Nathanael Johnson in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The Green New Deal has been championed by advocates for getting the United States running on purely renewable energy right away. Some 600 environmental groups had demanded the initiative set out to ban not just fossil fuels, but also nuclear, biomass power, and large-scale hydroelectricity. So when the resolution made its long-awaited debut on Thursday, it came as a surprise to some that the door was left open for nuclear power and even fossil fuels with carbon capture.

But it was likely the key to getting an impressive group of Democrats to get behind the deal. Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren have signed up as co-sponsors, and all of them just happen to be running for president in 2020.

So just like that, the most aggressive climate policy proposal we’ve seen in years has the de facto backing of the Democratic party.

The Green New Deal doesn’t mention “nukes,” but it doesn’t use the words solar or wind, either. The non-binding resolution, unveiled by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York and Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts, calls for “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” In wonk-speak, zero-emission is code for nuclear power or fossil fuels with carbon capture.

More here.

Heather Radke at The Believer:

On a map, Assateague appears as a long green strip, denoting national park land, and runs thirty-seven miles up the east side of Virginia—the last land before open ocean. Chincoteague, just seven miles long and full of ice cream stores and cheap beach shops, lies half a mile to the west of Assateague, tucked between the long barrier island and the mainland. Driving up the coast from Virginia Beach to Chincoteague I pass areas that are verdant, rural, and poor.  A discontinued train line connects abandoned tracks and ghost stations. Boarded-up Victorian houses and dollar stores dot the landscape. But the cliché of rural decline isn’t all that you see as you drive—there is an enormous NASA flight facility and a marine science station on the mainland just before the bridge to the island.

Half the herd of wild ponies lives on the northern section of Assateague and belongs to the federal government, which manages them with a light touch—the most the feds do is shoot annual birth control darts into their rumps. The other half of the herd lives on a small southern section of Assateague and belongs to the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which has managed them since 1924, when it first used the annual pony penning and auction to help pay for its equipment.

more here.

Margaret Werth at nonsite:

Mallarmé’s emphasis on the “instantaneous and voluntary” character of Impressionist painting, its “rapid execution,” “effects of simplification,” attraction to “subjects close to home,” its “shifting glimmer of light and shadow,” and notion of “see[ing] … for the first time” corresponds to many contemporary and subsequent accounts of it.10 Edmund Duranty’s “The New Painting: Concerning the Group of Artists Exhibiting at Durand-Ruel,” for example, was a long, supportive pamphlet published at the time of the second Impressionist exhibition in April 1876, preceding Mallarmé’s publication the following September. Duranty outlines a number of features that would commonly be identified with Impressionism: the use of bright color; the observation of movement and rendering of passing effects of light and sensations of luminosity; plein air painting on site; the model of Japanese prints; the rejection of traditional rules and conventions; unusual and cropped compositions; lack of finish; originality and individual means of expression; artistic independence and freedom; and subjects of contemporary, everyday life.11 However, unlike Mallarmé, Duranty’s understanding of Impressionism is rooted in Realist and Naturalist ideas and commitments: he emphasizes individuality, Mallarmé impersonality; he stresses Impressionism’s response to contemporary life, Mallarmé the artist’s relation to Nature; his understanding of the “truth” of Impressionism depends upon the representation of modern life that Mallarmé’s text complicates.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

When composers die prematurely, it’s tempting to imagine what they might have produced had they lived to a riper age. For some musicians, like Mozart or Schubert, the question is moot—each was a mature artist in the full bloom of youth, producing a lifetime’s worth of masterpieces in an astonishingly brief period. But when composers happen to die just when they’re getting started, the question becomes more tantalizing. Consider, for example, the life of Charles Tomlinson Griffes, a man largely—and unjustly—forgotten by the general public today.

Born in 1884 in Elmira, New York, Griffes was a musical late bloomer, fluent instead in the visual arts from an early age. He specialized in watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings and was so talented in the field of copperplate etching that he contemplated making it his livelihood. At the age of 10 or 11, while bedridden with typhoid fever, Griffes listened as his sister Katharine played the piano and decided that he, too, wanted to learn the instrument. At first, his sister gave him lessons.

more here.

