A concert from the beginning of the decade to mark the end of it-- Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians (written between 1974 and 1976) performed by Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion in a free concert at Chicago's Millennium Park, August 22, 2011:
Just another summer night at the park in the Second City.
If 61 minutes of Reich isn't quite enough for you (as it wasn't for Chicago), here is the other piece performed that night, Double Sextet which Eighth Blackbird commissioned from Steve Reich for the occasion:
Bolivia has been among the poorest countries in South America for generations. In 2006, Juan Evo Morales Ayma, an Aymara by heritage, became the first indigenous President of Bolivia. A socialist, he was elected to 4 terms-- 2 more than the constitution of Bolivia allows, but his socialist policies were successful and popular with his constituency. Bolivia happens to sit on the largest reserves of Lithium in the world, a piece of minor trivia that has become of critical importance with the advent of electric cars. Morales had promoted the development of lithium as a source of wealth for Bolivians-- potentially as a material to be used primarily by Bolivian companies in the manufacture of batteries for export-- and had recently canceled a high profile deal with a German company that was intending to mine and export the metal as a raw material at a lower cost, of greater benefit to non-Bolivian capitalists.
Morales resigned and fled the country to Mexico on November 11 of this year under extreme pressure from the military. Morales' family was threatened and wound up fleeing to Argentina before his house was ransacked and burned. Within hours of his departure, Sen. Jeanine Añez, a somewhat obscure politician from a small right wing party representing the interests of wealthy Bolivians of European stock and their foreign allies declared herself president. These details are not coincidental.
I urge everyone to watch this very instructive interview of Morales conducted by the Intercept's Glenn Greenwald in Mexico City. Its 50 minutes contain a great many truths about our contemporary situation-- particularly the reach and current interests of the United States and its ruling class-- that call for urgent reflection (with an eye to subsequent action).
Merry Bezosmas everybody! Welcome to unspeakable (as heck). I know you have questions. I will answer them.
Q: Why "unspeakable (as heck)"?
A: Because "unspeakable" was taken.
Q: Why "(as heck)"?
A: Because I was raised to not swear in titles. Although I would still one day love to write my great American anti-corporate novel: The Fucking Genius.
Q: Why "()"?
A: What is this, the third degree?
Q: Why doesn't everyone know about unspeakable (as heck)?
A: Some are not as well read as yourself. Until they are, I keep the place a bit of a secret, which seems to favor the prolificacy of my writing. I don't know how eager I'd be to continue putting pieces of myself out there if I thought other eyes might be on it, reading it, judging. I sometimes contemplate the dissonance between the drive to publish pieces at a regular monthly rate that is greater than 0 versus the preference to not be read and it occurs to me that harmony could be restored by not publishing anything at all. You might think I'd at least publicize to family, friends and acquaintances, but for one reason or another I never have. I've only told 2 people in my life that I have a blog that I post to (once because it came up in casual conversation and the other time just to plant a seed of knowledge about it in the mind of someone other than myself) but they did not ask where they could find it and I did not volunteer the information. The failure to remember to apprise people of the existence of the place has turned into a determination to keep it under wraps for now. Originally, I kept it secret as an experiment in how public a non-publicized blog actually is. I used to wonder about the likelihood of anyone asking me if a blog they came across by chance was mine before I told them I was blogging. After several years of accumulating page views, I can now safely say that at the rate it is actually stumbled upon based on blogger statistics, it might become a household name by 2582. On the other hand, life being a series of uncertain events, there may yet be a peculiar day in my lifetime when someone by sheer luck comes across a post of mine, recognizes me by details I impart in it and reaches out for confirmation.
Q: I found you as the result of a google search. How do you manage to get high enough ranking to be noticed?
A: I wish I knew. In terms of rankings I always aim for my posts to be Number 1 but as readers will attest, it’s a pretty sure thing that they’ll be Number 2.
Q: How much do you get paid to do this?
A: I get out of it what I put into it. No money changes hands.
Q: You have several original posts each month, month after month going back a number of years on your site. Are you aware that Google admin has been known to completely remove blogger sites without warning-- that your work could vanish in an instant at the will and whim of an admin?
A: It is an unfortunate fact, easy to forget, that my content once published is no longer mine but the property of Google, an obscenely large and vastly powerful operation that is in the sole business of growing itself without limit, whose interest in the fruits of my free labor in the creation of content of substantial quality and personal value to me, is -- to say fickle is to be generous. No one who is not an owner in our type of society, works, creates, lives except at the will of the owners. I think this is wrong but this is the situation we find ourselves in in 2019 when we post on Blogger. I have found moments approaching fulfillment creating my blog, for reasons that are as mysterious to me as they must be to you (and would be to Google as well if the question were pondered by their algorithms). Creating my blog is both the bane of my existence, and my existence. It is a big contentious world out there and I know it is partially populated with people who reflexively respond to questionings of conventional thinking and morality or to satirical, impassioned, fringe, experimental or alternative points of view with offense who will now and then complain to Google about them in a desire to destroy them, and that the Google admins responding to complaints do not get paid to treat the creative expression of blogspot content creators with care but rather, solely to promote the interests (in limitless growth) of Google, which jibe with their bloggers' interests only coincidentally if ever. Where they are judged to clash or if they are not judged to be worth bothering to judge, Google wins. Those are the terms. There is an appeals process that I understand sometimes works in the blogger's favor. It is entirely possible that in acquiring Blogspot in 2003, Google aspired to live up to a responsibility to preserve the online record of the creativity of those humans who provide content for it. It's possible that a spirit of profound responsibility to protect and preserve the space of public expression that a blog hosting service perhaps truly ought to be yet thrives within the bosoms of Google and the Blogspot admins who maintain the site. But I'm not so naïve as to think it will be that way tomorrow. I've lived far too long to expect to be treated with care if I one day find my writings at unspeakable (as heck) in a "disappeared" situation, but for me and for my fellow creators of content for Google, I deeply hope for care from Admins (or Cosmic Void help us, from the algorithm that is surely being written to replace them) if I need it from them. In the meantime, I back it up.
Q: Who edits your posts?
A: I know, right?
Q: Why did the post I read 2 years ago change without any indication? Do you have no journalistic integrity?
A: Sometimes, I'm wrong or grammatically incorrect, or prone to perpetrate a mixed metaphor, a solecism or a malapropism or two. Sometimes when I discover an error, I correct myself after looking at it long enough. This is not the New York Times or Wikipedia. I don't think people should come here looking for truth, but I'd like them to find it.
I am on a personal mission to make Jeff Bezos a pauper by withholding my patronage from his businesses. It won't happen overnight but I'm in it for the long haul. My wife shares my opinion of the man who may be not be the only asshole billionaire but is certainly at the extremities-- but she can compartmentalize her feelings about him from the act of ordering batteries for a car fob from Amazon when you can't find them anywhere nearby or going to say Whole Foods when the usual place doesn't have currants. It's a mixed marriage but love knows no bounds.
For her, I was at the local WF on the currant mission recently. We had split up. I was hunting for the currants while she was going to grab another item she couldn't get at the usual store. Suddenly, I became aware of something heavenly happening on the sound system. It was a chorus of voices-- I couldn't tell if they were women or children -- singing a refrain of "Oh"'s that soared up the scale only to be followed by a line coming back down in an immediately captivating melody. After hearing the refrain a few more times, it dawned on me that my need to know the name of the song was urgent. This being Whole Foods, and the unfamiliar music having a confidence and a vaguely (to my ears) classical vibe about it, I assumed it was an entertainment for wealthy folks that I was surreptitiously overhearing by being in the store. I retrieved my iPhone* and set my SoundHound app on the job, and after a momentary grinding it came back with Choice Notes by Alex Winston. Nothing about this new information dissuaded me from my initial impression that this was rich people's music. Alex Winston? Never heard of him. I had visions of some continental European guy in a studio in Paris directing a chorus of French school children in a musical confection for the aristocracy. My glee at having the information felt a little bit dirty. When I got home, I snuck an opportunity to look into the matter and was relieved to be somewhat disabused about my prejudices right off the bat, first of all about Alex Winston himself. She's American:
The setting of the video is Detroit (Winston is from the suburbs) and specifically an area reclaimed by The Heidelberg Project of Detroit artist and activist Tyree Guyton and his band of young artists from the city. I've lived in those environs of Detroit, and I know what a Michigan autumn does to you.
