Managed democracy, Superpower, and inverted totalitarianism

Chalmers Johnson writes in a May 2008 review of Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin (published in paperback earlier this year):

Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered."

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."

The genius of our inverted totalitarian system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual." ...

"The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed." ...

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the "selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry" under cover of improving "efficiency" and cost-cutting. ...

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. ...

Another elite tactic of managed democracy is to bore the electorate to such an extent that it gradually fails to pay any attention to politics. Wolin perceives, "One method of assuring control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic lassitude on which managed democracy thrives." ...

Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)

Foreign military operations literally force democracy to change its nature: "In order to cope with the imperial contingencies of foreign war and occupation," according to Wolin, "democracy will alter its character, not only by assuming new behaviors abroad (e.g., ruthlessness, indifference to suffering, disregard of local norms, the inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by operating on revised, power-expansive assumptions at home. It will, more often than not, try to manipulate the public rather than engage its members in deliberation. It will demand greater powers and broader discretion in their use ('state secrets'), a tighter control over society's resources, more summary methods of justice, and less patience for legalities, opposition, and clamor for socioeconomic reforms."

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin's terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die. ...

"That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budgets means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from the government. Thus the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate." ...

Why I'm voting secessionist instead of socialist (or anything else)

"Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics."

—Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated

Vermont

Education, not Training!

Steve Nelson writes in today's Valley News (Vt. & NH):

WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, indeed! Based on the response to the new documentary film of the same name by Davis Guggenheim, it's going to be a very long wait for an educational system that genuinely serves America's children. The political and public frenzy over the troubled state of American education is driving a "reform" movement that is arguably as irrational as stockpiling nuclear weapons as a means of bringing peace to Earth.

Guggenheim's film mischaracterizes the decline in American education and misplaces blame. It offers a broad, gratuitous indictment of teachers and teachers unions. While some teachers are great and some significantly less than great, this is nothing new. Teachers are by and large as well qualified and dedicated as they were a generation ago. If education has dramatically changed for the worse, teachers are not the variable. Race, class and rapid cultural and social shifts are the more germane variables.

In addition to misidentifying the root causes of educational ills, the film goes on to celebrate the tough-love, often militaristic, data-driven practices that are supposed to make education better. These practices are guaranteed to make it worse. Watching the parade of celebrities, political leaders and sycophants lionizing media darlings such as D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee is depressing for those of us who love children.

I regularly ask parents what qualities they hope to see nourished in their children. The responses are always the same: creativity, confidence, integrity, a sense of humor, compassion, originality, honesty, imagination, critical thinking skills and so on.

If the purpose of education is to develop such things, the practices in most schools today, particularly in the schools held up as shining exemplars in Waiting for Superman, will do much the opposite. In these schools, as children march in uniformed lockstep to the next regimented bit of curriculum, their little hearts, minds and souls are being bleached into sad, bland conformity. The illusion of achievement, as symbolized by the minor, self-prophetic improvement in test scores, feeds the frenzy and the vicious (often literally vicious) cycle continues. There is no time for passion or compassion, a sense of humor is a liability, and imagination is an unnecessary distraction. Thinking critically is a risk no child dare take. Children in these schools are being trained, not educated.

This is no mere philosophical quibble.

Current trends in education - increasingly early academic work, test preparation and tests - are waging psychological and even biological warfare on America's children.

Children's cognitive abilities, especially reading, develop along highly varied timelines - roughly analogous to the wide range of ages that children begin to walk. There is no reason to expect that all 7-year-old children will be able to do the same things in the same way, yet our system is designed as though they should. Our treatment of many late readers, for example, is as abusive and senseless as it would be to scream at your one-year-old for not standing up and running on her first birthday.

As the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner once told me, the most damaging aspect of contemporary educational practice is the pressure for children to do too much, too soon. As a result of these practices, some children are branded for life as substandard, simply because they aren't yet up to "expectations." Others, who may be able to manage the work, are conditioned to see learning primarily as the process of giving the powerful adults (parents or teachers) the answers they're looking for.

The "losers" in such schools are disenchanted and brokenhearted. The "winners" are, in increasing numbers, unimaginative, dully conformist in thought and behavior, and neurotic. They can chant slogans about success and declare the ambitions they hope will please adults, but they have diminished capacity to love ideas, to take risks, to recognize or make something beautiful or to question authority.

The biological damage may be more profound. Advances in neurobiology and cognitive science make clear the im portance of rich and varied sensory stimulation for brain development. Children must sing, talk, paint, run, build fabulous towers, smell flowers, bounce balls, hear beautiful music and touch everything in sight. The complex and powerful neural pathways that constitute a well-educated person have their roots in all these natural and joyful experiences.

Why then would a supposedly "rigorous" school dispose of physical education, diminish art and music classes, while telling children to sit still and endure daily drills in computation and phonics? There is mounting evidence that the rote practices that produce the temporary illusion of progress are actually inhibiting the biological and emotional development required for authentic academic achievement.

Might this be why politicians and economists who brag about improved fourth-grade scores are often mystified by stagnant (or worse) eighth-grade scores? Could it be that the very practices that raise scores in the short term are guaranteed to fail in the long run? (Sound like Wall Street?)

Neuroscientists, psychologists and thoughtful educators around America know these things, but too many of the decisions about education are being made by politicians and metrics-driven "experts" who know very little about children. I'm sure the intent behind Waiting for Superman was good, but the result seems to be renewed enthusiasm for a very misguided approach to learning.

Steve Nelson lives in Sharon and New York City, where he is the head of the Calhoun School, a private school. He can be reached through e-mail at steve.nelson@calhoun.org. His column appears in the Valley News every other Sunday.

2010 Election Endorsements

Second Vermont Republic
Socialist Party USA
Liberty Union Party

US Senator: Peter Diamondstone, Socialist
Representative to US Congress: Jane Newton, Socialist
Governor: Dennis Steele, Second Vermont Republic; Ben Mitchell, Liberty Union
Lieutenant Governor: Peter Garritano, Second Vermont Republic; Boots Wardinski, Liberty Union
State Treasurer: Virginia Murray Ngoima, Liberty Union
Auditor of Accounts: Jerry Levy, Liberty Union
Secretary of State: Leslie Marmolare, Liberty Union
Attorney General: Rosemarie Jackowski, Liberty Union
State Senate (Addison County): Robert Wagner, Second Vermont Republic
State Senate (Chittenden County): Terry Jeroloman, Stephen Laible, and Mikey Van Gulden, Second Vermont Republic
State Senate (Rutland County): William Cruikshank and Dennis Morrisseau, Second Vermont Republic
State Senate (Washington County): Gaelan Brown, Second Vermont Republic
State Senate (Windham County): Aaron Diamondstone, Socialist
State House (Washington County): James Merriam, Second Vermont Republic

War is the obscenity

Mythbuster busted: Tom Gray and the hard facts of wind energy

The unflagging Tom Gray of the American Wind Energy Association has now presented a story about Kodiak Island, Alaska, as a "mythbuster".

It's a mythbuster only if you characterize, as Gray does, the problems with wind on the grid in the most simple-minded way.

1. First, he harps on the charge that backup power units must be kept running, noting (actually, asking tauntingly like a brat in a schoolyard) that Kodiak Electric Association (KEA) burned 930,000 fewer gallons of diesel fuel in the first year of three 1.5-MW wind turbines operating, so emissions must have been reduced.

2. For the same reason, fossil fuel use was reduced.

3. Finally, taking on the charge that wind is unreliable and hard to integrate into utility systems, he notes that KEA did it.

Now let us look at the facts.

