by Dave Maier

Consider how difficult it has been to get Big Tobacco to admit that cigarette smoking is bad for you at all, let alone that it kills many thousands of people every year. In particular, you might remember that time when all the major executives swore under oath at Congressional hearings that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Consider as well that most tobacco profits come from heavy users of tobacco, not smokers of only the occasional cigarette. So the all-important bottom line – public health be damned – can be preserved only by recruiting new heavy smokers as the older (or not so older) ones die off or quit. For Big Tobacco, this means targeting children, who are not only risk-takers by nature, but very often concerned above all to be cool. If cigarettes are risky and cool, then children will become smokers, and many (some studies say 30%) will become hooked, preserving corporate profits for another generation.

Marijuana prohibitionists hold the analogous establishment of Big Marijuana up as a nightmare scenario. If big money is involved – as of course it is – it is quite natural to worry that Big Marijuana will be just as bad as Big Tobacco: fighting warning labels, putting out deceptive and child-friendly advertising (Joe Camel = Joe Cannabis?) fighting class-action lawsuits with expensive lawyers, and so on. Prohibitionists point to the existence of yummy cannabis edibles (THC-infused gummy bears! “Pot Tarts”!) and fanciful marijuana strain names (“Girl Scout Cookies”! “Green Crack”!) as evidence that even the nascent legal cannabis industry has our defenseless children in its sights.

The most vocal proponent of this line is Kevin Sabet of the anti-legalization organization Project SAM [Smart Approaches to Marijuana]. Sabet represents a new development in prohibitionism, consciously distancing himself from old-school drug-warrior tactics in the hope of reaching a more moderate audience. In terms of actual policy recommendations, in fact, Sabet sounds quite a bit like yesterday’s marijuana reform activists. NORML's Roger Roffman, for example, whose book we looked at last time, spent most of his career pushing not for legalization, but for decriminalization, and more generally a reconstrual of marijuana policy not as a matter for law enforcement but instead as a public health issue: not arrest and incarceration, but education and treatment.

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by Matt McKenna

Though the target demographic for Suicide Squad can’t yet vote in the United States, it was was still thoughtful of director David Ayer to create a PG-13 film that educates children as to the state of the Republican Party. By fashioning the silly misanthrope protagonists in Suicide Squad after Republican candidates, Ayers deftly describes the sad circumstance many Republican politicians and voters are experiencing this election cycle–they dislike the candidates they’re obliged to support.

For those unfamiliar with the Suicide Squad comic book franchise, the protagonists are a group of DC Comics villains who are pressed into service by the United States in order to battle other, even worse villains. These anti-heroes, who share a cinematic universe with Batman, Superman, and other superheros in similarly boring films, are compelled to fight alongside the “good guys” because the good guys have threatened to detonate an explosive device implanted in each of the villain’s necks. It does seem a bit unfair to call the team the “Suicide Squad” given that if the protagonists don’t go along with the plan, their heads will be blown off. Alas, I suppose a more accurate title like “Hostage Squade” isn’t quite as mellifluous.

If the concept of Suicide Squad seems like a breath of fresh air compared to the noxious wind that accompanies most of the other Marvel and DC comic book movies, prepare to be disappointed. While the protagonists may not be the trite, righteous do-gooders we’ve been forced to endure over the past decade of me-too comic book cash-grabs fashioned in the form of feature films, the plot centers around the same tired tropes as its predecessors. Like the similarly incoherent Ghostbusters film from earlier this summer, Suicide Squad involves an action-figure-ready gaggle of wry underdogs charging into a skyscraper to battle a supernatural being who, before destroying the world, must first conjure a glowing beam of light and shoot it into the sky for two hours. Why does this evil spirit monster need to project a glowing energy beam through the ceiling? I don't know; Maybe that detail was covered somewhere within the bountiful dialogue, but even if it was, I can't imagine myself thinking, “Ohhh, okay. Sure, that makes sense.” Anyway, what Suicide Squad lacks in an interesting plot, it certainly makes up for in its uncanny depiction of the current state of the Republican Party.

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by Bill Benzon

These songs of mine have to be played. They mustn’t be lost, they have to be out there….They’re Byzantine and their ‘roads’, their tunes are ancient.
–Markos Vamvakaris

To read this book, this as-told-to autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris, is to confront how strange is this thing we call writing, the child of this strange thing in which we live, called civilization. It is not that Markos, as he came to be known, is uncivilized. It is not that. Living at the time and place that he did, Greece during the early and middle twentieth century, he couldn’t avoid it, this civilization.

