Sunday Sermon [Species Extinction]

Hola Everybody,
I’m simply amazed, for lack of a better word, at the bitterness coming from Hillary Clinton supporters these days. People have lost their minds.

Extinction Spasm

The new world is not only possible, she is on her way. When I am quiet I can hear her breathing.
 -- Arundhati Roy

As I was reflecting along with some friends about the spectacular failure of the Hillary campaign, and the Democratic inability to take responsibility for that failure, I have come away with the resolve to never ever vote for a Democrat (not that I ever did). I mean, they lost to a clown -- the very person they wanted as a candidate. But, you know: the Russians did it! Instead of taking leadership on the racist practice of crosschecking, the HillBillies have reduced themselves to trolls. SMDH

Almost none of my friends are on the internet and they think the energy I put into the “blogging thing” could be better put to use actually writing. Well, blogging helps me write. If I didn’t blog, I probably wouldn’t write. I am lazy.

Anyway, as I was laughing about the kind of person who would go to the extreme of becoming verbally abusive on account of something as irrelevant as a post on the moral cowardice of neoliberal Democrats, I thought about the very real crisis we’re all facing as a species. We may very well be the first species to make ourselves extinct. And it’s this type of thinking -- this narcissistic wish fulfillment of doing harm to others -- that is at the crux of our problem.

Anthropogenic global warming (catastrophic environmental degradation caused by human activity) is a fact and it has some of us thinking. Recently, I read an article stating that basic human needs are destroying our planet much more quickly than previously thought. The article cited a four-yearmultinational study, “The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” which found that humans “have ruined approximately 60 percent of the earth’s ecological systems to meet our demands for food, fresh water, timber, and fuel.”

Research shows that we’re in the middle of the sixth largest species die-off in biological history. What naturalists call an “extinction spasm,” which to me evokes an image of the earth purging itself of unhealthy organisms.

It appears that we do have something to fear and it is us.

I would ask why, but I think I already know. We can’t handle our technological advancements. It’s as if evolution has given a child a loaded gun and we’re playing with it with the safety off.

When I reflect on the mindset of the idolization of the individual, I am reminded of the paradox of the egomaniac with low self-esteem. It’s how I have heard the addictive personality described, but I am confronted with this narcissistic behavior too often, and I have to wonder if it doesn’t apply to our society as a whole. The issue at hand today, my brothers and sisters, is that we have to do something. If crisis is a measure of opportunity, then opportunity abounds.

Many of my friends were moved by the last election to decide to become more politically active, through dialog or local politics, and that’s where we all have to start. Each of us has our own temperament, but we engage we must. Perhaps your way is to picket an oil company. Others may fight to save an endangered coral reef. Maybe part of the challenge is bringing back a sense of awe and reverence for everyday life. So you might want to engage in some nature-loving pagan ritual. Go ahead, hug a tree, or bow down and kiss the earth.

We race around in these little boxes of steel, chasing after instant gratification and in the process we’ve forgotten our own humanity.

Stop... look... listen... breathe.

I have one suggestion that I think will help the most and you can begin to implement right now. Here in NYC, some companies give away tiny squares that unfold to a large map of the NYC subway system. It’s the size of a credit card and not much thicker. What we need in order to save ourselves is keep a bigger perspective in our pocket, just like the NYC subway map. A big perspective that you can unfold in your head at a moment’s notice. Too often, I see comments in my social media streams and from people in the real world that betray a singularly selfish perspective. We seem to have lost the ability to understand things from a larger perspective. “Don’t raise the minimum wage!” some of us screech, resenting the perception that as small business owners, or higher-paid workers some are not getting any “handouts” (they do). But if no one can afford your products, who would buy your services/ products?

We seem to want to demonize those we see as different, forgetting that in denying a working poor person the right to an honest (living) wage for an honest day’s work, we erode our own rights. Too many are willing to allow tens of thousands die simply because we want to cling to the concept of health care as a privilege rather than a basic human right. We decry taxes that could make our schools better, but are blind to the taxes that funded the land-mine some child in some far-off land just step on... 

