slaves are frequently boxed into making the choice they’ve watched their friends make. Kill curiosity! For sadly, it’s practical to do so, sort of. Don’t think too hard. Don’t care too much. The genius of a bop improvisation or a book using open rather than closed punctuation remains perpetually out of reach.
People need support and freedom to develop, even as adults. The oligarchs (name names!) undermining and blocking our growth as individuals and societies must be arrested, and their antisocial systems replaced with prosocial ones. The obstacles to doing so are far less about technical solutions and far more about, to use an education industry buzzword, our social emotional learning.
A look at two stories of trauma can convey a sense of the social emotional development required to free up lifelong education in safety for all. Education, knowledge: they lead to everything else, including gun-free campuses.
Seeking a savior from out the skies to answer his pleas
One of the key reasons we don’t rescue kids from danger is our habit of looking for messiah/savior politicians or celebrities who will do it for us while we munch popcorn and discuss the relative merits of their televised appearances.
I’m not immune to this. My close friends know that in the past year, I’ve gained a slightly embarrassing taste for autobiographies by the heavy metal musicians I idolized in my teens. It’s like Real Housewives, but dudetastic.
Last month, when no one was looking, I finished up Confess by Rob Halford, mostly known as the longtime singer and lyricist of Judas Priest, a very influential heavy metal band that began in Birmingham in 1969.
A common theme in Halford’s lyrics is messiahs, saviors who will arrive, likely on a flying motorcycle, to fix things for us (so we can keep doomscrolling). Consider these excerpts from his lyrics to “Exciter,” the opening track from Priest’s 1978 album Stained Class:
Stand by for Exciter Salvation is his task […] Who is this man? Where is he from? Exciter comes for everyone […] He’s come to make you snap out Of the state that you are in Look around and make you See the light again […] Only when there’s order Will his job be done.
[Exciter sounds like a strongman politician imposing “order.” right?]
Once offensive, it’s now harmless dad metal. So it goes
Similarly, an excerpt from Halford’s lyrics to 1990’s falsetto freakshow “Painkiller”, the title track off Judas Priest’s 1990 album by the same name.
Planet’s devastated Mankind’s on its knees A savior comes from out the skies In answer to their pleas […] Flying high on rapture […] With mankind resurrected Forever to survive Returns from Armageddon to the skies He is the Painkiller This is the Painkiller Wings of steel Painkiller Deadly wheels Painkiller
If we look beneath the shiny songs with shiny saviors, we can ask: Why might this theme be so prevalent for Halford? I’m not certain, of course, and things in life are rarely so direct, but I think it’s interesting how his childhood trauma fits with the lyrics of multiple classic Judas Priest songs.
Confession time
On pages 24-26 of the hardback edition of his autobiography, Halford discusses how, at approximately 14 years old, a pedosadist at an after-school program raped (“fondling”) him and some of his friends.
I was scrabbling around for information [about sex in general and homosexuality in specific], and getting nowhere. It was all a mystery to me. And what happened at my latest after-school activity didn’t help.
A small local metalworks began an informal scheme where kids could go down one day a week after school and learn to use equipment like lathes, vices, and drills. I suppose the thinking was that they would get ’em young and we might be interested enough to take up apprenticeships with them a year or two later.
Even though I had no interest in working in the factories—as I’ve said, the idea horrified me—I still went along with a couple of my schoolmates. It was only for an hour after school and, well, it was something to do. It beat being bored at home.
Unfortunately, we quickly found that the bloke giving the mini-workshops had a very different take on the idea of “get ’em young.” He wasn’t interested in teaching us the finer points of engineering. He just wanted to cop a feel.
The mustachioed, middle-aged bloke would show us how to make garden trowels or pokers for the fire, then hover over us. He’d give me a piece of metal marked with a pen line, tell me to file down to the line, and, as I filed away, he’d put his hand on my bum or down the front of my trousers.
The guy would walk round the workshop, from boy to boy, feeling us all up, and nobody said a thing. He never said a single word to us while he was doing it. It happened every week … and yet me and my mates never even discussed it. It was like it never happened.
I was struggling to come to terms with being gay, and while what he was doing didn’t arouse me—it seemed dirty, and sordid, and nasty—I just thought, Well, OK, is this what gay guys do? Is this how it works? It even made me wonder: Does this stuff go on in all the factories, then?
The weird thing was that we kept going, for six weeks at least. Fuck knows why. I just didn’t know what else to do. Then one week, after a particularly intrusive fondling, I mentioned to one of my mates on the way home that I was bit bored of the sessions.
“Me too!” he said, with what sounded a lot like relief. “Shall we stop going, then?”
“Ar,” I said [in Black Country accent].
And that was it. We never mentioned it again.
On pages 31-32, Halford describes in some detail how, when he started working in theater as a teen, he was raped by an older pedo coworker, and how, during that crime, Halford similarly experienced a child’s horrifying inability to understand, let alone stop, what was happening.
Did you notice how child Halford and his child friends never mentioned the fondling aloud to each other, and they stopped going to the pedo after-school program by discussing quitting it in an only indirect manner?
Dissociation is one term used for this. I’ve heard dissociation defined loosely as tuning out in the face of overwhelming emotion. Maybe he sang for decades of saviors because he hadn’t been able to process what had happened to him.
What happened to Halford (either time) is sort of what’s happening to adults today, except grown-ups have more choice and responsibility. Scary information about coronavirus—hey, did you hear about this company Center for Covid Control that’s a scam?—swirls around, and like the schoolkids at the metalworks after-school program, too many adults have trouble processing what is happening, and won’t even admit that much, Gollumizing about how their pain is unique and special rather than quite similar to that of everyone else in their town. After lengthy struggles, people might slip away from an abusive organization here or there, but the idea of going on radical campaigns against all of them is left to fantasy novels and video games. It’s just too much to face, or so adults typically claim.
Clearly nobody showed up to help young Rob Halford in the two very sad and infuriating situations. Not to idolize him or anything, but in the end he had to help himself, of course with assistance from his allies, by coming out as gay publicly in 1998, by releasing his autobiography in 2020, and so on. Don’t we all wish this could happen faster and we could work together? So we don’t have to look back, 15 years from now, saying I wish I’d known in 2022 that…
A look at another story, this one of non-trauma, shows how all can turn out very different.
Saving a Child’s Life
In January, the documentary filmmaker and former therapist Daniel Mackler posted one of his musing videos to his youtube channel, where he’s quite profilic. I find Mackler’s videos thought-provoking, although I disagree with some of his perspective, and I really appreciate the ones where he shares anecdotes and observations from his travels.
In the video, titled “Saving a Child’s Life — A First In My Life” and about 12 minutes in length, Mackler talks about saving a drowning kid out of a hot spring in the country of Georgia. Not only that, but he talks about the aftermath, how the child handled this trauma. I’ll transcribe the relevant parts below.
I was in the capital of Georgia, in Tbilisi, which from what I learned in Georgian means something along the lines of ‘hot water’ because there are hot springs […]
And one day, while I was sitting in [a hot spring], a father brought a little boy, and they were at the edge of the pool, and the boy was maybe four years old — three, four years old was what he looked like to me, but I was sitting there without my glasses, so I couldn’t see very well […]
I was just in my own world, I wasn’t really there to interact […] At some point, I was sitting out of the water, with just my legs in the pool, and I looked and I noticed that the little boy was there dipping his legs in the pool in the other side, and the father was gone. And I thought to myself, That’s not a very good idea […] but there were other people around […] I just thought, Okay, people are watching […]
So I just went back into my world; I was sitting […] eyes closed […] a little bit in lala land, it’s really hot […]
I look up and the little boy’s not there. […] He’s in the middle of the pool of water, under the water, but I’m really blind [with my eyeglasses off …] He’s waving his arms […] like he’s kind of swimming, but not swimming very well […] Nobody’s doing anything […] I’m seeing this kid move his arms and […] suddenly I realized, this kid’s not swimming [… I’d wondered] is this kid holding his breath and playing? […] Something in me, this little voice in my head says: Get this kid out of this water. So I jump in […] I’m like, Dude get in the water and get this kid out!
I picked him up and I realized: he wasn’t breathing. And he was pretty much limp. And I noticed his belly was all distended, with [hot] water in it […]
I brought him to the edge of the pool […] I turn him around, and I did the Heimlich Maneuver on his belly, not hard enough to really hurt him, but just to expel the water and it actually expelled the water first from his lungs […] and he coughed out all this water […] oh my God, he was drowning […] I turned him around to make sure he’s okay, and suddenly he vomited all over me […] he vomited all this yellow vomit all over me and into the pool of hot water […] he vomited some more […] suddenly the place erupted: people were coming over, and this guy who was in the pool also, he came over, and he’s talking to me in Georgian and Russian, and I’m trying to talk to this kid […] the kid kind of clings on to me like a little animal […] And I’m just holding him […]
The father was in the bathroom; he went to the bathroom and left his kid alone. Not a good idea! His kid could have died. So I handed the kid to him and the father took him and went off with the kid […] And then this guy who was sitting there in the pool started talking to me. And it turned out that the guy spoke Spanish. And I speak Spanish. He was a Georgian fellow, but he spoke Spanish. Well, he told me in Spanish, he goes, You just saved this kid’s life. And I realized it was true. […]
I suddenly just started crying. It was just overwhelming […]
The father came back [… he was from Moldova …] thanking me in Russian and shaking my hand.
And then the little boy came and he wanted to shake my hand. And I was worried that he’d be traumatized. As it turned out, I stayed in the hot water and just tried to skim the vomit off the water. And I stayed there.
The little boy did come back and he wanted to get in the water. And I talked about it with the guy who spoke Spanish. And I was like, This little kid, do you think he’ll be traumatized? And [the Spanish-speaking guy] wasn’t sure!
But what happened is the little boy did come in the water. But he kept taking water in his mouth *spit* and spitting it out, like in an arc! So I started doing it with him! And the two of us were doing it sort of as a game. And I realized, he was replicating his trauma. […] This little boy had no fear of me. And he wanted to bump me, he’d fist-bump me like a million times, he wanted to splash water on me. And I realized, he really loved me! And the thing is, I felt this! I loved him! It was like, you know, I don’t have children, but I do have children: and he was one of my children. It was so dear. […] If I hadn’t jumped in the water and saved him, if it had gone on for another minute, for all I know, he would have died […]
By playing with me in the water, by spitting the water out, and me spitting it with him, and us having fun, it was like he got back on the horse, as it were. And he made it his own experience. Where he made a new friend out of it! And I really don’t think he was traumatized by it! And that was so important to me; that was something that was very meaningful to me, because it’s a horrible and sad thing when a child learns very early on to become afraid of something that’s beautiful like the water. […] I don’t think this boy felt that, because he came [back] in the water. And he also learned that adults who are not his family, complete strangers, can be beautiful people, they can save your life.
Lessons from the two stories
When Halford sings of messiahs and saviours, it makes sense: for children. A kid of three or four doesn’t understand how to assess the risk of entering a hot spring. A kid of three or four doesn’t understand how to assess their swimming skills. A young teen troubled about sex does not know what is going to occur his first day at the theater or entering an after-school program. In Halford’s case, he was raped.
Who does understand these matters? Adults. Sometimes, though, out of our comfort zones, any of us can be surprisingly uninformed about what we will find. We might not know, right off the bat, know how we will find the inner strength to do the right thing. And there will always be for each of us consequences grave. Comfort zones cannot remain lifelong excuses. That’s because adults can, at least to a little degree, and then increasingly, self-direct, self-educate, and improve, especially when collaborating.
In most places people are taught collaboration means something extroverted and flashy: to succeed means to have a bestselling, raunchy book called Confess published. But it can also be “just” saving a drowning kid in a hot spring (and, as Mackler goes on to say in the video, making a new friend from the experience: the Spanish-speaker invited him back to his family’s house in a different part of Georgia, and Mackler took him up on the invitation a few weeks later, went and lived with the Spanish-speaker’s family for a while.) Or it can be both.
Since United States public education is on the ropes, possibly even disappearing, we really will have to teach each other, which, even though it’s the hard way, is in the long run, better. Confronting and openly discussing childhood trauma of ourselves and others is a good way to start.
Note: In 2022, I’m once again writing 52 blog entries, posted every Sunday. Today: Post 2 of 52. Flash fiction by me will soon arrive weekly too, by February, with these regular nonfiction blog postscontinuing.
Note: The photos in this entry are from this seven-tweet threadby NPR journalist Libby Denkmann who attended a student-led protest outside Seattle Public Schools headquarters on Thursday.
For one or more days this past workweek, according to data firm Burbio (accessed today), 6,003 public schools in the United States have been actively disrupted, defined as campuses not offering in-person learning. The country has around 130,000 public K-12s, but the Burbio statistic is still shocking. On Thursday, Seattle Public Schools said: “Due to very high absentee and quarantine rates, several Seattle Public Schools have either transitioned to remote learning or have been closed.”
On Friday, the Washington Postreported on the sickout movement: schoolkids countrywide, sparked by the increasing number of illnesses and deaths from the current Omicron mutation wave, are refusing to attend compulsory face-to-face classes unless adequate COVID safeguards are put into place. Many educators are sicking out as well; other industries are seeing their own sickouts, the term there referring to employees not showing up due to the ‘rona (current infection or risk thereof) and perhaps with r/antiwork-style resisistance thrown in too.
The Omicron wave has surrounded my own life. Here in the Emerald City, I’ve watched a friend suffer his own breakthrough illness from the latest variant in the last month; I’ve seen multiple businesses temporarily closing due to staffing shortages. (And during Spring 2021, a brave student in a math class I taught informed us she’d contracted a pre-Omicron version of novel coronavirus, a scary ordeal for her and the rest of us.)
U.S. authorities have provided the public with mere bargain bin quasi-solutions
“Do you guys care more about our well being? Or our test scores?”
Many of the public health measures in the United States are only half functional, akin to leftovers from the discount pile. School district spokespeople talk up ventilation and (years back) handwashing, but anyone who has entered campuses in poor neighborhoods knows about unopenable windows and empty soap dispensers. Meanwhile, The Center for Covid Control—accused profiteers running pop-up testing sites from coast to coast—has been reported, by health departments and city governments and consumers and journalists and others, to the Washington state attorney general, the attorney general in Florida, and attorney generals elsewhere for fraud, notably sending people invented test results while they were still waiting in line to produce samples. And the three vaccines offered in the U.S. offer only some protection (I received three doses of Pfizer), decreasingly so as mutations erupt continually, as anyone who has endured, or received a text message about, a breakthrough case realizes.
