I stopped doing overly political posts on Facebook some time ago. It got to be too painful.
But with all that’s going on, and the signs I’m seeing that suggest our society is taking a major turn toward the dystopian, I do share the occasional tidbit or quote.
The posts come across as cryptic. I know that.
And so a cousin of mine asked me, recently, to explain what I meant by a particular comment.
I declined.
But I do probably owe him something of an explanation, so here it is.
Let me put it this way
Many years ago—i was in my late 20s—i was out hiking when I noticed a plant I’d never seen before.
When I say “notice” I mean the effect was almost startling. Something about the shape of the leaves and their intensely dark color jumped out at me.
The plant was enmeshed in a tangle of weeds but as a shape or pattern it stood out clearly, almost as if it were glowing or backlit. It was striking and very beautiful.
I took a leaf home and ID’d it.
The plant was poison hemlock, one of the deadliest plants in the northeastern US.
1. The human mind-brain is exquisitely evolved to juggle and interpret inputs in order to screen them for patterns.
Do I see a face? Why yes. Yes, I do.
This happens quickly (instantaneously, as far as our conscious minds are concerned) and sub-consciously.
It’s how we survive. We must detect the tiger before it leaps. By the time the big hungry kitty kitty leaps out of the undergrowth, it’s too late.
In other words:
2. Detecting the pattern that means “tiger” amidst the tangled, chaotic inputs of brushy undergrowth is an extraordinary and extraordinarily useful capability.
3. It’s also something that is going on consciously in our mind-brains. We don’t control it.
We are continually scanning the world to detect patterns that indicate potential threats.
4. Today, the inputs we scan include vast amounts of textual information and projected images.
5. Within this chaotic mass of inputs, we “see” patterns that warn us of environmental threats, economic threats, social threats, cultural threats — any number of “bogies” that our minds assemble, from those inputs, for the purpose of forewarning us so that we can take action before the actual threat materializes and hurts or kills us.
This happens in our minds.
6. “Threats” are therefore mental forms. They are future possibilities, not 3D reality.
They are bogies.
7. Each of us brings to our experiences certain biases that influence what inputs we perceive, what inputs we reject, and how we interpret inputs. These are in part learned, and in part the consequence of our personal histories.
For example, if I grow up in a financially-stressed household, I will be biased to scan for “forms” among the inputs around me that are in the “shape” of economic threats.
If I spend all my time with people who are convinced that man-made climate change dooms the world, I will be biased to scan for patterns in the sea of inputs around me that reinforce the threat posed to me by climate change.
And the more attention I pay to those patterns, the more I notice them. It becomes self-reinforcing.
I can look at a cloud and see a cloud. I can look at a cloud and say, does it look like a face?
And immediately I start to pick out shapes in the cloud that look like a face.
Anyone can do that. It’s the way the human mind-brain works.
THEREFORE:
8. When we condemn each other for “fearing the wrong threat,” we’re ignoring the fact that we are all — ALL — subject to the same fundamentals wrt cognitive processes.
The political “left” and political “right” in the US (for example) scream at each other largely on the basis of the need to argue over bogies. “This is the real threat!” “No, THAT is the real threat!” “OMG, how can you be so stupid to think that’s a threat when clearly it’s not!” “OMG, while you waste time on that threat, this REAL threat over here is going to destroy us all!”
We scream that the “other side” lacks the data to support its threat assessments.
This battle between us ignores the fact that even in the most thoroughly studied areas of scientific or social research, there are always scraps of contradictory (or seemingly contradictory) data — which means that an engaged mind-brain can find contradictory patterns, or can fail to see patterns that appear obvious to other engaged mind-brains.
It doesn’t take more than a couple hours of reviewing the arguments of one side to confirm this.
My bogie is no less valid than yours — and vice versa.
9. The fact is, there are NOT legions of people out there who hold their political positions because they are stupid or uninformed — on either side. I don’t care what the powers-that-be claim.
There just aren’t.
10. On the contrary, the problem is more fundamental and ought to be approached with empathy and compassion: we are all afraid. We all want to be safe. We are all doing our best to identify threats and protect ourselves and the rest of the planet from those threats.
