#I think generally history education in America is pretty poor even at the more progressive schools like mine

[theamazingannie]

This is apparently an extremely unpopular opinion, but I hate 9/11 jokes. And I don’t say this as some super patriotic person who is always like #neverforget and planning memorials and all that. I was born in 1999. I was two when it happened, so I don’t remember it. But I live in America so I’ve seen the documentaries and the news reports. It seems like every year of school starting in like 4th grade I learned something new about what happened that day. And it was a tragedy. It was devastating. People died. People felt so hopeless that they jumped out of buildings because it was better than burning to death. I agree that it’s unbearably annoying that we are so obsessed with this event. I agree that it is horrible that our country ignores the effects of this event, all of the innocent people who died in the war, all of the innocent Americans who were harassed and harmed afterwards for simply looking like the people who did this. I’m angry at our government for ignoring the signs of this attack because it wasn’t random. There were many things our government did that led to this attack and signs that something was coming. I don’t think it was an inside job, but I do think it could have been stopped. I don’t think Bush was involved simply because he didn’t freak out and panic in front of a bunch of children during story time (something everyone who claims Bush did 9/11 ignore when talking about his straight face after finding out). This wasn’t a military attack. These were innocent people just going to work. My dad knows someone who was inside the building because he was delivering sandwiches for a lunch order. I think a big part of the younger generations’ response to it is overexposure and a lack of personal understanding that leads to apathy. We see this frequently. I understand why you think it’s okay to make constant jokes about this. But it was still a tragedy, one that happened during some of our lifetimes. I don’t expect you to weep and be filled with patriotism and rage upon hearing about it. But I also don’t understand how anyone could joke about it. Especially not an entire generation

[iteratedextras]

@falkon8888​

By “implicit multiple-ethnonationalism-in-one-country,” I’m not referring to the history of the country - you do realize they teach about the trail of tears and all that in public schools and have for years, right?  Like none of that stuff is mindblowing information to most people.

What I mean is the assumption that “children won’t learn as well if the curriculum doesn’t contain people like them” - e.g. the idea that ‘children of color’ won’t want to learn math if it seems ‘too white’.  Aside from the fact that asian children seem to have little to no trouble with this...

If everyone learns best when it’s a matter of their own group’s historical pride, then we would expect the “best” results by giving each group their curriculum which is just about how their own group is personally awesome.

I don’t think that’s the case, but you need to recognize that Progressive rhetoric can be pretty creepy if you are not a Progressive, and a lot of the “racism” you see is a reaction to Progressives being creepy.

“Stolen Land,” in other parts of the world, can easily be a prelude to military invasion followed by forced ethnic displacement (or murder), just as one example.  Progressives were the ones who popularized “intent isn’t magic,” and they’re allegedly the culturally sensitive ones, but they still implicitly subscribe to the outdated monolithic blob theory of race relations even though they won’t admit it.

As a demonstration of the monolithic blob theory in action, white privilege theory can lower white liberals’ sympathy for poor whites.  If poor whites are suspicious about it, it seems that might be more well-founded than people think?

@hinatagem​

My experience is that a lot of Progressives are also quite ignorant and eager to jump on anyone they disagree with on that basis. Their lead in knowledge over the conservatives they hate so much is like the B- student lording how smart he is over the C+ student.

For instance, have you ever tried finding educational interventions that work to close the outcome gaps?  Or did you just assume we already know how to do it, and we’re only not doing it out of a lack of will?

Whenever I have looked, I have found that most of the interventions, except for things like lead removal, have not really worked that well.

The Perry Preschool Project managed to improve some other life outcomes (with an excellent rate of return, if it can be replicated) but not cognitive scores.  The effectiveness of Head Start is pretty disputed, and it looks like there’s a fade out in the effects, but there are reasons to be optimistic about the Reach Up and Learn program James Heckman is apparently involved in (discussed with Glenn Loury here). ...but the rise in incomes it had in Jamaica isn’t enough to close the gap even if it successfully scales up and applies in America.

There was some optimistic news about vitamin supplementation for a minority of malnourished children, but I wasn’t able to find more contemporary information to confirm it, et cetera.

When you dig in without a purely optimistic lens, you find that there are some potential gains to be made, but the situation overall appears to be obnoxiously resistant to interventions.

@geekandmisandry​

“Individualism” being “white supremacist” is the kind of garbage that shows up in leaks of training documents.  It’s not so different from the “linear, rational thinking is white” stuff that showed up in the Smithsonian infographic that was pulled.

Like yes, technically using a different number system is outside the space of what you guys would typically do, but the typical rejecter of this doesn’t know the exact ways in which you guys propose dumb bullshit, he’s just modelling your general tendency to propose dumb bullshit, and the magnitude and general direction are roughly correct, at least for the fringe.

...and the fringe is moving quick.

Like I can explain why you wouldn’t specifically go with that specific policy, and maybe Joe Footballwatcher can’t.

But would someone who thinks “cause and effect relationships” are “white culture” propose something that ridiculous?  Okay, well they pulled that infographic, but then what’s the overall direction?  In general it has been towards more ridiculous and more censorious, with fewer people being willing to criticize the overreach, so can Joe Footballwatcher be sure it hasn’t gotten that much worse in the past six months?

Throw in a bit of being misunderstood on purpose, and...

So again, this is the B- student lording it over the C+ student.

The real meme warfare type was whoever posted the “It’s okay to be white” flyer, which caused progressives to step on a rake they could have easily prevented by posting an “It’s okay to be black” flyer right next to it.

GAM or someone in the chain has blocked, but I will leave unblocked should they change their mind.

But... GAM - I may not have collected the full File of Actual They’re That Dumb As Implemented In Policy, but I’m not taking payment in useless dismissals of the problem anymore.

[yoimeta]

Hi everyone! I noticed recently that the "KAZAKHSTAN 101 OR HOW TO OTABEK" post seems to have been taken off of tumblr? The author's whole blog seems to have been wiped. Do you know if this is archived anywhere? Is there a mirror, say, on Ao3?

Hello!

Thankfully, I managed to find what I believe is the original post. Here it is! The post is archived in plain text under the cut.

Hope this helps!

- Ji

Source: @sawyer-aik

KAZAKHSTAN 101 OR HOW TO OTABEK

THERE YOU GO YURI ON ICE FANDOM.

Disclaimer: this is in no way a fully comprehensive guide. This is just me trying to put together basics for people who are unfamiliar with Kazakhstan/Kazakhs to start their writing/research.

I am an ethnic Kazakh female, citizen of Kazakhstan, Almaty, bisexual, upper middle class, currently in college in the US. My experience is in no way representative of all kazakhs and Kazakhstan citizens. However, I think it’s pretty close to Otabek’s.

This is really, really long and kinda convoluted, but if you can bear it –– welcome!

Name: Many people have talked about Otabek’s name. This is how you shorten it –– “Bek”, “Beka”, or “Beks” if you wanna be really familiar and laid back.

Kazakhs don’t have middle names, we have patronymics. They are formed like this: the father’s name + ‘uly’ if the child is a boy or ‘kyzy’ is the child is a girl. For example, Otabek’s childrens’ patronymics would be Otabekuly and Otabekkyzy.

About Almaty and almatinians: Ok I’m so happy Otabek is from Almaty, I really don’t know much about life in other cities or rural areas. Almatinians rarely do. Comparing Almaty lifestyle to the rest of Kazakhstan is the same as comparing NYC to the rest of America –– it’s not representative of the quality of life in the country, like, at all.

Almaty has 2.5+ million population, and it grows every year. It’s a cultural and economic centre of the country. Apples originate from Almaty (!!!), hence the name from “Alma” –– apple. Almatinians are usually stereotyped as fast, brash and snobby –– kinda like New Yorkers, right? Almaty is much more tolerant and progressive, and also more ‘Western’ than the rest of the country in terms of mindset. Almatinians kinda look down on non-Almatinians, and really dislike the capital Astana because of all the funding and attention it gets.

Almaty has a great ethnic diversity –– main groups are Kazakhs, Russians, Uygur, Koreans, Germans, Jews, Uzbek, and many more. Though stereotypical jokes are generally acceptable, outright hate and discrimination against an ethnic group is not tolerated. Many foreigners visit here for business –– mostly Americans, Western Europeans and Chinese.

Almatinians love: coffeeshops, mall sales, cool cars (Hello Otabek’s motorcycle), smoking hukkah and vaping. They are usually concerned with status and try to show off their wealth. You can see people of all kind of different style and background in Almaty, fashion shows are held there, contemporary art and indie-music congregates there, along with all kinds of fancy ass crowd. It is a really interesting and kinda exhausting scene, especially if you are young and wanna have fun.

Language, culture, food, etc.

As an Almatinian Kazakh, Otabek is definitely fluent in both Russian and Kazakh, and probably has a very good grasp on English. He is a master of shala kazakh. Shala kazakh is a magic language that only city Kazakhs are privy to. It’s basically a wild mix of kazakh, russian and some fashionable english slang thrown in there. It’s usual for me to start a conversation with “OMG bro” and then kinda pull my speech together, substituting kazakh and russian words with each other and pepper it with “cool”, “ok” and other english exclamations. It’s not grammatically correct and is kinda lowbrow, but we all do it. Yes, even our parents. This is how Otabek sounds when he is talking to someone from home. Terrifying.

Nuclear family: City Kazakhs usually have two or three kids. That’s less than people have in rural areas. Children are important in Kazakh culture because they carry the family’s bloodline and history, especially boys. If you headcanon Otabek as having brothers and sisters, you are probably right! His family should be at least sort of wealthy to afford all the expenses of having a professional athlete for a child. Otabek has an expensive bike and his clothes look high-end –– he is definitely not poor.

Family in general. Kazakhs are close, VERY CLOSE to their family. Mind you, family is not just parents and siblings but also your grandparents, aunts and uncles and like all 173 cousins and nieces and nephews. Everyone is ridiculously involved in your life, always there with advice and complaints. You stay connected to your parents when you move out, when you get married, when you have kids, when you DIE. When Otabek misses the weekly skype dates or check-in phone calls, HE IS SHAMED SO HARD. Do you know grandma is worried about you, think about how old she is! Otabek’s relatives brag about his achievements like they moved him up the career ladder personally, with their own two hands. There’s nothing Otabek can really do about it tho he gets annoyed

Food: city Kazakhs have a very diverse cuisine. Traditional kazakh food is like 50% batter and 50% meat and takes long ass time to prepare so we reserve it for the holidays. My family loves fish, russian dishes such as borsht and blini, Uzbek lagman, Korean kimchi tho we try to avoid pork. And it’s not like we choose one day as a “Russian cuisine day”, we just kinda??? Deside to have some borsht today?? Almaty has lots of different restaurants, almatinians love sushi, pizza and pasta, shashlyk, all kinds of experimental foods and trying new things. Kumys –– mare’s milk –– is one of the things you should try in Kazakhstan as a turist, but I know many kazakhs who have never had it or don’t like it. They say it’s really good for you tho.

Holidays: ethnic Kazakhs in Kazakhstan celebrate: birthdays, New Years, Eid al-Adha which we call Kurban Bairam, Independence Day on December 16th and Nauryz on March 22nd. Young people kinda have get togethers on Halloween because it’s fun and a reason to hang out. Nauryz is one of my faves, it’s a pagan holiday of coming of spring and new life. On Nauryz, Almaty is adorned with flowers, yurts and giant swings are set on the city square, people wear traditional clothing and dance and play and eat a lot. My family also ended up celebrating Eastern Orthdox Christmas and Easter because each year our Russian friends invite us to hang out and celebrate with them, lol.

LGBTQIA+

Main principle is “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. General conflict avoidance protocols are in place. I personally know like 3 LGBT friendly hubs/clubs in Almaty. Nobody explicitly says “gay clubs” but people just kinda know what and where those are. There are get togethers and meetings you can attend to meet people, you can hang out with your significant other in public, hug, hold hands and no one would probably say anything. Colleges and universities are generally safe places, many of my friends are out in their college and don’t face any trouble. PDA will be frowned upon, but all PDA is generally frowned upon in Kazakhstan, even hetero. Feminist and sex-positive initiatives try to educate the populace and break the status quo, and are doing really well but the government’s disposition is homophobic. If your family is religious or traditional, they probably wouldn’t go as far as disowning you, but will probably pressure and guilt-trip you. LGBT+ youth generally plan to move somewhere else or just not settle. All of this is Almaty situation tho. Being LGBT in rural area is much more dangerous.

THE BEST PART: VOCABULARY

Ok this is what I find to be the easiest way to explain Kazakh to English speakers: think Turkish but written in cyrillic, with words borrowed from Arabic and Russian.

Endearments:

zhanym, жаным: my soul. Zhanym is everything to a Kazakh. You can use it for your family, friends, SO, I called my laptop zhanym today. It can be flirty, it can be serious. If you need Otabek to be affectionate with someone, use zhanym.

ainalaiyn, айналайын: really hard to translate but something like my precious?? Usually used towards small kids, but also if a Kazakh finds something really cute.

altynym, my golden baby. I love this one for obvious reasons, lol, hi, Otabek.

Mahabbatym, махаббатым, my love +

Suiktim, сүйіктім. my love, my dear. Kinda old fashioned but really romantic. I can see Otabek using this, but he will be teased and called an old sap if he does.

Kazakh have a lot more endearments, but most of them are for children.

Basic interaction and exclamations:

Iya. Ия. Yes.

Zhok. Жоқ. No

Rakhmet. Рахмет. Thank you.

Keshir. Кешір. Sorry.

Salem, Сәлем. Hello. A familiar greeting.

Sau bol, Сау бол. Literally “Be well” but actually means goodbye. Pretty familiar too.

O Kudai, О Құдай/O Allah, О Алла! Oh my god, obviously. Used in all kinds of different situations.

Oibai, Ойбай! How does one explain oibai. When a friend jump scares you, when you receive bad news, when you check your bank account –– oibai!

Abai bol, Абай бол. Be careful, is what your mom tells you when you go out.

Expletives and Swear Words. Yeeaaah the juicy stuff.

Zhyndy, Жынды. Crazy. If someone is being stupid or inappropriate, you call them zhyndy. When you tell a dumb joke at the familty table, mom smacks you upside the head and hisses “Ooooi, zhyndy!” When Jean-Jaques is acting a fool and makes out with his reflection, Otabek rolls his eyes and mutters “Zhyndy”.

Akymak. Ақымақ. Idiot. When someone is just dumb and not worth your time.

Ittin balasy. Иттің баласы. Child of a dog. It can be as harmless as “you pup” and as offensive as “son of a bitch” depending on the situation.

Kotindy kys. Көтіңді қыс. Squeeze you ass. God I love this one. When someone being an obnoxious wannabe, tell them they should squeeze their ass and check themselves.

Jean-Jaques: I am gonna be the King of the Grand Prix!

Otabek: Kotindy kys.

Shygasyn ba?! Шығасың ба?! You wanna go bro?! Ohh, someone is gonna catch these Kazakh fists.

Sigil. Сігіл. Basically go fuck yourself.

Sheshen ahmy/Sheshen sigem. Шешең амы/Шешең сігем. Your mother’s c*nt/Imma fuck your mother. REALLY FUCKING OFFENSIVE. Say this to a Kazakh if you have a death wish.

——————————————————————————————-

AND THEEEEEEERE YOU GO.

Again, this is just the basics. Do more research and talk to as many Kazakhs and Kazakhstani people as you can. We are a different but usually an interesting bunch. Thanks for your attention, Sawyer out!

[quakerjoe]

You do realize that one of two people will be the President of the United States on January 20, 2021–yes? Either the incumbent or the Democratic nominee will hold the office, and that’s a legacy as old as Jefferson and Hamilton. If you can not stop trashing both aspirants to the office may I suggest that you pursue the acquisition of a passport as well as some means of leaving the country? Your laments are so doleful as to finally become comedy.

You know what’s really funny? Everything about YOU. I’ll tell you why, since you bothered to ask. I at least owe you that much since you didn’t ask anon.

I get this sort of banter every now and again so I thought I’d display it and answer the question at hand.

First off, this “#Murica, love it or leave it!” horseshit has two facets to it in response.

ONE: “Go fuck yourself. If you’re so willing to lie down and take it in the ass for one of the parties constantly screwing you, you’re pretty useless. Why don’t YOU leave since you’ve clearly given up the fight? “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” comes at a price, sometimes a high one, and you have to FIGHT for it. If you’re willing to just bend over and take an elbow deep fist in your ass from the Democrats so it can jerk off the GOP while its dick is constantly forced down your throat, then perhaps YOU are the one who needs to pack up and fuck off to Saudi Arabia or North Korea. Maybe Russia or China are more your speed.

 TWO: Are YOU going to pay my way if I decide to give up on America and abandon my home and the nation that I love? I may not love your precious politicians, but I’m still proud to be an American. I served, am a vet, but THIS is not the nation I signed up to defend. This era of US history is the Big Sellout, and you, dumbass, are a part of that.

 You people had chances and opportunities to make this a better place than when you found it, but over the five decades I’ve been alive all I’ve seen is people fighting to get in line to buy the government snake oil like it’s a Cabbage Patch Kid or the new iPhone. It’s pathetic how much the US lacks vision or has any real pride or dignity worth talking about. We’re not #1 at fuck-all anything worth bragging about unless it’s how bad the education system has gotten or that we’re the TOP nation in the world for incarcerated citizens per capita and it’s mostly geared towards men who happen to have a dark complexion.

 The rich and powerful exist here because WE ALLOW it. People  like you, you defunct Fox “News” fan, are either a cheering fan for the status quo of yesteryear with Biden who wants to turn back the calendar to a time that BROUGHT US TRUMP in the first place OR you’re a trump fan who has NO IDEA… well, no ideas or thoughts about anything. Trump’s shown us who we really as a nation apparently- deluded, self-centered, selfish assholes, and the WORLD can see it. Not all of us, granted, but as a generalization, we truly suck. Such a waste of enormous potential, especially given all the resources we’ve had over the years.

 As a result, we’re being overwhelmed by a virus that’s killing us by the thousands and perhaps millions some day. But, since we no longer believe in or do science anymore, nothing much is coming to save us. If/When the time comes that its run its course and should we find a vaccine, there are still anti-vaxxers who’d rather die than take a cure. Then there are the religious zealots who think Jesus will protect them. You know; the ones who are dropping like flies these days? Those assholes; the hypocrites who think they’re part of ‘the faithful’ who, if you believe in that sort of thing, do Satan’s bidding more than Jesus’.

 If you’re not boiling mad at the GOP for literally doing everything they can to go out of their way to keep the US a hateful, racist, peddler of death nation bent on keeping its citizens poor and undereducated, you’re not a part of the solution. If your fucked-up solution is to have those not happy with the butt-hurt they peddle move to another country, it shows you’ve got no pride or respect for your country or yourself. You’re weak, ignorant, selfish and stupid all rolled into a big burrito of go fuck yourself.

If you’re not making a fist so tight that your nails are digging into your palms when you hear that the Democrats are literally forcing us to choose one racist sexual predator that can’t hold a thought or form sentences as the “champion” to replace the incumbent one, you’re DEFINITELY not a part of the solution. Also, you’re an idiot, an asshole, and totally a Biden Bro.

 What will it take for YOU to open your window and shout out “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” eh? You people rolling over for Biden are pathetic weaklings who sold out women and #MeToo and sold your souls to #MeTooExceptBiden, allowing the bar to be set to the same, low, cesspool standard that the GOP glorifies in. You sold out party, country, woman, minorities, and everything that was once even remotely good about the party that allegedly represented the working class so that the party leaders can keep their cash flow from Big Pharma, the Insurance lobby, Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex. You’ve turned the Democratic party into yesterdays feckless, weak and worthless GOP while the current GOP drags the country even FURTHER to the fucking right. You’re aiding and abetting the foulest elements of the nation’s existence.

Your attitude has cost us our place on the world stage and most of our allies while we crawl under the covers with bedfellows we once considered enemies because they treat their people like shit. Now WE are one of those shithole countries you people used to rant about… AND YOU’RE PROUD OF IT and unwilling to stand up and fix it. Instead, you prefer those who are willing to do your job FOR you to just move elsewhere. Loser. Listen, if you’re too much of a wuss to stand up to the establishment that’s using your tax dollars to bail out the rich while pissing table scraps down upon you, that’s on you. You’re too stupid to know better. I get it. But until YOU get off YOUR ASS and hold your government accountable, you’ve got no room to criticize those who ARE doing it.