For USians, better public health measures found around the world feel shrouded in a fog of war. The multiple other vaccines planetwide, let alone the laws/pacts controlling who can ship them internationally, aren’t on the radar of the average stressed person trying to get by. Even the University of Washington nanoparticle vaccine (study in Cell), which should be making headlines regularly and prompting inquisitive auditing from investigative journalists, is largely unknown. That one, presently in stage three trials, aims to inoculate against SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2, and every other present or future coronavirus (and variant thereof) in the beta segment. (Orthocoronavirinae, to which the popular term ‘coronavirus’ typically refers, has 45 virii divided into four genera, one of which, and nowadays the most dangerous to humans of which, is the beta segment containing 14 of the 45 species.)
Staff for Seattle Public Schools superintendent Dr. Brent Jones stopped media from questioning him
Who has the time and freedom to educate themselves on the COVID trainwreck such that herd mentality may be minimized? Very few have hours and hours available to conduct independent (and thus usually unpaid or underpaid) autodidactic research on an unfamiliar issue to an understanding approaching intermediate level or above. That leaves many to affiliate with a meme-simplified, speculation-heavy side such as right or left, vaxx or antivaxx, probably partly in hopes of cliquing up with others for sheer survival rather than mastering a topic in accordance with impersonal logic. There are professionals who in theory are paid to address crises expertly, but they succumb to untruth too.
Such politicization is evidenced, for example, in the additional information, released Tuesday, about emails involving chief White House medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci. You might recall that Fauci emails from the initial months of the pandemic were published in June 2021 in redacted form by Buzzfeed News (3234 pages of emails) and the Washington Post (866 pages of emails). Republicans on the federal House Committee on Oversight and Reform saw unredacted versions made available in camera by the Department of Health and Human Services and, while they couldn’t make copies, they were allowed to take notes on them, a task I assume done by skilled transcriber underlings.
The additional information newly revealed includes records related to a February 1, 2020 phone conference between Dr Fauci, his then-boss Francis Collins, and several of the world’s leading virologists.
It shows some of the world-renowned scientists believed, at the time, that it was likely the novel coronavirus was human-altered and that it may somehow have escaped a Wuhan lab. Virologist Robert Garry, for instance, wrote that he was unconvinced the pathogen evolved naturally. Evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambau wrote: “The biggest hinderance at the moment (for this and more generally) is the lack of data and information […] I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.” There are no certain answers yet; just sufficient smoke to point to a serious fire of some sort.
Definitely the National Institutes of Health officials wanted an ass-pull cover-up for political reasons. Garry told The Intercept that after the call, he was advised not to “mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists.” Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier wrote in one email: “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular” (see also; see especially). Fauci’s boss Francis Collins advised the virologists to shut down talk of unnatural evolution or a lab leak—to protect “international harmony.”
By March 2020, Garry had changed his mind based on scientific evidence, coming to believe instead that SARS-CoV-2 likely developed without human intervention, but the recently exposed NIH officials’ insistences a month prior don’t exactly inspire trust in the intelligentsia, now do they.
Tuesday’s news connects with ongoing reporting from Vanity Fair about NYC-based EcoHealth Alliance and its pre-pandemic interest in working with Wuhan virologists (all institutions in China are mixed up with the Chinese Communist Party). In October 2021, the magazine reported the National Institutes of Health belatedly acknowledged EcoHealth Alliance enhanced the capacity of coronavirus to infect humans to such an extreme that the nonprofit had violated its own grant conditions by not reporting the danger they’d created. The same Vanity Fair piece discusses the grant proposal EcoHealth Alliance sent to the Pentagon’s research arm DARPA in 2018, recommending a partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to construct SARS-related coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens.
The connection between those reports and last week’s? Virologists on the February 2020 conference call expressed startlement at an unusual segment of the novel coronavirus’s genetic code: a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. A month later, in Nature Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal that’s part of the prestigious Nature Publishing Group portfolio, scientists on the conference call, including Garry, published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” in which they downgrade February 2020 suspicions that novel coronavirus was likely to have been lab-altered to possible but unlikely. I’m told that, in oversimplified terms, such virology research essentially entails comparing protein shapes of various virii strains to one another statistically to assess likelihoods of how precisely the pathogens may have changed or evolved over time.
Pointing to the Proximal Origin study, Garry corresponded with The Intercept about its report on this past workweek’s newest puzzle piece to say the March 2020 study reflects his revised view. In any case, the latest information involving the February 2020 conference call is a story of top virologists told to downplay their then-suspicions not for scientific reasons, but for political ones. That’s obviously bad for scientific integrity. And the March 2020 paper doesn’t rule out that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through artifical techniques.
Shall we speculate about the origins of COVID-19? One possibility is that scientists pursued making coronavirii far more dangerous for whatever good or bad reasons, a practice controversial among scientists, and then SARS-CoV-2, perhaps enhanced in its danger to humans, slipped out of a Wuhan lab accidentally. Then maybe people associated with the research panicked, because money was being misused, and anything they might try to say to explain themselves would just sound nefarious. There’s no smoking gun; at minimum, it’s yet another example of opaque or mostly opaque systems impairing science and public health.
And we can all imagine less charitable possibilities.
Now what?
Weakening scientific integrity (requested cover-up) and radical science (transparency, intellectual independence) predictably worsens large-scale public health problems. That’s very evident in the somewhat separate but still COVID19-related case of Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Dr Rick Bright, if you study the formal complaint he filed in May 2020 (exhibits; some exhibits missing).
Politicizing science, as NIH brass sought in February 2020, certainly doesn’t help reveal the origins of the pandemic, one of the more recent iterations of the powerful’s longstanding and ongoing genocide of global humanity, particularly those disabled or dispossessed. Authoritarians don’t need to put soldiers on the streets (though they do that as well) to terrify or decrease populations when they can just ignore their public health needs from yachts.
Thankfully, the pandemic’s origins don’t need to be completely understood for clear-eyed students to fight for their right not to inhale this thing, something of extra importance for people blocked from nutritious food, aerobic exercise, or other boons strengthening respiratory and immune systems, as well as blocked from free quality masks, infection testing that actually works, and the legal entitlement (for those with disabilities, which is ultimately everyone if you think about it) to free appropriate public education that should include transparency for all of us to learn exactly what the powerful—both government and corporate actors—are doing to us.
Some but not enough educators have been supportive of the schoolkids, but will more adults support them as is their grown-up responsibility, and if so, how? I’ll write about that next weekend.
After all, why should children have to be the ones to do this?
Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 40 of 52.I skipped weeks 37, 38, and 39.
Note: My two entries in August providing sleep tips (Part 1 and Part 2) recommended sleep lab founder Matt Walker’s book Why We Sleep. But it turns out the book is sketchy. In November 2019, Moscow-based independent researcher Alexey Guzey, who has a background in economics and math, posted a devastating critique of Walker’s bestseller, which Guzey put together across two months (and updated most recently in April 2021).I updated my two sleep tips posts with this information. I regret the blunder and suggest checking out Guzey’s critique.
When confronting a challenge, I often throw myself into it, paying attention to educational materials on the subject only concurrently, not in advance. It was this way with substitute-teaching or volunteering with Food Not Bombs. “Take these to the dish pit,” a Seattle FNB non-leader leader said during the last decade, handing me dirty trays as we cleaned a Thai buffet in exchange for surplus food to redirect to the dispossessed, including some of our own number. “What’s a dish pit?” I asked. Looking back, such incidents are amusing moments, but at the time, they can be embarrassing, painful. It’s what happens when you throw yourself into things. Thankfully, if a person sticks with something—and has an inquisitive, adaptable mind that stays out of ruts—improvement also happens.
Another doc from planet paperwork
For leaving the United States, I knew if I continued comparing countries via watching youtube videos, and kept on musing endlessly about possibilities, I’d never get anywhere (literally). That’s why, while messing around with Canada’s Express Entry eligibility estimator, I decided to, among other actions, just go take the computer-based IELTS General exam in San Diego to prove English proficiency as required of non-students seeking permanent residency in the northern nation. I crammed for two days and, as expected, aced the reading and speaking sections, but made a sole mistake in the listening part (you hear audio texts only once, so no wandering attention nor confusion with the test format allowed!) and—I bungled the writing component. Despite a summa cum laude bachelor’s—a double-major in philosophy and, wait for it, writing—and despite years and years of paid freelance writing, including multiple news media publications, standardized writing tests and I simply don’t get along. Long ago, I similarly bombed the GRE’s writing section, repeatedly! Yeah, shove it, standardized tests.
I took the IELTS General on September 9 (see previous post); my test report form, dated September 11, eventually arrived in my PO Box showing the following scores: 8.5 overall, 9 reading, 9 speaking, 8.5 listening, and 7.5 writing. Since higher IELTS General scores help a non-student migrant gain admission to Canada and a handful of other Anglosphere countries, I got grumpy about that last grade, and looked to see what my options were for vengeance.
Turns out, there’s a procedure called Enquiry on Results, or equivalently, for the sake of SEO keyword stuffing, Inquiry on Results or simply EoR. Within six weeks of a test report form’s date, an IELTS test-taker can get a section(s) re-marked, for, of course, a fee.
The completely contingent order of things. (Source)
Anecdotal reports suggest EoR cannot lower your score; however, I couldn’t find official documentation from IELTS authorities proving that’s the policy. Google-savvy and forum participants suggested official documentation doesn’t exist, at least not online. I thought briefly about phoning the IELTS authorities overseas, but then decided, whatever, it fits my general knowledge of academia that it’s unlikely for EoR to lower my score, only keep it the same or raise it. Make no mistake, these myriad migration paperwork hurdles have the distinctive reek of academia/intelligentsia. Well, my destination thoughts were shifting from Canada to the Netherlands anyway. Better just to wing it, to purchase an Enquiry on Results for my writing section. YOLO!
I called the testing center and was asked to email the director with EoR in the subject line. I did. After some back-and-forth, my EoR request was officially in and paid for on October 4. Pretty ironic: the first task on the IELTS General’s writing section tells candidates to type an everyday letter, say to a newspaper or in order to complain to a company—and here I was, asking for that task to be re-graded, by means of me writing email letters with the testing center staff, communicating with perfect competence.
The higher-up graders re-marked my writing section and by email I received the new, or rather, not new, score in a PDF on October 6. You can see the outcome in the screenshot starting this post. My score didn’t change a smidge. Blegh. Vengeance denied. Had I prepared better, I would have spent more time with official practice materials or free/low cost courses specifically on the IELTS General writing section available on MOOC platforms such as edX, Udemy, Coursera, etc. Because as we all know, exams don’t evaluate your writing or English proficiency. They test how well you take the test. But the point was to throw myself into the actual emigration process. Psychology score, A+. Home economics score…F.
Well Canada, you and I had a few flirty dates, but it looks like there won’t be any more nights out on the town for the two of us. I don’t have enough points to meet your high standards. That’s okay, I have gray—oops, grey…er, grijs—in my stubble now; I’m no teen who can’t handle rejection. Besides, you have mining companies with active licenses for profiteering off the genocide in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. And your money-laundering transnational criminals in Vancouver are protected by Chinese spies. *Hangs up*
This past workweek in West Seattle, antivaxx and antimask protesters waved signs during five o’clock traffic in my neighborhood. Aside from the bald dude in the, what’s that Dutch word, *scrolls up*, grijs hoodie, who, though he lacks camo pants, sorta resembles a typical contractor you’d find working for a company like Craft International (a merk firm and friend of spy biz Stratfor with a mysterious habit of hanging around events like the Boston Bombing)—I have no idea who the grijs dude is, just sayin’ he looks a bit creepy—it seemed a fairly ordinary group of Seattle rightwingers of the new school. I stopped my car in the parking lot behind these vaccine hesitant folks to get a photo for the blog entry you’re reading now.
When I saw the flag, I knew it was going to be bad
Giving their respiration a wide berth, I walked to a suitable site to hold my phone up at ’em. Seemingly in unison, the women chorused, “Are you going to write about us?!?!” The ;) ;) @}->– @}->– flattery in their voices twisted this writer’s face into an involuntary smile. Like thundering storm clouds above a parched man in a desert dropping rain: acid rain. I told them Yes and continued thumbing my phone. Then one protester lady asked: “Are you going to write ill of us?” Interesting choice of words, there. They asked where to read, so above the noisy traffic I shouted: “DouglasLucas dot com!” Maybe they’ll comment and tell us more about Mister Grijs Hoodie.
A satisfactory photo achieved, I headed back to my car by the same circuitous route in reverse. I crossed the street. Suddenly I was passed by Mister Grijs Hoodie! He had his bald head down, his face sternly focused, and he was powerfully striding alone, whither I know not. I should specify, relative to being a Craft International employee (which I’m including almost entirely for joke and to link readers to stuff), it’s far more likely he’s a complete nobody, for instance a run-of-the-mill bargain bin patriarchy boss of some local Kik group for definitely-not-advisable hookups (read: loss-leads), which, as #OpDeathEaters has been pointing out since 2014, is, like, same diff, or can be, you know, more precisely, the everyday consequences of supranational pedo propaganda from above swamping populations with dolla dolla bill masculinist ideology rebranded to sound like freedom. Not to mention human trafficking. [Hey! Are you an editor or other potential payor reading my blog? Find academics vouching for #OpDeathEaters in that same diff link. That’s the completely contingent order of things—for now!]
Nothing hurts me except bad hair days
A surprisingly high portion of the cars passing the protest were repeatedly honked in favor. Not surprisingly, those one-note vehicles tended to be jacked-up pickups with needless stickers of an out-of-character Calvin urinating. I saw only one person indicate disapproval: a driver doing their daily grind, gripping the steering wheel with one hand and with the other, like a time-warped Roman emperor, presenting an unmistakable thumbs-down.
The wild hyperlocal antivaxx advertising blitz appearing in my neighborhood did not detain me from getting my third Pfizer (booster) jab Friday, courtesy of my public education employment. Although I follow news on twitter, email lists, and elsewhere too much from my own good, even I almost missed last Monday’s study in The Lancet, among the globe’s most prestigious medical journals—a study written up by The Hill. To oversimplify, the research indicates Pfizer-BioNTech protection against novel coronavirus infection drops significantly—approximately in half!—four to six months after the second jab, with the specifics varying depending on the scenario, mutation, etc. Thus, boosters. As with, say, the tetanus shot. According to the CDC and FDA in September, certain Team Pfizer folks can get the third jab once a minimum of six months since their second jabs has elapsed. Hopefully better vaccines (here’s looking at you, University of Washington) will be approved soon and become widely accessible for all, so we can be done with these less than ideal, but still very helpful, interim measures.
