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April 24, 2021

Earth Day in eastern NC, processing the Chauvin verdict, and catching up with The Handmaid’s Tale

Sally and I had a particularly good Earth Day this year visiting eastern North Carolina. The enormous wildlife refuges near the NC coast have large populations of black bears, and we were hoping to see some of their new cubs. We failed as to the cubs, but saw a group of six bears. We also found a lot of beautiful birds, including a large flock of glossy ibises, a new species for us. There were hardly any people, which was just fine.

The trial of Minneapolis police officer Eric Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd ended this week with a jury verdict of guilty on all counts. The evidence of guilt seemed overwhelming, but given our history, the outcome was far from certain. It is disturbingly common in the US for police to use extreme force on Black people, but extremely rare for a police officer to be charged and convicted for resulting injuries and deaths.

The Chauvin trial has inspired some useful discussion of why this is so, and what needs to change. Part of the story is the background rule of qualified immunity, a circular Supreme Court doctrine that usually protects police even in egregious cases. Another aspect is police union contracts that prevent firing of officers guilty of racist misconduct. There is the famous blue wall of silence, the unofficial rule that generally prevents officers from testifying against other officers. Less famous is the standard procedure among district attorneys of ignoring police crimes, with a view to maintaining good relations with them for reasons of DA career advancement.

Above all, there is our racist caste system. In our system, for a long time many of us were taught that Black men are more violent and dangerous than other people. Even now, after that lie has been thoroughly debunked, many ordinary potential jurors believe it. With such racist training still lodged in their minds, it isn’t hard to convince them that a police officer that killed a Black man had a reasonable fear for himself, no matter what the circumstances, other than that the man was Black.

My guess is that Chauvin and his lawyers were counting on there being at least one juror with this traditional mindset, since there normally is. For such a person, it would be possible to repeatedly watch the horrifying video and hear abundant supporting testimony without concluding that Chauvin committed murder. For a juror with a strong enough filter of racial bias, any police violence against Black people would seem reasonable and justified.

The good news is the Chauvin jurors managed to see past racial filters and look at the evidence. This suggests we’re making some progress in unwinding the caste system. But of course, there’s a lot more work to be done.

Here’s a new exhibit in that case: Black Lives Matter protests are now being targeted by Republican state legislators. According to the NY Times, this year there have been anti-protest bills in 34 states. Some proposed laws immunize drivers who drive into protestors, while others add prison terms and other harsh penalties for protesting. This is appalling, but also instructive.

The Times reported that almost all of the BLM protests were peaceful, with an estimate that only 4 percent involved some property damage or police injuries. Nevertheless, for many Republicans, influenced by right wing media, the false impression persists that the protests were instead mainly about violent Black people attacking the police.

Our long training in the caste system makes it possible for some of us to look at one thing (Black people systematically victimized by police violence) and see the exact opposite (police and white people being targeted by Black people). This fits into and reinforces a narrative of white victimhood, which works to conceal the much larger story of white privilege.

Wherever you look, you will likely find a strong remnant of this caste training that distorts reality. I doubt it will lose its hold in this generation, but it seems to be getting weaker.

Last week Sally and I have finally caught up with The Handmaid’s Tale, a television series that premiered in 2017, and which we began watching on Hulu a couple of months ago. When I first heard about THT, I thought it was probably not for us. We’re not especially keen on science fiction, particularly when it’s dark and violent. But so far (with the 4th season about to begin), we’ve found it absorbing, thought provoking, and even at times inspiring.

The set up for THT is this: in the near future, a fanatical religious group has seized power in the United States and imposed a police state they call Gilead which has a rigid caste system with women at the bottom. The permissible roles for women are limited (mostly cooking, cleaning, child-bearing), and they must wear uniforms that correspond to their roles.

Women married to higher caste men get to wear handsome teal capes, but like all women are not allowed to read or do work outside the home. Because of a fertility crisis, Gilead has created a ceremony to allow higher caste men to rape low caste women to impregnate them.

The idea sounds over the top, but it turns out that Gilead is a great laboratory for imaginative testing of some of our actual notions and values. Patriarchy, misogyny, and other expressions of hierarchy (such as racism) are so much a part of our own world that it’s easy to stop seeing them, or to assume that they’re natural and necessary. THT helps us to reconsider some of our underlying assumptions about gender roles, as well as other orthodoxies.

This experiment in imagination seems more urgent since the attack on the Capital of last January 6. According to recent polling, a majority of Republicans continue to believe the Disgraced Former President’s lies about his winning the last election, and very few have condemned his efforts to throw out the election results and take over the US government. Republicans in many states continue to work on changing their voting systems to increase their advantage by making it harder for people of color to vote. In addition, they’re now trying to throw out the Republican state election officials who helped save our democracy by following the law instead of the lying ex-pres.