This very moment... and the next...

Think! Or rather, think differently. Think with the larger perspective. If we take consideration from the advantage of a more panoramic perspective, we quickly learn that denying others their rights erodes ours. And the answers are not the problem. It is the will, or lack of, that will doom us. Just think that if we all did something as seemingly insignificant as stop using plastic bags, it would have an immediate and tremendous impact.

We need to hold a big perspective to remind us that nature is one tough bitch, and life has so far survived the collision of continents, mountain ranges erupting in volcanoes, murderously cold ice ages, the plague, your ex mother-in-law, and even the parade of neoliberals who have abdicated their role as leaders even as we vote for them (well, the jury still out on that last one).

The Big Picture also carries your inner understanding that you are part of it all, and so are they (<--insert a="" along="" anyone="" blacks="" describe="" didn="" enemies.="" etc.="" father="" friendly="" get="" great="" had="" he="" hold="" immigrants="" men="" my="" people="" phrase="" resentment="" span="" t="" to="" towards:="" used="" whites="" with="" women="" you="">

This is a species-wide problem. We’re living the curse of “interesting times” with plentiful opportunity and need to act wisely and with compassion. If your Big Picture doesn’t include a Bigger Love then we’re doomed for sure.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Making Hope Possible

Hola mi gente,
This is for the energy freaks who may not adequately appreciate that attention to all of life, and not just the positive, is essential in envisioning and creating a better world.

Please consider making a donation to my campaign HERE. Alternatively, you can use PayPal, where you can also set up a monthly donation, HERE. 

Your generosity will support my writing and advocacy as well as my desire to amplify the voices of those who don’t get heard, but are the ones most directly impacted by the compromises we in the advocacy world make on a daily basis. In fact, id there is a heaven, the first words you might here are, "Good thing you gave to Eddie when you did, otherwise your ass would be out." LOL

Making Hope Possible

Los Indignados march in Spain. The banner reads "It's not a crisis, it is the system."

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
 -- Raymond Williams

The above quote appears in all my email signatures and serves as a reminder for me… 

So! Some of you may ask, “Who are you to ask for a donation? What have you done and are doing?” Simply put, I am a dedicated activist, writer, and advocate who for the past 20-plus years has fought for human rights at a time in our shared history that demands that the human species achieve some fairly unprecedented evolutionary advances. 

I don’t want to run a long laundry list of the world’s problems, but I think it’s safe to say that humankind now faces some fundamental and unprecedented challenges. These include questions about our modern forms of social organization and governance, and questions about our planet-destroying system of maximum production and consumption.

The answers to these very important questions are my challenge.

The shadow looming over us all, of course, is climate change global warming caused by human activity -- a technological incubus that has been haunting us for more than a generation even as our so-called leaders look the other way. That is surely because to confront the sources of global warming and its consequence, climate change, is to confront the very foundations of capitalism itself. The very real possibility that we are about to unleash an ecological disaster that will make all extinct is simply the most urgent of a long cascade of other environmental crises now underway -- the massive species extinctions, dying coral reefs, depleted groundwater, lead zones in the ghettoes, and so on. Our impact on the planet’s ecosystem is so pervasive that it now qualifies as a separate geological era, the Anthropocene.

It is customary to speak about problems such as “the environment” and “economic inequality” as if they were something out there as abstract policy issues somehow separate from us. But in fact these problems are rooted deeply inside of us -- in how we relate to our world, how we relate to each other, and how we have structured our institutions. We are still under the Cartesian delusion that our bodies and minds are separate, and by extension that humanity is different from nature. This lets us maintain the dangerous denial that we can continue to recklessly pillage the biosphere, particularly if there’s money to be made.

So why do I bring up these troubling thoughts? 