The 4.5 MW of wind went into operation in July 2009. The data provided by KEA on diesel fuel saved is estimated as proportional to the net energy produced by the wind turbines. That is not a record of actual fuel savings, which is affected by the diesel generators' efficiency, which is affected by more frequent ramping and switching on and off to balance the wind feed.

As Gray knows, the charge that other plants have to be kept running primarily applies to large coal (and nuclear). Smaller coal plants may be able to ramp their production as needed (at a cost of efficiency). Natural gas plants may be able to switch very quickly on and off (again, at a cost of efficiency, like city versus highway driving). Diesel plants, too, can switch on and off quickly. On an island, they act very much like the backup generator that an off-gridder keeps ready.

So points 1 and 2 dodge the issue of exactly how much diesel fuel is saved by using an estimate rather than actual data. In a similar example from East Falkland, Islas Malvinas, less than one-fourth of the estimated fuel savings was actually seen. And it has still to be documented how less cleanly the remaining three-fourths is being burned.

Again, emissions may have been reduced, but by very much less, if any, than hoped or claimed. And fossil fuel use was reduced, but likely by very much less than estimated.

As for point 3, an island system is a simple closed system, with fast-responding diesel generators (as well as in this case hydro) to adjust quickly to changing demand. They continue to operate in the same way with the addition of wind turbines, which are essentially "negative demand". Being a "small, isolated" utility system is precisely why it is easy to integrate wind there, not, as Gray implies, an example of particular challenge.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

A Sheaf of Araby

"I considered the lilies on the veldt and unto Balkis did I disclothe mine glory. And this."   —Finnegans Wake

Click here to download Eric Rosenbloom's new essay into Finnegans Wake, "A Sheaf of Araby".

Or click here to read it on line.

   

Two poems by Eric Rosenbloom

THE FALLEN FAR

Clouds waft from over the ocean         And rain upon the land Rivers flowing return to ocean         Waters seeped through the land Out of the ocean a ship finds the river         And sails against her waters Its people build on her shores of mud         With rushes, wood, and stone And their towers tumbling back to the land         Are the last that the river washes Of the memories returned to ocean         Of its people seeped in the land

THE FAYRE QUEAN

Lilith the earth has drawn the waters to her And grown a tree that branches over the ocean And screens the sky from its jealous view Adam takes the proffered fruit And dwells with Lilith among the limbs And leaves of her mortal garden She is fair and he her king, but Eve Her clouded brow is drawing him apart To live again with her as ever He promises return but knows not which And Lilith dies, and he dies too, or lives With Eve our queen to return, to return

Wind industry continues to lie

Here are a couple of examples of the alternate reality in which wind industry executives operate, hoping that the rest of the world will join them.

In today's Daily Mail report about the U.K.'s new sprawling wind energy facility off the coast of Kent, an unnamed spokesman for Renewable UK, responding to criticism that this 13.5-square-mile, £780 million plant will produce at an average of only 35-40% of its capacity, said, ‘You have to bear in mind that coal and gas-fired power stations don’t work at full capacity either – and even nuclear power stations are taken off line.’

He does not mention that other power stations are used according to demand, not the whims of the wind. Using a peaking plant (at full rated power) 35% of the time, that is, when you need it, is very different from wind turbines producing power, at variable rates, whether you need it or not. An average of 35% is meaningless: If it can not be produced on demand, it is worthless. Wind turbines produce at or above their average rate — whatever it might turn out to be — only about 40% of the time — at whatever times the wind wills.

Also in the article, an item in the sidebar says that it "generates power at wind speeds between 8mph and 55mph". Elsewhere in the article, however, it is noted that the the plant will generate at full capacity only if the wind is blowing at 16 metres per second, i.e., 36mph. Below that speed, production falls precipitously. At 8mph, it is barely a trickle. Furthermore, after the wind gusts above 55mph and the turbines shut down, they don't start up again until the wind goes down to 45mph.

Let us now turn our attention to Vermont, where the founder of anemometer maker NRG Systems David Blittersdorf (his wife Jan is still CEO; David went on to Earth Turbines and then All Earth Renewables, which applied for millions of dollars of grants this year, so Mr B got himself appointed to the state committee disbursing the grants ...). As reported by the Rutland Herald, Blittersdorf gave a talk about wind power at the annual meeting of the Castleton Historical Society.

He said that "wind power is practically unsubsidized when compared to power sources like oil and nuclear energy." Federal financial interventions and subsidies in the energy market were examined by the Energy Information Administration in 2008. They found that wind energy received $23.37 per megawatt-hour of its electricity production in 2007, compared with 44 cents for coal, $1.59 for nuclear, and 25 cents for natural gas and oil.

He also said that "many of the objections to wind power, such as danger to birds and concerns about noise, are no longer true due to newer technology". In fact, "newer technology" simply consists of taller towers with larger blades, which now reach well into the ranges of migrating birds, both large and small. Every post-construction survey of a wind energy facility continues to report more deaths than predicted. (And yet permitting agencies and bird protection organizations continue to believe the developers' assessments.) In addition to birds, the toll on bats has become an increasingly alarming concern. The size of modern turbines has also only increased, not decreased noise problems. Everywhere that wind turbines are erected within 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) of homes, people complain of disturbed sleep, consequent stress and irritability, and often worse health problems that may be a direct result of the throbbing low-frequency noise on the balance organs of the inner ear. (And yet permitting agencies and neighbors continue to believe the developers' reassurances; the latest victims of this willful obtuseness reside on the island of Vinalhaven, Maine.) Again, the problems with wind have only become worse with "newer technology"..

And so he said that the only real remaining objection is the aesthetic one: "Some folks don't want to see a wind turbine on a mountain. We have to choose something. By denying wind power, you're supporting coal, oil and nuclear energy."

Bullshit and bullshit. Not to mention, the aesthetic objection is valid, considering that wind turbine facilities are generally built in previously undeveloped rural and even wild areas. You can't have environmentalism without aesthetics. Vermont doesn't allow billboards on the highways. It essentially bans all development above 2,000 feet on the mountains. 400-feet-high machines blasted into the ridges and connected by wide straight heavy-duty roads are rightly seen as an insult to what we hold dear.

Anyway, many objections — as described about birds, bats, and noise — remain. And the benefits to be weighed against those "aesthetic" costs are hard to find. By denying wind power, you're not supporting other forms of energy any more than you are by promoting wind power. Because wind, which answers only to the whims of Aeolus, not to the actual minute-to-minute needs of the grid, has not replaced and can not replace other forms of energy on the electric grid.

David Blittersdorf may think it's worth killing birds and bats, destroying the neighbors' health, and wrecking the landscape in the belief that if we erect ever more wind turbines we might actually see some positive effect (ignoring all the havoc wreaked to get there). But instead he denies that these well documented impacts actually occur. That is quite disturbing.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, Vermont

Gogol Bordello: Immigraniada

U.S. Out of Vermont!

Israel-Palestine peace talks to clear way for bombing Iran

As Sam Smith points at Undernews, the point of these very unserious peace talks seems really to be to declare their failure, thus clearing the way for the next round of atrocities by the U.S. and/or Israel. Next stop, Iran!

Stock exchange versus the economy

"You have to distinguish between two things — the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. ... That's the Swedish economy, and it's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago. ...

"The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy."

—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Burning Qurans

While everybody gets all morally righteous against the ignorant fearful hatefulness of marking September 11 with a pyre of Korans, or against the ignorant fearful hatefulness against a Islamic community center in downtown New York . . .

Let's not forget that these are just reflections of the greater ignorant fearful hatefulness of fact of the U.S. military invading and occupying two large Muslim countries in southwest Asia, abetting one small one (Israel) in its campaign against the mostly Muslim people whose land they took and want more of, and supporting antidemocratic Muslim autocracies in crass return for oil.