It’s hard not to see a disturbingly large overlap between the traditionalist patriarchal authoritarian system of Gilead and the MAGA view of how America should be. At the same time, Gilead has one aspect of social justice that both the MAGA ideal and our actual present caste system does not: in Gilead, Black people are treated just like non-Black people. That is, there is no difference in the respect and opportunities people receive based on skin color. Gilead, along with horrifying systematic misogyny, also is a reminder that our racialized caste system is a cultural invention and can be reformed.

Gilead is a police state with armed soldiers watching at all times and preventing unapproved discussions by women. There are brutal public punishments, like mass hangings, stonings, and removal of limbs.

But interestingly, the Gilead surveillance methods are not nearly as advanced as those now being used in China, or even in the US. Gilead has few if any video cameras watching the streets, businesses, or living spaces, and apparently no supercomputers analyzing facial recognition and other data (as China and we do). A MAGA version of Gilead would almost certainly be more technologically adept at identifying and suppressing dissent.

So I’ve gone from thinking that the world of THT is an over-the-top fantasy to seeing it as something that almost just happened, and still could. Except the MAGA version might well be more efficient and cruel.

The good news is that even in Gilead, there is resistance by people with compassion and courage. It won’t spoil the story for me to say the women there turn out to be resourceful and strong. Their unflinching and mostly non-violent struggle against oppression is inspiring. Maybe it will inspire some of us to continue opposing our own moralizing oligarchs.

April 9, 2021

Understanding life, or at least, trying

It was sunny this week, and warmer. After I recovered from my bout with the flu, I got to spend more time outside with the birds, and made a few images I liked.

I admit, one of the things I like about nature photography is fiddling with the amazing technology, which allows for harder and closer looks at everything. But for me, the deeper purpose is connecting with the animals, vegetables, and minerals. It is quite possible to be surrounded by nature and barely see it, as I have done many times. On the other other hand, if you start looking and keep looking, there’s always more to see.

Nature photographs are, of course, distinct from nature itself. Even the best are only tiny slices of the whole, and, for better or worse, always incorporate human choices on technology and aesthetics. At the same time, there are aspects of nature, like a bird catching a fish, that we could barely see except in a photograph.

In Mark Bittman’s new book about the human food system, he makes a point I found semi-comforting about the misery that humans have inflicted on the rest of the earth: it wasn’t planned. There was never an evil genius or plan directing mass slaughter of animals or destruction of their habitats. There were, of course, strong cultural forces at work, such as capitalism, religion, and imperialism, as well as greed and fear.

At the end of the day, though, there was no conscious decision to exterminate billions of wild animals. We just didn’t notice. We didn’t bother to look closely at the lives of other creatures, or think. Even as it was happening, we didn’t really understand the extent of the damage we were doing to them, and to ourselves.

But now we are starting to understand. Maybe. I hope. There could still be time to change our course.

We’ve been thinking more about viruses, but curiously scientists are not in agreement on whether viruses are alive. According to Carl Zimmer’s recent piece in the NY Times, there is actually no well settled definition of where life separates from non-life, and viruses can arguably fit in either category. No one ever saw a virus until there were modern electron microscopes, and no one knew much about how they operated until the advances in understanding DNA and RNA of the late 20th century.

We now know there are a lot of individual viruses. According to Zimmer, there are more of them in a litre of seawater than there are humans on the planet. And there are more species of viruses than of anything else — possibly trillions of them. In our own guts, there are at least 21,000 viral species.

This sounds kind of scary, since the only viruses most of us have heard of are those that cause disease. But a lot of them are harmless, and some of them are essential for life. Some important ones assist our gut bacteria, and some of them have become part of the human genome.

As to bacteria, we’ve come a long way from when I was a kid in the mid-20th century. Back then, bacteria were all considered dangerous enemies. Kitchen and bath cleaning products as well as medicine embodied the view that the only good bacterium was a dead one. Now we understand better that bacteria are an essential part of our world, and, indeed, essential elements of our own bodies. It sounds like we’re starting along a similar learning curve as to viruses.

Apropos of misunderstood and unfairly despised inhabitants of our home planet, I’d like to say a word on behalf of octopuses. They are not, to human eyes, very attractive, but they have extraordinary talents, as I’ve noted before. My Octopus Teacher, currently on Netflix, is a wonderful documentary about an octopus and a diver who develop a surprisingly intimate relationship.

I was very disappointed at the New York Times this week when it published a story whipping up octopus fears. In a nutshell, the Times breathlessly reported that an octopus “angr[ily] lash[ed]” a tourist in Australia. Later in the story, the Times finally made clear that the tourist was not seriously injured, and was more likely stung by a jellyfish.