I think we are also at a time and place in which we have rare opportunity to plant a seed for creating a society based on compassionate logic and ethic -- and to make coalitions with others who are searching for a new way to live. The same technological advances that threaten our existence on the one hand, can serve to bring us together to envision and create the kind of world we want to live in on the other. It can start different types of conversations, movements, and projects. The ripple effects of these efforts could go far beyond the local to the global. In fact, we have seen such nascent movements appear. There are the global occupy movements here in the States and Los Indignados in Spain, for example. There were the Arab Uprisings. And before that, there was the anti-nuclear movement, and the Zapatistias in Chiapas, and on and on… 

While we stand at the precipice of extinction, we’re also at the start of evolutionary quantum leap the likes that we have never seen before. As with every evolutionary leap, there are several potential outcomes -- death and life being the two main ones.

But before I on to why I have these wild visions, let me share some of my experiences on the frontlines of activism. It might help explain why I see so much potential. 

I “re-awakened” during the early 1990s, and became depressed at the sorry state of the U.S. political culture -- and the even sorrier state of progressive activism. The neoliberal Trojan horse, Bill Clinton, was the one who gave us telecom deregulation that resulted in massive media consolidation, the loosening of securities and banking laws that culminated in 2008 financial crisis, and so-called welfare reform has decimated poor people and the most vulnerable in our society. At the same time, nonprofits have become so professionalized and locked into their funding base, they don’t dare to experiment or innovate lest it marginalize them politically or, worse, be cut off the nonprofit-industrial teat (more on this in a post to come soon).

I came to realize that liberalism, at least as co-opted by the U.S. two-party system, was not going to produce the kinds of changes our society really needs. It became clear that conventional public policy and law have been taken hostage by the two major political parties, which themselves are both under the thrall of business elites. It is an incestuous alliance of the two great forms of power in our country, which systematically seek to diminish both democracy and the power of the people.

I am not saying that we simply walk away from politics, policy, and law. These institutions remain vital arenas of engagement. But, if we are honest with ourselves, we would admit that our politics today is too structurally compromised to produce much significant change. The game is rigged and most of us know this. We live in a runaway society -- an oligarchy of crony capitalism, poorly performing government institutions, declining democratic participation, and slow-motion ecological collapse.

But if the 1990s created despair in me, I also discovered the great, transformative potential of the power of the people -- the commons -- which has been my passion for more than twenty years. One way to understand the commons is as everything that we inherit or create together, which we must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. The commons could be understood as a social system for managing shared wealth, with an emphasis on self-governance, fairness and sustainability. The commons is also a worldview and ethic that is ancient as the human race but as new as the Internet. 

There were two other things going on in the 1990s that pushed me out of the liberal tradition and into the grassroots. The first was the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1994 as a popular medium. As I began to write for the web (first in Usenet newsgroups then as a blogger), it gradually became clear to me that parts of cyberspace is a realm in which neither the state nor the market is the driving force. Here, social cooperation is the norm and hugely productive without markets or formal law. I learned to see that the Internet is really a massive hosting platform, a new fantastically adaptive infrastructure that is generative because it lets people self-organize their own resources.

When blogs, wikis, and social networks began to proliferate in the early 2000s, it was clear that something very new and different had arrived: a more democratic, less hierarchical way to organize and to challenge the mainstream narrative. This phenomenon simply cannot be explained by mainstream economics and its model of human beings as selfish, rational, utility-maximizing materialists.

The second thing that I encountered since then was the unlikely rise of an eclectic social movement based on the principles of common interests. It has had several notable international social movements, and it has many active hubs of strategic action. It is what makes hope a reality.

Which brings me back to the great British critic, Raymond Williams, who put it so well: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” That is the real challenge that we face, to overcome cynicism and hopelessness, and to bring about the many serious alternatives awaiting our creativity.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery for civilization… 

The Snow, the Dog, and the Lion

¡Hola! Everybody...
I finally took some vacation days (after not taking any time off for 18 months) and what do I do? I get sick! LOL I’m venturing outside for the first time since Sunday. Oh yeah… and it snowed after Christmas. What kind of fucking shit is that?!! Which brings me to today’s offering…

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-=[ Michael Vick, Climate Deniers, and Quacks ]=-

Self-righteousness is the load din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

-- Eric Hoffer

The Center of the Known Universe just got about 20 inches of snowfall the other day. An old-fashioned snowstorm. Two things jump out at me immediately: the mayor chastising New Yorkers for being quite vocal about their displeasure on how the storm was handled and the knee-jerk reaction from the conservative climate change deniers. The first item is quite strange. The mayor, last I looked, works for us. And… the response to the snowfall was sub par, to say the least. The mayor should be out there fucking shoveling snow, instead of whining about our critique of his management capability.

