At a Discrete Distance

This post from Eric Loomis should remind everyone of the strange situation we are in, here in the belly of the beast:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/the-cambodian-crackdown

Back in '77 I went with the other Red Clay Ramblers on a long, fairly hilarious "tour" of much of western Europe. It included a stop at Luxemburg, where a German customs agent was assured that all our LPs were just "promotional," and that we'd just toss 'em into the Mosel if we had to pay duty on them. It included a bird's eye view of a "waiter's race" in Lausanne, Switzerland, where waiters ran through the steep streets carrying trays with a bottle of wine and a filled glass, and a trip to see the Bern bears themselves. It included a very long ride in a Volkswagon van from the Swiss-German border up to Stockholm, which took about twelve hours longer than we had calculated, and which included an accidental opening of the sliding side door, and an an accidental departure of some boots onto the autobahn, never to be found again. This wonderful leg of our tour ended at Israel Young's place, in Stockhom, where I found to my amazement a copy of my first LP, "The Fuzzy Mountain String Band," in Mr. Young's record collection. It had arrived here before I had, to this beautiful place in the far north. Mr. Young loved Sweden and its sensible governmental structure, which provided among other good things free child care and medical care for his wife and child. Mr. Young, at that moment, believed that the Khymer Rouge, in Cambodia, was building an Asian people's paradise. He based his beliefs on sketchy reports, and no doubt revised them as more information became available. The war in Vietnam had only ended two years earlier, and Mr. Reagan was an aging retired actor and former governor of California. At that distant time, shirts and blue jeans were still manufactured in the United States, and, indeed, in the South. Now and then we did a great song called "Cotton Mill Colic":

Payday comes, you pay your rent
End of the week you ain't got a cent
To buy fat-backed meat, pinto beans
Cook up a mess o' turnip greens

I'm a-gonna starve and everybody will
'Cause you can't make a livin' in a cotton mill

Pete Seeger sang this version. We went back and got the original, recorded on a '78 by David McCann (or McCarn). The 78-rpm recording was said to have sold "briskly" during a strike in Danville, Va. To "colic" is to complain. Down the road from Charlotte lies Gastonia, NC, where there was a cotton mill or two in the '20s and '30s. Here's a long article, first published in the magazine "Southern Exposure," which details the strike at the Loray Mill in Gastonia:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/weisbord/Gastonia.htm

Although it wasn't Mr. Reagan's idea, by the 1980s basic manufacturing industry was moving from the United States to distant places where, to put it in unemotional language, people had a lower standard of living. When Mr. Clinton finally brought a Democratic Administration back to office in Washington, he had accepted as a fait accompli that the movement of manufacturing from the United States to the "third world" was simply an economic fact to be lived with; it was quixotic to resist this fundamental economic trend. And so this bipartisan agreement has reigned supreme, no matter the political party in national office. Mr. Romney, a man who made his millions surfing the wave, was rejected for national office, but Mr. Obama has no interest in tilting at this long-term trend.

Meanwhile Amiri Baraka died this past week, age 79. He wrote an acclaimed play in 1964 called "The Dutchman." In it a white liberal woman stabs a black man to death on the subway. This pretty much sums up Mr. Baraka's way of looking at things. Here's a picture of him dancing with Maya Angelou, which I think is pretty neat. It comes from the New York Times obituary.
Chester Higgins took the photo.

After being discharged from the Air Force for being a suspected Communist--Baraka was reading suspicious books--he went on a life-long journey of art and politics which led, much later, to his decision to "be" a Marxist, whatever exactly that might mean in the life of a celebrated if cantankerous black American man of letters. The New York Times obituary is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/arts/amiri-baraka-polarizing-poet-and-playwright-dies-at-79.html?ref=obituaries

Cubing Stupid

Source: Hubblesite.org



Jon Stewart the other night did a riff on some Fox conversationalists who were using the current cold snap (or Polar Vortex, as the Klingon overlords call it with a chuckle) to poke fun at the idea that our modern civilization machine is pumping such quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as to cause relatively rapid climate disturbances. As you no doubt are aware, in earlier days this observation was quaintly termed "global warming," as the observation turned on the green house effect which already keeps things in a temperature range that makes human life possible. The critics of climate science, like six-year-olds at a birthday party, fixed on the "warming" adjective and have whined and quibbled for ten or fifteen years now every time the weather does something noteworthy. As long as it involves snow or cold that is. (And what's much worse, of course, is that this whole infantile stance is actually a rhetorical strategy which insults the public by assuming that this is all it takes to convince.)

That these people are not laughed into silence is a critique of our mass media (and particularly Fox News), and a critique as well of our general weakness as a country to educate people as to what science is and what science is doing. Meanwhile, people who are scientists carry on. They have, for one thing, a longer view, and for another, an intense need to know. Scientists know that the system of inquiry builds and builds, one block after another. This is what they're working on these days, at the juncture of cosmology, astronomy, and astrophysics:

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~pettini/Physical%20Cosmology/lecture14.pdf

They are photographing deep space using gravitational lensing. The photographs are published, and can be viewed here:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/01/full/

Next time you happen to read about the derision Galileo was subjected to when he discovered imperfections on the lunar surface, and find yourself incredulous that anyone could be so backwards, and stand so athwart the very plain visual evidence Galileo was presenting, consider that at this moment not only Fox News, but a variety of pundits including the venerable George Will, and a variety of US Congresspersons, heap the same derision and scorn on climate science every time it gets cold in places it usually doesn't.