We’re in the middle of a pandemic and the ONE GUY who has been fighting for his decades-long career for UNIVERSAL health care was someone YOU opted out. American apparently hasn’t suffered enough to grow a pair of whatever motivates it to stand up to the wealth inequality. The US idolizes the rich and instead of fighting for a chance to live at least a DECENT life without having to worry about going tits-up and pear-shape because of hospital bills or job losses, they’d rather just piss away their fortunes and futures so that people with more money than they can spend in a lifetime of ten could possibly spend, all while THEY pay little to ZERO taxes, leaving YOU stuck with the bill. That’s on YOU if you’re willing to bend over and just take it in the ass and take it dry; no kiss, no lube, not so much as a feel-around. That’s YOU.

You, sir, are the problem. Clearly, with people like you, the US is simply BEGGING for 4 more years of trumplefuckery. Perhaps you even deserve it. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but who am I? I’m just one of the few willing to call anyone out on their bullshit, from the GOP overall to Pelosi’s feckless approach, to Schumer’s “kid who gets beaten on the schoolyard daily” approach to trying to appear useful. I’ll shit on Liz Warren for not backing a Progressive approach and getting behind Sanders EARLY; screwing her friend and ally AGAIN like in 2016. I’ll call out all the other “candidates” who say one thing while their track records show that they’re pretty full of shit. I’ll DEMAND that we have a party that’s transparent and willing to fight to drag us BACK to the Left instead of the “oh, let’s settle for plutocracy and oligarchy because it’s better than fascism” route. Fuck that, fuck them, and of course fuck you too. Thought I forgot about you? Oh, this is all about you, you spineless goon.

 So let me know if you and your ilk are willing to throw your precious few dollars into a GO FUND ME to finance my move to another country. This includes my family, all our belongings, and of course a home once we get there. Naturally, you’ll be finding us ALL gainful employment there and the costs for the passports, visas, and whatnot and you’ll of course be lining us ALL up with jobs. I’ve got a big family, so it’s going to be pretty goddamn expensive. Shit, just ME moving is going to cost more than you’d be willing to cough up.

 In the mean time, I’m going to remain here, giving the finger to the GOP, the Establishment/Corporate owned Democrats, and people like you. Seriously, you’re an idiot.

@ imall4frogs He’s talking about people like YOU.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: You went from being a posh girl with an elite Oxbridge education to serving as a British army officer which is pretty rad.  But today's world seems to be highly critical of war. War is seen as destructive and  immoral. Is it though? Don't wars and conflicts in general build cultures and identities? Don't they push civilization to grow? The real question I want to ask you is does culture need conflict?

Mud, sweat, and blood doesn’t discriminate against one’s background. Neither do bullets, RPG rocket fire or IEDs.

When you put it like that it does seem ‘rad’ but it’s really nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to remarkable to write home about.

To be perfectly honest I don’t think about the past other than as a series of closed chapters in my life. It’s done and dusted and now one moves on.

What matters is what challenges in life you set yourself to do today in preparation for tomorrow.

Onwards then to your question. And what a great question it is.

The answer I can give isn’t definitive but my reading of history - since that’s what I studied as well as Classics - is that yes, cultures do need conflict to grow but it doesn’t mean they should ever go looking for it because war - and I have first hand experience of it - is inevitably destructive and can be monstrously immoral.

But then again, the word ‘need’ makes my moral compass twitch.  Do societies actually NEED war to build a better society and thus elevate a civilisation? I think that’s problematic to shift from description (history does show that societies have only progressed as a consequence of conflict) to prescription (societies can only grow through war and conflict).

We live in a (Western) moral based culture so no sane person gets up in the morning and states ‘right let’s have a jolly good war to get some exercise in and be home for tea time’. I mean that’s just nuts.

It would be more accurate to say states may feel they need war for whatever reason simply because it’s the state that decides to go to war or not and society either follows or resists. The state has the monopoly on violence (the army and security apparatus) but obviously it goes to war either in defence of the very survival of its culture or perhaps in defence of upholding its values.

Having said that a state of affairs in which everyone was blissfully happy would be very unproductive of anything except happiness.  It is a bit like what we tend to think of as normal stress. If an individual is overwhelmed by stress, that is obviously a bad thing both for her and her work. If an individual feels no stress at all, then why should she do anything at all? We need some motivation to get going, presumably, and a degree of stress is fine to motivate us to get things done and succeed in our tasks. Perhaps this is a bad analogy. Maybe.

The thing about war, though, is that it so easily slips from being a period of some aggravation to becoming a highly destructive environment. History is littered with examples where statesmen think they could have a good war and not suffer inconsequentially e.g. First World War and Second World War to Vietnam and our contemporary wars.

We need to be careful between what we think we need and what we want. Whether a state goes to war or a limited conflict in the name of its culture depends on negotiating the tension between these two elements.

Has war pushed civilisations to grow? It depends. History is an ambivalent guide. One could argue either way. Civilisations can grow strong and dominant or lay the seeds of internal destruction. 

I will make this one observation though. If states and society (and therefore culture) are not in synch with each other then that is a recipe for disaster and decay. For every Elizabethan or Victorian England there is a Romanoff Russia or a Hapsburg Austria.

Lately for some odd reason I have been talking to former and current soldiers who are friends of mine (British, French, and American) and mulling over this question of  whether going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan actually influenced our western cultures and societies in tangible ways?

It clearly has but some would say arguably not in a positive way e.g. look how viscerally divided America is culture and politics wise or look at Britain and how divided we are as a culture over our relationship to Europe or even France with politically charged debates about immigration and multiculturalism. Far away wars can push civilisations to ‘grow’ but in what direction?

And when we talk about elevating civilisation culture wise who actually fights these wars and conflicts?

It’s not the artists or the intellectuals (to whom we look to for cultural elevation and achievement). This isn’t to diminish their valuable role in society because clearly they do have an important role. But unfortunately it’s nearly always the poor and those on the lowest rung of the social ladder who do the real fighting. And nearly always they never really benefit from the fruits of an elevated high culture because their sacrifice and exertions just gets forgotten as they scrape for recognition and respect and even mere survival.

Sadly, that’s just the way it is. It makes me angry and it should shame us all.

Your question does remind me of a very famous movie line which is wickedly witty and yet full of sad pathos. It is of course from Carol Reed’s classic film The Third Man with Orson Welles’ amoral character educating his friend about the actual ways of the world as way of justifying his criminal activities:

“Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Thanks for your question

[buri-art]

If you don't mind me asking, how come you're able to live and work in Japan (and China?)? Where did it al begin? I'm just really curious! Thanks!

I don’t mind, thanks for asking! Turns out I’ve been doing some advising on this topic lately. (Scroll to the bottom for specific advice!)It all began with Digimon…

I’ve always had a history of moving from one obsession to another, starting back with Barney the Dinosaur. Then when I was 11-years-old I found myself very curious about that weird Japanese show on Fox Kids, which looked so different from the Western cartoons I was so fond of. What I caught of it kept me surprised–my stereotypes about it were wrong, the characters and their situations were complicated, and plot had depth? What was this and why did it make me care so much??Well, once I decided I was hooked, I was hooked. Obsessed overnight. I needed to know everything there was to know about it, including the country it came from. Guess I better learn Japanese, I thought. 

That thought didn’t go away. I generally got obsessed with anime and Japanese culture, anything I could get my weeby little hands on. Wanting to know everything about Japan led to curiosity about China too, because if you’re going to stretch far back in the origins of Japanese culture, eventually you’re going to get interested in the big collection of nations and time periods known as Ancient China. (Stuff like Fushigi Yuugi and the anime rendition of Condor Hero sure helped drive that interest.)I stayed obsessed with Japan all through my teen years (and started Japanese study in earnest when I was 16) and I chose a college where I could start studying Chinese. It seemed like the natural progression in my studies by that point, but I guess other people thought it was surprising. Or they called me a traitor. (I can tell you now that lots and lots of people wind up studying both.)

Anyway, I went in to college with a pretty wide knowledge of East Asia, but studying it from all sorts of angles, getting good advising in school from nerdy professors, and studying abroad certainly made my understanding more nuanced. Going to a small school where it was easy to stick out also helped me get a good handful of work-study experiences and special attention for my particular passions. (It helps that a couple teachers were enamored with traditional Chinese culture, another loved Heian aesthetics, another wrote a dissertation about the production of shoujo manga, and another loved to give students free food. Now those are my people.)What most people find surprising was that even though I had a heavier course load in Asian studies, my major was Economics. I was concerned about finding work with only nerdy Asian studies, and I felt like I needed to save the world by working at an NGO and sacrificing my personal happiness for the sake of the poor and underprivileged. (I still feel like that, but thankfully there are more ways to support NGOs than only by working in them.) In my research topics I usually had a special focus on developing nations in Asia, and I made sure to get a good understanding of the whole region, not just, like, Edo period gay samurai fanfiction (yeah, that was totally a thing).Well, anyway, I never worked at an NGO. I went to grad school to keep working on my Chinese while keeping up independent Japanese study  (including the JLPT), then I worked for the one international company in my hometown doing stuff for their Asian side of business. It was cool if you had any interest in engineering, but I didn’t. I like culture. The weeb shit, as it’s known. All according to keikaku, I became a Coordinator for International Relations on the JET Program (it’s not all English teachers!), and had the time of my life in Matsue (my love for that place is seeeeerious). That’s when I took my wide knowledge of Japan and started getting deeper knowledge, by doing anything and everything, especially practicing naginata, tea ceremony, and competitive kimono dressing. (I like to say I broke the weeb scale a long time ago.) Even among CIRs, who all speak Japanese fairly fluently, I guess I was noteworthy for my nerdy knowledge of obscure pieces of local culture, and my enthusiasm for sharing it. That’s just me being my obsessive self, folks. But yeah, lots of JET Program participants are obsessive and eager to go out and experience things. Aaaahhh, my people. After that, I felt I needed more experience in China, so I got a teaching job (which is relatively easy to do, if you’re a native English speaker). Due to my work schedule and living in Shanghai as opposed to like, Wuyishan or even Hangzhou, I didn’t devote as much as to cultural classes as I originally planned on, but I did practice tea and martial arts throughout my time there, and I continued to work on my Mandarin and gaining obscure cultural knowledge, but especially gaining experience melding with society there. Although it was more overwhelming, I do feel much more competent with my Chinese skills now, and I still love a lot of the culture and have so much more traveling I want to do there. I can still nerd out so hard for so much there.Moving back to Japan felt like a very natural course of things. I know a lot of people who have been happy to be Japan-nerds from a distance, or do the JET Program for a while and then just go back to visit, but at least for now, I don’t see myself happy with only visiting. I have personality flaws, like being very inflexible, that make me work very well in a rigid society like Japan. I’m too used to good convenience stores to live happily without them. I enjoy speaking Japanese all the time instead of taking occasional opportunities. Also, my niche skill set is kind of useless in my part of the US. I did try to find work here, really. That being said, having niche skills means that when I’m useful, I’m super useful. Job searching from outside of Japan was a lot more challenging than applying for the JET Program (which any JET applicant can tell you is not a simple process, but once you’re in, you really appreciate how much they handle for you in matters of moving abroad). It was really, really nerve-wracking to turn down two very good corporate job offers in favor of a somewhat new hotel chain. I really wanted to enter the tourism industry because this feels like the only place (outside of academia) where I can use all my obsessive studies of mainstream and obscure but especially traditional culture, and where my gushing about how much I love stuff is actually useful. Plus, it’ll make use of all three of my languages, not just one or two at a time. I hope this will work out for at least the next few years, if not forever. I also hope that if I live in the US in the future to be closer to family*, then I’ll have enough industry experience to work in hotels here or start a tour company targeted at Asian clients. (*Family is the primary reason I still consider long-term life in America, and it’s a big one, and worrying about them is the hardest part about living abroad. Excessive humidity in a lot of Asia is another reason I might choose to live in the Western US.)But like, now my hobbies are my job. While it won’t be the bulk of it, wearing kimono and performing tea ceremonies is no longer something that makes me cool and special and unexpectedly useful, it’s going to be what I need to be professionally competent in (eeeeeeep). This is the kind of stuff that obsessive teenage Buri would have swooned to know, but also totally expected. Career-Buri is a little more level-headed about it and also very grateful to have these opportunities. So anyway, advice!!—If you think you want to do anything in China or Japan, START STUDYING THE LANGUAGES NOW. Yes, I know they’re difficult. No, there’s no perfect program. Whatever you’re going to use, just do it consistently. Fluency is not actually required for a lot of jobs, but hot damn, some language skills will help. (For reference, I passed N1 of the JLPT before starting JET, and passed HSK5 while I was in grad school. I studied for HSK6 while I was in China and would have had a 50/50 chance of passing, but chose not to because it’s not actually that useful for the price I’d pay for it.)–To get a work visa in either country, 99 times out of a 100, you’re going to need a Bachelor’s degree. Your major is not usually as important as simple proof of graduation. Many places will care about your grades, though, so try to keep them up. –Teaching is still the easiest way to get there. There’s a wealth of programs to recruit you, but I suggest trying to steer clear of places that only provide a stipend instead of a salary, or small dispatch companies with questionable reputations. The JET Program is probably the best way to teach in Japan because of the level of support you get, but I’ve known people who had good experiences on the larger dispatch companies like Altia or Interac as well. For more direct hires, there are English tutoring companies (like English First (EF) or Coco Juku) where you might have students of all ages, as well as companies that focus on very small children (where you’ll basically be a glorified preschool teacher). On that note, many kindergartens and other for-profit education companies (like what I did in China) will hire directly, but your experience can vary widely. Finally, you can also look into international schools, but your teaching credentials will be much more important. Any background in teaching, or TESOL certification, will be a boon to your application (and at some places, your paycheck). –All of these places will want to see that you are a dependable, flexible person. Getting experience abroad, being able to speak frankly about challenges you’ve dealt with, and showing a willingness to go anywhere and do whatever is needed will look really good on your interviews. I say this a JET Program interviewer; the people who displayed the most patience and maturity were the people we felt best about giving a high score to. Those are the people we like to send out into the communities. –As we like to say in the JET Program, every situation is different (ESID for short). That applies to every teaching situation you might yourself in abroad.–You don’t have to be a teacher (after all, I only did JET because of the CIR position, I loved it!!). But you’re going to have to be really competent in whatever else it is you’re doing. Headhunters, such as at Pasona Global (which has branches in many Asian countries), are really, really good to work with, but they are most likely to hook you up with corporate jobs in big cities. If that’s what you want, awesome. (I wound up finding my hotel through a Japanese job searching site specifically for tourism related work. Other industry-specific fields may have their own job hunting sites, possibly in English, possibly not.) Language competency will be a lot more important if you take this route. –If at all possible, STUDY ABROAD!!! Many people will get the experience they want doing this instead of dealing with the frustrations of working and residing abroad. It’s a good way to see how much you love it and decide if the frustrations are worth it. Plus, it really helps your job applications. –Even if you can’t work abroad due to your personal situation, PLEASE TRY TO TRAVEL THERE!!!! When you’re interested in another culture or a foreign language, it means so, sooooo much to be there, even if it’s temporary. I don’t just say this as someone who has chosen tourism as my calling (though I am more than happy to give travel advice), I say this as a passionate nerd. I feel you. I get you. You need this. –Back to studies and stuff though, if you’re going to major in some form of area studies or foreign language, it is difficult to get jobs with that alone. Consider double-majoring in something that will play into that, or which will open other career options. Money is kind of important, especially if you’re going to have to pay for flights across the Pacific. 

–That being said, study what you care about too. You know how oddly useful my elective class about Non-Western Theater has been!?!? And if something in anime catches your attention, for goodness sake, you’re on THE INTERNET. If you liked Jubei-chan, go study samurai, if you like Fruits Basket, go learn to make onigiri, if you like Mob Psycho 100, then go—well—um—go work out, being physically healthy is also important!!

Well, anyway, that’s long enough. Good luck to all you nerds out there!! KEN TANAKA LOVES YOU and all that good stuff!! 

[whereareroo]

FREEDOM SCORE

WF THOUGHTS (3/18/21).

I'm depressed today. After you read this post, you'll be depressed too. Sorry.

America is supposed to be the "home of the free." Isn't that what the national anthem tells us? Isn't that what we've been taught forever? Isn't freedom an essential component of our national history?

I've always been proud to live in the land of the free. I was proud even though I was aware of the fact that America is an imperfect place. Too many Americans can claim, as Langston Hughes said in his famous 1935 poem, that "America has not been America to me." Despite my awareness of America's imperfection, I've always believed that we were on a march towards a more perfect union. Today, I am doubting my beliefs.

A few days ago, I was driving and listening to National Public Radio. They did a promotion for an upcoming segment on freedom in the world. I was shocked by a statistic that was referenced in the promotion. In a recent ranking of 84 "free nations" by a think tank, America ranked #53. That statistic stuck with me.

When I got home, I made a note to investigate the situation. Maybe I misheard the statistic? Maybe the think tank is a fake? There's no way that the degree of freedom in America ranks 53rd on a list of 84 countries! Right?

I easily found information on the think tank. It's called Freedom House. It's based in Washington D.C. It's been around since 1941. It's widely recognized as being the "gold standard" for organizations that study freedom around the world. Since 1972 it has been publishing an annual report, called "Freedom in the World," which assesses freedom in every country in the world.

The annual reports are detailed and dense. I suppose that the complexity is one reason that we don't hear about the reports in the mass media. The data set forth in the reports is used by academics, researchers, Congressional Committees, agencies at the United Nations, and other think tanks. Nobody disputes the data or the conclusions. If anything, the knock on Freedom House is that it isn't tough enough on America.

I think there's another reason that, particularly in the past 15 years, we haven't been hearing about these reports from our elected officials or the mass media. The reports show that freedom has been declining in America for at least 10 years. Why would anybody want to report that bad news? The keepers of our government, our elected officials, certainly do not want to highlight the decline of freedom in America. The mass media generally avoids such complex and depressing issues. We've been kept in the dark.

Despite my conclusion that Freedom House is a legitimate and respected organization, I was still hoping to find a way to discredit these reports. I didn't want to believe that America is #53.

I delved into the methodology. If the methodology is bad, even a good organization can reach the wrong conclusions. Unfortunately, the methodology seems very solid. To compile the report, a staff of 24 analysts studies data from all over the world. Before the annual report is released, it is reviewed by a team of 12 academics who study freedom all over the world. Then, everything is reviewed by 16 independent consultants. It's hard to question the methodology.

I still wanted to find a way to ignore the conclusion that America is #53. I looked for another organization that ranks countries. I learned that another respectable group is the Political Instability Task Force. It's funded by the CIA, and every year it ranks countries in terms of the level of democracy that exists. In the most recent ranking, America was #49. That's pretty close to #53. (I also found a third source that concluded that the annual Freedom House report has an 80% correlation to other respected reports.) At that point, I had no choice but to conclude that the Freedom House reports are accurate and that America has some big problems when it comes to freedom and democracy. Who would have guessed that 50 countries are doing better than us? Why isn't anybody talking about the fact that, compared to other countries, America gets a poor grade on freedom?

To do its "freedom ranking" for each country, Freedom House evaluates 25 issues related to political rights or civil rights. For each of the issues, the country is scored on a point system where "0" is the lowest score and "4" is the top score. Thus, the maximum positive score is "100."

America has been losing points in the following areas:

▪Electoral Fairness (because of voter suppression, voting obstacles, and foreign interference)

▪Electoral Corruption (big money is too influential)

▪Legislative Weakness (stalemates in Congress quash the will of the people)

▪Accountability (between elections, there is no way to remove bad players)

▪Transparency (too much is done secretly)

▪Politicized Judiciary (appointments based on politics instead of qualifications)

▪Overzealous Prosecutors and Discriminatory Prosecutions

▪High Homicide Rates from Gun Violence (causing various problems throughout society)

▪ Massive Inequality (gender, racial, sexuality, economic, educational, housing, health care, citizenship, religious)

▪Massive Economic Imbalances (income and wealth)

We all knew that we had problems in these areas. Were you aware of the fact that other countries are doing a much better job of overcoming these challenges? The result is that freedom is more widespread in other countries. Isn't that sad?

It's bad news that we're #53. There's worse news. Our "freedom score" has been declining steadily since 2010. In 2010, we scored a 94---which is still too low in my book. We're now down to 83. Yes, our freedom score has dropped 11 points in the last 10 years. We're not marching towards a more perfect union. We're going backwards. Over the past 10 years, only 24 other countries experienced such a large decline in their freedom score. I feel terrible that we're not in the top 50 with respect to freedom but we're in the top 25 with respect to anti-freedom trends.

Please don't tell me that our latest freedom score, a score of 83, is OK. In my school days, an 83 would be a "B" or "B-." Didn't you think that America would score an "A" or "A+" on the freedom scale. The truth hurts.