The second item is even more exasperating. The media whores, the front-line of the corporate-funded “libruhl bias,” would embarrass Pavlov’s dogs they salivate so much after a snowstorm. You see, it seems these dolts don’t know the difference between weather and climate. So, if it snows, it means that the overwhelming scientific consensus/ evidence on global warming caused by human activity (Anthropomorphic Global Warming -- AGW) is really a vast socialistic conspiracy to make us bow down to the treehugger agenda. Tragically, Americans for the most part buy this stupidity. this anti-science attitude helps explain why so many dismiss evolutionary science.

Have I mentioned my idea that anyone admitting they don’t believe in the science of evolution should be exempted from its benefits? Shit like vaccinations and life saving treatments against horrible diseases should not be wasted on these knuckle-dragging barbarians. We all would be better off without them. Oh, if you need to slap your goober brother-in-law or cousin from the South with some facts AGW, check this site for easily digested responses to some of the stupidest claims from climate change deniers (click here). It won’t change their minds (apparently, conservatives are less evolved), but at least you can enjoy the perverse please of the confused looks on their faces as cognitive dissonance settles in.

Next on my list is the mostly conservative (mostly feigned) moral condemnation of Michael Vick. Let me just note that just recently a police officer received less time for shooting a defenseless, prone black man, than Michael did for running a dog fighting ring. Let us also conveniently forget there is a current (white) quarterback who is, at the very least, a serial sexual harasser who is playing in the NFL with nary a yelp from the wingnuts. For the record, I abhor cruelty and inhumanity of all kinds and what Michael Vick did was reprehensible. However, he paid for his crimes and has tried to make amends for his past actions by becoming a spokesperson against animal cruelty and has used his talents to become an honest, tax paying, working citizen. Conservatives feel that people don’t deserve redemption. This focus on vengeance, a core conservative value, is in large part responsible for the fact that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. In fact, incarceration measured as a percentage of the population is unprecedented in human history.

Luckily for Mr. Vick, he has a highly valued set of skills that demands a high salary from these corporate types, so he has an opportunity to pick up the pieces of his life. Shit, even PETA is saying to leave the motherfucker alone. I say that if your sins were writ on your forehead (as it is for people who have been incarcerated), you would be wearing your hat pretty low. Of course, there’s a double standard. If you’re a white collar criminal or conservative politician, no crime is too great not to deserve redemption. But may the full force of hell come down upon you if you’re black.

And speaking of quacks, allow me to leave with the following (true) story. I won’t name names here folks, but some of you might now…

Some time ago, a recently incarcerated man was going through “orientation” at a New York State prison. Orientation, from a penal perspective, resembles a brainwashing experience: your head is shaved, you are deloused, you are humiliated, your name is taken away and you’re given a number instead. You’re instructed that that number is now your name and must respond when it is called out. You’re also given a series of measures in order to gauge your academic attainment and personality.

As part of the psychological profiling, this individual was called into a psychiatrist’s office for an examination. As part of the questioning process the following took place:

Psychiatrist: What would you do if you were to suddenly discover that a lion was in your cell?

Inmate: well, I would reach for my gun under my pillow and shoo the lion!

Psychiatrist: (somewhat taken aback) Where would you get such a gun?

Inmate: From the same place you got the lion, you stupid bitch!

Of course, the man in question was beaten by the guards and immediately diagnosed as suffering from an anti-social personality disorder. The psychiatrist, on the other hand, is probably still “practicing.”

Love,

Eddie

The Hordes of Unreason

¡Hola! Everybody...
I had meant to post after the holidays, but it needed airing out. Sorry for the lackadaisical editing and for making it so long... For those who don’t read me regularly, please be careful and enjoy the holidays.