Aside from its great charm, two things struck me about the video. First, its age. How did such a thing exist for so long without once entering my consciousness? Second, and even more striking is the high volume of comments posted by fans whose experience echoed mine: they heard the song in one or another national chain store-- many of them as employees-- went through a period of urgent wonder about it only to either, like me, eventually pull out their music identifying app to track it down or to rediscover it by accident online-- one of my favorite rare pleasures in the world. Another contingent of commenters were Europeans who heard the song on advertisements. Did it exist only for corporate commercial contexts?
It's no mystery how once aware of it, corporate musicologists would be all over it. There's no denying the strong hooks it gets into you by virtue of its alluring sound and structure. Also, as an independently produced piece of music it's competitively priced. But where were the rest of us?
I don't have an answer for this. I also don't really have a point in writing about it other than to take an opportunity to ponder why some music grabs us, how it affects us, and whether there is more to that interaction than delivery of pleasure. In the case of this particular song and me, I detect traces of deep seated nostalgia that the song evokes in me. Musically, I respond to the harmonies and pleasant dissonances, the easy way it straddles moods and modes between minor melancholy and major exuberance, the wall of voices, the texture created by the interplay of the timbres of each instrument. Lyrics are not usually the first thing I notice about a song, and there was no exception here, but on multiple listenings, the matching of phrases to music strikes me as above average. There might be something to my initial impression of the song as a kind of delicacy that was slumming a bit by availing itself to my ears. I stand at the threshold of a song I'm learning to hear, and from this vantage, I somehow see other roads I might have gone down. If the song itself is old when I first hear it, something about the lost time gives the acquaintance an extra poignance. After ten years as a stranger, this song finally grabbed me by the shoulder and made me pay attention.
Plus it's got a good beat.
~~~~~~
* Once Bezos is destroyed, Apple is next.
Late on an August day, I fled as a storm was coming, clouds converging on the wind, down a forest road until I came upon a rocky field. The sun, lowering on the bay, was asserted still on stones and trees and grass, and mostly on the flesh of a white stallion; it seemed to source beneath its mud-caked hide. And mirrored on a dusky pool that trembled in the heat of earth-bound breezes, the sun reared, lean and muscular, as a horse.
And all the wind became a whinny-- now two-- and a night-black mare, as though in tune with the atmosphere, and expectant of the stallion's rush, quaked on the heat-parched ground and slapped her hooves against the pebbled sod. As if spurred by Nature-music, the stallion was transformed into a Thrust-- a wedge against the flesh of mare, who had become All-Terror. He peeled her from the landscape, plunged, nipped her neck. She shunned. Provoked by her escape, he regrouped, lunged.
And lastly, when the mare, conspiring, moored her flanks against the stud's descent, Earth and sky were horses coupled; the storm foretold in a nostril snort.
Miles away, a torrent surely blacked the sea, and made a mixture vexing coughing fish and troubling stupid eyeless clams choking on the squall. Here, horse love was all that railed against my skin; horse lust and the quirk of chance that sent me here and let me in.
I left them there to merge with night: a neigh and a suspended glow. I did not want to go, but it was time. And now, it seems you only see the Havoc once or not at all.
The Bernie Sanders campaign is encouraging supporters to hone the telling of how they came to support his candidacy in a project called "My Bernie Story". The suggested format from the campaign for a Bernie story is to personalize a key component of Bernie's agenda by framing an issue around the supporter's own experience. For instance, I could legitimately be encouraged to discuss the anxiety I have about global warming, and my particular concern about the future for my daughter and for my nieces and nephews, let alone for the entire planet, and relate it specifically to Bernie's plan to attack it aggressively and in the process transform our economy through his proposed implementation of the Green New Deal. I could do this and be done with it, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
Periodically the campaign sends surveys asking supporters to pick their top 3 issues from among a huge laundry list: Climate Change, Medicare For All, Cancelling Student Debt and establishing Free Public College Tuition, Worker's Rights, Wealth Inequality, Getting Money out of Politics, Voting Rights, Civil Rights, Prison Reform, Housing Reform, Women's Rights, LGBTQ rights, Immigration Reform, Getting Billionaires and Corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, and so forth. Bernie has policy positions on each of these that align with my own desires and they are positions that he can back up by a lifetime of activism and public service. While I can sometimes see my way clear to prioritizing the list for purposes of completing the survey, I find myself very resistant to the idea of excluding anything. All of them have been neglected, rejected, or actively undermined in every case by our elected representatives who act not at the behest of their electorate but of their donors. After a lifetime of settling for what technocrats and think tanks and "the serious" among our elites have told me are the limits of possibility, only to be woken up by the 2016 and 2020 campaigns of Bernie Sanders to the reality I knew all along-- that the only thing "serious" about the conventional wisdom of what is possible is that it is seriously full of shit-- I want it all. I don't know how this campaign 2020 thing is going to work out but I do know that no matter what the outcome is, something important has happened for those for whom Bernie Sanders' message has resonated. In my case, it's an awakening from a self-induced coma.
I always want to start my Bernie story with my first presidential election, Carter vs. Reagan 1980. In many ways it was a lot like Clinton vs. Trump 2016, but there was no Bernie. Governor Jerry Brown of California who challenged President Carter in the primary was outside the mold, but he didn't even support universal health care. As a pre-voter, I had developed a rabid distrust of Jimmy Carter in his first term, but I vainly cast my first presidential vote for him as a way of avoiding a victory for his far worse challenger, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, a jolly, wealthy Hollywood has-been, company spokesman and ex-governor was used very successfully as an advertisement promoting wealth, power and capitalism the benefits of which would-- if left unfettered to grow as only a free market would lead them to, the theory went-- "trickle down" to the rest of us. Carter had merely promised more of the same. Reagan promised Morning in America, and to Make America Great Again. His team pioneered the injection of irrelevant, divisive cultural issues into politics to corral the votes of a "moral majority." Tired of recession and stagflation and wage freezes and oil crises and enamored with the sunny airhead they remembered from B Movies and TV re-runs who spoke only in corny sound bites, the people bought in. In return, Reagan's administration architected the regressive, dysfunctional top down order that has dominated our culture ever since, making any hope of social, economic or environmental progress a fading memory while exacerbating the conditions that threaten our common existence and demand progressive responses. They ravaged social programs by reducing taxes--the shared cost to each of us for the shared services we get in return-- particularly at the top, from what had been among the highest rates in the developed world (which had largely fueled the social programs of the 30's through the 60's-- the rates have continued to dip in intervening years from a high of 70% at the start of Reagan's term to what are now effectively less than 30%). Within his first term he had destroyed the air traffic controller's union ringing the death knell for labor across the country, and cut the budgets of Medicaid, food stamps, public education and the EPA all while bloating the budget of the military.
In the presidential primaries of 1984 and 1988, I was thrilled to support the campaigns of Jesse Jackson (an acknowledged inspiration for Bernie Sanders), but I had to vote for Mondale (who got trounced by Reagan for his second term) and Dukakis (who Bush the elder defeated) respectively in the general elections. The first president my vote ever helped to elect was Bill Clinton in 1992, who built a career on the proposition that Democrats, who had lost all but one of the prior 6 presidential elections, could regain their mojo by offering a light version of Reaganism-- not Republican Reaganism or Democratic Socialism but a Third Way. The genius of this approach was that coming from a "liberal", Clinton could do what Reagan had wanted to but never could by putting an end to social programs such as welfare, making the notion of trimming social security palatable to the technocratic elite, and passing the "3 strikes and you're out" crime bill that has devastated poor communities for 30 years. And still get the votes of the Democratic base.
