tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78105309754650623202024-03-08T03:32:00.903-08:00Hubevents NotesAll mistakes are mine.
Hubevents Notes are raw notes from some of the events attended from the weekly Energy (and Other) Events around Cambridge, MA at <a href="http://hubevents.blogspot.com">http://hubevents.blogspot.com</a> and books I've been reading. This is something of an electronic commonplace book.gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.comBlogger203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-64617522155623670232023-11-10T16:49:00.000-08:002023-11-10T16:49:10.534-08:00Notes on Nonviolent Communication<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life_ by Marshall Rosenberg</span></p><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2015</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 978-1-892005-28-1</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(21) We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsiblity for how we behave, think, and feel.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(32) The first component of NVC entails the separation of observation from evaluation. When we combine observation with evaluation, others are apt to hear criticism and resist what we are saying.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(40) Expressing our vulnerability can help resolve conflicts.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(41) Distinguish between what we feel and what we think we are.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(49) What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but not the cause.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(49-50) Four options for receiving messages:</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">1. blame ourselves</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">2. blame others</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">3. sense our own feelings and needs</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">4. sense others’ feelings and needs</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: all at once, one at a time, and in every combination: 6, I think</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(51) As we shall see, the more we are able to connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond compassionately.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(52) The basic mechanism of motivating by guilt is to attribute the responsibility for one’s own feelings to others.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(56) “I have lived for sixty-five years, and if there is one thing I have learned, it is never to give unless I give from the heart.” - a man in a bus station who gives a child an orange after kissing it.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(69) In addition to using positive language, we also want to word our requests in the form of concrete actions that others can undertake and to avoid vague, abstract, or ambiguous phrasing.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(74) My belief is that, whenever we say something to another person, we are requesting something in return. It may simply be an empathic connection - a verbal or nonverbal acknowledgment, as with the man on the train, that our words have been understood.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(97) …I’ve found that people feel safer if we first reveal the feelings and needs within ourselves that are generating the question. Thus, instead of asking someone, “What did I do?” we might say, “I’m frustrated because I’d like to be clearer about what you are referring to. Would you be willing to tell me what I’ve done that leads you to see me in this way?"</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(99) As we’ve seen, all criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message. The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(104) Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. We often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">In NVC, no matter what words others may use to express themselves, we simply listen for their observations, feelings, needs, and requests. Then we may wish to reflect back, paraphrasing what we have understood. We stay with empathy and allow others the opportunity to fully express themselves before we turn our attention to solutions or requests for relief.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(135) Don’t Do Anything That Isn’t Play!</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(137) After having acknowledged that you choose to do a particular activity, get in touch with the intention behind your choice by completing the statement, I choose to…. because I want….</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(139) When we use language which denies choice (for example, words such as should, have to, ought, must, can’t, supposed to, etc), our behaviors arise out of a vague sense of guilt, duty, or obligation.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(142) Where guilt is a tactic of manipulation and coercion, it is useful to confuse simulus and cause.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…. To motivate by guilt, mix up stimulus and cause.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(144) When we judge others, we contribute to violence.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">...At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled. Thus anger can be valuable if we use it as an alarm clock to wake us up - to realize we have a need that isn’t being met and that we are thinking in a way that makes it unlikely to be met.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(147) Violence comes from the belief that other people cause our pain and therefore deserve punishment</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">We recall four options when hearing a difficult message: 1. Blame ourselves 2. Blame others 3. Sense our own feelings and needs 4. Sense others’ feelings and needs</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(151) I’ve learned to savor life much more by only hearing what’s going on in their hearts and not getting caught up with the stuff in their heads.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: If you can recognize the difference</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(161) Whatever the situation may be, resolving conflicts involves all the principles I outlined previously in this book: observing, identifying and expressing feelings, connecting feelings with needs, and making doable requests fo another person using clear, concrete, positive action language.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(163) They [mediators] are not at all concerned with creating a quality of connection, thus overlooking the only conflict resolution tool I have ever known to work. When I described the NVC method and the role of human connection, one of the participants at the Austria meeting raised the objection that I was talking about psychotherapy, and that mediators were not psychotherapists.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">In my experience, connecting people at this level isn’t psychotherapy; it’s actually the core of mediation because when you make the connection, the problem solves itself most of the time.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(164) NVC Conflict Resolution Steps - A Quick Overview</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">First, we express our own needs.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Second, we search for the real needs of the other person, no matter how they are expressing themselves. If they are not expressing a need, but instead an opinion, judgment, or analysis, we recognize that, and continue to seek the need behind their words, the need underneath what they are saying.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Third, we verify that we both accurately recognize the other person’s needs, and if not, continue to seek the need behind their words.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Fourth, we provide as much empathy as is required for us to mutually hear each other’s needs accurately.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">And fifth, having clarified both parties’ needs in the situation, we propose strategies for resolving the conflict, framing them in positive action language.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(165) In order not to confuse needs and strategies, it is important to recall that needs contain no reference to anybody taking any particular action. On the other hand, strategies, which may appear in the form of requests, desires, wants, and “solutions,” refer to specific actions that specific people may take.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(168) So this is our work: learning to recognize the need in statements that don’t overtly express any need. It takes practice, and it always involves some guessing. Once we sense what the other person needs, we can check in with them, and then help them put into their need into words. If we are able to truly hear their need, a new level of connection is forged - a critical piece that moves the conflict toward successful resolution.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(170) We must not assume that when one party expresses a need clearly, that the other party hears it accurately.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(171) People often need empathy before they are able to hear what is being said.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… If we could just say, “Here are the needs of both sides. Here are the resources. What can be done to meet these needs?,” conflicts would be easily resolved.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(183) When we witness behaviors that raise concern in us - unless it is a situation that calls for the protective use of force as described in Chapter 12 - the first thing we do is to empathize with the needs of the person who is behaving in the way we dislike.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(186) Robert Irwin, Building a Peace System</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(189) I believe it is critical to be aware of the importance of people’s reasons for behaving as we request.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(198) Focus on what we want to do rather than what went wrong.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(199) Defuse stress by hearing our own feelings and needs.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(203) By showing us how to focus on what we truly want rather than on what is wrong with others or ourselves, NVC gives us the tools and understanding to create a more peaceful state of mind.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(210) The Three Components of Appreciation</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NVC clearly distinguishes three components in the expression of appreciation:</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">1. the actions that have contributed to our well-being</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">2. the particular needs of ours that have been fulfilled</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">3. the pleasureful feelings engendered by the fulfillment of those needs</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(212) Accustomed to a culture where buying, earning, and deserving are the standard modes of interchange, we are often uncomfortable with simple giving and receiving.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Anthropologists might disagree that there is such a thing as “simple giving and receiving"</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… “I would like to thank you in a way that we Sufi Muslims do when we want to express special appreciation for something.” Locking his thumb onto mine, he looked me in the eye and said, “I kiss the God in you that allows you to give us what you did.” He then kissed my hand.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(214) “Dad, are you aware how often you bring up what’s gone wrong but almost never bring up what’s gone right?”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(218) My grandmother loved to dance, and my mother remembers her saying often, “Never walk when you can dance.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(220) Ruth Benedict, “Synergy - Patterns of the Good Culture” Psychology Today 4 (June 1970): 53-57</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(222) Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana: The Realization of Life Tucson: Omen Press, 1972</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-1365165852583706542023-10-22T20:31:00.001-07:002023-10-22T20:31:46.164-07:00Quotes from The Dude and the Zen Master<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><u>The Dude and the Zen Master</u> by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman (</span><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Blue Rider Press, 2012 </span><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 978-0-399-16164-3)</span></p><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(page 8) [BG] I was an aeronautical engineer and mathematician in my early years, but mostly I've taught Zen Buddhism, and that's where we both met. Not just in meditation which is what most people think of when they hear Zen, but the Zen of action, of living freely in the world without causing harm, of relieving our own suffering and the suffering of others.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(16) [JB] Mark Twain said, "I am a very old man and have suffered a great many misfortunes, most of which never happened."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(22) [BG] An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don't take it seriously.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(23) [JB] So I have this word for much of what I do in life: plorking. I'm not playing and I'm not working, I'm plorking.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(31) [BG] In Zen we say that the other shore is right here under our feet. What we're looking for - the meaning of life, happiness, peace - is right here. So the question is no longer, how do I get from here to there? The question is: How do I [get] from here to here? How do I experience that fact that, instead of having to get _there_ for something, it's right here and now? This is it; this is the other shore. In Buddhism we sometimes call it the Pure Land.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(39) [BG] Finally I realized that practice and enlightenment were endless so enlightenment experiences would keep happening. And since an enlightenment experience is an awakening to the interconnectedness of life, the awakening will keep deepening. It begins with the sense of my self being my body, and it stretches until my self is realized as the universe.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(60) [BG] You might call him a Lamed-Vavnik. In Jewish mysticism, there are thirty-six righteous people, the Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim. They're simple and unassuming, and they are so good that on account of them God lets the world continue instead of destroying it. But no one knows who they are because their lives are so humble. They can be the pizza delivery boy, the cashier in a Chinese takeout, the window-washer, or the woman selling you stamps in the post office.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(68) [JB] At the same time I'm reading about the Tibetan Lojong practices, which are basically slogans all about leaning into these uncomfortable situations and opening up to them as if they're gifts. One in particular strikes me: _Always maintain a joyful mind._ Appreciate the struggles as opportunities to wake up.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(69) [JB] So I suggested we do something that my wife and I do sometimes. We sit opposite each other. One person expresses what's on his or her mind and the other person just listens and receives, till the first person has no more to say, and then we switch. We keep on doing that till both of us feel like we're done. Sometimes the shift happens, sometimes it doesn't; it's a jam.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(72) [BG] One day he [Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch] goes to the market to sell his wood and hears a monk chanting a line from the _Diamond Sutra_: "Abiding nowhere, raise the Mind." If you can abide nowhere, you are raising the mind of compassion. So here's this guy who knows nothing about Buddhism, a woodcutter, but when he hears that verse he has a profound enlightenment experience.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(75) [JB] Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, said that if something is not paradoxical, it's not true. If you say that abiding nowhere is the same as abiding everywhere, then abiding and not abiding are kind of the same thing, too. It can get very confusing, and true at the same time.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(129) [BG] For me, being at peace means I'm interconnected.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Integrity as peace</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(130) [BG] I'm Buddhist, but as you know, I'm also Jewish. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom. Many people know that word, but what they may not know is that the root of shalom is shalem, which means whole. To make something shalem, to make peace, is to make whole. There's a Jewish mystical tradition that at the time of the Creation, God's light filled a cup, but the light was so strong that the cup shattered into fragments scattered throughout the universe. And the role of the righteous person, the mensch, is to bring the fragments back and connect them to restore the cup. That's what I mean by peace. For me, peace means whole.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(137) [BG] Even when people see the value of something, the desire to keep their identity as a conservative, a liberal, or anything else can be stronger than their sense of interconnectedness - even if it means that kids go hungry. _How can I work with a liberal, even if we have the same goals?_ It makes no sense, but the differences can take over. That's what we fight wars about.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(141) [JB] Another practice I find interesting is tonglen. That's a Tibetan practice that helps us connect with others' suffering and our own. I'm kind of a beginning student of it, but one idea I really like is that your feelings are not just _your_ feelings, we all have them. So in some ways, you're a representative of what it is to be alive. As an actor, I feel that I represent a community, the family of man and woman, and my job is to show how different people will act in different situations, like the father in _American Heart_. So when it comes to feelings of struggle and suffering, you're not alone; your suffering is on behalf of the whole group, on behalf of all of us.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(143) [JB] Johnny's [Goodwin] point of view was that A440 is a relatively modern standard of tuning and basically it's an arbitrary thing. [Chris] Pelonis, who is an acoustical engineer, said that A440 is not just the frequency of the note A but is also the earth's vibration. Earth has a basic resonance, and that's why A became the standard. He summarized it this way: "the region of 440 is by Supreme design and not arbitrary or coincidental."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(146) [BG] That sutra [the Heart Sutra] talks about the state of not knowing, so if you're at one with the sutra you're in resonance with the entire universe. Of course, we are always in resonance with the entire universe because we _are_ that universe. But how do we become aware of it? How do we experience? By getting into that space where that's _all_ we experience, where there's nothing but A [the whole sutra can be understood in one letter].</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(178) [BG] I have lots of hope. Expectation is the bummer; that's where I get into trouble. As long as hope is without expectation or attachment, there's no problem. </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(194) [BG] I've played with changing that vow [of the Bodhisattva] to: Beings are numberless, I vow to serve them. It sounds less arrogant and more possible. But whether you serve them or free them, you're helping people see that there is no one truth, that everything they believe or that others believe is just an opinion. </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(199) [JB] And he quoted Tolstoy: "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(200) Marian Kolodziej, Catholic Pole who was one of the first prisoners in Auschwitz and later painted murals of the barracks in Oswiecim, "The Labyrinth."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(206) [JB] Many people think about children as their immortality. She [Bridges' mother] said that they're really closer to your mortality. When you have a child, you have another pair of eyes, another heart that you love more than your own, but you have no control over them.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(233) [BG] Being a Zen teacher, I know that frustrations come out of expectations, but in this case [Israeli/Palestinian peace] I was really attached to seeing big changes.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(257-258) [JB] Buddhist Five Remembrances</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">from _Plum Village Chanting Book_ by Thich Nhat Hanh</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" />gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-46248097849614003622023-10-10T20:05:00.005-07:002023-10-11T11:24:02.235-07:00Facing the Emotional Reality of Accelerating Climate Transformations<p><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Once you know: growing our capacity to face darkening climate predictions</span></p><span style="font-family: Geneva;">2023 Charles D Keeling Memorial Lecture, Scripps Institution of Oceanography</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">May 8, 2023</span><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Susan Moser, Affiliate Faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst; Research Faculty at Antioch University of New England</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Lecture: </span> <span style="font-family: Geneva;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6pCZ1-K0To">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6pCZ1-K0To</a></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Once You Know documentary: h<a href="ttps://www.videoproject.org/once-you-know.html">ttps://www.videoproject.org/once-you-know.html</a></span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Moser first learned of climate change in 1985</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">"We're moving outside the range of the familiar in terms of frequency, intensity, and how expensive they are."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">growing acknowledgment of mental health threats from climate</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">extreme heat causes people to be more aggressive</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">"It is really intense how domestic violence and abuse of children goes up in those [climate] events: any time another storm hits, a man hits a woman" is a bitter </span><span style="font-family: Geneva;">irony known among those who work in that field</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Climate change is not the same for everybody, the people who did the least to cause the problems and least able to navigate climate change are hurt worse and have to look at the effects almost constantly. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">[Moser repeated this point several times.]</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The confluence of racism and poverty with climate is potent.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">There is also first responder burn-out</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Is This How You Feel - letters from scientists to the future on climate</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><a href="https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com">https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com</a></span></div><div><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">"Climate change doesn't capture what's happening here... We're dealing systems collapsing. A complete shift... It is impacting everything - culturally, ecologically, economically." Gay Sheffield</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">How do you go home knowing that?</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">In some way this is toxic knowledge.</span></div><div><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">what is meaningful work on the way down?</span></div><div>[<span style="font-family: Geneva;">A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies New Edition by Howard T. Odum (Author), Elisabeth C. Odum (Author) - 1991, the great ecologist's last book]</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">local officials are key</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">people don't learn about trauma informed communications</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">the same people who are trying to work with the whole community on climate/resilience are part of the government which is perpetrating police violence and callous social policies on those very marginalized people who need the most help. </span></div><div><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">National Adaptation Forum (</span><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><a href="https://www.nationaladaptationforum.org/">https://www.nationaladaptationforum.org/</a>) </span><span style="font-family: Geneva;">is one resource</span></div><div><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">How do we know all this about climate and not do something?</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Those for whom the apocalypse is their day job are predominantly women (hence, double, triple burdens)</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">fear of spreading "doom" and despair, obsession with (easy) hope... personal attacks (including threats to life, work, reputation, person) </span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">[around the world people doing practical work on the environment are murdered, often]</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">'The challenge</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">A world of rapid and constant and complex change with great uncertainty, unknowing and surprises; more frequent and pervasive traumatic disruptions for more and more people; inevitable (chosen and/or imposed) transformative change."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The Adaptive Mind Project (<a href="http://www.susannemoser.com/documents/AdaptiveMindOverview5-27-19.pdf">http://www.susannemoser.com/documents/AdaptiveMindOverview5-27-19.pdf</a> pdf alert) building the skills needed for coping with transformative change while reducing their own trauma and trauma to others.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">First ask is simple acknowledgment [that climate change is already here and we are suffering it.]</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Adaptive mind is not just in individuals but in the community [including non-humans] </span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">community care [not just individuals or nuclear families]</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">"We are so imagination challenged and we cannot imagine that there is a future that's not just a doom future."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">"Covid showed us how quickly we can change and how little stamina we have."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">We need to learn more about how social change can happen.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Acknowledge the doom and gloom and move from there</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">end of notes</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;">I've used this quote since I first read it:</span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">the war that matters is the war against the imagination</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">all other wars are subsumed in it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Diane di Prima</span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It and the following two quotes inform how I view the world:</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Lew Welch</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous behaviors that will avoid extinction. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">R. Buckminster Fuller</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This lecture was an event I found while compiling Energy (and Other) Events Monthly (http://hubevents.blogspot.com), the website archive and free listserv. These kinds of things happen every day all over the world and many are </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">available in real time as well as archived online. W</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">hat I do and why I do it (</span><a href="http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2013/11/what-i-do-and-why-i-do-it.html" style="color: #888888; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2013/11/what-i-do-and-why-i-do-it.html</a>) <span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">explains how I'd like to see this resource used.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-18045686366998622142023-07-11T19:36:00.000-07:002023-07-11T19:36:02.158-07:00Notes on Samuel R Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue<p>Samuel R Delany's book on urban development issues, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York University Press, 1999) brings his astute and engaging science fiction writer eye to the topic. He has a kind of Victorian erudition coupled with all the tools of post-modern deconstruction and political discourse.</p><p>He relates his experiences over nearly thirty years in Times Square talking with the homeless and the hustlers, the small businessmen and their customers, the denizens of the porno theaters he frequented and makes a strong case that the "redevelopment" that has pushed most of these folks out of the area is based upon a fear of contact (as opposed to networking) and especially any contact across class lines. By remaking Times Square into something like a mall that is always tourist-friendly, Delany believes that all of us will become tourists even in our own communities. As a black homosexual, he has an unique perspective based upon his survival observations of a mostly white, heterosexual culture. </p><p>(pages 149 - 152) The generally erroneous assumption about how new buildings make money is something like this: A big company acquires the land, clears it for construction, and commences to build. After three to five years, when it is complete, the company rents the building out. If the building is a success, all the offices (or apartments, as the case may be) are leased, and the site is a popular one, then and only then does the corporation that owns the building begin to see profits on its earlier outlays and investments. Thus the ultimate success of the building as a habitation is pivotal to the building's future economic success.</p><p>If this were the way new office buildings were actually built, however, few would even be considered, much less actually begun.</p><p>Here is an only somewhat simplified picture of how the process _actually_ works. Simplified though it is, it gives a much better idea of what on and how money is made. A large corporation decides to build a building. It acquires some land. Now it sets up an extremely small ownership corporation, which is tied to the parent corporation by a lot of very complicated contracts - but is a different and autonomous corporation envertheless. That ownership corporation, tiny as it might be, is now ready to build the building. The parent corporation also sets up a much larger construction corporation, which hires diggers, subcontracts construction companies, and generally oversees the building proper.</p><p>The little ownership corporation now borrows a lot of money from a bank - enough to pay the construction corporation for constructing the building proper. The small ownership corporation also sells stock to investors - enough to pay back the bank loan. The tiny ownership corporation (an office, a secretary, and a few officers that oversee things) proceeds to pay the parent construction corporation with the bank funds to build the building. It uses the stock funds to pay back the bank. Figured in the cost of the building is a healthy margin of profits for the construction corporation - and for the large corporation that got the whole project started - while the investors pay off the bank, so that _it_ doesn't get twisted out of shape. Meanwhile both the ownership corporation and construction corporation pay the parent corporation as their controlling stockholder.</p><p>Yes, if the building turns out to be a stunningly popular address, then (remember all those contracts?) profits will be substantially greater than otherwise. But millions and millions of dollars of profits will be made by the parent corporation just from the construction of the building alone, even if no single space in it is ever rented out. (Movies are made in the same manner, which is why so many awful ones hit the screen. By the time they are released, the producers have long since taken the money and, as it were, run.) Believing in the myth of profit only in return for investments, public investors will swallow the actual cost of the building's eventual failure - if it fails - while the ownership corporation is reduced in size to nothing or next to nothing: an office in the building on which no rent is paid, a secretary and/or an answering machine, and a nominal head (with another major job somewhere else) on minimal salary who comes in once a month to check in ... if that.</p><p>Two facts should now be apparent.</p><p>First fact: The Forty-second Street Development Project (I use this as a metonym for the hidden corporate web behind it) _wants_ to build those buildings. Renting them out is secondary, even if the failure to rent them is a major catastrophe for the city, turning the area into a glass and aluminum graveyard.</p><p>A truth of high finance tends to get away from even the moderately well-off investor (the successful doctor or lawyer, say, bringing in two to four hundred thousand a year), though this truth is, indeed, what makes capitalism: In short-term speculative business ventures of (to choose an arbitrary cutoff point) more than three million dollars, such as a building or civic center, (second fact) the profits to be made from dividing the money up and moving it around over the one to six years during which that money must be spent easily offset any losses from the possible failure of the enterprise itself as a speculative endeavor, once it's completed.</p><p>The interest on a million dollars at 6.5 percent is about 250 dollars a _day_; on a good conservative portfolio it will be 400 dollars a day. The interest on ten million dollars is ten times that. Thus the interest on ten million dollars is almost a million and a half a year. The Forty-second Street Development Project is determined to build those buildings. The question is: How long will it take to convince investors to swallow the uselessness of the project?