But he could resist it. And that he did, with wine, women, and song. Hashish too, more than the wine, and the bouzouki, along with the song and more than the women. Civilization didn’t win, neither did Markos. But I wouldn’t call it a draw either. It was a dance.

* * * * *

I knew almost nothing about rebetiko – Greek urban folk music with Asian influence – when I began reading this book, this circle dance between Markos the road warrior, Angeliki Vellou-Keil, scholar and scribe who published the material in Greek in 1972, and Noonie Minogue, who translated and edited this English edition (2015). Yet the story herein set forth, Markos Vamvakaris: The Man and the Bouzouki, that story is a familiar one: poverty, social marginalization, drugs, rubbing shoulder with criminals, womanizing, dedication to craft, and the transformation of a nation’s musical culture. Rebetiko has been likened to the blues, and the stories of major blues musicians have all those elements. It is a story of resistance, survival, and transformation.

Markos Vamvakaris was born in 1905 on the island of Syra in the Cyclades in the South Aegean Sea. That puts it on one of the major crossroads of world travel and trade for three millennia, between mainland Greece to the West and Turkey to the East. Its largest city, Ermopouli, was the major Greek port in the second half of the 19th Century, and a center for commerce and industry. Many different peoples have lived in and passed through Syra, as they do today in these days of destruction and despair in the Middle East. The dance of snivilization, as James Joyce called it, power and domination, freedom and music, pomp and circumcision, the bouzouki vs. bullets. Markos snubbed the law and the songs won. For awhile.

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By Jonathan Kujawa

Photo by W. Bentley [1]

In 1611 Johannes Kepler wrote a scientific essay entitled De Nive Sexangula; commonly translated as “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake”. It was the first investigation into the nature of snowflakes and what we'd now call crystallography. Since he was a gentleman and a scholar back when you could be such a thing without being ironic or a hipster, Kepler gave the essay as a New Year's gift. As Kepler wrote on the title page:

To the honorable Counselor at the Court of his Imperial Majesty, Lord Matthaus Wacker von Wackenfels, a Decorated Knight and Patron of Writers and Philosophers, my Lord and Benefactor.

As the title suggests, Kepler's main concern was the question of why snowflakes are almost always six-pointed. In his essay Kepler ponders the shape of honeycombs, flowers, Platonic solids, and the Fibonacci Sequence. The shape of a snowflake doesn't seem to be imposed from the outside (as a scientist, “God did it” doesn't quite cut it as an explanation). He speculates, then, that there must be an internal cause for the six points. Nowadays we'd call it an emergent property of the snowflake.

Kepler next imagines that when moisture freezes it forms little “beads of vapor”. If so, it must be how these beads are arranged which gives rise to the shape of a snowflake. Thus Kepler is led to consider how one may pack together beads. In particular, he considers the question of how they could be packed together as tightly as possible. That is, how can we pack spheres together in such a way as to minimize the volume of the space between them?

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“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play
that determines if it’s good or bad.” —Miles Davis

Next Note

There are no bad notes
if you’re open, cool and quick

there’ll be a next note:
first rung on a ladder from a ditch

new rudder of a boat
you'll sail to hope from glitch

The chance is not remote
you'll rise to praise from bitch

if you'll crack your shell and note
that next can overcome a hitch

you may courageously re-quote
and take your tune from poor to rich

by Jim Culleny
8/14/16
.

Painting by Vagharshabadi
.

by Daniel Ranard.

“Every choice we make is totally predetermined,” you hear someone say, a little too loudly, from a nearby table at the coffee shop. “If we had a big enough supercomputer, and we knew the exact configuration of all the atoms that make up a person and their surroundings, we could calculate their future perfectly!” This sounds like an excited young scientist or amateur futurist. But imagine replacing “supercomputer” with “super-mind,” and it sounds more like the French polymath Laplace, writing about determinism 200 years ago. In fact, as far back as antiquity, you can find philosophers speculating that all motion follows rules.