By Clinton's second term, I had renounced my democratic party ties and registered as an Independent, though I continued to vote mostly for Democrats (making an exception for Ralph Nader in 2000) mostly to avoid the always worse alternative. But over time, I stopped paying close attention to politics as a way of improving my own mental health. The entire culture had drunk the Kool Aid. There was no fighting it.
If my stupor was typical no wonder the 1% won. People who had more to begin with and kept getting more got very good at convincing the rest of us who started with less and were getting less and less that it had to be this way. So we let them take away our public institutions, taking their word for it that what was missing was the profit motive. Labor was fractured while management and ownership became consolidated. Instead of establishing careers, we became competitors in a job market. As the owners became more and more corrupt and conspiratorial in their business and professional practices, the employee's role in many companies has become something akin to abetting. Pensions were replaced with 401Ks through which financiers and Wall Street profited regardless of the risk to us. Credit boomed as it became the only way anybody could afford anything. We handed them our airports, our police forces, our schools, our prisons. Whatever they could get their hands on. We've seen the result. After the financial crash of 2008, hope came in the election of Barack Obama, but it was crushed before he even entered the White House by his appointment to his cabinet of representatives of the deregulators and Wall Street executives who created the climate in which the catastrophe occurred, signaling that what mattered was not the people who had felt most of the brunt of the crisis whose hope had elected him but the 1% by whose grace he was permitted to serve, just as if those who had voted him in had never won at all. The success of Trump's right wing populism following Obama's 2 terms was symptomatic of a global dysfunction imposed from the top tiniest percent that tells us that the only choice that remains to us is between fascist capitalism represented by Trump and his kind and Third Way capitalism represented by the Democrats and their neoliberal counterpart around the world.
For 40 years, down has been up, low has been high, wrong has been right.
Republicans, the Alphas of the current order, have been honest about their part in the inversion of what our experience tells us about American reality. At the same time they have been marshaling their vast stores of wealth in strategic purchasing of the chains that bind the rest of us-- state legislatures, judiciaries, the executive branch. Republicans' motives are pure at least, which is how their insane politics win at all. Democrats have been dishonest about their complicity. The Democratic leadership, a decidedly Beta class, have compromised the purported left agenda of their party in an effort to be regarded as "serious" by the moneyed establishment while selling out their traditional base, the poor, the working class, women. The upshot is that the 1% has gotten wealthier and wealthier while real incomes for everyone else have gotten smaller and smaller. And the planet continues to be squeezed to death for profit.
Capitalism is a Pathological Fatal Illness from which we must be cured.
And in 2016, out of the blue, Bernie Sanders came along to remind us that it does not have to be this way. Republicans need workers to win and they appeal to them with cultural issues; Democrats need workers to win and they appeal to them with party loyalty. But the only candidate that workers need to win is Bernie Sanders.
For the past 40 or 50 years the message of the 1% has been: Not you. Us! Who's in charge?, they ask rhetorically. Not you. Us! Who decides where attention is paid? Not you. Us! Who's got this? Not you! Us! And we have taken it. We’ve taken what they’ve given us which is less and less. While life has cheapened and become harder for us, they’ve taken free rein to exploit the world we all live in for profit, without giving back (unless you count the dribs and drabs they bestow as they see fit in large enough amounts to call themselves philanthropists, never mind how meagerly they address the issues facing us).
And this is the message of most of the candidates running with their plans and their platforms and their debate talking points that they leave it to us to opt out of. You don't need to worry about how things will get fixed. Not you. Us.
We've got news for them. We don’t want your stinking plans. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who says, “Not me. Us!” All. Of. Us. And this is how I came to awaken from my 30 year self-induced coma and support Bernie Sanders and now I urge you, my brothers and sisters, to ask yourself, "Which side am I on?" and do the same. Time is wasting. At least our primary votes don't need to be wasted as well. Please join the revolution.
Every few months or so, I find myself randomly experiencing a revelation about myself. This has been going on for years. I'm tempted to say it's periodic but the periods are irregular. What it seems to be is serial-- one revelation at a time that drifts to my consciousness about myself and that gets tested and proven as I mull it over in my mind and observe myself in light of my new self-knowledge. Each revelation becomes a theme of the season until it gets absorbed into the makeup of my self-regard. In this way, I come to "know myself" more deeply, bit by bit, step by step, insight by insight.
You might think that after years and years of deep insightful illuminations into my psyche I would be a fortress of self-actualized self-knowledge. The funny thing is, more often than not these revelations of mine tend to have a way of knocking me down a peg or two. The revelations can be profound-- The expectations you have been setting for yourself all your life are unrealistic!-- or they can be trivial -- You shave all wrong! But they do all seem to point to failings and shortcomings that even I was unaware of in myself. Some of the revelations barely leave a mark -- You're a space cadet!You have absolutely no athletic talent!-- whereas others sting for weeks -- You're a slob! That last one hurt for a while because I had always assumed I had above average hygiene and taste. I realized in retrospect that the few weeks when I was on the cutting edge of fashion back in the 1980's were the result of my wife's little experiment in jazzing me up. I played along for a while-- wearing the outfits she had carefully selected for me and even letting one of her hairstyling friends experiment on my head with what are in retrospect hilariously fashion-victim results. When I drifted back to my natural slovenly state over time, my wife gave up on me, but my opinion of myself as a man of style and taste did not-- until decades later when I actually stopped and regarded myself in a men's room mirror at work and it hit me that the zhlubby stranger looking back at me was me.
This is all prelude to my purpose in writing today which is to share my latest revelation. You are eager to help yet you are singularly bad at helping! To be honest, in retrospect it's less than startling news. I dread being asked directions because while inside my head I know exactly where I am and how to get wherever I want to go, when I give directions, I never fail -- and I mean never-- to realize as my hapless victims have wandered away and are already well on their way along the path of chaos I have sent them, the essential detail I have gotten entirely backward or failed to impart that will steer them wrong in a way that will be difficult for them to recover from. This is a problem in a town that is a major tourist destination at all times of the year.
The revelation really has as much to do with the corollary to being bad at helping which is being eager to help. It's a reflex in me. I detect distress in someone, say a woman my mother's age looking quizzically at a metro turnstile from the outside, and I leap to their aid, for instance, proffering a tutorial on the mechanics of the contraption before them. Invariably an older person at the metro, particularly a person of apparently modest means has no need of a tutorial on the metro system. In fact, my injecting myself into the situation with "help" has complicated the achievement of the woman's modest goals as she has to pause from whatever momentary setback raised a cloud of confusion on her elderly mien the moment my consciousness chose to settle upon it in a state of alertness that was begging to see calamity where there was only mild consternation, to explain why my help is not needed. Most people being offered help from a kind, generous stranger will take pains to return the unsolicited kindness with politeness and an investment of themselves in their engagement with the helper. The upshot is that help being bestowed where it is not needed is a burden and a hindrance. Directed at an older person, it's the poor cousin of the con man's game: taking advantage of an older person's gentility and trust to completely waste their time. So the over-eagerness to help is itself a problem.
But the problem is compounded and protracted when help is needed and the help being given is not good. I've dropped groceries I was helping a stranger carry from a car to their stoop. I nearly killed a very old man who was wondering if he should risk taking a short-cut off of a high ledge by holding out my hand to help him down (someone else was fortunately there to guide him to safety). I once saw a ragged looking person sitting on the hot summer sidewalk, cup in hand as I was hurrying to get to an appointment. They didn't have to ask even once-- one look at them and my hand went reflexively to my pocket where it gathered my loose change (which I had an abundance of because it was in the days when I was not yet turned onto the notion of using a card for every transaction as a way of avoiding the accumulation of coins in the pocket). I released it all into the cup as I rushed past, too late to see what was already in it, until I heard the plop of solids hitting a liquid surface and felt a splash of ice water on my knuckles. The person was just as stunned as I was, which was too stunned to say anything. We were both shaking our heads as I continued on my way. So if you're that person reading this all these years later, please let me apologize.
