by Thomas R. Wells

The politics of populist rage are on the ascendant in every democracy, even if thankfully not always triumphant. Authoritarian regimes like China and Russia, and cynics like John Gray, are relishing the collapse of the moral high ground and the return to good honest Machiavellianism. The old calumnies against democracy seem to be coming true. That the rule of the people is just the rule of the mob. That order, the uncontested rule of the powerful, is the best we can hope for. That there is no higher moral principle for a people to aspire to than their country's domination over others.

Something has certainly gone wrong in how we do democracy. We have forgotten what it is and how to do it. Specifically, we have gotten the idea that democracy consists in our right to command the government to give us what we want, when actually it is collective self-government. Democracy is not a reality TV-style contest in which the people are spectators and voters on who gets to win the prize of ultimate power. Rather, it is a relationship to ourselves and our fellow citizens that we develop and practise in our daily lives.

I

So how did we go so wrong?

We allowed the bonds between us to decay. The collapse of civic institutions outside work, well noted by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone', left more and more people isolated, unable to relate to each other as fellow citizens, unable to organise anything together.

Cable news and then social media came along to reorder us into bubbles of those we agree with. But worse, the economics of both cable news and social media depends on engagement – the more time we spend watching, or liking and sharing, the more of our attention these companies can chip off and sell to advertisers. And it turns out that outrage – besides cute cats – is extremely good at generating engagement. That's why Facebook's news feed algorithm has gotten so good at serving up the exact stories from around the world most likely to send us into paroxysms of anger, or the other dark emotions such as fear and disgust.

And that's where we are now. A society of millions of strangers, all alone together in front of our televisions and twitter feeds, shivering with indignant rage.

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by Carl Pierer

Much has been written about how the political centre today can be characterised by offering a choice between two spins of the same idea. Essentially, a choice that is not a really choice. But this point is nothing new. Indeed, this very mechanism can already be found in the 1938 film You Can't Take It With You.

In line with his other films, Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You excels in a sentimentality and heart-warming humour that has won much popular appraisal. It is a film that is easy to watch, easy to enjoy and thus precisely of the charming sort that attracts fervent criticism. Too comforting, too nice, but most importantly too ideological. Capra's films are often seen to hide, behind a humanist façade, a stifling defence of the status quo and an outmoded idea of Americanness. This is not least due to his own descriptions in his autobiography. Against this sort of criticism, without defending Capra's non-existent ideas, it is possible to appreciate his You Can't Take It With You as a staple of ideological presentation of a pseudo-choice.

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by Richard King

I wonder, do you believe that children are our future? I do. In fact, I often catch myself thinking how important it is to teach them well, and indeed to let them lead the way. Hell, some days I even resolve to show them all the beauty they possess inside – you know, give them a sense of pride, to make it easier, right? And their laughter reminds me … Okay I'll stop now.

Whitney had one thing right, at least. Children, young people, are the future. Or rather, they'll experience more of the future than I, at 46, am likely to. Not a difficult point to grasp, or a difficult point to make, and of course we should keep our hands on our wallets when politicians invoke The Young. Such invocations are to politics what The Bodyguard is to cinema: transcendentally anodyne.

And yet, and yet … Young people, youth, the kids, whatever, are facing a very uncertain future, and their place in it is fast becoming an inescapable modern theme. Indeed a healthy sense of grievance would appear to be brewing in their hormone-addled brains. The young are revolting, and by that I don't mean that their complexions resemble pizza dough or that their hair smells like a forest floor. No. I mean that they're pissed off with the world and with the indifference of our political Kevin Costners to their current and future prospects within it.

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by Michael Liss

"What do you expect from a Republican?"

Being the child of FDR Democrats, I can't tell you how many times I heard that. What does one expect from a Republican? Always siding with business and the wealthy over the interests of the common people. Loving wars; making them, spending big for the toys to make them, and questioning the patriotism of those who disagree. Displaying an unseemly admiration for pencil-mustached right-wing dictators who wear uniforms and mirrored Ray Bans. Having an unhealthy fascination about how others live their private lives—and a compulsion to tell them how to live it better. That's what you expected from a Republican.

