The paternal wisdom of Dave Chappelle

Tthe most extraordinary thing about 8:46 is recognizing how Chappelle himself has metamorphosed. While he begins and ends the routine by dismissing the idea that celebrity reactions to Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests are of any importance (“Nobody cares what Ja Rule thinks right now”), he seems to recognize at some level that, in his case anyway, there are millions of Americans who are interested in what he has to say. This is because, in the space of two decades, he has changed alongside his audience. He has become, absurdly perhaps but also fittingly, a paternal figure, offering a nation of people who still laugh at his jokes about R. Kelly and crack and black white supremacists something at once similar and vastly more important.

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen. Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying. Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

The Caronavirus Revealed America’s Failures

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

“Cultural survival depends on healthy land and a healthy, responsible relationship between humans and land. The traditional care-giving responsibilities which maintained healthy land need to be expanded to include restoration. Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual restoration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities of care-giving and world renewal.”

— 1994 Statement from the Indigenous Environmental Network  “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants pp. 337

“Navajo Nation — in the “Four Corners” area, with land that borders part of Northeastern Arizona, Southeastern Utah, and Northwestern New Mexico — has been hit hard by COVID-19. So far there are 354 confirmed cases with 15 confirmed deaths. As with much of the nation, the testing picture is incomplete. Navajo Schools stayed open two days longer than non-reservation schools, but the Navajo Nation has taken up strong distancing precautions since then. The Diné have now issued stay-at-home orders and instituted a strict curfew. They’ve also declared a state of emergency.

The seriousness of this response isn’t without precedent. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was devastating for the Navajo Nation. According to historical records, 12 percent of the population perished, or 3,377 people. So far, COVID-19 has mortality rates anywhere from less than one percent to ten percent or more, depending on a long list of factors. But preparedness seems to be a major determiner and Navajo Nation is woefully ill-equipped to fight off a virus like this. It’s certainly worth noting that 2009’s Swine Flu was four times more deadly in Indian Country than the rest of the U.S.

Diné attorney and leader Ethel Branch has set up the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund on GoFundMe (she also set up a Relief Fund for the Havasupai). This is the fastest and most direct way you can help people right now.

So far the Relief Fund has 2,000 families seeking assistance. The money is going to packages that are being dispatched throughout Navajo Nation. The Guardian reports that each package is filled with “flour, beans, rice, canned soups, dried meat, fever and cough medicine, as well as fresh vegetables, fruit, and meat when available.” These are crucial lifelines for many Diné.

So far, the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund is at about 50 percent of its goal. You can donate directly right here.”

Read the full piece here

While the idea that elites would dislike a gauche troglodyte like Trump is not remotely surprising, the idea that religious voters gave the president the cold shoulder runs counter to the prevailing narrative. And it is here where matters get genuinely curious in Carney’s account. As it happens, Trump primary voters are the most likely demographic to report religion as being “highly important” to them, but are the least likely to actually attend religious services with regularity. “In Trump country,” Carney declares, “even if expressions of religiosity are high, the churches are empty.” As for those very religious Mormon and Dutch Reformed counties that gave Trump a pittance of their primary support? Church attendance is exceedingly high.

God’s Bailout: A Review of Timothy P. Carney’s “Alienated America” - Los Angeles Review of Books (via mythsofmodernity)

The common thread uniting the well educated and well heeled to the religiously observant, according to Carney, is that both tend to be involved in a community, rife with the kind of institutions that foster networks of mutual aid and support. Surveys of Trump country, on the other hand, tend to find these places inhabited by people who report low trust in their neighbors; low membership to clubs, religious organizations, or civil associations; and who often claim that they have no one to turn to in the event of an emergency. In an especially disheartening example of this trend, one Trump supporter remarks that she can’t think of a single positive thing to say about where she lives. By contrast, the well off and the church-goers report living in the kinds of places where doors are unlocked and children play unsupervised; where membership in organizations like the PTA, a Bible study, or a book club are ubiquitous; and where people report having multiple sources of support should a crisis arise. Carney freely concedes that, in the former case, the catalyst is largely financial: the well off are likely to have the steady paychecks and stable schedules that facilitate enmeshment in a community’s institutional life, as well as the education required to comfortably occupy the positions of leadership that go with them.

God’s Bailout: A Review of Timothy P. Carney’s “Alienated America” - Los Angeles Review of Books (via mythsofmodernity)

Every culture shapes a corresponding character. The industrial farmer tends to be calculating, single-minded, forward-looking (anxiously as much as providently), unsentimental, given to uniformity and routine. He accepts that he’s a cog in a machine, dependent on impersonal market forces. He assumes that bigger is better and that all problems have technical solutions. He’s a manager; his skills and attitudes are as relevant to making widgets as to growing crops. In an agrarian culture, by contrast:    A competent farmer is his own boss. He has learned the disciplines necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by economic obligation, loyalty to his place, pride in his work. His workdays require the use of long experience and practiced judgment, for the failures of which he knows he will suffer. His days do not begin and end by rule, but in response to necessity, interest, and obligation. They are not measured by the clock, but by the task and his endurance; they last as long as necessary or as long as he can work. He has mastered intricate formal patterns in ordering his work within the overlapping cycles—human and natural, controllable and uncontrollable—of the life of a farm.