A lot more, a lot worse, than Korans have been burned and will be burned.

As a recent cartoon by Jeff Danziger suggests, the Koran burners in Florida reveal the truth of the U.S. mission, its crusade, this auto da fé.

Let them eat meat

Speaking of Affiliation, a correspondent writes about yesterday's column in The Guardian by George Monbiot (click the title of this post):

I always felt that there was something quite peculiar about Monbiot and how he never quite "gets" things that should seem so obvious, as in his dogged touting of industrial wind and his dumb war on Agas etc etc -- in this case in his bizarre, chillingly analytical defense of meat-eating (undoubtedly this is very convenient to his own tastes), he seems almost as if he suffers from Asbergers or autism in his precise, desperate totting up of percentages, ratios, and economics of "efficient" corpse production. Talk about missing the point of veganism, all the while he ignores the elephant sitting in the corner of this very tiny windowless room -- the abject horror, routine abuse, suffering and medieval cruelty that these living sentient beings are subjected to, on factory "farms" and little "happy farms" alike, and the fact that all of this nightmarish cruelty is utterly unnecessary, and that we have no right to take another creature's life and even their sense of well being. Monbiot would have made a very good accountant for Hitler -- what a truly dreadful little man he is, a very useful idiot for one destructive industry after another. And this is why I have so little hope for this planet and any evolution to a higher way of thinking about our fellow creatures -- because people like Monbiot, draped in the lurid polyester green flag of what passes these days for "environmentalism" or "sustainable light footprint" living, are listened to by people who used to see this kind of thing as blatant corporate brainwashing of the masses. But alas, no more; now they have joined the rest of the brainwashed greedy conformists -- we live in a real life world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where everyone really does increasingly seem like drooling idiot zombies.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism

Affiliation

In Witz, Joshua Cohen calls all religious Jews "Affiliated". After the sabbath meal a week before Christmas, Benjamin is born to Israel and Hanna Israelien in Joysey, the first son after 12 girls. This winter is particularly hard and in fact persists year round. Benjamin is born full grown, with a beard and glasses. His foreskin continually sheds itself and grows back. Already too big for his father's shirts, he takes to his mother's maternity robes. On Christmas Eve, all of the Affiliated die except first-born sons. The Israelien's maid, Wanda, drives Benjamin down to Florida to live with his grandfather, Isaac, who is Unaffiliated. Meanwhile, a cabal of government operatives are quarantining all of the first-borns on Ellis Island, now called "The Garden" (incorporated), capitalized with the property of the dead. A week later, they come for Benjamin. Isaac dies from a heart attack. Benjamin escapes at a rest stop but is eventually caught and taken to The Garden, where they have moved the entire Israelien house, complete with Sabbath guest still on one of the toilets. The Garden markets Benjamin as the messiah. A team of unaffiliated women are trained to act as his mother and sisters and see to his needs.

Then the first-borns start dying, and by Passover Benjamin is the only one remaining. It is arranged that he marry the President's daughter in Las Vegas, but Benjamin escapes again, to wander the country in his mother's robe. Back in New York, his "sisters" catch up with him, and during cunnilingus with his "Hanna", his tongue gets stuck and is torn off when his sisters try to separate them. The scandal destroys The Garden, and Benjamin is shunned by all (he and the operators of The Garden are Disaffiliated).

Without real Jews around to complicate things, America, and soon, the world, has become Affiliated. The President becomes chief of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. Those who refuse to Affiliate are sent to their "homeland", Polandland, to be killed. Benjamin finds his way there, too, visiting the towns of his mother's and his father's ancestors. In his wanderings, he sprouts the horns of a cow and ultimately he turns into a woman. The Affiliated, however, revive the cult of his tongue, now displayed as a relic. And Wanda, now Affiliated, with a son of her own, remembers the visitor that Benjamin had every night from his birth: Isaiah in the form of Santa Claus.

25 years later, we hear from a 108-year-old Jewish man who was in Auschwitz ... He has listed the punch line of a joke, who needs the setup any more, for every year that he has lived. Because what should you do only laugh.

(((( ))))
Today, affiliation means with Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, whatever Judaism. Cohen reminds the reader of the bloody record of The Bible: the flood, the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, the havoc wrought on the Egyptians, the conquest of Palestine. It is a model of single-minded imperial action by the self-chosen. When all of the Jews die, a singular Affiliation provides the complete means to realize the hegemony that has turned out to be the true American experiment. Indeed, after the destruction of The Twin Towers in New York in 2001, the world said "We are New York", but Israel said "Now you are Israel", which was prescient. Israel had already become everything that some thought it was supposed to stand against: it is a paranoid belligerent power instead of a voice for the oppressed and shunned. And America, seeing in Israel their own history (cf. the Indians), is wallowing even deeper into the madness of self-declared uniqueness that absolves it of all judgement. We are indeed marching headlong toward Affiliation: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer. God's Work.

Our Long National Nightmare Is Just Beginning

David Michael Green writes at Counterpunch (click the title of this post):

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was highjacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status – through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status – was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.

In any case, the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it is. Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case? For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers that question, doesn’t it? If you’re willing to savage military icons like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections – and especially after you get away with it every time – you’re willing to do anything. If you’re willing to mock the 9/11 widows as scheming opportunists, you’re willing to do anything. If you’re willing to don a tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press banquet in Washington, just as you’re telling the American military’s adversaries in Iraq to “bring it on”, you’re willing to do anything.

Looking at the rhetoric the right throws in the direction of our president these days, questioning his very nationality (oh, did I mention that he’s black?), it’s easy to see that they‘ve gone completely over the line. But what’s really out of control is what lies underneath this insanity generated for the consumption of an ignorant hoi polloi. And what that is – what you see when you move the slime-infested rock away – is an unfathomably monstrous greed. Watching these folks in action, you could easily get the impression that they had been impoverished their whole lives. That they had been denied everything, right down to food and water. That they had been deprived through poverty especially of their dignity. You know, like the real poor people of this world, the forty or fifty percent of the Earth’s population that survives on less than two dollars per day. Those folks.

Instead, we are talking about people who are already fantastically rich. And who, despite this, are absolutely hell-bent on getting richer, even if that means depriving hundreds of millions of people in the American middle class of their middle classness, and in many cases, ultimately of their lives. How do we explain people like this? Are they not essentially sociopathic? Are they not made of essentially the same stuff as those who can kill without guilt or remorse? Especially when you consider that even the greediest among us reach a limit beyond which one can effectively make use of the next dollar and the one beyond that, so that pushing others into poverty is no longer even for purposes of your own benefit, but instead for some kind of sick sport? Aren’t these the characters whose essential sickness preachers and philosophers and shrinks have been trying to sort out for millennia?

Whatever the explanation for such illness, the effects of their efforts are certainly plain to see. We’re talking here about a class of Americans who have been essentially offended by the diminishment of inequality produced in America during the middle part of the twentieth century, due to the national policies ranging from the New Deal to the Great Society, Republican administrations included. America’s socio-economic structure changed dramatically during that time, and almost entirely for the better. A huge middle class that had never existed before came into being. Anti-poverty programs took the worst sting out of living conditions for the poor. And America became the greatest economic dynamo since the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, by the way, the rich remained very, very rich.

But that was not enough. So they have made a concerted effort over the last generation or so to revert the country back to the bad old days of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge. Think about that for a second. What sort of elevated sickness, what sort parental deprivation in childhood, what sort of total absence of conscience and consciousness is required to produce a group of people with that mentality?

I wish I knew. But I do know that their plan worked. As Robert Kuttner notes in The American Prospect: “For more than three decades, the wages of American workers have been close to flat while economic insecurity has risen massively. Although the productivity of the U.S. economy has doubled in a generation, most of those gains have not been captured by workers. And in the decade that began in 2001, inflation-adjusted wages have fallen for all but the most affluent 3 percent of the population.

