by Michael Liss

Is American Democracy dying? For months, as I have watched the bizarre spectacle of the new Marshal in town and his posse, there's been a phrase rattling around in my head—the historian Allan Nevins' observation that "Democracy must be reborn in every generation."

For Nevins, the man who met the moment was Lincoln, who persevered through failure and terrible loss of life to lead "a new birth of freedom." For me and many of my generation, it was Watergate—a crime met with the deliberative process leading to bipartisan consensus that a sitting President needed to resign. For others, it might have been the Reagan years and the restoration of American power, or the astonishing rise of Barack Obama.

What rebirth might this generation, marinating in the glory that is the Age of Trump, see that would reaffirm their faith in first principles?

For the moment, it's not coming from the Right. We have a Tweeter-in-Chief who demonstrates his policy chops by sending out 140 character jeremiads. A substance-free Speaker who practices posing three quarters' front with chin upraised, affecting a scholarly but manly demeanor. And a Senate Majority Leader who periodically emerges from whatever underwater den he schemes in to gum a little lettuce while spreading his own bilious joy. This is not a trio that inspires confidence.

Meanwhile, on Stage Left, La Résistance (sounds chic and très Macron, n'est-ce pas?) bravely fights the good fight with banners and words and marches—but without victories in Congressional Special Elections, or on cherished policies. And, besides a Democratic version of #nevertrump, without a coherent ideology.

Drama, poor judgment, and just malfeasance we have in abundance. The White House seems to be stocked with people who spend their time watching their backs. Most of the Executive Branch jobs that require Senatorial oversight are unfilled, either because of benign or malign neglect. The State Department is so understaffed that they are considering setting up a search party to find anyone who might know anything about foreign policy—or just anyone who knows anything about anything.

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by Paul Braterman

In 1957, Charles Keeling of Scripps Institution of Oceanography began regular measurements of carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. By 1960, he was already in a position to report a steady increase, together with seasonal variations. In the northern atmosphere, CO2 concentration falls during the spring and summer growing season, but recovers during autumn and winter as vegetable matter decays. This sawtooth pattern is superposed, however, on a steady overall increase.

Above, R: Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Invertzoo via Wikipedia)

The Keeling curve and beyond

Charles Keeling died in 2005, but the work is being continued by his son Ralph. When I visited Scripps in 1995, I saw Charles Keeling's original curve, ink on graph paper, on the wall in the corridor outside his office. That curve has now been designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark, and there are commemorative plaques both at Scripps and at the Mauna Loa Observatory. Charles Keeling's original paper, freely available here, goes into meticulous detail regarding sample collection, calibration, precautions taken to prevent local contamination, and comparisons between the Mauna Loa data and those that numerous other sites, including the Antarctic and samples collected from an aircraft.

L: Atmospheric CO2, 1700 – 2014; NASA via Forbes. Click to enlarge. Note that the zigzags for atmospheric data are not error bars, but annual fluctuations.

By 1985, the record had been extended backwards in time by analysis of air bubbles trapped in ice cores, with dates ranging from the 1980s to the 1600s and earlier. These dates overlap Keeling's data, and take us back to pre-industrial times. Before long, the ice core record had been extended to an 160,000 years, taking us into the Ice Ages, while further work has pushed it back to 800,000 years. We have estimates going back far beyond that, but employing indirect methods and with higher uncertainty.

During the Ice Ages, carbon dioxide played a dual role, as product and as agent. The temperature oscillations at this time were driven primarily by subtle changes in the Earth's motion (so-called Milankovitch cycles). But carbon dioxide is less soluble at higher temperatures (which is why your carbonated drink fizzes inside your mouth). And so in the first place the rise and fall of temperature led to a rise and fall of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as the oceans released and reabsorbed the gas. But then, the changes in carbon dioxide concentration amplified the original effect, since more carbon dioxide acting as a greenhouse gas makes the Earth lose heat less efficiently into space.

To summarise the results, current levels of CO2 are the highest they have been for over twenty million years. In the centuries leading up to 1800, levels were steady at 280 parts per million (ppm); a slow but steady increase took place throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, so that levels had reached over 310 ppm when Charles Keeling began his studies; this increase has accelerated steadily since then; the present value is over 400 ppm; and the current rate of increase appears to be unprecedented in the geological record.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

On the M2 bus to the East side, a man heaves as he steps in with his walker.