I am more grateful than I used to be for slow news days, when there is no particular political scandal, mass shooting, or other disaster, and newspaper editors are straining a bit to fill the paper. But that doesn’t justify the Times’ tall tale of the angry lashing octopus.

As those with any interest in the world’s deteriorating coral reefs already know, octopuses and other reef creatures have more than enough problems already. Those who know nothing about octopuses, except that they look alien and scary, need education, rather than fear mongering. Dear Times, such anti-nature pseudo journalism is bad for animals, humans, and your reputation, and should be discontinued.

April 2, 2021

Flowers, birds, babies, bridges, and Bittman

Spring really showed up in Raleigh this week, with lots of flowers. It’s always cheering, even though we know the pine pollen will soon be causing sneezes. With several new buildings going up downtown, there are fewer trees for the birds to sing in, but there are still some singers. I recognized several, including cardinals, robins, mockingbirds, song sparrows, and Carolina wrens. I hope they all find mates, and have happy nests with bouncing chicks.

Jocelyn and Kyle visited here last week, and proudly announced that they were expecting a baby girl in the fall. I was thrilled! It is so exciting to be having a grandbaby, which I intend to spoil rotten. Being a parent the first time round was stressful for me. But especially with mature and loving parents taking care of the difficult things, like food, baths, diapers, and bedtime, babies are cute and fun to play with. I’ve even started putting together a little songbook of children’s songs to play on the piano for my grandbaby and her friends, some of which I learned from my mom. I’m also trying to decide what I’d like the new one to call me. Poppy might be good.

I got hit by a brutal stomach flu bug early in the week, which left me weak and shaken. For a whole day, I couldn’t do anything but lie on my back, and the day after that, all I could manage was some reading.

But I enjoyed reading about the roll out of several projects of our new president, including the big initiatives addressing our bridges, dams, roads, water systems, electric grids, and other infrastructure problems. After years of extreme polarization, it now seems that a lot of people are in agreement as to this reality: we’ve neglected basic operating needs for decades and unless we want more disasters, we’ve got to get to work. Just weeks after the defeat of that big-mouthed lying loser, it feels like we might be starting to make real progress on some of our big problems, including climate change and racial justice. The President’s proposal to have wealthy corporations start paying their fair share of the bills seems like it could work.

Apropos of reading and trying to patch up our system, I strongly recommend a new book: Animal, Vegetable, Junk, by Mark Bittman. It is about food, and asks the seemingly simple question: what is food for? If you said nutrition, then you will get some new perspectives from this book. Bittman shows that food practices explain a lot about the rise and fall of human civilizations, including our own.

Bittman urges us to rethink some basic assumptions, such as treating the earth as an inexhaustible resource for human consumption, and treating food as an industry entitled to seek nothing other than more money. Animal, Vegetable, Junk tells a gripping, severely under-reported story, which urgently needs our attention.

March 14, 2021

Getting better

My week was more medical than usual, with checkups for my teeth and eyes, and a follow up on my spine surgery. There wasn’t a lot of drama, except that both my long-time dentist and my long-time optometrist had retired since my last checkups. I liked them, and will miss them. The new docs I tried seemed pleasant and competent, old enough, but not too old, and with newer equipment. I have high hopes that they’ll still be practicing after I have no further needs in their specialities.

As for my spine, Dr. K reviewed new X-rays and thought that his work on my thoracic spine seemed to be healing well. He was sorry that my tingling symptoms were still here, but said they might get better in a few months. I thought, but didn’t say, this is starting to sound like an overly interesting (for clinicians) diagnostic puzzle. It’s a reminder that I likely have a best-if-used-by date, which I do not enjoy thinking about.

I’m grateful to have survived the coronavirus pandemic long enough to get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which I got yesterday over in Durham. It didn’t hurt to speak of — you should do it! What a turnaround in the pandemic we’ve had in just a few weeks, with vaccinations running way ahead of schedule.

Also amazing: this week President Biden signed into law a huge measure to address the effects of the pandemic, plus some long standing problems. The American Rescue Plan breaks new ground in getting some real help to people who are barely getting by. This idea of helping the less fortunate is not exactly new, but in the last half century our government has mainly been by and for the most fortunate, with a focus on giving them tax cuts and subsidies. It’s a little disorienting to see Congress pass legislation designed to help ordinary people, and especially poor people, with health care, education, food, child care, transportation, housing, and other needs.

As I discussed recently, Heather McGhee has a new book on how this old idea of a social safety net and basic public services was rejected in the U.S. out of fear of undermining the traditional racial caste system. But maybe we’re starting to turn the page on that sad chapter, and to reconstruct an America that’s less brutal and more caring. Here’s hoping!