With my limited world-view (my Dad insisted I read the incomprehensibly dense and partisan Ramparts magazine), I saw "Republicans" as sort of a duck-billed platypus. There were the kooks—what we would now call the tinfoil brigade—conspiracy spouting, rootin' tootin' Yosemite Sam types. There were the American Gothics, the Midwestern farmers who, to me, not understanding social issues particularly well, inexplicably voted against their own economic interests. There were the blue-collar ethnics who had started to move out of decaying cities to the suburbs and exurbs-Nixon voters in 1968. There was the beginning of the great political migration of the Solid South. And, most importantly, there were the guys at the top of the food chain, the well-heeled and the well-bred. Tall, good-looking, society-page weddings, Mayflower, SAR, DAR. Those guys—the ones who really ran things, and for whom the government always worked. Discreetly. As you can see, I had a very sophisticated view of things.

Of course, this was a caricature. There was an entire moderate wing of the GOP. A real one—not some lonely Rock Cornish Hen wingette, but a plump, juicy game-bird of an appendage. New York's very own Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, was in charge of that wing, having inherited it from one of our former Governors, Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey started the State University System, doubled aid to education, and pushed through the first non-discrimination-in-hiring law. Rockefeller built more colleges, supported environmental causes, and created the New York State Council on the Arts (it's exceedingly difficult to explain to my own children that there actually were Republicans like this).

Yet, humanity evolves (in a non-Biblically offensive way). The moderates went the way of the Giant Squid—we hear occasional reports of one washed up on a distant shore. The farmers' loyalty intensified with the ever-warming Earth. The South turned so beet red that it solemnly considers secession every time there's an election result it doesn't agree with. Yesterday's kooks are today's….White House staffers, Freedom Caucus, and Cabinet Secretaries. And the blue-collar ethnics, and a surprising number of white-collar workers stalled in a no-growth-for-them economy, found their hero in a four-times-bankrupt brigand.

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by Maarten Boudry

For the past week or so I’ve been in Budapest on a study visit at the Central European University (CEU), where I’ve been doing some research on cultural evolution with the anthropologist Dan Sperber and his group. I wouldn’t normally be blogging about this kind of everyday academic excursion, but if you’ve been following the news at all closely for the last few weeks then the name of the university might ring a bell, because of the well-publicised plans of the authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán of the right-wing populist party Fidesz, to close the place down.

The CEU was founded in 1991 by the American businessman and philanthropist George Soros. It awards both Hungarian and American degrees, the latter thanks to an agreement with the educational authorities of the State of New York. It’s one of the best universities in Central Europe, with a high Times Higher Education ranking. It’s also a bastion of liberalism and democratic values, with students from all over the world doing unfettered research into a wide range of subjects, often with generous grants and scholarships.

That last point does not go down well with Orbán, a self-proclaimed “illiberal democrat” who has been undermining the rule of law in Hungary for much of his political career, and especially since he was returned to office in 2010. As far as Orbán and his brand of muscular nationalism are concerned, Soros and his transnational, cosmopolitan worldview—as represented by institutions such as the CEU—represent a threat to the sovereignty of the nation state. It doesn’t help that Soros’s foundation finances a number of NGOs that have been strongly critical of Orbán’s policy towards refugees. So a few months ago, the government announced that Soros and his international network of subversive liberal influence needed to be reined in. And that meant that the CEU became a target.

At the end of March, Orbán’s government pushed through a bill, which the President of Hungary has since signed into law, to tighten the regulation of foreign educational institutions. Nobody is even trying very hard to pretend that this law has any other purpose than to close down the CEU. It imposes a legal requirement for any foreign university established in Hungary to also have a campus in its country of origin, a condition that the CEU just happens not to meet. Moreover, all staff of foreign universities who are not EU citizens (which, in the case of the CEU, means the majority) will need to apply for a Hungarian work permit, as the new law eliminates the existing waiver.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

It has been three long years since I was last on the summit of Mauna Kea. But at last, we were heading back up the mountain to see my husband's new instrument being installed on one of the telescopes at the KECK observatory. An experimental astro-physicist at Caltech, he and his team have designed a cutting-edge spectrograph for measuring and imaging the cosmic web. KCWI will be the ninth instrument between the two KECK telescopes on Mauna Kea and will become a wonderful boon to astronomers working in low brightness.

More importantly, though, this instrument had brought me back to Hawaii (Just kidding!).

The summit is other-worldly. In one respect, it reminds me of being in the Himalaya–as Mauna Kea is high enough to evoke that breathless, cloudless, stark lunar-scape quality one finds on the road to Ladakh. But this is Hawaii. So, rather than leaving behind the alpine beauty of Kashmir, on Mauna Kea you are but two hours away from mind-bogglingly gorgeous tropical beaches. It is unreal to see snow up there. Snow on Hawaii. A sleeping volcano, like Mt. Fuji, it is indescribably beautiful standing at the summit and watching the clouds roiling beneath you–on a good day you can see Hilo Bay off in the distance.