I have yet to open the box that has the Sufi nai you brought me.

When the man attempts to sit down, he has trouble balancing.

I have yet to open that box by my bedside. It's between your Rubik's cube and the shawl printed with Attar's verses from "the conference of the birds."

A woman, obese and weak, uses all the strength in her two arms to steady him. Both the man and the woman are out of breath as they sit down. They are not related.

I have yet to open the box you bought at a layover in Istanbul, nearly missing your flight.

The woman is of a different race and generation than the man. Both have a drizzle of sudden summer rain on their shoulders, as have I. And another passenger's library books.

The nai in the box is the kind of flute Rumi praises. It's made of pockmarked reed.

Outside the museum, the woman who gives small crumbs of her sesame bread to the sparrows, has her back to the man with the camera.

The reed bed has made the flute an emissary of its longing.

The camera lens must see the slightest scar of the sparrow. It is big enough to make a nest in.

by Jalees Rehman

The short story "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("An anecdote about the lowering of work ethic") is one of the most famous stories written by the German author Heinrich Böll. In the story, an affluent tourist encounters a poorly clad fisherman who is comfortably napping in his boat. The assiduous tourist accidentally wakes up the fisherman while taking photos of the peaceful scenery – blue sky, green sea, fisherman with an old-fashioned hat – but then goes on to engage the lounging fisherman in a conversation. The friendly chat gradually turns into a sermon in which the tourist lectures the fisherman about how much more work he could be doing, how he could haul in more fish instead of lazing about, use the profits to make strategic investments, perhaps even hire employees and buy bigger boats in a few years. To what end, the fisherman asks. So that you could peacefully doze away at the beach, enjoying the beautiful sun without any worries, responds the enthusiastic tourist.

I remembered Böll's story which was written in the 1960s – during the post-war economic miracle years (Wirtschaftswunder) when prosperity, efficiency and growth had become the hallmarks of modern Germany – while recently reading the book "Du sollst nicht funktionieren" ("You were not meant to function") by the German author and philosopher Ariadne von Schirach. In this book, von Schirach criticizes the contemporary obsession with Selbstoptimierung (self-optimization), a term that has been borrowed from network theory and computer science where it describes systems which continuously adapt and "learn" in order to optimize their function. Selbstoptimierung is now used in a much broader sense in German culture and refers to the desire of individuals to continuously "optimize" their bodies and lives with the help of work-out regimens, diets, self-help courses and other processes. Self-optimization is a routine learning process that we all engage in. Successful learning of a new language, for example, requires continuous feedback and improvement. However, it is the continuous self-optimization as the ultimate purpose of life, instead of merely serving as a means to an end that worries von Schirach.

She draws on many examples from Körperkult (body-cult), a slavish worship of the body that gradually replaces sensual pleasure with the purpose of discipling the body. Regular exercise and maintaining a normal weight are key factors for maintaining health but some individuals become so focused on tracking steps and sleep duration on their actigraphs, exercising or agonizing about their diets that the initial health-related goals become lose their relevance. They strive for a certain body image and resting heart rates and to reach these goals they indulge in self-discipline to maximize physical activity and curb appetite. Such individuals rarely solicit scientific information as to the actual health benefits of their exercise and food regimens and might be surprised to learn that more exercise and more diets do not necessarily lead to more health. The American Heart Association recommends roughly 30-45 minutes of physical activity daily to reduce high blood pressure and the risk of heart attacks and stroke. Even simple and straightforward walking is sufficient to meet these goals, there is no need for two-hour gym work-outs.

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by Katalin Balog

This is the last in a series of four essays on subjectivity and objectivity. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

"…tie me to earth…"

(Angel Damiel from Wings of Desire)

1. Mind and body

Descartes thought God could create a disembodied mind – indeed he thought angels are such beings. Consequently, he thought that mind and body are distinct and separate entities. The essence of mind, or what he thought was the same, the person, is to think, feel, perceive, reflect, understand, and doubt; bodies, whose essence is to occupy space, are in some sense external to persons. Having a body, though supremely important for actual human beings, is not part of what it is to be a person.

