A Bed In Sheol

 Twilight comes early.

Sunset choked to death on clouds of ash. 

"Eat the fruit of this tree

and you shall be like God" -

but the idol of our godhood,

kindled by that pyrotechnic tree,

burns now to the ground.

I live in a city which hasn't seen blue sky or stars now for the last five days and counting.  I have been inside my house for about the same amount of time, and during that time there has not been a day in which the air has not smelled like smoke.  I should have gotten a lot done in that time (including house cleaning and repair, writing a blog post, and other business), but instead I must confess that I've been somewhat glued to websites like this:

• Portland Oregon Weather Underground
• Oregon Department of Environmental Quality - Air Quality Monitoring Data
• Oregon Smoke Information
• AirNow Interactive Map of Air Quality
• Smoke Forecast - FireSmoke.ca

Call my preoccupation a fetish, but as Samuel Johnson once said, "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."  This year is beginning to feel to me like the run-up to a mass execution.  First, the stupidity and malignancy of Donald Trump.  Then the coronavirus.  Then the emergence of a blatant, murderous racism reminiscent of the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the very public murders of unarmed African-Americans.  Now massive wildfires for those of us in the American West, and a very active hurricane season for those on the eastern and southern seaboards of the United States.

A few facts about the wildfires.  First, for the last three days, the smoke has produced widespread areas of pollution levels that have been designated as hazardous by State and Federal agencies.  That's "hazardous", as in, "Any exposure to the air, even for a few minutes, can lead to serious health effects on everybody. Avoid outdoor activities."  Second, the three biggest pollutants of concern have been smoke particles with diameters of 2.5 microns and below, smoke particles in the 10 micron range, and carbon monoxide.  The presence of carbon monoxide is especially troubling because CO is only produced when there is not enough oxygen present to ensure at least a stoichiometric mix of oxygen and carbon-bearing materials.

Many of the fires have been caused by downed power lines or by lightning.  Many of the fires have also been caused by typical human activity.  But the fires have also become yet another occasion for political posturing by the American Right.  Trump claims that this season's wildfires are the result of "poor forest management," but the facts don't support him.  Many of the wildfires that have started this fall did not originate in forests.  And there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the worsening fire seasons worldwide are a consequence of manmade climate change.  Much of that evidence was compiled over the last two or three decades by national laboratories funded by the United States Government.  Names like Livermore, Berkeley, and Argonne come to mind.  These national laboratories are now the victims of Trump budget cuts.  Therefore I expect that like the coronavirus, or deteriorating social relations, or fraying social safety nets, or a declining currency, Trump will willfully and deliberately botch his response to this exigency also.

And that had me thinking at 4 am this morning.  You see, these things don't just impact me as a series of facts that fit into an analysis.  (Even though I'm rather strongly geeky!)  I am thinking of how last Monday I enjoyed an evening walk through the neighborhood and spent time in my backyard watering the veggies and playing my guitar beneath a clear twilight sky with two cats at my feet.  That was my chill time, my therapy which enabled me to cope with a world that has recently become chaotic because of rich and powerful doofuses who want to Make Themselves Great Again due to long-standing inferiority complexes.  Trump is such a doofus.  But I thought I had learned to take him in stride even as I saw through his attempts to cause chaos.  Now the consequences of his doofus chaos have flared up in new and unexpected ways - much like the re-emergence of flames from a fire that was not properly put out.  And it's not just his doofus-ness.  It's his constant gaslighting, his absolute refusal to tell the truth about anything, lest he lose what he perceives to be the advantage of pulling the wool over the eyes of those who listen to him.  It's getting to be a bit much.

So because I had a hard time sleeping at 4 am, I was searching the Web for stories of Americans who have left the country for good within the last few years.  And I was checking out what it would take for me to emigrate to Canada.  (I found out that I'm just a few points shy of the minimum needed for a technical professional to be allowed to emigrate.)  But then I thought of the people I'd be abandoning if I did such a thing.  And I thought of how even the world's best places did not start out that way.  They were built by the sweat equity of those who were willing to sacrifice to try to construct a righteous order in the midst of chaos.  I also thought of how some of the world's best places are under attack from those who want to impose their chaos on what was a righteous order.  Becoming a refugee is a temporary protection at best.  And one can't be a refugee forever.