Finally, I have a bit of musical good cheer to share. In my piano studies, I’ve been wading into the deeper waters of jazz harmony and creating some piquant bebop dissonances. This week, in a change of pace, I focused more on tropical rhythms and some of my favorite bossa nova tunes, like Antonio Carlos Jobim’s classic The Girl from Ipanema. That cheerful, loping rhythm turns out to be tricky to do as a solo pianist.

Anyhow, I also started working on Jobim’s song Wave, and came across a version that filled me with happiness. It’s a live performance, under three minutes, with Elis Regina singing with joy and harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans playing with humor. You can listen to it here. Enjoy!

I took these shots early at Shelley Lake this week when the geese, herons, and eagles were starting their day. I was hoping to get a shot of one of the eagles catching a fish, and did see one try, but he missed.

February 27, 2021

The worst idea in history: animals and us

Canada geese at Shelley Lake near sunrise

I’m recovering just fine from my neck surgery, and the weather turned nicer, too. For a couple of days, it felt like spring, though after that, it cooled off. In the pleasant interval, I took my camera out to see the birds at Jordan Lake, and also stopped in to check on the bald eagles nesting at Shelley Lake. These are some of the pictures I took.

Spending some time with the animals, or even just standing by the water hoping they’ll show up, is very therapeutic. Walt Whitman got it right in his famous poem; being with them is moving and soothing. When I get out around sunrise or sunset, I’m always a little surprised when there are few or no other people looking at them, but not sorry.

Great blue herons at Jordan Lake near sunset

Apropos, there was a lively short essay in the NY Times this week on something I’ve hoped others were thinking about: the disconnect between what we know about animals and how we treat animals. Crispin Sartwell, a philosophy professor at Dickinson College, wrote that western philosophy has labored mightily to establish that humans are different from and superior to animals, and failed. Perhaps this is starting to be noticed.

Everyone who stayed awake through high-school biology learned that homo sapiens are animals, with close physical similarities to many other animals. But most of us still think of ourselves as not actually animals, but rather, better than animals.

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As Sartwell notes, we’ve also been taught to regard humans as distinctive and superior on account of their consciousness, reasoning abilities, and moral systems. Comparisons of humans and other animals generally focused on the things humans did best, such as human language, rather than areas where animals outperformed us, such as sight, hearing, smell, strength, speed, endurance, and memory. Where animals showed sophistication in their communications and culture, we learned to avoid thinking about it.

The essential lesson pounded into all of us was that human intellectual qualities justified treating other animals as mere objects to be dominated and exploited. This idea is so familiar and deeply entrenched that it is hard to see it clearly as an idea subject to discussion.

In my student days at Oberlin College, we used to debate the extent to which ideas could affect human history. We were thinking about whether the philosophies of canonic thinkers like Aristotle, Locke, or Marx were primary drivers of cultural change.

We didn’t even think to consider the effects of the idea that humans are separate from, and far superior to, animals. The idea has no known author and no supporting reasoning. If examined with any seriousness, it falls apart as nonsense. Yet, as Sartwell suggests, it is almost certainly the most important idea in human history.

Sartwell raises the issue of how thinking of humans as fundamentally superior to other animals relates to other hierarchies. To justify slavery, colonialism, or other violent oppression, the groups to be dominated are characterized as beastly, wild, savage, brutal, fierce, primitive, uncivilized, inhuman, and so on — in short, “like animals.”

Even today, discrimination follows this same basic pattern in addressing people with African ancesters, other disfavored nationalties, women, religious minorities, and LGBTQ people. That is, these groups are defined as something less than fully human, and therefore not entitled to the highest degree of privilege.

The hierarchies that stem from treating animals as inferior have caused enormous harm to the humans who are denied full human status. Slavery is a dramatic example from our past, but there are many others that are very much still with us, like suppressing the votes of minorities, lower pay for women, and violence against LBGTQ people.

As Sartwell notes, this hierarchical, exploitative way of thinking divides us both from each other and from nature. Indeed, it has led to an existential crisis for nature. A couple of articles this week highlighted aspects of this.

According to a new study, about one third of freshwater fish species are threatened with extinction. Climate change, habitat loss, and pollution caused by humans accounts for much of this dire threat. Meanwhile due to these same factors, the populations of large animals (mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish) have fallen by 68 percent since 1970. More than two-thirds of these animals. Gone. Since 1970. Holy camoly!