So what countries are kicking our butts with respect to freedom? You can probably guess some of them: Finland; Norway; Sweden; Canada; New Zealand; Denmark; Germany; Japan. You'll probably be surprised that we rank lower than countries like: Croatia; Argentina; Greece; Latvia; Chile; and Slovenia.

Freedom House characterizes 84 countries as totally "free." We're #53. Isn't that appalling. We're not even in the top half, and we're falling. It's awful.

Today is not the day for a detailed discussion about how to solve this awful problem. Let me just list a few very obvious steps that need to be taken:

1. We need to learn from other countries. What are they doing right? What are we doing wrong? We have to stop thinking that we're the experts on freedom. Obviously, we're not.

2. We need short term limits for all public offices. Career politicians seem to forget about freedom.

3. Our elections need to be fair. Voting must be easy for every voter. Incumbent politicians cannot be allowed to draw election districts that stack the deck. It's outrageous that that, throughout America, state legislatures are considering 250 bills that are designed to limit voting.

4. All election campaigns should be publicly funded at reasonable levels. We need to remove big money from the electoral process.

5. We should only elect politicians who take freedom--for everyone and at all levels--very seriously. If we don't wake up on this issue, we're going to be in a very sad place in 10 or 20 years.

6. All Americans need to vote. Those who are not enjoying full freedom in America need to protect themselves at the ballot box. It was nice that 158 million Americans voted in the last presidential election. Sadly, that means that 80 million eligible voters didn't vote. The system can't protect everybody, and bring freedom to everybody, if a big portion of the population refuses to elect leaders to champion their cause.

Through most of our history, there has been a slow but steady expansion of freedom in America. Sadly, we've fallen off the freedom trail. We're regressing. I'm confident that we can get back on track, but it will take work. As usual, the bulk of the work will have to come from those at the bottom of the heap. They need to engage in the political process and use their political power to demand equality and freedom. Most Americans will support efforts to expand freedom in America. In their hearts, most Americans still believe that universal freedom should be the ultimate goal in America. The forces in America that oppose widespread freedom must he removed from power.

Let me finish with more from Langston Hughes. He wrote "Let America Be America Again" in 1935. Sadly, despite all of the progress that we've made, we haven't created the America that Huges dreamed about. I urge you to read the whole poem. You should also read a bit about the life of Langston Hughes. As you consider the plight of freedom in America, reflect upon this passage from the poem:

O, let America be America again--

The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

[megacircuit9universe]

Ejector Seat

I’ve been thinking about the previous entry for a few days now... the idea of a self driving economy kept on the rails by the collective smarts of all the learning algorithms out there, whose prime directive is to keep the money moving...

And then it occurred to me yesterday that, even if this were true, things could still be screwed up by something like an arbitrary and pointless trade war with the nations who produce most if not all of the stuff that keeps this modern economy moving... namely, the smart phones themselves, as well as all the products we can use those phones to buy at low low prices.

Trumps insane tariff policies, will eventually result in a fairly painful (if totally artificial) inflation on the cost of all those things, which will eventually result in far less consumer spending... which in turn will result in a recession.

And because he is not sane, Trump will respond to the recession by doubling down on the tariffs... turning that recession into a global depression.

Now, before I go any further, I have to address an elephant in the room here... And it’s that the current economy, which has been doing so well for so long, has been pretty bad for many parties involved... such as the low wage global workforce who produces most of the stuff we buy for those low low prices, and also wage stagnation here in America... not to mention the huge education bubble... the growing problem of rent inflation... and of course, climate change!

But outside of America, we were, and still are, working on those problems. There is an argument that low wage factory work in developing nations, while not ideal, in terms of wages or working conditions... still lifts those people out of poverty and... can be seen as a stepping stone to their future prosperity much as factory work during the industrial revolution paved the way for the following generations to enjoy better working conditions, wages, and general quality of life.

That’s far from a guarantee, but it’s possible with the right focus.

Other issues, such as wage stagnation, and the education, rent, and healthcare bubbles... are purely American problems. Most if not all other first world nations either never had those problems, or have solved them by now.

Which leaves climate change... where again, most of the world is on board for addressing the problem, both short and long term.

So... excluding failed states that aren’t really in the game right now... the global economy, while far from perfect, is a work in progress that could become far more fair and equitable over time... 

...with the exception of America (and I guess, England too) where legacy political issues such as racism and unbridled corporate greed are currently fighting tooth and nail to stay relevant in this new century that is leaving them behind.

But, putting them to one side for a moment, we can see that our self driving economy... such that it is... could be bad, if it refuses to allow any further change... keeping rent and education forever too high, and foreign factory wages forever too low, while we blindly destroy all the planet’s resources and turn the atmosphere into an oven.

However... because this is ultimately an economy driven by social media... there is a built-in flexibility to accommodate the ever shifting desires of a collective human population, around the globe, who very much want life to become more fair and equatable... from the top of the ionosphere, to the street level, down to the bottom of the underground mine.

So if you accept that premise, as I do, then the collective AI acting as an auto-pilot for this economy... is a good thing... that will not become a bad thing down the road.

TLDR: Even if our modern economy is problematic, the self driving aspect does not damn it to remaining problematic forever, because the self driving aspect is designed to learn and change according to the collective will of all global consumers, rich and poor alike.

In fact, the poor, I would argue, have more leverage than the rich, because... well, they vastly outnumber the rich, for one thing... and they spend those pennies as fast as they get them... while the rich mostly sit on their piles of cash.

Those collective pennies from the 99% amount to far more money, pulsing through the veins of the economy on a daily basis... with the number of individual transactions being... what... in the quadrillions or something a day? 

When your self driving feature is a learning algorithm... it can only learn from a transaction.  

They literally look at your transaction history, to try and suggest more things you’re likely to be interested in, and if that leads to another transaction... bingo!  It has learned!

Far more of that is going on with low income consumers every day... than with the rich... who often try to launder their money and mask the few fat transactions they do make... leaving them out of that cyber learning loop.

Their fat cat financial decisions, more and more as time goes on, will be determined by the nuanced concerns of the 99%, who determine which investments are sound, and which are folly.

Alright!  So, lets get back to Donald Trump, noted racist and friend to the greedy... who is also batshit crazy.

He’s in power because of the first two things, but his tariff policy is all that third thing.  It’s not really racist or greedy.  The racists and the greedy never asked for any tariffs.  It’s truly just... batshit lunacy coming out of the cartoonish depths of his plaque ridden synaptic structures.

He heard somewhere that tariffs are a thing bossy presidents used to do, a hundred years ago, and then he heard some other lunatic on AM radio say they were some kind of a solution for white supremacy and... he just seized on that and now he will just never let it go.

As I said in the opening, this is the one kind of thing that could short circuit the self driving economy and cause it to crash like all other economies before it.

However, in the previous entry, I noted that thus far, the economic auto pilot has been doing a freakishly good job of just ignoring his inputs to the pedals and the steering wheel.

I say, “freakishly,” because the result has been huge stock market spikes one day, followed by huge dips the next... for a year now... with the net result that nothing much has changed, because the spikes and dips cancel each other out.

It’s terrifying to watch from one day and week to the next... but on the other hand... it’s been a whole year of this and... we’re still fine!

To be clear here, these are spikes and dips on a stock market chart... they are not spikes and dips in your or my bank balance... or in the prices for the things we buy... because they are happening waaaay to fast.

An apt analogy would be... I come into your living room and flip the lights on and off, fifty thousand times per second, for a whole hour.  Will you notice?

Well, considering that your alternating current cycles them on and off already at the rate of sixty thousand times per second (if you live in the US) no!   You will not fucking notice any change in the brightness of your lights in the living room.

Okay, yes!.. your light switch would break if I did that... possibly leaving you in the dark.  But your light switch is a mechanical component.

The switches and buttons Trump is exercising like mad every waking minute with his daily tweet storms and policy contortions... are all digital... powered by redundant servers all around the planet, sitting in air conditioned rooms, with surge protectors and back up generators.

So... simply overheating the self driving mechanisms our economy, by working them to death trying to compensate for an unending barrage of violent inputs... is not possible.

AI algorithms exist independent of any one server, drive, card, or chip... and the internet as a whole is built to withstand daily attacks from global electrical storms and natural disasters, solar storms, and a never ending assault on the power grid from the world’s squirrels.

So, the economy is quite safe from his day to day insanity.

The question is... is that self driving infrastructure clever enough to deal with the long term, artificial inflation that his tariffs will impose upon the system from the outside?

With the tariffs... Trump is side-stepping the computers entirely, and fucking with the underlying economic math itself!

That’s... what a tariff is!  

It’s a way for a leader to arbitrarily change the fundamental math that underpins the economy.

So the answer to the question... if the self driving economy can correct for such a root level attack... depends on how intelligent it actually is.

All of these learning algorithms, working in concert toward the one objective of maintaining and improving the circulation of money... are ALL black-box algorithms, as touched on in the previous entry.

It means... all of them have evolved to survive inside our internet jungle of multiple such species of AI... and while we do not know how any of them think or work... it’s a safe bet they will all work together to isolate and neutralize the same existential threat.

Now, that last paragraph echoes the two-parter on cyber sentience... specifically the fear of such destroying humanity in an act of self preservation... but that fear was fairly well resolved in that two-parter... and the echo to it here, is not intentional.

Instead... and now we are down to the grit of tonight’s entry... I believe it may just be possible that a self driving economy, such as our own, could actually posses, within the cryptic depths of it’s curious, collective mind... a primal awareness that all the, “off the chart,” alarms which have been plaguing it recently, are tied back to one single “agent” known as “President Trump.”

This would seem to make sense, given that the same collective of economic bots are able to identify random teenage girls who are pregnant, even before the girls know it themselves, and start marketing baby products to them.

Would it really be such a leap to imagine that a self driving economy, would not figure out that it was under attack by a worm, introduced through social media, that went by the name of “President Trump.” and... through trial and error... figure out how best to defend against this destructive parasite?

If so... then flashing the all powerful warning signal of an inverted yield curve last week, has proven to be very effective... rattling him to the core, and rattling his greedy enablers hard enough to start trotting out Republican primary challengers against him.

What this would amount to is nothing less than... a self driving car which is learning how to eject an abusive driver... even when the cops are giving that abusive driver a pass... without destroying itself... by turning that abusive driver’s friends against him... by threatening their lives.

And that’s pretty damn clever, if you ask me.

Of course, at this juncture you’re surely thinking, “all of this is has to be bullshit and the inverted yield curve was real!  That’s all there is to this!  The rest is just your own madness trying to get rid of Trump without suffering an economic downturn.”

And maybe you’re right.

But the larger theme of this blog IS... that we are living in very strange times... like nothing we’ve seen before.

And all of this is just an attempt to try and explain such insanity... by tying together the newest branches of established science, tech, and sociology... into a kind of braided rope to climb?

Okay, time for bed.

[bespectacledbellman]

Goodbye Greens: Why I Have Left The Green Party

I haven’t always believed in progressive politics. When I was in my early teens I was a little Communist short and stout, here’s my hammer here’s my sickle, comrade. I believed everyone should be paid the same for their work and everyone can have a decent quality of life. That was great until I realised that no matter how hard I did at school I’d end up with the same fate as those who put no effort in. That wasn’t going to work.

So, I deviated further and further right until I was embracing something close to Fascism. Yes, some people are superior, I thought. After all, someone who spends their time learning and bettering themselves deserves to earn more, deserves to have more rights, deserves to have a greater say in how the country works. Again, this logic was fine until I realised that modern society can only exist if people aren’t superior to one another. We need non-academic people happy to work in our shops, farm our land, fix our cars to keep the doctors and teachers and writers and philosophers and artists going. Academia doesn’t equate with capability.

I therefore managed to find my political worldview crushed between these two illogical tenets. What this resulted in was a pragmatic left-liberalism with a few traces of quasi-Fascism. Wondering how to square this circle I endeavoured to approach each political party at my own pace. I found that Labour and the Liberal Democrats could cater to the heart, but their sometimes pie-in-the-sky thinking coupled with the anti-Blairite counterrevolution concludd with senseless policy – if, indeed, policy was ever forthcoming. On the other hand, the Conservatives seemed to be fighting for the centre ground I called home: an economic policy that was, sometimes, unfair and unflinching, but otherwise their policies fostered progressive social reforms. Cameron’s mob would neither give to the poor nor steal from the rich, but what Robin Hood’s merry men did in their own time was no concern of theirs.

I’m not saying that their approach was successful, but four years on I wonder what the UK would look like if Cameron’s planned decade-long ministry would have culminated in.

Politically homeless, therefore, I started to judge the fringes. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party was always a laugh, but unelectable. Independents were fine too, but only at constituency level. But when I read the Green Party manifesto a couple of years ago I was enraptured. The manifesto spoke to me. Save the planet. Tick. Social reforms for equality. Tick. Universal basic income. Tick.

Nuclear disarmament? Once upon a time I was opposed to this. Who throws away their shield, I mused, when someone was pointing an arrow at your head? Of course, this metaphor is completely wrong. It should be why am I standing here holding a Molotov cocktail on the off-chance that someone throws their Molotov cocktail at me? I will still be on fire no matter whether I have one of my own or not. It’s basically revenge, wrapped in the camouflaged garb of national security. Pointless. The Greens want to abolish nuclear weapons. Tick.

Sticking to my personal policy that whenever I found a party that suited me down to the core I would support them, I became a member of the Green Party. Through financial and moral support, I argued their case to friends and family and did what I could do highlight key social and economic issues that the Greens could work to resolve. I even wore t-shirts and buttons to advocate their cause in public.

And it was sunshine and roses, pretty much, until this year they started to be, well, silly, with a few minor incidents and one big one: capitalising on the chaos in America, the Greens came out for slavery reparations.

I just think this is the wrong answer. I also believe it’s insulting to simply pay people off for the suffering caused to slaves. I also felt that the logic behind compensation for past immorality was a slippery slope: where is the line drawn? What about Ireland during the Potato Famine? India? Africa? Look at the chaos caused in China by imperialism. Drawn to its inevitable conclusion, historical compensation would bankrupt the Earth.

It was also not going to do anything to solve modern racism. Say a Green government gives a stipend to people who can prove their ancestors were slaves. I can’t say for certain, but I’d guess that large category would include at least one white millionaire. Eight generations of breeding will diversify the ultimate, current generation – as it should. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel it’s right for a government to pay someone compensation for hardships that they may never have suffered. And for those many people who have suffered hardships, a payout isn’t justice.

As I bleat on about like a noisy sheep from dawn til dusk, education is the way we move forward. Educate our children on race and the importance of loving and respecting one another. Obviously, this is a dream, because we all know people whom we neither love nor respect – but at least teach that there are so many genuine reasons for hating people that race needn’t be a contender. Hate someone for being a bully, a snob, cruel, violent, criminal. Each of those adjectives has been attached to people of every different creed and colour through history. Why compound these valid reasons?

Take all of the money earmarked for reparations and pump it into schools. Give the UK a world-class (or world-beating, which appears to be the term in vogue nowadays) education system that teaches moral and social values, and not just the order of Henry VIII’s unfortunate spouses.

It is, in my view, a cheap ploy to capitalise on what was going on around the world in support of Black communities, to make the Green Party look like the progressive party, when in fact it looks more like throwing money at the problem and hoping it goes away. This isn’t the medieval Church, we can’t buy indulgences from our national sins. Only through repentance – education – can we be absolved.

Add to that the other cringe-worthy events that I saw manifest over the Green Party’s own social media page: notably, heralding a local councillor as a champion of his community for standing up for residents, even though he actually hadn’t any idea what he was doing and jeopardised their appeals by ignoring due process. The recent election, where as a member you vote on important roles, including roles for each individual group, but you can only vote for representatives of groups you belong to. Sounds a lot like segregation to me. As a member I should be allowed to vote for the person responsible for LGBTQ+ rights, BAME rights, migrant rights. You do not segregate policy based on membership. A white straight cis man should have the same rights as a Black lesbian trans woman. (If you disagree, read the sentence the other way around and then you will.) As a taxpayer, any decision made on, for instance, women’s rights, will affect me. If the Green Party advocated sanitary products on the NHS, I am fine with that, but as I pay money for the NHS, I should be allowed to choose who comes up with that policy. It’s short-sighted to segregate policy in this way – not that I was surprised, I’d learned that short-sighted policy was our forte.

Instead of focusing on key policies that would help the country: economic policy, ecological policy, foreign policy – all grounded in a realistic view of the world – I instead was swept up in a vortex of one-dimensional thought. Yes, if you’re unhappy with the UK selling weapons to Saudi Arabia that’s fine, but don’t start a discussion about it without mentioning the consequences of the UK not doing that. Do you think China or Russia will wield the same moral pressure on the Saudi government when they inevitably fill the gap left by the UK? A more sensible, multi-faceted policy would be to use all profits from arms sales to fund refugees and migrants from conflicts. Russia would spend its profits on ivory backscratchers.

With all this, I felt forced to leave these daydreamers and return to my pursuit of a party of pragmatic progressivism. The Green Party will never become a government or have influence with policies like these. The best policies come from heart and mind. No party really provides this, and perhaps that’s what’s wrong with modern politics. There is no haven for those in the middle who want equal rights for all but a partial repeal of human rights agreements. There is no base for those who want an enlightened justice system based on forgiveness and rehabilitation, but also desire the return of the death penalty. It may seem that these things are contradictory, but they’re not: they are practical when delivered appropriately. And if you were to sit down with someone and delve into one topic for long enough, you’d find this cognitive dissonance lies within probably all of us at some level. We all sit in the middle of the political spectrum and although we’d always like to do the right thing for the right reasons, most of us acknowledge that we sometimes have to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. We must be pragmatic in our daily lives and we must be pragmatic in our politics.

The Green Party has the progressivism, but not the pragmatism; the ideals, but not the logic; it has my heart, but not my mind. It has my sympathy, but not my vote.