Others deny that disembodied minds – minds that exists in the absence of anything physical – are possible. According to most contemporary philosophers, minds can only arise in brains – or, perhaps, in other physical substrates, not to rule out the possibility of alien intelligence – though the details of what this means are controversial. But even these philosophers could assent to the possibility of a brain-in-the-vat scenario, in which a person survives as a mere brain, hooked up to appropriate input and output channels; or, perhaps less fancifully, to the possibility of a brain transplant. These cases suggest that my body is external to myself, much in the way my cat is external to myself.

Yet Descartes was also puzzled about the relationship of mind and body. As he muses in his Sixth Meditation, sensations of hunger, pain, and bodily feeling reveal that "I am …compounded and intermingled with my body, that I form, as it were, a single whole with it". In a letter to Princess Elizabeth, he suggested that it is hard, maybe impossible to understand clearly how mind and body can be both separate and a "single whole". My body reveals itself, rather than being external to myself, as myself, a piece of the physical world, but alive and suffused by soul. The notion of two separate things interacting – as Descartes thought mind and body were – doesn't do justice to our experience of the intermingling of the mental and the physical in our own body.

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by Amanda Beth Peery

Many articles have been written about the greatest Hamlet actors of all time and what they brought to the role. One such article, a 2014 New York Times piece, describes John Gielgud's 1930s Hamlet as "melodious and intellectual" while Laurence Olivier played "an expressly physical Hamlet of quicksilver mood changes and Freudian motivation." Not only did the two actors interpret Hamlet differently, but with the same lines and the same minimal stage directions, Gielgud and Olivier created different characters.

What if an actor could play your life? By speaking the "lines" with a different inflection, or moving differently around a room, what kind of character could they create? Could they play your life more truly or beautifully than you?

I wonder how the subjects of biopics feel watching the movies about their lives. How would it feel to see an actor (probably more attractive, more glamorous than you) recreating pivotal scenes and dramatic conversations from your past? In a biopic, the script is different than the exact words you said, but even so, I wonder if you would feel a strange kind of doubling. Would your memories begin to merge with the scenes in the movie? Is it possible that the movie scenes could feel truer than the memories of real experiences? If the lead actor played a scene with more empathy or beauty than the way it was in life, would you wish you could go back in time and act, in that circumstance, more like the actor?

One purpose of a biopic is "for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be this person, or to be a certain type of person" writes Dennis Bingham, a film scholar. On the other side, can the subject of the biopic, watching the movie, discover what it would be like if they were a different type of person?

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by Yohan J. John

Scientists have long acknowledged the power of metaphor and analogy. Properly understood, analogical and metaphorical thinking are not merely ornamental aspects of language, but serve as a bridge from the known to the unknown. Perhaps the most important example of this process was the one that epitomizes the scientific revolution: Isaac Newton's realization that both heavenly and terrestrial bodies were governed by the same physical laws. A precise mathematical analogy exists between the falling of an apple and the orbit of the moon around the earth. The moon can be thought of as a really big and far-away apple that's "perpetually falling". Newton's analogy rests upon a broadening of the concept of free-fall — in other words, it involves a more abstract concept of motion. A couple of centuries later, James Clerk Maxwell recognized the process of generalization and abstraction as central to the scientific enterprise. The new sense of an idea, "though perfectly analogous to the elementary sense, is wider and more general. These generalized forms of elementary ideas may be called metaphorical terms in the sense in which every abstract term is metaphorical." We might go so far as to call metaphor the alchemy of thought — the essence of creativity.

Words like "abstraction" and "generalization" can often appear neutral, or even positive, depending on your intellectual tastes. But there are drawbacks to these unavoidable consequences of analogical thinking. The one that most often receives comment from scientists and philosophers is the fact that analogies are only ever partial: there are always differences between things and processes — that's how we know that they aren't identical in the first place. In other words, every abstraction involves a loss of specificity.

If scientists discover processes that are "perfectly analogous" to each other, as in the Maxwell quote above, then this loss is so minuscule that it doesn't cause any real problems. But in areas of active research, much more circumspection is required. When we propose that one system serve as a model for another that we don't understand, we must be careful not to lose sight of the inevitable differences between the model and reality. Otherwise we may confuse the map with the territory, forgetting that a map can only serve as a map by being less detailed than what it represents. As a model becomes more detailed, it eventually becomes just as complex as the real thing, and therefore useless as a tool for understanding. As the cybernetics pioneers Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener joked, "the best material model for a cat is another, or preferably the same cat."