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-=[ The Age of Unreason ]=-

in Times of Uncertainty

An open mind is a valuable thing, just not so open that your brains fall out.

My friend Will (Astranavigo) likes to point out what he feels is a sad but true reality: our nation (USA) has gone dumb. The nation is full of idiots, he states, and I would be hard-pressed to argue that position. However, I think the issue of ignorance in this country is little more nuanced. It’s not so much that people are dumb, or stupid. Rather it has more to do with a tendency toward unreason. Too many people are attached to what historian Susan Jacoby calls “unreason” and mistaking that dysfunction for skepticism or critical thinking.

In her work, Jacoby surveys the anti-rational landscape from reality TV and “infantainment,” videos for babies, to a pseudo-intellectual universe of “junk thought.” This vast realm of junk thought reaches from semiliterate blogs of all political persuasions to institutions of so-called higher education that offer that do not require students to obtain a thorough grounding in American and world history, science, and literature. Throughout our culture, contempt for logic and evidence is fostered by the infotainment media from television to the Web; aggressive anti-rational religious fundamentalism; poor public education; the intense politicization of intellectuals themselves.

The consequences are numerous and far-reaching. If you’re wondering how junk science such as creationism and the deniers of anthropogenic global warming get traction, look no further than this unreason posing as “skepticism.” I recently posted a blog that mentioned the consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the theory that global warming is caused by human activity. One respondent called it a hoax, others chimed in that the science is “uncertain” and “subjective.”

Let me be clear about this: nothing could be further from the truth. The scientific consensus on AGW is almost as unanimous as the science can get. Certainties are rare in science. Even the appearance of the sun over the horizon tomorrow morning can be reduced to a question of probability. On the question of climate change, scientists say they are more than 90 percent sure that it’s happening and that humans are responsible. If you knew anything about science, or ever worked on a research project, that last statement would awe you.

Sure, you just never know, but scientists embrace that kind of skepticism. It’s through doubting certainties of the world (the flatness of the earth, the utility of bloodletting) that scientists advance human knowledge. But no serious scientist will stand up and denounce a widely accepted scientific theory without making a verifiable argument to the contrary. Yet, that’s what some participants in this forum are doing. They are not scientists; are not experts on climate science, nor have they been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but they will tell you that I am a bully because I shove this scientific consensus in their face.

I just don’t abide quackery, nor those who would promote it. While it may be true (but highly improbable) that someone might come out disproving evolutionary theory or show that the world is flat, I don’t see that happening any time soon and if deferring to scientific knowledge is a form of “hero worship” or “bullying,” then, yup, that’s me!

Scientists -- real scientists -- bind themselves to a strict set of standards, setting out their theories and experiments carefully, subjecting them to review by other credible scholars who are knowledgeable in their field, and publishing their findings in reputable journals such as Science and Nature. The people who approach the science of climate change with that kind of integrity have agreed on its underlying premise for years.

The French physicist Joseph Fourier first postulated the greenhouse effect in 1824. In the 1850s, the Irish physicist John Tyndall figured out a way to test and measure the capacity of various gases to absorb and transmit radiant energy. By 1858, he effectively proved Fourier’s theory. At the end of the century -- the 19^th century -- the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius advanced the theory even further. Arrhenius, considered the father of physical chemistry, was the first to predict that humans might actually increase the temperature of the earth by burning fossil fuels and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Over the last two hundred years, humans have been digging fossil fuels and setting fire to them, reintroducing the carbon to oxygen and releasing the resulting carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Arrhenius estimated that a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase Earth’s temperature by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a remarkable bit of science considering that the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that a doubling of carbon dioxide will increase global temperature between 3.6 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. What is unnerving is that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen since 1850 by more than one third and we’re on track of reaching Arrhenius’s doubling by sometime the middle of this century.