But trying to build or defend a righteous order in the midst of the chaos that is the United States just now seems to me like trying to make my bed in Sheol.  (Or if you like the King James Bible, it seems like trying to make my bed in hell.)  At least the Good Book promises that though I make my bed in such places, there is One Who is with me.  And the art of making a sleep-worthy bed in unpleasant places will become a valuable skill as the great societies of the world run up against the reality of resource constraints and as their leaders grapple with the involuntary ending of their dreams of godhood.  On that note, I'm going to lie down and try to take a nap.

P.S. Here and here are a couple of links to some interesting articles on wildfires and climate change.

The Omar Wasow Re-Election Strategy

I don't watch or listen to news much these days.  (Even I have limits on how much garbage I can swallow in a day!)  So it was surprising to me to hear that the entire city of Portland, Oregon is "entirely ablaze all the time."  Thus says our orange-haired President of the United States, a man who I am sure has never told a lie in his life... Question to self: if Portland is entirely ablaze, why did I not see dozens of fire engines trying to put out the blaze as I went to the grocery store today?  Why was the store not on fire?  Why did I sleep so well last night?

Yet there have been fires - deliberately set by rioters - oops, I mean, "violent protesters" recently.  These "protesters" have also made appearances in several cities throughout the United States, as I am sure you are all aware.  Their modus operandi seems to be to cause as much provocative, polarizing property destruction (including tearing down statues and setting fires) and cause as much provocative, polarizing unrest as possible.  Some of them are no longer even pretending to be associated with Black Lives Matter or with the struggle against racism.  According to one source, the Antifa has made its reappearance among these "protestors".  Note that according to some sources, these who are causing property damage are White.  (Additional note: I have deleted the source I originally cited.  He has since turned out to be unreliable.)

Let me suggest that it's useless telling these people that they are actually helping the cause of Donald Trump as he seeks to demonize those who are opposed to him.  They already know that - which is why they are doing what they are doing.  Their tactics are reminiscent of the staged battles between the Antifa and various right-wing groups in Portland and elsewhere during the 2018 mid-term elections.  They are also reminiscent of vandalism perpetrated by Russian agents in Ukraine.

Why does Trump think that injecting violence into American society (and especially into the protests against racist oppression) will help him?  (For yes, there is overwhelming evidence that people aligned with Trump are behind the injection of violence into American politics in 2020!)  Let me suggest that even though Trump probably doesn't read anything much more complicated than coloring books, he has advisors who do know how to read.  And I'm sure that they have heard by now of a man named Omar Wasow.  Mr. Wasow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton.  He also did a study which is by now quite famous among students of strategic nonviolent resistance.  That study showed that the 1960's civil rights struggle achieved its most impressive gains when it was most strongly non-violent.  That study also showed that when protests began to become violent, the violence actually hurt the cause of the protestors and helped Richard Nixon to win the 1968 presidential election.

And that is Mr. Trump's only hope of a road to a legitimate election victory this November.  You see, even dictators can learn new tricks (or at least try to recycle old ones), as Will Dobson documented in his book titled, The Dictator's Learning Curve.  And for the last ten years or so, dictators around the world have been staying up all night studying how to thwart strategic nonviolent resistance.  By the way, I highly respect Dr. Wasow and his work.  It's a shame to see his work put to evil uses.  

But will Trump's gambit work?  Let me suggest that in 1968, there was not a coronavirus pandemic or its resulting economic fallout to deal with.  Let me also suggest that Slobodan Milosevic lost the election which deposed him even though he also resorted to dirty tricks.  And lastly, let me note that the Democrats flipped the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.  Also, Dr. Wasow has two pieces of very good news.  First, the current data show that 93 percent of anti-racism protests this year have been peaceful and nondestructive, according to a recent Washington Post article.  Second, Trump's gambit does not appear to be working, according to additional recent articles in the Washington Post and on NPR.

Narcissism Vs. Democracy

I have a project which is due on Tuesday of next week, so today's post will be short.  But I want to note two things which follow from last week's post.  First, I want to repeat what I said about the role of structure in effective social movement organizations:

In order for a social movement organization to succeed in achieving any goal, therefore, it must have structure.  For the social movement organization to achieve democratic goals, the structure must be both explicit and formal, and it must be formally ratified by each of its members.  That structure must also include a formal, explicit, democratic method of decision-making.  The creation of such democratic structures is not a spontaneous process, but is deliberate, conscious, and goal-oriented.  Movement organizers who create such structures create movements that actually accomplish things.  "Movements" which don't are like an amoeba having a seizure.