</p><p>Far more important than whether the buildings can be rented out is whether _the investors think the buildings can be rented out_. In the late seventies, three of those towers were tabled for ten years. The ostensible purpose for that ten-year delay was to give economic forces a chance to shift and business a chance to rally to the area. The real reason, however, was simply the hope that people would forget the arguments against the project, so clear in so many people's minds at the time. Indeed, the crushing arguments against the whole project from the mid-seventies were, by the mid-eighties, largely forgotten; this forgetting has allowed the project to take its opening steps over the last ten years. The current ten-year delay means that public relations corporations have been given another decade to make the American investing public forget the facts of the matter and convince that same public that the Times Square project is a sound one. It gambles on the possibility that, ten years from now, the economic situation might be better - at which point the developers will go ahead with those towers, towers which, Stern has told us, _will_ be built."</p><p>(121) Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.</p><p>The class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world perpetually works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed.</p><p>While the establishment and utilization of those institutions always involved social practices, the effects of my primary and secondary theses are regularly perceived at the level of discourse. Therefore, it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for both the establishment of such insitutions and practices and, by extension, the necessary critique of those institutions and practices - a critique necessary if new instittuions of any efficacy are to be established. At this level, in its largely stabilizing/destabilizing role, superstructure (and superstructure at its most oppositional) _can_ impinge on infrastructure." </p><p>(123 -124) Contact is the conversation that starts in the line at the grocery counter with the person behind you while the clerk is changing the paper roll in the cash register. It is the pleasantries exchanged with a neighbor who has brought her chair out to take some air on the stoop. It is the discussion that begins with the person next to you at a bar. It can be the conversation that starts with any number of semiofficials or service persons - mailman, policeman, librarian, store clerk or counter person. As well, it can be two men watching each other masturbating together in adjacent urinals of a public john - an encounter that, later, may or may not become a conversation. Very importantly, contact is also the intercourse - physical and conversational - that blooms in and as 'casual sex' in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars, and sex clubs, on street corners with heavy hustling traffic, and in the adjoining motels or the apartments of one of another participant, from which nonsexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for decades or a lifetime may spring, not to mention the conversation of a john with a prostitute or hustler encountered on one of another street corner or in a bar - a relation that, a decade later, has devolved into a smile or a nod, even when (to quote Swinburne) 'You have forgotten my kisses/And I have forgotten your name.' Mostly, these contact encounters are merely pleasant chats, adding a voice to a face now and again encountered in the neighborhood." </p><p>(128 -129) There is, of course, another way to meet people. It is called _networking_. Networking is what people have to do when those with like interests live too far apart to be thrown together in public spaces through chance and propinquity. Networking is what people in small towns have to do to establish any complex cultural life today.</p><p>But contemporary _networking_ is notably different from _contact_.</p><p>At first one is tempted to set contact and networking to opposition. Networking tends to be professional and motive-driven. Contact tends to be more broadly social and appears random. Networking crosses class lines only in the most vigilant manner. Contact regularly crosses class lines in those public spaces in which interclasss encounters are at their most frequent. Networking is heavily dependent on institutions to promote the necessary propinquity (gyms, parties, twelve-step programs, conferences, reading groups, singing groups, social gatherings, workshops, tourist groups, and classes), where those with the requisite social skills can maneuver. Contact is associated with public space and the architecture and commerce that depend on and promote it. Thus contact is often an outdoor sport; networking tends to occur indoors."</p><p>(127) [Jane Jacobs] dismisses "pervert parks" as necessarily social blights (largely understandable in the pre-Stonewall 1950s when she was collecting material for her book, but nevertheless unfortunate), though she _was_ ready to acknowledge the positive roles winos and destitute alcoholics played in stabilizing the quality of neighborhood life at a _higher_ level than the neighborhood would maintain without them.</p><p>"I would recommend her analysis, though I would add that, like so much American thinking on the left, it lacks not so much a class analysis as an _interclass_ analysis."</p><p>Editorial Comment: Somewhere I should have notes on Jane Jacobs' _Life and Death of Great American Cities_.</p><p><br /></p>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-80842950492745917252023-06-19T14:22:00.002-07:002023-06-21T20:13:18.508-07:00Joan Didion: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live<div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live_ by Joan Didion</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Everyman Library, 2006</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 0-307-26487-4</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Slouching Towards Bethlehem</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Where the Kissing Never Stops”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(42) Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Slouching Towards Bethlehem”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(90) He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“On Keeping a Notebook”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(103) “The party was _not_ for you, the spider was _not_ a black widow, _it wasn’t that way at all_.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Notes from a Native Daughter”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(131) In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you uinderstand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento _is_ California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Letter from Paradise, 21º 19’ N., 157º 52’ W.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(146) On the whole I am able to take a very long view of death, but I think a great deal about what there is to remember, twenty-one years later, of a boy who died at nineteen.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: WWII graves in Honolulu’s Punchbowl</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Goodbye to All That”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(171) Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The White Album</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The White Album”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(185) We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the seventeenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common conditon but one I found troubling.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(211) In other words it was another story without a narrative.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Receiving a diagnosis of MS</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“James Pike, American”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(216) apologue - a moral fable, especially one with animals as characters</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Holy Water”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(225) The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">"The Getty”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(233) (I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns.)</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Good Citizens”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(241) … the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Notes Toward a Dreampolitik”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(251) To watch a bike movie is finally to apprehend the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which a noexistent frustration threshold is seen not as psychopathic but as a “right.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“In the Islands”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(281) What the place [the Royal Hawaiian Hotel] reflected in the Thirties it reflects still, in less flamboyant mutations: a kind of life lived always on the streets where the oldest trees grow.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“In Hollywood”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(296) There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: venture capital</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(297) [at Adolf Zukor’s 100th birthday celebration]… but on this night there is among them a resigned warmth, a recognition that they will attend one another’s funerals.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“On the Morning After the Sixties”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(329) … the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(330) I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Silent Generation of the 1950s, which I’ve now seen confused with the generation that fought WWII</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Salvador</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(362) “Don’t say I said this, but there are no issues here,” I was told by a high-placed Salvadoran. “There are only ambitions.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… That this man saw _la situación_ as only one more realignment of power among the entitled, a conflict of “ambitions” rather than “issues,” was, I recognized, what many people would call a conventional bourgeois view of civil conflict, and offered no solutions, but the people with solutions to offer were mainly somewhere else, in Mexico or Panama or Washington.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(388) There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain proximity to the cultural zero.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">After Henry</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Pacific Distances”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(592) When I first moved to Los Angeles from New York, in 1964, I found this absence of narrative a deprivation. At the end of two years, I realized (quite suddenly, alone one morning in the car) that I had come to find narrative sentimental. This remains a radical difference between the two cities, and also between the ways in which the residents of those cities view each other.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Los Angeles Days”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(614) … something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe. </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“L.A. Noir”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(653) In a city [Los Angeles] not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates. A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Sentimental Journeys”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(686) Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story a lesson, a high concept.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: tyranny of story, narrative</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(702) A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city [NYC] presents itself…</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(713) The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(714) In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general - problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the under-equipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color - the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Political Fictions</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“A Foreward”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(735) The piece I finally did on the 1988 campaign, “Insider Baseball,” was the first of a number of pieces I eventually did about various aspects of American politics, most of which had to do, I came to realize, with the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(736) It was also clear in 1988 that the rhetorical manipulation of resentment and anger designed to attract these target voters had reduced the nation’s political dialogue to a level so dispiritingly low that its highest expression had come to be a pernicious nostalgia. Perhaps most striking of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process. All of this was known.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(737 -738) The graphs themselves, however, told a somewhat more complicated story: only third-five percent of nonvoters, or about seventeen percent of all adult Americans, fell into the “apathetic” category, which, according to a directory of the Shorenstein study [Vanishing Voters], included those who “have no sense of civic duty,” aren’t interested in politics,” and “have no commitment in keeping up with public affairs.” Another fourteen percent of nonvoters were classifed as “disconnected,” a group including both those “who can’t get to the polls because of advanced age or disability” and those “who recently changed addresses and are not yet registered” - in other words, people functionally unable to vote. The remaining fifty-one percent of these nonvoters, meaning roughly a quarter of all adult Americans, were classsifed as either “alienated: (“the angry men and women of US politics… so disgusted with politicians and the political process that they’ve opted out”) or “disenchanted” (“these non-voters aren't so much repelled by politics as they are by the way politics is practiced”), in either case pretty much the polar opposite of “apathetic.” According to the graphs, more than seventy percent of all novoters were in fact registered, a figure that cast some ambiguity on the degree of “apathy” even among the thirty-five percent categorized as “apathetic.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: percentage of non-registered qualified voters</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(738) The interesting point at which the attitudes of voters and nonvoters did diverge was that revealed by questioning about specific policies. Voters, for example, tended to believe that the federal budget surplus should go to a tax cut. Nonvoters, who on the whole had less education and lower income, more often said that the surplus should be spent on health, welfare, and education. “Nonvoters have different needs,” is the way the Post summarized this. “But why should politicians listen?”<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(742) That this [incomes above $50,000 (1988 dollars)] was not a demographic profile of the country at large, that half the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our own country only an ideality, had come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application. </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Insider Baseball”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(750) American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(758) This notion, that the citizen’s choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a “difference,” is in fact the narrative’s most central element, and its most fictive.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The West Wing of Oz”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(785) In a 1991 Rand Institute report prepared for the Department of Defense, Benjamin C Schwarz noted that “the greed and apparent tactical incompetence of Salvadoran officers has so exhausted American experts posted to El Salvador that all the individuals interviewed for this report who have served there in the past two years believe that the Salvadoran military does not wish to win the war because in so doing it would lose the American aid that has enriched it for the past decade."</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(795) Not long after the Grenada invasion, for which the number of medals awarded eventually exceeded the number of actual combatants, the president, in his commander-in-chief role, spoke at a ceremony honoring the nation’s Medal of Honor recipients.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(797) Jeffrey K Tulis The Rhetorical Presidency, 1987: The routinization of crisis, endemic to the rhetorical presidency, is accompanied by attempted repetitions of charisma. In Reagan’s case this style was further reinforced by an ideology and a rhetoric opposed to the Washington establishment, to bureaucrats and bureaucracies… </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: speech as action and confusion</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(799) … ended by transforming the White House into a kind of cargo cult.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: woo woo, also for the 60s</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Eyes on the Prize”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(813) He [Jerry Brown] told Governor Clinton that the [1992] ticket would have his “full endorsement” in the unlikely eventuality that the platform was amended to include four provisions: “a $100 ceiling on all political contributions, a ban on political committees (PACs), universal registration undertaken by government itself (together with same-day registration), and finally election day as a holiday."</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(824) … large numbers of Americans report finding politics deeply silly, yet the necessity for this reduction is now accepted as a given.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(826) Political Scientist Walter Dean Burnham [1988?]: “The Republicans, however, are perfectly happy to declare class struggle all the time. They are always waging a one-sided class war against the constituency the Democrats nominally represent. In this sense, the Republicans are the only real political party in the United States. They stand for ideology and interest, not compromise.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Political Pornography”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(863) The genuflection toward “fairness” is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what “fairness” has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Clinton Agonistes”</div><p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(875) Perhaps because not all of the experts, authorities, and spokespersons driving this news had extensive experience with the kind of city-side beat on which it is taken for granted that the D. A.'s office will leak the cases they doubt they can make, selective prosecutorial hints had become embedded in the ongoing story as fact.</span></p><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(890) The fact that an election between two candidates arguing which has the more correct “values" left most voters with no reason to come to the polls had even come to be spoken about, by less wary professionals, as the beauty part, the bonus that would render the process finally and perpetually impenetrable. "Who cares what every adult thinks?" a Republican strategist asked The Washington Post to this point in early September 1998. "It's totally not germane to this election.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Vichy Washington”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(909) It was the solution to this problem, the naming of the citizens themselves as co-conspirators in the nation’s moral degradation, that remains the most strikingly exotic aspect of the event that came to dominate the late 1990s.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“God’s Country”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(936) Almost a year before the New Hampshire primary [2000 campaign after Clinton impeachment], then, the shape the campaign would take had already been settled upon, and it was not a shape that would require the Washington community to accomodate itself to the views of the country: what was concerning Americans, it had been decided, was the shame they had to date failed to recognize.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…. More than two-thirds of Americans polled by The Los Angeles Times in February 1999, immediately after President Clinton was tried and acquitted by the Senate, said that his misconduct had not caused them to lose respect for the office the presidency. Sixty-eight percent said that they did not want the issue raised in the 2000 presidential campaign. More than three in five said that the Republicans pursued impeachment “primarily because they wanted to hurt President Clinton politically.” Only one-third, or a number approximately the size of the Republican base, said that Republicans were motivated by concern about the effect of “Clinton’s actions on the legal and moral fabric of the country."</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(944-945) … (like the fact that the number of Americans who belonged to churches during the American Revolution constituted only seventeen percent of the population).,..</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Where I Was From</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(963) … a state where distrust of centralized government authority has historically passed for an ethic…</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(1028) Lakewood exists because at a given time in a different economy it had seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant. There are a lot of towns like Lakewood in California. They were California’s mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Such towns were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, where were believed to develop “good citizens,” and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males. During the good years, the years for which places like Lakewood or Canoga Park or El Segundo or Pico Rivera existed, the preferred resident was in fact an adolescent or post-adolescent male, ideally one already married and mortgaged, in harness to the plant, a good worker, a steady consumer, a team player, someone who played ball, a good citizen.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(1044) The perfect circularity of the enterprise, one in which politicians controlled the letting of government contracts to companies which in turn utilized the contracts to employ potential voters, did not encourage natural selection.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(1071) This gets tricky. Notice the way in which the author [Victor Davis Hanson] implicitly frames his indictment of himself and his family for turning away from the pure agrarian life as an indictment of the rest of us, for failing to support that life.</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-35551189749880200942023-03-26T20:07:00.003-07:002023-03-26T20:07:29.180-07:00Notes on The Persuaders<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_The Persuaders: at the Front Lines of the Fight for Heartsm Minds, and Democracy_ by Anand Giridharadas</span></p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Alfred A Knopf, 2022</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 9780593318997</span><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Dividing to Conquer</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(7) “The IRA [Internet Research Agency] knows that in political warfare disgust is a much more powerful tool than anger,” [Darren] Linvill and [Patrick] Warren have written. “Anger drives people to the polls, disgust drives countries apart.”</span></div><div><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(33-34) “The thing about our movement is that we’re too woke,” [Linda] Sarsour told me, “which is why we don’t have mass mobilization in the way that we should,” In choosing the word “woke,” she was using a term that once had real meaning in a Black radical tradition - “Today our very survival depends on oiur ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change,” Dr King once said - and had since been co-opted by the political right as a catchall label for the more pluralist, egalitarian future than many white people feared.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(48) The problem she [Loretta Ross] observed with one’s 90-percenters is that instead of focusing on the vast overlap, they fixated on the 10 percent divergence.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(49) For an activist who works in coalition, 75-percenters require a further skill beyond what 90-percenters do. You don’t merely have to tolerate others focising on different things, attacking a broadly similar vision of the prolbem in their own, distinct way. You have to accept large islands of disagreement in a sea of assent. With your 75-percenters, there is still so much you can get done together. But [Loretta] Ross obsreved an excessive interest in that nonoverlapping 25 percent. It was a scab people wanted to keep picking instead of doing the things they could do.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…You approach those people [50-percenters] by first accepting they don't want the world you want. Their vision is different. But if you can understand their values and needs and look for openings, as when Ross’s father fell into dread about his health care, you can, in addition to helping them, pry open a closed mind.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(50) You have to spend a lot of time on the concept of fear, because a lot of people, particularly in that 25-percenter category, operate from platforms of fear,” she [Loretta Ross] told me. “Fear of immigrants, fear of queers, fear of this, fear of that. And so you can have really productive conversations talking about their fears, but you have to take their fears seriously for them to even be able to listen to you. If you dismiss their fears, they don’t listen. They don’t think you’re taking the fact that they’re afraid seriously enough."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(51) Loretta Ross: “I think as part of the movement to end violence against women, we made some overpromises. We told people, particularly rape survivors, that we could create safe spaces, when in fact all we can do is create spaces to be brave together."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(55) She told them before they worry about those they were trying to win over, they should look at themselves. "You have to be in a loving, healing space to call anybody in,” [Loretta] Ross told me. “You can’t do it from anger, because it's just going to end up badly. So you have to asess why you’re doing it. What’s your motivation? Are you trying help this person learn, or are you actually trying to change them?”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Movement Building</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(70) Alicia Garza: … the longer I’m in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn’t about finding your tribe - it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(71) Progressives, Garza said, too often seek out united fronts when, in fact, they should be forging popular fronts. Drawing on Marx, she defines popular fronts as “alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs, for the purpose of achieving a short- to intermediate-term goal, while united fronts are long-term alliances based on the highest level of political alignment."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(74) Alicia Garza: So the moral of this story is how you make people feel matters. And sometimes part of our purist cultre can be not having room for the waking among the work. And because of that, we just kind of keep circulating among the woke. Forgeting that the whole point is not to be cliques.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(102) Kurt [white father of an adopted Afro-American child]: “I think the Black community will go, ‘Great, big deal. We've been grieving for hundreds of years. So yay! Congratulations. Nice work, Suck it up, Change. Let’s go.’”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: But where do we go, what do we do, what is our defined task and common vision?</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(119) Personal narrative and emotional appeals were how a politics that presented like change but avoided real change were sold to people, so they wouldn’t notice how little they were getting.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(148) Ben McDonald: “Whenever you confront somebody and you win, don’t walk away from the table. Always give them the golden gate of retreat.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The point was not that you let the other side advance. The word “retreat” was key. That was the intransigent part. You needed your vision of progress to prevail over theirs. What was up for grabs was how it would go down. Retreat itself was not negotiable, but there could always be ways of their retreating that bred resentment and made the conflict live on forever and other ways of retreating that made those who had lost or had changed their mind feel considered and seen, feel that they still had their dignity intact, which allowed them to let go of having to be right and having to win.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Geneva;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">AOC</span></span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(192) AOC: “Some people are of the belief that electoralism is broken beyond repair and it is a dead end when you look at the profound influence of dark money and X, Y, Z ways that American democracy is fragile, imperiled, or broken. The thing I keep coming back to is that it really isn’t one or the other. It’s that we need each other.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Ther are certain things that can be accomplished electorally that simply cannot be done with grassroots organizing,” she continued. “There are some things that can be done with collective mass movement that will never be accomplished through electoral means. And, in fact, going beyond that binary, both of these types of work and organizing are necessary for the success of the other. Yet you will have hard-liners in both categories.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: “Use EVERYTHING!” as my old martial arts teacher would exhort us. And there are more than just electoral politics and mass movements.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(202) AOC: I don’t value the things you think I value. That precisely is the source of power. The thing they fear the most is what they don’t control.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Anat Shenker-Osorio</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(220) The ranks of the persuadable change from issue to issue, year to year. But [Anat] Shenker-Osorio thinks about it as a rule of 20-60-20. When you ask people to rate their support for various issues (as opposed to parties, about which people are far more partisan and tribal), a fifth of people are committed to your side, a fifth of people are reliably for the opposition; most people are “moderate,” which is to say their minds are in play.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(226) Something struck her. On Luntz’s tests, which tracked the attitude of base, opposition, and moderates listening to a message, the winning one was defined as that which raised base approval, raised moderate approval, and _reduced_ opposition approval. Not the message that raised all three.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…It was that you should seek out ways to please your base, get it chanting in ways that encircled and wooed the persuadables, and, at the same time, alienate and marginalize the opposition. The left needed, if you’ll pardon the expression, to dial for blue meat.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(228) To sum up the [Anat] Shenker-Osorio method thus far: Don’t dilute the vision to reach out to a middle that isn’t in the middle but is confused. Thrill your base; alienate the people who aren’t going to vote for you anyway but will do you the favor, if you’re setting the rhetorical agenda, of yelling your ideas all over town. Don’t be afraid to call out, to woo the right people and drive away the right people. And there was more. These callouts, she argued, needed to be nested within a positive galvanizing mission that her allies on the left too often forget to include while deploring problems.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(231) Voters aren’t stirred to reduce harm, Shenker-Osorio said. They’re motivated to create good. </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">...“Paint the beautiful tomorrow”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…”The entire premise of my work is, ’Say what you’re for.’ The rest is commentary.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(231-232) “I genuinely believe,” she continued, “it is a Republican wet dream that they have us talking constantly about everything that we oppose because (a) it gives them more airtime, (b) it scares the shit out of people, and when people are afraid, what they seek is a more authoritarian, more restrictive, more conservative kind of leadership and structure, (c) it has us not speak about what we’re for.” She joked with colleagues that despite all her research into the nuances of different messages, there was really just one winning message for her side. “That message is, ‘We can have nice things.’"</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(235) “What you fight,” [Anat] Shenker-Osorio likes to say, “you feed.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Taoism, aikido</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(238) … the fight (for voting rights) should be characterized as seeking the freedom to vote.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… “We should care for our land, we should care for our earth, because it’s the American way. It’s what we’ve always done.” To her ear, this sounded off, because tradition, doing something because it’s what we’ve always done, is a frame that will never benefit the progressive left.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(240) The message ordering [Anat] Shenker-Osorio suggests instead goes like this: shared value, problem, solution.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… A fundamental thing many people who disagree with you share with you is the desire to feel like good people. If the message is venturing into challenging territory, it helps to ground it first in a shared belief.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(249) What the recent surveys showed was that when you asked Americans of all persuasions what values they most cared about, freedom consistently topped the list… “This really, truly is, over and again, the core value Americans associate with this country,” Shenker-Osorio told the the group…</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Freedom from or freedom for?