So the loss inherent in the process of analogy cannot be avoided through additional detail or specificity. In any case, any fastidious adherence to strictly literal language severely retards our ability to create new knowledge. If we seek any kind of usable understanding, we have to use analogy, taking care to watch out for the inevitable places where our analogies will inevitably break down.

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Jihad

by Sir Mohammad Iqbal

“The pen is mightier than the sword,”
preaches an imam from the pulpit.

In our era such sermons lack virtue: Don’t
talk of a Muslim with a dagger, speak

instead of a Christian gunrunner who
smears a striving for truth as unholy.

Ask: If war is immoral for the East,
is it not so for the West, and if truth

is the path, why are Western blunders
burnished and those of Islam broadcast?

Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari

by Elise Hempel

Did you catch it? Right before that commercial (or, if you have TiVo, right before your thumb plunged down on the double forward-arrow on the remote) on the NBC Nightly News on July 3rd. A little report on Chief Justice John Roberts' commencement speech at his son's 9th-grade graduation last month from Cardigan Mountain School, an elite boys' boarding school in New Hampshire. And after that report, a light-hearted little comment from Peter Alexander, the anchor replacing Lester Holt that night.

John Roberts' June 3^rd commencement speech to a class of 14-year-old boys and their parents/guardians is being described as "extraordinary," "a quiet rebuke to Trump" and "the best thing" he "wrote this term," is being praised for "bucking tradition." You may or may not have seen or heard any of the Chief Justice's speech, but here is a portion of what has gotten so much attention:

"Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I'll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don't take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either."

Nice words. But soon after these words, within his remarks giving both "deep" and "simple" advice to the class – including not to act like the "privileged young men" that they are – quickly, snuck in between the serious stuff, there was this: "You've been at a school with just boys. Most of you will be going to a school with girls. I have no advice for you." (Laughter from the audience.) And, on the July 3rd NBC Nightly News, just after the video of Roberts making his joke, just before the cut to a commercial, this comment from Peter Alexander: "On that you will get no dissent here."

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by Max Sirak

July 4th makes me think about freedom. I'm not alone in this. Most people in the US get together with their friends and families, get drunk, eat meat, and watch or set off fireworks. This is what we're supposed to do to honor the United States as a sovereign nation and ourselves as sovereign individuals.

However, recently I haven't had the will to buy in. Last year I expressed as much in my column. I wrote about a speech Fredrick Douglas gave in 1852 and ended my essay with, "You're a slave. Now wake the fuck up and do something about it."

One of my colleagues, Katalin Balog, left a comment. "Lovely," she said, "I'll start doing something right away." Katalin's comment struck me and stuck. Usually after painting a dark and damning picture of our collective predicament, I like to offer actions we can take to counter.

But I couldn't think of any.

Now, 54 weeks later, with the help of a history professor, I'd like to correct my missteps. Better late than never, right?

Definition Of Terms

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale. He has a permanent fellowship in Vienna at the Institute of Human Sciences and serves on the Committee on Conscience for the US Holocaust Museum. Earlier this year Snyder wrote On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.

In his book, Professor Snyder defines tyranny as "the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit."

This is a broad definition. It doesn't play favorites with where the threats to democracy come from. It could be a sitting president, an oligarchy, global business interests, or any other entity. All that matters is the desire to increase and consolidate power through the subversion of the rules.

There's no need to point fingers or name names. I don't care about where you perceive the dangers. I'm here to offer you 20 ways to support democracy when you feel it's threatened.

But first we need to talk about inevitability, disenchantment, and eternity.

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by Christopher Bacas

The boss' daughter, Cherie, came with a warning label. A coworker, who babbled endlessly about evil Ayatollah Khomeini and our hostages, told me:

"She's a piece of work. Just let her take whatever she wants and stay the fuck outta her way."

One night, twenty minutes before closing, a woman's head appeared above the swinging doors. Under swollen lids, her dark eyes licked out.