Part of our unfolding catastrophe has to do with our view that animals are so inferior that they can properly be treated as food. A new piece by Jenny Splitter in Vox sums up some of what’s happening. Meat production through factory farming — that is, raising and slaughtering billions of animals each year — accounts for more than 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and also for vast losses of habitat for wild animals. This food system is raising the threat of extinction for thousands of species.

Our meat-based food system is not only deeply immoral, but unsustainable. To continue along this path likely means ecological and human disaster. Splitter’s piece notes that we may get help from technology, like lab grown meat, and from requiring more responsible farming practices. But cutting back on eating meat and moving toward a plant-based diet is something we as a species will have to do eventually. And we as individuals can do it now.

If you are either on board with plant-based eating or interested in experimenting, or even if not, I recommend trying Guasaca Arepa on Hillsborough Street. They have some outdoor picnic tables, where I ate my first ever arepa this week. It’s a Columbian speciality that involves putting various fillings in a sort of cornmeal cake. Guasaca has many fillings on offer, but I tried the vegan. Though a bit messy, it was delicious!

Pied-billed grebe at Shelley Lake near sunrise

September 13, 2020

Our Cape May getaway, and Trump’s fiddling while the West Coast burns

Cape May lighthouse

Last week Sally and I had a beach getaway to Cape May, New Jersey. We met up with Jocelyn and our new son-in-law Kyle at an Airbnb house, which was charming and comfortable. Jocelyn and Kyle had, while in New York City, had Covid-19, which in their case was no fun but well short of fatal, and we all thought it likely that they were immune and not infectious. So we enjoyed cocktails and meals together, slow bike rides, and reading on the beach. There were dolphins playing just offshore, and several species of seagulls.

Cape May has a lot of charming Victorian gingerbread-type houses and beautiful gardens. It also is a prime transit point for birds migrating along the East Coast. Sally and I went out in the mornings and found some birds we weren’t familiar with, including a few warblers and large flocks of tree swallows. There were very lush areas near the beach, with lots of wildflowers. There were also mosquitoes, but no ticks, at least ones that found us.

We tried to take a break from the news cycle, including the never ending Trump Show, but didn’t succeed entirely. I found myself cycling between hope that sanity and good sense would ultimately prevail in the next election, and dread of the opposite.

Trump didn’t seem to have any new ideas, but his old ideas, including trying to scare white people with the thought that Black people were coming to their neighborhoods, had worked for past American presidents, to our national shame. When fear kicks in, the possibility of either compassion or logical thought is over, which is why he employs it.

But at least for now, judging from recent polling, his fear mongering calls for law and order don’t seem to be convincing anyone who he wasn’t pretty scared already. Unfortunately, some of those are all in, including so-called patriot militias with guns and QAnon believers.

One of Trump’s new favorite big lies is that antifa is a terrorist organization responsible for widespread violence. This lie has been pressed into service to explain the West Coast wildfires, which in the last few days have become catastrophic. In Trumpworld, the fires were set by antifa, rather than the lightning strikes that were in fact mostly responsible. Sadly, some folks with flames bearing down on their houses believed that antifa was both responsible and planning to loot their neighborhoods. Refusing orders to evacuate, they felt they needed to stay to defend their property.

As of this writing, Trump’s response to the West Coast wildfires has resembled his response to the coronavirus, which is to do nothing except emit hot air intended to distract attention from the disaster. For any other president, this would be a career-ending scandal, an unbelievable dereliction of duty, but for Trump, it’s just a normal week.

It did seem that Trump was causing some indigestion in the right wing from his derogatory comments about dead American soldiers being suckers and losers. This is definitely appalling, though not especially surprising. We’ve seen enough of Trump to know he is a deeply flawed person, with perhaps his most important flaw being an inability to care about anyone other than himself. He just can’t process empathy and compassion, and therefore thinks they’re for suckers.

His indifference is, for those whose lives might have been saved by federal action from wildfires, pandemics, and other human derived disasters, a disaster. For many, including untold numbers of wild animals, this is the end. For those of us still here, though, Trump’s ultra-selfishness and egomania can serve as a kind of negative example.

That is, Trump embodies the most extreme version of capitalist amorality, in which greed is good and every other consideration is for losers. His example of extreme individualism shows that such an ethos works poorly for everyone — even for the uber capitalist, whose appetites are relentless and never satisfied. The mind set of greedy no-holds-barred individualism is ultimately self destructive, as shown by Trump himself, a sad figure who can barely be said to have a self that is self-aware.

The opposite orientation — that is, prioritizing the concerns of others, expressing generosity, cultivating compassion — is in some ways more difficult. But it increases the chances of social harmony and personal fulfillment. As far as I know, we don’t have a political party organized around unselfishness and related values, but maybe someone will start one — though please, not till after November. As we start to see the light at the end of the Trump tunnel, it’s a good time to start planning for change.