</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(253) Shenker-Osorio: “We don’t have time to be genuflecting at the altar of bipartisanship, and pretending that Republicans are a party, that they are anything other than an authoritarian faction. We do not have time.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(256) An astonishing 17 percent of Americans were said to be QAnon believers now [as of 2021]</span><div><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: 17 percent supported Dick Cheney after he shot someone in the face </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Deprogramming Cultification</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(259) Once again, they [deprogrammers after Diane Benscoter was with the Moonies] weren’t trying to make her believe anything particular in that moment. They were illustrating the anatomy of brainwashing in general. It was helpful that the manipulation in question had nothing to do with the Moonies, belonging to a completely alien situation. People have less elaborate fencing systems to protect them from ideas on subjects they have little investment in. So she could see the art of manipulation more clearly and objectively. And then, having seen it, she could begin to make connections herself.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…Attempting to persuade her [Diane Benscoter] of new beliefs - of better biblical interpretations - hadn’t worked. But making space for new beliefs to enter by deflating the old ones was more effective.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(262) Where cults thrived, something in the society wasn’t working right.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(266) [Diane] Benscoter set up a nonprofit called Antidote, and these days it is in the early phase of a potentially vast project on how societies can vaccinate citizens against the virus of cults, disinformation, and manipulation.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… She wants to develop educational videos that might wake cult victims up, by playing on the only desire she has found can compete with the desire to have the world explained simply and totally - the desire not to be conned. She imagines video listicles like “Ten ways to tell if you;re being psychologically manipulated."</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(268) John Cook, Monash University “a systematic, step-by-step process for identifying fallacies”: </span><a href="https://skepticalscience.com/Resoruces-to-give-facts-a-fighting-chance-against-misinformation.html">https://skepticalscience.com/Resoruces-to-give-facts-a-fighting-chance-against-misinformation.html</a><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(271) Cook’s website Skeptical Science: </span><a href="https://skepticalscience.com/">https://skepticalscience.com/</a><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(273) Why couldn’t the opponents of misinformaiton do the same? Instead of answering disinformation with better information, try to discredit the misinformers! It was in keeping with what [Diane] Benscoter had experienced when the efforts to replace her beliefs with truer belifes had failed, but then the warning that she had been deceived by unscrupulous people using unscrupulous methods had worked.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(285) He [Cesar Torres] was the guy who tried to tell himself what John Cook had argued: that the crazies weren’t perpetrators so much as victims of a society awash in mis- and disinformation.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Deep Canvassing</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(299) “Over time,” [Steve] Deline continued, “it became cleat that, ‘Oh, all of these answers we’re trying to give aren’t helping.’ We can try to answer people’s concerns with facts and information. And their fears about gay people, and about their church being forced to do something, and their righteous indignation about lefties pushing things on them - there’s no answer we can give that dispels these fears. They’re actually in a place where they're wrestling with some deeply seated emotions. The thing that actually made a different was inviting them to talk about their lives, and then things they've experienced and their stories, and sharing our stories.</span></div><div><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(300) [Steve] Deline and his fellow canvassers didn’t think of themselves as being divided against their targets on the other side of the doors so much as they thought of their targets as being divided against themselves. They saw tham as being lost, grasping. It was another way of saying that Shenker-Osorio had described about the swing voter being confused, not centrist. (She would eventually advise deep canvassing effforts around the 2020 elections.) The canvasser’s opportunity wasn't to implant something of their own, something foreign to the target, into them. Rather, it was to pit some things going on inside them against other things going on inside them, to get them to re-rank these things.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Another possibility is to approach people as if we are all confused and trying to figure it out so let’s do it together. As if we had a common positive vision.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(301) First, the canvasser was to make contact</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Second, the canvasser was to create a “nonjudgmental context.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(302) Vox: “The new research shows that if you want to change someone’s mind, you need to have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen. It’s not about calling people out or labeling them fill-in-the-bland-phobic. Which makes it feel like a big departure from a lot of the current political dialogue.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… Third, the canvasser was to exchange personal narratives…</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… Fourth, the canvasser was to invite the analogic perspective taking. Was there a time _you_ needed support. Was there a time _you_ needed health care but struggled to access it?</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… Fifth, the canvasser was to make an explicit case. Here, after doing much listening and eliciting, the canvasser spoke more openly of their own feeloings about the subject at hand.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… Sixth, the canvasser, having sown some cognitive dissonance, was to seek to help the subject wrestle with it out loud.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(303) Seventh, and only seventh, the canvasser was to respond to the subject’s concerns with talking points and facts. As Deline had observed, this seventh step was step one for many amateurs.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… “Only after rapport had been established and stories shared would canvassers address concerns.” To be fact-checked, in other words, had prerequisites. It helped first to feel heard, cared for, respected, seen in the fullness of one’s complexity and even, yes, confusion.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Eighth, and finally, the canvasser was to ask the subject to rate their support for the policy question again. Has our conversation changed your opinion? the canvasser asks. The scholars who helped build up the method call this the “rehearsal of opinion change,” with the subject often lured into “active processing” of their own ideas and stories and background and the cognitive dissonance that might have surfaced. The theory is that political opinions are often hastily formed from scanty information. Following a substantive chat at the door, the subject is encouraged to think more slowly about whether their view comports with their deepest values, with what they know to be true, with their sense of themselves, with their experiences.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(308) For every hundred voters the campaign spoke to about establishing universal health care, including for undocumented immigrants, it moved around eight of them, according to the resulting research published by the scholars Joshua Kallla of Yale and David Broockman of Berkeley.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: 8-10% moivement</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(311) He [Matthew, a person Cesar the deep canvasser is talking to] was a fount less of political opinnions than of political emotions. He felt betrayed, lied to, ignored, condescended to. Many of those feelings were grounded in the realities of American life. But he then felt a need to assign ideas to these emotions.</span></div></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-10135691765981808052023-01-11T19:51:00.001-08:002023-01-11T19:51:38.680-08:00Friendly Fascism<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Bertram Gross worked on employment and economic issues for the Senate and the President during the FDR and Truman years and went on to a career as a professor of political science and public affairs. In 1980, before Reagan was elected, he wrote Friendly Fascism (ISBN 0871313170) to warn the USAmerican public about the dangers to democracy he saw developing, a more “friendly” Fascism which was as violent and authoritarian as the original.</span></p><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">He thought some of the characteristics of Friendly Fascism would include</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>Drive to maintain unity of “Free World” empire, contain or absorb communist or socialist regimes, and perhaps retreat to “Fortress America”</div><div><br /></div><div>A more integrated Big-Business-Government power structure, backed up by remolded militarism, new technocratic ideologies, and more advanced arts of ruling and fooling the public</div><div><br /></div><div>A more unbalanced economy, rooted in extended stagflation, manipulated shortages, more junk, and environmental degradation</div><div><br /></div><div>Subtle subversion, through manipulative use and control of democratic machinery, parties, and human rights</div><div><br /></div><div>Informationial offensives, backed up by high-technology monitoring, to manage minds of elites and immobilize masses </div><div><br /></div><div>Rationed rewards of power and money for elites, extended professionalism, accelerated consumerism for some, and social services conditional on recipients' good behavior</div><div><br /></div><div>Direct terror applied through low-level violence and professionalized, low-cost escalation, with indirect terror through ethnic conflicts, multiple scapegoats, and organized disorder</div><div><br /></div><div>More varied and extensive anxiety relief through not only traditional escape mechanisms but also through sex, drugs, madness, and cults</div><div><br /></div><div>Internal viabiity grounded on system-strengthening reforms, multilevel co-optation, creative counterresistance and innovative apathetics</div></blockquote><div></div></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-91502747904537908822022-11-17T19:48:00.001-08:002022-11-17T19:48:53.579-08:00The Sheep Look Up<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><u>The Sheep Look Up</u> by John Brunner</span></p><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><div>NY: Ballantine Books, 1972</div><div>ISBN 0-345-24948-8-195</div><div><br /></div><div><div>(frontispiece) Please help</div><div>Keep pier clean</div><div>Throw refuse overside</div><div>sign pictured in God's Own Junkyard edited by Peter Blake</div></div><div><br /></div><div>(page 14-15) Sharp on nine the Trainites had scattered caltraps in the roadway and created a monumental snarl-up twelve blocks by seven. The fuzz, as usual, was elsewhere - there were always plenty of sympathizers willing to cause a diversion. It was impossible to guess how many allies the movement had; at a rough guess, though, one could say that in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, LA or San Francisco people were apt to cheer, while in the surrounding suburbs or the Midwest people were apt to go fetch guns. In other words, they had least support in the areas which had voted for Prexy.</div><br />"Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME!<br /><br />"And in every case the inscription was concluded with a rough egg-shape above a saltire - the simplified ideogrammatic version of the invariable Trainite symbol, a skull and crossbones reduced to<br />0<br />X</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(291) At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist. Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant. Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">The same day, in Northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about 200 of the last 600 in the state. The sign said: FOR EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">The promise was carried out with Schmeiser machine-pistols. The actual score was 18 people for 17 trees.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Close enough.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(291-292) But the most ingenious single coup was later laid at the door of a Chicano working for the California State Board of Education. (Prudently he wasn't behind the door at the time; he'd emigrated via Mexico to Uruguay.) He'd used the computerized student records to organize a free mailing of literally thousands of identical envelopes, every one addressed to somebody receiving public education in the state. They never did find out exactly how many there had been, because although they were all postmarked July 1st the mails were so lousy nowadays they arrived over a period of a week, and by the end of that time parents alert to protect their kids from commie propaganda had been warned to destroy the envelopes before the intended recipients could open them. But they guessed that 50,000 did get through.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">On each envelope was printed: "A FREE GIFT FOR YOU ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, COURTESY OF THE "BE A BETTER AMERICAN LEAGUE." Inside there was a handsome print, in copperplate engraving style, showing a tall man at a table with several companions handing pieces of cloth to a group is nearly naked Indians of both sexes.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Underneath it was the caption: First in a Series Commemorating Traditional American Values. The Governor of Massachusetts Distributes Smallpox-infected Blankets to the Indians.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(320) … Prexy said quote, Well, you don’t have to go abroad to know our way of life is the best in the world. End quote.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(351-352) … unanimously ascribed to fear of Trainite atrocities by traffic experts across the nation. In many places the car per hour count was the lowest for 30 years. Those who did venture out this Labor Day often did not meet with the welcome they expected. In Bar Harbor, Maine, townsfolk formed vigilante patrols to turn away drivers of steam and electric cars, persons carrying health foods, and other suspected Trainites. Two fatalities are reported following clashes between tourists and residents. Two more occurred at Milford, Pennsylvania, when clients at a restaurant, angered at not obtaining items listed on the menu, fired it with gasoline bombs. The owner later claimed that supplies had been interrupted by food-truck hijackers. Commenting on the event by the shore of his private lake in Minnesota, Prexy said, quote, Any man has a right to his steak and potatoes, unquote. California: experts at assessing mortar damage to the bay bridge…</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(369-370) reading, as you might say, from the top down:</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Dead satellites.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Discarded first and second stages of rockets, mainly second.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Fragments of vehicles which exploded in orbit.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Experimental material, E. G. reflective copper needles.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Combustion compounds from rocket exhausts.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Experimental substances intended to react with the stratospheric ozone, EE., sodium.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Very light radioactive fallout.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">CO2.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Aircraft exhaust.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Medium fallout.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Rainmaking compounds.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Smoke.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Sulfur dioxide.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Lead alkyls.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Mercaptans and other bad smells.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Car exhausts.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Locomotive exhausts.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">More smoke.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Local fallout.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Products accidentally ventilated from the underground nuclear tests.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Oceanic fluorine.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Nitric acid.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Sulfuric acid.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Sewage.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Industrial effluents.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Detergents.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Selenium and cadmium from mine tailings.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Fumes from garbage incinerators burning plastic.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Nitrates, phosphates, fungicidal mercuric compounds from "compacted soils.”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Oil.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Oil derived insecticides.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Defoliants and herbicides.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Radio active this from aquifers contaminated by underground explosions, chiefly tritium.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Lead, arsenic, Oilwell sludge, fly ash, asbestos.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Polyethylene, polystyrene, polyurethane, glass, cans.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Nylon, dacron, rayon, teryline, stylene, orlon, other artificial fibers.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Scrap.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Garbage.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Concrete and cement.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">A great deal of short-wave radiation.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Carcinogens, teratogens and mutagens.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Synergistic poisons.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Hormones, antibiotics, additives, medicaments.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Drugs.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Solanine, oxalic acid, caffeine, cyanide, myristicin, pressor amines, copper sulfate, dihydrochalcones, naringin, ergot.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Botulinus.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Mustard gas, chlorine, Lewisite, phosgene, prussic acid. </div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">T, Q, GA, GB, GD, GE, GF, VE, VX, CAA, CN, CS, DM, PL, BW, BZ.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">CO.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">- to name but a few.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(409-411) Thank you. Friends and fellow Americans, no president of the United States has ever had a more melancholy task than I have at this moment. It is my sad duty to inform you that our country isn't a state of war. A war that is not of our choosing. And, moreover, not a war with bombs and tanks and missiles, not a war that is fought by soldiers gallant on the field of battle, sailors daring the hostile sea, airmen streaking valiant through the skies – but a war that must be fought by you, the people of the United States.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">We have been attacked with the most cowardly, most monstrous, the most evil weapons ever devised by wicked men. We are the victims of a combined chemical and biological attack. You are all aware that our crops have failed disastrously last summer. We, the members of my cabinet and I, delayed announcing the truth behind that story in the van I hope that we might contain the threat of the jigras. We can no longer do so. It is known that they were deliberately introduced into this country. They are the same pest which ruined the entire agriculture of Central America and led to the sad and unwished-for conflict in Honduras.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">That by itself we could endure. We are resilient, brave, long-suffering people, we Americans. What is necessary, we will do. But alas there are some among us who bear the name ”American" and are traitors, determined to overthrow the legitimate government, freely elected, to make the work of the police impossible, to denigrate and decry the country we love. Some of them adhere to alien creeds, the communism of Marx and Mao; some, detestably, adhere to a creed equally alien yet spawned within our own borders - that of the Trainites, whose leader, thank God, is safely in jail awaiting his just punishment for kidnapping an innocent boy and imprisoning him and infecting him with foul diseases that endangered his life.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">We are fighting and enemy already in our midst. He must be recognized by his words as well as his deeds. One of the great cities of our nation today writhes in agony because the water supply, the precious diamond stream that nourishes our lives, has been poisoned. You may say: how can we resist an enemy whose weapon is the very faucet at the sink, the very water-cooler we go to for relief in the factory or the office? And I will say this! It is you, the people of our great land, who must provide the answer!</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">It is not going to be easy. It is going to be very hard. Our enemies have succeeded in reducing our stocks of food to the point where we must share and share alike. Following my speech, you will be informed of the emergency arrangements we are putting in a hand for equal and fair distribution of the food we have. You will be informed, too, of the plans we have for silencing known traitors and subversives. But the remainder is up to you. You know who the enemy is – you met him at work, you heard him talking treason at a party, you heard about his attendance at a commie-front meeting, you saw the anti-American books in his library, you refused to laugh at his so-called jokes that dragged the name of the United States in the mud, you shut your ears to his anti-American propaganda, you told your kids to keep away from his kids who are being taught to follow in his traitor's footsteps, you saw him at a Trainite demonstration, you know how he lied and slandered the loyal Americans who have built our country up until it is the richest and most powerful nation in history.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">My friends, you elected me to lead you into the third century of our country's existence. I know you can be trusted to do what is right. You know who the enemy is. Go get him before he gets you!</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(427) Commenting on the speed of this return to more-or-less normal circumstances in Denver, the President said, quote, It will be a source of dismay to our enemies to see how rapidly we can get the ship upstate back on an even keel. End quote. Pockets of Trainite and black militant resistance in city centers up and down the nation are collapsing as hunger and cold take their toll, and the illnesses which are everywhere rife. New smallpox warnings have been issued in Little Rock and Charleston, Virginia. Pressure to put Austin Train on trial continues to grow, as the long delay has encouraged his supporters who eluded the mass roundup of subversives to resume their sabotage attacks and propaganda. Jigra [an invasive worm devastating crops] infestation has been reported in Canada and Mexico today. Now the weather. Over much of the West and Midwest acid rain has been falling, the result of atmospheric action on smoke containing sulfur, and…</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(442-443) “Thank you, my sick friends," Austin said as the cameras closed on him. “Poisoned, diseased, and now about to be starved as well… No, I'm not joking; I wish I were. And above all, I wasn't joking when I spoke of the people who have put me on trial as being stupid.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">"That is the worst thing they have done to you: damaged your intelligence. And it's small consolation that now they are doing it to themselves.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">“Those charges that the intelligence of people in this country is being undermined by pollution are all true – if they weren't, do you think I'd be here, the wrong man, the man who didn't kidnap Hector Bamberley? Who could have been so silly?”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">There was laughter. Nervous, drive-away-the-ghosts laughter.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">“And because of that"– he drew himself up straight –"At all costs, to me, to anyone, at all costs if the human race is to survive, the forcible exportation of the way of life invented by these stupid men must… be... stopped.”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">His voice suddenly rose to a roar.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">"The planet Earth can't afford it!”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">He's got them, Peg thought. I never believed he'd do it. But he's got them. Christ, that cameraman: he shaking, shaking from head to foot! In a moment he's going to weep like Petronella did!</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">“Our way of life," Austin said, resuming a conversational tone. ”Yes… You're aware that we're under martial law? It's been claimed that we're at war, and that at Denver we suffered a sneak chemical attack. As a matter of fact, the stuff that caused the Denver Madness is a military psychotomimetic based on the ergot that infects rye, known by the US Army code ‘BW,’ manufactured on an experimental basis at Fort Detrick, Maryland, from 1959 to 1963, stored at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal until the latter year,and then disposed of in steel drums in an abandoned silver mine. Are you interested in hearing what happened to it?"</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(445) “When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare to drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor's bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don't wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year's vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with the garbage? Which of you right now is not suffering from a nagging minor complaint - bowel upset, headache, catarrh, or like Mr. Bamberley there” - he pointed - "acute claudication of a major artery? Someone should attend to him please he needs an immediate dose of a good vasodilator.”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">(445-446) "In Europe, as you know, they've killed the Mediterranean, just as we killed the Great Lakes. They're in a fair way to killing the Baltic, with help from the Russians who've already killed the Caspian. Well, this is living organism we call Mother Earth can't stand that treatment for long – her bowels tormented, her arteries clogged, her lungs choked… but what happened inevitably as a result? Such as social upheaval that all thoughts of spreading this – this cancer of ours have had to be forgotten! Yes], there's hope! When starving refugees are besieging frontiers, armies can't be spared to propagate the cancer any further. They have to be called home – like ours!”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Again his voice rose to that pitch that commanded total attention.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">"Keep it here! For God's sake if you believe in Him, but in any case for Man’s sake, keep it here! Although it's already too late for us, it may not be too late for the rest of the planet! We owe it to those who come after that there never be another Mekong Desert! There must never be another Oklahoma dustbowl! There must never be another dead sea! I beg you, I plead with you to take a solemn oath: though your children will be twisted, and don't waited, and slow of speech, there will remain somewhere, for long enough, a place where children grow up healthy, bright and sane! Vow it! Swear it! Pledge it for this species we have so nearly – Yes?”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Blinking at the cameraman with tear-wet cheeks, now sniveled, " I'm sorry, Mr. Train, but it's no good!" He tapped the earphones he was wearing. "The president has ordered you to be cut off!”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">There was total silence. It was as though Austin were an inflated dummy and someone had just located the valve to let the gas out. He seemed inches shorter as he turned aside, and scarcely anyone heard him a mutter,”Well, I didn try.”</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">“But you mustn't stop!" Peg heard herself scream, leaping to her feet. "You –“</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">The wall behind him buckled and the ceiling leaned on his head with the full weight of a concrete beam. Then the roof began to cascade down on everybody in a stream of rubble.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /><div>(456) We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on - in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we’ve been doing for the past half century - if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species. [The approximate population of USAmerica at the time the book was written was 200,000,000.]</div><div><br /></div><div>(456-457) Opening the door to the visiting doctor, also to apologize for the flour on her hands – she had been baking – Mrs. Byrne sniffed. Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire! </div><div><br /></div><div>"We ought to call the brigade!" She exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”</div><div><br /></div><div>"The brigade would have a long way to go," the doctor told her curtly."It's from America. The wind's blowing that way."</div></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-60932443316786221262022-10-13T19:37:00.006-07:002022-10-15T20:52:38.004-07:00Reinventing Collapse<p><u>Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects</u> by Dmitry Orlov</p><div>Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2008</div><div>ISBN: 978-0-86571-606-3</div><div><br /></div><div>(page 5) Wars take resources; when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>(8-9) But I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent and less capable of bouncing back.</div><div><br /></div><div>(11) There is a lesson to be learned here: when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.</div><div><br /></div><div>Editorial Comment: Mutual aid, the way people pulled together in the first few months of the COVID pandemic. That was a platform which could have been built upon much more solidly than it has, if it has.</div><div><br /></div><div>(31) It is in the nature of all information to want to spread freely, and networked computers make it ridiculously easy for it to do so.</div><div><br /></div><div>(37) There is a little secret that everyone knows: the United States military does not know how to win. It just knows how to blow things up. Blowing things up may be fun, but it cannot be the only element in a winning strategy. The other key element is winning the peace once major combat operations are over, and here the mighty US military tends to fall squarely on its face and lay prone until political support for the war is withdrawn and the troops are brought back home.</div><div><br /></div><div>Editorial Comment: “We don’t do nation-building.” </div><div><br /></div><div>(53) Camus also indicated a specific failure of both systems [Communism and Capitalism]: their inability to provide creative, meaningful work. We see this failure in the very high rates of depression. We attempt to define depression as a psychological ailment, but it is a symptom of a cultural failure: the inability to make life meaningful or enjoyable.</div><div><br /></div><div>Editorial Comment: All my notes on Gandhian or nonviolent economics are available through <a data-cke-saved-href="http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html" href="http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html">http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html</a> <br />The concept of swadeshi, local production, a daily practice of producing something, Gandhi also called the soul of satyagraha, truth force, political and social nonviolence.</div><div><br /></div><div>(58) ... the US desperately needs an enemy to justify having a military that cannot win. This enemy must be safe to rail against, but obviously too powerful to attack directly, leaving a proud and purposeful paralysis as the only possible choice of action.</div><div><br /></div><div>(82) The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash. At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer. But once the consumer is disposed of, who will be left to take him out with the trash....</div><div><br /></div><div>Speaking of agricultural disasters as a class, it is worth noting at the outset that agriculture is seriously dull work, best done by decidedly simple people who do not mind bending down to touch the ground all day until they look like hunchbacks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Editorial Comment: This is ridiculous and offensively stupid on a variety of levels unless, of course, it's joke.</div><div><br /></div><div>(85) Shortly before the Soviet Union's collapse, it became known informally that the ten percent of farmland allocated to kitchen gardens (in meager tenth of a hectare plots) accounted for some 90 percent of domestic food production.</div><div><br /></div><div>Editorial Comment: He means fruits and vegetables not meats and grains. USAmerican Victory Gardens of WWII harvested an estimated 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) of fruits and vegetables in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables or 50% of all the produce consumed that year (<a data-cke-saved-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden#United_States_2" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden#United_States_2">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden#United_States_2</a>). 