“This pattern of deepening inequality was well entrenched before the financial collapse – which only made things worse. In 2006, economists at Goldman Sachs, sounding almost Marxian, reported that ‘the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income.’ By 2006, wages as a percentage of gross domestic product were already at their lowest share – 45 percent – since government began keeping statistics in 1947. In the past three years, the decline in worker earnings has only intensified, as worker bargaining power has been undermined by very high unemployment. As the economy has stumbled toward a feeble recovery, corporate profits and executive bonuses have rebounded smartly, but salaries and wages have not.

“In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, wages and productivity moved upward in lockstep. Beginning in the 1970s, as government regulation of labor conditions faltered, trade with nations that exploited their own workers increased, and corporations declared open war on unions, the lines diverged. Productivity kept increasing, while median wages were nearly flat.”

This is the successful agenda of the right in America, though it has been cleverly masked by the politics of resentment. This has been the real ‘class warfare’ in the United States these last decades – not, as pouncing regressives instantly scream out in an effort to silence truth, the very occasional and even more feeble attempts by the odd Democratic politician who slips up and mentions what has actually happened. And, as Warren Buffett is honest enough to point out, the war is over and his side won. As Robert Reich noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, the richest one percent of Americans have gone from taking in nine percent of the total national income right before the Reagan era began, to nearly one-fourth of it today. As Reich also reminds us, the last time this happened was in 1928. I would rush to say, “Hey, remember how that one turned out?”, but it’s pretty unnecessary to crack the history books for that reference, since we’re now living it. As just about the stupidest society that ever was, we’ve decided to get together to explore the fun and exciting question, “What would happen if America had a devastating economic downturn once again, boys and girls?!?!”

There is one big difference between today and the 1930s, however. Once there was a political party in America – the one that did the New Deal and the Great Society – that stood up a bit for the middle class and the poor. But Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different path. Now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the GOP’s plutocracy protection service. And, seemingly, for getting its face bitch-slapped bright red at every possible juncture. Both aspects of the New Democrats are a puzzle, but particularly the latter. What sort of psychology of the self-loathing explains how a Clinton or an Obama can be so passive, even when getting handed their heads by the most scurrilous of creeps on the political landscape, pieces of (allegedly) human garbage who could be destroyed with the slightest show of self-defense, let alone a wee assertion of political courage? ...

Social Security and the Deficit

They have nothing to do with each other. Social Security is a self-supporting fund that is not part of the federal budget. Once again:

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.

Read more about it in Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.

A new world

At the outskirts of my father's dwellingplace, at the furthest limit of His encampment, there amid the ringing of haycocks where land gives way to earth, to pure planet — there's an emptied barrack or prison thatch that once quartered killers of mine and of any other kind, too, murderers with governments and the sanction of uniform, weapon, and horse. It's since become all board, nail, leak, and draft, its floor strewn with straw and that and its walls smeared with the sickening reek of we hair, pelage, daily turd. Inside, inhabiting, there's only a lone aged ram. It's humiliated, made modest, as its burden's considerable: how it's dually imaged, as if once for each horn, for each half of the cadence responsible; this ram both existing of its kind, as the last of its species still grazing, and then existing for its kind, too, as their most imperfected survivor — most imperfected as their survivor, their last and their only; to be herded humbled, alone, as a herd of one and itself, up the ramp of an Ark, bound express for our covenant's end: think the species' lowliest, and most degenerate aspect, made ancient to wizened bellwether with raggedy coat, then hefted here to rume out its life once it's downed its last golden door; it's lost its horns, too . . . how they'd been stolen by night, by a boy and his father, and an angel that'd saved them both from a mountaintop altar. At the sound of my horns, my own shofars these shofarot twinned in the wind, one for each lip ended upon that lip of last day . . . how this ram despite wormy illness and old age will perk, turn itself dumbly, lean its head toward the gusting, an echo. Hoof mud. Now, charging its brutishly bared head, and with nothing to fear, forward and always, this ram will hurl itself against the furthest wall of the barrack, not east nor west but out, only out and with such fierce and wet woolen force — to knock everything down, to shatter it through, an escape, into unlimited space.

—Witz by Joshua Cohen

High school military recruitment opt-out forms

Here are 3 opt-out forms to prevent your or your child's high school from sharing your private information with military recruiters. Only one of these 3 forms is needed.

Click here for the parent's form.

Click here for the legal guardian's form.

Click here for the student's form.

You ALSO need to send THIS FORM to the Pentagon's Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies office (whose address is in the form), which gathers information on 16–25-year-olds from sources other than schools and is used by military recruiters (click here for information).

Gubernatorial misconceptions regarding wind

On July 27, the Burlington Free Press printed replies on Vermont's energy future from the five Democratic (primary) and one Republican candidate for governor. Here are their statements regarding wind, with commentary following in italics. Dunne and Bartlett did not mention wind.

Dubie: Last November, Bolton Valley became the nation's second ski area, and Vermont's first, to install its own wind turbine -- a 121-foot-tall Northwind 100, manufactured by Vermonters at Northern Power in Barre. It will produce 300,000 kw annually.

As of 10:11 a.m., August 23, 2010, the Bolton Valley wind turbine had produced 125,809 kWh since October 2009. So, apart from confusing kilowatts (rate of production) with kilowatt-hours (energy produced), Dubie is basing his claim on a projection that almost one year later can be shown to be wrong. In its first year of operation, the Bolton Valley wind turbine is likely to produce less than half of the energy predicted (yet still claimed).

Racine: There are locations throughout the northeast that make sense for solar, wind, biomass, and hydro, and if we take a regional approach, we can site these power sources with the least impact possible.

This assumes that these projects must be built. As for wind, its poor production of almost no value to the grid does not justify its erection anywhere. The least impact possible is to forget about it.

Markowitz: I am a strong supporter of community wind projects, hydropower, solar, biomass and geothermal energy production. As governor, I will review our regulatory process to ensure that renewable energy projects get a fair hearing and fast results.

Since energy projects are developed by well capitalized corporations and inordinately affect host communities and environments, the concern should be that those who are adversely affected or who advocate for the environment are able to get a fair hearing.

Shumlin: To meet our electricity needs we will need power delivered from small community-based solar projects to utility scale wind farms and everything in between. As outlined in a Vision for Vermont, I will work with the Treasurer's office to leverage the state's ability to borrow money at affordable rates and issue a series of Vermont renewable energy bonds so that every Vermonter who wants to can literally invest in our energy future. The revenue generated through these projects, guaranteed through electricity sales to the utilities, will help pay the bonds off.

The "everything is needed" approach as presented by Shumlin lacks any sign of rational evaluation of costs and benefits. The only people who would benefit from this circular funding model are the manufacturers and installers — it is a job creation program, but without regard to its effect on the environment and hosting communities, or to its actual contributions to a reliable electricity supply.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, Vermont

To the south, which is for why always west ...

Which by an estranging yet commodious rictus brings us westward ho, which is southbound, again, as it’s been said with a smile, and, if given to belief in all the signs that bedevil the toothless, tongueless, gaping beyond, the north and east, too, all of it together and around again if the mystic’s you thing, also if not: silver highways that, if you obey the recommendations of their contingently blinking advisories, if only you would heed their wondrous warnings arcaned in ways symbolized of arrows and stars, promise to take you out as far as the garden of Angels, which is Holywood, the second city that is all cities, but is all other cities perfected, made irreal: apparently, a place of pilgrimage, the developers now sell it as, per the glossed propaganda a mystical shrine, in which dream need not be its own fulfillment, no matter how common its interpretation nor how brute its price. Here there are intersections and there are causeways and byways, there are interchanges and coded connections, known only to the select under hidden numbers, by secret names. To approach this wisdom, it’s said, you must follow the wide wave of the desert, then turn — averting disaster — just before its break, forsaking its spill over the concrete and the meridian there, to abandon its wake that drifts sand as if stars to constellate the further beach, which gives itself over to the Pacific as a grave, the bottommost burial of the world . . . this is the ocean, the other ocean. A rumbling wave prays in thanks for the sacrifice of the shore, the land, the dry earth. As here, as much as everywhere else, the heavens open: every weather crowded into cloud. It’s Friday already, it's the Sabbath again, and we tumble into its fissure, timequaked — the void of yet another Shabbos.