I took this photo in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park this past workweek. The image shows happiness
I embed an image from the exam room not to boast, but to model good behavior, to encourage people to get vaccinated. Of course I know Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies have horrifying histories of wrongdoing (an easy peasy first stop, Wikipedia criticism section footnotes, when they exist), but the risks thereof are, in my case, far less than the risks of suffering COVID-19. The Pfizer press release about the third jab has the expected advertising but also a lot of interesting links for people who might want to dig.
I’m too exhausted by the coronavirus vaccination debate to go into more detail, but the big picture might be helpful: if you don’t experience something firsthand (while knowing what you’re looking at, too), you have to decide whether to trust information from others. Documents may be more reliable than most people, but even with documents, you have to trust they’re real and not forgeries. How do we accomplish this as humans?
Like we always have: with trust networks. As far as I know, that’s a term that kinda originated with cryptography, but the phrase intuitively makes sense, right? My unfairly overworked primary care physician, whose performance is usually stellar, recommended the bestseller Why We Sleep to me (see note above starting this entry). I assumed she had read it closely, when probably—I’ll ask next time I see her, because mapping trust networks, even for oneself, is of life-and-death importance—she heard about it on a podcast or something, while HIIT sprinting or Wim Hof breathing. I presume she then passed the recommendation from the podcast (or whatever) to me, and despite the intuitive misgivings I initially felt about Matt Walker’s marketing image, I got swept-up a bit in his glitz. I mostly listened to Why We Sleep, while driving or exercising, meaning I didn’t read individual sentences in print, a way of reading that makes it easier to be careful and critical. I just had it on in the background to learn by osmosis. So I got fooled.
From what I’ve read so far, Walker’s never directly acknowledged his critic, the Moscow-based independent researcher Alexey Guzey.
Corporate spotlight decreasingly needed for winning crushes’ attention … but will our ability to search for non-corporate knowledge-sharers be fully seized by the powers that be?
Example of actual public diplomacy. @TheBoobla versus @sleepdiplomat … Fight! … Boobla wins!
Having read most of the devastating critique by Guzey, who ended up on international news himself to tear apart Walker, I lowered the glitzy guy’s reliability score as a science source in my personal trust network, and updated my blog entries accordingly. Actually, early on, I emailed Walker’s press person once or twice with various questions—on twitter, Walker goes by @sleepdiplomat, and says he wants to spread his message everywhere—and never got a reply; he could have been occupied, of course, but sometimes, mentioning my news publications gets me at least a politer version of He’s too busy for you (e.g., I’ll ask him!! <3 <3 <3 and then they never do). Based on how my primary care physician reacts when I ask her about this, I’ll adjust her trust network reliability score (especially on the topic of book recommendations) down, up, or not at all. Same for whatever podcast (or other source) she got her Why We Sleep info from. Unlike cryptographers, I don’t have actual numbers scoring people in my head (each person would have multiple scores, one per topic). It’s just something I think humans do all the time, semi-automatically, unless they’re effectively brain dead. (Oops, that’s rude to actual brain-dead people, who, uh, won’t be reading this.)
Imagine if IELTS and academia tested people, not on avoiding typos during unrealistic, one-shot English exams, but on the everyday life-and-death practice of adjusting trust networks. You know, critical reasoning and media literacy classes. In fact, spy agencies (public or private) use trust networks too. For a few years, I read thousands of Stratfor emails, and their staff was expected, when relaying to internal email lists the insights they heard from their sources, to give each source a letter grade to indicate their reliability (as well as other information about the source, the reliability of the particular insight, timeliness, and so on). There were similar trust network instances in the zillions of State Department cables and additional public, classified, or otherwise restricted documents I’ve read. We all do this when evaluating information. It’s just that the spies’ goals are antisocial, and mine, and hopefully yours, are prosocial. BTW, spying these days doesn’t merely mean cloak-and-dagger stuff, like car-bombing journalists critical of Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, as in this April 2012 conversation: a 24-minute excerpt of the bugged recording of Lukashenko’s then-spymaster was published by EUobserver in January 2021 here (see also the 12-page English transcript or the 8-page Russian transcript; this related DW article in English too). Spying also means high-level marketing crap like Stratfor employees writing the majority of this or that article released by your favorite corporate media outlets. That’s an observation still true yet a bit past its sell-by date, since now the Dems openly run CIA and military spy candidates; heck, might as well openly put them on mainstream media mastheads while they’re at it. (If your bar is lesser evil, explain it not to me, but imagine how you’d get ratio’d for explaining it to actual torture victims who use twitter.)
Example of spies using their trust network with sourcing criteria. US714 was Aaron Christopher Grigsby, then a director of the Texas state police Ranger divison. Source a decade ago.
I’ll close this section with three more observations. First, I know wonderful people who are far too busy (perhaps a single mother or a prisoner with limited or no computer access) to do the countless hours of reading required to really evaluate, say, scientific papers. So they often have to go by, for instance, their affinity for a rando shiny podcaster, because again, we all use trust networks. What else are we going to do, not look up information, not sift through reading options by some means? I understand, but get slightly annoyed, when twitter radicals call these people fascists; in a remote-controlled (autogenocide) way they are, but that’s like shooting fish in a barrel, when radicals could try instead to save them from the peril (by aiming at the top authoritarians cuz else, regrowing hydra heads). Similarly for academics who’ve lived their whole lives in the ivory tower and have never stepped foot in a prison, long-term psychiatric lockup facility, non-Western country (me!), and on and on. We’re all in this sort of boat, just for different topics.
1960s international smallpox vaccine records of US citizen
Second, a few short years ago it was fashionable in the hacktivism/transparency realm to fund vaporware websites with a Great Man on top supposedly to change things, but these vaporware projects didn’t employ trust networks (among other problems), just glitzy marketing. We were supposed to trust our emergency-based need to get wrapped up in trusting their machismo. GetGee, the global commons for public data, allows users to employ trust networks when looking at research.
Third, if disinfo feels hopeless, remember it’s startling how effective a) history and b) reframing things can be. For instance, if someone’s para about vaccine passports, you can show them international smallpox vaccination records for US citizens from more than fifty years ago, or reframe the concept by saying, hey, to go into a bar serving alcohol, or to pilot a two-ton metal box powered by explosions down the freeway, we have to show age passports. And yes, I know both the conventional and alternative medical industries can be untrustworthy (see links on my blogroll), everything around ‘securitized’ border enforcement too, and that COVID-19’s origins deserve more investigation; but, uninformed speculation is cheap and funding investigative journalism (which sometimes requires travel to do well) is expensive.
So yeah, I got my third Pfizer jab Friday, and Sunday, 48 hours later, pfno pfside pfeffects pfso pfar.
Blog update
Recently I received a donation for my blog from a reader—thank you! (Hic haec hoc, huius huius huius!) The donation encourages me to keep blogging. For anyone else who might be interested in donating, here are the donation options, to which I just added snailmail.
This past month I made tinkery updates across the website, mostly under the hood; some, though, you might notice. Do tell if you spot any problems or have any suggestions. I overhauled the blogroll (see right sidebar, up) for the first time in years and years. I replaced http:// links across my site with absolute https:// links. Digitizing my belongings to prepare for emigration, I came across a nice print ad for the 2017 bookstore talk I did, and added that to the in the media section, where it looks, um, good! I grumble about the monkey see, monkey do requirement of social proof in marketing (completely contingent social order…for now!), but, whatever, it’s good to have more, how shall I say, self-esteem or something like that, and enjoy these sorts of thingymaboppers, at least while I’m still a loudmouth resident of the loudmouth United States!
By the way, the bookstore I spoke at is called Burning Books; it’s in Buffalo, New York. After over ten years, they’re now expanding, more than tripling their floor plan and adding designated event space, all without leaving their location. Everything will be fully accessible, too. Below, their fundraising video and gofundme link.
Because these blog posts usually take more than a day to write when they’re lengthy, and because offline readers have advised me that shorter posts would be easier for them to take in (time-wise), I need to figure out how to change this blog, and how to modify my time and energy investments in my overall writing more generally. A few weeks ago, I was working on a very long post about Beto O’Rourke and realized I really need to rethink my efforts. Diverting huge chunks of my time and energy away from my longform fiction- and nonfiction-writing goals to pin down, by skimming seemingly identical NPR articles at 3 a.m., the exact date the Del Rio international bridge closed during the ongoing refugee crisis, and who actually issued the order to close it (various local/regional mini-authorities stumbled over each other trying implausibly to claim the ugly credit in the media spotlight), is fascinating, but maybe not the best sort of time-sink every single weekend. I do enjoy writing journalism (especially were I able to do more investigative work uncovering as-yet-unknown ‘revelations’). And summarizing/analyzing other journalists’ work in reframed language weekly is, to borrow from Pokémon Go, super effective, biz-wise and persuasion-wise, in terms of staying in readers’ minds on a regular basis. For example, these posts not infrequently convert into incoming messages from people I haven’t heard from in awhile, asking me what’s up and what do I think of xyz popular issue. Yet such posts should just be a sole theater of war among several, not my only battlefield.
Then there’s the damage to psychophysical health from end-gaining (sacrificing healthy means to ensure ends are achieved, which might compare with emergency-based structures). To write something called lengthy, like this blog post, it helps the writer tremendously to keep the material in short-term memory (RAM for computerheads) while working. Especially if the content’s not strictly outlined (this piece is pretty outlined). The more creative, the more the creator needs to have all the data (even imaginative data) for the piece readily accessible in their minds, even to the point of boiling, such that the energy must be discharged (mixing my engineering metaphors). Taking breaks to tend to houseplants, do the dishes, or complete other sanity- and health-maintaining tasks risks losing the data’s salience. So you find yourself with a hacker hunch, crooked over the laptop, flies circling the sink, and Dutch roommates, if you have those, perhaps eyeing you suspiciously. Good luck with the 9-5 schedule, too. While potentially liberating, such pedal-to-the-metal practices can be risky, especially if an inexperienced and/or broke person doesn’t intersperse them with rest and/or has insufficient social support.
The problem is particularly acute for me in terms of creating a freelance/entrepreneurial business plan to meet migration requirements of the Dutch American Friendship Treaty. I haven’t picked the Netherlands for certain yet, but I imagine I will have in roughly two or three weeks, at which point I’ll buy a one-way overseas plane ticket months ahead of schedule to give me salient countdown timer motivation. (Psychology score, A+; home economics…) The business plan for writing in the Netherlands is mandatory. That’s why, despite frequent exercise and cooking super-healthy veggie-rich meals at home, I’ve been suffering moodiness and lethargy lately: much of it revolves around my fear that I’ll soon have to devote most of my time and energy, i.e.my life, to content-marketing, not the reading and writing I’d rather do. Though it’d perhaps be fun to run a content-marketing business in the Netherlands for vegan restaurants, free software firms, and antipsychiatry / critical psychiatry service providers called something like, Idealistic Content Marketing (how do you say that in Dutch?). With long-term substitute-teaching assignments and CELTA training, I was able to squeze some blog posts and fiction-writing in, but it wasn’t easy, and I found that eventually the employment system—at least in the United States—beats avocational activities out of overworked employees. Optimizing routines, honing goals + plans, and the like can help tremendously, and cutting costs through, say, miraculously finding good roommates, but, also, let’s not kid ourselves.
Another photo I took, same day, same park… lovely place
To close off this section, let’s consider how I’ll blog for this year’s remaining 12 weeks. The last post will of course sum up my 2021 year of blogging. The penultimate entry will explain with bullet points how I made it through a full calendar year, for the first time since 2013, without a manic episode or psych lockup. That leaves 10 weeks. Then there are three series I started in 2021 with a single post and never finished: Meet new president Joe Biden, part 1 of 2; Views of happiness: Journey versus destination, part one of two (this should actually be three parts); and Review of education books, part one of two (this should actually be four parts). That’s six posts needed to conclude those series. Leaving four weeks. I want to post about trees in Seattle, and maybe finish the Beto O’Rourke URL-as-tome. That would leave two weeks … I also wanted to do news blasts for Colombia, and I never finished with the Haitian presidential assassination news blasts, but no one has solved that murder yet, so nobody else finished the story, either.
Division of labor makes an interesting way to look at this business plan, life plan challenge. The titles change, but in the forms of media-writing I know, including print-only fiction and journalism, there are usually four roles in my experience (call them what you want): researcher at the most granular level, then writer, then editor, then producer at the most birds eye-view level. I need better self-production skills, so I imagine there’s, if not an app for that, then quality courses I could check out on the various MOOC platforms, and book recommendations I could ask friends/mentors for. Just not any books by disgraced sleep diplomat Matt Walker.
Maybe the best plan for my blog in 2022 would be the following formula, to which there could be occasional exceptions: one observation from daily life, one philosophical/political/whatever lesson drawn from it, and then an international news blast or two. Heck, maybe even a music and fiction section after the news blasts! (See, I keep adding stuff…) If anyone has thoughts, suggestions, or requests for this blog, I’d love to hear them!
Does it? Much, though not all, wrongdoing is in the open nowadays. Other factors may be more important than darkness, such as lack of good framing, endless grains of news sand staying decontextualized, and the antisocial system of carrots and sticks that corporations condition us for. Oh, and don’t forget cowardice
United States. On September 23, the Washington Post published a lengthy op-ed by influential neocon Robert Kagan, cofounder of the notorious warmonger thinktank Project for the New American Century. Kagan’s op-ed is titled “Our constitutional crisis is already here” (full text at Cryptome) and argues that, unless his health fails entirely, Trump will be the next Republican presidential candidate. Kagan says come November 2024, the United States will reach its biggest crisis since 1861, with widespread mass violence and a federal system breaking completely. He blames the cults of personality surrounding demagogues for the impending doom, and just like the Washington Post itself, he makes the evergreen claim that democracy will die, though Kagan prefers November 2024 as the date to put on the coroner’s report.
While we’re still forced to work, in some senses, alongside liberal states against outright fascism because innovative alternatives to the liberal order need greater amplification and effort and funding (and uh, commissions from editors) and knowledge of self, health, and wealth—the sneak attack, the edutainment style returns like that, my philosophy keeps it plain and simple, the kingdom of hip-hop is within you—it might be a worthy endeavor to introduce some rigor upon these sales slogans about democracies dying and failed states. Nation-state is an incoherent package-deal concept, but to roll with it for a while, the idea of an international order of liberal nation-states is typically traced back to 1648’s Peace of Westphalia. The Peace of Whatphalia? I must have been roaming the hallways that day in AP European History. What criteria must such liberal nation-state countries meet to count as successful or failed, alive or dead? There are of course readable scholarly books on such subjects, for those with time, i.e., not salaried at the Washington Post or Idealistic Content Marketing.