I imagine that humankind first witnessed the power of this idea when astronomers predicted the motion of the planets, leading to an image of the heavens as an orderly machine. Newton brought the laws of the heavens down to earth, positing that all matter follows the same rules, from celestial bodies to falling rocks. His theories made plausible the image of a clockwork universe, ticking in accordance with mechanical law. At the time, it was difficult or even ridiculous to imagine that living things followed the same rules, and many believed that life had its own spark or guiding force, apart from the mechanistic laws. But advances in biology and chemistry slowly convinced scientists that life is part of the clockwork, too. By the late 1800s, this idea permeated scientific circles and even literature–Dostoevsky's characters raged against the possibility that mathematics determined their decisions.

Since Laplace's time, our physical theories have changed, and our philosophical ideas have grown more sophisticated. With our new knowledge, what could we say to a nineteenth century thinker, existentially worried about living in a clockwork universe? What could we say, for example, to Dostoevsky's “Underground Man” in Notes from the Underground? He's concerned about a world where all human actions are “tabulated according to… laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms.” Phrasing the question in terms of free will and scientific determinism, many philosophers today declare that there's no need to pick between the two—free will and determinism are compatible. Other philosophers see the compatabilist argument as a mere redefinition of terms. But in addition to the philosophical question, there's also a more scientific question. According to modern scientific theories, is it true that the world behaves mechanistically and allows perfect prediction?

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by Genese Sodikoff

Recent outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Madagascar offer a glimpse into the dynamics of past outbreaks, the Plague of Justinian (sixth to eighth centuries), the Black Death (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and current wave of “Third Pandemic” plagues that began in the nineteenth century. Over the past few years, genetic studies of the bacillus, Yersinia pestis, have revealed why the pathogen was so devastating, killing tens of millions over centuries. Yet much about it remains mysterious.

Tracing the plague's dynamics on the ground raises hard-to-solve questions, hard because of the material conditions in countries of Asia and Africa, where most of today's epidemics erupt. Impassible roads, lack of equipment, broken-down communication networks, proximity to rats in homes, and traditional healing and mortuary practices enable the plague to persist and evolve. Antibiotics contain the plague, but these are not always easy to get, nor are the proper dosages always consumed, in poor, remote areas.

I have just returned from a trip to Madagascar, where I visited the site of the August 2015 plague outbreak (14 cases and 10 deaths). I have a lot to learn, but my burning questions concern how long Y. pestis can survive inside a corpse or underground. For medical workers there, answers could help control outbreaks. And if it turns out that the dead are only ephemerally infectious, an overhaul the current policy on burials and funerary rites would be welcome news. The policy is a source of major anxiety for relatives of plague victims, who are prohibited from burying their kin in family tombs for seven years. For most, accumulating enough money to be able to transfer a body over a long distance is an enormous burden, so the seven years may stretch out indefinitely. Those who die of plague in the hospital may not receive the customary funerary rites from their family. All told, plague victims are unable to transform into proper ancestors. They are lost souls.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

The assumed Islamist terror attack in Munich two weeks ago that was part of a series leading to claims that “terrorism has now reached Germany” turned out to be something else: the shooter actually targeted ‘immigrants', and carried out his attack on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 Norway attacks conducted by his hero Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist and self-declared fascist. Because the shooter had Iranian parents, people jumped to conclusions, but then became increasingly confused – not only as to whether to call this act an act of terrorism or a killing spree, but also whether to link it to an Islamist, or rather, a right-wing ideology. What makes the reaction to this particular shooting interesting is the incapacity of getting the story straight. While the drive to create a narrative with a clear distinction between some kind of ‘us' and some kind of ‘them' was obvious enough in the shooting, the specific contents of that opposition confused the attempts to make it fit an expected pattern.

The recent obsession of certain right-wing intellectuals in Germany with the idea of thumos is an interesting example where the position of a ‘we' standing up against a ‘them' seems more important than the actual content of that opposition, and the position, moreover, turns out to be somehow informed by what it opposes. While these intellectuals rally to reaffirm a thumos which is supposed to mean something like wrath or rage and connotes an invigorating vitality, one cannot help but suspect that such thumos is exactly what its advocates see in the Muslims they work so hard to distinguish themselves from. Many former workers who now favor the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) do have legitimate anger, since the social democratic parties – like their equivalents in other European countries – have been neglecting them. Marc Jongen, one of the AfD's chief ideologues, on the other hand, philosophizes and elevates (or rather diverts) this anger into a value in and of itself, without the burden of actual issues. The anger, now thumos, is nobilitated as a philosophically deep temper with an ancient Greek term. Thumos should not be appeased – with, say, political interventions that actually solve a problem – but rather fueled and raised to a permanent level of tenseness. Jongen, formerly an assistant to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, claims to speak for the bourgeois AfD supporters with a higher education who actually make up the majority of AfD voters.