—Witz by Joshua Cohen

Do you hear what I hear

From The Free Press, Rockland, Maine, Aug. 12, 2010:

"Wind turbine noise is becoming a bigger issue in the U.S.," said Patrick Moriarty, an aeronautical engineer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. NREL belongs to the U.S. Department of Energy and is the primary research and development site for energy efficiency and renewable energy, including wind power. Moriarty is a senior engineer at the lab.

"It's been a big issue in Europe for a while because their wind farms have been up longer and they are in more densely populated areas," Moriarty said.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights

Wind power is a cynical game

Monique Aniel writes in the Bangor Daily News:

Wind power in Maine is a chess game, a chess game for those protected by multinational companies and allies in the current administration.

It is a game that took 20 years to design, a game that redefined new rules for state and federal agencies, reshaping their mandates of protecting America’s citizens and majestic lands into doing the exact opposite.

A game that puts people’s rights and public health behind those of the wind industry and simply ignored the complaints of those disturbed by the maddening whoosh of turbines.

Wind power is a game that turns electricity, which is already expensive, into a thrice absurdly expensive commodity hurting the pocketbook of residential and business customers alike. First in the purchasing cost, second in the cost of subsidies necessary to support the inefficiency and unreliability of this industry and third in the ratepayer-funded new electrical transmission structures required to accommodate the thermal stresses of spurting wind generation.

Wind power is a game that sacrifices America’s natural heritage for the profits of parasitic corporations adept at exploiting government policies, political correctness, guilty consciences of environmental organizations and fears about our environment.


wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights

Dayeinu

As gossip becomes rumor becomes rule of Law, then eventually discredited, dismissed, overturned, it’s difficult to know what to do besides stand aside, sleep our dreams, wake, walk, and whisper, monger our gossip into rumors, while letting the course of events inhuman enact whatever punishment it is that might appease the anger of a God; render unto and all that — let the Lord exact the AlmightyÆs retribution, take enough suffering to satisfy them both, then make wing for day.

—Witz by Joshua Cohen

Israel destroys Bedouin village

From CNN:

Police evicted 200 Bedouins from their homes in a southern Israeli village on Tuesday and demolished their dwellings, an act decried by residents who said they are on ancestral land.

The move occurred five miles north of Beer Sheva in a village called Al-Araqeeb, an enclave not recognized by the state of Israel.

Witnesses told CNN that the Israeli forces arrived at the village accompanied by busloads of civilians who cheered as the dwellings were demolished. They said armed police deployed with tear gas, water cannon, two helicopters and bulldozers.



Also read: "Ethnic cleansing in the Israeli Negev: The razing of a Bedouin village by Israeli police shows how far the state will go to achieve its aim of Judaising the Negev region" — Neve Gordon in The Guardian. Click here (more video, too).

If you have a house, you are safe.

Too early for morning, too late for regret, the air veined in lightning, the sun a clouded clot. Thunder. Gods are being born in the sky.

This is why we left the Garden and moved out to Siburbia, as we're always explaining, most of all to ourselves.

My boy, look around you, listen, sniff the air and taste the bread your mother bought, you're sure to understand: this is why we lit out, bringing only the candlesticks with us — why this dispersal to plot, this diaspora of the subdivision, such limitation of the eternal Development.

—Witz, by Joshua Cohen

Word

Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen. —Huey Long

(Via The Progressive Review)

Nimby wind developer

A New Zealand–based farmer who gave the go ahead for wind turbines to be built on moorland he owns above Rochdale [England] says he would be unhappy if a windfarm were built close to his home.

Jeremy Dearden, Lord of the Manor of Rochdale, told his local newspaper there had been a ‘NIMBY’ – Not In My Back Yard – aspect to the campaign against plans to build a dozen 400ft turbines at Crook Hill and is quoted as saying: “The visual pollution aspect of it … I can appreciate that.

“I have a pretty big view from my place here, and I don’t know that I’d like to see a lot of windmills.”

—Rochdale Observer, July 20, 2010

Israeli PM Netanyahu: I "stopped" Oslo peace process

Here is the transcript of the translated portion of the video posted earlier (click here):

Netanyahu: Turn off the camera so that we can elaborate on this.

Narrator: A few minutes later... the camera is turned on again and Netanyahu begins to speak without quotation marks and without masks

Netanyahu: Now we're beginning to understand the meaning of the slogan 'Yesha Zeikan Judea, Samaria, and Azza are here'

Netanyahu: Yesha is everywhere, what is the difference.

Netanyahu: What does Arafat want? He wants one big settlement [implies Palestinians see all of Israel as a settlement].

Woman: Yes that's what my daughter in law who came from England says [i.e. they, Palestinians, see Tel Aviv as a settlement also].

Netanyahu: Tel Aviv is also a settlement. From their point of view [Palestinians], our territorial waters are also theirs.

Netanyahu: The fact is that they want us in the sea. Over there... [gestures] in the distant water.

Netanyahu: The Arabs now are preparing for a campaign [or war] of terror, and they think that this will break us.

Netanyahu: The main thing is, first and foremost, to hit them hard.

Netanyahu: Not just one hit... but many painful, so that the price will be unbearable.

Netanyahu: The price is not unbearable, now.

Netanyahu: A total assault on the Palestinian Authority.

Netanyahu: To bring them to a state of panic that everything is collapsing.

Netanyahu: ...fear that everything will collapse... this is what we'll bring them to...

Woman interrupts: But wait a minute, at that point the whole world will say 'What are you occupiers?' Netanyahu: The world will say nothing. The world will say that we are defending ourselves.

Woman: Aren't you afraid of the world Bibi? Netanyahu: No

Netanyahu: Especially now, with America, I know what America is.

Netanyahu: America is a thing that can be easily moved. ...moved in the right direction.

Netanyahu: They [Americans] will not bother us.

Netanyahu: Let's suppose that they [Americans] will say something [to us - Israelis]... so they say it... [so what?]

Netanyahu: 80% of the Americans support us. It's absurd! We have such [great] support there! And we say... what shall we do with this [support]? Look, the other administration (that of Clinton) was pro-Palestinian in an extreme way. I was not afraid to maneuver there. I did not fear confrontation with Clinton. I was not afraid to clash with the U.N.

Netanyahu: As it is, I am paying the price in the international arena... So I might as well receive something of equal value in exchange.

Child: But never mind that. We gave them things, and we can’t take them back. Because they won’t give them back to us.

Netanyahu: [Gestures for child to let him speak] First of all, Oslo is a system [or package of things]. You're right, a) I do not know what can and cannot be taken back [from Palestinians]

Woman: He has political opinions, believe me.

Netanyahu: He's right.

Woman: He said such things to Arik Sharon that I told him: that’s not – that’ not a child’s opinion. The Oslo Accords are a disaster.

Netanyahu: Yes, I know that and you know that... but the people need to know

Woman: Right. But I thought that the prime minister did know, and that he’d do everything so that, somehow, not to do critical things, like handing over Hebron, that...