These are typical examples of what happens when I am moved to "help" strangers-- not outliers. I don't have this issue with my work and my work product helps people, but it is planned, the plan is vetted, it is well resourced, it is tested, and I am given feedback and every opportunity to improve my work so that those who requested the help achieve maximum satisfaction. I am there to help and my help is actually helpful.
Is the crucial difference that my participation is not voluntary? Because I'd almost rather be doing anything else.
I have to wonder, how can there be a god in a world where a person so singularly terrible at helping is endowed with a zealousness to assist? I can't help but blame it on our current political and economic system. Hear me out: if our system were not designed to keep people poor and alienated from each othert, if jobs at a living wage were guaranteed, if housing were treated as a universal right, there would not be raggedy people sitting on sidewalks in need. If global warming were mitigated, such persons who remained on the street would not need to take time from begging to hydrate themselves. There would be no turnstiles hindering elderly subway riders, because public transportation would be free to all at best and certainly to the elderly at least. Grocery bags would still break at my touch, and I would need to learn to resist trying to help old people off of steep ledges, but perhaps thanks to mental health provisions under Medicare for All I could get the help I needed to make that possible.
Written circa 1630 by Gregorio Allegri during Pope Urban VIII's reign, the Miserere mei, Deus (Have Mercy upon me, God) was based on Psalm 51 (Psalm 50 in the Greek Septuagint/ Latin Vulgate numbering) to be performed as part of the Tenebrae service for Easter Week in the Sistine Chapel, but we at unspeakable (as heck) believe in spreading the Mercy around the calendar.
Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.
Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.
Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.
Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele.
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.
Ne proiicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.
Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.
Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur.
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam.
Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis.
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.
Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Ierusalem.
Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.
Translation from the Book of Common Prayer (1662)
Have mercy upon me, O God, after Thy great goodness
According to the multitude of Thy mercies do away mine offences.
Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness: and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my faults: and my sin is ever before me.
Against Thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that Thou mightest be justified in Thy saying, and clear when Thou art judged.
Behold, I was shapen in wickedness: and in sin hath my mother conceived me.
But lo, Thou requirest truth in the inward parts: and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly.
Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness: that the bones which Thou hast broken may rejoice.
Turn Thy face from my sins: and put out all my misdeeds.
Make me a clean heart, O God: and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from Thy presence: and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
O give me the comfort of Thy help again: and stablish me with Thy free Spirit.
Then shall I teach Thy ways unto the wicked: and sinners shall be converted unto Thee.
Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, Thou that art the God of my health: and my tongue shall sing of Thy righteousness.
Thou shalt open my lips, O Lord: and my mouth shall shew [show] Thy praise.
For Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it Thee: but Thou delightest not in burnt-offerings.
The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou not despise.
O be favourable and gracious unto Sion: build Thou the walls of Jerusalem.
Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of righteousness, with the burnt-offerings and oblations: then shall they offer young bullocks upon Thine altar.
~~~~~~~~~
Bonus Beauty - Northern Lights (2012) by Ola Gjeilo, performed by Sjaella:
I frequently find myself driving through an industrial part of the world on my way to places-- a landscape of bus and truck depots, a self storage facility or two, a vintage bottling plant, a cobbled together complex of ancient service stations, car washes and body shops that are now something like an automotive graveyard, a stockyard for aggregate with a side interest in pallets, a storage dome for road salt nestled alongside a reedy marsh. Truthfully, I place myself in this setting because it's magical, especially when the shortening of days and the lengthening of shadows goes into overdrive and the temperature teeters between almost too hot in the sun and frickin cold in the shadows of highway overpasses-- but the other seasons have their own charming effects on the scene. The natural terrain of the setting, the leafy banks of a tributary that abides in spite of its exploitation for commercial purposes has an insistent beauty that bestows a patina of timeless elegance even on the aging utilitarian structures in its midst.
At one point, the service road I take feeds a State Route which has heavy traffic particularly at the crepuscular parts of the day, and for this reason there are billboards to ignore along the way. My favorite part of the route is a cloverleaf exit ramp from the state highway that leads down to another state route from which I access a byway that skirts the river, but lately this highlight of the route is marred by a billboard sitting across from it that its funders would be delighted to know is hard for me to ignore. It will sound innocuous enough: on a plain white background a gigantic black and white portrait of Abraham Lincoln, his name spelled out for those who somehow don't recognize him-- the most familiar image with an abridged version of some of his most familiar words: "A house divided ... cannot stand". Beneath in a white capital font within a red block is the single word "CIVILITY", the subject of a sentence trailed in lower case in smaller black italic font outside the block by the predicate "is in you". At the base, the impresarios of this wisdom: PassItOn.Com.
Something about this plug for Civility enrages me.
When Abraham Lincoln spoke those biblical words in accepting his nomination for the Illinois Senatorial campaign of 1858 he was attempting to project a hope that the Union would survive the cataclysm it was headed for in order to resolve the question of slavery, regardless of the outcome. As much as the Southern slave owning gentry would have preferred it, he was not advocating that abolitionists take a chill pill for the sake of CIVILITY. How much simpler that would have been for the slave owning minority, if not for their slaves!
I had a suspicion about the origin of this bleaching of history on a billboard and it turned out to be true. As it happens, PassItOn.com is the project of one family, the Anschutz family of Denver Colorado, among the largest landowning families in the country with over 10 million acres in Colorado alone. It's a family whose wealth originated generations ago in banking and oil and whose interests have expanded to rail, agriculture, sports, wholesome entertainment (a.k.a. pablum) and communication. while they continue to pursue the exploitation of the planet for fossil fuel reserves. The current patriarch Philip Anschutz's telecommunications-slash-financial company Qwest ended in 2002 with the exposure of Enron like accounting practices used to inflate its worth with the bursting of the internet bubble at the turn of the millennium. The company failed but Anschutz made off very well, selling his interests while the getting was good and before buyers and shareholders could catch wind of it. Anschutz's business practices earned him the title of America's "greediest executive" from that bastion of politically radical journalism Fortune magazine in 2002. From his Wikipedia entry:
In May 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer reached a settlement with Anschutz after filing a civil complaint accusing Anschutz of accepting IPO shares from Salomon Smith Barney in exchange for Qwest's investment banking business. Anschutz denied any wrongdoing but volunteered to donate a total of $4.4 million to settle the case as long as he selected the recipient organizations in advance.
To give an appearance of atonement for their aggressive pursuit of business, The Anschutzes avoid taxes and promote their brand of Christian, conservative, pro-business causes through the well established vehicle of a Family Foundation, which gives (as is their right and privilege thanks to accommodating tax codes and statutes) to organizations and politicians such as James Dobson's Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Discovery Institute that are anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, anti-public education (the public education siphoning, unaccountable, corporate boondoggle and segregation loophole of charter schools is a pet project of theirs), and as could be predicted based on their fossil fuel connections, engaged in the promotion of climate change denial. When publicity of their support of reactionary causes and legislation threatens their reputation and their profits, they have been known to throw a million now and then at say the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
An article at Inside Philanthropy on their activities gives an indication of the family's approach to social issues:
Anschutz has said that "food banks, charter schools, and homeless shelters are a good way to help people, but in the long run, people grounded in solid values will be better situated to prosper on their own." By "values," Anschutz often means an emphasis on faith and family, and he's a big backer of religious work. But his foundation also promotes such values as empathy and respect for others.