What they are really doing is heaping scorn on scientific inquiry. They are as absurdly certain as six-year-olds arguing about who has the biggest piece of cake. They are deriding argument of the sophistication of Dr. Pettini's Lecture 14, above, with "nayah, nayah, nayah."

Hat tip to Digby for bringing the wonderful Hubble site to my attention this morning. Another hat tip to Eric Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, for his post on the "German Coast Slave Rebellion of 1811." I'll bet you never heard of this event in our exceptional American history. I'll bet it's not in any history text used in any high school, middle school, or elementary school in the United States. Here's a link to Loomis' post (he offers references to further reading in the post):

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/this-day-in-labor-history-january-8-1811

It is not really surprising that most people recoil from distasteful information that would tend to change how they feel about themselves and their country. This is human psychology. After General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, the little crossroads was utterly abandoned and the town moved down the road a piece, to Appomattox Station. I'm surprised the locals didn't salt the earth. Nonetheless, it is the charge of people with education and perspective to keep the truth in view, whether it be the truth of American history, or the truth of gravitational lensing.

Best NC News (So Far)

Welcome to 2014. One hundred years ago this year World War I started. That was in late August I believe, or early September. Before that them folks were living in a more or less 100-year peace and having a terrific time. Who knows how this year will turn out. Just sayin'. But I was happy to see the following news story yesterday over at WRAL.com, which is the Raleigh TV station of record, and the birth place of Jesse Helms, Senator.

INDIAN TRAIL, N.C. — Call it a politician boldly going where no one has gone before.

On Thursday, David Waddell used the Klingon language to write his letter of resignation from the Indian Trail Town Council in North Carolina.

Waddell says he opted to use Klingon, the language of a warrior race on the "Star Trek" TV shows and movies, as an inside joke. Mayor Michael Alvarez is calling the letter unprofessional.

Waddell says he is resigning at the end of this month. His four-year term expires in December 2015.

Waddell says he also needs to devote time to mounting a write-in campaign on the Constitution Party's platform against U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan.

http://www.wral.com/nc-politician-writes-resignation-letter-in-klingon/13267131/

Indian Trail, by the way, is a suburb of Charlotte and is located on US-74, which at that point is known as "Andrew Jackson Highway." Andrew Jackson was an American genocidist who marched the Cherokee people off to Oklahoma, causing some ten thousand of them to perish en route, an event known as the Trail of Tears. He was President of the most exceptional United States, and graces our $20 bill. His hair is obviously arranged to masque his Spock ears.

Senator Hagan, while hardly perfect, has been a far better representative of North Carolina than either Jesse Helms or Andy Jackson. I'd expect she is some delighted by the prospects of tilting against the Right Honorable David Waddell, part-term Town Councilman. Mr. Waddell, on the other hand, might expect a note from Mr. Art Pope concerning his, erm, "unseriousness."

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I'd be remiss if I didn't award honorable mention to David Brooks' column on reefer (as we hipsters called it back in the day). The column itself you can find any number of places, and it's caused such consternation that even Chris Hayes devoted an excellent segment on its pathetic qualities last evening. The best response I've seen is the following:

http://www.garygreenbergonline.com/w/?p=449

Next, week 2.14, wherein the NC temperatures are going to plummet to single digits, and maison Hicks may be due for some emergency plumbing assistance if all doesn't go as hoped. Once I lived in a house with no plumbing, just a well and a bucket. Sometimes it was a hassle, to be sure, and when Libby and Anna (age 3) came to live here, it wasn't long before we achieved the modernity of pipes, bathtubs, hot water heaters, and all that fancy dancy stuff of the past century. But one thing's for sure, there are no frozen pipes in that lost world, and the water doesn't freeze 30 feet down.

I'm a "Southerner" Too

I have to agree with this gentleman, but be careful watching this if you're at work. There's also some very solid responses to Richardson's assertion that black people were "happy" when he was growing up:

To say you “never saw a Black person mistreated” in the Deep South in the 50’s and 60’s, is genuinely astounding. You’re talking about people who couldn’t vote, walk in the wrong part of town, drink from the wrong fountain, sit down in a diner, or show inadequate “deference” to any white trash idiot no matter how poor or stupid he was. You’re talking about people with few if any genuine rights who were consigned to those fields because they were actively excluded from anything else. You saw nothing but Black people being mistreated, and just because you never saw some white guy actually standing over them and beating them with a chain is no excuse to play dumb about it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/20/1264135/-My-Facebook-Note-Re-Phil-Robertson?detail=email

Mark Steyn, on the other hand, claims at National Review that Mr. Richardson is being bludgeoned by that dangerous group of thugs, GLAAD. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366896/age-intolerance-mark-steyn

Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

It's pretty sad when this blurry, sloppy phrase, "conventional Christian morality," gets dragged around town in support of pretty much every bigoted notion that sleeps in America's lizard brain, waiting only for the alarm bells of people like Steyn to slither awake yet again. The southern ranter at the top has it exactly right. It's the rubes who are being shilled by the Richardsons. And by the American right wing.

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Update, 12/28/13: The suspension has been lifted, praise Jesus, and the faux duck millionaires can continue to make their tv show for the A&E huckster billionaires. Now that didn't hurt much, did it?