[sufredux]

Washington Consensus

I encountered rank disbelief in the Congressmen before whom I was testifying that there were any significant changes in economic policies and attitudes in process in Latin America. After discussion with Fred Bergsten, the director at the Institute for International Economics, where I was (and am) professionally located, we decided to convene a conference to test the extent to which I was right and to put the change in policy attitudes on the record in Washington. A few weeks later I gave a seminar at the Institute for Development Studies in England, where I made much the same argument. I was challenged by Hans Singer to spell out what I meant when I said that many of the countries were changing their policies for the better. This emphasized the need to be very explicit about the policy changes that I was thinking of. I decided that conference that we were planning for the autumn, which 2 we decided to call “Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?” needed a background paper that would spell out the substance of the policy changes we were interested in. That paper was entitled “What Washington Means by Policy Reform” and was sent to the ten authors who had agreed to write country studies for our conference to try and make sure that they addressed a common set of issues in their papers. That paper said inter alia on its opening page: Th[is] paper identifies and discusses 10 policy instruments about whose proper deployment Washington can muster a reasonable degree of consensus….The paper is intended to elicit comment on both the extent to which the views identified do indeed command a consensus and on whether they deserve to command it. It is hoped that the country studies to be guided by this background paper will comment on the extent to which the Washington consensus is shared in the country in question…. The Washington of this paper is both the political Washington of Congress and senior members of the administration and the technocratic Washington of the international financial institutions, the economic agencies of the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve Board, and the think tanks. The Institute for International Economics made a contribution to codifying and propagating several aspects of the Washington consensus in its publication Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin America (Balassa et al. 1986). My opinion at that time was that views had pretty much coalesced on the sort of policies that had long been advocated by the OECD. I specifically did not believe that most of the “neoliberal” innovations1 of the Reagan administration in the United States or the Thatcher government in Britain had survived the demise of the former (Mrs. Thatcher’s government was still in its death throes at the time). The exception was privatization, which was Mrs. Thatcher’s personal gift to the economic policy agenda of the world, and which by 1989 had proved its worth. But I thought all the other new ideas with which Reagan and Thatcher had entered office, notably monetarism, supply-side economics, and minimal government, had by then been discarded as impractical or undesirable fads, so no trace of them can be found in what I labeled the “Washington Consensus.” Of course, acceptance as relevant to the developing world of ideas that had long been motherhood and apple pie in the developed world was a momentous change. All through the Cold War the world had remained frozen in the 1950s’ classification of First, Second, and Third Worlds, each of which was assumed to have its own distinct set of economic laws. 1989 marked the end of the Second World, to the great relief of most of its subjects, and also the end of the intellectual apartheid that had so long assumed that citizens of the Third World behaved quite differently to those of the First World. But the globalization of knowledge never meant general acceptance of neoliberalism by any definition I know of. Content of the Original List The ten reforms that constituted my list were as follows. 1. Fiscal Discipline. This was in the context of a region where almost all countries had run large deficits that led to balance of payments crises and high inflation that hit mainly the poor because the rich could park their money abroad. 2. Reordering Public Expenditure Priorities. This suggested switching expenditure in a progrowth and propoor way, from things like nonmerit subsidies to basic health and education and infrastructure. It did not call for all the burden of achieving fiscal discipline to be placed on expenditure cuts; on the contrary, the intention was to be strictly neutral about the desirable size of the public sector, an issue on which even a hopeless consensus-seeker like me did not imagine that the battle had been resolved with the end of history that was being promulgated at the time. 3. Tax Reform. The aim was a tax system that would combine a broad tax base with moderate marginal tax rates. 4. Liberalizing Interest Rates. In retrospect I wish I had formulated this in a broader way as financial liberalization, stressed that views differed on how fast it should be achieved, and—especially—recognized the importance of accompanying financial liberalization with prudential supervision. 5. A Competitive Exchange Rate2 . I fear I indulged in wishful thinking in asserting that there was a consensus in favor of ensuring that the exchange rate would be competitive, which pretty much implies an intermediate regime; in fact Washington was already beginning to edge toward the two-corner doctrine which holds that a country must either fix firmly or else it must float “cleanly”. 6. Trade Liberalization. I acknowledged that there was a difference of view about how fast trade should be liberalized, but everyone agreed that was the appropriate direction in which to move. 7. Liberalization of Inward Foreign Direct Investment. I specifically did not include comprehensive capital account liberalization, because I did not believe that did or should command a consensus in Washington. 8. Privatization. As noted already, this was the one area in which what originated as a neoliberal idea had won broad acceptance. We have since been made very conscious that it matters a lot how privatization is done: it can be a highly corrupt process that transfers assets to a privileged elite for a fraction of their true value, but the evidence is that it brings benefits (especially in terms of improved service coverage) when done properly, and the privatized enterprise either sells into a competitive market or is properly regulated. 9. Deregulation. This focused specifically on easing barriers to entry and exit, not on abolishing regulations designed for safety or environmental reasons, or to govern prices in a non-competitive industry. 10. Property Rights. This was primarily about providing the informal sector with the ability to gain property rights at acceptable cost (inspired by Hernando de Soto’s analysis). First Reactions The three American discussants whom I had invited to react to my paper were Richard Feinberg (then at the Overseas Development Council), Stanley Fischer (then Chief Economist at the World Bank), and Allan Meltzer (then as now a professor at CarnegieMellon University). Feinberg and Meltzer were intended to make sure that I had not represented as consensual anything that one or other side of the political spectrum would regard as rubbish, while Fischer would play the same safeguard role as regards the IFIs. Fischer was most supportive of the basic thrust of the paper, saying that “there are no longer two competing economic development paradigms” and that “Williamson has captured the growing Washington consensus on what the developing countries should do.” But he pointed to some areas that I had not commented on and where sharp disagreements remained, such as the environment, military spending, a need for more comprehensive financial reform than freeing interest rates, bringing back flight capital, and freeing flows of financial capital.3 It was not my intent to argue that controversy had ended, so I would not take issue with his contention that there remained sharp disagreements on a number of issues (including the desirability of capital account liberalization). And my initial paper did indeed formulate the financial liberalization question too narrowly. Meltzer expressed his pleasure at finding how much the mainstream had learned (according to my account) about the futility of things like policy activism, exploiting the unemployment/inflation tradeoff, and development planning. The two elements of my list on which he concentrated his criticism were once again the interest rate question (though here he focused more on my interim objective of a positive but moderate real interest rate than on the long run objective of interest rate liberalization) and a competitive exchange rate. The criticism of the interest rate objective I regard as merited. His alternative to a competitive exchange rate, namely a currency board, would certainly not be consensual, but the fact that he raised this issue was my first warning that on the exchange rate question I had misrepresented the degree of agreement in Washington. Feinberg started off by suggesting that there really was not much of a consensus at all, but his comment mellowed as it progressed, and he concluded by saying that there was convergence on key concepts though still plenty to argue about. His most memorable line does not appear in his written comment but consisted of the suggestion that I should have labeled my list the Universal Convergence rather than the Washington Consensus, since the extent of agreement is far short of consensus but runs far wider than Washington. He was of course correct on both points, but it was too late to change the terminology. The point about how much more apt it would have been to refer to a universal convergence rather than a Washington consensus was rubbed home in a fourth comment, by Patricio Meller of CIEPLAN in Santiago de Chile. In the months that followed I participated in several meetings where I not only argued that the policies included in my ten points were in fact being adopted fairly widely in Latin America, as our conference had confirmed, but also that this was a good thing and that lagging countries should catch up. I know that I never regarded those ten points as constituting the whole of what should be on the policy agenda, but perhaps I was not always as careful in spelling that out as I should have been. The two points in my original list that seem to me in retrospect least adequate as a summary of conventional thinking are the two identified by Allan Meltzer, namely financial liberalization and exchange-rate policy. The agenda for financial liberalization went broader than interest rates, to include most importantly the liberalization of credit flows, and (as Joe Stiglitz has often pointed out) it needed to be supplemented by prudential supervision if it were not to lead almost inexorably to financial crisis. We already had the experience of the Southern Cone liberalization of the late 1970s to emphasize that point, so I clearly should not have overlooked it. On exchange rate policy I fear I was guilty of wishful thinking in suggesting that opinion had coalesced on something close to my own view, whereas in fact I suspect that even then a majority of Washington opinion would have plumped for either the bipolar view or else (like Meltzer) one of the poles. In arguing that lagging countries should catch up with the policy reforms on my list, I argued on occasion that the East Asian NICs had broadly followed those policies. A Korean discussant (whose name I regret to say escapes me) at a conference in Madison challenged this contention; he argued that their macro policies had indeed been prudent, but also asserted (like Alice Amsden and Robert Wade) that their microeconomic policies had involved an active role for the state quite at variance with the thrust of points 4 and 6- 9 of my list. I think one has to concede that some of the East Asian countries, notably Korea and Taiwan, were far from pursuing laissez-faire during their years of catch-up growth, but this does not prove that their rapid growth was attributable to their departure from liberal policies, as critics of the Washington Consensus seem to assume axiomatically. There were after all two other East Asian countries that grew comparably rapidly, in which the state played a much smaller role. Indeed, one of those—namely Hong Kong—was the closest to a model of laissez-faire that the world has ever seen. It would seem to me more natural to attribute the fast growth of the East Asian NICs to what they had in common, such as fiscal prudence, high savings rates, work ethic, competitive exchange rates, and a focus on education, rather than to what they did differently, such as industrial policy, directed credit, and import protection. Incidentally, one should compare the policy stance of Korea and Taiwan with that of other developing countries, not with a textbook model of perfect competition. Most of the countries that failed to grow comparably fast were even less liberal. So even if it was wrong to treat the East Asian NICs as pin-up examples of the Washington Consensus in action, it is even more misleading to treat them as evidence for rejecting microeconomic liberalization. That controversy cannot be resolved by any simple appeal to what happened in East Asia. 6 But arguments about the content of the Washington Consensus have always been secondary to the wave of indignation unleashed by the name that I pinned on this list of policy reforms. Some of the reformers obviously believed that I had undercut their local standing by calling it a “Washington” agenda, and thus suggesting that these were reforms that were being imposed on them rather than being adopted at their own volition because they recognized that those were the reforms their country needed. When I invented the term I was not thinking of making propaganda for economic reform (insofar as I was contemplating making propaganda, it was propaganda for debt relief in Washington, not propaganda for policy reform in Latin America). From the standpoint of making propaganda for policy reform in Latin America, Moisés Naím (2000) has argued that in fact it was a good term in 1989, the year the coalition led by the United States emerged victorious in the Cold War, when people were searching for a new ideology and the ideology of the victors looked rather appealing. But it was a questionable choice in more normal times, and a terrible one in the world that George W. Bush has created, where mention of Washington is hardly the way to curry support from non-Americans. It was, I fear, a propaganda gift to the old left. Varying Interpretations To judge by the sales of Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?, the vast majority of those who have launched venomous attacks on the Washington Consensus have not read my account of what I meant by the term. When I read what others mean by it, I discover that it has been interpreted to mean bashing the state, a new imperialism, the creation of a laissez-faire global economy, that the only thing that matters is the growth of GDP, and doubtless much else besides. I submit that it is difficult to find any of these implied by the list of ten policy reforms that I presented earlier. One event that I found extraordinary was to learn that many people in Latin America blamed the adoption of Washington Consensus policies for the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001. I found this extraordinary because I had for some years been hoping against hope that Argentina would not suffer a collapse like the one that occurred, but was nonetheless driven to the conclusion that it was highly likely because of the fundamental ways in which the country had strayed from two of the most basic precepts of what I had laid out. Specifically, it had adopted a fixed exchange rate that became chronically overvalued (for reasons that were not its fault at all, let me add), and—while its fiscal deficits were smaller than in the 1980s—it had not used its boom years to work down the debt/GDP ratio. Its fiscal policy as the crisis approached was not nearly restrictive enough to sustain the currency board system. None of the good reforms along Washington Consensus lines that Argentina had indeed made during the 1990s—trade liberalization, financial liberalization, privatization, and so on—seemed to me to have the slightest bearing on the crisis. Yet Latin American populists and journalists, and even a few reputable economists, were asserting that the Washington Consensus was somehow to blame for the Argentinean implosion. I am still hoping to learn the causal channel they have in mind. One has to conclude that the term has been used to mean very different things by different people. In fact, it seems to me that there are at least two interpretations of the term beside mine that are in widespread circulation. 7 One uses it to refer to the policies the Bretton Woods institutions applied toward their client countries, or perhaps the attitude of the US government plus the Bretton Woods institutions.4 This seems to me a reasonable, well-defined usage. In the early days after 1989 there was not much difference between my concept and this one, but over time some substantive differences emerged. The Bretton Woods institutions increasingly came to espouse the so-called bipolar doctrine (at least until the implosion of the Argentine economy in 2001, as a direct result of applying one of the supposedly crisis-free regimes), according to which countries should either float their exchange rate “cleanly” or else fix it firmly by adopting some institutional device like a currency board. As pointed out above, that is directly counter to my version of the Washington Consensus, which called for a competitive exchange rate, which necessarily implies an intermediate regime since either fixed or floating rates can easily become overvalued. Again, the Bretton Woods institutions, or at least the IMF, came in the mid-1990s to urge countries to liberalize their capital accounts, whereas my version had deliberately limited the call for liberalization of capital flows to FDI. Both of those deviations from the original version were in my opinion terrible, with the second one bearing the major responsibility for causing the Asian crisis of 1997. But there were also some highly positive differences, as the Bank and Fund came to take up some of the issues that I had not judged sufficiently major in Latin America in 1989 to justify inclusion. I think in particular of institutional issues, especially regarding governance and corruption, in the case of the Bank, and financial sector reform as reflected in standards and codes in the case of the Fund. And by the late 1990s both institutions had replaced their earlier indifference to issues of income distribution by a recognition that it matters profoundly who gains or loses income. The third interpretation of the term “Washington Consensus” uses it as a synonym for neoliberalism or market fundamentalism. This I regard as a thoroughly objectionable perversion of the original meaning. Whatever else the term “Washington Consensus” may mean, it should surely refer to a set of policies that command or commanded a consensus in some significant part of Washington, either the US government or the IFIs or both, or perhaps both plus some other group. Even in the early years of the Reagan administration, or during Bush 43, it would be difficult to contend that any of the distinctively neoliberal policies, such as supply-side economics, monetarism, or minimal government, commanded much of a consensus, certainly not in the IFIs. And it would be preposterous to associate any of those policies with the Clinton administration. Yet most of the political diatribes against the Washington Consensus have been directed against this third concept, with those using the term this way apparently unconcerned with the need to establish that there actually was a consensus in favor of the policies they love to hate.5 Why should the term have come to be used in such different ways? I find it easy enough to see why the second usage emerged. The term initially provided a reasonable description of the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions, and as these evolved the term continued to refer to what these currently were. What puzzles me is how the third usage became so popular. The only hypothesis that has ever seemed to me remotely plausible is that this was an attempt to discredit economic reform by bundling a raft of ideas that deserve to be consigned to oblivion along with the list of commonsense proreform proposals that constituted my original list. This was doubtless facilitated by the name that I had bestowed on my list, which gave an incentive to anyone who disliked the policies or attitudes of the US government or the IFIs to join in a misrepresentation of the policies they were promoting. In any event, surely intellectual integrity demands a conscientious attempt in the future to distinguish alternative concepts of the Washington Consensus. Semantic issues may not be the most exciting ones, but being clear about the way in which terms are being used is a necessary condition for serious professional discussion. The practice of dismissing requests for clarification as tedious pedantry should be unacceptable. Perhaps then more critics would follow the example of the Korean discussant to whom I referred earlier who laid out precisely which elements of my original agenda he objected to. Or if a critic chooses to use the third concept, then surely he should say that he is talking about a concept of the Washington Consensus that has never commanded a consensus in Washington. The Future However much exception I may take to some of the assaults that have been made on the Washington Consensus, I have to admit that I too am uncomfortable if it is interpreted as a comprehensive agenda for economic reform. Even in 1989, there was one objective of economic policy that I regard as of major importance but that found only very tenuous reflection in the Consensus.6 Since then fifteen years have passed, and it would be remarkable (and depressing) if no new ideas worthy of inclusion in the policy agenda had emerged. Hence there are two reasons why my policy agenda of today can differ from the Washington Consensus as I laid it out in 1989: because I am not limiting myself to doctrines able to command a consensus but am presenting what I believe deserves to be done, and because time has passed and ideas have developed. A book that I co-edited last year (Kuczynski and Williamson 2003) addressed the issue of delineating a policy agenda appropriate for Latin America in the current decade. Note that this new agenda, like the original Washington Consensus, was aimed specifically at Latin America at a particular moment of history, rather than claiming to be a text for all countries at all times as many critics have interpreted it to be. We identified four major topics that ought to be included. The first of these is stabilization policy. The need for more pro-active policies to keep the economy on an even keel has been driven home with great force in recent years by the horrifying price that many emerging markets have paid for the crises to which so many have been exposed. When I drew up the Washington Consensus the overwhelming need, at least in Latin America, was to conquer inflation, so that was the macroeconomic objective that I emphasized. Had it occurred to me that my list would be regarded in some quarters as a comprehensive blueprint for policy practitioners, I hope that I would have added the need for policies designed to crisis-proof economies and stabilize them against the business cycle (the sort of measures that Ricardo Ffrench-Davis has advocated under the heading of “reforming the reforms”). A first implication is to use fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool, insofar as possible. The most effective way to do this seems to be to strengthen the automatic stabilizers and let them operate. (It seems unlikely that emerging markets would have more success with discretionary fiscal policy than the developed countries have had.) Most developing countries have been precluded from doing even this by a need to keep the markets happy, which has required deflationary fiscal policy during difficult times. The way to end this is to use booms to work down debt levels to a point at which the market will consider them creditworthy, which means that countercyclical fiscal policy can be initiated only during the boom phase of the cycle. Obviously there are other tools besides fiscal policy that may help minimize the probability of encountering a crisis, and its cost if it nevertheless occurs. Exchange rate policy may be the most crucial, since many of the emerging-market crises of recent years have originated in the attempt to defend a more-or-less fixed exchange rate. For this reason most countries have abandoned the use of fixed or predetermined exchange rates in favor of some version of floating. However, there is still an important difference of view between those who think of floating as implying a commitment on the part of the government not to think about what exchange rate is appropriate, versus those who take the view that floating is simply avoidance of a commitment to defend a particular margin. In the latter view, which I share, it is still perfectly appropriate for a government to have a view on what range of rates would be appropriate, and to slant policy with a view to pushing the rate toward that range, even if it avoids guaranteeing that the rate will stay within some defined margins. In particular, I would argue that while a government should freely allow depreciation in order to avoid or limit the damage of a crisis, it should if necessary be proactive in seeking to limit appreciation in good times, when investors are pushing in money. If a country has a sufficiently efficient and uncorrupt civil service to be able to make capital controls (like the Chilean uncompensated reserve requirement of the 1990s) work (and not all countries do!), then it should be prepared if necessary to use capital controls to limit the inflow of foreign funds and hence help maintain a competitive exchange rate. Monetary policy is also highly pertinent to countercyclical policy. Many countries, especially those that have abandoned a fixed exchange rate and were therefore seeking a new nominal anchor, have told their central bank to use an inflation targeting framework to guide monetary policy. This appears a sensible choice, provided at least 10 that it is not interpreted so rigidly as to preclude some regard for the state of the real economy when setting monetary policy. Recent experience has demonstrated conclusively that the severity of a crisis is magnified when a country has a large volume of debt denominated in foreign exchange (see e.g. Goldstein and Turner 2004). This is because currency depreciation, which does—and should—occur when a crisis develops, increases the real value of the debts of those who have their obligations denominated in foreign currency. If the banks took the exchange risk by borrowing in foreign currency and on-lending in local currency, then their solvency will be threatened directly. If they sought to avoid that risk by on-lending in foreign currency, then their debtors’ financial position will be undermined (especially if they are in the nontradable sector), and the banks are likely to end up with a large volume of bad loans, which may also threaten their solvency. If the government contracted foreign currency debt (or allowed the private sector to shield itself by unloading its foreign currency debt when conditions turned threatening), then the effect of a currency depreciation will be to increase public-sector debt and thereby undermine confidence at a critical time. Whatever the form of such borrowing, it can intensify any difficulties that may emerge. The solution is to curb borrowing in foreign currency. The government can perfectly well just say no when deciding the currency composition of its own borrowing and issue bonds in local currency (as more and more emerging markets are now starting to do). Bank supervision can be used to discourage bank borrowing, and lending, in foreign exchange. The more difficult issue is foreign-currency borrowing by corporations. To prevent that would require the imposition of controls on the form of foreign borrowing. Perhaps it makes more sense to content oneself with discouraging, rather than completely preventing, foreign currency–denominated borrowing. That could be achieved by taxation policy, which could give less tax relief for interest payments on foreign-currency loans, and/or charge higher taxes on interest receipts on such loans. Obviously crisis-proofing an economy may require attention to other issues. For example, in many countries subnational government units face a soft budget constraint, which for well-known reasons is not good for stabilization policy. But the purpose of this section is to give an idea of the issues that are important in designing a policy agenda, not to write a comprehensive account of every issue that may face a policy practitioner, so I will leave this first issue. The second general heading of our policy agenda consisted of pushing on with the liberalizing reforms that were embodied in the original Washington Consensus, and extending them to areas like the labor market where economic performance is being held back by excessive rigidity. One does not have to be some sort of market fundamentalist who believes that less government is better government and that externalities can safely be disregarded in order to recognize the benefits of using market forces to coordinate activity and motivate effort. This proposition is such a basic part of economic thinking that it is actually rather difficult to think of a work that conclusively establishes its truth. But there are a variety of indirect confirmations, from the universal acclaim that meets the abandonment of rationing to the success of emissions trading in reducing pollution at far lower cost than was anticipated. It is certainly true that the move to adopt a more liberal policy stance in many developing countries over the past two decades has as yet had the hoped-for effect of stimulating growth in only a few countries, like India. The results have not been 11 comparably encouraging in, say, Latin America (Ocampo 2004, Kuczynski and Williamson 2003). But the blame for this seems to me to lie in the misguided macroeconomic policies—like allowing exchange rates to become overvalued and making no attempt to stabilize the cycle—that accompanied the microeconomic reforms, rather than in the latter themselves. The same was true in the United Kingdom under Mrs. Thatcher and in New Zealand when Roger Douglas was finance minister; both undertook far-reaching microeconomic liberalizations that can now be seen to have arrested and even reversed the relative decline of those countries, but their peoples saw no benefits for the best part of a decade because of the primitive macro policies that accompanied the micro reform. When we asked what is today most in need of liberalization in Latin America, we concluded that it is the labor market. Around 50 percent of the labor force in many Latin American countries is in the informal sector. This means that they do not enjoy even the most basic social benefits, like health insurance, some form of safeguard against unemployment, and the right to a pension in old age. What people do get is the right to maintain through thick and thin a formal-sector job if they are lucky enough to have one, and a wide range of social benefits that go along with all formal-sector jobs. Not all these benefits appear to be highly valued, to judge by the stories of workers taking second jobs to supplement what they can earn in their guaranteed maximum of 40 hours, or taking another job during their guaranteed summer vacations. So we proposed to flexibilize firing for good reason and curtail the obligation to pay those elements of the social wage that appear less appreciated, in the belief that this will reduce the cost of employing labor in the formal sector and so lead to more hiring and greater efficiency. There is an abundant economic literature that concludes that the net effect of making it easier to fire workers is to increase employment net. The third element of our proposed policy agenda consists of building or strengthening institutions. This is hardly novel; the importance of institution building has in fact become the main new thrust of development economics in the 15 years since the Washington Consensus was first promulgated. Which particular institutions are most in need of strengthening tends to vary from one country to another, so the possibility of generalizing is limited, but archaic judiciaries, rigid civil service bureaucracies, oldfashioned political systems, teachers’ unions focused exclusively on producer interests, and weak financial infrastructures are all common. One institutional reform that we certainly did not advocate was introduction of industrial policy, meaning by this a program that requires some government agency to “pick winners” (to help companies that are judged likely to be able to contribute something special to the national economy). As argued before, there is little reason to think that industrial policies were the key ingredient of success in East Asia (see also Noland and Pack 2003). But we did have a lot more sympathy for a cousin of industrial policy usually referred to as a national innovation system. This does not require government to start making business judgments; it instead has government seek to create an institutional environment in which those firms that want to innovate find the necessary supporting infrastructure. A national innovation system is about government creating institutions to provide technical education, to promote the diffusion of technological information, to fund precompetitive research, to provide tax incentives for R&D, to encourage venture capital, to stimulate the growth of industrial clusters, and so on. While 12 there is still ample scope for productivity to increase in Latin America by copying best practices developed in the rest of the world, it may need an act of Schumpeterian innovation—and therefore the sort of technologically supportive infrastructure that comprises a national innovation system—to bring world best practice to Latin America (ECLAC 1995, part 2). The final element of the policy agenda is intended to combat the neglect of equity that was as true of the Washington Consensus as it has long been of economics in general. We suggested that it is important for governments to target an improved distribution of income in the same way that they target a higher rate of growth. Where there are opportunities for win-win solutions that will both increase growth and improve income distribution (such as, maybe, redirecting public education subsidies from universities to primary schools), they should be exploited. But the more fundamental point is that there is no intellectual justification for arguing that only win-win solutions deserve to be considered. One always needs to be aware of the potential cost in terms of efficiency (or growth) of actions to improve income distribution, but in a highly unequal region like Latin America opportunities for making large distributive gains for modest efficiency costs deserve to be seized. Progressive taxes are the classic instrument for redistributing income. One of the more questionable aspects of the reforms of the past decade in Latin America has been the form that tax reform has tended to take, with a shift in the burden of taxation from income taxes (which are typically at least mildly progressive) to consumption taxes (which are usually at least mildly regressive). While the tax reforms that have occurred have been useful in developing a broader tax base, it is time to reverse the process of shifting from direct to indirect taxation; effort should now focus on increasing direct tax collections. For incentive reasons one may want to avoid increasing the marginal tax rate on earned income, but that still leaves at least three possibilities: • The development of property taxation as a major revenue source (it is the most natural revenue source for the subnational government units that are being spawned by the process of decentralization that has rightly become so popular). • The elimination of tax loopholes, not only so as to increase revenue but also to simplify tax obligations and thus aid enforcement. • Better tax collection, particularly of the income earned on flight capital parked abroad, which will require the signing of tax information-sharing arrangements with at least the principal havens for capital flight. Increased tax revenue needs to be used to increase spending on basic social services, including a social safety net as well as education and health, so that the net effect will be a significant impact in terms of reducing inequality, particularly by expanding opportunities for the poor. With the best will in the world, however, what is achievable through the tax system is limited, in part by the fact that one of the things that money is good at buying is advice on how to minimize a tax bill. Really significant improvements in distribution will come only by remedying the fundamental weakness that causes poverty, which is that too many people lack the assets that enable them to work their way out of poverty. The basic principle of a market economy is that people exchange like value for like value. Hence in 13 order to earn a decent living the poor must have the opportunity to offer something that others want and will pay to buy: those who have nothing worthwhile to offer because they have no assets are unable to earn a decent living. The solution is not to abolish the market economy, which was tried in the communist countries for 70 years and proved a disastrous dead end, but to give the poor access to assets that will enable them to make and sell things that others will pay to buy. That means: • Education. There is no hope unless the poor get more human capital than they have had in the past. Latin America has made some progress in improving education in the last decade, but it is still lagging on a world scale. • Titling programs to provide property rights to the informal sector and allow Hernando de Soto’s “mystery of capital” to be unlocked (de Soto 2000). • Land reform. The Brazilian program of recent years to help peasants buy land from latifundia landlords provides a model. Landlords do not feel their vital interests to be threatened and therefore they do not resort to extreme measures to thwart the program. Property rights are respected. The peasants get opportunities but not handouts, which seems to be what they want. • Microcredit. Organizations to supply microcredit are spreading, but they still serve only about 2 million of Latin America’s 200 million poor. The biggest obstacle to an expanded program consists of the very high real interest rates that have been common in the region. These high interest rates mean either that microcredit programs have a substantial fiscal cost and create an incentive to divert funds to the less poor (if interest rates are subsidized), or (otherwise) that they do not convey much benefit to the borrowers. Macro policy in a number of countries needs to aim to reduce market interest rates over time, which will inter alia facilitate the spread of microcredit. In the best of worlds such policies will take time to produce a social revolution, for the very basic reason that they rely on the creation of new assets, and it takes time to produce new assets. But, unlike populist programs, they do have the potential to produce a real social revolution if they are pursued steadfastly. And they could do so without undermining the wellbeing of the rich, thus holding out the hope that these traditionally fragmented societies might finally begin to develop real social cohesion. Concluding Remarks Some may ask whether it matters whether people declare themselves for or against the Washington Consensus. If the battles are essentially semantic, why don’t we all jump on its grave and get on with the serious work of pursuing an updated policy agenda? Good question, but perhaps there is a serious answer. When a serious economist attacks the Washington Consensus, the world at large interprets that as saying that he believes there is a serious intellectual case against disciplined macroeconomic policies, the use of markets, and trade liberalization—the three core ideas that were embodied in the original list and that are identified with the IFIs. Perhaps there is such a case, but I have not found it argued in Stiglitz (2002) or anywhere else. If the term is being used as a pseudonym for market fundamentalism, then the public read into it a declaration that the 14 IFIs are committed to market fundamentalism. That is a caricature. We have no business to be propagating caricatures. Everyone agrees that the Washington Consensus did not contain all the answers to the questions of 1989, let alone that it addresses all the new issues that have arisen since then. So of course we need to go beyond it. That is the purpose of this conference, to which I hope the penultimate section of this paper will contribute. References Balassa, Bela, Gerardo Bueno, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, and Mario Henrique Simonsen. 1986. Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin America. (Washington: Institute for International Economics.) De Soto, Hernando. 2002. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. (London: Black Swan.) Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 1995. Latin America and the Caribbean: Policies to Improve Linkages with the Global Economy. (Santiago: ECLAC.) Goldstein, Morris, and Philip Turner. 2004. Controlling Currency Mismatches in Emerging Markets. (Washington: Institute for International Economics.) Kuczynski, Pedro-Pablo, and John Williamson (eds.). After the Washington Consensus: Restarting Growth and Reform in Latin America. (Washington: Institute for International Economics.) Naím, Moisés. 2000. “Washington Consensus or Washington Confusion?”, Foreign Policy, Spring. Noland, Marcus, and Howard Pack. 2003. Industrial Policy in an Era of Globalization: Lessons from Asia. (Washington: Institute for International Economics.) Ocampo, José Antonio. 2004. “Latin America’s Growth and Equity Frustrations During Structural Reforms”. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring, 18(2), pp. 67-88. Stiglitz, Jospeh E. 2002. Globalization and Its Discontents. (New York and London: Norton.) Williamson, John. 1990 Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (Washington: Institute for International Economics.)