Youtube offers plenty of videos from US individuals who’ve relocated to China as obedient reflectors, playing by the rules and keeping their mouths shut. Footage from these moneymaking individuals suggest they have a pretty good life in China, happy but helpless. Well, good for them. Now let’s talk about the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, and the propaganda war around it in the United States. Trump, who tweeted in April 2013 that China owns DC, won reactionary hearts by telling his followers he would resist the Chinese government’s encroachments on the United States, but he himself has been a bigly CCP beneficiary. In October 2020, Forbes put together a helpful guide to The Donald’s debt, which astonishingly totaled at least a billion dollars. (And you thought your student loan debt was bad!) The Forbes guide looks at multiple Trump properties, but let’s just consider the 1290 Avenue of the Americas location. More than two hundred million dollars for that New York City property came from the CCP-owned Bank of China. That bank says the debt was sold to Vornado Realty Trust. Maybe so. But without transparency, maybe Bank of China is still a creditor on the building, if say, after the sale, Vornado sold it right back. Opaque transactions we can’t audit don’t help explain. Whoever the current creditors are, guess when the debt comes due: November 2022, the mid-term elections. There are more connections between Trump and China, such as his pledge- and likely constitution-violating hiring of firms with majority CCP ownership in early 2017, and the eighteen trademarks granted to Donald and Ivanka Trump in late 2018 by guess who, the Chinese government. That’s the reality, while they’re telling their fans they hate China. As the top predators block their constituents on social media, they party together and laugh about you wearing their T-shirts, didn’t you know? Meanwhile the US left is misled by garbage-news from channels loyal to the CCP and Putin (see here and especially threads here and here). Note it’s both obviously bad Trump and wrongly beloved Obama who sided with Putin to bring us to this brickbat BRICS point. A busy and hardworking activist asked me the other day to explain what the problem with fake news website The Grayzone is. “Red-brown alliance,” I started off succinctly, meaning the longstanding and continuing pattern of Commies allying with Nazis (see news blast above regarding the thankless duty of grumbling anarchists, when forced to pick between the two, to support the liberal order over the outright fascists, while still shoving reframing, truth-bombs, and nonviolent/self-defense other bom—nevermind, into faces). Grayzone founder and head honcho, your local Assad apologist Max Blumenthal, successfully pressured the Southern Poverty Law Center to take down this article. I dare him to try my website, I’ve shielded myself with lengthy paragraphs! The article explains, on the Internet Archive at least, how presently, fascist propagandists like Steve Bannon use intermediatry hops to convert left-wing resentment (paging Nietzsche, or better, The Creation of Me, Them, and Us on the struggle between reflectors and negative images in Hegelian setups) into unwitting support for Putin-, CCP-, Assad-, etc. aligned talking points. As the first track of Lupe Fiasco’s Birth of the Cool album propounds, check your ingredients before you overdose on the cool. Might be a bit Tatmadaw when those discussing the CCP’s horrifying Uyghur genocide find themselves told by USians that it’s a “Karen” move to feel cross-border, cross-sect empathy: “Yeah, tell us again Karen, how the Uyghur genocide actually affects you” and the like. Nope, empathy across distances is a good thing. Finally, whataboutism is increasingly not accepted online, so I don’t have to put a long disclaimer in here about multiple awful genocides caused by the US.
“What is this garbage you’re watching?” the US fifties father says, thrusting the remote control like a gavel. “I want to watch the news!” (Points for those who know the music video source.)
Well, if there’s anyone still reading after that giga-paragraph, such was my understanding prior to this blast, so now we crank the volume! I’m basing the below largely on the September 28 YAC.news article, “Prelude to war: China’s plot for world domination,” and the links therein. Heather Marsh’s 2014 post “World War III: Pillage and plunder” provides some helpful historical background about power shifting from the British empire / Five Eyes / etc. to the Chinese empire, and then her 2020 post “The catalyst effect of COVID-19,” offers more crucial background, regarding the present attempt at a planetary mono-empire, transcending the Cold War binary and dangerously trying to sublate us all into obedient nothing-humans. Back to the YAC.news post.
The excellent article explains “China’s goal is global ideological and economic domination. To achieve that, it is spreading propaganda, expanding information operations, amassing economic and social influence, and sabotaging democratic political systems.” The article gives backstory and context such as “The CCP has had a monopoly on power in China since Mao Zedong first obtained control in 1949 after a grueling civil war. The CCP currently has more than ninety million members, not including non-Chinese loyalists scattered worldwide. Over 70 percent of the CCP’s members are men” but in 2019, more than 42% of new members are women, contemporary gender parity in joining authoritarian destruction. Here’s a key paragraph from YAC.news:
The CCP does not seek ideological conformity but rather power, security, and global influence. President Xi promotes China’s authoritarian governance as being superior to democratic political systems and seeks to spread “Chinese wisdom” throughout the world as a “contribution to mankind.” Xi speaks of China’s prosperity as proof that the path to prosperity does not lead through democracy. Unlike the United States and the fallen Soviet Union, China is currently not spreading its ideology through the installment of authoritarian strongmen or through military conquest. Instead, it promotes itself as “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence”. Chinese officials commonly speak of the “right” of nations to choose their political systems, often advocating the right of countries to be ruled by nondemocratic regimes. When paired with China’s economic and political measures China’s policy reinforces authoritarian regimes and weakens democratic systems around the world.
What does it take to descibe more than just the US as imperial?
Speaking of war, note that like the physically unfit Trump, China is campaigning against effeminate men and other non-machismo experiments with beauty. China’s TV regulator this month banned the “abnormal aesthetics” of “sissy men”; in February, Wang Hailin, the screenwriter vice president of China’s National Film Literature Association, ranted in moronic binary form: “If a man pays too much attention to his outfits and his makeup, it means that he is trying to avoid responsibility and our society is going backward. …If we have more sporty and manly men, it means that our society is moving forward and improving.” Gee, so simple even authoritarians can understand it, unlike, say, cutting their toenails.
The Chinese government harasses Chinese nationals on Canadian soil. The Toronto Starreported last month that a Chinese student located in Canada retweeted three posts critical of the CCP or against its interests, from his fake-name twitter account with only two followers. That was all it took for the Chinese authorities to contact him (in Canada) and his family (in China) with threats. They told him to delete the posts or “face trouble.”
In November 2019, the Toronto Sundetailed how dozens of Chinese in the Vancouver area are getting in person visits on Canadian soil from “Chinese officials” due to their anti-CCP online posts. “When we meet in my office, they want the blinds closed,” Brad West, mayor of Port Coquitlam (just outside Vancouver), told the paper. “They’re that fearful.” He said the Canadian “government has been doubling down on the same approach [to this problem] for decades now and the proof is in the pudding. There hasn’t been a change and things have gotten worse.” The article concludes with the mayor saying, “Maybe I’m being too simplistic in thinking, but when dealing with a bully, there does come a point where you just have to stand up for yourself.”
Wray testifying to Congress. Yeah, I don’t trust his agency or face either, but look. The FBI director isn’t talking to us. Neither is Reuters. They’re both talking to other wack members of the security services, intelligentsia, etc. We’re the (presumed apathetic) public listening in on this particular regional gang giving each other data about another regional gang, the CCP, and we’re deciding not only to care, but to act.
Where else is the CCP harassing Chinese nationals? In the United States. In July 2020, Reuters reported on FBI director Christopher Wray’s explanation of China’s “Fox Hunt” program in an hour-long presentation to the conservative militarists at the Hudson Institute. The program sees Chinese citizens, some also US green card holders or US citizens, who are anti-CCP dissidents, finding themselves blackmailed on US soil—told “return to China promptly or commit suicide” for example—by CCP “emissaries” suddenly showing up and using the Fox Hunt targets’ family members back in China and even in the United States “for leverage.” At the Hudson Institute, Wray said there are “hundreds of [Fox Hunt] victims” in the United States, and the CCP forces use “a variety of means of coercion” against them. “If you use your imagination,” Wray said, “you’re not going to be far off.”
The FBI director points out that any Chinese company is required to give the CCP any information its requests on anything. That includes data of USians using Tik Tok, owned by a Chinese firm that tries to censor mention of the Xinjiang concentration camps where Uyghur and other minorities are incarcerated by the CCP for indoctrination, torture, rape, and death. The CCP has also created an international state-sponsored organ trafficking industry.
Canada and the United States aren’t the only places China’s influence activities reach. As linked in the YAC.news article, intelligentsia guy Larry Diamond and other intelligentsia guy Orville Schell, wrote a November 2018 report at the influential conservative Hoover Institution think tank, on the Stanford campus, about China reaching beyond its borders in nefarious ways. The report’s 48-page second appendix, titled Chinese influence activities in select countries, draws on typical intelligentsia sources (journalists, academics, bureaucrats, yadda) to list example after example of CCP influence and harassment operations in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Quoting from the second appendix:
China seeks to make itself more palatable to democratic societies by using many of the customary vehicles of soft power—such as state-funded research centers, media outlets, university ties, and people-to-people exchange programs […] In conjunction with the dramatic expansion of Chinese economic interests abroad, the Chinese government has focused its influence initiatives on obscuring its policies and suppressing, to the extent possible, voices beyond China’s borders that are critical of the CCP. Targeting the media, academia, and the policy community, Beijing seeks to penetrate institutions in democratic states that might draw attention or raise obstacles to CCP interests, creating disincentives for any such resistance. Chinese economic activity is another important tool in this effort. Beijing is particularly skilled at using economic leverage to advance political goals in the realm of ideas […]
[For Australia, for instance:] In June 2017, a joint investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media revealed that the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) had warned the major political parties that two of Australia’s most generous political donors had “strong connections to the Chinese Communisty Party” and that their “donations might come with strings attached.”
More of CCP leader Xi Jinping … I wonder what kind of red wine that is?
YAC.news published a separate article on September 21, “China’s war on global education,” which says: “The Chinese government is actively working towards undermining academic freedom globally. Currently the CCP is influencing academic discussions, monitoring Chinese students abroad, and censoring scholarly inquiry. Chinese nationals have reportedly had to alter their behavior and self-censor to avoid threats, harassment, and authoritative backlash. Individuals who show interest in democracy, pro-democracy movements, or criticize the ruling class are monitored and reported on by CCP informants and spies.” To help combat such CCP coercion on university campuses, Human Rights Watch in March 2019 issued a 12-point code of conduct (3-page PDF). It advises measures such as speaking out in defense of academic freedom, recording instances of CCP infrigements on same, disclosing Chinese funding, and more.
The September 28 YAC.news “Prelude to war” article concludes:
China is not only on the warpath to subvert democracy but also pervert our global social contract built around human rights which was designed to in theory protect us from the blood lust of tyrants after the second world war. While the weakening of the human rights charter has been underway for more than half a century by despots that go unchallenged or democratic countries such as the United States that violate it with impunity, China’s plot for power aims to outright erase it. […]
Any effort to combat the CCP’s growing influence and reach must start with cracking down on transnational organized crime, especially that originating from the Golden Triangle and being spearheaded by China-linked Triads. Aggressive anti-money laundering measures need to be put in place across North America and Europe to cut off CCP funding. Anti-money laundering measures must include an international crackdown on illicit or suspicious real-estate and luxury asset acquisition across major metropolitan cities such as Vancouver, Canada, San Francisco, U.S., and London, U.K, among many others. A serious inquiry and crackdown on the vast network of Triad linked – Chinese diaspora based businesses used as fronts for human trafficking, such as spas, beauty salons, and general stores is also necessary. Any effort to curb China’s dark money should avoid arousing xenophobic sentiments, which would only serve to distance potential allies and disenfranchised Chinese in diaspora leading them back to the grip of the CCP. Legislation must also be amended to hold politicians and officials found to be colluding with the CCP judicially accountable. Those actively receiving funds from CCP linked organizations while promoting the party’s interest also need to be subject to transparency measures and held judicially accountable if found complicit […]
In order to secure democracy journalism across democratic countries must regain independence from CCP complicit media moguls and sponsors. Civil society must also be given the tools and training to allow complete transparency on the whereabouts of its funding and any CCP linked connections of its most vocal members. In order to circumvent China’s financial grip, with the Belt and Road Initiative, on financially strained countries, wealthy democratic countries must provide, corruption free, infrastructure development. Accountability and an end to impunity for officials, royals, and wealthy individuals residing in democratic countries must also gain priority to counter China’s narrative of western hypocrisy and instability […]
Currently some democratic states have sent naval assets to the Pacific to curtail CCP expansionist actions however without serious moves at home China grows bolder and stronger. Ultimately if China’s plot is not stopped and democracy is not reinforced the countdown to military confrontation at a global scale is underway.
Record-breaking numbers of container ships in August 2021 backed up off the coast of southern California (Source)
A year and a half ago, in her post “The catalyst effect of COVID-19,” philosopher Heather Marsh wrote: “We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once. […] the [trade] economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups [cults, to oversimplify] when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality [cult mindsets, to oversimplify], as economics is. The crash we started the year off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted [consider] power structure with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.” She then goes on to supply a list of specific opportunities that activists could pursue during the pandemic to establish/defend a world that’s much more exosocial [based on balanced, euphoric interactions rather than predatory, draining transactions].
In Seattle, when I stop by grocery store news-stands for a few moments, the papers are full of the latest headlines about the ongoing implosion of the trade economy. Maybe your area news-stands are similar. Even booksellers are affected, as Quartzreported on September 16: “Publishers are warning sellers and consumers that supply chain issues have forced a major slowdown in book production and threaten a shortage of certain titles for the rest of the year. Supply chain problems have touched almost every aspect of book production, storage, and delivery, mostly as a result of Covid-related bottlenecks. […] because many books are printed in China, the route from printer to the bookstore is currently fraught with bottlenecks. Port congestion, lack of shipping containers, a shortage of dockworkers, and trucking staffing problems are impeding the movement of books from warehouses to store […] publishing delays are likely to hit independent booksellers harder.” On September 13, Tubby & Boo’s, a New Orleans independent bookstore focusing on science fiction and fantasy along with titles of interest to queer communities, put together a 15-tweet thread detailing problems with raw materials, costs of production, distribution/circulation of commodities, and so on.