Back to the Land

A farm is full of idiosyncrasies, over which an industrial farmer will ride roughshod but which a genuine farmer will take the time to learn. For this reason, farms in agrarian societies tend to be of middling size—giantism is alien. In an agrarian society, farming is a kind of self-expression, with more of the craft spirit than the business spirit. Though independent and conscientious farmers are becoming rarer, Berry finds enough of them to compose a kind of master class illustrating the good farming practices he’s constantly preaching.

Back to the Land

Thomas Gold was a brilliant scientist and very original thinker. Whilst most academics stick tightly to the prescribed boundaries of their discipline and confine their thinking to the established dogmas of the times, Gold loved ideas. And he was not frightened to rock the academic boat. He first became interested in the origins of petroleum back in the 1950s, when he engaged in discussions on the matter with fellow astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. But it was in the late 1970s, when the USA faced a major energy crisis, that Gold aggressively moved his work on petroleum forward again.

Gold reasoned that since petroleum and its component hydrocarbons were present across the entire universe, it was inherently odd to casually assume that on Earth they must be biological in origin. He noted how earthquakes facilitated the migration of methane gas from the deep Earth to the surface, leading him to speculate that any large earthquake would fracture the ground, opening up an escape route for gas once trapped deep inside the planet’s core. Gold believed that this would explain the number of unusual phenomena associated with earthquakes, such as fires, flares, earthquake lights and gas emissions. With his colleague Steven Soter, Gold constructed a map of the world depicting major oil-producing regions and areas with historical seismic activity. Several oil-rich regions, such as Alaska, Texas, the Caribbean, Mexico, Venezuela, the Persian Gulf, the Urals, Siberia and Southeast Asia, were found to be lying on major earthquake belts. Gold and Soter concluded that these belts may explain the upward migration of gases through the ground and, subsequently, the creation of oil and gas fields.

Soon after Gold started publishing his theories, researchers discovered a number of ecosystems functioning under conditions of heat and pressure once thought impossible to sustain life. Another important piece of evidence that supported Gold’s hypothesis was the known fact that some exhausted oil wells appeared to refill from nowhere, generating huge amounts of ‘new’ crude oil. All of this led Gold to propose that the Earth may possess at least 500 million years’ worth of so-called ‘fossil fuels’.

After conducting a range of major experiments, Gold eventually consolidated his theory in his 1992 paper ‘The Deep Hot Biosphere’ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Gold suggested that coal and crude oil deposits have their origins in natural gas flows that feed bacteria living at extreme depths under the surface of the Earth; in other words, oil is produced through tectonic forces, rather than from the decomposition of dead organisms. At the beginning of the paper, Gold also referred to hydrothermal vents that had recently been discovered pumping bacteria from the depth of the Earth to emerge on the ocean floor. He also noted that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to ‘deep Earth’ formations, not the haphazard depositions found with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.

[…]

Sir Fred Hoyle summed up the situation as he saw it, rather succinctly: ‘The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.’

[…]

There have been numerous reports in recent times of oil and gas fields not running out at the expected time, but instead showing a higher content of hydrocarbons after they had already produced more than the initially estimated amount. This has been seen across the planet from the Middle East to the deep gas wells of Oklahoma and in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as many other places. It is this apparent refilling during production that has been responsible for the gross underestimate of reserves that have been published time and again. In the early 1970s it was firmly predicted that by 1987 there would be a huge energy crisis as oil and gas wells ran dry, and that there would ensue a huge shift in the wealth of nations. The natural refilling of wells is an item of the greatest economic significance, and also a key to understanding what the source of all this petroleum had been.

[…]

Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir – not from the sides, as would be expected from parallel organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up. Dr Gold strongly believed that oil is a ‘renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs.’

[…]

It was once thought that oil from the Middle East was a finite resource that could last 40 or 50 years at best. Yet over recent years, reserves have more than doubled. These fields have been methodically exploited since the first gusher was discovered. Today, OPEC is pumping around 30 million barrels of oil per day.

Oil-producing countries and oil-extraction companies both stand to gain financially by sticking with the fossil origin claim. If it is perceived to be a finite commodity prices will remain high, compared to a situation where it is accepted that there is an almost boundless supply bubbling up from inside our planet. In addition, governments like the fossil theory because it allows them to be seen as responsible in taxing an endangered fuel source.

– Christopher Knight

Lee is a pivotal figure in American history worthy of study. Neither the man who really existed, nor the fictionalized tragic hero of the Lost Cause, are heroes worthy of a statue in a place of honor. As one Union veteran angrily put it in 1903 when Pennsylvania was considering placing a statute to Lee at Gettysburg, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse, then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to humanity.’” The most fitting monument to Lee is the national military cemetery the federal government placed on the grounds of his former home in Arlington. To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform. There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans.* Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917,  but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace. The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience. The question is why anyone else would.

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee : https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy,” America has to remain unhealthy. [...] The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

“ Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money. “ -- Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

“Fill in the void of being employed with ballin” -- Kendrick Lamar

It is not anything of yours that you are bestowing on the poor; rather, you are giving back something of theirs. For you alone are usurping what was given in common for the use of all. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.

St. Ambrose