Take it from a born wealthy, tax shirking, planet destroying greediest man: wealth inequality could be eliminated if the less fortunate had empathy and respect for other people. Contrast The Anschutz Foundation's facile morality with this from Bernie Sanders' recent rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Queens:
I want you all to take a look around and find someone you don’t know, maybe somebody who doesn’t look kind of like you, who might be of a different religion, maybe who come from a different country… My question now to you, is are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself? Are you willing to stand together and fight for those people who are struggling economically in this country? Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt, even if you are not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has health care as a human right, even if you have good health care? Are you willing to fight for frightened immigrant neighbors, even if you are native born? Are you willing to fight for a future for generations of people who have not yet even been born, but are entitled to live on a planet that is healthy and habitable?
This is a challenge to everyone with the responsibility of casting a vote in the upcoming primary season. And it couldn't provide a more stark contrast to the cheap talk of Anschutz's billboards. For his vision of a more just, inclusive America, Sanders gets called a crabby old loudmouth. For his roadside eyesore vapidity, Anschutz gets to shirk paying taxes and call himself a Philanthropist.
Let us be perfectly clear, Phillip Anschutz's agenda is not Civility. Civility is a lecture at you, it's not a social movement meant to inspire and involve you. Anschutz's lecture at you is in front of your face (there are no billboards in his neighborhood); his true agenda-- welfare for the rich, freedom to use his obscenely outsize slice of the pie to rape the earth for profit, control of the global political agenda to suit his narrow and frankly provincial worldview without contributing a dime of his wealth to the sustaining of a public good-- is hidden from view.
If Philip Anschutz wins, the planet loses, women lose, free creative expression loses, we lose. Philip Anschutz wins. If we win, Anschutz will be forced to live in a world where health care is a universal right, where the planet starts to be healed by the end of fossil fuel consumption and the mitigation of carbon emissions and the development of an economy based on renewable energy and resources. Where the failed intrusion of private interests in public education is ended, public schools are funded equitably and no longer based on zip code, and a college education is free for all.
If we win, Philip Anschutz still wins, but LGBTQ people win, women win, immigrants win, education wins, labor wins, the planet doesn't lose, and Philip Anschutz doesn't lose anything but capital that only a greedy greedy man would miss. It's a win-win situation, but unlike the Win-Win wind that capitalists and neoliberals insist that corporate charity is all about, the winning in Bernie Sanders' model of society is actually real for everybody.
Start from a position of assumed advantage. Underestimate your adversary. Don't learn anything. Don't admit you don't know anything. Get pumped up on Aderall and get an underling to jot down your stream of consciousness ravings. Don't say what you mean. Don't mean what you say. Don't say or mean anything. Don't put any thought into how you communicate with people. Assume they can read your mind. Attitude is something else-- give plenty of that. Rest assured your inability to be communicated with and to be bargained with will come across loud and clear. Snort more crushed Aderall. Make credible threats that your unstable personality lend an air of plausibility to. Make sure that you are negotiating over things that deeply matter to people and be sure that you do not budge an inch in giving them what they want. It does not matter what your objective is-- in fact, don't have an objective. Just don't cooperate with anyone anytime. Regardless of the outcome, you will surely win.
According to the legend, sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Lee Hawkins and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson of New Orleans, had already had a #1 International hit as the Dixie Cups with Chapel of Love in 1964 and were between sessions in a New York recording studio when they began fooling around, tapping a rhythm on ash trays and Coke bottles with drumsticks and singing a song their Grandmother had taught them about a clash between rival Mardi Gras krewes. Their producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were recording the improv and immediately recognized a hit. They added minor instrumentation and released it in the spring of 1965 as Iko Iko. Their intuitions about its potential were right - it charted at #20 on the Billboard list. Knowing only their grandmother's version, the songwriting credit went to the Dixie Cups.
As one theory goes, unknown to the Dixie Cups, Grandma may have been augmenting a memory of this version released (to greater obscurity than the Dixie Cups recording) by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford and his Cane Cutters in 1953:
A lawsuit filed by Crawford against the Dixie Cups' label was settled with Crawford relinquishing any credit for the song in exchange for 25% of future performances. Crawford reportedly had this to say about it: "I don't even know if I really am getting my just dues. I just figure 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing."
Crawford was first with a recording, but the words suggest a more ancient origin of the song:
My grandma and your grand-ma were sit-tin' by the fire
My grandma told your grand-ma "I'm gon-na set your flag on fire"
Talk-in' 'bout, hey now hey now I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
Look at my king all dressed in red I-ko, I-ko, un-day
I bet-cha five dol-lars he'll kill you dead, jock-a-mo fee na-né
Talk-in' 'bout, hey now hey now I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
My flag boy and your flag boy were sit-tin' by the fire
My flag boy told your flag boy "I'm gon-na set your flag on fire"
Talk-in' 'bout, hey now hey now I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
See that guy all dressed in green I-ko, I-ko, un-day
He's not a man, he's a lov-in' ma-chine jock-a mo fee na-né
Talk-in' 'bout, hey now hey now I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
Talk-in' 'bout, hey now hey now I-ko, I-ko, un-day
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né, jock-a-mo fee na-né
Theories of the song's provenance were explored by Drew Hinshaw in an article for Offbeat magazine from 2009. According to Hinshaw's account:
I was sitting by the shore in Ghana, watching an extravagant parade, when I heard a chant that rung my eardrums like a bell. “Iko, Iko!” To which the nation’s Ewe speakers would say “aayé!” ... It belongs to no particular language, Iko—and the Ashanti, Fante, Ewe spell it “ayekoo”—but that swallowed ‘I’ and soft, clucking ‘ko’ sound uncannily the same. “It means well done or congratulations,” says Dr. Evershed Amuzu, a social linguistics lecturer at the University of Ghana, who proceeds to pull a phenomenal stunt. Having professed no prior knowledge of the song, he takes hold of the lyrics sheet and sings the chorus—flubbing the rhythm, but more or less nailing the melody. “It’s definitely West African,” he concludes. “I can tell from the sound of each word what tone comes next.”
Hinshaw floats other theories in his piece, including the intriguing possibility that Jock-A-Mo may be a transliteration of the Haitian place name Jacmel, which if true underlines the strong connection between Haiti and New Orleans cultures.
There's no question that the Dixie Cups and Sugar Boy Crawford are singing versions of the same song. But it's at least an interesting alternative possibility that the Dixie Cups independently and legitimately unearthed the song from memories of their New Orleans upbringing along a completely different path from whatever inspired Crawford to record the tune a dozen years earlier.
If Bernie Sanders were to have to leave the 2020 race, would Elizabeth Warren step up and fill his shoes? Could taking on the mantle of Bernie's agenda salvage the heretofore middling run of Pete Buttigieg whose profile of Bernie Sanders won him an essay contest in high school? Fortunately thanks to the ability his publicly funded congressional insurance affords him to take advantage of good health care, Bernie is not going anywhere soon.
Watch this ad Bernie supporter Matt Orfalea created independently from the Sanders campaign and please read Nathan J. Robinson's piece at Current Affairs on Why Bernie Has to Win. If you sense that Bernie is irreplaceable in this campaign it's because he is. If you only get your news from corporate media then you really need to see this.
Prunus Persica by Otto Wilhelm Thomé (from Wikipedia)
In an interview conducted Wednesday with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of The Hill's daily morning news show Rising on Wednesday, Hawaii Congresswoman and 2020 Democratic hopeful Tulsi Gabbard was unequivocal in her position that "impeachment would be a divisive process and that voters must be the ones to remove President Trump from office." She went on to say that at her rallies she hands out copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights to those in attendance to remind them of what's at stake in the election. Perhaps in the meanwhile since that interview, she has read the part about how "Congress shall have the sole Power of Impeachment" because 2 days later, she dis-unequivocated and now says on reading the transcript of Trump's conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in July and details of the whistleblower complaint released late in the week, "not impeaching the president would set a very dangerous precedent," to whit:
Future presidents, as well as anyone in positions of power in the government, will conclude that they can abuse their position for personal gain, without fear of accountability or consequences.