May 3, 2020

Missing Florida, processing some photos, and picturing hell

Osprey at Jordan Lake

I’d planned to be in Florida this past week photographing the big birds there, like egrets, wood storks, and roseate spoonbills. With the coronavirus pandemic still in full force, that wasn’t possible, but I did get to spend some time at our area parks, including Shelley Lake and Jordan Lake. It was good to be outside with our local birds.

Although I didn’t capture any images that were singular, I was happy to practice getting better exposures. I also enjoyed experimenting with the raw images in Lightroom, Photoshop, and other apps, with a view to improving my processing skills. Here are some of the results using bird shots I took this week, as well experiments with Sally’s orchids. The white one lost its flowers a few days after the last shot of it. Hope it will come back next year.

These days there’s a lot of background fear and worry, and no simple solution to all our ills. But I’m finding it helpful to spend some time focusing on moments of beauty and peace, and also spending more time meditating. I discovered some good new (to me) resources on YouTube, including some guided meditations by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. I don’t think I’m anywhere near nirvana, but I’m happier and more peaceful.

Tufted titmouse at Shelley Lake

I used to worry about the possibility of going to hell. In the religious tradition I grew up in, hell was a real place, ruled by Satan, where sinners were sent after death to be tortured forever. I eventually came to think that the likelihood of there being such a place was close to zero, and that worrying about it was a waste of time. But it’s interesting that the concept of hell has had such a long life, and continues to terrify people today.

I learned more about hell in an interview with Bart Ehrman on Fresh Air a few weeks ago, and just finished his new book, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina, contends that the notions held by most Christians of the afterlife are not found in the Bible. Rather they were made up by various early Christian writers to support religious theories and emotional needs.

It’s good to know that the horrifying idea that God set up a massive system for never ending torture is not universal, and is actually a relatively recent (around 1,800-year-old) invention. Christian ideas of hell have varied with respect to the brutality and intensity of the torture, including some with extremes of sadism. But even the milder versions are peculiar. Our experience is that we get accustomed to almost any pain or misery, and nothing lasts forever. The oddity, and impossibility, of unending, unstoppable agony does not seem to have struck many people.

In the interview on Fresh Air, Ehrman mentioned that he was confident that hell did not exist. He seemed to think people suffered unnecessarily because of the concept, and that they’d be happier without it. I think that, too.

On the other hand, I’ve been re-reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book on the meat industry, Eating Animals, which depicts a truly hellish reality. Every year, billions of sentient creatures — cows, pigs, chickens, and others — are brought into existence by humans who treat them with unspeakable cruelty. Humans inflict suffering on these animals on a scale that truly defies comprehension. Then they kill them and eat them.

The horror of the meat industry is most apparent in its cruelty to billions of individual animals, but it also produces a lot of suffering less directly. It is one of the largest contributors of the greenhouse gases that account for global warming. It introduces steroids, antibiotics, bacteria, and viruses into the human food chain that account for a lot of sickness and death.

The meat industry is also a place of misery for the workers who kill and cut up the animals. Slaughter houses are some of the most dangerous workplaces in America. Many of the workers are immigrants who are too desperate and powerless to demand safe conditions and reasonable pay.

It was therefore not a huge surprise that there have been serious Covid-19 outbreaks in industrial meat operations. But the reaction of President Trump was surprising, and even for him, perverse. He issued a declaration that the meat industry was essential infrastructure under the Defense Production Act and must therefore remain open. He didn’t say how this was to be accomplished if the workers in large numbers got sick and died.

So is the meat industry, with its enormous profits based on cruelty and lies, essential? It’s hard to see how that could possibly be. We can certainly survive without meat, and hundreds of millions of people do so every day. In fact, eating a healthy plant-based diet is a lot better for the human body. I’ve been doing it for twenty-some years, and I’m here to tell you, it’s been good.

Perhaps, along with a lot of death, Covid-19 will cause more people willingly or unwilling to eat less meat and more plants. Once we factor in all the health gains from less meat-related disease and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, we might have a net gain in the survival rate. There could be a win-win — less animal cruelty, less human suffering, and more health and happiness.

March 15, 2020

Spring birds, and The New Jim Crow

Canada geese at Shelley Lake

Spring is definitely arriving here in Raleigh, and the birds are singing lustily. This week at Jordan Lake, I sawsome juvenile bald eagles, osprey, and great blue herons. At Shelley Lake, I enjoyed my old friends the Canada geese, and there was a towhee who posed nicely for me while singing.