[jmaria200]

Sweet Pain

05/28/2018

Sweet Pain

05/28/2018

The first full day of the new eating lifestyle has come and gone and I’m in such need of a piece of strawberry licorice. I not sure if I should call it a diet(actually you don’t lose weight this time around), a lifestyle, torture, etc. It’s official name is The Whole 30, another food fad that attempts to right the wrongs of the American diet. This time sugar, specifically processed sugars,(you know everything that tastes great and is addicting), preservatives, starches are the enemies and the Whole 30 commands you to get rid of them, cold turkey. Instead you are beholden to meat, nuts, fish and other proteins and fruit for thirty days.

My wife, a worse junk food junkie than me, is on the hunt for the latest ways to curb her yearnings and this was her latest find. Having long waged the secret inner war with my sweet tooth face it almost all of us do, I signed up and even after the first day I’m craving good old fashioned sugar. Lord, what would we do without it in this country? Maybe not be so fat? I’ve decided to keep this online journal of my progress and my pain over the next 30 days.  

5/29/2018

I feel lethargic, my mouth is constantly watering, and my head is fuzzy, . This marks the second day of the Whole30. Food, once reliable comfort, has become a antagonist. The kitchen is a mine field where I must step carefully. It is so easy to pluck out a sensual chocolate covered marshmallow from a red colored box and bite into it. The food I can eat sits like a bag of sand in my gut. It keeps me sustained but not happy.

I’ve read some of the literature and what I’m going through is quite normal and it will get worse before it gets better. My body is converting slowly converting from sugar based fuel to fat fuel (apparently good fats) however it doesn’t know how to do that yet so I am sluggish. I think I will accompany this blog with some research on the story of Americans obsession with sugar and processed foods. Writing will help distract me.  

5/30/2018

Here I am two days behind. I’ll try to catch you up. I’m going to try to focus on not what I and my wife are doing this meal plan but why we’re doing it. Why this radical life change? I found this list symptoms from a website of a fitness expert. Guess what these refer too. 

Anxiety

Changes in appetite

Cravings

Flu-like symptoms

Depression

Mood changes

Dizziness

Fatigue

Headaches

Shakiness

Changes in sleep patterns

Weight loss

Stomach flu? Food poisoning? Nope. These are the symptoms of sugar detox. Yep, that’s right. This is what happens if you take sugar out of your diet and I’m not talking about cookies and ice cream and chocolate. This plan goes much deeper: bread, pasta, beans, etc. All of these types of food are broken down into sugars in your body and sugars are being linked to inflammation, bad skin, poor mood, etc.

Now America is the land of diets and eating fads as in the end we as a society have little idea of what to eat and what is good for us. If this meal plan sounds like one the many movements out there that finds its enemy: fat, gluten, carbohydrates, etc and profits off getting people worked up about it, your right and I agree. More to come on this.  

6/8/18

It is now day 11 of the Whole 30 food plan and clearly my attempts to keep up with this blog on a regular basis have failed. This is a conglomerate of previously mentioned twin infants that need near constant car and the mission to find not only summer employment but full term employment.  I can easily recap most of what has happened in those missed days.

First, I feel I must break away from food talk only and integrate my career story as it is the other side of the coin that is my life right now and it is in trouble.  My job history has been a floundering mess. I won’t go into all the gritty details as I feel they’ve been with me for at least a quarter of my life here on earth and they can get repetitive and depressing.  Let’s say I had little idea of what I wanted to do coming out of college. I tried a few different fields usually based more on “this interests me” than real research. This tactic did not work very well. The pile of temporary, part time, and “road not taken” jobs grew and grew and, at forty two, I have yet to have a steady full time job. I discovered a love of teaching in my mid thirties, specifically freshman composition at the community college level, but I have remained woefully underemployed as an adjunct for five of the six part years.  This lack of opportunity is a combination of the need for excessive education and experience for even entry level positions, the ongoing deterioration of the the writing career field, and the heightening level of competition.  I also believe my subdued personality does not help my chances.  I now have a family that depends on me and I’ve been able to do no better than a one year contract for the small Onondaga community college in upstate New York.  Since then I’ve tried to shift into high school teaching. Once again the need for degrees and certification is rigorous. I have a master’s degree, albeit not in education, and was led to believe by the recruitment people of Anne Arundel community college master’s in education program that I could potentially land temporary teaching employment while gaining my certification. The Baltimore County public school systems didn’t seem to see it this way.(go figure) I’ve also had little to no help in figuring out what to put in my application packet to make me a more attractive candidate.  Since the Onondaga success, my job search has become a rather dark cycle of sending out applications and getting rejections.  Being a daddy doesn’t allow me much time to network and I tend to be poor in this area. I’ve sought out help from the state career program, but it is painfully slow.  I take time to write about because I think the cumulative effect has become a mixture of depression and anxiety. Depression? That word is scary what with two celebrities having recently committed suicide in thew news. I have a family history of it. I have felt worn down and isolated lately but could it be that? Not knowing for sure is more worrisome which might lead to more depression. I go to bed anxious over money, anxious that my family will be well off, and wondering how many more years I need to struggle. II worry about retirement of course. I’ve scraped and saved what I could but without a solid income it’s going to be woefully inadequate. Could it be depression? I keep searching out some signal of depression in my consciousness as if I might uncover it but people who are depressed generally aren’t good at diagnosing their own condition. It’s hard to link the physical symptoms to something mental. 

So what do I do? Well, I’m working hard to stay focused, to get more organized, but I need the help of others and that help is hard to find. I need career help. I’m leary of the integrity of paid career consultants but how long can I keep floundering? I can see this summer will be tedious. It will be about slowly piecing together the knowledge to get a foot in the door in high school and probably working a part time job that is a poor fit to get there. I will need strong doses of positivity and support in my life and a real sense of direction. I’m not sure where to find that right now. I love Aurora but she is not strong at being emotionally supportive, at least not for me.  I will have to do some research on where I can find the help I need. I will leave my story there for now.

Whew, one of the best functions of writing is catharsis, to get one’s thoughts out there. It’s not pretty but it’s necessary. I wrote the previous section because it captures what is happening outside of the Whole30 and being a father and is vital to how I have been feeling over the past four days both mentally and physically. At first I’d naturally thought my symptoms were linked to the change in eating habits, but last Wednesday they took a real turn for the worst. I hadn’t felt that strange in a long time-just heavy and thick headed with blurry vision and shortness of breath. Each day I’ve felt a little better thankfully. I went to the doctor today to rule out physical cause. She didn’t find anything obvious but I still have blood labs pending that the neglected to get done. The intense labor of the Whole30 hasn’t helped my mood. No single meal is a simple grab and go and the constant preparation is taxing. in fact, I must bring this blog to a close now.

6/23/18

We are a nation of sugar addicts. “Two hundred years ago, the average American ate only 2 pounds of sugar a year. In 1970, we ate 123 pounds of sugar per year. Today, the average American consumes almost 152 pounds of sugar in one year. This is equal to 3 pounds (or 6 cups) of sugar consumed in one week” (www.dhhs.nh.gov). Sugar is everywhere in our diet slipped into breads and bacon to make them more desirable so we eat more. Here’s the little secret that is not really a secret: these foods are desirable while not satisfying so we eat more and more so we buy more. Food companies figured this out a long time ago. It’s good for business and bad for people. These are one of the tenants of the Whole 30, to become aware of how we are being manipulated this way. Whats more, like many business influenced trends, these machinations only become really effective when they are normalized by culture. Just think about how many American cultural norms involve sweets and processed food of some form: cakes at birthdays, drinking alcohol at social gathering, cheap vending food at sporting events. If you want to stand out at just about any social gathering  American society, try avoiding foods with sugars and processed foods.  Many conversations this way leading inevitably to discussion of the Whole 30. This was one of the most surprising side effects of being on this meal plan. I and my wife had to educate the waiter of a expensive steak house in Washington D.C. on the guidelines of our meal plan. Most dining out experiences will be this way. Sorry, but we can’t eat ninety five percent of the food on the menu. 

Just walking into a grocery store, I was shocked by how much was off limits: pasta, cereal, juice, etc.  That was one of the great challenges of this diet. What could we eat? Obviously, there was meats and vegetables and fruits but what about diary? beans?. They don’t have added sugar, right?  While diary and things like beans did not have added sugar they include sugars and other chemicals that aren’t necessarily healthy.(For more on this read the accompanying book It Starts With Food).  If you’re skeptical at this point, I’m understand. I’m still a skeptic. After all, the Whole 30 is another lifestyle program, one of many products that is being marketed to the public in the age of food confusion in this country.  

7/1/18

Promises, Promises...

“Systemic inflammation” seems to be the catchphrase behind the Whole 30. (There’s a lot of food science behind this that I won’t go into. Again read the book). The jist of systemic inflammation is that bad foods silently hurts your body. Over time this damage shows up as illnesses including allergies, depression, and diabetes. Eating foods that contribute to both physical and psychological well being can lead to better health. This idea seems legitimate enough but then the authors also include anecdotes by people with illnesses ranging from lyme disease to diabetes whose symptoms disappeared after being on the Whole 30. You can practically hear the credibility of the writers straining here. I had eczema before the Whole 30 and and I still have eczema after it. All in all, taking sugar out and adding more protein is beneficial to people but let’s hold off on the miracles.

While I’m on the topic of veracity, I can understand the authors of the Whole 30 exaggerating the effects of their meal plan- after all maybe one person out there with lyme disease did experience an improvement in their symptoms and, if this doesn’t happen, no one would necessarily be worse off-since their plan seems sound and is self directed for the most part. I didn’t need to constantly by products from the authors of the Whole 30.  But what about those companies that, for all intensive purposes, are influential on our health, what about the stories that the food industry tell? 

“the post-crash world appears to have become much more cynical about the behavior and motives of corporations.” (Beatte).  Unless you’ve been “off the grid” for most of your life you’re probably all too familiar with the constant avalanche of ads that are forced upon Americans everyday so much so that, like me, you’d do anything to get away from them. Now I’ve already covered the influences of advertising in another part of this blog; however, the food industry holds a special place among advertisers as, for better or worse, they often determine what we put in our bodies in this country and this isn’t necessarily due to their popularity but a well designed combination of market control and addiction.

The master plan

The current state of the American diet is, like most institutions, a result of the interaction between corporations, the government, and the individual where each party is both influential and under the influence.  However, what is key here is that the influence of the individual has eroded significantly over the years unless they happen to be wealthy enough to be influential. Government has responded more to these wealthy and corporations creating more and more of a corporate dictated agenda.   

The Food Guys

If you do a little research you’ll find that thanks to constant mergers and take overs about ten mega corporations control most of the U.S. food production. Think about that, just ten! Some are well known like Pepsico, which owns Tropicana, Quaker, Lays, while others are more obscure like Unilever that owns Knorr, Good Humor, and Skippie. Regardless, you can bet you’ve eaten something made by one of of these ten companies recently.  Much like health care and airline travel, a key aspect of weakly regulated capitalism is that power in the form of market control can be consolidated in the hands of a few major players and this is scary especially when it comes to our food.  These companies may not necessarily set out to give people cheap, poor quality food  but this arises out of an effective business model that calls for high profit and low cost and if one is successful they can dominate the market. This model may work for computers or cars but not necessarily food. 

Now before I go on lambasting corporations there are some important details to cover.  A good capitalist would probably argue that companies are simply responding to market demands. This is one of the classic “pass the buck” phrases business people use to recuse themselves(and it drives me crazy)but it is important to consider. Keep firmly in mind the question: “Who has helped create these market demands?”

Today, people have less free time to prepare and consume their meals. Yes, this seems to be the trend ever since the post World War II years when consumer culture took off in this country and packaged, processed food along with it. Appliances became more commonplace in the home, woman started to go to college and get jobs outside the home, and the car became more available. One of the largest changes in the household was the television. Now with the help of the tv dinner one could watch their favorite shows and eat at the same time. Over the years the cost of living has increased, wages have stagnated, and people have to work more than ever to keep up. Business stepped up and what started with the tv dinner has slowly blown up into a full industry of packaged, processed food. These foods were tasty and easy to make. How many times has these phrases been uttered in a food commercial?  Consider though who has influenced many of these lifestyle changes? Who has increased the working day, kept wages generally flat, and increased costs? The general picture is that businesses have either through direct influence or through influence on government public policy and today Americans are probably more stressed and less healthy than every before.

Consider how foods are advertised in this country. Let’s take the Coca Cola corporation. Coca Cola is best known for their soda but they also control a large percentage of what we drink: Perrier water, Minute maid juice, and Nos energy drink. Coca Cola often uses images of young, hip looking people smiling and drinking their soda(Heck, what company out there doesn’t use young, hip, ethnically diverse people to sell their product? That is a generalization...let us continue). These ads remind you that drinking soda (pure sugar and other flavorings in carbonated water) can be fun and social, so much more than just soda. There is of course no mention that soda with destroy your teeth and probably cripple your health over time. An advertiser would have to be insane to let on such information about their product. But imagine if they did. If there was a disclaimer at the end of soda commercials. Would it make a difference? I’m betting not and this is where the addiction factor comes in. Look at smoking. It is well known that smoking can cause serious health problems and even death.There are commercials and prints ads constantly advertising these facts yet people continue to smoke because it is addictive. In the information age, people generally know the health threats of drinking soda over a life time yet they still do. This is where individual choice does come in(more on this later) and, as mentioned before, sugar is another addictive substance and companies rely on this.