As you've no doubt heard, not everyone is happy to see this sublime landscape filling up with observatories. As of today, there are some twelve domes and a few scattered infrared and submilliter telescopes dotting the Martian-like landscape on the summit. In addition to KECK, other well-known observatories include the Gemini telescope (with its twin in Chile) and the Japanese beauty Subaru.

I wonder how many people probably have been reading about the controversy surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)?

Trying to do everything possible to meet the expectations of the native Hawaiian movement, the consortium (Caltech and UC; plus Canada, Japan, China and India) chose a spot not on the summit itself but in recessed spot below the summit, so that the massive dome would not be visible from below. The spot was cleared by archaeologists so as to guarantee it is not a burial place and it was also cleared by ecologists. Despite what would be a huge boon to the economy and great advantage to students in the University of Hawaii system, representatives of the movement felt enough was enough– and the gigantic telescope project is not going forward as planned. When I was there recently, I was talking on the beach with a couple from Canada about the situation, and they reminded me that this issue is not just about Mauna Kea or the native people of the Big Island, but rather all around the world, native peoples are being stepped all over. The pipeline immediately comes to mind. This controversy over TMT is bigger than this mountain. A small group was here protesting at Caltech Friday and one of the protester's signs really sticks in my mind.

It read, "Standing Rock is everywhere." (Article in local paper is here; my husband is the scientist quoted at the end).

So, the scientists might need to go elsewhere. It's not easy, of course, since Mauna Kea is one of only two nearly perfect spots in the world to make astronomical observations.

What makes it so perfect?

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by Sarah Firisen

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. This was the tagline of a great New Yorker cartoon years ago. The joke being that no one could ever be sure who the real person was sitting behind the online persona. Last night I was watching a re-run of the Big Bang Theory. Howard Wolowitz was trying to rekindle his relationship with Bernadette. Their relationship had ended when she had caught him pleasuring himself while “playing” in World of Warcraft with Glissinda the Troll. It’s later revealed that Glissinda the Troll is actually Steve, the greasy old fat guy in Facilities Management. The punchline speaks to a nagging fear that anyone who has flirted, or more, on the Internet with stranger.

Who are you? Prove it! We are asked to prove our identities all day, every day. And conversely most of us, in many situations, have a degree of skepticism about the identity of people when we first encounter them, particularly online. While the fears of being taken in by a con man or having one’s identity stolen have been around for as long as mankind has been, they’ve become far more of an everyday fear and valid concern since the rise of the Internet.

For the few painful years I participated in online dating, I learned to treat every new encounter with a healthy amount of suspicion; I became the queen of romantic sleuthing. And those suspicions proved over and over to not be the result of a paranoid mind but entirely valid. In fact, over time, I became more suspicious and skeptical about men I chatted with online because I encountered every form of deception: profile photos that were poached from the headshots of actors and models; lots and lots of married men pretending otherwise; made up careers; inaccurate geographic profiles. Some men were clearly outright con artists clearly hoping to lure some less guarded poor woman into some financial scam. Some were just trying to cheat on their significant others. Some wanted to get laid while they were passing through town and thought that their chances were better if they pretended to be locals. Almost everyone using online dating has told white lies about their age and or height. If nothing else, there’s a valid concern that if you tip over into a new decade that will immediately shut you out of searches and so saying 39 instead of 40 doesn’t seem so terrible. Of course, when you’re still saying 39 five years later, that white lie becomes an increasingly dingy shade of gray.

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by Bill Benzon

In 1938 Walt Disney decided to bet the farm on an extravaganza originally entitled The Concert Feature. He would use the power of animation to present Classical Music to the Masses. Get it out of the concert hall, into the movie palace, and dress it up. But he also wanted to showcase the powers of this new medium – one in which Disney had a considerable investment, both in time and imaginative effort, and in money – in a way that had never been done before.

Disney secured the collaboration of Leopold Stokowski, the best-known conductor of the day, and who had already been parodied in a cartoon or two, and devoted the full resources of his studio to the effort. The film premiered in late 1940 under a new name, Fantasia, and received mixed critical notices. Music critics were offended, film critics didn’t quite know what to think, though some liked it. The public, for the most part, did not. The film was a financial failure, though it finally managed to break-even in the late 1960s, after Disney had died.