A towhee

At Jordan Lake, I thought I might have spotted a rarity — a black-headed gull. After studying my bird books, I posted a picture on the Carolina Bird Photographers Facebook page, and asked for the opinion of any gull experts. I got a quick response: it was a Bonaparte’s gull, which is not uncommon. I was a little disappointed, but I now have a firmer grasp of what a Bonaparte’s looks like.

A Bonaparte’s gull that looked a lot like a black-headed gull

For the spring migration, I’ve been refreshing on my bird song identification skills, using Peterson recordings and the Audubon app. I’m able to identify most of our local birds, and I’m getting ready for the less common migrants.

I finished reading The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, which I highly recommend. Alexander, a former civil rights attorney and professor, paints a powerful and disturbing picture of mass incarceration in the US, showing that the war on drugs was to a great extent a war on black people. Seemingly race neutral laws resulted in a huge increase in imprisonment, with most of the prisoners black people convicted of non-violent drug crimes.

This had a ripple effect through black communities, destroying families and leaving a large percentage of black males unable tp find work and unable to vote. The effect has been comparable to the Jim Crow system for suppressing blacks after abolition, and has sustained our racial caste system using the race neutral terminology of crime.

An osprey at Jordan Lake

There’s a quick overview of the book in Wikipedia, and she wrote a recent essay in the NY Times that has some of her main points. though I thought it was well worth reading the whole book.

Alexander was on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast recently, and sounded like a really knowledgeable and thoughtful person. The subject of the podcast was prison abolition. This was the first time I’d heard that there is a prison abolition movement that is connected to the insights of her book. The basic idea is to address mass incarceration by changing our penal system, including redefining what’s criminal and designing less draconian punishments. This does not sound at all crazy, and I look forward to learning more.

Juvenile bald eagle

When Alexander’s book was first published ten years ago, her message that the drug war was a symptom and expression of a racial caste system seemed radical, but it’s becoming widely accepted. We’ve made some progress in modifying the worst discriminatory laws of the war on drugs and addressing policing abuses, but much of the system is still in place, and the victims are all around us. It’s a prime opportunity to exercise our capacity for compassion, expand our political vision, and work for change.

December 22, 2019

Cold first flights, and a thought experiment — forget the rule of law

It was cold here this week, and it took some willpower to get up while it was still dark and roll out to check on the birds. But I did it, making it to Shelley Lake just after sunrise to listen to the geese honking and watch them take their first flights of the day. Each bird and each group bird is a little different. As the sunlight hits the trees on the far side of the lake, the calm dark water turns orange and green.

As always, it was calming and invigorating to spend some time beside the still water with the geese, ducks, herons, gulls, eagles, and song birds. But there were challenges. One day my hands got so cold I couldn’t feel the shutter button on my camera. But fortunately, I didn’t get frostbite, and I wore heavier gloves after that.

My more serious pain issue now is from the Trump impeachment fireworks. Last week I suggested that too much anger, hysteria, and other strong emotions are a big part of our polarization problem, and we need to calm down. I admit, I was thinking the Trumpians might need calming more than me, but I’ll also admit, I’m finding I greatly need it.

I was stunned and sickened when the Republican legislators repeatedly declared this week that the investigation of Trump was a sham. They said it was a hoax, a witch hunt, and a dastardly sneak attack on America. They compared their Democratic colleagues to those who crucified Jesus! What they did not do was acknowledge the voluminous evidence of Trump’s serious misconduct, much less attempt to rebut it.

I keep trying to understand this world view, in which Trump is the innocent victim of the evil Democrats. As I’ve said before, part of the explanation seems to be tribal loyalty and fear of being cast out of the tribe, but a big part of it seems to be raw anger and hatred of Democrats, fueled by the Fox-led propaganda machine and reinforced by group-think. The Republicans seem to be projecting their hatred of Democrats onto Democrats. That is, they seem to think the real problem is Democrats’ blind hatred of Trump, rather than what Trump did.

Perhaps in the Republican mind this justifies dismissing the evidence against Trump as a sham. In this mind, their obstruction of the process, obfuscating, repeating diversionary lies, and promoting wingnut conspiracy views are all the lesser of evils, necessary to combat the greater of evils (that is, Democrats).

Whatever the causes, I’ve been expecting the Republican fever to break (as Michelle Goldberg put it in her column yesterday). I’ve thought that eventually the dissonance between reality and their alt-reality would become untenable. Surely loyalty to the nation, honesty, and honor would eventually prevail. But the hearings this week and the lack of any indication of diverging views among Senate Republicans have made me think (along with Goldberg), that I may have been mistaken. We may be starting a new normal.

The Republicans’ unqualified support for Trump is probably more corrosive of our democracy than Trump’s own misconduct. Let me explain. We’ve only got two major parties, and one of them is signaling that there is nothing — no crime or constitutional violation — that a president of their party can commit that they will deem disqualifying. If that turns out to be their final position, the president will no longer be subject to our traditional system of checks and balances. That is, the president will not be subject to the rule of law. That would be a big change in the very idea of law.