The apparent lack of a certain level of thumos, of an inner force that Western Culture exhibits, became a subject, interestingly enough, in the context of the so-called refugee crisis. Faced with an imaginative ‘horde' of eager young Muslim men ‘overrunning' this country, apparently Western civilization started worrying about their state of thumos tenseness. Those cultivating these worries probably felt confirmed by representatives of the German economy insisting these highly motivated refugees eager to work are not only welcome here but actually much needed. This also goes for the demographic development, as Germany is a quickly aging population that does not produce enough offspring. It was against such a background that the thumos discourse evolved.

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by Katalin Balog

This is the second of a series of four essays on understanding the mind. You can read part 1 here.

The mind's relation to the physical world is a hard thing to understand. The difficulty comes in no small part from the fact that there are two, radically different ways of going about it: one is to look within, to understand oneself (and by extension, others) as a subject, a self; the other, to look “out”, at the world so to speak. The first method is subjective, humanistic, and is essentially tied to a particular point of view. I can sense my frustration trying to come up with the right phrase. I know what that kind of thing feels like. I think I understand what it feels like for you as well, but only because of the familiarity with my own case. The second method is objective, it is based on observation of body, behavior and brain, and it is accessible to anyone, irrespective of their personal idiosyncrasies or their point of view. Its best embodiment is the scientific method. How the subjective fits in with the objective is one of the most vexing questions both in philosophy and life.

In the first part of this series of essays, I have looked at how a subjective, humanistic understanding of the mind comes under pressure from science. In the present essay and the next I look at the flip side of these hostilities: the pushback in some quarters of the humanist camp against science and objectivity. In the last, I will look at the prospects of a peaceful coexistence between the two sides.

I. Two worlds

The first major clash between the subjective and the objective approach didn't revolve around the mind directly; it concerned the world. In the 17^th and 18^th century, Galileo and Newton brought about a monumental change in the way we understand the physical world. According to the new physics, all physical change can be explained completely in terms of certain quantified properties of matter in motion – properties such as size, shape and velocity. The fact that these features were quantifiable allowed for a mathematical formulation of the laws of nature. The view of the physical world that emerged is mechanistic; in an only slightly misleading metaphor, it implies that the physical world is a vast machine, its movements and changes described by precise law. This is a shocking view, come to think of it.

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Elemental

skysea sliced by blade
honed to a slick edge by the god of knives
drawn now across a bluegray scrim

bloodless sharp white
clean as a whistle

you might almost hear it whisper
but for its mystic stillness

more thought than thing,
free of bone and gristle
.

by Jim Culleny
8/3/16

Photo by Terri Amig
.

by Paul Braterman

Michael Gove (remember him?), when England's Secretary of State for Education, told teachers

“What [students] need is a rooting in the basic scientific principles, Newton's Laws of thermodynamics and Boyle's law.”

Never have I seen so many major errors expressed in Newton via Wikipedia in so few words. But the wise learn from everyone, [1] so let us see what we can learn here from Gove.

From the top: Newton's laws. Gove most probably meant Newton's Laws of Motion, but he may also have been thinking of Newton's Law (note singular) of Gravity. It was by combining all four of these that Newton explained the hitherto mysterious phenomena of lunar and planetary motion, and related these to the motion of falling bodies on Earth; an intellectual achievement not equalled until Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Above, L, Isaac Newton, 1689. Below, R, Michael Gove, 2013

In Newton's physics, the laws of motion are three in number:

1) If no force is acting on it, a body will carry on moving at the same speed in a straight line.