Fantasia is highly regarded among students of animation and has sold well in videotape and DVD. I have little sense of where it stands among more general arbiters of culture. I’m convinced it is a masterpiece. But a masterpiece of what?

The World as We Know It

Fantasia has no story. Rather, it is a set of nine unconnected episodes arranged in a convenient order. In Disney’s original conception the film would tour constantly, with new episodes being exchanged for old ones from time to time so that there would always be something to see. Though other episodes were planned, and work had begun on some, this aspect of the plan never unfolded. The film that premiered in 1940 is only version we’ve got.

When you examine those eight episodes carefully you realize that they traverse an astonishing range of … of what? “Human experience” would be a good phrase here, but one major segment, The Rite of Spring, concerns things that no human being could possibly have experienced. Human experience, yes. But more generally, the world.

And that is the film’s singular achievement. In the short compass of two hours it presents us with the world, all of it. Not in any detail, of course, but by analogy, implication, and indirection.

Here then is a brief sketch of how Fantasia maps the world. Each segment, except for the last, is preceded by a brief onscreen introduction by Deems Taylor, a well-known music critic of the time.

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by Dave Maier

I’ve tried a couple of times already, in this space, to make sense of the relations between sound, noise, and music. (See here and here) (also here). Here’s another chapter in that ongoing story.

If music is the art of tone, and noise is not, then we need to understand how noise differs from mere sound. (We could interchange these terms, and speak of the art of sound as opposed to mere noise, but I want to make the link to what we often, perhaps carelessly, call “noise music”.) A key issue is the denotational content, or lack thereof, of sound. Two opposed views each seem too extreme. “Acoustic ecologists” like R. Murray Schafer see the denotational function of sound as essential to sound art, regarding other, non-documentary types of sound art as “mediated”, cutting us off from our natural acoustic environment for dubious aesthetic ends. In response, noise artists like Francisco López promote “absolute listening,” which attempts to hear sound in itself, completely independent of its cause or referent. López thus demands “the freedom of a painter” (who can use colors and forms freely, without representational intent, if he so desires).

In so doing, López explicitly enlists Pierre Schaeffer’s “acousmatic” conception of the objet sonore. But this is not quite right. As Brian Kane points out, in an interesting book I have been reading, in this Schaefferian tradition “acousmatic sound” is defined not as sound regarded for its own properties (let alone aesthetic ones), but simply as sound heard without seeing its cause. This need not require the “reduced” or “absolute” listening we may or may not use in approaching sound aesthetically. Kane’s point, which seems good to me (much as I admire López), is that there are many cases in which a sound is detached from its source, or its source is invisible to us, other than in Schaefferian sound art, and we shouldn’t let what we say about the latter determine what we say about the former; and most of Kane’s book is about these other cases. We might then go on to wonder whether that analysis was right even about the narrower case, given how it mangles the wider one, if it does.

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From Wikipedia.

by Jonathan Kujawa

Approximately 1900 years ago Theon of Smyrna authored On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato. In it, Theon wrote:

For Eratosthenes says in his writing he Platonicus that when the god pronounced to the Delians in the matter of deliverance from a plague that they construct an alter the double of the one that existed, much bewilderment fell upon the builders who sought how one was to make a solid double of a solid. Then there arrived men to inquire of this from Plato. But he said to them that not for want of a double altar did the god prophecy this to the Delians, but to accuse and reproach them the Greeks for neglecting mathematics and making little of geometry.

Thus the problem of doubling the cube was born. If we are given a cube of a certain volume, can we construct a cube whose volume is exactly double? We might as well start with the cube as a practice problem and worry about the more complicated shape of an altar once we've got the cube sorted out. Also, up to changing our choice of units, we can safely assume the cube has volume exactly 1. We've now got a simple geometry problem: given a cube with volume 1, how to construct a cube with volume 2? Like many of the best questions, this seemingly innocuous problem opens a Pandora's box of interesting things to ponder.

Plato warns us not to neglect our mathematics. As mathematically minded folks we know we should first decide on ground rules. If we don't bother to first agree on clear, unambiguous definitions and axioms, then we'll just end up talking past each other. This might play on cable tv, but it's not mathematics. Besides, like writing a sonnet or a haiku, half the fun in math is in the constraints. Like Robert Frost said, "I'd sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down".