To this paragraph I would add that the members of a democratically run social movement organization must be willing to be bound by the results of the democratic method of decision-making.   And this willingness to be bound by the results of democracy provides a key to the motivations behind those people in high places who have launched successful attacks against democracy both in the United States and elsewhere.

For those who have grown used to life as dominant power-holders and whose lives of privilege have produced an unhealthy narcissism tend to regard the emergence of a diverse population as an existential threat - especially if the members of that population have equal access via democracy to the power held by the dominant.  To guard against that threat, the dominant must damage or cripple democracy - through such things as the revocation of voter protections, the sabotaging of national postal services, the selective disenfranchisement of dark-skinned ethnic minorities, and other means.  This is why the American Right has been engaged since 2008 in what appears to be a project to tear the United States apart.  For even when the dominant remove the threat of the powerless by denying the powerless access to pre-established structures of democracy, this is no security to the dominant.  Instead, what is very likely is that the dominant will themselves self-destruct by means of in-fighting among the members of the elite, each of whom is saying to himself or herself that it is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.  These elite members will be unwilling to be bound by the results of anyone else's decision-making - even if the decisions are made by the other elites.

Second, in regard to the weakness of "leaderless" movements, here are two more articles to chew on:

• "Analysis: Do 'leaderless' revolts contain seeds of own failure?", Reuters
•  "What Successful Movements Have In Common," Harvard Business Review

Spontaneous? Or Successful?

Among the many essays and opinion pieces that have been written for major media publications during the last few months, quite a few have quite understandably focused on the mass protests that have occurred in the wake of several high-profile police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans in this country.  These echo articles written within the last two years about the strength of "leaderless protests" worldwide.  Check out the short list below:

• "The George Floyd Protests Show Leaderless Movements Are The Future of Politics," Slate Magazine
• "Today’s Activism: Spontaneous, Leaderless, but Not Without Aim," New York Times
• "The Common Element Uniting Worldwide Protests," The Atlantic
• "Leaderless rebellion: how social media enables global protests," Financial Times

Note that the Slate article heralded such protests as "the future of politics."  If such protests are seen by the powerless as "the future of politics," then let me just suggest at the outset that the powerful and the dominant have nothing at all to fear from the powerless.

As long-time readers of my blog know, I have been touting the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance for the last three-and-a-half years.  But I find lately that I need to add a cautionary note to my praise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For those who want to engage in resistance nowadays seem to be guilty over and over again of the same two basic mistakes repeated ad nauseam.  The first mistake is to assume that strategic nonviolent resistance consists solely of protest marches and rallies.  The second mistake is what I want to tackle in today's post.

Let me take you first to a TED talk given by Zeynep Tufekci, titled, "How The Internet Has Made Social Change Easy to Organize, Hard to Win."  Ms. Tufekci is a sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina, so she's no lightweight.  In her TED talk, she examines the wealth of "leaderless," spontaneous protest "movements" which erupted throughout the world from the 1990's to the mid 2010's.  She noted that these "movements" (of which the Occupy "movement" was a prime example) scaled up very quickly from one or two people to many mass gatherings of tens of thousands of people.  However, they achieved no long-lasting gains.  I think it safe to say that the Occupy "movement," for example, did not accomplish a bloody thing.  Why is this?

Zeynep suggests that "movements" which are easily and hastily thrown together by means of a few mouse clicks are largely composed of people who have not learned to work together and to make decisions together as a collective unit.  Therefore, they are unable to form a coherent strategy or to adjust their tactics to overcome strategic challenges that arise in their struggle.  Thus they have no staying power.  In another place (I can't remember where just now), I believe Ms. Tufekci likens modern, easily thrown-together "movements" to a car that can accelerate quickly to high speed, yet has no steering wheel.  She compares the protest rallies of these modern movements with the March on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech.  The 1963 march was not just a march, but it was a signal to dominant power-holders of the capacity of a large number of people to act collectively in a coherent, long-term, strategic manner.  It served as such a signal precisely because back before the Internet, organizing things like a march, a strike, or a boycott required people to work together for a long time and to figure out how to work together long-term without falling apart.  It required people to create formal processes for deciding on goals, for analyzing power, and for mapping and implementing strategy.  These were not spontaneous processes.  Today's protests seem at times to me to be more like a bunch of kids throwing a spontaneous open-air tantrum!