Netanyahu: What were the Oslo Accords? The Oslo Accords, which the Knesset signed, I was asked, before the elections: “Will you act according to them?” and I answered: “Yes, subject to reciprocity and limiting the withdrawals.

Netanyahu: But how do you limit the withdrawals? I interpret the accords in such a way that will enable me to stop this rush toward '67 borders [returning to armistice line]. [So...] how do we do it?

Narrator: The Oslo Accords stated at the time that Israel would gradually hand over territories to the Palestinians in three different stages, unless the territories in question had settlements or military sites. This is where Netanyahu found a loophole.

Netanyahu: No one said what defined military sites. Defined military sites, I said, were security zones. As far as I’m concerned, the Jordan Valley is a defined military site.

Woman: Right [laughs]. The Beit She’an settlements. The Beit She’an Valley.

Netanyahu: How can you tell. How can you tell? But then the question came up of just who would define what Defined Military Sites were. I received a letter – to me and to Arafat, at the same time... which said that Israel, and only Israel, would be the one to define what those are, the location of those military sites and their size. Now, they did not want to give me that letter, so I did not give the Hebron Agreement. I stopped the government meeting, I said: “I’m not signing.” Only when the letter came, in the course of the meeting, to me and to Arafat, only then did I sign the Hebron Agreement. Or rather, ratify it, it had already been signed. Why does this matter? Because at that moment I actually stopped the Oslo Accord.

Woman interrupts: And despite that, one of our own people, excuse me, who knew it was a swindle, and that we were going to commit suicide with the Oslo Accord, gives them – for example – Hebron. I never understood that.

Netanyahu: Indeed, Hebron hurts. It hurts. It’s the thing that hurts. One of the famous rabbis, whom I very much respect, a rabbi of Eretz Yisrael, he said to me: “What would your father say?” I went to my father. Do you know a little about my father’s position?

Woman: Yes

Child: No [laughs]

Woman: He'll read in a little while.

Netanyahu: He’s not exactly a lily-white dove, as they say. So my father heard the question and said: 'Tell the rabbi that your grandfather, Rabbi Natan Milikowski, was a smart Jew. Tell him it would be better to give two percent than to give a hundred percent. And that’s the choice here. You gave two percent and in that way you stopped the withdrawal. Instead of a hundred percent.'

Netanyahu: The trick is not to be there and break down. The trick is to be there and pay a minimal price.

Woman: May you say that as prime minister.

Netanyahu: In my estimation that will happen.

Netanyahu: I Deceived U.S. to Destroy Oslo Accords

... At the time [9 years ago] Mr Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Mr Sharon’s government as finance minister.

On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd”.

He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel’s harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats. ...

The video is now available with English subtitles by courtesy of the Institute for Middle East Understanding:

Bruno Vico and Finnegans Wake

From A Word in Your Ear: How & Why to Read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, by Eric Rosenbloom, pages 29–39:

Saints Giordano and Giambattista

Besides characters, there are a few informing spirits behind the work, most notably Giordano Bruno (of Nola) and Giambattista Vico. Giordano was a determinedly independent philosopher burned in Rome by the Inquisition in 1600 after 8 years of imprisonment. He spent his youth — 13 years — in the refuge of a Dominican monastery. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia characterized his thought as “incoherent materialistic pantheism.” From the Copernican solar system he went on to suggest that the sun is not the center of the universe, that creation is infinite, and further that every living thing contains an infinite universe. He said the earth, too, is a living being. Developing the work of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who said that in God contraries unite, Giordano stated that everything knows itself best in the struggle with its opposite, even creating its opposite for that purpose, or by finding it across time as well as space — or in a mirror — and that no living thing exists except that its opposite exists as well. He envisioned entities in constant flux, exchanging identities, moving farther from and closer to the unity of God. He also worked on a system of memory training, dabbled in alchemy, and believed that Jesus was a magician. He first fled Rome and then many other cities ahead of various church and university authorities, and spent a few very productive years in London as toast of the town. Back in Venice, he was betrayed by his host to the Holy Office. The Nolan’s wide-ranging intellect and varied life (much of it in exile) yet singleness of vision represented for Joyce the spiritual unity of character. As such, he is found in Dublin as the stationers Browne and Nolan (who published the edition of Chapman’s Homer that Joyce probably read as a child).

Giambattista Vico (1688–1744) was a linguist and legal historian who published his New Science, which he described as “a rational civil theology of divine providence,” in 1725 and went mad while perfecting it for further editions. Developing many of Giordano’s ideas, he too rejected the idea of “golden” ages; the New Science examines the course of nations out of Cyclopean family clearings, divine kings, and the offer of asylum for vassals, through alliance of the “noble” fathers in eternal reaction against the growing demands of the vassals, to a certain equity for all, descent into civil wars and anarchy, and salvation under a civil monarchy. The monarchy (i.e., empire) collapses, and, as divine kings rise again in its wake, barbarism returns and the nations are reborn. The cycle began after the universal flood with a flash of lightning and clap of thunder that drove brutish giants to recall their humanity and hide in shame in caves, there beginning the institutions of religion, marriage, and burial that are at the origin of every civilization. A recourse of the cycle began in Europe after the collapse of Rome.

By examining Greek and Roman history, language, mythology, and law, Vico described the course of nations in terms of the Egyptian ages of gods, of heros, and of people. Each age has a characteristic nature (poetic, heroic, human), reflected in its social organization (family, city, nation), natural law (divine, force, reason), government (theocratic, aristocratic, democratic), customs (religion, social ceremony, civic duty), reason (revelatory, political, personal), language and letters (mute gesture and heiroglyphics, heraldry and symbolism, popular speech and characters), and so on. The heroic age is transitional, transferring the rights and property of Adam to more of the people. It is marked by verbal scrupulousness, punctilious manners, violent struggles, suspicion and civil turbulence, and pura et pia bella (pure and pious war, such as the Crusades that ended the “dark” age of Europe’s ricorso).

Each age itself goes through a cycle of rising and falling, recovery and demise, ending with a poet — theological, heroic, vulgar — who culminates the age and ushers in the next by creating a new Jove.

Vico does not limit himself, however, to this 3-stage scheme, describing 5 and 6 stages as well for the unfolding of humanity through necessity, utility, comfort, pleasure, luxury, madness, and “waste of his substance.” His scheme can be described as a flux between divine kings defending the special status of the “heros” and a civil emperor protecting human equity. And just as Vico analogizes individual development to speculate about early humanity, Joyce sees a cycle of history in every person’s childhood, maturity, and decline.

The major part of the New Science establishes the thought of the divine and early heroic ages, their “poetic wisdom.” For example, as a nation’s world expanded, local names were re-used for farther places in the same direction. This (along with Dante’s finding that he and Florence were a central concern of the divine order in his Comedy) provides a model for Joyces’ Dublin-based universe (“they went doublin their mumper all the time” (p. 3)). Vico also discovers the true Homer as the collective voice of the Greek peoples, those of the northeast in the Iliad and centuries later those of the southwest in the Odyssey; this is akin to Joyce’s mystery of Finnegan and his incarnation in HCE, Here Comes Everybody.

Viconian Cycle

It is usually said that the four parts of Finnegans Wake follow a Viconian cycle of gods–heros–people–recourse. Indeed, “vicus of recirculation” is mentioned in the first sentence, there is a flood followed by thunder later on the first page, and thunder words continue to be heard (pp. 3, 23, 44, 90, 113, 257, 314, 332, 414, and 424 — nine of 100 letters each and one of 101 to total 1001 letters). The thunder, however, is like the audible babblings of a fitful sleeper threatening to rise, given form by responses from the players of the book that ensure he will stay down until they are ready, i.e., the book seems to be stuck in the pre-human state of atheist giants, in the Norse Ginnungagap, before (and after) time.