2) If a force is acting on it, the body will undergo acceleration, according to the equation

Force = mass x acceleration

3) Action and reaction are equal and opposite

So what does all this mean? In particular, what do scientists mean by “acceleration”? Acceleration is rate of change of velocity. Velocity is not quite the same thing as speed; it is speed in a particular direction. So the First Law just says that if there's no force, there'll be no acceleration, no change in velocity, and the body will carry on moving in the same direction at the same speed. And, very importantly, if a body changes direction, that is a kind of acceleration, even if it keeps on going at the same speed. For example, if something is going round in circles, there must be a force (sometimes, confusingly, called centrifugal force) that keeps it accelerating inwards, and stops it from going straight off at a tangent.

Then what about the heavenly bodies, which travel in curves, pretty close to circles although Kepler's more accurate measurement had already shown by Newton's time that the curves are actually ellipses? The moon, for example. The moon goes round the Earth, without flying off at a tangent. So the Earth must be exerting a force on the moon.

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by Yohan J. John

There's no real downside to engaging with pop culture. If you happen to get into the latest craze, you can participate in collective joy. If it doesn't quite move you, you can join in with the 'haters' and engage in a different but no less enjoyable communal experience. Either way, you can be part of the Conversation, analyzing the meaning of the mass experience from as many perspectives as possible. So it was in the spirit of social participation that I decided to start playing Pokémon GO. I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

In the US, Pokémon GO now has more users than Twitter. And it only took them a few weeks to achieve this. Part of the draw of Pokémon seems to be nostalgia. The original game was introduced by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1995. Since then it has morphed into a media empire, spanning anime, trading cards, toys and all manner of swag. The basic concept behind the game is quite simple: each player (or “Pokémon Trainer”) travels around a virtual world looking for Pokémon — cute “pocket monsters” with whimsical names like “Pikachu”, “Meowth” and “Bulbasaur”. The trainer captures a Pokémon by chucking a magical ball at it — it seems to work a bit like that spectre-snatching toaster from Ghostbusters. Various in-game resources must be used to 'level-up' the trainers and 'evolve' the Pokémon. The Pokémon trainers then compete in vicarious battles, pitting their Pokémon against each other.

No doubt nostalgia (or retromania) is a powerful cultural force these days, but I suspect that it was only the initial impetus for Pokémon GO's popularity. After all, many of the current players are kids who are too young to remember the early Pokémon games and TV shows (plus curious adults like me who were a little too old for them when they first came out). I suspect that Pokémon GO works because its gameplay combines some of the most powerful elements in modern gaming in a package that requires little or no skill.

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by Elise Hempel

There's an innocent-looking little white ornamental tree in my neighbor's front yard which blocks your view when you're trying to turn from C Street onto Polk. You must crouch at the wheel and peer through the small open space beneath its lovely overhang to see another car coming from the left. Because this sweet little tree had already caused one accident and one near-accident, and because the tree's owner isn't friendly and approachable enough to tell her that her tree is a hazard, I decided recently to call the police.
Here, in condensed form, is the conversation between me and the male officer:

Me: Hi. I'm not sure I'm calling the right place, but there's a tree in my neighbor's yard – a little white ornamental tree – that blocks our view when we're trying to make a turn onto Polk Street. We're on C Street. There's already been one accident, and just now another one almost happened….

Officer: I know the tree you're talking about. I live in the neighborhood. I've never had a problem with it.

Me: Well, I can't see around it, and neither can my boyfriend. There's already been an accident, and a guy on a motorcycle almost got hit just now….

Officer: Are you in a car or an SUV when you're trying to turn?

Me: A car, but it doesn't matter. My boyfriend drives a truck and can't see around the tree. You can't see around it when you're walking either.

Officer: I've never had a problem with it, Ma'am, but I'll send an officer out to determine if it's a hazard.

Me: I'm telling you: It is a hazard. You can't see around it. We're afraid to turn there, and I'm afraid there'll be more accidents….

Officer (in anger): Ma'am! I said I'll send someone out to make that determination!

And then the click of the phone as he hung up on me. At first came puzzlement and disbelief, and then an anger that soon turned to a familiar sick feeling in my stomach. And then, even though I had started the day in a good mood, I was suddenly in tears at the kitchen window. I had imagined, before I made that call, that I would get a thank you from the police – thanks for letting us know, for being a good citizen, for helping us keep our streets safe. But instead I had been dismissed – almost before my first sentence was out of my mouth, almost immediately. I felt terrible, and now, so quickly and easily, full of self-doubt. What had I done wrong? Had I pushed too hard? Had I interrupted him and not been aware of it? Should I have been more quiet and polite?

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