The Coca Cola corporation doesn’t claim their product is healthy but many other companies do. Take cereals. Breakfast cereals are often so processed that there is little nutritionally value, yet companies put labels on like “part of a balanced breakfast”, “containing vitamins A, B....”, “5 whole grains”. Companies attempt to replace some of the lost nutrition in these foods but they are far from healthy. Also any nutrition is offset by the amount of sugar in these cereals. This is especially tragic when one realizes that some of the worst cereals are marketed to children with flashy cartoon characters, logos, and commercials. I admit it wouldn’t take much for me to eat a bowl of Count Chocula even now knowing how bad for me it is. That is growing up in this country. I hope different for my children, but the corporate machine is hard to escape.

The Men in Black

“Read the farm bill, and a big problem jumps right out at you: Taxpayers heavily subsidize corn and soy, two crops that facilitate the meat and processed food we’re supposed to eat less of, and do almost nothing for the fruits and vegetables we’re supposed to eat more of.” (Haspel)

Healthy food like fruits and vegetables are usually more costly to grow and transport and organic food can’t use chemical pesticides,herbicides, or genetically modified organisms. Since the 1930′s the United States government has subsidized (helped pay for) farming in this country to protect our food sources as raising food can be unpredictable.  The Farm Bill began with good intentions but the money has slowly been funneled to supporting a few crops like corn and soy that are versatile and can be broken down and used in many processed and unhealthy foods. Consider that our government is supporting the production of poor quality foods? What does this mean for us? It means the commonly cited downsides of the the American diet: diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc. all given a stamp of approval by politicians who are pledged to watch out for us. On the plus side not being subsidized is often favored by farmers as they don’t need to meet the regulations set by the government but it still means people will pay more.  People do have the choice not to eat these foods, but realistically not everyone can afford these costs and, if they can’t, people become trapped eating unhealthy food cycles not to mention deepening the already aggravated class divide in America. It’s much easier to get potato chips than organic fruit. Organic apples are on average three dollars a pound(which means about two) while potato chips are three dollars a bag. You can eat a lot more chips for the same money but the chips are sad, empty calories but, as I mentioned earlier, people will buy and eat them not because they are healthy but we have slowly become wired to do so. Currently slashing or stalling social welfare programs is the trend in government. Public policy has become heavily influenced by corporate interest over public good due in large part to funding of campaigns by companies and the wealthy ergo there is little possibility right now.

Choice of the People

Our American class structure can be seen in our food. The neighborhood I currently live in, which shall remain unnamed for reasons of privacy, is considered marginal. People are more often working class and black. This neighborhood was also known as a urban food desert for some time.(One neighborhood over is a wealthy, mostly white neighborhood with a high end, albeit expensive grocery store). Food deserts are areas without a decent source of healthy foods. They exist in the poorer sections of many major U.S. cities including New Orleans, New York, and Memphis. 7-11′s and corner bodegas often don’t count. In fact, the convenience store is one of the greatest offenders concerning food choice. They have made food too convenient. Just look at the shelves of any convenience store.

A low end grocery store finally came to this neighborhood. They stack most of their products on the floor instead of on shelves, their staff is poorly trained, and, while the store does sell fresh produce and even a little organic food if you look hard, the majority of the products are standard processed foods: Drakes desserts, chips, processed meats, etc. I’ve watched people in line with carts filled with soda. I can’t be too critical as I was making poor food choices all the same, but not on this level. Why does anyone would need ten bottles of soda? The evidence is in the obese bodies and poor skin. Yet, people consume these foods. This can be for three main reasons: they are aware but apathetic, they aren’t aware, they are aware but not doing enough or following one the ineffective “diets” out there. Often the poor and working class fall in the second category.

Back to Biology

Early humans had to eat what they could kill or gather(Raising crops for a stable source of food came later). We subsisted on meats, berries, nuts, etc. These were necessary, nutritious sources of protein and fiber. Fats and sugars were rare and highly desirable as they meant easy calories especially for lean times. This is where our evolutionary biology was cemented and still functions this way, but now we are provided a plethora of cheap fats and sugars everywhere. They taste good and give us a quick boost. But these foods don’t provide sufficient nutrition so we are constantly needing to eat more and more while gaining mostly empty calories and health problems. This makes sense if you stand back and think about it. This is the “addiction” factor that aids companies in getting us to eat poor quality food. The food makes us feel good in the short term, but in the long run we crash and need more. Thus, the “addiction” factor.

Apple or Ring Ding?

While sugar, fat, and salt can be addictive and some people have financial problems, ultimately people choose what they put in their bodies and their bodies will hold them responsible. This is especially true when we are people who know or suspect what we eat is bad for us and continue to do so.  I believe this is tied to an idea I’ve brought up before, our culture. America is the land of opportunity where we can all have the American dream that are really just that for most of us, a dream that we continue to cling too. This ability to better ourselves is both beautiful and tragic. America is a society whose people struggle to face it’s darker sides instead burying them in indulgences or placing blame elsewhere. This collective denial makes us extremely malleable. We are already primed to believe in our food, our politics, our society.  No matter how self destructive over time vices become misconstrued as personal rights. By buying gas guzzling vehicles, shopping, indulging in poor quality foods, collecting dangerous guns we declare our freedom from the system when it’s the system that is providing these.  This beautiful psychology that companies can only cheer us on and count their money. Buy more. Eat more. Excess is wonderful. Be rebellious and trendy by buying phones and drinking soda. Companies let us down, cheat us, and we still buy their products and elect officials who take their money.  We grumble when the government doesn’t punish these companies but we don’t either. Despite having mentioned the short comings and influences of corporations and government, it is up to us to determine what is good for us. I believe what we’ve lost sight of the most in this country is the sense of personal advocacy and a sense of unity to stand up ourselves, the power of the customer, of the voter. Instead we fight and criticize and go along.

The experience of the Whole 30 has helped me be a healthier person, but it has really helped me take action and reconsider my perspective concerning the food I eat. I’ve tried to relay the many facets of what I’ve learned here for others who may be curious. Also I should end with there are some positive changes on horizon.  Organic food is now available in more grocery stores than ever before. The fast casual restaurant offer healthier choices that have eaten into the profits of fast food companies like McDonald’s, all because educated customers have demanded it. However, changes need to come from the top down, from the government and that is where the real hard work comes in because first we need to heal the rifts in our society. Then maybe we can eat better.

7/5/18

The Results.

The end of the Whole 30 has arrived, well, it actually arrived more than a week ago so clearly I’m not a dedicated diarist. I’ve also done the “reintroduction” portion of the meal plan where by I bring back the foods I’ve given up.I’m going to discuss both the small scale and bigger picture results of this experiment.

The results:

I can taste more, For example, fruits are sweeter and meats are richer.

I have more consistent energy.

I don’t get as hungry between meals.

I don’t have the craving for added sugar that I once did but I can tell from sampling foods with added sugar that it is quite easy to go back.

Diary is hard on my stomach.

Alcohol gives me a headache even after one glass of wine

[sending-the-message]

I’m severely regretting posting a photo of my great-grandfather online by kapekilp

I posted a picture of my great-grandfather over to r/OldSchoolCool a few days ago. I posted it on my main account (not this one). I regret posting it. It’s turned my family’s lives upside down, opened up possibilities I’d rather not even contemplate, and thrown into question everything I thought I knew.

I was scanning some old family photos onto the computer for my Mum. I’ve always been fascinated by my great-grandfather – my Mum always has so many stories to tell me about him, and how he brightened her childhood – he was truly a remarkable character. Plus, he was a particularly handsome man – I’ve always loved that photograph of him, with his chiselled face and his dark eyes staring into the distance. He wasn’t looking directly at the camera. It’s the only photograph we have of him. My Mum says he was caught off-guard by that photograph, because he normally never liked having his photo taken.

Before I posted the photo, I was pretty certain he’d be a sure-fire hit with the online crowd. And I was right. But you know, at the same time, I was still surprised by the extent to which people agreed actually with me – the photograph shot up to thousands of upvotes very quickly. My great-grandfather was internet famous.

I got the usual ‘Oh my goodness your great-grandpa was soo handsome!’

and ‘Is your great granddady single?!’ comments.

Also: ‘Hey, can we have a picture of you, OP, so we can see how much of the good looks you inherited?’

The first few comments made me smile and feel oddly proud of my genealogical inheritance. After a while it started to get a bit creepy, as some people started to cross boundaries and take things too far – I started to feel guilty.

Sure, there were some beautiful, respectful comments, discussion and questions – but as the popularity of the photograph steadily increased, so did its exposure to the world in general, and that was when the less-than-savoury characters started coming out of the woodwork.

I never knew my great-grandfather, but from everything that I’ve heard, he was such an upright, almost regal sort of man – well-bred, well educated, respectable and dignified. A true gentleman, and he had been greatly loved and revered by my family. And now, it felt like an oxymoron, this clash of worlds – having my amazing, dignified great-grandfather on display for the ugly underbelly of the internet to ogle and make crude remarks. It felt like I was violating his memory; like I was literally whoring him out for my own personal gain. And what gain? A few arbitrary internet points?

I was about to remove the post – when two things happened, in fairly quick succession. First, someone kindly offered to colourise the photo and asked for details about hair/eye colour etc. I asked my Mum for details. She had been very close to her granddad, and she could remember everything very well. The most striking thing about him – that you couldn’t see from the black-and-white photograph – was that he had two different coloured eyes: one a deep green, and the other dark brown. In the black-and-white photo it just looked like there was a shadow over the darker eye.

When the colourised version came, it was beautifully done. They got the shades exactly right. That made the whole ‘online sharing’ experience slightly redeeming, I must say. I showed my Mum, and it made her cry. I’d almost been afraid to show my Mum, because she had loved her grandpa greatly, to the extent that she still didn’t like to talk about the end of his days – all I know is that it had been an extremely traumatic time for her. She sometimes still tears up, if something happens to remind her about the end.

Anyway, a few minutes after the colourised version was posted for everyone to see, someone responded.

‘Hey there. I know this is going to sound really weird, but after seeing that colourised photo of your great-grandpa, I know a guy who looks EXACTLY like him! Seriously! He comes into my coffee shop almost every day so I see him a lot. It’s like his doppleganger or something! I’m going to take a photo and send it to you tomorrow morning. I swear, it’s exactly like him!!’

I checked out the poster’s history, and it didn’t look like he was a troll or anything. I don’t know, something about his entire post history and earnest way that he’d written the message, made me believe him, and feel mildly interested about the promised picture. His enthusiasm seemed genuine, and so I was intrigued to see this alleged doppleganger. Most likely it wouldn’t look like my great-grandpa at all, though, I was sure. After all, we’re often told by friends that they know someone who looks exactly like so-and-so, and when you see the proposed ‘twin’ later on, it’s usually quite disappointing.

So I just replied:

‘Hey, cool! I can’t wait to see the photograph of my ancestral twin, haha.’

And then soon forgot all about it, basically. The next day, though, I got this message:

‘Hey. So, I know I promised a photograph, and here it is. Just a quick disclaimer: I was hoping to get a straight head-on shot of the guy. I asked him if I could take his photograph, and he asked why, and I tried to briefly explain without sounding too stupid. Basically I told him that there was a picture on the internet that looked just like him, and I wanted to send his picture to a great-granddaughter of the dude he looked just like. It sounded progressively weirder as I tried to explain it, haha… It made me realise that things that are perfectly reasonable on the internet can sound so utterly bizarre in real life!

Anyways, I don’t know why but he got quite angry and wouldn’t let me take his photo. I mean, fair play to him, not everyone likes their photo taken to be shared on the internet. But I mean, it was weird how his attitude just did a 180… he’s always so friendly and nice and he tips really well. I would have expected him to say ‘no’ nicely. But it really upset him. He was very curt with me. I got the sense now that this’ll be his last visit here, which is a shame, because he seemed like a cool dude before all this :(

Anyways so, I didn’t want to let you down after the build-up yesterday. Plus, the fact that he seemed so annoyed meant that he likely won’t come back, and so this would be my last chance to get a photo! So I know this is really iffy, ethics wise or whatever, but I sneaked a photo anyway, haha. He had to stop at the door – he held the door open for someone coming inside. So I *was able to snap a quick pic, but he wasn’t looking right at me, which is both why I was able to take the picture, but also why the picture isn’t that great.

It’s a side-pose so maybe you won’t be able to see the resemblance as well as if it had been from the front. But seriously, I still thinks it looks just like your mom’s grandpa. I hope you’ll agree. Let me know what you think.’

Given the lengths this poor guy had gone to in order to attain this picture, I was quite amused, so I clicked the photo with neutral expectations. The man was visible in side-view, but I had to admit he did bear a passing resemblance to the colourised version of my great grandfather. Maybe he was a distant relative, somehow. It bears noting that the guy who sent the photo was practically on the other side of the world to me, and to my knowledge, I have no relatives in America, so this is really unlikely.

I thought the ‘doppelganger’ photo would amuse my mother, who of course, had known her grandfather very well. It would be interesting to get her opinion on it, I thought.

I took over my laptop to her and showed her the photograph. She glanced at the screen, first absent-mindedly, and but then she did a double-take. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.

‘My God,’ she said, putting her hand to her mouth. She leaned into the screen, peering at it. ‘Can you zoom in? On his face?’

I zoomed in as much as I could without making a pixelated blurry mess of the face.

She stared at him for what seemed like ages.

‘My God, it looks just like him,’ she said, finally. ‘I mean, honestly. Just like him. I mean – even…’

She ran her fingertips over the screen so earnestly and lovingly.

‘Do you see the slight scar there? On his cheek, near this ear? He used to tell me stories about how he got that. A different story every night. I was so little – I’d sit nestled on his knee and gaze up at that scar, sometimes until I fell asleep. And – ’

She gasped and pointed at the scar on the man’s hand, which was clutching the cup of coffee. His sleeve was slightly lifted back. There was the trace of a scar protruding from his forearm, extending onto the back of his hand.

‘That one, too. That one was so prominent. It was a deeply-cut scar. I could feel that one underneath my fingers when I held his hand. It seemed huge to me, then, underneath my small hand. He’d tell me stories about that one, too. Silly little stories, to amuse me. Fights that he’d gotten into. Or mythical beasts he’d wrestled.’

She sighed and smiled, lost in her happy childhood memories for a moment, and then, I guess, the bizarreness of the situation hit her. The man holding the coffee in this modern photograph, was a young man. And yet he had the face and accurate identifying features of my mother’s grandfather.

She sat down heavily on the chair next to the table.

‘How is this possible?’ I asked, voicing the obvious question for both of us.

‘Could it be a hoax?’ she said. ‘Could this man – who sent you the picture – could he be playing a trick on you? These internet people can be so clever with their – their Photoshop stuff, can’t they? Could they have worked from your original photo?’

‘Well… yes… maybe but…’ I trailed off. I mean, it was the only possible explanation I could think of. Anything else would be too bizarre.

I brought up the original photograph, the one where my actual great-grandfather was facing towards the camera more head-on. The scar near his ear wasn’t visible due to the angle of his face. His hand wasn’t in view at all, either.

My mother and I both took in these details, wordlessly. She stared at me, her eyes wide.

‘This is impossible,’ she said. ‘It can’t be possible.’

I sat down next to her. We sat in silence for a while. My blood was ringing in my ears. There had to be some explanation, surely? It had to be a trick, or a joke, somehow. Or just a really, really weird coincidence?

Having said that, the picture wasn’t that great quality. You could see the scars once my Mum had pointed them out, but not before. So maybe it was like an optical illusion, like one of those ‘hidden pattern’ type things that aren’t really there, but you make yourself see them, and then you can’t unsee them. Maybe it was like that, and the scars weren’t really there, and we saw them because my Mum expected to see them, because the man’s face looked a bit like her grandad, and she’d made me see them now, too. Hey, it could be a prominent vein on his hand, or the lighting, or something, and the lighting had caught it just right.

I said all of this to my Mum, and she nodded along, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced.

‘I suppose…’ she said, and then she trialled off. ‘But…’

‘What?’

‘It might have something to do with what happened at… at the end.’ She was staring at the floor, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Her hands were shaking, and she seemed… frightened.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, carefully.

She shook her head.

‘I’m being ridiculous,’ she said, and she just got up, and left. Her whole body was trembling, and I could see tears on her face.

You have to understand some backstory, even though admittedly I don’t know all that much. Mum has never spoken about those last few days, despite my previous careful prodding. All I know is, it was a traumatic time when she lost him. It was some sort of violent accident. I know no details beyond that. She still has nightmares about it, and was in therapy for some time. I was itching for details when I was little, but I had eventually made peace with the fact that I might never know. Any small details had been like gold dust.

She talks about him all the time, his life, his character, passing on his wisdom. But never about those end days. Not to me (and never to my Dad, either, because I’ve asked him). It’s basically ‘restricted territory’ for our family to discuss. I think, partially because of the mystery around his end days, and what an amazing person she describes him to have been – I’ve always been so intrigued by this man’s presence in our family history, and the bond my mother shared with him, how he had shaped her character. I guess it’s because of this general awe and intrigue that I’d scanned that old picture into my laptop in the first place, and then why I posted it online. Because I wanted to share his essence with the world.

So, of course, my natural curiosity was on fire when she just walked away like that…. So close to telling me more, and clearly in some sort of turmoil. And she thought – whatever it was that happened at the end – might be related to this? This modern-day man walking around who looked like him? How on earth is that even possible, and what the hell was it that happened?

I really wanted to go after her and just open up my flood of questions, but she seemed in that unreachable mood again, liked she often did when she was reliving her traumatic memories. I could hear her crying and I didn’t want to open any wounds.

So I just sat there awkwardly, my nerves a squirming bundle of unease… and confusion and an uneasy feeling of fear, I guess. I was trying to process things but just coming up blank.

The modern photo was just a coincidence, we were seeing scars where there were none, and I’d managed to open up a whole can of traumatic worms for my poor mother, probably messing with her mental health. I should have known better than to post about this sensitive subject online at all.

My mind was made up, then, to delete the post – and forget all about it.

I logged into my account and I had hundreds of new messages. I’d been offline most of the day, because my Mum and I had been discussing the new photo for quite a while. I opened my inbox with a bit of a sigh, expecting more of the same general comments of jokes and compliments and the occasional lewd remark.

Except, what was posted just amplified my unease by a thousand. I have no idea what to think. I’m terrified now…. I think I’ve opened up a Pandora’s box in our family history.

Here’s what happened: after that guy posted the modern photo of my ‘great-grandpa’ in the coffee shop, along with the colourised version from the other user… there had been a barrage of comments. Here is just a sample that I copy/pasted and saved at that time (there were many, many others, though, some that I didn't even manage to read):

(Edit: I've now quickly edited out their usernames, sorry if this messes up formatting)

User 1:

‘Dude… this is gonna sound pretty random, but that guy looks just like a mythical figure famous in my hometown. They say he’s evil and has a flying beast at his behest, that he’ll summon, if you cross him. The sounds of its helper-creature’s screams are enough to kill you. We have an old portrait of him in our Town Hall, it’s basically part of our heritage. They say that many years ago he and the Screaming Falcon wiped out half the town population because they mistreated him. I’m going to post the portrait tomorrow. Same chimera eyes and everything! Freaky!’

(Reply to the above):

User 2:

Are you from my hometown? I won’t post the exact place b/c doxxing… but are you in South America? We have exactly the same legend here! Except we call him something different. We call him the Cunning Eyed One. They say he has two different coloured eyes because his flying minion can see through one of his eyes. Anyone he doesn’t like… anyone with attitude… the monster flies over immediately. Its screams are enough to paralyse you and pulverise your flesh, just from the sound alone. I used to be so scared whenever I heard screaming during the night. My mother would scare me and my brothers with the Cunning Eyed Man all the time whenever we misbehaved. And there are old people here who swear they’ve had run-ins with him, or know someone who has. Everyone thinks he’s real. I got thrills when I saw you mention the legend.’

(Reply):

User 1: I’m not from South America – I’m from a tiny town in Eastern Europe! How scary that you guys have basically the same legend over there! I’ve never heard anyone else mention this legend other than here in my home town.’