water

me and all of my selves
we run like we’ve been here before
like we know what’s waiting here
and it’s nothing
nothing for us
anyway
so we run
away from the idea that we “need” to exchange energy for paper
to only then turn around and exchange paper for energy
we run because our energy gets spent better running
we run from the people screaming
to convince us to fit into their machine to keep it moving
we are always moving
fueled by our own willpower instinct intuition
we run
trying to keep up
with all of ourselves
all of ourselves knowing peace is not a destination
and this journey, it never ends
so me and all of my selves run
like we know what’s out there
in the infinite of it all
we run like we breathe
like it’s so natural for us to move
and never stop to take someone else’s fears into consideration
we run like we know what feels good to us
(‘cause we know what feels good to us)
we run like water
on a mission
to go absolutely nowhere
and everywhere
we run like water in love with
moving
and freedom
and all our fluid selves
we run
past imaginary borders
we run through lines on maps
we run because all of this belongs to all of us
and if time existed we’d for sure spend it running
so we run
and we run
and we run

by Lauren May
from Split This Rock

Listen

Adrian Woolfson in Nature:

Globally, the burden of depression and other mental-health conditions is on the rise. In North America and Europe alone, mental illness accounts for up to 40% of all years lost to disability. And molecular medicine, which has seen huge success in treating diseases such as cancer, has failed to stem the tide. Into that alarming context enters the thought-provoking Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, in which evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse offers insights that radically reframe psychiatric conditions. In his view, the roots of mental illnesses, such as anxiety and depression, lie in essential functions that evolved as building blocks of adaptive behavioural and cognitive function. Furthermore, like the legs of thoroughbred racehorses — selected for length, but tending towards weakness — some dysfunctional aspects of mental function might have originated with selection for unrelated traits, such as cognitive capacity. Intrinsic vulnerabilities in the human mind could be a trade-off for optimizing unrelated features.

Similar ideas have surfaced before, in different contexts. Evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, critically examined the blind faith of ‘adaptationist’ evolutionary theorizing. Their classic 1979 paper ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm’ challenged the idea that every aspect of an organism has been perfected by natural selection (S. J. Gould et al. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205, 581–598; 1979). Instead, like the curved triangles of masonry between arches supporting domes in medieval and Renaissance architecture, some parts are contingent structural by-products. These might have no discernible adaptive advantage, or might even be maladaptive. Gould and Lewontin’s intuition has, to some extent, been vindicated by molecular genetics. Certain versions of the primitive immune-system protein complement 4A, for instance, evolved for reasons unrelated to mental function, and yet are associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia.

More here.

Christopher J. Lee in Africa is a country:

It is time to shift the geography of political tribalism in order to recognize the United States as a tribal society. This was the essence of the keynote speech given by Kwame Anthony Appiah at “A Night of Philosophy and Ideas” held at the Brooklyn Public Library on February 2, 2019. Though reading from a tablet, with his voice barely rising above the din of people still entering through the front doors, Appiah’s message was clear: the terminology frequently, and often gratuitously, applied to politics in Africa and more specifically Ghana, his childhood home, should now be applied to his home in the US. His perspective wasn’t entirely original—commentators as different as Steven Pinker, David Brooks and Amy Chua have also denounced recent American politics for devolving into tribalism. But Appiah’s views carried far more weight. Not only was this an instance of an African philosopher irreverently turning the tables of where tribalism exists in the world today, but here was an intellectual who could ground the issue in history. Tribalism in his lecture wasn’t simply generic western-speak for the absence of political civility. Appiah drew from firsthand experience.

As Appiah explained in his opening remarks, “tribes” and “tribalism” are ordinary terms with common usage in Ghanaian English, unlike their pejorative—and frequently racist—meanings in American English. To invoke “tribal” identity is to signal an investment in cultural and historical affiliations that preceded modern Ghana, with language, region, and other facets defining what counts as tribal. Appiah went further to describe how his father, Joe Appiah, during the 1950s promoted a national Ghanaian identity over ethnic ones—in his case, an Asante heritage—in the buildup to and aftermath of Ghana’s independence. Though this principle of national over tribal identity was never entirely fulfilled, it remained an ideal, even when pride was taken in ethnic affiliation, as Anthony Appiah readily admitted to embracing. Put simply, tribal identity still matters.

But there is a difference between “tribe” and “tribalism.” The problem isn’t with tribe itself; the problem is when it is mobilized into the charged, confrontational and self-interested practice of tribalism. It is this antagonism that his father struggled against, and it is through this distinction that Appiah called upon the audience to do better in the present, to draw upon, in his words, “the better angels of our identities.” Appiah, it can be said, has never been part of a tradition of radical thought. His consistent emphasis throughout a number of books on individual choice in matters of identity and moral philosophy can be faulted for not taking full account of systemic hierarchies that inform civic identities and limit political agency. In this sense, his case against tribalism, when taken too narrowly, neglects the ways in which such practices have been institutionalized over time. Mahmood Mamdani has argued that ethnic conflict in postcolonial Africa can partly be attributed to the enduring structural legacies of indirect rule.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

John Baker in BlackPast.Org:

I tell the story of my ancestors Emanuel and Henny Washington, who were enslaved on Wessyngton Plantation owned by the Washington family.  This is also the story of the hundreds of other African Americans connected with the plantation for more than two hundred years. It is a story of family, faith, and community. Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America’s first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres in Robertson County and held an enslaved population of 274 African Americans. They comprised the largest enslaved population on a single plantation in the state of Tennessee and they worked on the largest tobacco plantation in the United States and the second largest in the world.