System collapse — that’s the warning from global supply chain workers according to a September 29 article posted by CNN Business. The piece centers on the joint open letter from International Chamber of Shipping and other shipping industry groups to heads of state attending the United Nations General Assembly last month. The industry organizations asked the UN “that our transport workers are given priority to receive [World Health Organization] recognised vaccines and heads of government work together to create globally harmonised, digital, mutually recognised vaccination certificate and processes for demonstrating health credentials (including vaccination status and COVID-19 test results), which are paramount to ensure transport workers can cross international borders. We also call on the WHO to take our message to health ministries.” The supply chains are expected to buckle further toward the end of the year when employment contracts come up for renewal.
What does trade’s downward spiral mean for how we organize ourselves? Today, wage slavery is compulsory: the completely contingent order of things—for now—is that almost everyone must pick between Employer A or Employer B or Employer C to toil for moneytokens, or feel shame for begging in a world where free essentials aren’t cheerfully shared, or die. Sometimes the authoritarians describe this wage slavery as freedom; other times, they admit it’s compulsory, as in late September, when Gary D. Cohn, chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, also an IBM vice president, told Yahoo Finance that “we need to force people, in many respects, to reenter the workforce.” For more on IBM’s witting complicity with fascists, read investigative journalist Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: How America’s Most Powerful Corporation Helped Nazi Germany Count the Jews.
I’ll try to make the worldwide trade economy collapse/change a recurring feature of my news blasts. If you feel dismay, remember, as John Donne (sorta) said in other words centuries ago, don’t respond by building emotional walls and blaming yourself for the corporate destruction making our lives difficult. I think I’m taking a little liberty with Mr Donne. Point is, reach out, talk about shame to throw it out the airlock, strengthen yourself, build bridges, and stick up for yourself and others!
Art Blasts: Theodore Sturgeon, Wanda Landowska
Since from now on it might be fun to include blasts, timely and untimely, about all forms of art, let’s look at some fiction and music real quick. Like trying to get a cranky vehicle started, I’ve been having trouble getting my own fiction-writing going as much as I’d like (although it is going, just slowly), so someone (Hoi!) recommend a while back that I do stuff about fiction to build up enthusiasm. Art blasts may help with that. This weekend’s are apropos of nothing; most aren’t timely at all!
Fiction, other) I have a friend who just published a poetry book, and another friend who just sold two fiction tales, but I haven’t read them yet. Sorry for the delay, y’all. I’ll get to your work soon!
Fiction, Theodore Sturgeon) One of my favorite writers is the late Theodore Sturgeon, mostly known for his stories of science fiction and fantasy. His work might be described as a bridge between the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction (circa 1938 – 1946), in which scientists like Isaac Asimov portrayed cerebral, familyless men exploring the universe and saving it nearly singlehandedly with hard rationality, and the New Wave of Science Fiction (1960s and 1970s), in which anti-authoritarian authors, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, focused on soft sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc.) and promoted/debated counterculture ideals. Sturgeon’s ponderings on love and his lyrical style, seen for instance in his screenplay for the famous Star Trek: TOS Amok Time episode, was a huge influence on the far more famous Ray Bradbury.
This two-minute, 2013 video from Open Road Media, which has been digitizing Sturgeon’s backlist, will vibe you with the author quickly:
The above Sturgeon video and facts have been familiar to me for a long time, but this past week I was delighted to stumble, for the first time, on the last issue of the Steam Engine Time fanzine, from March 2012, which contains a lengthy, well-sourced biographic and analytical essay on Sturgeon’s work by Matthew Davis, and ruminations on Sturgeon’s 1953 story “The World Well Lost” by Dick Jenssen aka Ditmar. Jenssen explores how “The World Well Lost,” written at a time when in the United States homosexuality was still voted by psychiatrists into being a diagnosable mental illness, shows bigoted homophobes as objectifiers obsessed with superficial appearances, while love is shown as a connection between what people have on the inside, regardless of the anatomy of their naughty bits. Before reading Davis’s essay, I already knew a lot about Sturgeon, but his piece told me things even I didn’t know. For instance,Sturgeon wrote for the black-and-white TV show Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), which predated The Twilight Zone. I love the latter, but have never seen the former, so I was startled to learn from Davis that Sturgeon wrote the very first Tales of Tomorrow episode, “Verdict from Space.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the full 28 minutes are on youtube, giving me something to watch asap!
Music,Wanda Landowska) At the end of Sturgeon’s best known novel, 1953’s More Than Human, he describes ethereal post-humans inspiring humanity, and one result of the inspiration is “a child Landowska listening to a harpsichord.” He means Wanda Landowska, Polish pianist and harpsichordist, born 1879, died 1959. If you enjoy Bach, as I do, you might be more familiar with the widely available interpretations of his music by eccentric and deceased Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Yet Landowska was very famous in her day, and still is among those knowledgeable on the musical era. Both keyboardists performed Bach’s 1735 Italian Concerto. We can use Gould’s popular interpretations as a sort of baseline to compare Landowska’s earlier interpretations against.
Glenn Gould, piano, squeaky chair, and mumbles, 1959
Wanda Landowska, harpischord, 1936
Same thing for Bach’s two- and three-part inventions from 1723, pieces I used to annoy my family with by playing them on the piano over and over. Both Gould and Landowska recorded the inventions, Gould in 1963-64 and Landowska in 1959. Hers are all up at the Internet Archive; his are all on youtube here. We might compare Landowska and Gould’s performances of a single piece from that set of compositions, the 13th two-part invention, in A minor:
Gould, piano, squeaky chair, and mumbling, 1963-64
Landowska, harpsichord, 1959
Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have anything to say about Gould, Landowska, and JS Bach right now—I was just sharing. In future posts, I hope to share music by Debussy, Grimes, Queensrÿche, Savant, and others. It’s been a weekend of typing; now I’m at last spent of words. Until next time!
Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 30 of 52.
Comedy and tragedy masks at Wilton’s Music Hall in London, photographed in 2011 by failing_angel/B
This past week in Washington state, where I live, the governor has recommended people in high transmission areas resume wearing masks for indoor public settings. His change comes along with more news about the novel coronavirus’s highly contagious Delta mutation, and along with the federal government ending the countrywide ban on evictions. Since June 28, the number of new cases in King County, home of Seattle, has quadrupled, according to county public health officer Jeff Duchin in an hour-long July 30 video embedded below. Some Seattle restaurants/bars just started requiring patrons to provide proof of vaccination. In light of all this, here’s a COVID-19 update — including a look at larger, systemic forces at work — followed by news blasts for Haiti and the U.S.
WA state will follow current CDC guidance and I am asking Washingtonians statewide to consider wearing a mask in public indoor settings in areas of substantial or high transmission. This is a recommendation, not a requirement.
Many in the United States — typically rightwingers, but not always — see government advice or mandates to mask against the novel coronavirus as tyranny, imposed suddenly, ex nihilio: out of nowhere, without precedent. Such a belief betrays the country’s overall ignorance of history and the wider world.
Imagine someone coming to dinner at your home. Everyone is seated around the table. Diners are passing around a dish of sweet potatoes. One person, holding the dish, sneezes directly into it. The other diners drop their jaws. “Cover your nose when you sneeze!” someone says. But the same person responds by simply coughing into the sweet potatoes. “What the hell?” another diner protests. The sneezer-cougher explains: “It’s my freedom to spread my germs where I want. That’s individual choice. It’s what makes our country great.”
For good reason, it’s a strong social norm to cover your mouth/nose when coughing/sneezing (use your inner elbow, not your palm, since you might soon after touch others with your hand), so the sweet potatoes scenario depicted above is rather unlikely — but masking against COVID-19, a respiratory illness, is the same idea.
Consider too how surgeons mask, to protect against exhaling germs into a patient’s exposed body, and how masking has been used for decades in various countries across the world to guard against spreading contagious respiratory diseases, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a type of coronavirus first identified in 2002. SARS, and headlines about it, proliferated around the globe until the syndrome was contained in 2004. One of the ways it was stopped was — you guessed it — masking. From the article linked in this paragraph:
Japanese wear masks when feeling sick as a courtesy to stop any sneezes from landing on other people […] The SARS outbreak was a “turning point,” for Asia, said Chen Yih-chun, director of the National Taiwan University Hospital Center for Infection Control in Taipei. Before that, she said, Taiwanese saw masks as a stigma marking them as severely ill. “Why we always mention the SARS matter is because during SARS and before that to wear a mask was impossible and patients didn’t want to cooperate,” Chen said […] Japanese had worn them even in the 1950s as a safeguard against rising air pollution, a byproduct of industrialization. Now people who feel just “under the weather” in Japan wear them
I’m surprised how rarely analogies to everyday sneezes and coughs, and how rarely other countries’ histories, have been discussed by those trying to educate USians on coronavirus prevention. Instead, all too often, the commentariat got bogged down in the weeds of complicated scientific studies, partly to demonstrate their fealty to conventional science, which the public has lost a lot of trust in, understandably. It’s great, of course, to talk about whatever interesting topics online. But I think supplying the simple information above would have been more effective than the corporate media obsessing over studies. And still would be.
Scary new study on the Delta mutation
This year’s Lollapalooza lineup looks sick. By Eric Downs.
Speaking of scientific studies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a new one Friday that the New York Timesreported on the day before.
The scary research says asymptomatic vaccinated individuals are spreading the Delta variant, a more contagious mutation of the novel coronavirus that grows faster in respiratory tracts, and it says Delta is causing symptoms in, and hospitalizing, even vaccinated individuals (“breakthrough” cases, as in the virus ‘breaking through’, or not being stopped by, vaccine-produced antibodies).
Over Twitter, I asked Dr Bob Morris, a Seattle-based epidemiologist, about the new study (who needs to wait around for official interviews and official articles, nowadays?). Dr Morris said the research is important in drawing attention to Delta’s high infectivity, but also that it should be interpreted with caution. The study is titled: “Outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Including COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections, Associated with Large Public Gatherings — Barnstable County, Massachusetts, July 2021.” In other words, the research focuses on large public gatherings, such as festivals, which cautious individuals have been avoiding for over a year now. Specifically, the study looks at an outbreak precipitated by Provincetown, Massachusetts’ Bear Week (bear as in queer slang for a lover with lots of body hair). That’s tons of people getting together in person to kiss and do additional naughty things, thus passing on the Delta version of the virus.
I think it is an important study showing the infectivity of the delta variant, but it should be interpreted with caution. Take a look at Bear Week in Provincetown, the event that precipitated the outbreak. The level of contact and interaction put participants at maximum risk.
To say a study should be interpreted carefully isn’t to say the study is irrelevant; after all, plenty of huge public gatherings — superspreader events — are ongoing or upcoming in the United States:
Happening now, the four-day Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, 100k people. While concertgoers must present vaccine cards or masks (which they might not actually wear), there’s also an exception for individuals who present a negative test result from the prior 72 hours (which with 100,000 people won’t stop some infected people from attending).
Happening Aug 6 – Aug 15, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, half a million to three quarters of a million attendees expected. No masks, no vaccine proof required.
More…
This schlocky medical thriller scared me as a kid. Source.
Like the missed opportunities in explaining masking, another messaging error has been emphasizing the word “variant.” A variant can be made up of multiple mutations, so the words aren’t interchangeable (and ultimately there are no synonyms). But for popular contexts such as headlines, “variant” sounds neutral, probably harmless, whereas “mutation” has frightening connotations. I recommend using “mutation” frequently when explaining this stuff to everyday non-specialist audiences.
In September 2020, the CDC implemented a countywide ban on residential evictions — but it ends today. The federal House of Representatives didn’t extend the moratorium; the final scene of the drama included a last-ditch effort by Dem legislators being blocked by North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry. An estimated 15 million-plus tenants in the U.S. are behind on their rent and thus at high risk of getting kicked to the curb. Many of these at-risk tenants are planning to live in their cars, a common thing here in Seattle. However, some local and state governments, including Washington state, maintain their own eviction bans, independent of the federal government, continuing to provide protection against evictions.
The worsening poverty in the United States, and the slow-mo trade economy collapse worldwide, makes me think of teenagers at Seattle Public Schools or teenagers from around the world in Zoom classes I’m currently teaching in. Faced with impossible pressures emanating from the world of biz, they’re resisting quietly by setting boundaries with knowledge-hoarding institutions and credentialing authorities. They don’t ruin their health to show up early, or even on time necessarily, nor do they meekly obey demands that they silence their home environments or do this or that with their computers (factors over which they might not have control anyway). Boomers wail and gnash their teeth, telling each other that their power over trade should be absolute and that such boundary-setting heralds the End Times, but connecting survival to moneytokens and their silly institutions is the real insanity.
It’s sad to live in a world where millions agree: “Don’t have enough moneytokens? No food, clothing, shelter for you! At best, rely on shameful charity. You’re awful!” Sometimes capitalists argue for this system by saying that policies such as a ban on evictions enslave businesspeople. To some extent, as one of the billions of rats running through the maze of capitalism daily, I can sympathize with related concerns: nobody likes bureaucratic paperwork or edicts, when they’re stupid or illogical, and businesspeople have to feed their families too, and don’t necessarily have time to be a therapist/socialworker for particular tenants who disrespectfully and dramatically wreck buildings, which does happen sometimes. But rather than get caught up in myopic, stale metaphors like “It’s a balancing act!” or advocating for the low, low bar of tacking social welfare programs onto a sadistic economic system, I think it’s far better to point out history and the wider world, to indicate possible paths to a better future.
June 2021 photo by me near East Wenatchee in central Washington state, where the Wenatchis/P’squosa were forcibly displaced by white settlers
For most of human history, and in civilizations such as the Indus Valley one, trade, biz, exchange — whatever you want to call it — existed, but minimally, relative to today (or that’s my understanding!); it wasn’t considered the epitome of life to which all else must be sacrificed. And more importantly, just look at a child drawing stick figures on a piece of paper, free of charge, and sticking it on the family refrigerator, also free of charge. The kid is motivated to do such things for fun/curiosity, to enjoy drawing, to share social approval with their family, etc. In a world without money, and with a public data commons for arranging details (such as transporting cement long distances), it should be fairly straightforward (versus for instance the sprawling social services industry cursing people as defective and needing drugs) for people to build houses and help those who live in them manage the various equipment (e.g., plumbing), free of charge for the same reasons as the kid drawing on a piece of paper. If you wouldn’t want your children abruptly demanding five dollars and seventy-six cents from you to stick their drawings on the fridge, why do you want adults to do the same for the housing system, plus lifelong debt etc.? A good system would be like: “Oh hey, that’s Latisha, she works on the plumbing around here, she’s awesome!” And Latisha walks up to the house and tells the residents about the cool new wrench she got that helps with fixing pipes. It’s really not that difficult to fathom, it’s similar to volunteering, and again, my understanding is, most humans have lived their entire lives in such a manner. (Guaranteed basic essentials would help the misfits/dissidents survive/thrive without having to pander for popularity.) When people hearing about this scornfully retort That’ll never happen, they’re likely expressing their contempt for multigenerational effort or their inability to withstand criticism for saying challenging things (like advocating for a world without a financial system), which — like a sole individual loudly coming out of the closet — has more power than people typically realize.