So let's talk about learning to work together and make decisions together as a collective unit.  And let's begin with a question, namely this: how are decisions made in a group of people who want to achieve something?  Or in other words, can there ever really be such a thing as a "leaderless" movement?  To answer that question, we must turn to another sharp woman, feminist scholar Jo Freeman.  Ms. Freeman wrote an essay titled, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."  Her essay, which was written in 1970, shows that leaderless, structureless groups have long appealed to those who are trying to escape from systems of domination and oppression.  However, Ms. Freeman shows that such leaderless, structureless groups quickly become neither leaderless nor structureless.  What happens instead is that in place of formal, universally acknowledged means of making decisions, an informal network of decision-making always springs up.  And this informal structure is always created by those members of the group who are the most dominant - either in personality or in wealth of pre-existing resources.  These dominant members become the group's "elites."  Once that happens, bam!  You're right back in a structure over which you have no control unless you're one of the "elites."

In order for a social movement organization to succeed in achieving any goal, therefore, it must have structure.  For the social movement organization to achieve democratic goals, the structure must be both explicit and formal, and it must be formally ratified by each of its members.  That structure must also include a formal, explicit, democratic method of decision-making.  The creation of such democratic structures is not a spontaneous process, but is deliberate, conscious, and goal-oriented.  Movement organizers who create such structures create movements that actually accomplish things.  "Movements" which don't are like an amoeba having a seizure.

And this is why I don't hold out much hope of lasting change from many of the protests now taking place, not only against oppressive White supremacy, but against many other evils.  Nor will I have hope until the organizers of such resistance actions begin to grow up, to get over their Millennial sense of entitlement to their opinions, to stop trying to re-create Woodstock, and to start reading some books.  Because their "movements" are "leaderless" and "structureless", they can be very easily co-opted and hijacked (for instance, by agents provocateurs who cause violence at protests), and their message can be derailed by their enemies - enemies who have both leaders and formal structures and who therefore succeed.  We have already seen this happen.

Let me leave you with a quote from Srdja Popovic, former leader of the OTPOR! movement which successfully overthrew Slobodan Milosevic.  Srdja said, "There are only two kinds of political movements in history: they're either spontaneous or successful." Chew on that.

The Fall of Liberty's Libertine

Libertine: a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.

- from Dictionary.com (Emphasis mine.)

I am trying to read a technical document just now.  It's for a proposal I'm putting together for an environmental project, and it is a very dry document.  Dry documents tend to make me sleepy, so I indulged myself in a quick bit of Web surfing to distract me from my overwhelming desire to snooze.  (Yes, I know - a better tactic would be to drop and do 25 push-ups.  I'll try that next time.)

My web surfing (when I indulge in it, which is not often) frequently takes me to a consideration of the 1980's, which were a high point for the Republican Party and for the freak show known as white American evangelicalism.  So I googled "evangelical scandals 1980's pastors" and came across a surprising bit of present-day news.  In case you didn't know it, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Jerry Falwell who founded and led the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's, resigned this week from Liberty University.  His resignation was not voluntary, but came as a result of the revelation of his involvement in a few sex scandals, and the revelation of a photo of himself and a woman who is not his wife posing together with their zippers down.  (Literally!)

It is no secret that the junior Falwell is racist.  It is also no secret that he has been a rabid supporter of another serial adulterer named Donald John Trump.  Falwell is like many white Evangelical mouthpieces in saying that we must support Trump because he is "a chosen vessel whom God has raised up for a glorious purpose" - and "if God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar for His glorious purposes, God can use Trump to carry out His mysterious plan!"  Note that in saying such things, both he and others like him are bad-mouthing not only God, but Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar.  How ironic that in showing himself to be just as slimy as Trump, Mr. Falwell has brought consequences upon himself.  And I expect that Liberty University will not itself survive unscathed.

In my march through the reading of the Old Testament, I am now reading the book of Micah.  And what Micah says is a direct contradiction of Falwell, and of other sketchy people like him, including Franklin Graham.  But I do not write this to moralize.  Rather, I want to make a psychological observation.  Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the pathological, narcissistic raging of white supremacy against a world that is inexorably changing around those who wish to remain supreme.  Like Trump, Falwell Jr. is a symptom of a larger American disease.  He is also yet another example of the outworkings of damnation.

And now, back to work!

Repost - The Sunk Costs of Stinkin' Thinkin'

A blog is a voracious beast, and feeding it with high quality material can seem at times like hoisting 50 pound sacks of elephant feed at a zoo.  While I enjoy the workout, there are things I need to fix and clean at my house this weekend, along with two fruit trees that I need to finish harvesting ASAP before the fruit spoils.

