Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

«Apr 2015»
SMTWTFS
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
 

In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

April 7, 2015

Save us from grown-up children

Jeff Bezos is known for refusing to suffer fools. His reported put-downs include: "Why are you wasting my life?," "Are you lazy or just incompetent?" and "I'm sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?" Imagine someone as impatient as the Amazon CEO being forced to move at the speed of bureaucrats.

Thus a columnist in the Wall Street Journal defends and promotes the man who wants to deliver 85% of Amazon parcels using drones (that's how many weigh less than five pounds). What makes these juvenile delinquents think that the rest of us want miniature flying machines whizzing around our neighborhoods a few feet above our heads? How can these people be stopped?

Once a year or so we read about people getting killed on a movie set, often involving a helicopter. It might be safer to use drones when making movies whenever possible. How many movies are made each year, and how many parcels does Amazon deliver each day?

Once a month or so in the USA nowadays a man is killed (it's always a man) walking down railroad tracks listening to music with earphones, so that he can't hear the train coming. Our stupidity beggars belief. 

Come to think of it, our politicians are usually men, too.

 

April 7, 2015

Is it still okay if I get up in the morning?

Indiana's Religious Freedom Act should be unnecessary under our constitutional protections. Discrimination is unconsitutional under the 14th Amendment. Forced participation against one's conviction is equally unconsitutional under the First Amendment. These should encourage reasonable people to accommodate one another.
So writes a reader to the Wall Street Journal. Most of the readers of that paper are reasonable people. The problem is our stupid and greedy politicians. Each year in the legislatures, local, state and federal, hundreds, maybe thousands of laws are passed, a great many of them unnecessary, by politicians trying to show us how effective they are, or simply sucking up to their base. (The base in Indiana seems to be pale, male and stale. There are many meanings of the word "base".)

As I keep saying, I am a liberal, a Democrat and a union member. Yet I also say to you that our democracy is doomed unless we remember how to allow each other simply to be.

 

April 7, 2015

I thought so

David Barash reviewing a book in last weekend's Wall Street Journal:

There is a single chunk of DNA that dooms its carriers to shorter life spans and a greater probability of death due to accidents, as well as increased risk of being not only violent but also a victim of violence. More than 90% of people who run afoul of the law and are currently incarcerated carry this gene [...] It’s a tough road for those unfortunates who are forced, through no fault of their own, to deal with such defective genetics: There is no cure. The SRY gene is located on the Y chromosome, and if you haven’t already guessed, it’s the one that makes its carrier male.

SRY comes from “Sex determining Region of the Y chromosome.” The book is Women After All, by Melvin Konner, who makes a powerful case that in every way that matters, women are superior to men. Furthermore, it is becoming more and more evident in our societies that "their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence make them biologically superior. They live longer, have lower mortality at all ages, are more resistant to most categories of disease, and are much less likely to suffer brain disorders that lead to disruptive and even destructive behavior."

Dr. Konner is no crank, but a professor of anthropology at Emory University.  In making his case, he explores evolutionary biology, ethology, neurobiology, embryology and history, with digressions into economics and politics. Barash writes, quoting Konner:

Let’s face it: Men are responsible for much more than their share of the world’s wars, drug abuse and sexual misbehavior. To be sure, men have also been responsible for many of the good—even great—aspects of civilization, but this may be because they grant themselves more influence and opportunity in this regard. “Life on this planet isn’t threatened by women’s tears; nor does that brimming salty fluid cause poverty, drain public coffers, ruin reputations, impose forced intimacies, slay children, torture helpless people, or reduce cities to rubble. These disasters are literally man-made.” Indeed, if we were to magically do away with male-initiated violence, we would pretty much do away with violence altogether. (Of 80 mass killings in the U.S. involving guns between 1984 and 2014, men perpetrated 78.)

There have been plenty of books about feminism and books about the evolutionary biology, but this one combines the two. “Contrary to all received wisdom,” writes Konner, “women are more logical and less emotional than men...."

But I do not know whether they will be taking over soon enough to save us.