Shayla Piccini, pro-BLM protester who sued the City of San Diego over her arrest. See linked article below.
To help end the pandemic, I think individuals should get vaccinated (as I did) — the forthcoming University of Washington vaccine, not of mRNA design, likely will be very impressive, too. In the video embedded above, King County public health officer Jeff Duchin says:
“Do vaccines work against Delta? The answer is unequivocally yes. Although there might be a slight drop-off [decrease] in protection, vaccines offer excellent protection against Delta, particularly against serious infections, hospitalization, and death. And if you aren’t vaccinated, you’re at high risk of becoming infected and spreading infection to others.”
Dr Duchin also says, in the July 30 video, that 81% of King County residents ages twelve and up have received at least one vaccine dose, 75% of residents ages twelve and up have completed the vaccination series, and 65% of all King County residents (of all ages) are fully vaccinated. King County is one of the most highly vaccinated regions in the United States. Over the past thirty days in King County, 81% of COVID-19 cases are not fully vaccinated, 89% of COVID-19 hospitalizations are not fully vaccinated, and 91% of COVID-19-related deaths are not fully vaccinated. Most cases in King County are Delta mutation cases. Vaccination is the single most important thing a person can do to protect themselves and others; vaccination makes it much less likely, though not impossible, that a person will catch and spread COVID-19.
I also think individuals should mask, though it’s sometimes hard to be certain when exactly with the shifting public health messages. Prior to Delta’s spread, some doctors told me that with vaccination, I shouldn’t worry about masking or asymptomatic transmission. But now with the Delta mutation, I think I should. And what about elderly individuals, or those who are invisibly immuno-compromised? Not masking places them, and others, at risk. Masking doesn’t hurt anything (it’s just annoying to do); those calling it tyranny might consider what real tyranny looks like: the military dictatorship in Myanmar, for instance, is outright killing medical workers and attacking their facilities, exacerbating COVID-19’s spread to aid the junta in maintaining power. Yes, the United States has its horrors too, what with pro-Black Lives Matter protestors arrested by plainsclothes cops in full combat gear and hauled off in unmarked vans, or thousands of massage parlors in U.S. strip malls acting as fronts for billion-dollar rape trafficking. The list of nightmares goes on. Asking the public to wear masks so they don’t spread germs during a pandemic is not among them.
We’re now at 629,115 dead from COVID-19 in the United States — that official number is probably lower than reality, and it doesn’t include the frightening suffering of Long COVID (unless there’s death) — and blaming Trump for the toll will also help end the pandemic, so people don’t fall for the crazy snake-oil cures his administration was selling, and more. It’s not “political” or “annoying” to say 2 and 2 make 4, or that Olympia is the capital of Washington state, or that, instead of damning themselves, individuals should instead correctly accuse Trump & co. for calling coronavirus a hoax in February 2020 and for retaliating against Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Dr Rick A Bright for his insisting “on scientifically-vetted proposals” and “a more aggressive agency response to COVID-19.” I mean, it might not be something to bring up to a partner while the two of you are trying to fall asleep, but I mean generally!
Finally, consider the fundamental role of corporate control and disinformation in our lives, and how to combat it. Read this 26 July ’21 YAC.news article — How corporations are choosing profits over life with COVID19 medications — or watch the four-minute video version, embedded below right before the news blasts. In short, governments across the planet are permitting Big Pharma monopolies to make decisions based on profit, not need. Only 1% of individuals in low-income countries have received a vaccine dose. That’s unfair, and for those who don’t care about fairness any longer, bear in mind it also allows more mutations to develop and proliferate to your doorstep. A stronger response, ideally a zero-COVID strategy, would stop a new permanent paradigm of unending mutations. The article concludes:
The CEOs of pharma corporations attributed the speedy development of COVID-19 vaccines to the [intellectual property] system, disregarding the contribution of public funding (paid by everyones taxes), people’s volunteering in clinical trials (risking their lives) and regulatory support (by professionals focused on saving lives). Millions of people are still waiting to benefit from the important medical innovations of the past year and half. Thanks to profiteering corporate leeches and the archaic intellectual property laws millions of poor people are being sentenced to death.
To fight Big Pharma’s hoarding, an idea, encouraged by YAC.news and others, is to support a proposal initially made by South Africa and India in October 2020: waive certain provisions of the TRIPS agreement for the sake of preventing, containing, and treating COVID-19. In October 2020, Doctors Without Borders gave five reasons people should support the #TRIPSWaiver to weaken Big Pharma’s power to hoard so-called intellectual property. Briefly, the waiver would benefit everyone, accelerate the COVID-19 response, include not just vaccines but also essential equipment such as ventilators, make needed COVID-19 medications and vaccines more affordable, and reduce corporate power. Six steps to support the #TRIPSWaiver:
Step 1) On this Google Map, click on a country’s X (not supporting the #TRIPSWaiver) or question mark (undecided). Clicking will give you pro-#TRIPSWaiver text to copy that includes the twitter handles of the country’s relevant authorities.
Step 2) Paste the copied text into a tweet draft, customizing it if you like.
Haiti,1 of 2. Often when people think of North America, three large countries quickly come to mind. But there are hundreds of islands and multiple countries in the Caribbean, too. One of these is Haiti. (Another is Cuba, which I discussed in last week’s news blasts.) I first started thinking about Haiti as an adult when I was writing for the alumni magazine of the university I graduated from. In October 2013, I wrote an article for that magazine about an alum, Dr Ric Bonnell, who initially in 2007 went on missionary trips to provide altruistic medical care to Haitians, but then by 2009 decided he could provide better help by training native Haitian doctors and nurses, including assisting them remotely via Skype. I quoted Dr Bonnell as saying: “Providing unneeded or unwanted ‘help’ causes harm […] Always ask yourself, ‘How do I work myself out of a job? How do I make it so that my help is no longer needed?'” After putting together that piece, I’d perk up whenever I heard some friend, or some newscaster, mention Haiti, but I sadly didn’t know all that much more about the country. Fast forward to July 7 this year when, early in the morning, in an attack on his home in the capital city Port-au-Prince, US-backed Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. According to the country’s constitution, Moïse’s term of office ended February 7, but he ignored the law and remained in power, causing mass protests (see three-minute Al Jazeera video embedded below). U.S. mercenaries were spotted during these protests but apparently were limited to protecting Moïse. He’d already dissolved the country’s parliament — not a good sign. As Foreign Policy magazine explained on February 10, the State Department of the Biden administration along with the Organization of American States (OAS) endorsed Moïse’s prolonged presidency, pitting the David-size Haitian opposition against the Goliath-size United States et al. Haiti was already battered by the 2010 earthquake that destroyed infrastructure and killed an estimated quarter million people. Famine, as well: a 9 July ’21 Oxfam report, The Hunger Virus Multiplies, discusses crisis-level famine in multiple countries, including Haiti, where starvation has been a long-standing problem (as Dr Bonnell also noted). Making matters worse, the illegitimate Moïse apparently kidnapped opposition leaders and acted as a tyrant, saying bluntly in a February 7 public address: “I was supposed to leave, I’m still here. If you guys keep fighting me, I guarantee you that I will win.” Nerds can debate in prolix prose the legal or “foreign policy” angels dancing on the heads of courtroom pins, but demagogues boil down their dictatorships to such frank statements, titillating fascist crowds and terrifying their negative images (the ones they dislike). Back to Moïse’s July 7 assassination. YAC.news wrote an article that very day (talk about timely) titled “Haiti’s US-backed president Jovenel Moïse assassinated” (the source for much of this news blast item). The article states: “Prime Minister Claude Joseph said highly trained assassin[s], some speaking a mix Spanish or English with a US accent, assassinated the president at his home. The assassins yelled, ‘DEA operation! Everybody stand down! DEA operation! Everybody back up, stand down!’ Residents reported hearing high-powered rounds being fired and seeing black-clad men running through the neighborhoods, they also reported exploding grenade and drones buzzing overhead […] Bocchit Edmond, the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., described the attackers as ‘well trained professional commandos’ and ‘foreign mercenaries.'” This whole saga goes on, but I’ll get to it in next week’s news blast, as it’s too much to summarize here, plus I also want to look at more recent news on the assassination. But if you want to continue yourself, read this and this.
Video from President Jovenel #Moïse's assassination in #Haiti.
The assassins claimed to be DEA; spoke a mix of Spanish & English with a US accent. Haiti's government says highly trained foreign attackers involved. All borders & airports shut.
United States. Two news items in my home country. First, the January 6 coup attempt is the subject of ongoing hearings in Congress. In late June, the New York Times published the 40-minute video resulting from their six-month investigation piecing together radio transmissions, social media video uploads, police bodycam footage, and other sources to show what happened that day. The NYT summarized their key findings here. Of course, they’re too co-opted to use terms like “coup attempt” or “demagoguery,” but the astonishing video is definitely worth the watch. It will happen again; there will be another coup attempt. Second news item, Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner, whose August 2018 sentencing I reported from in person (the only highly descriptive article that goes into detail about both the document she gifted the public and the scene at the courthouse that day), was released June 2 from full federal prison, FMC Carswell in Fort Worth Texas (where she and other prisoners contracted COVID-19), to a halfway house, and a week later, to home confinement. Below I’ve embedded some recent Winner family photos. Here’s her support website; you can follow her mom, Billie J. Winner-Davis, on twitter. As her sister Brittany Winner explains in a July 20 article, and as her lawyer Alison Grinter explained on Democracy Now! on June 15, Reality Winner still needs a full pardon to ease her felony conviction, remove the continuing plea deal-based censorship of her (preventing her from telling her story and sharing more information about the leak), and to promote healing for the country. On July 30, Winner accepted the Government Accountability Project’s Pillar Award. What’s really worth checking out in that regard is what Reality herself said when accepting the award. The 12-minute acceptance Zoom video is embedded below; she talks from 9:25 to 11:27. I especially like this part:
“there’s life with purpose and meaning and dignity […] Everybody who didn’t look away when the government called me a terrorist, people who wanted to find out who I actually am, I can’t thank everybody [enough …] when I’m ready, I’m going to be seen, I’m going to be heard.”
Reality reuniting with her dog on 3 July 2021 in Kingsville, Texas. Photo by Chris Lee.
Reality Winner with her new niece; sister and mother at her side. Source.
Note: In 2021, I’m posting a new entry to my blog every weekend or so. This is number 28 of 52; omg, the year’s more than halfway done.
Fort Worth, TX, summed up? I took the Whataburger pic this weekend, but didn’t actually eat the “triple meat” burger or drink the large vanilla shake
I was travelling through central Washington state and northeast Oregon for a few weeks earlier this summer — now, in mid-July, I’m visiting my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas for not quite half a month. Besides seeing family and friends, I’m here to do research of a personal sort. Yet after six years as a Seattle resident, I can’t help noticing several things about the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex, some bad, some good. I’ll share those observations. I was going to then provide news blasts about the current situations in Cuba, Haiti, and Germany, but this entry simply grew too long, and I gotta do some other stuff. Hopefully next week I’ll take on news blasts for those three countries. I’m an untimely fellow.
Bad stuffabout North Texas
Graphic of SimCity game. Would you want to live here? Source.
Gridlock) Aside from traffic jams and the Lone Star State’s uniquely deregulated, isolated power grid — meaning during disastrous outages (including this year), Texas, its leaders boasting with pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps lies, cannot, unlike all other 47 contiguous states, receive energy sent as assistance from beyond its borders; the privatized electric system has yet to be fixed or replaced, even though lawmakers knew of its vulnerabilities: they chose to serve the power companies instead — I want to talk about another type of Texan gridlock. In Seattle, multitudinous fairy-tale roads wind up hills, passing idiosyncratic houses with quirky paint jobs, and in the distance are bridges, sailboats, mountains. Many of my Seattleite friends have never lived anywhere else, nor have they ever been to the South. Comparing my place of birth with the Emerald City’s highly commercial Northgate neighborhood (an exception to the usual Seattle beauty), I tell them North Texas is primarily composed of tract houses, billboards, strip malls, fast food joints, and car dealerships. That truth was really evident from the sky as my flight descended toward DFW Airport. During landing, I was reading the first chapter in a thought-provoking collection of essays from 2006, edited by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.: Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes. It’s research for my fiction project set at least partially in northeast Oregon and 2036, because all time connects, and the colonial histories of NE Oregon often begin by trumpeting the settlers Lewis and Clark, whose expedition, commissioned by slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, journeyed, between 1803 and 1806, from Pittsburgh to the Pacific Northwest coast and back to St. Louis, thanks to aid from the enslaved, pregnant, and raped Sacagawea, of the Shoshoni and aged merely fourteen to sixteen years or so at the time of Lewis and Clark’s wrongly idolized quest. That’s not the version you heard in school, right? In the United States we aren’t taught the truth that Jefferson’s top goal for the expedition was establishing evermore commerce, nor that the explorers called the indigenous peoples Jefferson’s “children,” an insult that should call to mind Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. Rivers also have hidden truths… In his essay Frenchmen, Bears, and Sandbars, in the Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes collection, Vine Deloria Jr. discusses how “Rivers do not, as a rule, create long straight embankments.” Indeed, rivers move over time, something a character mentions early in Cynthia Shearer’s excellent 2004 novel The Celestial Jukebox: “What you looking at there used to be the Mississippi River. Long time ago the river moved itself over […] River just change its mind and move sometime.” As the virtual flight attendants on the seatback televisions were politely ordering me to stow my tray table in the upright position, Deloria Jr. was telling me how Lewis and Clark misinterpreted Missouri River sandbar deposits, insisting with Enlightenment rationality that measurable straight lines must exist to explain the deposits as human-made, when actually they were natural phenomena. Lewis and Clark didn’t understand how chaotic rivers and Nature are. I glanced out the airplane window, and below, behold, North Texas, designed and coerced into “rationality” by long straight lines everywhere. Tract houses separated by long straight congested roads. Like some Cartesian grid Texans are all locked into. The pain caused by living apart from Nature should not be underestimated, even if Texan natives aren’t aware of it, as I wasn’t for a long time, though toward the end of my residency in Texas (I left at the end of 2015), I was frequently going to parks for just that reason. It makes me think of the ideology implicit in the 1991 Super Nintendo game SimCity, which I spent countless hours playing as a kid.