I have been blogging here lately about the collapse of insect populations. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of articles about this trend online, now, many of which cite field research supporting it. But is the global collapse of insect populations objectively true? And is it really a harbinger of a broader environmental collapse?
I have no idea. And I’ve been on this planet long enough to have seen many, many environmental doomsday predictions fail to materialize.
This has taught me something very, very important:
Sometimes what looks like a tiger in the brush is actually just … the brush.
11. We need to stop condemning each other.
We need to stop buying into the politicians’ power games (which they play because their own fearfulness is allayed by persuading others to believe in their bogeys).
12. Reality is more pliable and subjective than we can even imagine.
13. Fear is not the answer.
14. We must learn to approach our disputes with kindness, and patience, and compassion.
He calls for states to take action against the Federal government’s out-of-control encroachment on our Constitutional liberties.
Best of all, he suggests actual concrete action: a Constitutional convention to repeal the 16th Amendment. That’s the one that established the income tax, btw.
“This single change,” Barnett writes, “would strike at the heart of unlimited federal power and end the costly and intrusive tax code.”
Congress could then replace the income tax with a “uniform” national sales or “excise” tax (as stated in Article I, section 8) that would be paid by everyone residing in the country as they consumed, and would automatically render savings and capital appreciation free of tax.
History, one may presume to say, affords no example of any nation, country or people long free, who did not take some care of themselves; and endeavour to guard and secure their own liberties. Power is of a grasping, encroaching nature, in all beings, except in him, to whom it emphatically “belongeth”; and who is the only King that, in a religious or moral sense, “can do no wrong.”
Power aims at extending itself, and operating according to mere will, where-ever it meets with no ballance, check, controul or opposition of any kind. For which reason it will always be necessary, as was said before, for those who would preserve and perpetuate their liberties, to guard them with a wakeful attention; and in all righteous, just and prudent ways, to oppose the first encroachments on them. “Obsta principiis.”
After a while it will be too late.
For in the states and kingdoms of this world, it happens as it does in the field or church, according to the well-known parable, to this purpose; That while men sleep, then the enemy cometh and soweth tares, which cannot be rooted out again till the end of the world, without rooting out the wheat with them.
— Jonathan Mayhew, “The Snare Broken. A Thanksgiving Discourse Preached at the Desire of the West Church in Boston, N. E. Friday May 23, 1766. Occasioned by the Repeal of the Stamp-Act.” In Political Sermons of the American Founding Era 1730-1805, (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1990), p. 258
Paglia. We both lived, as children, in the same town. Not at the same time, but very nearly. My dad taught in the same school where her dad taught.
She mentions it in a Salon article [Update: link doesn’t work any more …]
Just so you know how unlikely a coincidence this is, the town numbered about 3000 when I was a kid.
Something else I have to wonder. Take a bright, observant, verbal post-WWII young girl with aspirations to be a writer and plunk her down in that setting and maybe some of what happens next is a bit inevitable. I mean, the passage where she mentions Oxford. This is exactly the kind of thing that I experienced as a kid, and I completely “get” how it shaped Paglia’s understanding of gender and feminism. I was shaped by the same sort of experiences.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was another version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
I could Bideniarize that anecdote, use it in my own life story, and it wouldn’t even be a stretch.
Brilliant article, incidentally, a highly recommended read regardless of whether your initial impressions of Palin are from the right- or the left-hand side of the Proverbial Spectrum. Not that you’d expect less from Paglia. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my homey ;-)
Why, our government, of course! Because forbidding meat packagers from testing for mad cow and saying “hell yeah!” to irradiating our food isn’t mischief enough!
Be sure to tell them how happy you are that they keep The Peoples’ best interests foremost in their pure little hearts. Here’s your chance:
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, announced that EPW will have hearings on the disposal of sewage sludge on agricultural and other land. These hearings will be held on September 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C.
The September 11 hearing on sludge is currently scheduled for 10:30 AM.
The hearings are usually live streamed on the web. Check the EPW website the day of the hearing. Confirmation of the day and time are usually posted a few days beforehand on the EPW website.
That info comes courtesy of Sludge News. Because not everyone agrees it’s a good idea to eat our own waste. You go, Sludge News.