Also late to the impeachment game were a quintuple of freshman congresswomen (no, not them-- they came ready) who refer to themselves as "badasses" on the basis of their military and intelligence experience prior to their election to congress. I'm not especially persuaded by the military and intelligence credentials-- after too much familiarity with the spectacle of medals or CIA experience being paraded around as a license to conduct mischief (see General Kelly, Oliver North, Alexander Haig, General Petraeus, John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden), I need a lot more to go on than a career choice-- but I know many will be. But the Badasses along with fellow "national security" democratic congresspersons Gil Cisneros and Jason Crow lay out a pretty good case in an op ed to the Washington Post:
The president of the United States may have used his position to pressure a foreign country into investigating a political opponent, and he sought to use U.S. taxpayer dollars as leverage to do it. He allegedly sought to use the very security assistance dollars appropriated by Congress to create stability in the world, to help root out corruption and to protect our national security interests, for his own personal gain. These allegations are stunning, both in the national security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent. We also know that on Sept. 9, the inspector general for the intelligence community notified Congress of a “credible” and “urgent” whistleblower complaint related to national security and potentially involving these allegations. Despite federal law requiring the disclosure of this complaint to Congress, the administration has blocked its release to Congress.
As a citizen who is already on board with the idea that Trump has engaged in a requisite amount of High Crimes and Misdemeanors for impeachment to remain a threat to him (here's a running list), this makes a further convincing case to me for an impeachment inquiry, and it may have tipped the scales for other members of congress, including the Footdragger of the House Nancy Pelosi who until recently had an opinion more in line with Tulsi Gabbard's pre-Friday.
Speaking of Speakers of the House, as revealed in an incredibly satisfying article in Vanity Fair that came out this week, Former Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin who has recently joined the board at Fox News after matriculating out of Congress following the 2018 election is himself moving toward the impeach column.* Said one Fox executive, “Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it,” (emphasis mine. ^_^) Courageous bunch of leaders we have in this country, wouldn't you say? You might call them a bunch of real peaches.
The chaos at Fox undermines a bit the political case that many have made and some continue for now to hold, that Impeachment is not a smart political move for House Democrats since, requiring 67 votes to succeed in the Senate, it will fail in formal proceedings if it moves to the Republican controlled chamber. There is necessarily a political component to the undertaking of any Impeachment, but there is a prudent alternative to "letting the voters decide" versus "rushing through a doomed-to-fail impeachment for the sake of having it done". The option of impeachment is in place to serve as a contingency for removing from office an Executive whose actions have been demonstrated to enrich himself or to harm the country. Popularity with the President's base is nowhere to be accounted for in the duties laid out in the Constitution. Might I suggest taking seriously the responsibility of Congress to conduct the proceedings as thoroughly, judiciously, transparently and free of politics as duty calls for. A poorly conducted inquiry that accidentally "exonerates" the president on a technicality would be disastrous.
~~~~~~~~~~~
* Now that's it's a distinct possibility, Bill Maher in typical crotchety old man fashion has gone the other direction; after months of whining for impeachment during the largely baseless and fruitless Mueller investigation, he's suddenly against it.
If you've been paying attention to the 2020 Democratic Presidential race at all so far, it can't have escaped your notice that something is not right with Joe Biden. He was already bad but in the years since he has left the White House (going by history and not by Biden's delusional accounting) he has apparently declined from mere conventional terribleness to abject Hall of Horrors wretchedness as a candidate. Already this season-- above and beyond betraying in his off-the-cuff remarks a loose idea of where he is at any given moment in the space-time continuum and a tenuous grasp on logic let alone the English language-- he has invited public reflection on his very troubling record with regard to race by reminiscing fondly about cooperating on legislation with segregationists (after opening his campaign with a message condemning Donald Trump's softness on racists); he's expressed a (no joke!) lack of empathy for millenials with regard to the way the outrageous cost of their educations have put them deeply and possibly permanently in debt at the start of their working lives; he has broken a pledge to take no money from fossil fuel executives at least twice; he has had to promise to "do better" in the area of unwelcome touching (while openly mocking the need to). When his mouth opens you'd better believe his handlers tremble in fear of what could come out. In this way he bears a strong resemblance to what he and a large contingent in the media presume will be his foe in the general election, and this could well be what inspires his backers most.
The loose cannon excitement of Donald Trump but filtered through the sensibility of an eager-to-compromise Centrist Neo-liberal democrat? How could he lose? I'll tell you how: because if you like Donald Trump, the weak tea Democratic knockoff is not going to appeal to you in the least, and you can be sure the ones whose abstention from voting for centrist Hillary Clinton in 2016 enabled Trump's electoral victory will find better things to do on election day than vote for Joe Biden.
This invites the pondering of 2 mysteries. First, given his propensity for extreme incoherence on every position of importance and the folksy logorrheic chaos that spews from his loose-dentured maw, why does he continue to remain at the top of the polls? Even given the kid glove treatment that Biden, who is as solid a member of the establishment as there is, gets from the mainstream media, it would take pathological cluelessness to miss that the wires are coming loose. My theory is that if Joe Biden is your candidate, you are not paying attention to the 2020 Democratic Presidential race. The very act of preferring Joe Biden is an advertisement that you do not pay attention. If you can't be moved from the hope that Biden must defeat Trump, taking the ostrich approach to how things are going with your candidate might be the only way for the hope to survive. But will his supporters wake up in time to keep from making a monumental blunder come primary season?
Second, why is Trump's team apparently actively working on sabotaging Biden before the first primary vote has been cast? You would be forgiven for thinking it's because they do not want Biden to be Trump's opponent. But this makes no sense. On the playing field in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump play, Trump is the hands down winner. Trump will chew Sloppy Joe up and spit him out within seconds of facing off against him in a debate. The negative ads write themselves. Defending him against the attacks his behavior will invite will be a chore few will be eager to rise to. No, I don't think they want to prevent Biden from winning the nomination. I think they are convinced Biden will be the nominee and, starting as they are from a very well deserved gigantic deficit in voter support themselves, they aim to start chipping away now at the will to elect he who they assume, right or wrong, will be their opponent in the general election (provided their efforts aren't their own undoing). In this fashion they expect to repeat the successful strategy that they employed and took advantage of against Hillary Clinton 4 years earlier.
It's not too late to thwart them from making 2020 a rerun of 2016, but it's going to call for the paying of attention beforehand. As an appetizer, here, from Twitter, is a little slice of life on the Biden 30330 campaign trail that illustrates so much of why Joe Biden is so wrong for the job.
🏭 @JoeBiden's climate plan doesn't call for a ban on fracking natural gas
🏭🏭 Andrew Goldman, who recently hosted a fundraiser for Biden, co-founded a natural gas company
🏭🏭🏭 Heather Zichal (Biden's climate adviser) has made a million dollars off of natural gas
Speaking of not knowing what one is talking about, a media blogger I occasionally read (and have been frequently infotained by for many years) was for an extended period a while back writing almost exclusively about how bad popular math and science books are … because he doesn’t understand them. I was shocked one day to read in the comments of one of his diatribes on the quality of a particular biography of a 20th century mathematician that someone remembered that the blogger had had trouble with the Monty Hall problem years ago (2 administrations ago as it turns out).
For anyone who does not know, the Monty Hall Problem (named for the host of a wacky game show of my youth called Let's Make a Deal) goes in a nutshell like this: You are a contestant on Let's Make a Deal. Monty Hall shows you three doors on stage, behind two of which are goats-- but let's say piles of goat manure to remove an incentive for animal lovers-- and behind the other, in the original framing is a brand new car, but to make it extra interesting, let's say $100,000,000.
You are instructed to select one of the doors. Whatever is behind it is your prize. All things being equal, you have one chance in three of picking the door hiding the money. At this point, one door is just as good as any so you pick one--let's say Door Number 1-- and announce your selection. Instead of simply opening the door you picked, Monty opens one of the two remaining doors (let's say Door 3) to reveal a pile of goat manure. He then offers (in a suspiciously assertive way as was his wont) to let you switch your pick from Door 1 to Door 2. Should you switch?