In the case of the doubled cube, the Greeks allow us to use a straightedge (that is, an unmarked ruler which allows us to make any straight line we like) and a compass (those devices from elementary school with a point on one end and a pencil on the other which allows us to make any circle we like). Nowadays you can instead play the addictive free game Euclidea.

Since a cube is completely determined by its side length and the volume is just the side length cubed, doubling the cube comes down to the problem of using a straightedge, compass and a line segment of length 1 and, by hook or by crook, construct a line segment whose length is the cubed root of 2.

Doubling the Cube (from Wikipedia)

After fiddling with your straightedge and compass for a millennium or two you might start to suspect that the god was putting one over on the Delians (after all the Greek gods weren't known for playing fair). But how in the world could you ever know for certain that it wasn't possible? After all, tomorrow you might find That One Weird Trick Which Doubles the Cube!

Math is nearly unique in that you can show things are never, ever possible. I was blown away when I first saw the proof that the real numbers cannot be put into an order list numbered by the counting numbers and that the square root of two cannot be written as a fraction of two counting numbers. In retrospect, it was the proofs of impossibility which first converted me to math.

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The Free Exercise of

At its center is a tree
which wraps the garden
in its entirety

The roots of it run deep—
some say to a molten core
while some insist they exit the other side
to suck juices from a Southern Cross
and that its sweet and sour blooms
on this respiring side of dust
reach and blossom
beyond the north pole star
and meet the ends of far
in parts we'll never know
until we wake or break
to give or take
right here and now
in time and space
the bait of love
or snake

Jim Culleny
3/27/17

by Brooks Riley

I feel a stress disorder coming on. Call it Persistent Trump Stress Disorder. Or PTSD 2.0.

This is not about Trump himself, the ‘dingo’ here, whose many inadequacies, fallacies and prevarications are scrutinized, dissected, biopsied, and finally lampooned 24/7 in every corner of the fourth estate, reaching every corner of the globe.

This is not about the man who’s determined to crush the zeitgeist Obama left behind and replace it with a deceptively quaint, unworkable fantasy from the mid-20^th century when employment was analog, energy was black and endless, skies were ripe for pollution, white men called the shots, and inequality was just fine if you were white, even as America was nevertheless still basking in the glow of its victories in World War 2. Just what ‘great” is he talking about?

This is not about the First Narcissist, whose new Presidential Face must have been rehearsed in front of the mirror for weeks before the inauguration, the grimaces and goofy smirks now replaced by a parody of grim determination and implied gravitas that ends up projecting ‘grumpy old man’, with an emphasis on ‘old‘ that was probably not intended.

This is not about all the progress that this man wants to disassemble–revoking Obamacare, denying climate change, disabling the EPA, eliminating the Clean Water Rule, defunding Planned Parenthood, endangering workers in critical professions, slamming shut the doors to the American dream, undermining an economy that needs to function way beyond its shores.

This is not about the pathology of a vengeful egotist whose priorities verge on the absurd, for whom a chocolate cake, or the performance of Schwarzenegger on his former show, or a department store that drops his daughter’s label, all matter more to him than the names of countries to which he launches missiles, or of leaders he shakes his fist at.

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by Jalees Rehman

On 5 November 2015, an iron ore tailings dam burst in Bento Rodrigues near the Brazilian city of Mariana, releasing 60 million cubic meters of a reddish-brown mud-flood. This toxic flood buried neighboring villages and flowed into the Rio Doce, contaminating the river with several hazardous metals including mercury, arsenic and chromium as well as potentially harmful bacteria. The devastating and perhaps irreparable damage to the ecosystem and human health caused by this incident are the reason why it is seen as one of the biggest environmental disasters in the history of Brazil. The German sociologist Stephan Lessenich uses this catastrophe as a starting point to introduce the concept of the Externalisierungsgesellschaft(externalization society) in his book Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis ("Around us, the deluge: The externalization society and its cost").

What is the externalization society? Lessenich uses this expression to describe how developed countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany transfer or externalize risks and burdens to developing countries in South America, Africa and Asia. The Bento Rodrigues disaster is an example of the environmental risk that is externalized. Extracting metals that are predominantly used by technology-hungry consumers in developed countries invariably generates toxic waste which poses a great risk for the indigenous population of many developing countries. The externalized environmental risks are not limited to those associated with mining raw materials. The developed world is increasingly exporting its trash into the third world.

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