"I'm Cherie Lasalle"

Her voice was low and slightly raspy.

"Yes, Miss Lasalle"

She walked behind the counter with a tray holding two plates.

"You new here?"

"Yes, Miss Lasalle"

"Is there any chicken?"

"No, Miss."

"Well, shit! When did you sell it?"

"A while ago. They only put a couple on the pit"

"That's stupid! Don't you sell more than that?"

While I served the last customers and tallied their bills, Cherie dodged around me piling up meat and side dishes, then dotted the tray with small boats of sauce and butter. I had to turn sideways so she could totter everything past me on stiletto heels. She sat at a booth in the back. A few minutes later a tall man arrived. He craned his neck and after seeing her, walked back. Her boyfriend was an Iranian student, Marwan Aref. They drove matching IROC Z-28s. Her Texas plate read: "CHERIE-L", his: "MAR-ONE". While the pair canoodled and giggled incessantly, I carried the 6 foot cutting board to the sink for scrubbing, cleaned and replaced all serving utensils and pans, then mopped the floor with scalding water and industrial degreasers. Rick and I usually smoked a joint after he locked the doors; not tonight.

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by Ali Minai

Following the shock of Brexit in Britain and the cataclysmic election of Donald Trump in the United States, there is much soul-searching, head-scratching and gnashing of teeth in liberal circles. Some see the end of democracy, others predict the collapse of liberalism, or at least of the liberal world order. The more sanguine speak of history's pendulum and some see both promise and peril in new technologies. A sub-genre of political analysis that has blossomed in these troubled times is the critique of cruel, corrupt neoliberalism that has abandoned the working classes in its search for a technocratic utopia powered by unbridled markets. For the most part, all these responses take for granted the existence of a well-defined liberal ethos, and – more importantly – its stability in human affairs. Not surprisingly, liberal thinkers see liberalism as inherently "better" than the alternatives, and approach their analysis from a "How will liberalism succeed?" viewpoint. Conservative critics, in contrast, see liberalism as a deviant human condition that seeks to subvert the "natural" order of things. Understandably, these views are regarded as contradictory. The central aim of this article is to argue that, in fact, accepting both viewpoints as valid may provide a better understanding of liberalism, its promise, its challenges, and its current state.

An early disclaimer is also in order: this article on a very complicated topic is intended as a "view from 36,000 feet", and does not speak to the microdynamics of activism by individuals and organizations. The world is full of good works on all sides of the political spectrum; the focus in this piece is on historical forces and long-term global patterns.

Political analysts often express amazement that, in many important instances, ordinary people support leaders and causes against their own rational interests. But this surprise stems from an idealized and rather inaccurate view of human decision-making as a rational process focused on optimizing economic costs and benefits. In the practical situations of daily life, people usually make choices driven by values, not calculation or analysis. And, as students of human nature have always realized, and as the recent work of behavioral economists has shown systematically, these values are instantiated in a toolbox of heuristics – rules of thumb – that suffice for reasonably good and highly efficient real-time decision-making, but often flout the rules of probability and logic. At different levels, this repertoire of heuristics is termed instinct, intuition, or common sense, and is identified with the "natural" – as opposed to calculated – decision-making. Amos Tversky – one of the pioneers in this field – famously termed these irrational heuristics "natural stupidity" as a tongue-in-cheek contrast with "artificial intelligence", and with the implication that, in fact, much of "real" intelligence arises from this "natural stupidity" rather than the logical rules that underlie theories of classical economics and artificial intelligence.

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Maluma and Takete

No offense to Shakespeare, but I've never quite bought into the philosophy that names are immaterial. Calling a rose by another name might not affect its smell, but it could well impact our association with the flower.

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TV, Bronx News 6/30/17

Gun again.
In this case a pissed-off
former employee
with a not-so-extraordinary
sense of personal privilege
to take life by right,
which in the American zeitgeist
has become popular as
an act of self expression afforded
by liberty through an amendment to law
lucrative to private sector arms interests
who live by death through means of tiny explosions
of sulfur and saltpeter mixed with charcoal
which send chunks of lead by click of triggers
into the boney meat of flesh and blood
to end the only real thing
anyone ever has

Jim Culleny
6/30/17
.