The four parts of Finnegans Wake do not follow the Egypto-Viconian ages. If anything, they go backwards, from the rollicking expansiveness of the first book (of the people), through the set-pieces of the second (the heroic family), to the self-worshipping Shaun of the third (the god-like son). Most problematic with the identification of Joyce’s parts with Vico’s ages is that the recourse (ricorso in Italian) is not a 4th age, but the return of the 1st. Instead of following Vico’s cycle, the four parts of Finnegans Wake may — as Samuel Becket claimed — represent the three institutions (religion, marriage, burial) that move humanity into the light of civilization and, finally, step into history. Kabbalistically, they may represent the archetypal, creative, formative, and material worlds in the process of getting from idea to the manifestation of dawn. They may be simply four different dreams through the deepening night. They may originate from the four parts of the Tristan & Isolde stories.

Joyce, as he does with all his sources, re-interprets Vico to fit his own scheme. He certainly uses Vico, but the heroic age is always in the present, the divine age always in the past, and the popular age in the future; and they are all present simultaneously. Finn Mac Cool with the goddess Brighid is of the divine age, HCE and ALP are of the heroic, and Shem, Shaun, and Issy the popular. Avatars of each of them appear in every age. Cycles spin off from multitudes of events and in myriad lives, overlapping and intertwining and confusing each other. The flood represents the cataclysmic end as well as the pause before going round again.

Nonetheless, Finnegans Wake is full of 3- and 4-term sequences; usually they represent the religion, marriage, and burial at the beginning of history, e.g., “Harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me” (p. 408; all 3 institutions are binding: by piety, shame, sense of immortality). Their regularity emphasizes the universality and circularity of human time that Vico stands for in the book. On page 590, the cycle appears very simply as “Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds.” And on page 452: “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.” This describes simultaneous opposite movement from a point of unity, joining briefly on the other side and continuing back to the origin. It describes a flux as much as a cycle, a “systomy dystomy” (p. 597) like the beating of the heart or the fall and rise of all human endeavors.

Joyce, although often referring people to Vico, also asserted he did not “believe” Vico’s science, “but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” He was perhaps using Vico to think about the subconscious mind in history more than about history itself. Vico provided the idea that mind and history are identical, and that language betrays their secrets. Thus all history could be revealed in a book of a sleeping soul, its crude projections redeemed in the unconscious mind that created them. (As Stephen Dedalus might have said in his dotage, “History is a nightmare I’m dreaming to wake.”)

Hugh Kenner has suggested that the dreamer does not want to wake up, that ALP is a widow resisting the conscious awareness that her husband — executed after the 1916 Easter uprising, he says — is no longer beside her. The hanging scaffold is suppressed by becoming Tim Finnegan’s building scaffold. Her tears become the river in which her dreams flow. The book of history assures us that life always rises from the ashes, but we also know that individual loss is unrecoverable. The incomplete sentence at the end of Finnegans Wake gives the reader a choice: Leave the book and return to life, or return to the book’s first words.

Joyce once likened Finnegans Wake to the Dark Night of the Soul, a treatise by shoeless and imprisoned Saint John of the Cross on the perfection of love and his poem Dark Night. That work is the fourth part of his Ascent of Mount Carmel, and similarly Finnegans Wake as a whole is a separate elaboration of Vico’s cycle through the nightly unrest of dream. As history courses like the rise, glory, and descent of the sun each day, an individual recourse occurs at night. The language of the book reflects this period of transition from — the flux between — decadence and a new beginning. There is a Vico road in Dalkey, a southern coastal suburb of Dublin.

Death and Rebirth

Joyce once imagined his book as the dead giant Finn Mac Cool lying by the Liffey (where swam the salmon, his totem animal) watching history — his and the world’s, the past and the future — flowing through him. This life-in-death dream becomes a sacramental process of rebirth. At Finnegan’s wake, Finnegans wake.

One should also remember that Joyce nearly joined the Jesuits, and that the Christian ceremonial cycle continued to shape his imagination. The mystery of the trinity, for example, three persons (multiplicity) representing unity, is very much in the spirit of Finnegans Wake. At its best, Christianity has been a great syncretizer and humanizer of older myths. For example, the stations of the cross represent a sacrifice ritual in terms of a human procession, the paschal drama of the rise and fall and rise again of human history. At its worst, it is a great beast devouring, Shaun-like, everything before it in the name of salvation after death.

The Christian sacramental meal, the eucharist, the host, is often present. Hoc est corpus (“This is the body”) is another manifestation of HCE (“Here Comes Everybody”; but also High Church of England). As host (“victim” in Latin) at his pub, HCE serves and is mocked by his 12 customers. In Vico, the earlier meaning of host is alien, thief, violator of the clearing — an enemy of the people who is sacrificed in their name. The first cities were identified with the altars that were in the fields, where, for example, Cain slew the more primitive Abel and Romulus slew Remus who jumped over the just-plowed boundaries. It is alienated Hosty who writes “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” (pp. 44–47) against the outsider HCE.

Vico called the course of nations a history of piety, and in their recourse they were guided by Christianity, a more human religion. For Joyce, Christianity is more prominent than other religious and mythological systems because it is the one he knew intimately. But the eucharistic meal — the renewing sacrifice — fits the pattern described in James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough of killing and eating a divine king. And it is connected with the Jewish feast of tabernacles, or Succoth, as a turning of the year. Although it is now only theater, the original barbaric act (“He’ll want all his fury gutmurdherers to redress him.” (p. 617)) still erupts into history and continues to reverberate in the human unconscious.

Humanism

My use of the term is not philosophically rigorous, but Vico and Giordano are important also as humanists. Giordano’s love of God was such that he loved nature as it is. He showed that the infinitude of the divine is within every element and creature of nature and every human being. Vico showed that history was not a matter of destiny or fate, but the operation of divine providence in the human mind; he insisted that “the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”

Bolton Valley's wind turbine underperforming

Promises, promises.

Northern Power Systems says that Bolton Valley ski area's "Northwind 100 [kW] will produce about 300,000 kilowatt-hours per year, the equivalent of the electricity consumed by 40-45 Vermont homes."

Since October 2009, however, it had produced only 114,309 kWh as of 10:00 p.m. on July 9, 2010. At that time, it was producing power at the rate of less than 7 kW, equivalent to the average load of 8 Vermont homes.

Too bad for the other 32!

Oakland stevedores refuse to cross picket line to unload Israeli ship

As reported by Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (click the title of this post for the complete article):

From 5:30 am to 9:30 am, over 800 labor and community activists held a militant and spirited protest in front of four gates of the Stevedore Services of America, with people chanting non-stop, “Free, Free Palestine, Don’t Cross the Picket Line,” and “An injury to one is an injury to all, bring down the apartheid wall.”

Citing the health and safety provisions of their contract, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers refused to cross the picketline to report for duty. ...

This week the San Francisco Labor Council and Alameda Labor Council passed resounding resolutions denouncing Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Both councils sent out public notices of the dock action.

The ILWU has a proud history of extending its solidarity to struggling peoples the world over. In 1984, as the Black masses of South Africa were engaged in an intense struggle against South African apartheid, the ILWU refused for a record-setting 10 days to unload cargo from the South African “Ned Lloyd” ship. Despite million-dollar fines imposed on the union, the longshore workers held strong, providing a tremendous boost to the anti-apartheid movement.

Today’s Oakland action, in the sixth largest port in the United States, is the first of several protests and work stoppages planned around the world, including Norway, Sweden and South Africa. It is sure to inspire others to do the same.

The goal is for a 24-hour shutdown of the docks where the Israeli ship is docked, so the protest is planned again for 4:30 p.m. Click here for details of the 4:30 p.m. protest.