During the Civil War many African American men from the plantation enlisted in the Union Army, others ran away and worked on the military fortification, Fort Negley, in Nashville.  After the emancipation in 1865 many of the freedpeople returned to Wessyngton as sharecroppers.  Others purchased their own farms including several who bought land on which they had previously been enslaved.  Some of this land remains in their descendants’ possession.

Only two slaves were ever sold from Wessyngton Plantation so the African Americans there formed family groups that remained intact for generations.  Many of their descendants still remain in the area close to the plantation, others now numbering in the tens of thousands live throughout the United States.  Some of the African Americans on Wessyngton also retained true African names, which was very rare for that period.  This has made it possible to trace their African ethnic group heritage, which has been confirmed by DNA testing.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Olivia Goldhill in Quartz:

A man is suing his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. That might sound ridiculous, but he has a point. The plaintiff behind the lawsuit, 27-year-old Raphael Samuel, believes in “anti-natalism,” namely the philosophical theory that parents do not have moral standing to bring an unwitting child into the world. And there are some seriously legitimate philosophers who advocate for this argument.

The best-known anti-natalist is David Benatar, head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town and author of the 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. (Though Benatar is heralded as a philosopher, he’s controversial at the University of Cape Town for comments he’s made about race, and was dismissive of African philosophy in a recent interview with Quartz.) A 2012 New Yorker article on the theory highlights a central premise of Benatar’s work: If a couple have multiple hereditary genetic diseases and live in horrendous conditions, we might well agree they have a moral obligation not to procreate and so avoid bringing into the world a child who will suffer terribly. Conversely, if a couple is wealthy and disease-free, we would not consider them morally obliged to create a child.

More here.

Bruce Schneier in Wired:

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin—and everything about it.

Much has been written about blockchains and how they displace, reshape, or eliminate trust. But when you analyze both blockchain and trust, you quickly realize that there is much more hype than value. Blockchain solutions are often much worse than what they replace.

First, a caveat. By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements.

More here.

Tom Bissell in the New York Times:

The dystopia George Orwell conjured up in “1984” wasn’t a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party — that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, certainly, but maybe the more frightening dystopia is the one no one warned you about, the one you wake up one morning to realize you’re living inside.

Roger McNamee, an esteemed venture capitalist, would appear to agree. “A dystopian technology future overran our lives before we were ready,” he writes in “Zucked.” Think that sounds like overstatement? Let’s examine the evidence. At its peak the planet’s fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A. The totality of this man’s professional life has been running this company, which calls itself “a platform.” Company, platform — whatever it is, it provides a curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos, birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish lizard-men. No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary, users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company’s best efforts to keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform.

More here.

Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books:

The teratology of the contemporary political imagination – plentiful enough: Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán, Kaczyński, ogres galore – has acquired a new monster. Rising above the ruck, the president-elect of Brazil has extolled his country’s most notorious torturer; declared that its military dictatorship should have shot thirty thousand opponents; told a congresswoman she was too ugly to merit raping; announced he would rather a son killed in a car accident than gay; declared open season on the Amazon rainforest; not least, on the day after his election, promised followers to rid the land of red riff-raff. Yet for Sérgio Moro, his incoming justice minister saluted worldwide as an epitome of judicial independence and integrity, Jair Bolsonaro is a ‘moderate’.

To all appearances, the verdict of the polls last October was unambiguous: after governing the country for 14 years, the Workers’ Party (PT) has been comprehensively repudiated and its survival may now be in doubt. Lula, the most popular ruler in Brazilian history, has been incarcerated by Moro and awaits further jail sentences. His successor, evicted from office midway through her second term, is a virtual outcast, reduced to a humiliating fourth place in a local Senate race. How has this reversal come about?

More here.

Sol/o

my love
there are no accidents
in war – no kisses
on the belligerent lips of crocodiles
no loves greener than
the dancing hearts of children
no reveller jollier than the worm
in columbus’s boiling head

there are no songs beautifuller
than the stern indifference of the hills
there are no flowers more clamorous
than the seas of children
home in my little heart

i tell u this
as the sun recedes
into the quaking pinstripe
of my warriors
grinning & vulgar in their muddied dreams
of power

i tell u this love
because the roads
have become hostile

by  Seitlhamo Motsapi
from earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow
publisher: Deep South, South Africa