Screenshot of video showing tract housing in Fort Worth. Source.
Graphic of SimCity residential donuts. More industrial zones needed, but why? Image source.
A well-known strategy among SimCity gamers is to create “donut” neighborhoods: squares imposed on the land, usually in nine-by-nine arrangements, with train tracks or roads boxing them in, and a park in the middle to appease the unhappy residents. In SimCity, players are rewarded for engineering such supposedly rational cities. In real urban life, rivers are forced to flow “logically” in straight lines, like trees in some parks, lined up in discrete pots. As a video game-playing kid, I didn’t quite understand that these efficiency setups clash with harmonious ways of living with land, though I did play in undeveloped lots regularly, needing that. To be honest, not until very recently did I put two and two together, comparing rivers in rural areas with rivers in urban places, although a 2019 Seattle Public Library exhibit did briefly puncture my conventional consciousness on the subject. In Fort Worth, I grew up walking and jogging on the sidewalks by the Trinity River, and just assumed the embankments were naturally steep and unchanging, shaped conveniently for urban planners to impose at a moment’s notice, above either edge, unchanging sidewalks…
Despite Seattle’s beauty, the same story plays out there, too. Unfortunately I haven’t read it yet, but BJ Cummings’ 2020 bookThe River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish looks amazing from this interview and this review. The book talks about how without displacing Salish indigenous peoples and trashing and forcibly diverting the Duwamish River, the city of Seattle as we know it wouldn’t exist. There would be no city forums for identitarians to debate which sect should get paid more wages for helping corporations drive us extinct. And in contrast to the dolla dolla bill, let’s-go-extinct-ASAP civilization of biz, which argues each individual is an autonomous sole proprietor capable of not caring what anyone else thinks, and worthy of paralyzing shame for any mistake actually caused by corporate destruction, I hope my discussion of rivers and gridlock — not to mention what volcano Mount Rainier and the Cascadia Subduction Zone might have to say — helps to show how people are in fact creatures of their environments, which of course doesn’t remove each individual’s responsibility to fight for something better. It’s interesting, too, how fiction-writing instructors typically badger writers into obsessing over their supposedly autonomous characters’ ex nihilo motivations, rather than learning about the settings they’re in: for instance, how does the local power grid, or train track, or river characterize a protagonist, or for that matter, a protagonist’s grandparents or neighbors? The so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction in the 1950s presented familyless protagonists singlehandedly subduing the universe; but in the ’90s, science fiction writer Octavia Butler presented characters with extended families walking fiery highways as refugees, an entirely different take on life.
Photo by me this weekend beside wonderful Trinity River in Ft. Worth
Coronavirus confusions) From observation, I guesstimate that ten percent, or fewer, of North Texans are masking. As of 16 July ’21, for Texans ages 18 and up, only 53.9% are fully vaccinated and only about 62.6% are partly vaccinated (one jab of a two-jab series). By way of comparison, in King County, home of Seattle, as of the same date and for ages 16 and up, 75% of residents are fully vaccinated, and 80.7% of residents are partly vaccinated. That’s all according to public health data managed by regional government entities. As for masking, given my observations a few weeks ago, in the Seattle areas that might be described as very progressive or Green Party-ish politically, for instance, inside co-ops selling organic foods, I’d guesstimate that indoors, 90+% of people are masking. How this came to be so politicized, I’ll address in a moment.
This does not look good. Source: John Hopkins Univ COVID-19 map.
A disproportionately high number of those masking in North Texas are individuals categorized on bureaucratic paperwork as minorities (and then identitarian activists tell us we must all heed our opponents’ paperwork). Sometimes those groups tend to have less resources to pay for healthcare yet simultaneously tend to sometimes have more empathy and altruism, gifts of being slotted into negative image roles (differing from the idealized images, you know, white businessmen in suits and the like, who tend to live in grandiose, puffed-up headspaces). Because some of the people I’m visiting indoors are elderly, I wore a high-quality mask the whole time, and received mockery for it. In crowded North Texas restaurants, diners aren’t masking whatsoever. The US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that’s fine if you’re vaccinated; the UN-based World Health Organization (WHO) disagrees, telling even vaccinated people to mask, since they might be asymptomatic carriers — however, growing evidence suggests those vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna are far less likely to be asymptomatic carriers; studies are underway in this regard for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — and in rare instances, vaccinated people can still become diseased with COVID-19 (a “breakthrough” case), including as a sufferer of Long COVID. Adding to everyone’s confusion, the CDC stopped actively tracking all breakthrough cases, and now tracks only breakthrough cases resulting in hospitalization or death. Meanwhile, the Delta variant of the virus, a more contagious mutation that grows faster inside people’s respiratory tracts than the original, currently accounts for at least a fifth of all United States cases, and COVID-19 is now on the rise in every US state; Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country, just resumed mandating masks. Getting two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, as I did in March, is effective in protecting against the Delta mutation (though less effective than against the original novel coronavirus), so that’s the basis on which I’m travelling (while masking, handwashing, physically distancing, and meeting only outside insofar as possible), plus the greatly decreased likelihood of a person with an mRNA vaccination being an asymptomatic carrier, something a Harvard-trained doctor I know puts his trust in. Apparently the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines similarly protect decently, though not perfectly, against Delta. Perhaps surprisingly, nobody on my flight to Texas (I’ve yet to fly back to Seattle) caused any trouble; each passenger masked as required without incident. Based on this 2018 study suggesting window seat airline passengers are least likely to catch respiratory illnesses, I got window seats. But SNAFUs (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up) prevented me from getting tested knowledgeably, namely not receiving a timely response back from my primary care physician regarding how vaccination affects COVID-19 tests, likely because her underling completely didn’t answer my question. I asked something like: “How does being vaccinated, versus unvaccinated, affect COVID-19 serology and PCR test results?” And they replied something like, “Are you wondering what type of test you should get?” And it’s like, answer my question or link me to an answer! I’ve taken to replying to such responses, or front-loading my questions with, “If you don’t know the answer, it’s okay to just say that,” and I find interlocuters usually react better. Instead of them trying to extract my motivations. Really, I should have figured out about the testing myself. But testing-while-vaccinated is another example of coronavirus confusions people are enduring. I’ve shown zero symptoms, not even mild ones, since the pandemic began; in fact, I haven’t had any sort of respiratory illness in years and years, probably owing in part to a vegan/glutenfree and low-sugar diet as well as frequent cardiovascular exercise and better sleep than in my past. That’s not to brag; it’s to link you to experience and info that might help. Best I can figure from the CDC in July ’21, for vaccinated people, serology tests to detect past infections no longer work (due to confounding with the vaccine-produced antibodies), but swab tests to detect current presence of the virus do still work. I’d like to get that done prior to spending extensive time with (vaccinated) elderly people indoors, just to be on the safe side; will see how that goes in North Texas. Finally, as for all this being politicized, let’s not forget in February 2020, the Jeffrey Epstein associate and likely Putin asset, former and probably forthcoming US president Donald Trump called coronavirus a “hoax” (as he calls global warming a “hoax”), and his administration punished US Health and Human Services Department whistleblower Dr Rick A. Bright for Bright’s insisting “on scientifically-vetted proposals” to overcome the pandemic and for pushing “for a more aggressive agency response to COVID-19.” At least two-thirds of a million people dead of coronavirus in the United States since the pandemic started, a decrease in population handy for the oligarchs who, thanks to advanced technology, no longer need as many toiling masses. Locking down hard everywhere for just 100 days would end coronavirus; that’s feasible (see New Zealand’s zero-COVID approach), yet the authorities in the US and elsewhere apparently do what they can to ensure COVID-19 continues, a new permanent paradigm of endless variants, a bit like 9/11 introduced a new permanent paradigm, terrorists as military targets instead of law enforcement suspects and everyone a potential terrorist. Well, maybe the forthcoming University of Washington vaccine will help. Or maybe people will read about coronaviruses prior to 2020 so that they understand masking against respiratory illnesses is a sensible precaution commonly done elsewhere for decades — not tyranny. Next thing you know, libertarians will whine about having their freedumb right to litter taken. I do think those badgering vaccine-hesitant people generally need to have better appreciation for why so many are correctly suspicious of conventional science and conventional medicine, though quacks exist in the alternative science/medicine realm as well, see “the disinformation dozen” spreading fear, uncertainty, doubt, and denial around the coronavirus vaccines. As the last few years have especially shown, propping up subject matter celebs like Neil deGrasse Tyson or whomever, conventional or alternative, and then trying to cheerlead them into winning an advertising blitz on behalf of vaccines or whatever else, is insufficient; having a propagandized public is harmful, whereas having a public capable of self-education is helpful. That requires overhauling our information system.
Pic I took this weekend of a Fort Worth lawn near Camp Bowie
The Decline of North Texas Civilization) I’ve been in Fort Worth a full week, and I get a general sense of exhaustion and torpor from Texans. I’m also witnessing little things falling apart. It’s just an anecdotal observation, but the motel I’m staying in — the same as when I last visited two years ago — is even more run-down this time around. When I arrived, the bed lacked pillows, the bathroom lacked towels, and various objects were broken. I’m not the kind of picky person who makes a fuss over such minutiae; the point is merely that North Texas appears to be slowly breaking down. The world has moved on, as those Stephen King Gunslinger books say. I feel tired and lazy, too, which I think is probably a partial result of the overall lower quality of life here, decreases in things like water quality, relative to Seattle. Although that could be my imagination, or more about the odd feelings I’m experiencing around being back here. Except for family member funerals possibly, I don’t think I’ll return to Texas any after this, which is a big change to accept internally. I’m finding the research information I was looking for, and long-ago acquaintances don’t want to meet face to face, probably because deep down, we both know we’re no longer actually friends with a fun energetic connection, or even shared values and interests, beyond fairly superficial things like Star Trek … so that makes sense. I was just curious how their lives have played out, and if they have anything new and exciting to say. Despite half the region now differing — a change I’ll get to below — at least half this region will still likely celebrate the probable return of a Donald Trump presidency, howling once again their bloodthirsty approval for his ideas like bombing accused terrorists’ innocent civilian family members. I hope someday even more people emphatically and consistently insist loudly that adopting If they aren’t paying your bills, then fuck ’em as a civilization-wide strategy has negative consequences for all.
Good stuffabout North Texas
Pic I took this weekend of the Boulevard of Greens storefront near where Camp Bowie and I-30 cross
Refuge) Prior to my leaving for the Pacific Northwest at the end of 2015, Fort Worth had only one dedicated vegan restaurant, the noteworthy Spiral Diner on Magnolia Avenue in the Near Southside neighborhood. That neighborhood has continued to develop admirably since I lived here, although I don’t know what the unhappy underbelly might be. Of course, besides Spiral Diner, restaurants for pho and thai and other non-USian (“ethnic”) vegan-friendly food have existed in North Texas for a long time, I think particularly in Arlington (where, an elderly Republican in Fort Worth, panicking from a diet of FOX News, once told me, non-white terrorists are assuredly lurking and soon coming to get us). But now, in 2021, there are more, specifically vegan restaurants even here in Cowtown. There’s Belently’s Love on Bluebonnet Circle, which I haven’t tried yet, serving TexMex. There’s also the amazing Boulevard of Greens, where everything is vegan and gluten-free. They offer a number of smoothies, juices, bowls (including with quinoa and broccoli!), and other invigorating items. Boulevard of Greens really has shifted my visit from miserable to manageable.
It also deserves mentioning that North Texas, especially Fort Worth, has a lot of art museums and other cultural institutions. There’s the Modern Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Kimball Art Museum. I’ll probably go see this exhibition at the Amon Carter of work by a photographer born in Saigon during the Vietnam War. The perfectionism of the classical music world can be misery- and stress-inducing, but the performances associated with the Fort Worth-based Van Cliburn Foundation can still be beautiful. And besides art, North Texas has plenty of parks. There’s a once frequent, but now rare due to that “rationally imposed” urban development, ecosystem in Arlington, a bog with unusual plants and animals, that I went to years ago. And of course, the excellent Fort Worth Botanic Garden, where I’ve gone many times. More than a decade ago, I wrote a blog post about a specific tree there, the biggest Southern Magnolia in DFW!
Before the pandemic at least, there were also multiple enjoyable bars/nightclubs with live rock music, that I used to frequent. I can’t find it in me to look up if there are any outdoor shows by musicians I once knew. Guess I just don’t relate to Texas anymore. Reminds me of the song “I’m Not From Here” by the great James McMurtry, himself born in Fort Worth: “Hit my home town a couple years back / Hard to say just how it felt / But it looked like so many towns I might’ve been through on my way to somewhere else […] We can’t help it / We just keep moving / It’s been that way since long ago / Since the Stone Age, chasing the great herds / We mostly go where we have to go.”
Wait, what?) Tarrant County, home of Fort Worth, has long been one of the reddest counties in one of the reddest states, Texas. But in the 2020 presidential election, Tarrant County went blue for Biden. Unfortunately, discussions of elections are dependent — a point still not often acknowledged — on secret, corporate, closed-source computerized vote-tallying. Who counted your vote, name the person! Where was your vote counted, go to the place! Can’t answer those, can you? Yet in the past in the United States, and in the present in Australia and elsewhere, people use(d) handmarked paper ballots, and the ballots were/are counted publicly, observably. Here’s a book and another book on the topic, worth reading. Not to mention the problems with democracy altogether (including direct, representative, and liquid): propagandizing hundreds of millions of people to come to an oversimplified consensus on things that don’t affect them and that they don’t know about, among other troubles. Anyway, I digressed. It’s just interesting to see my hometown turning blue for the first time in my life, if turning blue it indeed has. How can a person begin to appreciate perspectives considered very far-out, like anarchism, if they’re terrified of, or get screamed at or worse for, something as mild as voting for a Democrat? It takes a lot of strength to be a dissident. Maybe the reportedly Biden-blue Tarrant County heralds a change for the better for North Texas.