Therefore, I'd like to present you with a post I wrote back in 2015.  This post highlights some of the dysfunctional societal results of what had been until recently a highly effective long-term campaign of lobbying and propaganda by the National Rifle Association and the American Right.  (Note also how these two entities were helped along in their efforts by a certain foreign government.)  Enjoy.

Climbing Out Onto The Skinny Branches

Those who have read my blog over the years know that at present I "own" two cats, and that the reason why these cats live with me is that a neighbor foisted them off on me.  (However, I now wouldn't trade them for the world.)  When they were kittens, they frequently got themselves stuck in some of the trees in my backyard as they indulged their impulse to climb things without having learned how to get themselves back down to the ground.  Therefore, from time to time, I had to get a ladder and fetch my cats out of some of the sticky situations they got themselves into.  Eventually they figured out that what goes up must also learn to get down, and they learned to get down out of and off of various high things.  So an evening came in which, as I was leaving my house to go to the store, I looked behind me and saw two cat heads on the roof staring down on me in the moonlight.  Rather spooky it was, but by then I was confident that they'd find their way safely back to earth.

Now a competent cat weighing a handful of kilograms can climb trees and traverse branches that a human weighing several dozen kilos would (or at least should) fear to tread.  And there's a reason why the phrase "going out on a limb" has metaphorical punch even after decades of use.  So it surprised me (and the world) to hear that Vladimir Putin had gone out on a rather skinny limb a few weeks ago with the announcement that Russia had developed the first coronavirus vaccine approved for widespread use.  In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up around 2,000 points, and other stock exchanges rose significantly.

An effective vaccine would be welcomed in many corners, and if Russia were the nation to discover such a vaccine, it would certainly boost Russian prospects of being regarded as the most awesomely cool nation on earth.  It would also help Putin's image not only as a physically robust national leader who goes hunting bare-chested in Siberia in the winter, but as a chess master, judoka, expert strategist, and totally awesome dude without equal in the world.  ("Who is like the beast?  Who is able to make war with him?")  But almost immediately, the branch onto which Putin had climbed (bringing his nation with him) began to show some signs of cracking.  For starters,

• The development of this vaccine has been horribly (and irresponsibly) rushed.  
• A number of sources state that the vaccine developers would only have been able to complete Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials within their stated timeframe of development.
• Some sources (such as this and this) state that the reality is that the Russian vaccine has not even yet passed Phase 1 trials.

Add to this the lack of transparency to date in Russian data on the trials of their vaccine, combined with the unfortunate tendency for bad things (falls from windows, poisonings by tea, etc.) to happen to Russians who provide information or criticism damaging to their country's prestige, and one can see why prudent people don't want to climb out onto the branch Putin is occupying.  And even Putin's government has slightly, ever so slightly, walked back some of its rhetoric lately, saying now that the Russian vaccine is now "ready for mass trials."  Some of those trials will take place on people who are not Russian and who don't want to climb onto any skinny branches, but who may find that they have no choice.  For instance, autocrat Philippine president (and Putin groupie) Rodrigo Duterte has stated that large-scale inoculations of his nation's people will begin in October, although Duterte himself won't volunteer for a shot until he sees how well his countrymen respond.  My, what courage!

From these events, we can see the following things:

• First, we see what world leaders and economic ecosystems Putin now has in his pocket.  With a net worth of $200 billion, Putin might have a surprising number of people in that pocket.  Some of those people might be behind the most recent stock market rallies - rallies which are by now completely divorced from the actual on-the-ground economies of the nations these markets are supposed to represent.  Watch also for national leaders who rush to volunteer their populations as guinea pigs for the Russian vaccine.
• Second, we see the harm that the damaging and toxic mix of malignant narcissism and unethical competition can produce.  I am reminded of YouTube videos of Margaret Heffernan discussing the damaging effects of competition on the creation of things of genuine economic value.  One of the reasons for the damage is the intense pressure felt by people in highly competitive environments to overstate their accomplishments, to plagiarize the work of others, and to outright fake results.

As you can tell, I am skeptical about Russian claims of awesomeness in any domain just about now.  But I am going to provide a caveat and thus position myself on the lowest possible skinny branch in case I am proven wrong.  So here it is: I am not a doctor or biologist.  But I can be persuaded by verifiable results.  Let's see how the Russian vaccine developers do when they are judged by a jury of their peers.  As for now, I am still wearing a mask.