Competition is for losers

COMPETITION: An event in which there are more losers than winners. Otherwise it's not a competition. A society based on competition is therefore primarily a society based on losers.

— John Ralston Saul

Simon Wiesenthal Center wants to dig up ancient Muslim cemetery to build "museum of tolerance"

Click the title of this post to read the story.

Soccer balls met with tear gas

In Bili’in, Palestine, protesters played a soccer game near the Israeli barrier that divides the village, kicking several balls over the barbed-wire fence onto land still owned by villagers.

The Israeli soldiers fired several tear-gas canisters and then arrested six journalists, continuing to detain two of them. While people worked to put out the fires in an olive grove caused by the tear-gas bombs, soldiers fired on them.

Click on the title of this post for the story from Ma'an News.

Video from the Mavi Marmara

Israeli Attack on the Mavi Marmara // Raw Footage from Cultures of Resistance

On the night of Sunday, May 30, showing a terrifying disregard for human life, Israeli naval forces surrounded and boarded ships sailing to bring humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. On the largest ship, the Mavi Marmara, Israeli commandos opened fire on civilian passengers, killing at least 9 passengers and wounding dozens more. Others are still missing. The final death toll is yet to be determined. Cultures of Resistance director Iara Lee was aboard the besieged ship and has since returned home safely.

Despite the Israeli government's thorough efforts to confiscate all footage taken during the attack, Iara Lee was able to retain some of her recordings. Above is raw footage from the moments leading up to and during the Israeli commandos' assault on the Mavi Marmara.

15 min. version:

Video of passengers attacking Israeli soldiers appears to be fake

Some astute observers of the Israeli video showing the passengers of the Mavi Marmara fighting back in the assault on their ship noticed that details of the ship in the video didn't quite fit those of the Mavi Marmara. Most obviously, the name of the ship should be prominent on the side of the deck where the filmed events are taking place, but it is absent in the Israeli video. (Click here for a ship-spotting photo of the Mavi Marmara and here as it was prepared for the flotilla) Click the title of this post to see comparisons of the ship in the video and the actual Mavi Marmara.

This is not to say that a small group of activists did indeed resist, injure, and capture some of the Israeli soldiers attacking their ship. But at least nine activists were killed (several are still missing). (Click here for video of soldiers beating and then shooting 19-year-old Furkan Dogan.) Whereas the injured soldiers were cared for and protected from further harm by the ship's passengers.

Children of All Ages Delighted by Enslavement of Topsy The Elephant

TUCSON, AZ—Cheers, laughter, and applause filled the big top tent at the Ringling Bros. Circus Saturday as children of all ages were captivated by the savage enslavement of Topsy the elephant. ...

[click on the title of this post to read complete story]

animal rights

Mrs Moonan, Nuvoletta, Cadwan, Cadwallon and Cadwalloner

Also residing under Mrs. Matchless's roof were the boarders of the establishment, of whom there were four - or five, depending on how one viewed that fifth lodger, who was something of a special case.

There was a Miss Rivers, a young woman of character and refinement. She had russety locks, a creamy face given to blushing, and quenched-looking bashful eyes, like a Little Bo-Peep in a nursery-book. Miss Rivers was partial to all things tortoiseshell - tortoiseshell combs, tortoiseshell spectacles, tortoiseshell hair-brushes, tortoiseshell handbags, tortoiseshell cats. She could have been a walking testimonial to the tortoiseshell trade, but she hardly ever went out. She had a small independence worth £120 per annum, with which she devoted herself to the consumption of novels and exotic teas.

There was a Mr. Kix, a narrow, peevish, old-maidish sort of mustached bachelor. Mr. Kix was a man who looked always on the worst side of things, a grouch who thought the world a very dark place and the town little better. And there was his exact opposite, Mr. Lovibond, a plump, pink, full-bodied personage with a clean chin, a ready smile, and a bald head. Mr. Lovibond, too, was a bachelor - irretrievably single - but unlike the grouchy Kix he was always happy, hardly ever peevish, certainly never old-maidish, which annoyed Mr. Kix no end. Despite their differences the two were often in each other's company, the better to remind the other of his imperfections. Both subsisted on the income from annuities, which made them easy and spared them the trouble and inconvenience of engaging in the work-a-day world.

Mr. Frobisher was the fourth lodger in the house. He was a dark man of some attraction, in a rangy, cagey sort of way. His age was no more than five-and-twenty, and he passed most of his time out of doors, though as to the nature of his avocation no one had the least clue. Like Mr. Kix, he had a mustache, one which well suited his flowing hair, lustrous eyes, and lean good looks. The youthful Frobisher was a newcomer to the house, and had yet to accommodate his habits to that regimen of predictability which guided the lives of his fellow inmates.

The special case to which we have made mention was the fifth and final boarder. This was a Miss O'Guppy, who unlike the regular boarders resided in the attic rooms with the servants. She was rather a quaint young woman, very delicate of face and limb, with a nervous constitution that was - not to put too fine a point on it - rather delicate, too. In short, there were some who thought her a little unhinged.

Miss O'Guppy was an accomplished violinist, or fiddler as she liked to say. She was in great demand in the front-parlor, where she often accompanied Miss Rivers at the cottage piano. An habitual reader of the cards, she believed she could divine the future and predict the fortunes of those who consulted her in this capacity. More than this she saw and heard things only she could see and hear, and claimed to remember what she called a "morning time" before her own birth, a sort of earlier life unlinked to her present earthly existence - which was partly the basis for some persons' thinking her mad.

—Strange Cargo, by Jeffrey Barlough

Jewish boat to Gaza is sailing soon

(Press Release, via palestinelibre)

In a harbour in the Mediterranean a small vessel is waiting for a special mission. She will be sailing to Gaza during the second half of July. In order to avoid sabotage, the exact date and name of the port of departure will be announced only shortly before her launch.

"Our purpose is to call an end to the siege of Gaza, to this illegal collective punishment of the whole civilian population. Our boat is small, so our donations can only be symbolic: we are taking school bags, filled with donations from German school children, musical instruments and art materials", says Kate Leiterer, one of the organizers. "For the medical services we are taking essential medicines and small medical equipment, and for the fishermen we are taking nets and tackle. We are liaising with the medical, educational and mental health services in Gaza."

"In attacking the Freedom Flotilla, Israel has once again demonstrated to the world a heinous brutality. But I know that there are very many Israelis who compassionately and bravely campaign for a just peace. With broadcasting journalists from mainstream television programmes accompanying our boat, Israel will have a great chance to show the world that there is another way, a way of courage rather than fear, a way of hope rather than hate", says Edith Lutz, organizer and passenger on the "Jewish boat".

The "Jüdische Stimme" ("Jewish Voice" for a Just Peace in the Near East), along with her friends of EJJP (European Jews for a Just Peace in the Near East) and Jews for Justice For Palestinians (UK) are sending a call to the leaders of the world: help Israel find her way back to reason, to a sense of humanity and a life without fear. "Jewish Voice" expects the political leaders of Israel and the world to guarantee a safe passage for the small vessel to Gaza, thus helping to form a bridge towards peace.

Contacts:
Edith Lutz, EJJP-Germany +15204519740
Kate Katzenstein-Leiterer, EJJP-Germany +1629660472472
Glyn Secker, Jews for Justice for Palestinians (UK) +7917098599

[Also: Click here to sign the petition at AVAAZ.org for an immediate, international investigation into the flotilla assault, full accountability for those responsible, and the lifting of the Gaza blockade.]

human rights

Israel's campaign against peace and peaceful resistance

Two essays:

"The myth of Israeli morality", by Lamis Andoni

"The real motive behind the Gaza flotilla attack", by Rannie Amiri

human rights