 

April 7, 2015

Archeology

I am still digging around in the detritus of having moved 2000 miles across country. Now that I am ensconced in what I shall henceforth call my shedquarters, with a view of Ethne's new garden out the window, I am almost sorted out, but not quite. Yesterday I discovered bits and pieces in my bedside table-drawer that needed relocation. And I have pawed through a huge pile of clippings and rubbish that the movers scooped off my desk in Pennsylvania last October, and which I haven't looked at since. Among other things, it is evident that if I want to make a little improvement or update to my Encyclopedia I should do so immediately, rather than accumulating the clippings; but nobody is paying me to do that, so what the hell...

In the pile of stuff I discovered three issues of the Times Literary Supplement, which had ended up there because they had given me ideas for blog entries which were never carried out. Writing in this space is another thing I should do when I think of something, rather than letting it go; but more seriously, the older I get the more discouraged.

In an issue from January 17 2014, Stefan Collini was reviewing two books. The headline and strap were "For the common good: Despite differences of period and class, R.H. Tawney and Richard Hoggart shared a belief in the corrosive power of unchecked market forces." I had circled parts of certain paragraphs:

...in a "share-owning democracy", ordinary citizens are besieged with injunctions to "safeguard your family's future" by placing bets in the global casino that is the stock market...focus was on how English society had allowed the unchecked pursuit of individual profit to become the overriding social goal...

And there was much more. Tawney was born in India, a product of Empire, became an economic historian and died in 1962; Hoggart was born into the working class in Leeds in 1918, became a cultural and literary critic, and died in 2014. What they had in common, Collini writes, was an "affirmation of certain deep, powerful truths".

Profit is a hollow and unworthy goal. The unchecked imperatives of the market deform and destroy human lives. The only force capable of resisting the destructive power of capital is the collective will to give expression to a common good through legal means -- or in other words, the state [...] they both recognised the obligation to "do" politics, to engage in public life, to work through institutions. 

Tawney could have written more history, and Hoggart more criticism, but they felt it their civic duty to chair committees and run institutions. It was a long book review and deeply moving, but I don't remember what I was going to combine it with a year ago, what point I was going to try to make. And now a year later I wonder if here is any hope for any sort of idealism.

Capitalism is all we have. It has created a world in which I can send out these words which will likely live forever, even if not many read them; and in which I can share beautiful music with like-minded friends all over the world every day. But we also see men who have grown unbelievably rich raping the environment and building casinos and who are buying politicians by the bagful, and both parties being suffocated by lobbyists in Washington, so that our boom-and-bust cycles will continue while the nation's moral and physical infrastructures fester.

And as for foreign policy, forget it; Eisenhower deposed the legitimate democratically elected leaders in other countries; Nixon committed treason by secretly interfering with the Johnson administration's negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris, so that the extraordinarily decent Hubert Humphrey lost that election and the war went on until a few thousand more young Americans had died for nothing. Reagan committed treason by secretly interfering in the Carter administration's negotiations with Iran over the embassy hostages, empowering the student radicals who had trashed international law and who are still in power there today, primitive misogynistic grownups who now want to become a nuclear power. And today's Republican Congress has committed treason by trying to interfere with Obama's negotiations in Iran. And while we can at least be grateful that Obama hasn't started any wars, he does not inspire confidence on the international front, going too far in the other direction by doing very little while Rome burns. 

All of which is my latest excuse for not writing here very often. Why bother? 

 

April 7, 2015

Long Live Lady

On Billie Holiday's 100th birthday, I'm listening tonight to Lady and Lester Young: 'This Year's Kisses', 'Mean To Me', 'Back In My Own Back Yard', 'I'll Never Be The Same' -- imperishable masterpieces from almost 80 years ago. She was just a kid, but knew what to do with a song, and Prez was the other half of her. May she live forever.

The unsigned note on the Columbia Legacy CD I'm listening to refers to "pianist-arranger Teddy WIlson, who served as leader on many of Holiday's record dates". They were not her dates; they were his. But never mind; the records were made quickly and cheaply for jukeboxes, and nobody dreamed they would still be selling in the next century.