The Big Wheels, and Dignity) Since there’s little to no public transit in North Texas, I had to book a rental car for my trip. I reserved a polite, Seattle-sized compact vehicle (i.e., very small) and a GPS unit, one of those add-on devices that suction-cups to the front of the automobile. (Yes, I know most people just use their smartphones.) When I arrived, of course the rental car company had overbooked to protect itself against cancellations, so with few cancellations, there were no GPS units available. (And the capitalist Texans explain to each under how “rational” and “Enlightened” this system is, versus the depositories in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, where nobody owns non-personal items, so if you want an object, just go grab one from the nearby depository, maintained by people who like to do that sort of thing and receive social approval for it.) With no add-on GPS units, the Alamo rental car company (Forget the Alamo, lol) asked me if I was okay with a car that had built-in GPS. I said yes. Except the only vehicle they had with built-in GPS was a Nissan Armada! It’s a full-size, Texas-sized SUV so huge it makes Suburbans and Hummers look tiny. I actually had trouble in a parking garage because the Armada almost hit the ceiling, and almost couldn’t squeeze through the entry lanes, you know with the lowered gate where you take your ticket. In US schools, you hear the word “armada” in connection with the Spanish Armada, a fleet which in battle with the British was completely destroyed! Maybe the Nissan marketers figured no one would remember such a trivial detail as the armada sinking. Once I figured out how to adapt my driving for the Armada — it brakes more slowly than a smaller car, for instance — I started having a hilarious time driving this ridiculous battleship, as a lone guy without a family to pack the air-conditioned seats. All other passenger cars, tiny next to my vehicle, fearfully defer to the surprisingly fast Armada, so I can easily change lanes at whim, king of the road in my big wheels. Guilty pleasure. More seriously, the Armada has Sirius XM satellite radio, enabling me to listen to — wait for it — Ozzy’s Boneyard. A few days ago, the channel/station/whatever was playing an interview with Ross Halfin. The rock photographer told a story about how, in short, a Led Zeppelin member (I forget which) disrespected him in person. Halfin said that after that, he decided never to let anyone else diss him similarly again; the radio hosts murmured their approval. What strikes me about this otherwise mundane conversation is that Halfin didn’t specify the means-whereby, how, he’d ensure others wouldn’t disrespect him — and the hosts didn’t ask. What actions does Halfin take when someone tries to disrespect him in person? What words does he say, and how does he say them? I mean, he (or most anyone) could say something like, Hey fuck you, I don’t take this kind of shit, a string of words that doesn’t exactly require a Ph.D. in Rhetoric to formulate (in fact, most intelligentsia I meet are completely clueless how to handle confrontational situations, stuck abstracting in their ivory towers). While bullies usually back down, what do you do if the bully doesn’t back down? What if it comes to fisticuffs, and what if you’re concerned about getting indicted for assault afterward? I’ve never seen a flowchart for this sort of thing, how to protect one’s dignity, the details. I think it’s extremely important and very overlooked. Insults have a way of piling up over the years, breaking down a person who’s never learned how to respond to them skillfully and quickly, making the person fall prey to internalized oppression and making the person suffer all sorts of health and psychological/sociological problems. Didn’t the civil rights movement in the ’60s address this? What if you don’t want to do a strictly nonviolence-only approach, perhaps because you’re itching to say, Hey shithead, cut it out, or I’m gonna run you over with my Nissan Armada! (Unless it sinks.) If you want to waste eight minutes of your life, here’s Out of Spec Reviews’ youtube take from DFW Airport on the 2021 Nissan Armada, so you can actually see this big-ass Behemoth. Or read about problems of car culture instead.
Note: In 2021, I’m blogging once a week, usually on Saturday. This is entry 20 of 52.
Note: Adding a little to last week’s post on math empowerment, here’s a list of online resources for learning math free of charge, the helpful r/math subreddit FAQ,and mathematician Paul Lockhart’s well-known 25-page essay, sometimes called Lockhart’s Lament,decrying how math is typically taught in schools and providing suggestions for how to teach the subject as discovery and art. He later developed his essay into a book (which I haven’t read), titled A Mathematician’s Lament.I’ll stick this note atop last week’s post as well.
United States Postal Service – Rural Free Delivery vehicle in South Dakota, 1905 – from Popular Mechanics
This evening I added a feature to my blog that hopefully will improve discussions. If readers choose to leave a comment on an entry, they now have the option to receive an email whenever a new comment is added to the post by anyone. Such emails include an unsubscribe link.
My hope is that receiving notifications of new comments will encourage previous commenters to return and converse with other readers. If you subscribe in this manner, and the post to which you subscribed were suddenly to go viral and draw zillions of comments, flooding your inbox, you can just unsubscribe. Further, all notification emails include [DouglasLucas.com Blog] in the subject line, so you can set up filters in your email system if you like.
I tested the feature a few times; it’s working fine, at least for me. However, if anyone has troubles or concerns with it, please let me know. Besides fixing a few additional things under the hood of this blog (invisible from the reader point of view), I also tried tonight to add a feature for my blog to notify commenters by email once their comments are approved (after being held for moderation), but none of the plug-ins I experimented with worked, at least not via a few hours of tinkering. I’ll try again next week.
To close off this week’s post, I’d like to inaugurate the news blast(s) write-ups I’ll include with each entry from this point forward. Many readers of my blog aren’t on twitter, where such information initially hits international awareness, so I’m hoping these news blasts will be a good way to spread topics that too often stay off the everyday radar, particularly here in the United States. I also will try to summarize the information in such a way as to provide an overview for audiences who may be unfamiliar with the material and who might need an accessible entry point into it.
Myanmar (aka Burma). Since the February coup d’état this year in Myanmar, in which the military murdered hundreds and arrested the democratically elected civilian government to replace it with its own junta (claiming a fraudulent election), hundreds of thousands of protesters have continued to take the streets and demand an end to military rule, sometimes in favor of the actual National Unity Government (NUG) declared illegal by the usurpers. However, U.S. officials in the first week of May said they won’t support the NUG unless it adopts representation for the displaced and persecuted Rohingya people and/or adopts a decisive anti-genocide position. Some individuals online are also pressuring the NUG to improve. Meanwhile, poverty in Myanmar is increasing to starvation levels amid a collapsing trade economy, Internet access is repeatedly shut down, journalists and poets are murdered for voicing anti-junta opinions, and dissidents are tortured with their organs harvested. Yet resistance continues, including hacks against the junta, and huge portions of the Burmese public joining militias / ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) or a civil disobedience movement to oppose the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military). The rank-and-file military is brainwashed to believe the resistance is chiefly foreign funded; the junta attempts to cut its troops off from outside information; one military doctor told the New York Times: “I want to quit, but I can’t. If I do, they will send me to prison. If I run away, they will torture my family members.” Arrests and rapes by military forces continue. Earlier this month, the junta declared martial law in Mindat, a town in Myanmar’s northwestern state of Chin, where residents told Reuters “We are running for our lives” and “We are living in a nightmare. Mindat is literally a war zone.” Clashes between insurgents and junta forces are ongoing as of yesterday in the Demoso township. Resistance movements in different countries, including Myanmar, are supporting one another, sometimes under the banner of the Milk Tea Alliance. Currently, because China, Russia, India, Turkey, Israel, and other countries supply weapons to the Tatmadaw, 200+ NGOs, as well as Anons, are calling for an arms embargo against it. Here in Seattle, protests took place outside corporate ABC affiliate Komo News. Save Myanmar Seattle information is available at this linktree page. The junta has suspended nearly a thousand educators in the Gangaw Magway area from their posts because teachers and students are learning real lessons by resisting them. A significant show-down may be coming since the junta expects compulsory education to resume on the looming date of June 1.
Note: In 2021 I’ll publish one blog post per week. Here’s entry 15 of 52.
Compulsory education, imposed by nearly all governments
Currently my day job is substitute teaching in public education, something I did previously in Texas, too. Mostly known for popping into rowdy classrooms for a single day at a time, substitutes sometimes work long-term assignments also, effectively replacing the regular teacher across multiple weeks or months, as I’m doing now. There’s a lot I could say about schooling, especially this spring as students in the United States are encouraged to return to poorly outfitted classrooms against the advice of epidemiologists. I worry some of the innovations (to use bizspeak) hit upon during the struggles of remote learning might be forgotten in the rush back to so-called normalcy — for instance, teaching to the test and one-size-fits-all attitudes were thankfully dropped in the last year, but they’ll presumably return soon unless there’s a fight to stop them. Recently I sent many freelance pitches on the subject out to corporate media, nonprofit news, and literary magazines; we’ll see if I get a commission. In the meantime, I thought something quick and focused on the topic might be nice to self-publish here.
There are four books on education that have had an impact on me. What follows is a short review of two of them. In the near future, I’ll blog about the other two. (I’m just cutting in half what would otherwise be a review of four books, in the interest of saving time.)
By Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, 1995. I read this roughly a decade ago, around the time I was first going into teaching in Texas. I no longer have a copy of the award-winning bestseller on hand, but I remember the book was very much a tearjerker. It describes public education in the poorest U.S. congressional district then and now, in the Bronx. Kozol exposes in great detail the poverty, racism, and other injustice of public education there, telling the stories of individual students and families. I strongly remember how he very effectively depicts, as the New York Times review puts it, “the hypersegregation of our cities [that] allows whites to maintain physical as well as spiritual distance from complex and daunting urban problems.” Kozol describes the heroic effort put in by many school employees, and the ways employees, students, and families supported one another. In the wealthy private schools I experienced, something like a diagnosis of severe mental illness (whatever that means) would serve as pseudo-justification for ostracizing and making fun of a troubled kid. But I’ve seen firsthand in public schools, otherwise beaten down by a lack of resources and care from the surrounding world, how some students will of their own initiative provide unpaid support to diagnosed kids, just to aid them — something the upper, upper middle, or intelligenstia classes will completely forget exists, erased in their addiction to comfort. I also remember a friendly coach who collected donated clothes and stored them in a portable for poor students to have. I could tell those stories and many more in great detail, some other time. It’s just to say that the contrasts between fancy-pants private schools and worn-down public schools are very striking. The latter aren’t utopias to be romanticized — many bullies and awful, fatalistic teachers, along with other problems, fill public schools, but with 50+ million people in the public education system across the United States, they deserve more attention than the intelligentsia usually deign to give them. You can find out more about Amazing Graceon Kozol’s website. As the book’s subtitle suggests, that the well-off let most public schools rot, shows the low approval given to children, compared with, say, the high approval given to video games (gauged by discrepancy in amount of time individuals devote to each). Thankfully in many areas that’s been changing dramatically in the past few years. I should conclude with the caveat that since I haven’t read this book in a very long time, I don’t know what all I would make of it now were I to re-read it.
By Aaron Kupchik, Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear, 2010. This book, published by NYU Press, I also read roughly a decade ago — due to a very good review of it at Salon. Homeroom Security combines two topics I follow, education and authoritarianism (surveillance, cops everywhere, crushing of dissent, etc.). Like the Salon review says, the sociology/criminology professor wrote it in such a fair way that doubters who read the book can really be won over to his “radical” thesis: social support and participatory environments make schools safe, not the battle-zone mentality. I remember also (I haven’t read it in a decade, so again the same caveat as with Amazing Grace) that the academic Kupchik very effectively integrates both quantitative methods (statistics regarding money, measurable outcomes, and more) with qualitative ones (interviews, visiting the campuses for long durations like an an anthropologist, and so on). Most importantly, the book discusses how the armed cops, surveillance systems, and other military-like features lately ubiquitous in schools condition kids to believe those elements are just normal in life, to be expected always, rather than only sensible as rare emergency measures (i.e., humans have unfortunately set up the endo-realities of our our social/governance systems as if we’re experiencing permanent nonstop emergency, with all the health-destroying stress that entails). I’ll let the excellent Salon review — which is mostly an interview with Kupchik — finish up my work for me: below, Kupchik talking with the Salon interviewer:
We’re teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we’re doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment. It’s very Big Brother-ish in a way. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal. And my concern is that these children are going to grow up and be less critical and thoughtful of these sorts of mechanisms. And so the types of political discussions we have now, like for example, whether or not wiretapping is OK, these might not happen in 10 years. […] As part of my research, I interviewed students, and one of the questions that seemed like a good idea at the start was asking them whether they liked having the SROs [school resource officers] in their schools. For me, having gone to public schools without cops, this really seemed odd to me, to put police officers in peaceful schools. And the students were puzzled by this question, and I quickly realized that it makes no sense to them because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s completely normal. It makes about as much sense as if you asked them, “Should your school have a principal?”
The two books above, I highly recommend to anyone interested in reading about public education. The other two I’ll post about in the near future.
In conclusion
For now, let me conclude by saying that what I’ve found most important as a substitute teacher in a long-term assignment is just showing up, being truly present, for the kids. So they know they have someone consistent, there each school-day to greet them, who won’t be a mean-spirited dictator. A simple example: if students are marked repeatedly tardy or absent, there can be a variety of unfortunate repercussions for them. If they’re a few minutes late, it’s safer to just mark them present than it is to force them into a show-down with the quasi-legal system embedded in the schools, when the real problem might be a late bus or a domestic crisis or lack of nutrition/sleep or any number of other things that may be no one’s fault. Having a teacher they can count on not to be a threat, is important, in this otherwise stressful, endosocial world of permanent nonstop emergency that we’ve built for ourselves. And then, I can teach students about geometry and whatever else. Student challenges with, say, math, are often simply troubles with English language learning for migrant/refugee kids, or students understandably feeling miserable with, and resistant to, compulsory education in the first place. It’s helpful when school settings permit teachers to pick just one little piece of the math puzzle that students are struggling with, and break it down, teach it slowly, to make sure everyone understands, while meanwhile giving the advanced students enrichment books to pursue on their own. With the likely return of teaching-to-the-test pressure (or the school loses funding when students don’t pass) and one-size-fits-all in the name of efficiency, not to mention grief and stress in connection with the pandemic — and the poverty, racism, and authoritarianism Kozol and Kupchik document — I fear there are dark days ahead for U.S. public schools. But with the Internet encouraging people to become more outspoken about everything, to stick up for themselves and others, there’s also a lot of room for hope.
Stop coming up with fancy systems and spreadsheets for grading and controlling your students. The only thing that works is to connect with them. The only way they'll learn is if you take them from where they are and let them grow.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
Email: DAL@RISEUP.NET (ask for pgp key or check keyservers if you want encryption)
Snailmail (United States Postal Service only): Douglas Lucas / PO Box 75656 / Seattle WA 98175 / United States
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