1944 was only the second growing season of the program. Imagine what we might have now if we'd continued with a Victory Garden and local agriculture program since then. Imagine what we could do if we started now, and did it consistently, year after year. See City Agriculture at <a data-cke-saved-href="http://cityag.blogspot.com" href="http://cityag.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://cityag.blogspot.com</a> for years of links to urban and advanced agriculture.</div><div><br /></div><div>(91) In the United States, medicine is for profit. People seem to think nothing of this fact. There are really very few fields of endeavor to which Americans would deny the profit motive. It could be said that making a profit off the suffering of sick people is simply unethical: it comes down to exploiting the helpless - a predatory practice that a civilized society cannot tolerate.</div><div><br /></div><div>(114) Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?</div><div><br /></div><div>Editorial Comment: Voting is the least of democracy, which is do it yourself anyway, but in the present circumstances (today and the foreseeable future) a necessary and sometimes useful tool.</div><div><br /></div><div>(133) This, then, is the correct stance vis a vis the money economy: you should appear to have no money or significant possessions. But you should have access to resources, such as food, clothing, medicine, places to stay and work and even money. What you do with your money is up to you. For example, you can simply misplace it, the way squirrels do with nuts and acorns. Or you can convert it into communal property of one sort or another. You should avoid getting paid, but you should accept gifts and, of course, give gifts in return. You should never work for money, but always donate your time and effort charitably. You should have a minimum of personal possessions, but plenty to share with others. Developing such a stance is hard, but, once you do, life actually gets better. Moreover, by adopting such a stance, you become collapse-proof.</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-14877276224438041022022-09-28T19:22:00.000-07:002022-09-28T19:22:03.785-07:00The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">In memory of Curtis Jones, student of strategy and history</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><u>The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe</u> by James Chambers</span></p><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Atheneum, 1985</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 0-689-70693-6</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(page 6) “The greatest pleasure,” he [Chingis Khan] had said, “is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(24-25) And by the time the feasting and the entertainments had ended a secret treaty had been signed between Venice and the Mongol Empire. The traveling Venetian merchants would make detailed reports of the economic and military movements in the countries that they visited and spread such propaganda as the Mongols required, and in return wherever the Mongols rode all the other trading stations would be destroyed and Venice would be left with a monopoly.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(34) There were many Christians in the east who followed the teachings of Nestorius, a former patriarch of Constantinople who had set out for the east in the fifth century, after being deposed by the Council of Ephesus for refusing to recognize the Virgin Mary as the “Mother of God” and preaching that Christ was merely a man who had been endued with the Holy Spirit.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(36) The Nestorian Christians who rode with Chingis Khan were Kerait Mongols.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(45) His was the first great empire to know religious freedom and when the first western visitors reached Karakorum they were amused to find a city where churches, mosques, and temples stood side by side.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… and as a gesture to “consumer protection,” the death penalty was prescribed for merchants who allowed themselves to go bankrupt for the third time.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(60) Apart from achieving its obvious purpose, the great hunt, which was controlled throughout by messengers and signals, must also have given the Mongol soldiers practical experience of the strategic principle that was to be such an essential basis of their supremacy, and which Napoleon later described as the first necessity of war, “unity of command.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(65-66) Napoleon said that the strength of an army, like the quantity of motion in mechanics, is estimated by the mass multiplied by the velocity, and on the basis of this formula alone the Mongol army that set out to conquer Europe, moving at more than twice the speed of its enemies, was the match for an army at least twice its size. Yet the numerical odds against which the Mongols had been victorious were very often more than two to one and many of the principles developed and affirmed by theorists and strategists of later ages were already known to the Mongol “nation in arms” simply as military common sense. At the end of the eighteenth century Clausewitz argued that the key to victory in all but a limited war was the destruction of an enemy’s army on the battlefield, while his most distinguished opponent, Jomini, a general on Napoleon’s staff, maintained that the key to victory was the progressive domination of the enemy’s territory; with their usual thoroughness the Mongols believed and put into practice both theories.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(85) The first western country to be affected by the Russian campaign was England. Every year ships from the countries around the Baltic used to sail to Yarmouth to buy the rich herring catch, but in 1238 the people of Novgorod and its dependencies, who were preparing for the return of the Mongols and repelling the lesser incursions by opportunists in the west, kept their ships at home, while the ships from Sweden, Gotland and the Livonian coast were being used to transport the invading armies of Earl Birger and the Livonian Knights. Consequently no ships came to England that year. There was a glut on the herring market, merchants went bankrupt and even deep inland fdifty pickled herrings could be bought for a shilling.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… Not only Frederick, but also King Louis IX of France and King Henry III of England received Moslem ambassadors, of whom the most notorious were the representatives of the sinister “Old Man of the Mountains” who commanded the Ismaili “Order of the Assassins."</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(86-87) In a conservative, reactionary and superstitious age, Frederick II stood out as a progressive and enlightened despot. The grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and King Roger II of Sicily, he had been brought up in Palermo as a proud Sicilian. He spoke Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and Arabic; he had a passion for scientific experiment; he had studied astronomy; and he was also an accomplished falconer and an erudite ornithologist. Since his scholarship had led him to look upon his European contemporaries with arrogant contempt and reject their backward traditions, his reason and his curiosity had led him to reach out towards the superior world of Islam and regard its princes as his only cultural and intellectual equals. His Moslem mercenaries and his harem so scandalized the prudish and newly ascetic Christian clergy, against whose attempts to extend their temporal power he was an implacable enemy, that they gave him the nickname “Stupor Mundi."</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(96) … in the last resort Mongols could always retreat faster than any European army could advance.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(105) In Germany it was said that the Tartars were the lost tribes of Israel and that Jews were smuggling arms to them, using barrels which they pretended were filled with poisoned wine, with the result that at several border posts Jewish merchants were indiscriminately slaughtered.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(110) Among eight Mongol prisoners captured in Austria durring this reconaissance there was an Englishman. He had once been a Templar, but after being banished from England for an unknown crime, he had travelled through the Middle East and entered the Mongol service as an interpreter. It was said that he spoke seven languages.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(111) Venetian merchants had provided the Mongols’ intelligence service with most of its information about the distribution of the European armies and the political allegiances of their princes, and Subedei would have been unlikely to allow an army to threaten so valuable an ally.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(116) John of Plano Carpini was to travel through Russia and deliver his letter [from the Pope] in person to the “King of the Tartars.”</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Friar John was the most experienced and distinguished of the ambassadors. Aged about sixty, he had been born in Plano Carpini, a town near Perugia now known as Magione, and had been one of Saint Francis’s first disciples. He was a jovial monk whose loyalty and solicitude for his brethren had earned him their love and respect and whose charm and judgement had won him the friendship of the Bohemian and Silesian royal families. He was so heavily built and overweight that while he had been provincial vicar of Saxony he had found it easier to forsake the dignity of a horse to travel through the countryside on the back of a donkey.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(139) Sergius maintained that the khan favoured the Christians and was contemplating baptism, but the friars could see for themselves that the worthy successor to Chingis Khan was careful to appear impartial, sharing his patronage equally among the religions of his subjects and diplomatically attending all their important ceremonies. His mother Sorkaktani, who had died soon after his election, had been a Christian all her life, but she had set him a judicious example by founding a richly endowed Moslem college in Bukhara.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">… Archaeological research has revealed that it [Karakorum] covered an area of about one and a half square miles with suburbs beyond its four gates and Friar William [of Rubruck] was probably underestimating its size. It contained twelve Buddhist, Taoist and Shamanist temples, two Moslem mosques, one Nestorian Christian church and palaces for members of the imperial family and court officials.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: William of Rubruck wrote an account of his visit to the Khan</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(149) Just as the death of Ogedei had saved Christendom, the death of Mangku saved Islam.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(155) The battle of Ain Jalut has been recorded as one of the most decisive and significant battles in the history of the world. It was not a conclusive victory in itself and it was no dishonor to Georgian, Armenian and Mongol arms that the soldiers fought so well against such odds, but it destroyed the myth of the Mongols’ invincibility, it broke the momentum of their conquests and it marked the day when Islam was returned towards triumph from the brink of oblivion. From that time onwards, while confusion and discord divided their enemies, the Mamluks flourished, the final methodical expulsion of the crusaders from Palestine began and Christian influence in Asia was eclipsed.</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-4748086578457177692022-09-06T13:14:00.000-07:002022-09-06T13:14:00.984-07:00Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy <p><span style="font-family: arial;"> <span style="font-size: 14px;">Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2006</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-5723-2</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(page 2-3 ) Emile Durkheim's notion of _collective effervescence_: the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and, he proposed, forms the ultimate basis of religion.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(6) But as the anthropologist Michael Taussig writes, "It's the ability to become _possessed_... that signifies to Europeans awesome Otherness if not downright savagery." Trance was what many of those wild rituals seemed to lead up to. and for Eyuropeans, it represented the very heart of darkness - a place beyond the human self.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(10) [Victor Turner] recognized collective ecstasy as a universal capacity and saw it as an expression of what he called _communitas_, meaning, roughly, the spontaneous love and solidarity that can that can arise within a community of equals.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(11) The self-loss that participants sought in ecstatic ritual was not through physical merger with another person but through a kind of spiritual merger with the group.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(23) In his justly popular book _Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language_, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues for an optimal Paleolithic group size of about 150.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(24) "Dance," as a neuroscientist put it, is "the biotechnology of group formation."</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(33) As Aldous Huxley once observed, "Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other... It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine."</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(44) The rise of social hierarchy, anthropologists agree, goes hand in hand with the rise of militarism and war, which are in their own way also usually hostile ot the danced rituals of the archaic past.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(67) E. R. Dodds, in his famous _The Greeks and the Irrational_, suggested that hair-tossing might be a universal hallmark of religious ecstasy.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">NB: head banging</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(141) The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure...</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(183) Or, as some revisionist social psychologists put it very recently, the effect of fascism was to convince social scientists that "groups are inherently dangerous."</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(186) We begin with an important distinction: The mass fascist rallies were not festivals or ecstatic rituals; they were spectacles, designed by a small group of leaders for the edification of the many.</span></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">NB: Society of the Spectacle - my notes are at </span><a href="https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html">https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html</a></span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(186-187) At Nuremberg, as at countless other rallies in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the only spectacle on display was the military, the only legitimate form of motion the march.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">NB: No dancing</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(208) "rioting" ...according to LInda Martin and Kerry Segrave in their book _Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock 'n' Roll_, "just involved kids dancing in the aisles at theaters; jiving in their seats; and stomping, clapping, and yelling a lot - having a good time, in short. The authorities thought an audience should sit quietly and sedately, perhaps clapping a little at the end of the performance."</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">NB: Applause in time in Europe and Latin America, English versus American debate</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(211) The motionless perception required of an audience takes effort, especially when the performance involves the rhythmic motions of others. As we saw in chapter 1, recent research in neuroscience suggests that thte neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of motion by another person are closely linked to the _execution_ of that motion by the perceiver. To see a man marching or dancing, swaying as he plays the saxophone, or simply waving his arms to draw melodies from an orchestra is to ready oneself internally to join in the marching, dancing, swaying, or arm waving.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(214) NB: Only one footnote mentions the jitterbugs, none about ragtime and jazz</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(218) Thomas A. Dorsey "Black music calls for movement!" Mahalia Jackson wrote, "I want my hands... my feet... my whole body to say all that is in me. I say 'Don't let the devil steal the beat from the Lord!' The Lord doesn't like us to act dead. If you feel it, tap your feet a little = dance to the glory of the Lord!'"</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(225) For most people in the world today, the experience of collective ecstasy is likely to be found, if it is found at all, not in a church or at a concert or rally but at a sports event. Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in the United States; soccer worldwide: These games now provide what the sports sociologist Allen Guttmann calls "Saturanalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotion which are tightly controlled in our ordinary lives."</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(226) Sports stadiums, however are round, so "the spectator confronts the emotion apparent on the faces of other spectators." People may say they are going to see the Browns or the A's or Manchester, but they are are also going to see one another, and to become part of a mass in which excitement builds by bouncing across the playing field, from one part of the stadium to the other.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">NB: No discussion of Roman and Byzantine sports as politics; no soccer war</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(248) Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy - other people, including strangers - no longer holds much appeal. In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(251) The aspect of "civilization" that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(255) It is a measure of our general deprivation that the most common referent for _ecstasy_ in usage today is not an experience but a drug, MDMA, that offers fleeting feelings of euphoria and connectedness.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">(259) People must find, in their movement, the immediate joy of solidarity, if only because, in the face of overwhelming state and corporate power, solidarity is their sole source of strength.</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /></span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Penelope Reed Doob _The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages_</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">Gustave Le Bon _The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind_</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1971</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">William H. McNeill _Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History-</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">No _Crowds and Power_ by Elias Canetti</span><br style="font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-size: 14px;">No _Samba_ by Alma Guillermoprieta</span></span></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-5681452759412579032022-08-29T22:31:00.001-07:002022-08-30T12:50:37.573-07:00Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing: Quotes and NotesThis is a series of lectures Doris Lessing did in Canada in the 1980s. With the concatenation of politics, pandemic, and climate on top of war, famine, and the usual disasters, I doubt that anyone in the world now, and certainly in the "developed world," is entirely sane. At the very least, we are all suffering from PTSD. Lessing spoke to that, way back then.<br><br>
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing<br>
NY: Harper and Row, 1987<br>
ISBN 0-06-039077-8<br><br>
(page 7) More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Butler’s Erewhon….<br><br>
(9) … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past and are permitted to be brutal and cruel.<br><br>
It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.<br><br>
I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war - not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself.<br><br>
(11) Seven years of war had left them [Zimbabweans] in a stunned, curiously blank state, and I think it was because whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily…. It was evident that the actual combatants on both sides, both blacks and whites, had thoroughly enjoyed the war.<br><br>
NB: Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard: “The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition... [people who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away]… It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”<br><br>
(13) It is not too much to say that when the word “blood” is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.<br><br>
(21) … the Left might find it useful to say something like this, “It has been easily observable for some time that groups like ours always split and then the two new groups become enemies equipped with leaders who hurl abuse at each other. If we remain aware of this apparently inbuilt drive that makes groups split and split again we may perhaps behave less mechanically.”<br><br>
(22) It is possible to sit through hours, days, of discussion about war, and never hear it mentioned that one of the causes of war is that people enjoy it, or enjoy the idea of it.<br><br>
(23) Opponents are never hated as much as former allies.<br><br>
(33-34) Brain-washing has three main pillars or processes, by now well understood. The first is tension, followed by relaxation. This one is used, for instance, in the interrogation of prisoners, when the interrogator is alternatively harsh and tender - one moment a sadistic bully, the next a kind friend. The second is repetition - saying or singing the same thing over and over again. The third is the use of slogans - the reducing of complex ideas to simple sets of words. These three are used all the time by governments, armies, political parties, religious groups, religions - and always have been used.<br><br>
(35) The more sane we are, the more likely we are to be converted. But we may comfort ourselves with this: that brain-washing is usually not permanent. We may be brain-washed - by conscious or unconscious manipulators, or we may brain-wash ourselves (not uncommon, this) - but it usually wears off.<br><br>
(36)… as all the philosophers and sages have recommended, we will all live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.<br>
NB: negative capability as positive capability<br>
"a writer's ability to accept 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,' according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter."<br><br>
(39) … as if it were in some way reactionary or anti-libertarian or anti-democratic to look at the behaviour of human beings, at _our_ behavior, dispassionately, as something that one may learn to predict.<br><br>
(40) Government by show business… Well, every authoritarian goverrnment understands this very well.<br><br>
(44) The researchers of brainwashing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resisted best. The Turks, for instance… the soldiers who faced their torturers with laughter sometimes survived when others did not. Fanatics don’t laugh at themselves; laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can’t laugh. True believers don’t laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea. Tyrants and oppressors don’t laugh at themselves, and don’t tolerate laughter at themselves.<br><br>
Laughter is a very powerful thing, and only the civilized, the liberated, the free person can laught at herself, himself.<br>
NB: The smile on the bullet in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury<br><br>
(48) But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group.<br><br>
… If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates my general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in posssession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.<br><br>
(53) It has been noticed that there is this 10 per cent of the population, who can be called natural leaders, who do follow their own minds into decisions and choices. It has been noted to the extent that this fact had been incorporated into instructions for people who run prisons, concentration camps, prisoner of war camps: remove the 10 per cent, and your prisoners will become spineless and conforming.<br><br>
(57) This, [Milgram] experiment, like the many others along the same lines, offers us the information that a majority of people, regardless of whether they are black or white, male or female, old or young, rich or poor, will carry out orders, no matter how savage and brutal the orders are.<br><br>
(60) Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.<br><br>
(61) When I look back at the Second World War, I see something I didn’t more than dimly suspect at the time. It was that everyone was crazy.<br><br>
(62) How is it that so-called democratic movements don’t make a point of instructing their members in the laws of crowd psychology, group psychology?<br><br>
When I ask this, the response is always an uncomfortable, squeamish reluctance, as if the whole subject is really in very bad taste, unpleasant, irrelevant. As if it will all just go away if it is ignored.<br><br>
So at the moment, if we look around the world, the paradox is that we may see this new information being eagerly studied by governments, the possessors and users of power - studied and put into effect. But the people who say they oppose tyranny literally don’t want to know.<br><br>
(63) But wait… we all know the news is presented to us for maximum effect, that bad news seems, at least, to be more effective in arousing us than good news - which in itself is an interesting comment on the human condition.<br><br>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-30863192249590884822022-06-17T20:18:00.002-07:002022-06-17T20:18:24.963-07:00Notes on Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure ClassThe Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen<br>
Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994 (ISBN 0-486-28062-4)<br><br>
(page 20) So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.<br><br>
(21) … but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible… pecuniary standing...<br><br>
(22) An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.<br><br>
(28) It has already been remarked that the term “leisure,” as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.<br><br>
(49) So, those offices which are by right the proper employment of the leisure class are noble; such as government, fighting, hunting, the care of arms and accoutrements, and the like, - in short, those which may be classed as ostensibly predatory employments.<br><br>
(53) … pecuniary decency*… conspicuous consumption…<br><br>
(54) It is not that the city population is by nature much more eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor has the rural population less regard for pecuniary decency.<br><br>
(60) *In order to be reputable it must be wasteful.<br><br>
(71) The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which the consumer acts in any given case is the principle in its bald, unsophisticated form.<br><br>
(94) The consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to give them servicibility for their ostensible mechanical purpose are honorific.<br><br>
(100) … the canon [of conspicuous consumption] is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its special developments is called classicism.<br><br>
(108) The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men - and women perhaps even in a higher degree - abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure, - much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly.<br><br>
(122) Except for the fear of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so characteristic a feature of the predatory culture, and the presence of which is frequently the most striking mark of reversion in modern communities, the case of the American colonies might be cited as an example of such a reversion on an unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of very large scope.<br><br>
(123) The leisure class is the conservative class.<br><br>
… The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.<br><br>
(124) Innovation is bad form.<br><br>
Editorial Comment: Innovation now conspicuously consumed and consuming<br><br>
(142) Mercantile pursuits are only half-way reputable, unless they involve a large element of ownership and a small element of usefulness.<br><br>
(152) Moreover, the ostensible serious occupation of the upper class is that of government, which, in point of origin and developmental content, is also a predatory occupation.<br><br>
(153) It is only the high-bred gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal solvent of differences of opinion.<br><br>
(157) It is noticeable, for instance, that even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking. These huntsmen are also prone to histrionic, prancing gait and to an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or on onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit.<br><br>
… Except where it is adopted as a necessary means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in question is substantially make-believe.<br><br>
(165) From the evidence already recited it appears that, in sentiment and inclinations, the leisure class is more favourable to a warlike attitude and animus than the industrial classes.<br><br>
(181) Indeed, it is somewhat insistently claimed as a meritorious feature of sporting life that the habitual participants in athletic games are in some degree peculiarly given to devout practices.<br><br>
(184) The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The social structure in which the predatory habit has been the dominant factor in the shaping of institutions is a structure based on status. The pervading norm in the predatory community’s scheme of life is the relation of superior and inferiors, noble and base, dominant and subservient persons and classes, master and slave. The anthropomorphic cults have come down from that stage of industrial development and have been shaped by the same scheme of economic differentiation, - a differentiation into consumer and producer, - and they are pervaded by the same dominant principle of mastery and subservience.<br><br>
(189) It is not only incumbent on the priestly class to abstain from vulgar labour, especially so far as it is lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to the temporal well-being of mankind.<br>
Editorial Comment: Monastic work rules of basic labor and service may contradict as does history of alternatives like Mondragon cooperatives<br><br>
(204) This non-invidious residue of the religious life, - the sense of communion with the environment, or with the generic life process, - as well as the impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way to shape men’s habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action of all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process; while the particular aptitudes here in question assert themselves, on the economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of a futile manner of life, and in an impulse to participation in or identification with the life process, whether it be on the economic side or in any other of its phases or aspects.<br><br>
(211) As has been seen in an earlier chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the mark of a pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a habit of disesteem of useful occupations, but there results also what is of more decisive consequence in guiding the action of any organised body of people that lays claim to social good repute. There is a tradition which requires that one should not be vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or details that have to do with the material necessities of life.<br><br>
(228) … the leisure-class sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism…<br>
NB: Society of the Spectacle<br><br>
(234) In point of derivation, the office of government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion over the population from which the class draws its sustenance.<br>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-38345938689000753952022-04-28T22:04:00.005-07:002022-04-28T22:06:02.399-07:00Nikola Tesla on His InventionsMy Inventions by Nikola Tesla<br>
London: Arcturus Publishing, 2020<br>
ISBN 978-1-78950-078-3<br><br>
(page 17) When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In 20 years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise?<br>
[Tesla’s imagination and Einstein’s thought experiments. Did they ever meet?]<br><br>
(21) The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objests with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort.<br>
[Do I dare to eat a peach? from the Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock <br>
Tesla would have been interested in qi gong.]<br><br>
(32) I am ambidextrous now but then I was left-handed and had comparatively little strength in my right arm.<br>
[Tesla taught himself to be ambidextrous. A Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain exercise is to draw with the non-dominant hand and see what that does. I like to play stringed instruments with the non-dominant as well as dominant hand in my practice.]<br><br>
(52-53) In 1899, when I was past 40 and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was over 13 times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain. In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive 20 or 30 miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously. I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all. The roaring noises form near and far often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accidental components. The sun’s rays, when periodically interrupted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me. I had to sumopn all my willpower to pass under a bridge or other structure as I experienced a crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of 12 feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead. My pulse varied from a few to 260 beats and all the tissues of the body quivered with twitches and tremors which was perhaps the hardest to bear.<br><br>
(67) I rejected the inductor type, fearing that it might not yield perfect sine waves which were so important to resonant action.<br><br>
(73-74) One day, as I was roaming in the mountains, I sought shelter from an approaching storm. The sky became overhung with heavy clouds but somehow the rain was delayed until, all of a sudden, there was a lightning flash and a few moments after a deluge. This observation set me thinking. It was manifest that the two phenomena were closely related, as cause and effect, and a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy involved in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of lightning being much like that of a sensitive trigger.<br><br>
Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever derived, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man.<br><br>
(80) ‘The Terrestrial Stationary Waves.’ This wonderful discovery, popularly explained means that the Earth is responsive to electrical vibrations of definite pitch just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound.<br>
[what would a world where Tesla’s World System works look like?]<br><br>
(103) We are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for free will. The movements and other actions we perform are always life preservative and though seemingly quite independent from one another, we are connected by invisible links.<br><br>
(108) The proposed League [of Nations, My Inventions was first published in 1919] is not a remedy but on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite. It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit.<br><br>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-69013762492057280322022-04-11T18:35:00.000-07:002022-04-11T18:35:57.115-07:00The Devils of Loudun - Quotes<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><u>The Devils of Loudun</u> by Aldous Huxley</span></p><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Perennial Library, 1952</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(page 22) But partisanship is a complex passion which permits those who indulge in it to make the best of both worlds. Because they do these things for the sake of the group which is, by definition, good and even sacred, they can admire themselves and loathe their neighbors, they can seek power and money, can enjoy the pleasures of aggression and cruelty, not merely without feeling guilty, but with a positive glow of conscious virtue. Loyalty to their group transforms these pleasant vices into acts of heroism. Partisans are aware of themselves, not as sinners or criminals, but as altruists and idealists. And with certain qualifications, this is in fact what they are. The only trouble is that their altruism is merely egotism at one remove, and that the ideal, for which they are ready in many cases to lay down their lives, is nothing but the rationalization of corporate interests and party passions.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(66) His career was a demonstration of the fact that, in certain circumstances, crawling is a more effective means of locomotion than walking upright, and that the best crawlers are also the deadliest biters.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(98) We are born with Original Sin; but we are also born with Original Virtue - with a capacity for grace, in the language of Western theology, with a “spark,” a “fine point of the soul,” a fragment of unfallen consciousness, surviving from the state of prmal innocence and technically known as the _synteresis_.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(115) To sins of the will and the imagination kind nature sets no limits. Avarice and the lust for power are as nearly infinite as anything in this sublunary world can be. And so is the thing which DH Lawrence called “sex in the head.” As heroic passion, it is one of the last infirmities of noble mind. As imagined sensuality, it is one of the first infirmities of the insane mind. And in either case (being free of the body and the limitations imposed by fatigue, by boredom, by the essentail irrelevance of material happenings in our ideas and fancies), it partakes of the infinite.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(134) Few people now believe in the Devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number. In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge in their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(156-157) By those who serve him, a great man must be treated as a mixture between a god, a naughty child and a wild beast. The god must be worshiped, the child amused and bamboozled, and wild beast placated and, when aroused, avoided. The courtier, who, by an unwelcome suggestion, annoys this insane trinity of superhuman pretension, subhuman ferocity and infantile silliness, is merely asking for trouble. </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(174) “The soul is immortal, created of nothing, and so infused into the child or embryo in his mother’s womb, six months after conception; not as the brutes, which are ex traduce (handed on by parent to offspring) and, by dying with them, vanish into nothing.” - Robert Burton</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(192) Those who crusade, not _for_ God in themselves, but _against_ the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(260) Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes inn some sort a part of him.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(284) Insofar as they are incarnated minds, subject to physical decay and death, capable of pain and pleasure, driven by craving and abhorrence and oscillating between the desire for self-assertion and the desire for self-transcendence, human beings are faced, at every time and place, with the same problems, are confronted by the same temptations and are permitted by the Order of Things to make the same choice betweenn unregeneracy and enlightenment. The context changes, but the gist and the meaning are invariable.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(307) We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. The tragic author feels himself into his personages; and so, from the other side, does the reader or listener. But in pure comedy there is no identification between creator and literary creature, between spectator and spectacle. The author looks, judges and records, from the outside; and from the outside the audience observes what he has recorded, judges as he has judged and , if the comedy is good enough, laughs. Pure comedy cannot be kept up for very long.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(312) That the infinite must include the finite and must therefore be totally present at every point of space, every instant of time, seems sufficiently evident. </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(331) The fundamental human problem is ecological: men must learn how to live with the cosmos on all its levels, from the material to the spiritual. As a race, we have to discover how a huge and rapidly increasing population can go on existing satisfactorily on a planet of limited size and possessed of resources, many of which are wasting assets that can never be renewed. As individuals, we have to find out how to establish a satisfactory relationship with that infinite Mind, from which we habitually imagine ourselves to be isolated.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(350) For these neo-conservatives [Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany] , mass intoxication was chiefly valuable, henceforward, as a means of heightening their subjects’ suggestibility and so rendering them more docile to the expressions of authoritarian will.</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-55618696996248256892022-02-13T19:15:00.002-08:002022-02-13T19:15:56.620-08:00Motivation and Drive<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <b>Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us</b> by Daniel H. Pink</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;">NY: Penguin Group, 2009<br />ISBN 978-1-59448-884-9<br /><br />(page 8) "When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity," he [Edward Deci] wrote....<br /><br />Human beings, Deci said, have an "inherent tendency to seek our novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn." But this third drive was more fragile than the other two; it needed the right environment to survive. "One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards," he wrote in a follow-up paper.<br /><br />(23) Lakhani and Wolk uncovered a range of motives, but they found "that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver." A large majority of programmers, the researchers discovered, reported that they frequently reached the state of optimal challenge called "flow." Likewise, three German economists who studied open-source projects around the world found that what drives participants is "a set of predominantly intrinsic motives" - in particular, "the fun... of mastering the challenge of a given software problem" and the "desire to give a gift to the programmer community."<br /><br />(24) For example, in April 2008, Vermont became the first U. S. state to allow a new type of business called the "low-profit limited liability corporation." Dubbed an L3C, this entity is a corporation - but not as we typically think of it. As one report explained, an L3C "operate[s] like a for-profit business generating at least modest profits, but its primary aim [is] to offer significant social benefits." Three other U. S. states have followed Vermont's lead. An L3C in North Carolina, for instance, is buying abandoned furniture factories in the state, updating them with green technology, and leasing them back to beleaguered furniture manufacturers at a low rate. The venture hopes to make money, but its real purpose is to help revitalize a struggling region....<br /><br />The Fourth Sector Network in the United States and Denmark is promoting "the for-benefit organization" - a hybrid that it says represents a new category of organization that is both economically self-sustaining and animated by public purpose. One example: Mozilla, the entity that gave us Firefox, is organized as a "for-benefit" organization. And three U. S. entrepreneurs have invented the "B Corporation," a designation that requires companies to amend their bylaws so that the incentives favor long-term value and social impact instead of short-term economic gain.<br /><br />NB: Gandhian economics, stewardship</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html">http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/sarvodaya-swaraj-and-swadeshi.html</a><br /><br />(28) Some scholars are already widening the reach of behavioral economics to encompass these ideas. The most prominent is Bruno Frey, an economist at the University of Zurich... As Frey writes, "Intrinsic motivation is of _great importance_ for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives."<br /><br />(32) To recap, Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn't mesh with the way many new business models are organizing what we do - because we're intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers. It doesn't comport with the way that twenty-first-century economics thinks about what we do - because economists are finally realizing that we're full -fledged human beings, not single-minded economic robots. And perhaps most important, it's hard to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work - because for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than unrelentingly routine, boring, and other-directed.<br /><br />(36-37) [Tom Sawyer fence painting incident] From this episode, Twain extracts a key motivational principle, namely "that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." He goes on to write:<br /><br /><blockquote>There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.</blockquote><br /><br />In other words, rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes. Let's call this the Sawyer Effect.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">NB: Tom Sawyer organizing<br /><br />(39) Deci: "Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tends to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation," they determined. "When institutions - families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example - focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people's behavior," they do considerable long-term damage.<br /><br />Alfie Kohn, whose prescient 1993 book, _Punished by Rewards_, lays out a devastating indictment of extrinsic incentive<br /><br />(40-41) They [Ariely and others] recruited eighty-seven participants and asked them to play several games - for example, tossing tennis balls at a target, unscrambling anagrams, recalling a string of digits - that required motor skills, creativity, or concentration. To test the power of incentives, the experimenters offered three types of rewards for reaching certain performance levels.<br /><br />One-third of the participants could earn a small reward - 4 rupees (at the time worth around 50 U. S. cents and equal to about a day's pay in Madurai [India] for reaching their performance targets. One-third could earn a medium reward - 10 rupees (about $5, or two weeks' pay). And one-third could earn a very large reward - 400 rupees (about $50, or nearly five months' pay)...<br /><br />As it turned out, the people offered the medium-sized bonus didn't perform any better than those offered the small one. And those in the 400-rupee super-incentivized group? They fared worst of all. By nearly every measure, they lagged behind both the low-reward and medium-reward participants. Reporting the result for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the researchers wrote, "in eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to _worse_ performance."<br /><br />...In 2009, scholars at the London School of Economics - alma mater of eleven Nobel laureates in economics - analyzed fifty-one studies of corporate pay-for-performance plans. These economists' conclusion: "We find that financial incentives... can result in a negative impact on overall performance."<br /><br />(44) [Candle problem] He told the first group that he was timing their work merely to establish norms for how long it typically took someone to complete this sort of puzzle. To the second group he offered incentives. If a participant's time was among the fastest 25 percent of all the people being tested, that participant would receive $5. If the participant's time was the fastest of all, the reward would be $20. Adjusted for inflation, those are decent sums of money for a few minutes of effort - a nice motivator.<br /><br />How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes _longer_....<br /><br />Why? Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That's helpful when there's a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But "if-then" motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people's focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.<br /><br />(46) For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation - the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing - is essential for high levels of creativity. But the "if-then" motivators that are the staple of most businesses often stifle, rather than stir, creative thinking.<br /><br />(50-51) As the cadre of business school professors [Harvard Business School, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School] write, "Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior."<br /><br />The examples are legion, the researchers note. Sears imposes a sales quota on its auto repair staff - and workers respond by over-charging customers and completing unnecessary repairs. Enron sets lofty revenue goals - and the race to meet them by any means possible catalyzes the company's collapse. Ford is so intent on producing a certain car at a certain weight at a certain price by a certain date that it omits safety checks and unleashes the dangerous Ford Pinto.<br /><br />The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even it it means taking the low road....<br /><br />Executives game their quarterly earnings so they can snag a performance bonus. Secondary school counselors doctor student transcripts so that their seniors can get into college. Athletes inject themselves with steroids to post better numbers and trigger lucrative performance bonuses.<br /><br />Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself - deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one's best - there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it's impossible to act unethically because the person who's disadvantaged isn't a competitor but yourself....<br /><br />Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.<br /><br />(53) "After the introduction for the fine [for not arriving on time to pick up children from day-care] we observed a steady _increase_ in the number of parents coming late," the economists wrote. "The rate finally settled, at a level that was higher and _almost twice as large_ as the initial one." And in language reminiscent of Harry Harlow's head scratching, they write that the existing literature didn't account for such a result. Indeed, the "possibility of an increase in the behavior being punished was not even considered."<br /><br />...One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers - who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters - and wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine - like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment - edged aside the third drive. The fine shifted the parents' decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids' teachers) to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn't room for both. The punishment didn't promote good behavior; it crowded it out.<br /><br />(54) Pay your son to take out the trash - and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What's more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you'll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance.<br /><br />As Suvorov explains, "Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is face, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again." And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo - which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.<br />NB: Sounds like CEO pay and the banksters bonuses don't it<br />Addiction thinking<br /><br />(55) In other words, if we watch how people's brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar....<br /><br />Rewards' addictive qualities can also distort decision-making. Knutson has found that activation in the nucleus accumbens seem to predict "both risky choices and risk-seeking mistakes." Get people fired up with the prospect of rewards, and instead of making better decisions, as Motivation 2.0 hopes, they can actually make worse ones.<br /><br />(57) Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly _lower_ long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently. (One reason: The earnings-obsessed companies typically invest less in research and development.) They successfully achieved their short-term goals, but threaten the health of the company two or three years hence. As the scholars who warned about goals gone wild put it, "The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization."<br /><br />(58) This is the nature of economic bubbles: What seems to be irrational exuberance is ultimately a bad case of extrinsically motivated myopia.<br /><br />By contrast, the elements of genuine motivation that we'll explore later, by their very nature, defy a short-term view. Take mastery. The objective itself is inherently long-term because complete mastery, in a sense, is unattainable. Even Roger Federer, for instance, will never fully "master" the game of tennis. But introducing an "if-then" reward to help develop mastery usually backfires. That's why school children who are paid to solve problems typically choose easier problems and therefore learn less. The short-term prize crowds out the long-term learning....<br /><br />Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first - but the healthy behavior disappears once the incentives are removed.<br /><br />(59) Carrots and Sticks: The Seven Deadly Flaws<br />1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.<br />2. They can diminish performance.<br />3. They can crush creativity.<br />4. They can crowd out good behavior.<br />5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.<br />6. They can become addictive.<br />7. They can foster short-term thinking.<br /><br />(60) The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards - wages, salaries, benefits, and so on - are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.<br /><br />(62) For routine tasks, which aren't very interesting and don't demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivation booster shot without the harmful side effects.... when the task called for "even rudimentary cognitive skill," a larger reward "led to poorer performance. But "as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance."<br /><br />(64) Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that's not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it's part of a larger purpose...<br /><br />Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course. And the acknowledgment will help people understand why this is the rare instance when "if-then" rewards are part of how your organization operates.<br /><br />Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it... give them the freedom over how they do the job.<br /><br />(66) The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete....<br /><br />In other words, where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, shift to "now that" rewards - as in "Now that you've finished the poster and it turned out so well, I'd like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch."<br /><br />Ad Deci and his colleagues explain, "If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be experienced as the reason for doing the task and are thus less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation."<br /><br />(67) First, _consider nontangible rewards_. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci's original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that "positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation."<br /><br />...Second, _provide useful information_. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, "informational or enabling motivators can be conducive" to it.<br /><br />(72) SDT [Self Determination Theory], by contrast begins with a notion of universal human _needs_. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs - competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we're motivated, productive, and happy.<br /><br />"If there's anything [fundamental] about our nature, it's the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine it," [Richard] Ryan explained during one of our conversations.<br />NB: Interest is attention - appamada<br /><br />"Of course, they're [rewards] necessary in workplaces and other settings," says Deci. "but the less salient they are made, the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating."<br /><br />(76) If your starting point was Theory X, he [Douglas McGregor] said, your managerial techniques would inevitably produce limited results, or even go awry entirely. If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve. But if your starting point was Theory Y, the possibilities were vast - not simply for the individual's potential, but for the company's bottom line as well.<br />NB: Theory X/Theory Y : Conservative/Liberal<br /><br />(78-79) Type I [Intrinsic] behavior is made, not born. These behavioral patterns aren't fixed traits. They are proclivities that emerge from circumstance, experience, and context... The science demonstrates that once people learn the fundamental practices and attitudes - and can exercise them in supportive settings - their motivation, and their ultimate performance, soars. Any Type X [Extrinsic] can become a Type I.<br /><br />Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that's not always true in the short term. An intense focus on extrinsic rewards can indeed deliver fast results. The trouble is, this approach is difficult to sustain. And it doesn't assist in mastery - which is the source of achievement over the long haul....<br /><br />Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X's and Type I's care about money. If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline that I described in Chapter 2 - if her organization doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work - that persons motivation will crater regardless of whether she leans towards X or toward I.<br /><br />(80) Type I behavior is a renewable resource. This of Type X behavior as coal and Type I behavior as the sun....<br /><br />Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being. According to a raft of studies from SDT researchers, people oriented toward autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than those who are extrinsically motivated.<br /><br />(80-81) Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.<br /><br />(86) ROWEs [results-only work environments] are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE's principles marry the commonsense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage-rattling radicalism of Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time - or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.<br /><br />(87) People still had specific goals they had to reach - for example, completing a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales. And if they needed help, [Jeff] Gunther was there to assist. But he decided against tying those goals to compensation. "That creates a culture that says it's all about the money and not enough about the work." Money, he believes, is only "a threshold motivator." People must be paid well adn be able to take care of their families, he says. But once a company meets this baseline, dollars and cents don't much affect performance and motivation. Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise - and employees' spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE's staunchest advocates.<br /><br />(88) Gunther: "For me, it's a partnership between me and the employees. They're not resources. They're partners." And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.<br /><br />(90) Deci and Ryan: "Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice," they write, "whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self."<br /><br />Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It's not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice - which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one. Researchers have found a link between autonomy and overall well-being not only in North America and Western Europe, but also in Russia, Turkey, and South Korea. Even in high poverty non-Western locales like Bangladesh, social scientists have found that autonomy is something that people seek and that improves their lives.<br /><br />(90-91) According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being. Those effect carry over to the workplace.<br /><br />(91) For example, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.<br /><br />(93) Now, once a quarter, the company [Atlassian] sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want - only this time, "to get them out of the day to day," it _must_ be something that's not part of their regular job.<br /><br />At two P. M. on a Thursday, the day begins. Engineers, including Cannon-Brookes himself, crash out new code or an elegant hack - any way they want, with anyone they want. Many work through the night. Then, at four P. M. on Friday, they show the results to the rest of the company in a wild-and-woolly all-hands meeting stocked with ample quantities of cold beer and chocolate cake. Atlassian calls these twenty-four-hour bursts of freedom and creativity "FedEx Days" - because people have to deliver something overnight. And deliver Atlassians have. Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes that might otherwise never have merged. Says one engineer, "Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx Days."<br />NB: Pecha-Kucha and Maker Culture<br /><br />"We've always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on," Cannon-Brookes told me. "If you don't pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features."<br /><br />(93-94) And what a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of the essential features is autonomy - in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. As Atlassian's experience shows, Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T's: their _task_, their _time_, their _technique_, and their _team_.<br /><br />(94) In the spring of 2008, they [owners of Atlasssian] announced that for the next six months, Atlassian developers could spend 20 percent of their time - rather than just one intense day - working on any project they wanted.<br /><br />(95) William McKnight, CEO 3M in the 1930s and 1940s: ...this unlikely corporate heretic established a new policy: 3M's technical staff could spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their choosing... so seemingly illicit, that inside the company, it was known as the "bootlegging policy." And yet it worked. These walled gardens of autonomy soon became fertile fields for a harvest of innovations - including Pot-it notes.<br /><br />(96) McKnight's innovation remains in place at 3M. But only a surprisingly small number of other companies have moved in this direction, despite its proven results. The best-known company to embrace it is Google, which has long encouraged engineers to spend one day a week workign on a side project. Some Googlers use their "20 percent time" to fix an existing product, but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course, Google doesn't sign away the intellectual property rights to what's created during that 20 percent - which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy....<br />NB: Art Kleiner's _Age of Heretics_<br /><br />As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: "Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time."<br /><br />(100) If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption - that people want to do good work - then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it.<br /><br />(101) Reporting on the company's [Best Buy] ROWE results in the _Harvard Business Review_, Tamara Erickson writes:<br /><br /><blockquote>Salaried people put in as much time as it takes to do their work. Hourly employees in the program work a set number of hours to comply with federal labor regulations, but they get to choose when. Those employees report better relationships with family and friends, more company loyalty, and more focus and energy. Productivity has increased by 35%, and voluntary turnover is 320 basis points lower than in teams that have not made the change. Employees say they don't know whether they work fewer hours - they've stopped counting.</blockquote><br /><br />(102) Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer <a href="http://zappos.com/">Zappos.com</a> (now part of <a href="http://amazon.com/">Amazon.com</a>), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn't for them and want to leave, he'll pay them $2,000 - no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He's using an "if-then" reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren't fit for a Motivation 3.0-style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. Zappos doesn't monitor its customer service employees' call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.<br /><br />(103) ... Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States - ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton....<br /><br />homeshoring. Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center they're routing the calls to the employees' homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.<br /><br />(105) For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don't do the hiring. That task falls to a department's employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time. At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.<br /><br />(106) And once again, the science affirms the value of something traditional businesses have been slow to embrace. Ample research has shown that people workign in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams. Likewise, studies by Deci and others have shown that people high in intrinsic motivation are better coworkers. And that makes the possibilities on this front enormous. If you want to work with more Type I's, the best strategy is to become one yourself. Autonomy, it turns out, can be contagious.<br /><br />(107) If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they've known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they'll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, "scaffolding" to help every employee find his footing to make the transition...<br /><br />As Zappos CEO Hsieh told me by e-mail, "Studies have shown that perceived control is an important component of one's happiness. However, what people feel like they want control over really varies, so I don't think there's one aspect of autonomy that's universally the most important. Different individuals have different desires, so the best strategy for an employer would be to figure our what's important to each individual employee."<br /><br />(111) Gallup's extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work - and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a year in lost productivity - a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel Yet in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.<br /><br />(114) Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they'd describe their state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a mini-movie, of someone's week.<br />NB: App for finding flow? Probably already exists.<br /><br />(117) He [Stefan Falk of Ericsson] persuaded managers to configure work assignments so that employees had clear objectives and a way to get quick feedback. And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-tear performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward mastery. The flow-centered strategy worked well enough that Ericsson began using it in offices around the world....<br /><br />The he required them [managers] to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work - and to adjust assignments to help they find flow. After two years of managerial revamping, state-owned Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years - and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity as a key reason.<br /><br />In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge - that is, the urge to master something new and engaging - was the best predictor of productivity.<br /><br />(118) Why not, he [Jenova Chen] thought, design to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers?<br /><br />...Chen calls his game flOw </span>(<a href="http://jenovachen.info/flow">http://jenovachen.info/flow</a>)</div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">. And it's been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />(119) Some tasks at work don't automatically provide surges of flow, yet still need to get done. So the shrewdest enterprises afford employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties.<br /><br />(121) ...the first law of mastery: Mastery is a mindset.<br /><br />(121-122) If you believe intelligence is a fixed quantity, then every educational and professional encounter becomes a measure of how much you have. If you believe intelligence is something you can increase, then the same encounters become opportunities for growth. In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it's something you develop.<br /><br />The two self-theories lead down two very different paths - one that heads toward mastery and one that doesn't. For instance, consider goals, [Carol] Dweck says they come in two varieties - performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal. "Both goals are entirely normal and pretty much universal," Dweck says, "and both can fuel achievement." But only one leads to mastery.