Think about that for a moment. Remember there's $100,000,000 at stake. I'll wait. < Unloads dishwasher ... Paints house ... Reads Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century >
Ready? The spoiler follows. The blogger, in pretty typical fashion for initiates to the problem, insisted that on having your choices reduced to 2 by Monty Hall (i.e., from Doors 1, 2 and 3 to merely Doors 1 & 2), you actually now had a 50% chance of being right so you might as well resist the pressure and stay put with Door 1. This is the choice that contestants on the actual game show made all the time. As it turns out, and as Monty Hall well knew, it is not correct. The rather surprising answer is that you should switch because 2 times out of 3, when you switch you get the money. Our blogger, in light of the fact that the problem was being posed to him and the solution explained in the pages of the New York Times, not only strongly disagreed with the solution but confidently skewered the paper for spreading disinformation yet again.
What surprised me about the comment that I came across in the recent post was that on the day in question all those years ago, I actually helpfully emailed the blogger (very uncharacteristically on my part) to try to explain why switching when Monty Hall opens a door with a goat behind it paid off with a car 2/3 of the time. The very next day, the blogger acknowledged (very uncharacteristically) that he’d received emails that suggested he might need to re-evaluate the situation, but he doubled down on his assessment based on the New York Times statement of the problem which he was originally critiquing. (He was still wrong!) I don't recall that it was ever mentioned again, and I thought I was the only person to remember the incident, but apparently there are traces of it still out there on the web—not just on the blogger's site.
My explanation went something like this. Imagine instead of 3 doors, there are 4-- goat manure behind 3 of them and the fortune behind one. In this case, you have a 1 in 4 chance of picking the right door the first time. After hearing your choice, instead of one door, Monty reveals goat piles behind 2 of the remaining doors. Now how confident are you in your first choice? Do you still think your first choice jumped from 25% to 50% likely to be correct?
Not yet convinced? Let's say there are 1000 doors. 999 of them have goat manure piled up behind them and 1 has $100,000,000 behind it. You have 5 seconds to pick and nothing to lose so you pick door number 451. Now Monty on hearing your selection, opens 998 of the remaining doors to reveal goat manure leaving only your choice and door number 778 closed. There are once again only two choices left, but are you still confident that the original odds that door number 451 has the money behind it went from 0.1% to 50.0%?
The factor that your mind edits out with 3 doors is that Monty Hall knows where the money is. His choice of door to reveal manure behind is never random. He'll never randomly show you the money before offering to let you switch. The reveal is done to fool you into thinking your odds of having chosen the right door on the first try have increased. In truth they've never changed. What changes is a stark reframing of the act of choosing on the second try. By having manure revealed behind one of the 2 unchosen doors, your odds do not change, but your choice is simplified to Switch or Don't. If you feel confident that your first choice was correct, stick with your first choice. If you feel it's more likely that your first choice was incorrect, change your choice. Staying with your first choice, you don't always lose, but by straightforward probability you do lose 2 out of 3 times whether Monty takes one of the doors out of play or not. Switching to what Monty has conveniently made the only other option on your second chance, you win 2 out of 3 times-- twice as often as staying put.
What have we learned? For one thing, we've learned that when Monty Hall gives you a chance to change doors, no matter how many doors you have to choose from and even no matter how many other doors hiding manure he reveals before asking for your decision, you're always at least somewhat better off switching. Moreover, if I have done my job, I hope we've all learned and can take to heart that contrary to all other evidence day in and day out from time immemorial, on one day in 2006, the New York Times was actually correct about something.
Satellite evidence confirming record number of fires in the Amazon rainforest, August 15-22, 2019. (NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens)
I don't do well with live TV. Awards shows, debates, breaking news, sporting events give me hives. I have a hard enough time with live life. Where is the escape in watching life unfold spontaneously on my television? Naturally I had trepidations about CNN's 7-hour Climate Crisis Town Hall on Wednesday night with 10 2020 Democratic candidates. But I wanted to see certain of the participants, and as it happened, 4 of the top names on my list appeared back-to-back at the time I tuned in. I caught Joe Biden's turn part-way through. I was tuned in long enough to see him squirm to the point of popping a blood vessel in his eye when confronted by an audience question concerning his plan to attend a fundraiser the following night hosted by natural gas entrepreneur Andrew Goldman, in violation of Biden's pledge not to take money from fossil fuel executives. Goldman, though not currently an executive in a strict pedantic sense, co-founded the natural gas company Western LNG (which stands for Liquefied Natural Gas) in Houston. (Contrary to Biden's shocked response when confronted with the fact about his donor on Wednesday, and an indication that he would not attend if found to be true on his review, he attended the fundraiser with open palms on Thursday anyway). Of all the candidates running, Joe Biden is perhaps the only one who could be pointed to whose entire political career has arguably been contributing to the problem of inaction-- sorry, bipartisan inaction-- on climate change. Tenuous frontrunner Biden's lack of interest in the topic (manifested in his ill-prepared off-the-cuff manner of winging it in this nationally televised forum on the issue) is a major factor in why the DNC rejected a Climate Change themed debate of their own. Based on his performance on Wednesday night, he doesn't seem especially eager to make amends. (His lack of empathy for millenials apparently doesn't stop with their unique and worsening situation with college debt.)
I also saw Elizabeth Warren, who acquitted herself rather well I thought, appropriately skewering the greed of fossil fuel billionaires as behind our current predicament, before contradicting herself on the question of whether utilities should be public rather than private by suggesting capitalism that rescues us from the catastrophe capitalism created is to be encouraged. (I'm not fully convinced.) Her performance coming on the heels of Bernie Sanders's tour de force was strong enough that it made a couple of tough acts for small town Mayor Pete Buttigieg to follow. Buttigieg's performance was leagues beyond the low bar set by Biden naturally, but his run-of-the-mill technocratic adroit-on-his-feet approach suffered by comparison to the bold mastery of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and was about where my attention started flagging.
Bernie Sanders who immediately followed Joe Biden provided a startlingly competent and refreshingly lucid counterpoint to the former Vice President's performance. The questions were for the most part excellent and Sanders remained on point. While it was encouraging to learn after the fact how many of the candidates rose to the occasion, of all the plans discussed, Bernie Sanders' is the most aggressive, the most far-reaching and the least compromising on the uncompromisable.
To be honest, in retrospect, there was that one moment from his segment that struck a bit of an odd chord with me, and I was not too surprised to discover by checking Google News on the CNN event on Thursday that it was the day-after talk of alt-right media. The question was addressed to him by a teacher, the crawl informed us, Martha Readyoff:
I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it is crucial to face. Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?
The answer I formulated in my head for Sen. Sanders as I watched mouth agape was something like this:
Well Martha the answer is no, and let me tell you why. While I will always support a woman's right to choose and will do everything in my power to protect that right which has become precarious under the Trump administration due to its manipulations of the Supreme Court with the assistance of a Republican controlled Senate, I would not presume to encourage a woman to choose birth control for any reason. A woman who chooses on her own to be childless in response to scientific predictions about the effects of climate change on future generations and perhaps in an effort to personally address issues of population expansion should have the right to whatever means make her choice possible. But, no, I do not believe government should be in the business of interceding in what should only be a matter between a woman and her physician.
The precedent for rejecting the premise of a question had already been set by his response to an Andrew Yang supporter seeking his opinion on exploring advances in nuclear power as an alternative energy resource. To that question, Sanders expertly rejected the idea on the well established objections to the concomitant and as yet intractable problem of what to do with the millenially radioactive waste that is a proliferating by-product of the technology. But to Readyoff's question concerning birth control, this is the answer that Bernie gave:
Well Martha the answer is yes, and the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies, and make reproductive decisions... The Mexico City agreement, which denies American aide to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd. So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support.