The science progressed on through the 1960s and by the 1970s, scientists were getting nervous, beginning to speak as one voice. In 1979, a National Academy of sciences report said, “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate change will result from man’s combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.” It was also becoming clear that even a small increase in climate warming could disrupt a balance that has existed before humans. They began warning of melting ice glaciers and collapsing ice caps, of floods and droughts and rising tides. They began to envision a change in living conditions more dramatic than anything that has happened in hundreds of thousands of years.

I offer all this as a way of contextualizing the subject matter. I am neither a scientist nor a historian, and I have no intention of jumping into the “scientific debate.” Someone on my previous post mentioned that attaining a grasp of this issue is almost possible, but that’s patently untrue. You can go online and read the Assessment Report of the IPCC, a scientific collaboration of unprecedented breadth, depth, and reputation. You can Google Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant New Yorker series, The Climate of Man. Alternatively, you can pick up one of the great populist science books on the subject: scientist Andrew Weaver’s (Canada) Keeping Our Cool; Tim Flannery’s (Australia) The Weathermakers; Kolbert’s later book Field Notes from a Catastrophe; and yes, even Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Any one of these will give you solid enough grasp of the science to leave you at least somewhat shaken about the state of our world.

My point, however, is that no one seems to be confused about climate change. As far as the scientific bodies of the world are concerned, as in the theory of gravity, the question of the flatness of the earth, and evolutionary theory, the consensus exists, not because a band of wild-haired pencil-necked academics want to take over the world on some presumed conspiracy, but because the science has answered the question.

With each new experiment, each new report, with each new article published in legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals, the science community became more certain. Naomi Oreske tested the question of consensus in a paper she published in the journal Science in 2005. Oreskes searched the vast ISI Web of Knowledge for refereed scientific journal articles on global climate change that were published between 1993 and 2003. She analyzed them on the basis of whether they supported, contradicted, or took no position on the consensus that the human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change -- and not a single study took exception with the consensus position.

Not one.

So, while there are those here who claim otherwise, the fact of the matter contradicts their statements. I don’t know about you, but if I want a medical opinion I don’t go to the shoemaker down the street.

What has happened in the last 20 years is that the mainstream press has presented the issuewith a false sense of “balance.” The brothers Jules and Max Boykoff, published an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Change in 2003 titled “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press.” they searched the libraries of four “prestige” newspapers in the United States -- The New York times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times -- and analyzed their coverage of climate between 1998 and 2002. They found that while the scientific press was coming down to 928 to zero in accepting climate change, in 53 percent of their stories these four newspapers quoted a scientist on “one side” of the issue and spokesperson on the other.

I say spokesperson rather than scientist for legitimate reasons. First, the deniers were very often not scientists, but rather political ideologues or self-appointed “experts” (not unlike some here) from think tanks. Secondly, even when the experts had scientific credentials, in most of the cases those cred3entials were not relevant to the topic at hand. The experts were geologists or economists commenting outside their field of expertise, not climate scientists reporting on up to date peer-reviewed science.

In matters involving social policy, such as abortion or economic strategies, this isn’t such a bad thing. Science, ion the other hand, is a discipline in which there legitimate experts, people whose knowledge is weighed and measured by their scientific peers. This is the process people use, for example, to decide a surgical procedure or the structural strength of a new alloy. If I were to come to you and suggest that inserting my penis into your rectum is a good surgical procedure for your sore throat, would you accept my theory? If not then why are we accepting the nonsense being thrown around by public relations entities, pundits, and bloggers who know nothing of the subject, let alone the process of the scientific method?

And if I refuse to listen to pointless diatribes about “democracy in science” (science is beholden only to the truth), or to read the contents of websites proclaiming a “climate gate” (conspiracy!) does that make me an “authoritarian,” or a “bully” or closed-minded?

If it does, then I will state here unequivocally that I am proud to wear those labels. Just go argue against creationism, evolution, or AGW somewhere else. As far as I’m concerned (and the science agrees) the relevant discussion is not whether AGW is real, but about finding effective solutions for it. When and if there is an equal, credible body of knowledge that refutes AGW, or that world is round, I will be the first to own up to it. Until then, the shoemaker? He doesn’t get to tell me the earth is flat.

Ciao,

Eddie