<br /><br />(122) As Dweck writes, "With a learning goal, students don't have to feel that they're already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. aFter all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they're smart."<br /><br />(123) Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters. bEgin with one mindset, and mastery is impossible begin with the other, and it can be inevitable.<br /><br />(124) The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective [West Point] cadets' ratings on a noncognitive, non-physical trait known as "grit" - defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain....<br /><br />As he [psychologist Anders Ericsson] puts it, "Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years."<br /><br />(125) As they explained, "Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible... in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment."<br /><br />(127) This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote.<br /><br />You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cézanne, you can _never_ touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully...<br /><br />The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.<br /><br />(129) As Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "After just two days of deprivation [of flow]... the general deterioration of mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment woudl have been unadvisable."<br /><br />...And one of Csikszentmihalyi's more surprising findings is that people are much more likely to reach that flow state at work than in leisure. Work can often have the structure of other autotelic experiences: clear goals, immediate feedback, challenges well matched to our abilities. And when it does, we don't just enjoy it more, we do it better.<br /><br />(133) Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people - not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied - hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.<br /><br />(136-137) Even cooperatives - an older business model with motives other than profit maximization - are moving from the shaggy edge to the clean-cut center. According to writer Marjorie Kelly, in the last three decades, worldwide membership in co-ops has doubled to 800 million people. In the United States alone, more people belong to a co-op than own shares in the stock market. And the idea is spreading, In Colombia, Kelly notes, "SaludCoop provides helath-care services to a quarter of the population. In Spain, the Mondragón Coporación Cooperativa is the nation's seventh largest industrial concern."<br /><br />...The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose - and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.<br /><br />(138) MBA Oath from HBS students in Spring 2009<br /><br />And in just a few weeks, roughly one-quarter of the graduating class had taken the oath and signed the pledge. In launching the effort, Max Anderson, one of the founders, said: "My hope is that at our 25th reunion our class will not be known for how much money we made or how much money we gave back tot he school, but for how the world was a better place as a result of our leadership."<br />NB: <a href="http://mbaoath.org/">http://mbaoath.org/</a><br /><br />(139) Robert Reich's pronoun test: When he visits a workplace, he'll ask the people employed there some questions about the company. He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But most of all, he listens for the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer to the company as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"? "They" companies and "we" companies, he says, are very different places.<br /><br />(141) In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being...<br /><br />But field research at the prestigious medical facility [Mayo Clinic] found that letting doctors spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaingful to them - whether patient care, research, or community service - could reduce the physical and emotional exhaustion that accompanies their work. Doctors who participated in this trial policy had half the burnout rate of those who did not. Think of it as "20 percent time" with a purpose.<br /><br />(142-143) But the results for people with profit goals were more complicated. Those who said they were attaining their goals - accumulating wealth, winning acclaim - reported levels of satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect no higher than when they were students. In other words, they'd reached their goals, but it didn't make them any happier. What's more, graduates with profit goals showed _increases_ in anxiety, depression, and other negative indicators - again, even though they were attaining their goals.<br /><br />"These findings are rather striking," the researchers write, "as they suggest that attainment of a particular set of goals [in this case, profit goals] has no impact on well-being and actually contributes to ill-being."<br /><br />(144) A health society - and healthy business organizations - begins with purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product of its attainment...<br /><br />And since the planet very soon will contain more people over age sixty-five than under age five for the first time in its existence, the timing couldn't be better.<br /><br />(163) Kimley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without asking permission, anyone in the company can award a $50 bonus to any of her colleagues. "It works because it's real-time, and it's not handed down from any management," the firm's human resources director told _Fast Company_. "Any employee who does something exceptional receives recognition from their peers within minutes." Because these bonuses are noncontingent "now that" rewards, they avoid the seven deadly flaws of most corporate carrots. And because they come from a colleague, not a boss, they carry a different (and perhaps deeper) meaning.<br />NB: Are there rules?<br /><br />(170) In Motivation 3.0, the best use of money is to take the issue of money off the table.<br /><br />The more prominent salary, perks, and benefits are in someone's work life, the more they can inhibit creativity and unravel performance. As Edward Deci explained in Chapter 3, when organizations use rewards like money to motivate staff, "that's when they're most demotivating."<br /><br />(172) Paying people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale...<br /><br />Indeed, other economists have shown that providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure.<br /><br />(174) We're bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.<br /><br />(178-179) Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence.<br /><br />Make praise specific.<br /><br />Praise in private. Praise is feedback - not an award ceremony.<br /><br />Offer praise only when there's a good reason for it.<br /><br />(181) Sudbury Valley School... gives its students total control over the task, time and technique of their learning.<br /><a href="http://www.sudval.org/">http://www.sudval.org</a><br /><br />The Tinkering School <a href="htttp://www.tinkeringschool.com">htttp://www.tinkeringschool.com</a><br /><br />(185) Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of LIfe as Play and Possibility by James P Carse<br /><br />(188)<a href="http://www.mindsetonline.com/">http://www.mindsetonline.com</a><br />Carol Dweck: Learn to listen for a fixed mindset "voice" that might be hurting your resiliency.<br /><br />Interpret challenges not as roadblocks, but as opportunities to stretch yourself.<br /><br />Use the language of growth - for example, "I'm not sure I can do it now, but I think I can learn with time and effort."<br /><br />(185) Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon<br /><a href="http://www.goodwork.org/">http://www.goodwork.org</a><br /><br />(187) Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L Deci with Richard Flaste<br /><br />Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck<br /><br />(192) Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn<br /><a href="http://www.alfiekohn.org/">http://www.alfiekohn.org</a><br /><br />(193) Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler<br /><br />(197) Peter Drucker's 2005 Harvard Business Review article, "Managing Oneself."<br /><a href="http://www.druckerinstitute.com/">http://www.druckerinstitute.com</a><br /><br />(198) [Jim] Collins [Built to Last] suggests four basic practices for creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish:<br />1. "Lead with questions, not answers."<br />2. "Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion."<br />3. "Conduct autopsies, without blame."<br />4. "Build 'red flag' mechanisms." In other words, make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when they identify a problem.<br /><br />(217) <a href="http://www.danpink.com/drive.html">www.danpink.com/drive.html</a>, free quarterly newsletter<br /><a href="mailto:dhp@danpink.com">dhp@danpink.com</a></span></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-70336242345772756432022-01-24T17:56:00.000-08:002022-01-24T17:56:17.922-08:00Energy and Equity: Ivan Illich Uses Transportation as an Example<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Energy and Equity by Ivan Illich</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Harper and Row, 1974</span></p><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">06-080327-4</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(page10-11) The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which power corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall call it counterfoil research. It has three steps, First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(19) The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(26) He (the habitual passenger) takes freedom of movement to be the same as one’s claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportatioin and communication systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure and autonomy.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(32) Tell me how fast you go and I’ll tell you who you are.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(38-39) By now, people work a substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they could not even get to work. The time a society spends on transportation grows in proportion to the speed of its fastest public conveyance. Japan now [1974] leads the United States in both areas. Life-time gets cluttered up with activities generated by traffic as soon as vehicles crash through the barrier that guards people from dislocation and space from distortion.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Ivan Illich watches “Traffic” with Jacques Tati</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(45) The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying an abundant use value (the innate capacity for transit). Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need. Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the non-therapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Elinor Ostrom</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(54) Their [planners'] belief in the effectiveness of power blinds them to the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(60) Man on a bicycle can go three of four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calaries. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man out strips the efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(75-76) There are two roads from where we are to technological maturity: one is the road of liberation from affluence; the other is the road of liberation from dependence. Both roads have the same destination: the social restructuring of space that offers to each person the constantly renewed experience that the centre of the world is where he stands, walks and lives.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: JG Ballard and Ivan Illich</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-39745422198717453632022-01-10T19:27:00.002-08:002022-01-10T19:27:26.175-08:00Defying Hitler<p> <span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002</span></p><table id="bibInfoDetails" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 0px; color: black; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><tbody style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><tr style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><td class="bibInfoLabel" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 10px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ISBN</td><td class="bibInfoData" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 630px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="recordDetailValue" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 4px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">0374161577</div></td></tr></tbody></table><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(16-17) Growing up during WWI "The force and influence of these experiences are not diminished by the fact that they were lived through by children or young boys. On the contrary, in its reactions the mass psyche greatly resembles the child psyche. One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism. That is where it draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward internal opponents. Anyone who does not join in the the game is regarded not as an adversary but as a spoilsport. Ultimately that is also the source of Nazism's belligerent attitude toward neighboring states. Other countries are not regarded as neighbors, but must be opponents, whether they like ti or not. Otherwise the match would have to be called off!"</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(31) "I reiterate that we should take note of the political reactions of children. What 'every child knows' is generally the last irrefutable quintessence of a political development."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(56) the inflationary economy of 1923 "The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well. Overnight they became free, rich, and independent. It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience were punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction were rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the high school senior who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slightly older friends. He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(86) 1930 "To my knowledge, the Bruning regime was the first essay and model of a form of government that has since been copied in many European countries: the semidictatorship in the name, and in defense, of democracy against fully fledged dictatorship. Anyone who takes the trouble to study Bruning's rule in depth will find all those factors that make this sort of government the inevitable forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent: its discouragement of its own supporters; the way it undermines its own position; its acceptance of a loss of freedom; its lack of ideological weapons against enemy propaganda; the way it surrenders the initiative; and its collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question of power."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(91) "In many respects the atmosphere in Germany resembled that which prevails today in Europe as a whole: a passive waiting for the inevitable, still hoping to avoid it up to the last moment."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(103) 1933 "Even some of those who became Nazis at this time did not fully realize what they were doing. They might think that they stood for nationalism and socialism, were against the Jews and for the pre-1914-18 status quo, and many of them secretly looked forward to a new public adventure, a repeat of 1923. Still, they expected all that to take the humane forms usual in a civilized nation. Most of them would have been deeply shocked if one had suggested that what they really stood for were torture chambers and officially decreed pogroms (to name but two of the most obvious things, and these are certainly not yet the final horrific culmination). Even today there are Nazis who are shocked and alarmed if this is pointed out to them."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(118-119) Reichstag fire "Outside, against a flaming backdrop, like a Wagnerian Wotan, Hitler uttered the memorable words, 'If this is the work of the Communists, _which I do not doubt_, may God have mercy on them!' We had no inkling of all that. The radio was switched off. Around midnight we sleepily took the night buses to our various homes, At that very moment the raiding parties were already on their way to get their victims out of bed, in the first great wave of concentration-camp arrests: left-wing deputies and literary figures, unpopular doctors, officials, and lawyers.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"It was only the next morning that I read about the fire, and not until midday that I read about the arrests. Around the same time a decree of Hindenburg's was promulgated. It abolished freedom of speech and confidentiality of the mail and telephone for all private individuals, while giving the police unrestricted rights of search and access, confiscation and arrest. That afternoon men with ladders went around, honest workmen, covering campaign posters with plain white paper. All parties of the left had been prohibited from any further election publicity. Those newspapers that still appeared reported all this in a fawning, fervently patriotic, jubilant tone. We had been saved! Germany was free! Next Saturday all Germans would come together in a festival of national exaltation, their hearts swelling with gratitude! Get the torches and flags out!."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(128) March 1933 "These elections, the last that were ever held in prewar Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 percent of the votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 percent). The majority was still against the Nazis. If you consider that terror was in full swing, that the parties of the left had been prohibited from all public activity in the decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German people as a whole had behaved quite decently. However, it made no difference at all. The defeat was celebrated like a victory, the terror intensified, the celebrations multiplied. Flags never left the windows for a whole fortnight."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(144) Nazism as an infection, "the wolf virus" </span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(151) The day they threw the Jews out of the law courts "Meanwhile a brown shirt approached me and took up position in front of my worktable. 'Are you Aryan?' Before I had a chance to think, I said, 'Yes.' He took a close look at my nose - and retired. The blood shot to my face. A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat. I had said 'Yes'! Well, in God's name I was indeed an 'Aryan.' I had not lied, I had allowed something much worse to happen. What a humiliation, to have answered the unjustified question as to whether I was 'Aryan' so easily, even if the fact was of no importance to me! What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace! I had been caught unawares, even now, I had failed my very first test. I could have slapped myself."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(155) "We were not equal to the situation, even as victims. If you will allow me this generalization, it is one of the uncanny aspects of events in Germany that the deeds have no doers and the suffering has no martyrs. Everything takes place under a kind of anesthesia. Objectively dreadful deeds produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents. Even death under torture only produces the response 'Bad luck.'"</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(185) "Today the political struggle is expressed by the choice of what a person eats and drinks, whom he loves, what he does in his spare time, whose company he seeks, whether he smiles or frowns, what he reads, what pictures he hangs on his walls, It is here that the battles of the next world war are being decided in advance. That may sound grotesque, but it is the truth."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(199-200) "The plight of non-Nazi Germans in the summer of 1933 was certainly one of the most difficult a person can find himself in: a condition in which one is helplessly, utterly overwhelmed, accompanied by the shock of having been caught completely off balance. We were in the Nazis' hands for good or ill. All lines of defense had fallen, any collective resistance had become impossible. Individual resistance was only a form of suicide. We were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it would end. At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege. Just a little pact with the devil - and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead you were one of the victorious hunters."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(213- 217) A conversation in the law study group "It happened just after the murders in Copenick. Brock and Holz came to our meeting like murderers fresh from the deed. Not that they had taken part in the slaughter themselves, but it was obviously the topic of the day in their new circles. They had clearly convinced themselves that they were in some way accomplices. Into our civilized, middle-class atmosphere of cigarettes and coffee cups the two of them brought a strange, bloodred cloud of sweaty death.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"They started to speak of the matter immediately. It was from their graphic descriptions that we found out what had actually happened. The press had only contained hints and intimations.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'Fantastic, what happened in Copenick yesterday, eh?' began Brock, and that was the tone of his narrative. He went into detail, explained how the women and children had been sent into a neighboring room before the men were shot point-blank with a revolver, bludgeoned with a truncheon, or stabbed with an SA dagger. Surprisingly, most of them had put up no resistance, and made sorry figures in their nightshirts. The bodies had been tipped into the river and many were still being washed ashore in the area today. His whole narrative was delivered with that brazen smile on his face which had recently become a stereotypical feature. He made no attempt to defend the actions, and obviously did not see much need to. He regarded them primarily as sensational.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"We found it all dreadful and shook our heads, which seemed to give him some satisfaction.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'And you see no difficulty with your new party membership because of these things?' I remarked at last.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"Immediately he became defensive and his face took on a bold Mussolini expression. 'No, not at all,' he declared. 'Do you feel pity for these people? The man who shot first the day before yesterday knew that it would cost him his life, of course. It would have been bad form not to hang him. Incidentally, he has my respect. As for the others - shame on them. Why didn't they put up a fight? They were all longtime Social Democrats and members of the Eiserne Front [non-Communist leftist semimilitary group]. Why should they be lying in their beds in their nightshirts? They should have defended themselves and died decently. But they're a limp lot. I have no sympathy for them.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'I don't know,' I said slowly, 'whether I feel much pity for them, but what I do feel is an indescribable sense of disgust at people who go around heavily armed and slaughter defenseless victims.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'They should have defended themselves,' said Brock stubbornly. 'Then they wouldn't have been defenseless. That is a disgusting Marxist trick, being defenseless, when it gets serious.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"At this point Holz intervened. 'I consider the whole thing a regrettable revolutionary excess,' he said, 'and between you and me, I expect the responsible officer to be disciplined. But I also think that it should not be overlooked that it was a Social Democrat who shot first. It is understandable, and in a certain sense even justified, that under these circumstances the SA takes, er, very energetic countermeasures.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"It was curious. I could just about stand Brock, but Holz had become a red rag to me. I could not help myself. I felt compelled to insult him.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'It is most interesting for me to hear your new theory of justification,' I said. 'If I am not mistaken, you did once study law?'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"He gave me a steely look and elaborately picked up the gauntlet. 'Yes, I have studied law,' he said slowly, 'and I remember that I heard something about state self-defense there. Perhaps you missed that lecture.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'State self-defense,' I said, 'interesting. You consider that the state is under attack because a few hundred Social Democrat citizens put on nightshirts and go to bed?'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'Of course not,' he said. 'You keep forgetting it was a Social Democrat who first shot two SA men -'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'- who had broken into his home.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'Who had entered his abode in the course of their official duty.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'And that allows the state the justification of self-defense against any other citizens? Against me and you?'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'Not against me,' he said, 'but perhaps against you.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"He was now looking at me with really steely eyes and I had a funny feeling in the back of my knees.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'You,' he said, 'are always niggling and willfully ignoring the monumental developments in the resurgence of the German people that are taking place today.' (I can hear the very word 'resurgence' to this day!) 'You grasp at every little excess and split legal hairs to criticize and find fault. You seem to be unaware, I fear, that today people of your ilk represent a latent danger for the state, and that the state has the right and the duty to react accordingly - at the very least when one of you goes so far as to dare to offer open resistance.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"Those were his words, soberly and slowly spoken in the style of a commentary on the Civil Code. All the while he looked at me with those steely eyes.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'If we are dealing in threats,' I said, 'then why not openly? Do you intend to denounce me to the Gestapo?'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"About here Von Hagen and Hirsch began to titter, attempting to turn it all into a joke. This time, however, Holz put a spanner in the works. Quietly and deliberately (and it was only now that I realized, with a certain unexpected satisfaction, how deeply angered he was):</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'i admit that for sometime I have been wondering whether that is not my duty.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'Oh," I said. I needed a few moments to taste all the different flavors on my tongue: a little surprise, a little admiration for how far he was prepared to go, a little sourness from the word 'duty,' a little satisfaction at how far I had driven him, and a new cool insight: that is the way life is now, and that is how it has changed - and a little fear. having made a quick assessment of what he might be able to say about me, if he went through with it, I said, 'I must say that it does not speak for the seriousness of your intentions that you have been thinking about it for some time, only to tell me the result of your thoughts.'</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"'Don't say that,' he said quietly. Now all the trumps had been played and to raise the stakes further we would have had to become physical."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(223) "The Germany that was 'my country' and the country of those like me was not just a blob on the map of Europe. It was characterized by certain distinctive attributes: humanity, openness on all sides, philosophical depth of thought, dissatisfaction with the world and oneself, the courage always to try something fresh and to abandon it if need be, self-criticism, truthfulness, objectivity, severity, rigor, variety, a certain ponderousness but also delight in the freest improvisation, caution and earnestness but also a playful richness of invention, engendering ever new ideas that it quickly rejects as invalid, respect for originality, good nature, generosity, sentimentality, musicality, and above all freedom, something roving, unfettered, soaring, weightless, Promethean. Secretly we were proud that in the realm of the spirit our country was the land of unlimited possibilities. Be that as it may, this was the country we felt attached to, in which we were at home.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"This Germany has been destroyed and trampled underfoot by the nationalist, and it has at least become clear who its deadliest enemy was: German nationalism itself and the German Reich. To stay loyal to it and belong to it, one had to have the courage to recognize this fact - and all its consequences."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(229) "It is a commonly held belief that caution is just as dangerous as recklessness, and that caution deprives one of the pleasure of taking risks. Incidentally, everything I have experienced in my life reinforces the truth of this perception."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(242) Remark overheard on the Nazi take-over of the Christian church "For pity's sake, now we even have to fight for the faith that we don't have."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(257) In order to qualify for his court exams, Haffner had to spend time in a Nazi training camp "Four weeks later I was wearing jackboots and a uniform with a swastika armband, and spent many hours each day marching in a column in the vicinity of Juterbog. Along with all the others, I chorused 'Do You See the Sunrise in the East' or 'Heathlands of Brandenburg' and other marching songs. We even had a flag - with a swastika, of course - and sometimes this flag was carried before us. When we came through villages, the people on either side of the road raised their arms to greet the flag, or disappeared quickly into some house entrance. They did this because they had learned that if they did not, we, that is I, would beat them up. It made not the slightest difference that I - and, no doubt, many another among us - fled into entryways to avoid these flags, when we were not marching behind them. Now we were the ones embodying an implicit threat of violence against all bystanders. They greeted the flag or disappeared. For fear of us. For fear of me.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"I still feel dizzy when I consider my predicament then. It was the Third Reich in a nutshell."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(261) The SA officer "I cannot say that he made an unpleasant impression. He was a small, dainty, brown-haired young man with lively eyes, not a bullyboy. But I noticed a peculiar expression on his face - it was not even particularly disagreeable, but it reminded me of something and it bothered me. Suddenly I remembered: it was exactly the expression of brazen audacity that Brock had worn ever since had had become a Nazi."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(267-268) "The worst came when he had finished. A fanfare signaled the national anthem, and we all raised our arms. A few hesitated like me, it was so dreadful shaming. But did we want to sit our examinations, or not/ For the first time, I had the feeling, so strong it left a taste in my mouth, 'this doesn't count. This isn't me. It doesn't count,' and with this feeling I, too, raised my arm and held it stretched out ahead of me, for about three minutes. That is the combined length of 'Deutschland uber alles' and the 'Horst Wessel Song.' Most of us sang along, droning jerkily. I moved my lips a little and mimed singing, as one does with hymns in church.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"But we all had our arms stretched out, and in this pose we stood facing the radio set, which had pulled these arms out like a puppeteer manipulates the arms of his marionettes, and we all sang or pretended to do so, each one of us the Gestapo of the others."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">NB: Are you going to act as the Gestapo for yourself?</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(272) "Finally, there was a typically German aspiration that began to influence us strongly, although we hardly noticed it. This was the idolization of proficiency for its own sake, the desire to do whatever you are assigned to do as well as it can possibly be done. However senseless, meaningless, or downright humiliating it may be, it should be done as efficiently, thoroughly, and faultlessly as could be imagined."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(279-280) "What about me? I notice that I have not had occasion to use the word 'I' in my story for quite a while. I have used either the third person or the first person plural; there has been no opportunity to use the first person singular. That is no accident. It was one of the points - perhaps _the_ point - of what was happening to us in the camp that the individual person each of us represented played no part and was completely sidelined. That just did not count. Things were quite deliberately arranged so that the individual had no room for maneuver. What one represented, what one's opinions were in 'private' and 'actually,' was of no concern and set aside, put on ice, as it were. On the other hand, in moments when one had the leisure to think of one's individuality - perhaps if one awoke at night in the midst of the multifarious snoring of one's comrades - one had a feeling that what was actually happening, in which one participated mechanically, had no real existence or validity. It was only in these hours that one could attempt to call oneself morally to account and prepare a last position of defense for one's inner self."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(282) "Or the other day when somebody else - otherwise a pleasant comrade - had talked about the trial of those accused of setting the Reichstag fire and said, 'I don't really believe they're guilty. But what does that matter? There are enough witnesses against them. So why not just chop off their heads and be done with it. A few more or less don't make any difference.' (He said it pleasantly, without rancor.)</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"What can one say to that? There is no answer. The only answer is to take an axe to the person's head who said it. Just so. But me with an axe? Besides the man who said it is quite decent otherwise."