I think the spirit of the answer I formed is in there, but I'm not sure that Sen. Sanders was tuned into the social engineering undertones of Readyoff's question that I picked up on (and could well have imagined) and their resonance with disturbing histories of eugenics. If anything Sanders' tangent about the Mexico City agreement addressed the mirror image kind of social engineering policy that undermines a woman's right to choose-- if not within the US where it was at least until recently more fully protected, than outside the borders where we proffer aid. I'll just say, Sanders answer surprised me nearly as much as Readyoff's question alarmed me. But on sober reflection, I am less sure that the question was a trap to corner Sanders into publicly endorsing a draconian baby-culling social policy and more to see it in the light that no doubt Sanders did, as a somewhat fuzzy way to tie the very real threat to women's reproductive freedom posed by Trump, the Supreme Court influenced by his two picks thus far, the Senate and an insidious Republican domination of State governments across the country to the issue, equally antithetical to the right, of climate change. Nowhere does Sanders (contrary to what the shit storm of right wing media-slash-propaganda outlets simultaneously suggested) talk about government promotion of abortion-- his response as he states in the opening of it is-- as it should be-- all about the freedom of a woman to control her own reproductive destiny through whatever means of birth control are at her disposal.
Let me be perfectly clear: I am opposed to sidetracking the government's response to climate change with formulating policy around the question of the ethics of procreation. Population control could well be a path for individuals to consider, and seems to be a perfectly fine focus of a private sector non-profit. It's not the place of government to do anything other than clear obstacles to the pursuit of birth control for those who see fit to practice it. For my part- -and I'm not Bernie Sanders so I can be blunt-- this is probably not in my top 100 steps we could take to address the climate. I do not think birth control should be a "key feature" of a government plan to address climate change. For one thing, it's too slow. It's post hoc-- more a response and reaction to climate change and not necessarily a proactive step to mitigate it.* I'm not convinced the invasiveness of the proposition of influencing individual women's choices to have children is warranted enough to require the involvement of the Federal government. While I'm more and more for social solutions to problems caused for the large part by unfettered havoc on the planet on the part of very powerful private interests, reproductive freedom is one area that I feel should remain forever free-- and procuring, protecting and preserving the freedom of it should be the extent of government's role in it.
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*Although fewer humans to engage in human caused global warming could not be a bad thing in the long run, given the concentration of blame for the climate crisis on less than 1% of humanity, the kind of humans being prevented is not irrelevant to its potential as an effective countermeasure. In short, while I don't support government promotion of birth control as a solution in principle, forced castration of fossil fuel executives and their financial and legislative enablers (and for good measure their heirs) should not be off the table.
Debra Messing is at it again. She can't seem to let go of the notion that Susan Sarandon is responsible for Trump being in the White House. What did Susan Sarandon do? She inserted herself in earnest once again in the 2020 Democratic primary by publicly endorsing Bernie Sanders' candidacy. After Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, Sarandon, who had already fallen out of love with Clinton in 2003 when the then New York Senator voted for the Iraq War, publicly urged the disaffected to vote with their feet and abandon the ship of the Democratic party. Her own vote was for Green candidate Jill Stein, but she intimated that even Trump would be a safer pick than Hillary Clinton. Less fracking, she predicted; less war.
Like Susan Sarandon, I was bitterly disappointed after the 2016 primaries. It was hard not to crash after soaring on an unprecedented opportunity in my lifetime to dream with some realistic hope about an opportunity to vote for a Socialist in the General Election. When Sanders conceded, I remained unenthused about his challenger, the nominee, and briefly, quietly contemplated abstaining from voting for president in November. But on listening to the arguments of Stein, Sarandon and others and especially due to increased exposure to the cesspool of Trump, I was not convinced.
I have no regrets about voting for Hillary Clinton to avoid Trump in 2016, but neither do I harbor any special animus toward Susan Sarandon, at least, for voting her conscience. Her supporters are right - Sarandon has many times over earned the respect of those on the left for putting her beliefs into action consistently for years. I have never thought (for longer than an instant or two anyway) that Trump's election is owed to Sarandon's abstention from voting for his most serious opponent. In the fight between Sarandon and Messing, my money is on the actual fighter.
Where I disagree with Sarandon's 2016 stance is not out of blame for Clinton's loss. Rather it is with the notion that anyone with eyes open about Donald Trump before the general election can be excused for shirking in the effort against him. Pissiness about Bernie Sanders' loss in the primaries is an especially feeble excuse considering Sanders' own commitment to Clinton's campaign following her nomination. But by all indications at the time, Susan Sarandon's withholding of support for Clinton was due to a confidence in her impeccable moral purity that constrained her from participating in a Clinton victory, a purity that was no doubt persuasive and influential-- and certainly encouraging-- to some small percentage of similarly disgruntled Bernie supporters in swing states. I've talked about my feelings about the begrudgers, but I have to confess I reserve a special place in my personal conception of Hell for the saintly abstainers who actively sought to side with the Trump voters against Clinton in the wishful belief that Trump's blatant horribleness would "heighten the contradictions" inherent in the system and perhaps instantly foment revolution. What made them so singularly special that they could be excused from the duty to vote responsibly, heedless of the Republican congress that Trump, if he won, would have at his disposal? How bad does the greater evil have to be to vote for the lesser evil if Trump is not it? How come they got to vote for the dreamy far out radical? Why was it up to me to vote for the war-mongering fracking neoliberal in an effort to save our mutual society from the fake tanned, pussy grabbing, incurious, racist fascist bastard?
Is the effect you're getting the effect you want? Was Susan Sarandon wanting to punish Hillary Clinton in 2016? Was she hoping to signal a greater virtue in voting for Trump? She is a dramatic actor. I now suspect she was just being dramatic. An interview with The Guardian in November 2017 if accurate and fair strongly suggests that far from being a super virtuous superwoman of the left whose vote for Jill Stein was too superior for its mighty purpose to be comprehensible to mere run-of-the-mill pants shitters who voted for Clinton to avoid Trump (I include myself), Susan Sarandon was a common naïf who assumed Clinton was going to win and was compelled to use her public platform to make clear that she wanted to claim no part in it. In spite of her bluster about how Clinton was more likely to start a war and to pursue frantic fracking than Trump, in the Guardian intereview, she referenced the safety of her district for Clinton among the conditions that enabled her protest. Explaining her stance in the general election, the article quotes her as saying, "Well, I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]. It was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein." She has this to say about her widely cited argument in an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC in the runup to the election that Hillary Clinton was "more dangerous than Trump":
I don’t mind that quote ... I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.
Acknowledgement that Clinton would be smoother (if not by much) than Trump doesn't sound like a pure belief in Clinton surpassing the danger of Trump. The virtue is cast in doubt even more by the argument that Clinton was going to win anyway.
In other words she spoke one thing publicly but justified her actions on a faulty foundation of the tragically mistaken belief about what the outcome of the election would be which in 2017 she apparently indicated regret in having wrong. Could her story be unique? The humanness of her mistake (if the impression left by the Guardian article is fair) gives me an odd kind of hope. I don't doubt that there were some small number of Clinton abstainers who genuinely evaluated Clinton's capacity for malevolence as on a complete par with if not surpassing Trump's. But Susan Sarandon, who is as virtuous as they come in leftist politics, appears with hindsight at least (which is 20/20 mind you) to not be among them.
What about Debra Messing's intentions? Does she want a mea culpa from Susan? Does she want to lock Sarandon's support for whomever the Democrat is in 2020? I suspect she's just being dramatic -- and hoping in the process to preemptively ridicule the wasting of votes on anything other than anti-Trump in 2020*. But based on the frantic righteous (and absolutely correct) defense of Susan Sarandon that Messing's repeated attacks inspire, I'm not so sure she's helping her own cause. Let's get the best candidate for 2020 now, and stock up on outrage until we need it. It's too late from a planetary perspective to quibble over purity displays in the general election. It's too early politically to do anything but get the nomination right.
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* Would Debra Messing support the ticket in November even if the nominee were Bernie Sanders? I'd really like to know.