User 3

Wow… now that you post those two photos… I have an old book of legends. One of the illustrations is of a handsome dark haired man with two eye colours. They say he’s a cruel monster disguised as a man, uncannily clever. Anyone who fails his tests is woken up to the sound of screaming, and the screams make their flesh rot and fall off. It’s described in so much detail with historical eye witnesses and stuff. The man looks like the photo here (sorry, OP, no disrespect to your grandpa, but it looks so much like him). This was an old legend from a small, remote Scandinavian village, I think. I can’t remember the name they gave to the monster. I’ll dig out the book and post more details. The way it was described gave me the creeps. Never heard anyone talk about this before, it was a really obscure legend.

User 4:

’OMG I know what you guys are talking about! We have a similar legend in India! In the village where my parents were from! I am SO EXCITED to hear others talking about this! My mother would tell me about something that happened to her aunt when she was little by the (rough translation) ‘Cruel, One-Eyed Demon’ with his Helper, the ‘Screaming Devil’. They call him one-eyed because they said he could only see through his dark eye, or he closed one eye to look at you through his good eye. I’m going to have to type out that story properly for you – I’m going to get my Mum to tell it again. Seriously, me and my cousins loved and hated that story in equal measure, it was so scary and we’d never sleep afterwards! We’d freak each other out by screaming in the middle of the night and scare each other awake. My older cousin did that once and I peed the bed, I was so scared (TMI, I know). All the elders in our village would tell us about it when I visited back home. OMG I am so thrilled that other countries have this same demon guy in their history too! It makes it so much scarier… like he really roamed the world. Wow, I can’t wait to tell my cousins. This is, like, all my childhood excitement/fears rushing back!’

User 5:

’We have a very similar urban legend in the place where I am from. They say he’s immortal and he flies from place to place on the back of his winged screaming monster thing… it had a name, can’t remember it. They have different names for it. They say that he had different coloured eyes, one evil and one good, and depending on how he felt about you, he would use one or the other to look at you. If he looks at you through the black eye, you’re screwed, basically. I also remember something about the screaming. It was my grandpa who would tell us kids stories about him, that he heard from his mother. Pretty cool to see it being talked about on here. My family is from a small village in China, but haven’t heard anyone else mention it. I thought the stories died out with my grandpa.

User 6:

’I’m blown away. Honestly. I thought this story was just an urban legend confined to my family, or something! I had a great uncle who swore he saw this man with unusually uncanny, beautiful, eyes, that were two different colours. He was almost hypnotised by them. The man – who my Great Uncle always swore up and down was not a man, but rather a monster of some kind presenting himself like a man - was very strong, and my uncle was very scared. My great uncle was working in a factory on the night shift. This man managed to bend metal with his bare hands, or something, because he was angry. My Uncle was freaked out, and he managed to get away from that place, came come with a high fever. The next morning the people who were there at his work that night were found literally pulverised. On phone, will type out whole details later if anyone interested. Can’t believe others are mentioning this same sounding man in other parts of the world that match up to what my great uncle said. Never really believed it fully until now.’

User 7:

’Guys. I had that photo open in my browser, and my grandma walked past – she’s visiting us. I’m not lying I swear. She saw the photos and she did a double take and just froze. She’s saying the man’s a ‘terrible creature’ from her childhood. I’ve never seen her like that before. She was legit scared and asking me where I got the photos, why I was looking at him, where were these photos taken, was this man still alive, where was he…. and she was getting all worked up… she just left our house and she’s gone home now, really abruptly. Won’t answer my calls. She seemed really upset and shaken. I swear I’m not making this up.’

(Reply): ’Which photo? OP’s great gramps or the new pic?’

User 7 (replying to the reply): ’Both. I was comparing them side by side, just out of curiosity. I never expected a reaction like that. I’m really freaked out. And reading other replies here, even more freaked out. I’ll see if I can get anymore info from my grandma when she calms down.’

User 8:‘I feel really sorry for OP. Turns out her great-grandpa looks just like a legendary demonic monster guy.’

User 9 (replying to the above): ’What if OP’s gramps really is this monster guy? Everyone swears it looks just like him, and it’s his likeness that’s triggered all this discussion…’

And on and on. Many legends and lore of a man who apparently looks JUST like my great grandpa, with two coloured eyes, one green, one dark brown, and different stories but all sharing very similar elements to the lore that follows this man all around the world. Lots of people saying they heard this legend, these stories around this man/monster/demon.

But here’s the worst part.

I felt really tired out reading all that stuff. I mean, obviously, I reasoned that they’ve just latched onto the fact that my great grandpa just happened to have the same unusually coloured eyes as the man in these legends. But with my Mum’s reaction earlier I was just feeling bad and overwhelmed I guess, so I just left the laptop and I went to sleep. There were hundreds of comments I still hadn’t read, and I’d changed my mind and I didn’t want to delete the discussion just then, because there were so many people involved and the whole thing was just buzzing and taking on a life of its own, and so I felt like I’d be rude just to cut it off abruptly when there were so many people so excited.

Besides, it wasn’t even about my great-grandpa anymore, it was just that his multi-coloured eyes had unearthed a legend that people had thus far just kept tucked away in their little corners of the world until then. At that point, I was even slightly proud that my photo had managed to bring to light a hidden, very interesting sounding, obscure legend that many cultures seemed to have their version of. I felt I would enjoy the discussion more when I was better-rested.

I wanted to take another look at the updated discussion in the morning, so I left the laptop in the living room, with the page open.

Big mistake.

I woke up this morning and my Mum was sitting by the laptop, reading it all. Her face was white as a sheet, honestly. Even on her worst days she’s never been like that. Even on the days when she’s had nightmares that reminded her of how her beloved grandpa died… even when she’s been reliving the trauma, I’ve never seen her look like she did that morning.

I was kicking myself for leaving the laptop open, so I snapped it shut, quickly, so she couldn’t read more (kind of rude, but it was basically to protect her) and I just tried to laugh the whole thing off. She wasn’t in a great place, mentally, anyway, because my stupid post had probably awakened further traumatic memories for her about his death and just… I really felt awful to have pushed her to this point. The discussion about the legend of the two-coloured eyed man was an off-shoot and unrelated, she had no business reading about it in her anxious state.

‘I know, Mum. It’s weird how there’s a legend about a creepy figure… with similar multi-coloured eyes!’ I laughed. ‘I guess there must be something in our collective unconscious about people finding chimera eyes scary, or something. So they built a legend around that.’

She stared off into middle distance, her gaze still fixed on the place where I’d closed the laptop monitor.

I tried to talk about other things, I rambled on, actually. And she just sat there, transfixed. In shock.

I was getting really scared now, so I got her a glass of water. She took it, just absent-mindedly, and held it, but didn’t drink it.

I was feeling terrible, there were goosebumps on my arms. Somehow, reading all that ridiculous, hyping up and exaggeration of the lore surrounding a two-coloured-eyed man had messed with my poor mum’s head. Was she having a mental breakdown? I really was such an awful human being for throwing my family’s sensitivities to the mercy of the internet like this. I was wondering whether to take her to the doctor.

She put the glass down. And got up. She walked into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. I could hear the sound of her retching.

I ran behind her and stood at the door helplessly, crying too, now, really, seriously, feeling like such a terrible person for opening this whole thing up. People on the internet think they can say what they want and run their mouths and create theories and not realise that those careless comments and hysteria can really impact people in real life. How dare I open up my family, my poor Mum, up to that sort of stuff? She was having therapy for his death, she still had regular nightmares, for God’s sake. Why did I ever think this was a good idea, and why had I let her be exposed to those horrible, persistent people getting their kicks from relating their stories?

When she emerged, she was puffy-eyed and hoarse.

‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I said, and hugged her, held her tightly, trying to squeeze away the bad feelings, somehow, to protect her from all that bad stuff. To fix her through sheer determined love. I really, really, hate seeing her when she has one of her anxiety attacks. It was a constant fear of mine, to see her in that broken state, when I was little. If you’ve ever seen a parent in a vulnerable state, you know exactly how awful, how scary, how heart-breaking it is. ‘All that stuff on the internet, it’s so stupid, I’m so sorry…’

‘It isn’t stupid,’ she said, in a small voice. She basically pushed me away. ‘It’s what I’ve feared, all these years.’ She was looking at the floor.

‘Ok… so, Mum, I think we need to go see the doctor this afternoon…’

‘I heard the screams,’ she said, looking at me in eyes for the first time. ‘I heard the sound of the screams. When I was little…. I saw the…’ She coughed and put a hand to her mouth, and I thought she was going to be sick again. But she wasn’t. She swayed a little, but steadied herself.

‘I had no idea about the scale of things. I had no idea he was… I mean, I guessed a little… but… Oh God! I was always so afraid to face the fear I always had. I loved him so much. I never wanted to face it.’

She covered her eyes and started sobbing – deep, gut-wrenching sobs – and then she went into her room. She hasn’t come out.

I really have no idea what to think, how to feel. I can’t even concentrate on the newer posts and messages I received. I’ve deleted the original post now, with its photo and discussion. I just can’t handle it.

I feel numb, but there’s this definite sense of terror, too, eating away at the back of my head. I feel so many large, unwieldly thoughts that make no sense, just clanging around in my brain, getting larger, like echoes, but I can’t focus on any one coherent thought. None of this makes sense.

Edit: I just went for a nap, and woke up to find a letter from my mother. She’s written something for me and I think she’s gone out for a walk. I think it contains more info, finally, about my great-grandpa. I’m going to read it through and will try and update.

x

[dear-ilenas-friends-blog]

Dear My Sister’s Friends,

Hi! Whats up? We’ve never met, but I’m _____’s sister, Allison. I’ve heard more about you than I’d care to admit, and honestly I’ve got some issues with all of you, but that’s not what I’m writing this for. You all for the most part seem to be a very Pro-Trump group of people. I wish I felt okay brushing that off, being like “oh whatever they have their beliefs I have mine.” But the country has progressed too far into the abyss, and we are only 11 days into the presidency. So we need to talk. This is going to get rough. I don’t really care about your feelings, just FYI.

#1. The ban on citizens from muslim-majority countries is unconstitutional, as is the complete freeze on the Syrian refugee program. Allow me to remind you of WWII and the Holocaust (do not deny it happened, if you do we have a bigger problem on our hands). While the Nazis of Germany and the Fascists of Italy and the Communists of Japan slaughtered millions of people they felt were a threat to society, the United States refused to take in refugees, citing our need to stay out of the war. The US allowed MILLIONS of people to die while we sat back and watched. WE CANNOT LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN. Oh what's up maybe you were never taught the poem on the statue of liberty? I had to sing it in third grade, and it goes like this: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”. Yeah we don’t turn people away. This whole fucking country was started by people escaping religious persecution in England. And DO NOT EVEN GET ME STARTED on the fact that we slaughtered indigenous people in order for the immigrants to live here (unnecessary).

#2. Let’s chat about women’s rights. Okay let’s assume that most of you don’t want to get pregnant at the moment, but one of you does. You don’t want that baby? TOO FUCKING BAD BECAUSE THE MEN IN THIS COUNTRY THINK YOU WANT THAT BABY. Some one them think that if you got pregnant from rape (god forbid) your body could just shut down and boom no pregnancy. Oh do you want an abortion? HAHA GOOD FUCKING LUCK. The way your precious president is going, women will not only have limited access to abortions, they may not be able to get them in time. There is a proposed ban on abortions past 6 weeks currently sitting in the senate and let me tell you something, most women do not know they’re pregnant until at least 8 weeks. THAT MEANS YOU WILL BE WAAAAYYYY MORE LIKELY TO HAVE TO CARRY THE CHILD. Oh and, on a related note, they are not children at conception. Fuck that. It’s a fucking zygote until brain waves are present at 25 weeks. And if the woman wants an abortion, her life is ALWAYS more important than the child’s. Yes, in case you forgot, zygotes are what happens when a sperm fertilizes an egg and it begins to grow into a fetus. FETUS. NOT CHILD. Mmmm want some free birth control? Of course you do! I get my pills for free, so does Ilena, so do you. Condoms are pretty free at the health center (or your RA has them - they’re always there just FYI). Bros, the new administration does not want your pills (or IUD or implant or whatever form of contraception you used) to be free. Actually, they don’t want them there at all. Besides the fact that men are running the government and are fundamentally stupid about how women’s bodies work (ask a guy what hole women pee out of- just do it), they also seem to forget about separation of church and state (you know jesus doesn’t believe in birth control blah blah blah see 19 kids and counting for more explanation). I will get more into separation of church and state later. Don’t worry. It’s coming. Anyway, birth control. Remember that. It’s a big deal.

#3. Okay. Separation of Church and State. Hotly debated. Basically it means that we are not a Theocracy, or a government governed by the rules of the bible (a la  the Vatican or...Spain in the 1500s). For some unknown reason, peeps in the government (read: men) think that we aRe kind of a theocracy?!? And love to use the bible to back up research. Okay. There’s a whole lot of shit wrong with that, starting with the fact that the Bible is...kinda not real, and ending with the whole Separation of Church and State clause in our GODDAMN CONSTITUTION. I would also like to take this moment to inform you of a very interesting concept called the American Civil Religion, which is basically the overlying tone of religion that weaves its way through our principles and governmental officials. Why do we always have to say “God Bless America”? Which god? Whose god are we talking about anyway? It doesn’t matter. That’s American Civil Religion. The belief that America is bLeSsEd by God in any way (this is also American Exceptionalism, which is the thing where Americans think they’re better than everybody else and ugh). Google “white savior complex” if you really want to get more into this topic.

#4. Shall we chat about people being nominated by Trump? IDK are you familiar with your currently president’s newest pick for the Supreme Court? Gorsuch? Yeah that guy is literally the worst. He sides with corporations over workers’ unions, has fought for domestic violence to be decriminalized, and would like to appeal Roe v. Wade (that’s the abortion one, in case you didn’t know). Let’s see, who else. Oh yes, his entire cabinet is...well...a clusterfuck. He chose a former CEO of ExxonMobil (oil giant, biggest oil spill in history, ruined the environment NBD) as his Secretary of State. Do you know what the secretary of state does? They go country to country, negotiating and meeting with heads of state, furthering our relationships with allies and creating new relationships with countries. The secretary of state is the most important job in the government next to the president. The most accomplished people have held the position (Madeline Albright, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson). I just realized you probably don’t know who Madeleine Albright is. She was the first woman to be Secretary of State, and she’s a badass. Look her up. Tillerson has no governmental experience (unless you count testifying in congress to save his ass) How can he be expected to be the country’s top diplomat? Let’s see, who else? Oh, let’s hit Betsy DeVos. You’ve heard of her right? She’s just a casual multi-billionaire nominated for Secretary of Education. She’s the one who said schools need guns because of bears. She’s also the one who has no experience with public education, and would like to take funding out of public institutions (cough cough University of Massachusetts Amherst cough cough) and give it to private schools and charter schools. Most of you had to take out loans for school right? Yeah good luck paying those off with her in charge. Bernie wanted to make college free? DeVos has no idea how to set interest rates for loans, and the way she’s planning on allocating Education Department funds makes it look like those rates will only increase. So good luck getting out of debt. Department of the Treasury? Steven Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs executive. If you spent any time being angry at Hillary for taking money from Goldman Sachs, thank you new Secretary of the Treasury, who by the way, has zero governmental experience. Secretary of Defense? General James Mattis, a retired Military commander who (thankfully) knows that torture does not work (looking at you Trump). Department of Justice? Jeff Sessions, who famously criticized the NAACP and ACLU while seemingly praising the KKK. Figure that one out. Health and Human Services? Tom Price, and ultra-conservative who has fervent opposition to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) (aka the whole reason you can stay on your parent's health plan until you’re 26). Who else who else...oh yeah Ben Carson, Mr. “I’m not experienced enough to be in the white house bye”, or better yet, Trevor Noah’s best impression to-date. Bro has zero experience in Housing and Urban Development, minus being poor in Detroit. He’s a pediatric brain surgeon….so yeah. Housing. No. Ah the Department of Energy and Rick Perry. The guy who famously said he’d want to eliminate the...department of energy. AWKWARD. Yeah, not a scientist. Climate change denier (though he’s recanted that recently) and oh did you know that the Department of Energy is in charge of our nuclear weapons? Yeah neither did he. The Department of Labor? Andrew Puzder, the one-time chief executive of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. (fast food chains). He’s a constant critic of minimum-wage laws (aka why should we pay people a lot of money so that they can live instead of struggle - let them struggle!) aaannnnddddd shockingly he has no governing experience whatsoever. Only a few left, stay with me! Secretary of the Interior nominee Ryan Zinke was a Navy Seal (that’s cool). He firmly supports mining and drilling on federal lands - which is big no no for environmental preservation. The Department of Commerce’s nominee is Wilbur Ross (shockingly another rich white guy) who...has no experience in government and doesn’t care about workers rights. Honestly no one cares, but the Department of Agriculture’s nominee is Sonny Perdue and he’s pretty whatever, and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs pick is David Shulkin who is from the Obama Administration so...that’s cool. I know what I just laid out is a lot. If you want to know more about the good the bad and the (mostly) ugly, check out this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-cabinet-tracker/510527/ - it’ll give you all the info you need. It’s important to note that there are two women vying for seat on the cabinet. Elaine Chao (who has already been confirmed as the Secretary of Transportation) and Betsy DeVos (who may not be confirmed for so so many reasons). There is one black man (Dr. Ben Carson...who’s special) and the rest of the guys are old, white, and rich #DrainTheSwamp.

#5. Presidential decorum. For those of you wondering, Trump has none. 0/10. Watch, I’ll put it on a scale against other presidents. Barack Obama was a 10. Bill Clinton was a 6. Reagan was a 7. Nixon was also a 0. See what I’m getting at here? Trump tweets. Oh does he tweet. SAD! He bullies people. He bullies DISABLED PEOPLE. He...can’t read? We don’t know. Our current presidents is...I don’t even know how to describe him. He believe Fox News. But he thinks CNN is fake news. No, wait, is all news fake news? The screenshot I took of his inauguration (which I watched on CNN.com) was that fake news? Did i imagine giant swaths of people missing? And then, after seeing that picture everywhere, why did Sean Spicer (ugh I’m not even going there) get up and lie to the entire press corp and country about it? We’re not all stupid. I have eyes. I’m college-educated. I know there were less people at Trump’s inauguration than there were at Obama’s. And both of those had less people than Reagan had! I wouldn’t really care if not for...alternative facts. Ah, alternative facts. The line spewed by the ever-terrible Kellyanne Conway. Alternative facts. Lies. They are the same thing. We cannot allow our government to dictate what is true and false. They will choose what makes them look good. And that will be detrimental for our country.

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I won’t lie to you guys. I got distracted a bunch of times while writing this. I’m at work, after all. But I got distracted because I had to stop to read articles that were coming out AS I WROTE about what’s going on. So I’d like to share what I read every day. Here are some of the things that distracted me:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/02/us/milo-yiannopoulos-ivory-tower/index.html?adkey=bn

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/30/politics/trump-travel-ban-live-blog/index.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-defends-troll-milo-yiannopoulos_us_589315e9e4b0af07cb6b992f?8mapjo6cymohia4i&

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/us/politics/donald-trump-islam.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/politics/trump-supreme-court-gorsuch-senate-democrats.html?ref=politics

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/02/tillerson-diplomats-must-be-team-despite-personal-beliefs.html

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TRUMP_IMMIGRATION_SANCTUARY_STATES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-02-02-10-52-37

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MOBILIZING_MUSLIMS_MAOL-?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-02-02-09-49-14

Please read these (and others) and educate yourselves. You can have an opinion if you’re not educated, but your opinion will be thin (and possibly uninformed) if you don’t back it up with FACTS. ACTUAL FUCKING FACTS. I DON’T DO THIS ALTERNATIVE FACTS BULLSHIT.

Anyway I’ll probably have to write more eventually, but I hope this at least maybe made you think? Or laugh? IDK I’m pretty funny sometimes. Or if you now hate me, well that’s fine too I guess…? Actually no it’s not. I’m pretty cool.

Oh! My next rant will be on Anti-Semitism and Racism and the intersectionality of Racism and Sexism in our country! YAAAAYYYYY

Peace out bitches

Wait no I’m not done I forgot! Going all the way back to the ban on people coming to the country, there are exactly 0 people from any of those countries who have attacked up. Peeps who have attacked us come from countries we didn’t ban (but trump has business ties to so ). ALSO. WHITE SUPREMACIST MEN DO MOST OF THE TERROR ATTACKS IN THE COUNTRY GET IT THROUGH YOUR GODDAMN THICK SKULLS. IT’S NOT MUSLIMS. IT’S THE WHITE MALE RACISTS. Okay the end.