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(285-288) "To start with the essential point comradeship completely destroys the sense of responsibility for oneself, be it in the civilian or, worse still, the religious sense. A man bedded in comradeship is relieved of all personal worries, and of the rigors of the struggle for life. He has his bed in the barracks, his meals, and his uniform. His daily life is prescribed from morning to night. He need not concern himself with anything. He lives, not under the severe rule of 'each for himself,' but in the generous softness of 'one for all and all for one.' It is often of the most unpleasant falsehoods that the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life. On the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only for soldiers in the field, for men facing death. Only the threat of death justifies and makes this egregious dispensation from responsibility acceptable. Indeed, it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"It is even worse that comradeship relieves men of responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences, they do what all their comrades do. They have no choice. They have no time for thought (except when they unfortunately wake up at night). Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everybody else does...."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"It was comradeship, which in a few weeks in a camp at Juterbog had molded us -Referendars [court officials], after all, with an intellectual, academic education, future judges - into an unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible mass, in which sayings like those about Paris or the Reichstag fire were commonplace, went unanswered, and set the intellectual tone. Comradeship always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level, accessible to everyone. It cannot tolerate discussion; in the chemical solution of comradeship, discussion immediately takes on the color of whining and grumbling. It becomes a mortal sin. Comradeship admits no thoughts, just mass feelings, of the most primitive sort - these, on the other hand, are inescapable, to try and evade them is to put oneself beyond the pale. How familiar were the attitudes that governed our camp comradeship absolutely and irrevocably! </span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">They were not really the official Nazi party line, they certainly had a Nazi character. They were the attitudes we had had as boys during the Great War, which had dominated the Rennbund [an informal sports group] and the athletics clubs in t he Stresemann era. A few Nazi-specific ideas had not yet taken root. For instance 'we' were still not virulently anti-Semitic. But 'we' were not prepared to make an issue of it. That was a trifle. Who could take ti seriously? 'We' had become a collective entity, and with all the intellectual cowardice and dishonesty of a collective being we instinctively ignored or belittled anything that could disturb our collective self-satisfaction. A German Reich in microcosm.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">"It was remarkable how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilization. The most important part of individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love. So comradeship has its special weapon against love: smut. Every evening in bed, after the last patrol round, there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs and jokes. That is a hard and fast rule of male comradeship, and nothing is more mistaken than the widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for frustrated erotic or sexual feelings. These songs and jokes do not have an erotic, arousing effect. On the contrary, they make the act of love appear as unappetizing as possible. They treat it like digestion and defecation, and make it an object of ridicule. The men who recited rude songs and used coarse words for female body parts were in effect denying that they had ever had tender feelings or been in love, that they had ever made themselves attractive, behaved gently, and used sweet words for these same parts... They were rough, tough and above such civilized tenderness."</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">(292) "Nevertheless, the condition of comradeship, dangerous as it is, has its weak point - as does every condition that is based on deception, doping, and mumbo-jumbo. The moment, namely, that its external requisites are missing, it disappears into thin air. That has been observed many thousand times, even with genuine, legitimate, wartime comradeships: men who in the trenches would have given their lives for one another, and more than once shared their last cigarette, feel the greatest shyness and inhibitions when they meet again as civilians - and it is _not_ the civilian meeting that is deceptive and illusory." </span>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-18533847712988369812022-01-06T19:59:00.004-08:002022-01-06T19:59:50.634-08:00Barbara Neely's Blanche White Mysteries<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The Blanche White mysteries by Barbara Neely are really enjoyable. Blanche is smart, perceptive, and resourceful but she often jumps to conclusions and has blind spots (and prejudices) which put her in danger. She is also "eggplant black,” middle-aged, plus-sized, and a domestic worker, who cooks, cleans, and serves in various wealthy households. I wish there had been more than just these four volumes.</span></p><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Barbara Neely has some home truths to tell and the mysteries are always human and never quite neat.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">——————— </div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_Blanche on the Lam_ by Barbara Neely</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Penguin Books, 1992</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 0 14 01.7439 7</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(page 39) Blanche was unimpressed by the tears, and Grace’s Mammy-save-me eyes. Mammy-savers regularly peeped out at her from the faces of some white women for whom she worked, and lately, in this age of the touchy-feely model of manhood, an occasional white man. It happened when an employer was struck by family disaster or too compulsive about owning everything, too overwrought, or downright frightened by who annd what they were. She never ceased to be amazed at how many white people longed for Aunt Jemima.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(48-49) Blanche had never suffered from what she called Darkies’ Disease….. Loving the people for whom you worked might make it easier to wipe old Mr Stanley’s shitty behind and take young Edna’s smart-ass, rich kid remarks. And, of course, it was hard not to love children, or to overlook the failings of the old and infirm. They were not yet responsible in the first case and beyond it in the other. What she didn’t understand was how you convinced yourself that you were actually loved by people who paid you the lowest possible wages… It seemed to her that this was the real danger in looking at customers through love-tinted glasses. You had to pretend that obvious facts - facts that were like fences around your relationship - were not true.</span><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_Blanche Among the Talented Tenth_ by Barbara Neely<br />Leawood, KS: Brash Books, 1994, 2014<br />ISBN 1941298478<br /><br />(70) Well, I guess I really hadn’t thought about what kind of person, not woman, but person, I wanted to be until I read her book. She made me see that a lot of what we’re told makes a good woman is not what makes you a good person. You know what I mean?<br /><br />(73) "I don’t think any of us is ever all grown up. No matter how old we get, life’s always got a lesson for you. Most likely one you’ve learned ten times before,” she chuckled. “That’s all growing up means, you know, acting like you know what you’ve learned."<br /><br />(124) She’d learned long ago that the best way to communicate with crazy people was in their world.<br /><br />(128-129) Lots of times when women say love, we mean somebody to take care of us, or to make our lives seem, worthwhile - things we ought to be doing for oursleves. Sometimes when men say love, they seem to mean they want to own you, or lock you in the kitchen and maternity ward or tell you what to think.<br /><br />(144) Maybe part of what happened when you had more than most people was that you fooled yourself into thinking you were independent.<br /><br />(154) When you hired someone to do something basic for you, did you automatically turn them into someone not to be taken as seriously as yourself?<br /><br />(157) Ain’t nothin’ wrong with bein’ interested in people. No better way to learn what not to do in life. And you don’t exactly stop listening when I start telling you what’s happening up here.<br /><br />(162) This wasn’t the first time she'd been attacked. She’d been raped and mugged. She was too familiar with the feeling of separation from herself that came with having been rendered defenseless, but she wasn’t taking responsibility for shit that wasn’t her fault.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: That feeling of separation from self is key and often overlooked.<br /><br />(191) We women would be wise to remember that we have always done all the important things, grow food, raise children, develop social groups, all the things that sustain human life. In my new book, I try to understand and explain why it is that we won’t accept the power and ascendency this gives us.<br /><br />… We don’t need other people to know our power, we need ourselves, ourselves.<br /><br />(192) I can’t imagine what it will take to make men feel it's all right to be human before they're male or black.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_Blanche Cleans Up_ by Barbara Neely<br />NY: Penguin Books, 1998<br />ISBN 0 14 02.7747 1<br /><br />(39) Most of the time she remembered the cost of childhood to the child and tried to act accordingly, but it didn’t always work.<br /><br />(99) astreperious - Asterperious, is one of four bomb squadrons of the 90th Bombardment Group Heavy. The 319th Bomb Squadron made history in New Guinea from 1943 Through 1944 in many critical battle campaigns including Wewak, Biak Island, and Rabaul; astorperious: (US, slang, dated, rare, AAVE) stuck up; haughty<br /><br />(129) wolf tickets - To speak aggressively to someone without intending to back it up with violence.<br /><br />(138) Old folks say the dead need our tears to get where they got to go.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: I say the only thing our dead want from us is to be remembered.</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">from _You Can't Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt, and Nat_ by Gene Lees<br />Lincoln, NE: Univ of NE Press, 2001<br />ISBN 0-8032-8034-3<br /><br />(xvi) from the preface by Nat Hentoff: [James] Loewen writes: I have found useful a distinction societies make in east and central Africa. According to John Mbiti, Kisawahili speakers divide the deceased into two categories: sasha and zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead...<br /><br />(149) … and if you were lucky enough to be loved, you weren’t always lucky enough to be loved in the way you needed.<br /><br />(264) “Well, you know what it’s like tendin’ bar; people talk to you like listenin’s what you get paid to do. When they ain’t talkin’ to you, they talk in front of you like you can’t hear.”<br /><br />(276) She took me to a friend of hers, a nurse or a midwife. But first Cousin Murphy made me pray for what would not have a chance to become a full baby born to me, made me thank it for giving me my life back. Made me promise to give of myself to some child already in the world. Atonement, she called it.<br /><br />(282) She wondered if men thought they were responsible for things they couldn’t control, or was this a woman thing?<br />Editorial Comment: a sexist comment. See above about “prejudice"</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">_Blanche Passes Go_ by Barbara Neely<br />NY: Penguin Books, 2000<br />ISBN 0 14 10.0197 6<br /><br />(5) It was easier to rush off to who you were becoming than it was to walk back to where you’d left a part of yourself and try to revive it. Life was a forward-moving thing. Trying to go back was like swimming upstream with rocks in your pockets.<br /><br />(18) The New South is where they capitalize Nigger.<br /><br />(128) Blanche pursed her lips to keep from laughing. There’d been a time when Karen’s Klanette attitude would have depressed her for days. That was before she was old enough to understand that both race and racism were invented by white people and didn’t have a thing to do with her. However, she did like to remind them of the cost of their stupidity when she got a chance.<br /><br />(129) She had a feeling it was the rare white person who could both see prejudice in those he cared about and speak on it.<br /><br />… She couldn't tell him she thought Karen was fine for him, as though being a racist wasn’t something that seeped through your whole life like the stench of sewer water rising in the basement.<br /><br />(137) Daisy wasn’t colored, but she sure as hell wasn’t white in the way the people they both worked for were.<br /><br />(142-143) Blanche recognized one of the dancing black men as a member of what she called the Andy Young Fools Club: civil-rights and other leaders and celebrities she read about who were foolish enough to go on those fact-finding trips for outfits like Nike and Kathy Whatherhame. They always came back grinning about how happy those Asian workers were, and how much they loved being underpaid. Did those so-called fact-finders really believe that what they saw in those factories was what went on when they weren’t around? Everybody cleans house when company’s coming.<br /><br />(261) I met lots of Americans. Blind as bats, most of them. Only looking at the world for how it is for them, not for other people, but…<br /><br />(289) A person had to feel powerful someplace, even the wrong place. Maybe being a black man - the most hated human being in the country - and mostly working jobs where somebody else had all the say had something to do with wanting exclusive ownership of a woman’s life.<br /><br />(305-306) Yes, Blanche thought, and for the same reason: the shame of the wounded. What was it that the rapists, the batterers, and torturers did to make women they hurt feel ashamed of what was done to them, to suspect, at least for a moment, that they deserved to be raped, maimed, and bruised?</div><div style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NB: Ties in with the separation of self</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-51773052982410090992021-12-10T21:04:00.001-08:002021-12-10T21:04:14.754-08:00Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through Autism’s Unique Perspectives<p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><u>Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through Autism’s Unique Perspectives</u> by Dr Temple Grandin & Sean Barron, edited by Veronica Zysk </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(</span><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Arlington TX: Future Horizons Inc, 2016 I</span><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">SBN 9781941765388)</span></p><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(xi) Our brains started shifting from only seeing the details into appreciating larger concepts. Smaller, specific unwritten social rules started migrating under the umbella of broader categories that described social behavior.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(18) TG: The one thing that was the core of my self-motivation was building things. I’ve mentioned it often now, and on purpose, as I don’t think most neurotypicals understand how much fun building things can be, and how it satisfies innate need of people with ASD.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(39) TG: Neurotypical people have a “social sense” right from the time they’re born. Their learning happens through observation, whereas for chidlren and adults with ASD, learning only happens through direct experience.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(41) TG: Everything I feel falls into one of a few categories: happy, sad, scared or angry. I think part of that is the physical way my brain is built. Other people have more association-circuits in their cortex so they develop highly complex emotional connections.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(42) TG: Simon Baron-Cohen’s book Mind Blindness</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(46) TG: It took me twenty years to figure out how to handle that complex social interaction [jealousy on the job]: pull the person into the project and give him a piece of the action.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(47) TG: The multidisciplinary team [studying young couples in love] found support for their two major predictions: 1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with sub cortical reward regions rich with dopamine; and 2) romantic love engages brain systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Using functional MRI scans, they discovered love-related near-physiological systems operating in the brain, and postulated that romantic love may have more to do with motivation, reward and “drive” aspects of behavior than it does with emotions or the sex drive.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(58) TG: They [adults] require less from them [ASD people], probably because they beleive they are capable of less. Only a small percentage of people with ASD have jobs today. </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Low expectations are dangerous for people with ASD. Without raising the bar higher and higher, we arbitraily cap their potential and rob oursleves of the chance to learn what they are actually capable of learning and doing. When I spoke at an Asperger conference in Japan, every single one of the AS adults at the conference had a job. And, you know, they were halfway decent jobs.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(59) TG: We need to give them [ASD people] the services they need, but within an environment of high expectations and a real belief in their capacities to succeed.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(110) TG: People with ASD think specific-to-general while typical people think general-to-specific, and this difference in thinking pattern tips the scales heavily on the side of misunderstandings for ASD kids. Their whole world is comprised of details - thousands of little bits of information that at first don’t necessarily have any relationship to each other, because concepts are not yet a fluid part of their thinking patterns - especially in very young children. Furthermore, all those myriad little bits of information each have equal importance in the mind of an autistic child. Their ability to assign various levels of meaning to the information they’re amassing is a skill yet to be developed, and in its early expression can often be wrong.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(113) VZ: Based on the social understanding we have achieved in our lives, we emphatically agree that perspective-taking, being able to look beyond oneself and into the mind of another person, is the single most important aspect of functioning that determines the level of social success to be achieved by a child or adult with ASD. Through doing so, we learn that what we do affects others - in positive and negative ways. It gives us the ability to consider our own thoughts in relation to information we process about a social situation, and then develop a response that contributes to, rather than detracts from, the social experience.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(116) TG: 1. Visual thinker mind. Thinks in pictures. Often poor at algebra; good at drawing.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">2. music and math mind. Thinks in patterns. Good at chess and engineering. Instantly sees the relationship between numbers that I do not see.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">3. Verbal logic mind. Poor at drawing and good at memorizing facts or translating foreign languages.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(143) TG: Flexible thinking is what’s difficult, not learning the rules.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(171) SB: All the rules I devised and expected the world to conform to were equal in importance. Why? Because each time a person followed a rule I felt a measure of control and security, regardless of the rule or situation.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…It took me many years to learn that when it comes to social interactions among people, and even understanding these social encounters in relation to myself, an unwritten rule was understood by everyone but me: that not everything tips the scales evenly, and I needed to weigh things against each other in importance.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(173) TG: There are three basic levels of conceptual thinking: 1) learning rules; 2) identifying categories; and 3) inventing new categories.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(175) TG: Helping children “get into their head” different and varied ways of categorizing objects is the first step in developing flexible thinking.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…It’s an unwritten rule of social relationship, and of life itself: change is inevitable.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…On a conceptual level what we’re talking about is teaching compromise, along with a sense of what’s fair/unfair.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(181) TG: The only way for me to control anger was to switch it to another emotion; you can’t get rid of emotions, you have to change your reaction - in this case, to one that would not result in me being kicked out of the plant.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(183) SB: I wasn’t yet able to link my need to control the situation (and those in it) with my feelings of being powerless over the world around me.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(198) TG: … an unwritten rule of relationships: people keep “social history” in mind; they weigh your good points and bad points when it comes to mistakes you make in determining their own reactions.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(199) TG: It’s an unwritten social rule: there is a difference between honest mistakes and careless work.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(210) TG: Skills and self-esteem have to come first, or any change of feeling good about learning social rules will be squashed.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">VZ: …what matters more than the mistake you make is what you do once you realize you’ve made it.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(215) SB: An unwritten rule of social relationships is that forgiveness is something we do for ourselves.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(227) SB: As a general rule, people who seek an opinion, who are experiencing difficulties or who may simply need help and encouragement neither want to be told what to do nor want advice, because intellectually they know what to do. Instead, they need validation that someone cares, and diplomacy is a much more effective way to go in this case.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(233) Patricia Rakovic: What was most startling to those of us who run this social skills group was the emotional toll just talking about the subject of honesty and lying had taken on the ASD boys.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">…This is one of the few times we have experienced such a strong, anxiety-ridden, emotional reaction from the students in our social skills group when discussing any topic.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(240) VZ: Whereas honesty is mainly about what to say, and diplomacy is mainly about when to say it, it behooves every child and adult to learn that offering unsolicited comments isn’t always welcomed….</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(253) VZ: An unwritten rule of social relationships is at play: when you’re not polite in any given situation, a polite apology is the next best thing.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(260) SB: It’s hard to miss; you see this lack of civility - which goes hand in hand with an overall sense of personal entitlement - at political rallies, on cable news talk shows and even at a local restaurant.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(263) TG: I was very project-loyal, so when I was told that something I said or did might negatively impact the overall success of the project, it made sense to me, It didn’t lower my self-esteem because it was simply a behavior I needed to work on, not a different person I needed to become. People who are highly social wrap everything in emotions, and tie behavior into judgments about self-worth and self-esteem.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(266) VZ: Keep in mind at all times that children with ASD don’t learn by observation, but by experience.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(271) TG: I feel the emotion associated with an event, but then it gets stored on my hard drive in pictures without the emotion. It becomes a logic puzzle to figure out.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(294) VZ: Fear within any relationship is unhealthy. Good relationships foster trust between the individuals and a sense of comfort, whether they are business or personal.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(313) TG: However, we concentrate so much on teaching appropriate behavior and responses that we overlook teaching the child or adult that all people in a social situation contribute to its success or failure.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(321) TG: As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I didn’t even know that people communicated with their eyes until I was ini my fifties. I missed a whole language of public behavior that was going on around me.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(326) VZ: It’s an unwritten rule of social relationships that most people are quick to call your attention to what you’re doing wrong and slow to praise you for what you’re doing right.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(344) TG: I’ve noticed with the people I’ve met over the years, both on the spectrum and within the meat packing industry, that visual thinkers oftentimes have horrible anxiety problems. </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(378) VZ: Whether you think of it as psycho-babble or psychological truth, an oft-repeated mantra of social relationships is this: “the only person you can ever change is yourself.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(398) TG: On the job I remember to always be “project loyal.” My job is to complete a project I have designed and make it work.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(415) VZ: Adopt this mantra: All behavior is communicatioin - what is the child trying to say?</span>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-15654076787365208832021-10-28T12:22:00.003-07:002021-10-28T12:23:19.730-07:00Quotes from the Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">On my reading list are the last two volumes of Twain’s autobiography. I enjoyed the “disorder” and digressions of the first two volumes but then I have my own weird, just like everyone else.</span></p><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;"><u>The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain</u> </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">NY: Bantam Books, 1957</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“How I Edited an Agricultural Paper”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(49) Ah, heavens and earth, friend! if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“A Trial"</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(84) He had all a sailor’s vindictiveness against the quips and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“A True Story” - devastating critique of slavery which Twain says he took verbatim from the speech of a former slave. Hard to use today as it includes the “n-word” and would thus be seen as “racist” now.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The Diary of Adam and Eve”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(277) It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(282) Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Th3 £1,000,000 Bank-Note”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(317) Just like an Englishman, you see; pluck to the backbone.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(383) Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Was It Heaven? Or Hell?”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(480-481) Time slipped along, and in the due course a change came over their spirits. They had completed the human being’s first duty - which is to think about himself until he had exhausted the subject, then he is in a condition to take up minor interests and think of other people.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The Belated Russian Passport”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(422) There, alongside the door, was the trade-mark of the richest and freest and mightiest republic of all the ages: the pine disk, with the planked eagle spread upon it, his head and shoulders among the stars, and his claws full of out-of-date war material; and at that sight the the tears came into Alfred’s eyes, the pride of country rose in his heart, Hail Columbia boomed up in his breast, and all his fears and sorrows vanished away; for here he was safe, safe! not all the powers of the earth would venture to cross that threshold to lay a hand upon him!</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The $30,000 Bequest”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(506) “I don’t care!” retorted the angry man. “It’s the way you feel, and if you weren’t so immorally pious you’d be honest and say so.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Aleck said, with wounded dignity:</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“I do not see how you can say such unkind and unjust things. There is no such thing as immoral piety.”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(514) At bottom both were troubled and ashamed, for he was a high-up Son of Temperance, and at funerals wore an apron which no dog could look upon and retain his reason and his opinion; and she was a WCTU, with all that implies of boiler-iron virtue and unendurable holiness.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“A Horse’s Tale”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(527) That sort of words doesn’t keep, in the kind of climate we have out here. [excuse the grammar as it is a horse talking]</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(571) His face was as blank as a target after a militia shooting-match.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(579) Oh, hold on; there’s plenty of pain here [Heaven] - but it don’t kill. There’s plenty of suffering here, but it don’t last. You see, happiness ain’t a <i>thing in itself</i> - it’s only a <i>contrast</i> with something that ain’t pleasannt. That’s all it is. There ain’t a thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self - it’s only so by contrast with the other thing. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh. Well, there’s plenty of pain and suffering in heaven - consequently there’s plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“The Mysterious Stranger”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(646) You people do not suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as in any other appointed act -"</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(666) Oh, it’s true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(6678-679) “Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made everyone of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels etermal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitatioin, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!…</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“You perceive, <i>now</i>, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and fooish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a <i>thought</i> - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" />gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-58634652522746402242021-08-16T20:34:00.003-07:002021-08-16T20:34:50.281-07:00The Carbon Coin According to The Ministry for the Future<p><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">(NY: Orbit, 2020 </span><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">ISBN 9780316300131)</span></p><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><div>page 174: For every ton of carbon not burned, or sequestered in a way that would be certified to be real for an agreed-upon time, one century being typical in these discussions so far, you are given one carbon coin. You can trade that coin immediately for another currency on the currency exchanges, so one carbon coin would be worth a certain amount of other fiat currencies. The central banks would guarantee it at a certain minimum price, they would support a floor so it couldn’t crash. But also, it could rise above that floor as people get a sense of its value, in the usual way of currencies in the currency exchange markets.</div></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><div>Mary said, So really this is just a form of quantitative easing.<br />Yes. But directed, targeted. Meaning the creation, the first spending of the new money, would have been specifically aimed at carbon reduction. That reduction is what makes the new money in the first place. The Chen papers sometimes it CQE, carbon quantitative easing….</div><div><br />Page 288: Mary brought them to order. She reminded them of the meetings she had had with them over the past few years, in which she had urged them to create a new currency of their own collaboration, based on carbon sequestration, and exchangeable on currency exchanges; money like other money, but backed by the central banks working together, and securitized by the creation of long-term bonds, bonds with a century pay-out at a guaranteed rate of return large enough to tempt anyone interested in fiscal stability. In essence, as she had been saying, creating a way to invest in survival, to go long on civilization, as opposed to the many ingenious way that finance had found to short civilization, thus in the process shifting most of the surplus value created in the last four decades to the richest two percent of the population, making those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them.</div><div><br />Page 290: … a carbon coin, a digital currency backed by a consortium of all the big central banks, with open access for more central banks to join; these coins to be backed by long-term bonds created by the consortium, and shored up against financial attacks by speculators who were sure to attack it. Defended by all the central banks working together, they would be able to repulse successfully any entities that tried to hamstring their new system. Indeed, if the central banks blockchained not just the new carbon coins but all the fiat money that existed, they could probably squeeze parastic speculators right out of existence. The best defense being a good offense.