The Agriculture Department is within bounds to bar meatpackers from testing slaughter cattle for mad cow disease, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel said in a 2-1 ruling on Friday.
Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC, a small Arkansas packer, filed suit on March 23, 2006, to gain access to mad-cow test kits. It said it wanted to test every animal at its plant to assure foreign buyers that the meat was safe to eat . . .
In a 25-page ruling, Appellate Judges Karen Henderson and Judith Rogers said USDA has authority under the 1913 Virus-Serum-Toxin Act to prevent sale of mad-cow test kits to meatpackers. USDA interprets the law to control products for “prevention, diagnosis, management or care of diseases of animals.”
David Sentelle, chief judge of the District of Columbia appeals circuit, dissented from the decision. He said USDA “exceeds the bounds of reasonableness” for a law enacted to prevent the sale of ineffective animal medicine.
Because, you know, if any ol’ meatpacker had the capability to test for mad cow, it might, um. Mess things up. They might — horrors! — use the results to “market” their product as mad cow-tested.
USDA . . . says the tests should not be used as a marketing tool and the cattle that comprise the bulk of the meat supply are too young to be tested reliably.
And we can’t have that. The USDA has to be in CONTROL.
USDA allows the mad-cow test kits to be sold only to laboratories that it approves.
This is where our tax dollars go. This is how a federal agency established to serve this country’s interest is spending our freaking money. To protect ITSELF and its hold on power and the status quo IT has established.
Rather like the Food and Drug Administration, which thinks we should be irrradiating spinach to kill E. coli. Who cares that we’re adding one more item to our lengthening list of biologically altered foodstuffs, as meanwhile we’re already dropping dead from the crap we eat? Who cares if irradiation destroys folate and Vitamin A and who knows what other phytonutrients and might have other, poorly-understood effects on our food?
I know I need to blog about this, but I’ve been too stupified to try.
Yet it needs to be said, by as many people and in as many places as possible. So here goes.
First. Fourteen million dollars of Fast Ferry money is missing. That’s $14 million of New York State taxpayer money unaccounted for, and if you think anyone at any level of our government is going to chase it down and get it back to us, you’re smoking something.
[State Assemblyman] Joseph Errigo, R-Conesus, Livingston County, said he does not necessarily fault [state Comptroller Alan] Hevesi or [Attorney General/now governor-elect Eliot] Spitzer for not documenting the fate of the state aid, though he is “disappointed with that aspect of it.”
As for the agencies that provided the money, Errigo said, “The state lost out on $14 million, and you’d think they’d be interested in recouping all or part of that money.
“My conclusion is that they’re, I guess, embarrassed, and they don’t want this investigation to go further.”
(The article is thorough and documents all kinds of intriguing shenanigans. Enjoy it now, as the Democrat & Chronicle has a tendency to throw things behind their firewall & charge for them after awhile.)
(And for further context bear in mind that Hevesi, newly re-elected to his post in a landslide, exudes a strong smell himself & it ain’t roses. The public has spoken, all right.)
Okay. So that gives you a taste of how carefully our politicians watch our money.
Ready?
Now Rochester’s mayor wants to spend a quarter of a million on an option on Midtown Plaza. That’s an option to buy. If the city decides it doesn’t want the plaza after all, the money is gone for good.
“So?” you say. “Maybe the city will decide it wants to buy?”
You’re not from from around here, are you. Midtown Plaza is a mall in downtown Rochester. Well, it was a mall. Now it’s a hunk of deserted retail and office space.
Nobody wants it, because nobody can figure out how to make money from it.
Oh whoa, wait, I forget! The city can figure out how to make money from it!!! Of course!!!
Really, I am so disgusted I could spit.
It’s like they’re deliberately trying to accumulate worthless overpriced junk. The “fast ferry,” which still sits in dry dock because nobody else is a big enough sucker to buy it. Renaissance Square, the performing arts center cum bus station that nobody wants and for which we’ll be paying some undisclosed amount to keep solvent until it’s knocked down for a parking lot or something some day. And now Midtown.
If it wasn’t my money they’re wasting I’d find this hilarious.
UPDATE: Welcome, 2Blowhards readers, and thanks Michael for the link :-)
Randy Barnett, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown, 