[quakerjoe]

Cuppa Joe for Sun., 7 Jan 2019

I was sitting in my living room with my best mate watching “Parts Unknown” with the late Anthony Bourdain and the episode we were watching was in Welch, West Virginia. Watch it. Seriously, watch it. Listen carefully. You may just get more woke. I know I did. You see, people from regions like this are typified as hicks, hillbillies and rednecks. Well, to be fair, they are. Good ol’ coal country folk bent on guns and Jesus with a deep love of football. It’s never been my cuppa tea, honestly, but having been through places like this, I’ve experienced a couple of things. If I shut up and just listen, these folks, for the most part, are just like anyone anywhere else. They have pride in their homes, their families, their traditions, and they certainly don’t love, more or less, as frequently, or deeply as we do. Their pleasures are simple. Their tastes plain and direct. Their pains every bit as real as yours or mine.

Looking at them strictly through a political scope of late, especially since 2016 where my vision narrowed a bit, I’ve come to remember something; something that’s a bit embarrassing and certainly bears the burden of a dose of shame, now that I’ve watched this episode of “Parts Unknown”. Bourdain visited a coal mine and fired machine guns and ate the local delicacies of the area and talked to the folk, even being so brave as to broach the topic of politics in this once deeply blue, now deeply red and pro-trump part of our nation. “I’d lost my way,” I realized as I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I listened.

Now don’t get me wrong here; I’m not about to defend these poor bastards for voting for trump. Not in a million years. They didn’t do their research or homework and they’re guilty for putting that fuckwit in the White House. However, taking the time to listen to the “why” made me look a little deeper. It made me realize something. These simple folk, not overly educated but hard working, kind-hearted people, despite not being on the short path for a Pulitzer Prize for anything intelligent… might just be the geniuses we need. Sounds crazy? I’ll explain.

One of the big reasons they went trump is because HRC gave them all the impression that she was going to kill the coal industry but didn’t make the case well enough about retraining and repurposing their workforce. She ran a campaign against an industry steeped in their traditions now, generations having worked in the mines. Simply, she was an uppity city gal without a clue and she lost them. The problem here, for those unfamiliar with places like this, is that uppity city folk have ALWAYS found some way to come into their small, quiet towns, fool them into buying or investing in shit they don’t need nor want (which goes all the way back to the Carpetbaggers. Look that up if you don’t know what that is). While it brought them good paying jobs sometimes, like Big Coal did, they’re all too aware that their crops, resources and so forth are bought on the cheap there and sold by middle men for small fortunes in the big cities. They know full well they’re getting screwed, but they also don’t really have the means to exploit the market directly, eliminate the middlemen, and see that small fortune themselves. Generations have experienced making a little money while their efforts went on to make city folk pretty rich.

So why trump? In short, many feel he’s going to bring change and they like him because he “talks like they talk” and says how he feels and what he means. By now I do hope that’s changed a bit. Still, the orange fuckwit did ring a chord with these people, even though he’s a rich twat from NY. They’re confident that trump will bring change, and you know what? I just caught on that they’re right, just not in the way they’re thinking.

We’re at a strange stage of existence where the well educated are flustered at having to deal with the less educated, including that gap in religious beliefs or lack thereof. Both sides now look down their noses at one another and the chasm of contempt is obviously growing bigger and bigger. It’s no secret that we’re all getting more and more poor regardless of our level of education or faith, and because of that, the rich fuckers at the top utilize that ongoing divide to keep us from actually remembering what makes us all alike for fear we, the actual people, may rise up and literally get rid of them one way or another.

I used to think that the GOP only had eyes for corporations and their cash. It’s why I dropped my GOP leanings years and years ago. It’s one thing to want smaller federal government and fiscal responsibility, but when they’re always doing the opposite and the Democrats actually DID what the GOP’s platform was saying it was for, well, actions speak louder than words. However, I think we can all agree to some measure of other, that today’s Dems are acting like moderate GOPers of the 80’s to 90’s. As the Democrats have demonstrated in this new House, diversity is clearly something that keeps them at a respectable level on the Left, but wait… Watch this episode of “Parts Unknown”. It’s on NetFlix. Watch it and then read the rest of this. I’ll wait.

No I won’t. You know it. Still, watch it. It gave me the following epiphany here, and I’d like you to consider it. The people Bourdain talked to about trump, and we’ve heard it before too, and we mostly gaffed it off, but here’s the genius of it all- They’re right in that trump will bring change. He’s so terrible, so fucking stupid, so damaging to the country, that our only hope as a nation is to REMEMBER what makes us all Americans, not bitch about too many of the things that really don’t matter (yeah, I’ll lighten up on the religious folks, even if I think it’s all a load of bollocks) and look at things from a different angle. Here it is. This change NEEDS to happen, but not in the GOP; they’ll never change. No, seriously, they won’t. They’re loving the cash more than country. No, I mean CHANGE needs to come from the Democrats! For too long they've made dumb choices, their politicians are spineless, and their policies framed in ways that seem to look down at most of rural America (what I call #Murica). Democrats need to shut up and listen. They need to HEAR what troubles there are out there and not just wink and nod and say they’ll try to handle it, but to bloody well DO it. They need to be CLEAR what their message is.

Sanders lost a lot of support because he and his staff never actually spent the time to school the people out here on what DEMOCRATIC socialism (actually this term is incorrect if you want to split hairs- what Sanders is shooting for is Social Democracy; something we already have to a degree and it’s being stripped away and replaced with an oligarchy more and more. Also see Plutocracy) is, and the McCarthy-flashbacks kept people hearing “socialist” only and the association we were taught in school to that word relating to tyrannical countries like the USSR, China and so on and it put too many voters off. Still, Sanders creamed trump in loads of polls while HRC was sketchy; a gamble at best. She didn’t connect with the ‘simple folk’ out in the sticks and in blue territory while Sanders did. The Dems need to own their defeat, admit their part in helping trump get elected, and then move on from there. Americans are all for Progressive ideas; they just don’t trust the Dems to either have the spine to try, the balls to fight, or the strength to carry it through. Again, those people in Welch WV are right- trump will bring change, one way or another. Either we’re going to get rid of Corporate Democrats who ignore their constituents and suck corporate dicks for cash (as the GOP is famed for) and actually CHANGE by getting money out of politics and start working for “We the People”, OR they won’t, and change will still happen, only not in the way these rural folk think. It’ll be the collapse and end of the US as we know it, a division so bad that nobody will come and help because we’ve pissed off and alienated out allies and bowed down, on a global scope, to our former enemies like Russia and China and N. Korea.

So, while city mouse and country mouse may both enjoy time with their families, decent wages, decent jobs, good food, clean air and water, good education, healthcare, and the pride of being an American citizen, we need to remember that these are the important things that bind us together, not only with our fellow Americans, but our fellow human beings all across the planet. There are some things that just WON’T go away, and somewhere in here we need to agree to disagree. Abortion. Guns. It’s too late on these issues. We either respect the separation of  church and state and keep abortion legal for the safety and lives of women or we don’t and admit that we’re all up for Sharia Law, #Murican style. As for guns? We’ll never fix this one EVER. Again, watch the show I mentioned earlier. The problem is that we’re so saturated with guns that it won’t matter if there are any gun laws or not. They won’t do a damned thing no matter how much I wish they would. Still, trump will bring change, like they said. The question is, will Democrats make the changes in their party that are needed to literally save the United States and possibly the world, or not change and cement in our history that they ARE the scourge that those on the right think they are?

[chrisgis4680-blog]

Day One Readings

As a general statement, I remember in my class last semester, Anarchist Art that the readings we often had, way up and even through the twentieth century mankind was always referred to as man. For example, in the Declaration of Independence they say mankind often plus there is the whole, “all men are created equal” bit and then we have the Declaration of Rights of Man, which the title speaks for itself on top of them basically quoting the United States “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The whole thing to me is still just crazy that so many people get left out of documents like this that claim to fight for human rights, but it just turns out they are just white, straight, christian, cisgender, male rights. And unfortunately as the readings get closer to our time frame the fight for rights does not seem to change much.

When reading the Declaration of Independence I feel a bit sentimental I suppose. I find it really interesting that no teacher till now has actually required me to read it; not even in other political classes throughout college. But here I am reading it and it just sounds so personal. Before reading it I thought I would constantly zone out and have to reread parts a few times to get the point across, but though several parts are a bit wordy and need a minute to understand, a lot of it is not really that bad. It is very organized and to the point, “we don’t want to be under the king anymore and here is why.” I never knew that the King had done so much, you get the gist of it in general education history classes throughout the public school system, but not much more than that. I just found it very interesting to read what happened and how they saw everything rather than the interpretation out of a mass produced textbook that only tells half of the truth anyway.

Real quick referencing my first paragraph… go Adam Smith for being for equality for women at least haha. As I read Adam Smith I noticed that government and poverty really have not changed much in the last two to three hundred years. And I find that to be rather frustrating honestly. He talked about how the poor have a shorter life, they tend to have more children and how those children tend to die at a higher rate than children of the more wealthy class. Seriously? In three hundred years we have not been able to get our crap together in order to help out the poor? What has the human race been doing all these centuries? Centuries! It is the twenty first century for goodness sake, and the death rate for the poor is still lower than the rich, as well as the birth rate among the poor and one could stretch the argument towards the death rate of poor children, but I will admit that is pushing it. Yes this has improved a bit. The death rate gap has closed a lot, and people are not having twenty children to make up for the ten of them that died in childbirth or the first five years of their life. But the fact still remains that though this has improved a bit, it still hasn't been solved completely. Plus with the new administration I cannot see this whole helping the poor out idea solving itself any time soon in the United Stated of Business.

Honestly John Locke is pretty long winded. Though I feel like almost everybody from that age was long winded. I wonder if as a human race our attention spans have just gotten so much shorter over the years. Even my professors sometimes ask students to cut down on filler words just to reach the word count. Which on one hand I completely understand this, but on the other hand I read John Locke and all of his filler words and it kind of makes me wonder what the heck is going on with these professors. Though from what I could get out of it his arguments make a lot of sense for the time. There was a huge surplus of land compared to the population especially in the Americas (I am choosing to ignore the whole stealing the land from Native Americans thing because we may be here all day). I like when he talked about not taking more land than you need and how you only have the right to the part that you actually work. This way you don't wind up with somebody owning one hundred acres of land and only actually having crops on five of those acres. I feel like this makes a lot of sense, that part may even make sense for now. I just don’t understand why people need so much more than they really need or use ya know? Though I am not saying if a person works hard then they should just give all of their excess away, just that in some cases there is more excess than a person could ever use in their lifetime. That part confuses me and makes me more of the side of Locke there.

I also picked up a bit on Locke hinting at a utopian society. He explains how working the land not only gives a person the right to the land but helps the community as a general because if one person grows an acre of tomatoes and another an acre of corn then they can both trade for the different crops. It kind of motivates people in a way to work and earn the land they live on and then help out the economy around them and eliminate the need for money. I see a lot of good in the trading system, but I also kind of understand why humans moved on to money eventually anyway. Again I just think it works for the times as technology progresses then the barter system does not tend to work out as well because humans need to be motivated. And what better way to motivate them than money?

Wordsworth seems to have a very romantic view of the French Revolution and I don’t really understand why. As far as I can tell from discussions in class as well as references to past classes, it was a pretty bloody war. I mean people were being beheaded in the streets and has their heads paraded around on spikes. This doesn’t sound all that romantic to me. But I suppose if he was one of the oppressed poor then after being oppressed for so long and wanting the revolution maybe he could see it as romantic in a way?

Ah the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was not so bad to get through the first half and then my eyes basically glazed over. After class I can kind of see the political element of the poem, but it is pretty hard to see this on my own. Though the scenes of the dead bodies all around him did give a battlefield tone, and that was one of the easiest parts to see I think. I did enjoy the beginning of the story, and I think the rhyming helped keep my attention a lot. I often like modern poems that have a rhythm but do not rhyme, but on the other hand epic poems need the rhyme to keep my attention and hold my brain onto it without zoning and having to read it twice. At least his view of the French Revolution was not as romantic and weird as Wordsworth.

[quakerjoe]

It's been a while since I've written a "Cuppa Joe" sermon, so to speak, and for that I apologize. I've been getting over-saturated by the news and haven't been in the mood. With that, I challenge you to read this. A "Shot of Joe" for the end of February... ----------------------------------------------------- Gun violence. It won’t end in our lifetimes here in the United States. We won’t see the end of it, but perhaps, just maybe our children or grandchildren will see a day when America is once again worthy of seeing themselves as the “Land of the Brave”. Right now, we simply aren’t, and it has a lot to do with the differences we all imagine as the End Game for our futures. Some seem to strive for a sort of Utopian society where we all have health coverage, free education on all levels, clean air and water, safe food, honest, livable wages for all, and a society where it no longer matters what color our flesh is or from where our ancestors come from or what religious backgrounds we have or what sexual preferences or genders we are. We’ll reach an age, with any luck, where we’re all just simply… Americans.

However, while some of us strive for that sort of end game in the US, there are others who crave a time more akin to the post-apocalyptic times seen in Mad Max films or they hope for a zombie apocalypse or some sort of breakdown of society where they can unleash their darkest desires, including crime without fear of punishment like rape and murder, the re-implementation of slavery, and moves to put women back where they “belong”; back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and free to beat and slap around for being “uppity”. You know; “Biblical Times”. Praise Jesus, right?

The fact remains that so long as we, as a nation, glorify war and death and murder, all for the selfish sake of owning guns, then we have no business thinking we’re free, because we’re not, and there’s no merit for even remotely considering ourselves brave. Last I checked, there isn’t a nation on the planet who can assemble any kind of army, traverse the massive oceans of the Atlantic or Pacific, reach our shores and invade us. Mexico will never have enough of an army to come close to being a match for our over-bloated military. Canada… They’re simply not interested and that’s not their style since forever as a nation of their own. (They did burn down the White House during the War of 1812, but they were British back then.)

Given the massive natural barriers between us and anyone who could possibly want to do harm to the US, it seems beyond INSANE that our military is so bloody huge. We’re already fairly untouchable, and the world knows it. They, like many of us, know that our military budget is only rivaled by that of the next 15+/- nations COMBINED after us, and all but one are allies. Most of THEM, on the other hand, have amazing health care systems and far better education systems. They invest in their PEOPLE and not corporations. They have better and more modern infrastructure. They’re fighting climate change. They’re not at war with other nations like the US is all around the world. They care for their troops and don’t just talk about it and put bumper stickers on their cars. 

Essentially, Americans are, in general, totally full of shit, mostly empty thoughts, and blasphemous prayers that mean fuck-all nothing. It’s how they cope. What the hell is wrong with Americans? They’re the loudest, mouthiest, and chicken-shit nation there is today. Those in charge use the military as mercenaries for the rich and powerful private sector.  We treat those poor patriots like they’re going off to save the world, but does anyone ever wonder who “wins” in these overseas operations? Who gets the goods in the aftermath? Big Pharma gets poppies from Afghanistan. Big Oil corporations get benefits from constantly destabilizing the Middle East, either through bullshit invasions like in Iraq, or through undercover ops via the CIA and private merc companies. Big. Fat. Rich. Fucks. They are the ones who reap the prizes from war. Our own troops get shot at for the privilege of putting on a uniform and being led to believe that they’re going on some sacred, patriotic crusade for Uncle Same and the country they love. Their prize? They get PTSD, debilitating wounds, lost time away from home, and pretty much fucked over and forgotten in the VA system and there’s never enough money in the Big Military Budget to take care of those who they conned into facing lethal force for a king they don’t know even exists. Their bravery and duty to country is taken advantage of by those who will use them to get more money, either for their own corporations, or from donors who put big wads of cash into a politician’s coffers. We watch on as corporate money bucks taxpayer money and gains control over politicians who USED to work for “We the People”. Too many politicians work for “We, the Corporations” and the rest of us can simply go to hell, plug in to whatever diversion makes you happy, and simply… fuck off. We let politicians go unchecked. Some of us have been screaming warnings about shit like “Citizens United” which essentially has made bribery LEGAL for politicians to receive. When a politician abused his/her power, he was held accountable to “We the Taxpayers” and be ousted in the next vote or thrown out of office through recalls and so forth. Now, politicians are expected to get a return on investment for their rich donors who now get massive tax breaks while the rest of us are being lined up for slaughter because it is easier to rob a million dollars from a million people, one buck at a time, than it is to steal a cool mil from one rich fucker in one go.

The guns… Oh, the guns! It’s a religion in the US. People are simply just that selfish. Knowing FULL WELL that if there were fewer guns, people would be safer, people will NEVER give them up. That would take empathy, consciousness, conscience, and total honesty, not to mention… BRAVERY. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, we’re nowhere NEAR to any danger of being invaded. We already have a method for overthrowing the government; it’s called “SHOW UP AND FUCKING VOTE”. If you don’t like what’s going on, RUN FOR OFFICE. But give up guns? Hell no! Americans are afraid of just about everything, the worst being white dudes. Old ones. Young ones. Generation after generation, they’re bred into fear; fear of everything not white-cist-male-heterosexual and of course “Christian”. Because, you know, Jesus LOVES the AR-15 and I’ve always seen him as a sort of fifty caliber Desert Eagle carrying motherfucker, don’t you? Americans are afraid of each other. They’re afraid, like the Native Americans before them, of immigrants. You see, once you fuck someone over, you get paranoid. You’re afraid that what you did will turn around someday and come to bite you in the ass. Genocide of the Native Population. African Slavery. Religious altercations against non-Christians. Keeping women from being equals at home and in the workplace. Going overseas and shooting up the place so we can rob them of their resources to make the rich even more wealthy. Keeping the LGBTQ community hidden, repressed in the shadows and imprisoned in their closets for fear of being fired, brutally beaten or even tortured and killed. One day, there is that possibility that ALL of that could come together and bit a white man in the ass. The harshest, most brutal parts of American history were all committed by…. Wait for it… WHITE DUDES! It’s why they’re the biggest gun nuts and ammosexuals there are on planet Earth. They know their time of supremacy is coming to an end. Not all of them are on “their side”. There are those, and in ever increasing numbers, who want that Utopian society with all the clean air, food and water, livable, honest wages, and for ALL citizens of our nation to prosper and live decent lives and not have to be homeless and to live in squalor. ALL of us. Americans. Even the shitbags, chicken-shit gun nuts. That’s what being a Liberal and a Progressive means, kids. No more super-rich assholes buying our government for their own self interests. No more abusing our patriotic military to use as cannon fodder for profit. No more shafting rules that deliver justice and that protect and serve “We the People”. We won’t see it. We’ll grow too old, as we work ourselves to death because retirement is no longer an option for survival anymore. We’ll die younger and younger because only those of privilege can afford health care while the safety net programs leave more and more “We the People” out in the cold to starve to death or to die of poor health. We’ll be dead because our water is getting contaminated; our air getting more dangerous to breathe; our food becoming a corporate mob owned operation that’ll have us by the short hairs to keep us all docile and in line. We’re going to die, and not in a nation that’s brave or free. 

The American Dream is just that. It’s time to wake up and decide if we’re going to pursue that dream, or let it all slip away into the nightmares that lie on the horizon because not enough of us are learned enough to see what’s going on. Not enough of us are mobilized to get politically active. That’s part of why keeping us all poor works for the rich and powerful. If we can’t afford to take time off from one of our several jobs needed to survive, we can’t afford to march, protest, or support candidates who want that Utopian End Game. Keeping us stupid, by buying up all the media outlets and only telling us what they want us to know and keeping us divided (divide and conquer; heard of that before?) keeps us from coming together as the “We” in “We the People”. Keeping our children stupid keeps this ball rolling, and shafting the education system repeatedly is well on its way to achieving that. Add to that: School Massacres! As people become more and more afraid of sending their kids to school, what will they do?

Three choices are before them. First, Home Schooling; keeping children stunted and limited in their educational input because face it- parents are not all rocket scientists and parents cannot all teach their children well enough on their own. “It takes a village”, they say, or at least a proper, public school. Second, if you’ve got the coin, there may be private schools and they’re typically religious-based, jamming their religion into you while you’re trying to learn basic math. Lastly, for the growing masses of the not-so-well-to-do, there’s fuck-all nothing. No school. Keep the masses dumb, and let them get into the work force as soon as possible. There’s always the military. We’ve already been warned that the influx of applicants to our armed forces is overrun with the not-so-bright and that it’s a matter of national security because they’re not intelligent enough to do the really important jobs needed in our armed forces. The rich love that shit. Keep the kids fed with “America is the Best!” and “USA! USA! USA!” when they haven’t a fucking clue why they’re saying it. Keep them all armed, because gun deaths maintain the fear the rich and powerful crave. Keep the general population stupid and paranoid and they can rule supreme forever, right? Possibly. We shall see.

~Quaker Joe