<br />Page 294: They would issue together a single new currency, coordinated through the BIS [Bank for International Settlements] : one coin per ton of carbon-dioxide-equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere, either by not burning what would have been burned in the ordinary course of things, or by pulling it back out of the air. They promised to establish a floor in the value of this carbon coin, which exposed them to great danger from speculators trying to scare money out of the plan; and they foretold a rise in the value of the currency over the coming decades. By doing these things trhey made this investment a sure thing, assuming civilization itself survived.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;">Page 294: They [a consortium of all the big central banks, with open access for more central banks to join] would issue together a single new currency, coordinated through the BIS [Bank for International Settlements]: one coin per ton of carbon-dioxide-equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere, either by not burning what would have been burned in the ordinary course of things, or by pulling it back out of the air. They promised to establish a floor in the value of this carbon coin, which exposed them to great danger from speculators trying to scare money out of the plan; and they foretold a rise in the value of the currency over the coming decades. By doing these things they made this investment a sure thing, assuming civilization itself survived.</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space; word-wrap: break-word;"><br />Page 295: In fact, at the end of the agreement they all lent some fiat money of the ordinary kind, pooled into a fund administered through the BIS, which would be enough to pay for this new bureaucracy of verification that would have to be created to certify that carbon was rally being sequestered. This was a bureaucracy so vast no single bank could afford it, nor of course the ministry, not even close. It was almost a full employment plan all by itself.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Page 333: If all fiat money everywhere went digital and got recorded in blockchains, so that its location and transaction history could be traced and seen by all, then illegal tax dodges could be driven into non-existence by sanction, embargo, seizure, and erasure.</div><div><br />Thus it will be seen that a fully considered and vigorous tax regime, using digital trackable currencies and instituted by all the nations on Earth by way of an international treaty brokered by the UN of the World Bank or some other international organization, could quickly stimulate rapid change in behavior and in wealth distribution. Some might even call it revoutionary change.</div></div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-53288043653805026162021-07-07T19:13:00.001-07:002024-02-20T18:42:47.625-08:00The Power of Nonviolence by Richard Gregg<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The Power of Nonviolence by Richard Gregg </span></p><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">Nyack, N.Y.: Fellowship Publications, 1959</div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></div><div class="ApplePlainTextBody" dir="auto" style="-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px; line-break: after-white-space; overflow-wrap: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">(15-16) Hungarian successful nonviolent resistance to Austria by Ferenc Deak ending with a new constitution in February 1867 [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_Resistance_(Hungary)">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_Resistance_(Hungary)</a>]<br /><br />(29) Late in 1940 the Nazis displayed the swastika emblem from a Danish public building. According to a report in The New York Times, “the monarch protested that the act was contrary to the occupation agreement and demanded that the flag be removed. The German military officials refused. ‘I will send a soldier to remove it,’ the king replied, or so the story ran. He was informed the soldier would be shot. ‘I am the soldier,’ he retorted, and the Nazi flag was lowered.”<br /><br />… When the Germans tried to compel the Danes to adopt the Nürnberg laws against the Jews, the Danes refused, When the Germans ordered that all Danish Jews should wear a yellow star and that a Jewish ghetto would be established, King Christian announced that if this were done he would be pleased to move from his palace to such a ghetto and, accorded to and Associated Press dispatch of October 11, 1942, said, “If the Germans want to put the yellow Jewish star in Denmark, I and my whole family will wear it as a sign of the highest distinction.” He attended in full uniform a special celebration in a Copenhagen synagogue. All over Denmark opposition to the German plans of repression arose.<br />NB: The Danes evacuated 7,220 of Denmark's 7,800 Jews, plus 686 non-Jewish spouses, to neutral Sweden before the Nazis could round them up.<br /><br />(31) Haaken Holmboe, Norwegian teacher who helped organize teachers’ nonviolent resistance in Quisling’s Norway<br />Editorial Comment: Norwegian teachers refused to teach Quisling's new curriculum. Hundreds were jailed and sent to concentration camps to do forced labor. They held out for a year and returned to teaching while Quisling's Nazi curriculum was dropped.<br /><br />(35) This Norwegian nonviolent resistance was possible because all the people were self-respecting, self-reliant, self-confident, courageous, filled with a spirit of unity, independence and liberty, and felt urgently and steadily that they had to resist somehow. It was unpremeditated and spontaneous.<br /><br />(38) The transportation committee [in Montgomery, AL] first organized a Negro taxi service but this was blocked by an existing law which required a minimum fare of 45 cents for any taxi ride. Then a car-pool was formed and later was added to by station wagons bought and oeprated for the purpose by several of the Negro churches and by other contributors.<br />NB: possibiity of swadeshi, reminder of credit pooling by original Populists<br /><br />(39) The insurance companies were pressured into canceling the insurance on Negro cars. But this attack was defeated by getting insurance from Lloyds of London<br /><br />(40) The city [Montgomery, Alabama] brought suit in November 1959 to enjoin the operation of the Negro car pool. The petition was directed against the Montgomery Improvement Association and several Negro churches and individuals.<br /><br />(50) Christ, searching for a change in men more profound and important than immediate external acts, told them to get rid of anger and greed, knowing, I believe, that if this took place, war would disappear.<br /><br />Courageous violence, to try to prevent or stop a wrong, is better than cowardly acquiescence. Cowardice is more harmful morally than violence.<br /><br />(51) The nonviolent resister seeks a solution under which both parties can have complete self-respect and mutual respect, a settlement that will implement the new desires and full energies of both parties. The nonviolent resister seeks to help the violent attacker to re-establish his moral balance on a level higher and more secure than that from which he first launched his violent action. The function of the nonviolent type of resistance is not to harm the opponent nor impose a solution against his will, but to help both parties into a more secure, relative, happy, and truthful relationship.<br /><br />(55) … in nonviolent resistance, both anger and fear are controlled.<br /><br />(61) William Alanson White: “It follows, too, that no conflict can be solved at the level of conflict. That is, two mutually opposed tendencies can never unite their forces except at a higher level, in an all inclusive synthesis which lifts the whole situation to a level above that upon which the conflict rose.”<br /><br />(62) Peace imposed by violence is not psychological peace but a suppressed conflict. It is unstable, for it contains the seeds of its own destruction. The outer condition is not a true reflection of the inner condition. But in peace secured by true nonviolent resistance there is no longer any inner conflict; a new channel is found, in which both the formerly conflicting energies are at work in the same direction and in harmony.<br /><br />(63) So love is a great principle in moral dynamics. It does not suppress to thwart the energy behind fear and anger but uses it, and finds way to steer it into channels desirable to both parties to the conflict. <br /><br />(66) Fear and anger are closely allied. They have the same origin or purpose: to separate a person from a living creature, force or situation considered by the person to be painful, threatening or dangerous to his comfort or well-being, the easy action of his instincts or his very existence. If the person feels that he is stronger than the threatening force or situation, the emotion is anger, while if he estimates the danger as stronger than himself (including his skill), the emotion is fear.<br /><br />… Hate is a sort of deferred or thwarted anger.<br /><br />(67) We know that the elemental instinct of flight and its corresponding emotion, fear, can be controlled and disciplined by military training.<br />NB: fight, flight, or freeze<br /><br />… The new discipline probably is more quantitatively more difficult, because it involved control of both fear and anger, but it is not qualitatively or intrinsically more difficult, because both these emotions are similar in origin and in ultimate purpose, namely, human-preservation through individual self-preservation.<br /><br />(71) Violence is based upon fear and anger and uses them to the utmost. We have seen that these two emotions are based on the idea of separation, of division. Nonviolent resistance, on the other hand, is based upon the idea of unity. The hypothesis of nonviolent resisters is that the strongest factor in human beings, in the long run, is their unity - that they have more in common as a human family than as separate individuals.<br /><br />(72) War seeks to demoralize the opponent, to break a will, to destroy his confidence, enthusiasm and hope. Nonviolent resistance demoralizes the opponent only to re-establish in him a new morale that is finer because it is based on sounder values. Nonviolent resistance does not break the opponent’s will but alters it; does not destroy his confidence, enthusiasm and hope but transfers them to a finer purpose.<br /><br />(74) Frederick the Great wrote, “If my soldiers began to think, not one would remain in the ranks.” As soon as a soldier begins to think of certain sorts of things, he begins to be an individual, to separate himself from the mass mind, the will and personality of the army. If, then, the soldier is made to think for himself in the midst of a conflict, a start has been made toward the disintegration of his morale.<br />NB: The key is eye to eye contact, Auschwitz satyagraha, death march survivor, cops and a bathroom mirror during a Tompkins Square Park homeless riot... and other examples<br /><br />(75) The Duke of Wellington put it forcefully: “No man with any scruples of conscience is fit to be a soldier.” One of the most important elements in a soldier’s morale, as Hocking has indicated, is his consciousness of being a protector. If he is deprived of that, he feels useless and perhaps a little absurd.<br /><br />…Inaction is notoriously hard on a soldier’s morale.<br /><br />(78) In nonviolent resistance the suffering is itself a weapon or means of winning.<br />NB: less suffering than determination, I believe<br /><br />(86) In quality a victory by nonviolent resistance is far more gallant and joyous than one by violence can ever be. It requires no lying, distortion or suprression of the truth, no slaughter or threats. It leaves no bad conscience or bad taste in the mouth. The public opinion it gains is weighty and lasting.<br /><br />Still another way in which mass nonviolent resistance operates is to end and clear away social defects, economic mistakes and political errors. The semi-military discipline of the resisters, the getting rid of bad habits, the learning to struggle without anger, the social unity developed, the emphasis on moral factors, the appeal to the finest spirit of the opponents and onlookers, the generosity and kindness required - all these constitute a social purification, a creation of truer values and actions among all concerned.<br /><br />(87) When truth is more nearly approximated in action there is a tremendous gain in strength as well as a liberation.<br /><br />(89) Ghana, the new member of the British Commonwealth in West Africa, won its freedom in 1957 after a ten-year nonviolent struggle. Its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, in his autobiography says explicitly that the campaign for freedom was “based on the principle of absolute nonviolence as used by Gandhi in India,” and “We repudiate war and violence."<br /><br />(95-96) Clausewitz’s principles of war have been summarized by a British writer [AA Walser]: “Retaining the initiative, using the defensive form of action, concentration of force at the decisive point, the determination of that point, the superiority of the moral factor to purely material resources, the proper relation between attack and defense, and the will to victory.”<br /><br />(97) But psychologically, nonviolent resistance differs in one respect from war. The object is not to make the opponent believe that he is crushed but to persuade him to realize that he can attain practical security, or whatever else his ultimate desire may be, by easier and surer means than he saw formerly. The effort is furthermore to help him work out such new means, not rigidly or on any a priori plan, but flexibly in accordance with the deepest growing truth of the entire situation in all its bearings. Nonviolence does not destroy the opponent’s courage, but merely alters his belief that his will and desire must be satisfied only in _his_ way. Thus he is led to see the situation in a broader, more fundamental and far-sighted way, so as to work out a solution which will more nearly satisfy both parties in the light of a new set of conditions.<br /><br />(103-104) The nonviolent resister believes that a large part of the activities that the state are founded upon [is] a mistake, namely, the idea that fear is the strongest and best sanction for group action and association.<br /><br />(104-105) The struggle is fundamentally in the realm of ideas and moral principles, as Napoleon and other military writers have pointed out. Since it is axiomatic among all warriors that the best form of defense is to attack, then the most efficient attack is not in the realm of material weapons but in the realm of ideas, feelings and moral principles. I do not mean mere argument, though that is important, but still more by putting fine moral principles into action, by being strictly honest and candid with oneself as well as one’s opponents, admitting one’s past mistakes, first, unilaterally (every one of us has made mistakes), respecting one’s opponents and showing it in deeds, being willing to yield something - even something big and valuable, provided it is not a principle - being kind and generous to the opponents, stopping all threats and harsh holding-fast to the right. This will be very difficult, a very high price to pay for peace. But with all the load of past moral mistakes everywhere, we cannot have peace unless we are willing to pay a high price.<br /><br />(105) Peace, on the other hand, is not an institution. Like happiness and liberty, it cannot be had by direct effort. It is an indirect byproduct of other conditions, chief of which are mutual trust and a strong sense of the unity of mankind and its overriding importance. Trust, in turn, grows out of deeds that reveal continuing intelligence, good will and desire to cooperate and promote the common welfare. These underlying attitudes can be stimulated to grow. Their growth can be begun unilaterally. It is upon their developoment and growth that effort should be concentrated. Once they are strong and permanent, peace will come automatically,<br /><br />(107) The advantages of nonviolent resistance is that it begins at home and can and needs to be practiced in all the small private relations bretween people as a preparation for and accompaniment of its use on a large scale. Nobody can dodge the responsibility for its success. The poorest and most insignificant can practice it as finely, successfully and usefully as prime ministers, presidents, financiers, labor leaders or other powerful persons. Through nonviolent resistance we can reach an active, reasoned belief in the conditions that result in peace, conditions capable of continuous practice in all grades of life and all sorts of conflict, so as to educate everyone into a conviction that they give better results, more efficiently, than violence.<br /><br />(122) In conflict, what needs to be done is to change not people as such, but their attachment to certain ideas, sentiments, desires, and assumptions. Such changes are not effected by killing or wounding the opponents.<br /><br />(123) In the persuasion of nonviolent resistance, there must be not only gentleness and love but also truth. All human beings make mistakes. Adherence to truth requires public admission of our mistakes.<br /><br />(123-124) There are other advantages in thus notifying the adversary in advance of what you are planning to do. It shows a special kind of courage without threat. It is a demonstration to the opponent and the public that you are truthful even when it is risky, and that you adhere to truth and trust it even at personal sacrifice or when it does not seem at first to be to the advantage of your cause.<br /><br />(124) Since trust is an essential prerequisite to persuasion, and truth creates trust, persistent devotion to truth at all costs is strongly persuasive.<br /><br />(132) The result of such interaction [search for common purpose] is not compromise but growth and adaptation, a change of character without loss of permanent integrity.<br /><br />(147) We who believe in nonviolence must change our habits before we ask an opponent to change his.<br /><br />(148) Hence nonviolent resisters in order to alter opponents must first subject themselves to self-discipline.<br /><br />(151) Stride Toward Freedom by Martin Luther King Jr<br />Conquest of Violence by Joan V Bondurant<br /><br />(156) Acquiring self-respect mitigates the resentment that is caused by humiliations, and thus makes self-control easier. That is a great help toward success in using nonviolent resistance.<br /><br />(163) One of the hardest things which conscientious objectors during the world wars had to beat was a feeling of loneliness, a feeling that nobody agreed with them or cared about them.<br /><br />(166) Manual Work. The beginning of action adequate to our problem is manual work. Something all members of a team can work at together would be best, and that will be a service to the community.<br />NB: swadeshi - not mentioned in the book or the index<br />barnraising, mutual aid and association<br /><br />(167) If believers in constructive, loving nonviolence will give their labor regularly and steadily to such repairs, sanitation work and cleaning-up, they will promote both individual and community morale and good feeling.<br /><br />(182) Danilo Dulci, Palermo (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958) - Dolci was the Italian Gandhi</div>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-61722169132273949372021-05-09T19:07:00.008-07:002021-05-09T19:18:08.585-07:00Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space by Charlie HaileyCamps: A Guide to 21st Century Space by Charlie Hailey<br>
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009<br>
ISBN 978-0-262-51287-9<br><br>
(56) The neo-summer camp then approaches what [Hakim] Bey calls the “utopia of utopia” where work is play and threat becomes solution.<br>
(90) Cosimo Rondo camped for most of his life as baron of the trees. Having left his parents’ table on June 15, 1767, the twelve-year-old oversaw central Europe’s green canopy wihtout ever setting foot on earth again.<br>
NB: Italo Calvino The Baron of the Trees<br><br>
(158) Leave No Trace [LNT]<br>
IN this way, the LNT principles have their origins in the practices of camping but imply a reading far beyond the campground to frame outdoor ethics as a way of living:<br>
1. Plan ahead and prepare<br>
2. Travel and camp on durable surfaces<br>
3. Dispose of waste properly<br>
4. Leave what you find<br>
5. Minimize campfire impacts<br>
6. Respect wildlife<br>
7. Be considerate of other visitors<br><br>
(159) If the camping principles of LNT reflect the ethical underpinnings of governmental policy for an evolving national program to manage wilderness, then the Earth Guardians might be its localized practitioners and the Burning Man parlance of matter out of place (MOOP), its vernacular. After their certification as LNT Masters by the Bureau of Land Managemnt (BLM) in the Cabez Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Earth Guardians returned to the 2002 Burning Man with the objective to “green” the festival’s termporary city. The event’s theme camps can be certified as Leave No Trace sites, and in 2006 the Guardians estalished an LNT Model Camp Tour to showcase camps with LNT best practices. Solar showers, recycled materials, gray-water disposal, and other green technologies are profiled in the tour.<br>
NB: John Todd’s ecological waste treatment<br><br>
(201) The Royal Air Force occupied the now militarized holiday camp as RAF Hunmanby Moor, accomodating six thousand military personnel. Such wartime appropriation was not new - Cunningham’s Young Men’s Holiday Camp, thought to have initiated the holiday camping tradition, was transformed into an internment camp during the First World War. This ready, though uneasy, translation of holiday camp into places of detainment and military organization suggest how fluidly, and sometimes alarmingly, the spaces of camps in their perceived temporality can be transformed in kind but also by degree.<br><br>
(267 -268) Planning to design playgrounds and gardens for the internees, Isamu Noguchi, the sculptor of Nisei Japanese and American descent, left his home in New York and voluntarily entered the Poston Relocation Center on May 12, 1942. When his plans for a cooperative community proved impossible, it took Noguchi seven months to be discharged from the camp, having only been able to negotiate a temporary permit for his release. But the experience of the camp followed Noguchi and his work, as the existence of the internment camps has remained in the landscapes of many of the country’s extant military camps. Immediately after his release in November 1942, Noguchi produced the Monument to Heroes and sculpted My Arizona and the cast bronze This Tortured Earth.<br><br>
(325) aporia [ecological aporia] - an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.<br>
"the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars"<br>
In Transitional Settlement [Transitional Settlement/Displaced Populations by Tom Cosellis and Antonella Vitale (Oxford: Oxfam, GD, 2005)], the objectives of the refugee camp work between safety and assistance, within a semipermanent zone of expected, and by some measures planned, obsolescence; “Camps are not intended to be sustainable settlements, but every effort should be made to create and support livelihood opportunities for displaced populations, to empower them by increasing their self-sufficiency, and to reduce demands upon the aid community.” Considering the scale of refugee camps, many of which exceed populations of twenty thousand, environmental impacts complicate sustainable practices: “Camps are invariably established on marginal land, with little productive potential for agriculture and livestock; if the land was not marginal, the community would probably be using it.” Caught in this ecological aporia, camps succeed environmentally only when the increasingly complex needs of the displaced population are met more effectively with fewer resources. If natural disasters alone affected two billion people in the twentieth century’s last decade, then the environmental impacts of the resulting refugee and IDP camps yield increasingly great epiphenomena. Mandate refugees soon become environmental refugees, who are then joined by economic refugees. And when one-quarter of a region’s population lives in semipermanent camps, as in the case of Tanzania’s Kasulu district, environmental and social constraints collide.<br><br>
(328) castramentation - the making or laying out of a military camp<br>
...the military camp’s systems of control and the evolution of twentieth-century housing plans primarily arising out of Western traditions.<br><br>
(349) More recent research, carried out in combined civilian and military studies, has addressed language translation, open-source communications, and network infrastructure. Strong Angel’s Pony Express models a mobile vehicle used to establish a wireless cloud that services the immediate area of emergency and provides what is called a “sync groove,” linking with other sites across a hypothetical camp (see “Mock Refugee Camp” section). Coordination has also improved with the development of such projects as Global MapAid, an NGO specializing in the distribution of GIS technologies.<br><br>
(390) On March 31, 1933, the U.S. Congress authorized the president to direct emergency conservation work “for the relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work.” The purpose of the resulting Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) agency was to conserve and develop the nation’s natural resouces. As government-administered versions of the work camp model, ECW camps hosted a half million unemployed youth by the summer of 1935. ECW camps became CCC camps with new legislation in 1936, creating the Civilian Conservation Corps and limiting enrollment to three hundred thousand men - a total made up of unmarried male citizens between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, no more than thirty thousand veterans, and a maximum of ten thousand American Indians. Enrollees were required to devote a minimum of ten hours per week to “general educational and vocational training” - concretizing the learning component of CCC’s overall mission. As the main fiscal agent, the War Department served as the primary administrator within a complicated network of governance by three other departments - Labor, Agriculture, and Interior, Throughout its nine-year history, the program administered more than four thousand CCC camps.<br><br>
(396) Camp Katrina generated the organization “Burners Without Borders” (BWB). With its mission and projects coming directly out of the experiences in Pearlington and Biloxi, BWB is an “international network of volunteers dedicated creating community though social food works that reflect inclusion, self-reliance, civic responsability, gifting, and above all, the belief that doing good can be fun, and done with style.”<br>
NB: Rainbow Family disaster and advance teams, Cajun Navy, eco-restoration villages<br><br>
(397) Burners Without Borders <a href="https://www.burnerswithoutborders.org" target="_blank">https://www.burnerswithoutborders.org</a><br><br>
(400) Gary Smith’s Radical Compassion about the Jesuit priest’s work with homeless communities in Portland<br><br>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7810530975465062320.post-78191617510109787852021-04-02T18:57:00.000-07:002021-04-02T18:57:01.196-07:00Breathing Consciously<p> <span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The most useful and easiest health practice I know of is breathing. At the beginning of these COVID times I began to explore it a little more and took a free breath training course at </span><a href="https://breatheologyworld.com/courses/breath-training-in-the-corona-crisis/" style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">https://breatheologyworld.com/courses/breath-training-in-the-corona-crisis/</a></p><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">There I learned of a simple rhythm of inhaling through the nose and exhaling, twice as long as the inhale, through either nose or mouth, and that doing this relaxes the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body and the rest of the nervous system. The people who do this consciously a few minutes a day probably receive health benefits from it and can use it for first aid after an injury or shock.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Breatheology: The Art of Conscious Breathing (Breatheology, 2010 </span><a href="https://www.breatheology.com/free-ebook-covid-19/" style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">https://www.breatheology.com/free-ebook-covid-19/</a><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">) came with the course and is an introduction to pranayama, the ancient Hindu breathing practices.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">Here’s what the book recommends for breathing and pain relief:</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">1) Gently breathe out and focus on the sore or painful area, while one hand (yours or someone else’s) touches the area. In this way you achieve maximum awareness and can loosen up e.g. cramped muscles in the neck or shoulders. When you consciously “let go” of the area through nerve impulses from the brain, the muscles release their cramped condition. You can clearly feel the muscle “letting go” – like when you stretch a tense calf after a long run.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">2) Gently breathe out and focus your consciousness on your breath. Press your lips together or hold the air back with your tongue to produce a “pseeeee” sound when you breathe out. Now visualize the place where you experienced pain, and imagine that the area heals more and more for each exhalation. Feel the heat spreading in precisely the areas that you focus on. This exercise can easily take 5-10 minutes.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">3) Try hyperventilating energetically with 10-20 breaths. This breathing pattern often occurs spontaneously in laboring women and in people who experience sudden pain. Readily produce an audible sound and concentrate solely on the breathing mechanism. An intense hyperventilation will lead to many temporary changes in your body – your blood pressure will rise, your heart will work faster, the acidity of your blood will change and you will secrete a lot of adrenalin, which “prepares you for battle”. With all these distractions, you are bound to redirect your focus from the pain. It will become secondary to the many other changes that occur in your body.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">4) Do 10 hook breaths by pushing the diaphragm and chest down after a full inhalation. You probably use hook breathing spontaneously when you lift something heavy. This is also used by laboring women. In this way you create a higher oxygen tension in your lungs, which will lead to a greater oxygen concentration in the blood. Apart from temporarily changing your oxygen tension and blood pressure, it will also stimulate your nerves and create a kind of relaxation afterwards.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">5) Take a walk in a forest, find a deserted beach or lie down under your comforter. Scream at the top of your lungs. Do it 5-10 times. This will loosen up physical and mental tension, frustration and pain. By freeing yourself and stimulating your lungs, diaphragm, solar plexus and the rest of your nervous system, you create a soothing and refreshing sensation throughout your body. This is also a good exercise to use when you have stress.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">6) Breathe calmly – use Victorious Breath*, if you like. Make your exhalation twice as long as your inhalation as in the simple pranayama exercises, as this will have a strong stimulatory effect on your vagus nerve and thus the entire soothing part of the nervous system. At the same time, try to “enter” the pain. Examine it and accept it. In time you will become so eager to “investigate” your pain that it will disappear completely.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">7) Breathe calmly using the Victorious breath and take as much time as you can breathing out. Exhale through the mouth instead of the nose, and produce a deep and soft “hmmmmmmmm” sound. You can also make it sharper and higher “heeeeeee”, if you feel like it. The sound should be as smooth and melodic as possible. This is a pranayama exer- cise and is called bhramari. In Sanskrit bhramara means “bumblebee”, so this is the sound you should try to imitate. The exercise creates a lot of vibrations throughout your body and vitalizes your cells with a micro-massage. Apart from cleansing your cells and your nervous sys- tem, bhramari is also a formidable relaxation and concentration exer- cise that is good for insomnia. Alternatively, use the sacred mantra Om (pronounced “AAAAUUUMMMMMM”). This mantra is sure to make you feel the vitalizing vibrations in your entire body, at first in your chest and then your throat, jaws and your head. Besides oxygenating your lungs and having a relaxing and de-stressing effect, it will prepare you men- tally to accept and cope with your pain.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">8) Perform the exercise Paradise and use all your senses to experience the place as intensely as possible. Expand the exercise by observing yourself moving around in your paradise, light as a feather and without any tension or pain. Make sure your breath is as smooth and effortless as your weightless walk. In time, you will also be able to lower the sen- sitivity in the area of the brain where pain impressions are processed, whereby the discomfort seems less severe.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">*VICTORIOUS BREATH (UJJAYI)</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The exercise is extremely simple: When you inhale, make a little constriction in your throat to produce an even hissing sound. I believe you can describe the sound as being a bit “dry” - almost like a whisper. If you say “ngg” when you inhale, I am quite sure that you are on track. The entire sound is somewhat like “nggeeeeeeeh”. Try bringing your breath to a halt several times during the same breath – that is says “ngg”, “ngg”, “ngg” – then you will soon sense which part of the throat to move. Remember to keep the rest of your head and face completely relaxed. When you exhale, you can produce the sound “uee”. The entire sound is “uee – hhhhh”. When you learn to control where and how to constrict the throat, you can leave out the “ngg” and “uee” and just let the breath flow to the sounds of “eeeeeeehhh” during inhalation and “hhhhhhh- heee” during exhalation.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">The sound you are hearing is an amplified version of the sound that occurs naturally when you breathe. According to the ancient scriptures, this sound is a kind of repeating prayer – a mantra that sounds like “so- ham”. The key to Victorious Breath is the slight constriction in the throat, since this enables you to completely control the flow of air. By varying the degree of constriction in the throat, you can determine the amount of air that enters (or exits) and its velocity. It is the key to your perfect breath, and no other exercise is higher, stronger or more effective than Victorious Breath. You can perform it anywhere, standing, walking, lying down, running or swimming. Apart from the altogether calming effect, Victorious Breath is also useful to people who suffer stress, depression and asthma. Victorious Breath is applied to all asanas and as a fundamental element of many other pranayama exercises.</span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">———— </span><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: 14px;">May this information be of use.</span>gmokehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04358327448132770681noreply@blogger.com2