Great blue heron

So it doesn’t seem premature to consider the possibility that without much reflection we’re about to dramatically change our system of government. How will life be different if the legislature and the courts exert no authority over the supreme leader, and the law has force and meaning only when it suits the leader?

In fact, there are already a number of systems like that. I’m thinking of China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and the list goes on. And more appear to be coming on line. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen to democracy in India, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, the Philippines, and that list also goes on.

I wouldn’t volunteer to be a citizen of China or other authoritarian, but of course life in any of those places wouldn’t be all bad. There would be many of the things we enjoy and value now, like friends and family, art and entertainment, adventures and sports, good food and wine. There would be beautiful forests, mountains, and ocean waves. The swans would still swim in lakes and mount the air.

Hooded mergansers

But without protections for a free press or free speech, opposition to the regime would gradually fall silent. Normal life would not include any meaningful political participation. There would be no limits on arbitrary state violence.

Just as now, our leaders would act out of ordinary human impulses like greed and the lust for power, but unlike now, there would be nothing to check those impulses. Just as now, our leaders could harbor racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-gay bias, and hatred of political opponents, but unlike now, no law would generally prevent violent action against targeted groups. Just as now, there would be powerful propaganda and wacky conspiracy theories, but fewer and fewer rebuttals based on reality.

Mallards

This is depressing, I realize. So I should also say I don’t think any of this is inevitable. I heard a podcast recently recounting a few cases where people had fallen out of planes for thousands of feet, hit a kindly tree branch or a snowbank, and survived. Sometimes, even when it looks like all is lost, you catch a lucky break.

But rather than count on a long-shot miracle, we’d better start coping with the reality we’ve got — the reality that is obscured by overwhelming fear and hatred. Unless we figure out a way to overcome that fear and hatred, we’re in big trouble. The place to start is with ourselves. In first aid training, they teach you that the first thing to do in an emergency is stop and think. Take a moment to calm down. Take some deep breaths.

December 15, 2019

New bird views, meditating for health, and the Trumpian take on liberals

With the chilly and rainy weather this week, I didn’t get out for any nature photography. I missed seeing the birds, but was glad to have some extra time to experiment with photo processing. I’ve been improving my Lightroom and Photoshop skills, and learning how to use Nik, Topaz, and Luminar software. Along with various failures and frustrations, I’ve discovered some new possibilities.

These images are revisions of recent shots. When I first made them, I was excited to be able to see details that were generally invisible to the human eye. Looking at them again reminded me of the joy of just looking at the birds and sharing their world. Trying out new software tools to the images made me look at the animals in new ways.

Like most everyone, I generally think of reality as fixed and solid, though I also try to keep in mind that there are other ways to think about it. Along that line, I’m currently reading Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, by Sean Carroll. Carroll is a research professor of theoretical physics at CalTech. He gives a lively account of the main ideas of quantum theory, including the mind-bending oddities, such as entanglement (particles affecting the behavior of distant particles).

For all its remarkable theoretical and practical achievements, Carroll admits that quantum physics is incomplete, lacking in a broadly accepted paradigm. He is supportive of the Many Worlds theory, which holds that the best explanation of quantum phenomena is that our universe is only one of a great many. I’d thought that Many Worlds was some sort of game for deep science nerds, but he convinced me that it’s more than that.

More research is required. Anyway, along with our enormous universe, there could be many others, some with beings like us that we can never communicate with. That seems less farfetched after experiencing the polarization of US politics, and most recently the Trump impeachment hearings.

Watching Republican legislators last week was, for me, surreal. Asked to address hard evidence that Trump had acted in direct opposition to US policy on Ukraine in order to benefit himself, they tried various maneuvers, including objecting to procedures, talking about conspiracies, and babbling and shouting incoherently — seemingly anything to avoid the issue.

I couldn’t watch for long — it was just too painful. But I saw enough to conclude that these Republicans had very strong feelings. They were very emotional. I had been assuming that they were cynical hypocrites, with little regard for the public interest or much of anything other than their own selfish interests.

But their anger seemed sincere. So I decided to work with the assumption that they sincerely believed that Trump had done nothing wrong and was the victim of an evil witch hunt by liberals. I wondered how, in spite of a mountain of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, such a belief could arise.

Part of the story is surely Trump’s attacks on the mainstream press. By calling every report that is unfavorable to him “fake news,” Trump seems to have thought that he could create doubt and confusion about facts that were otherwise uncontested. And, amazingly, he may have been right.

I originally assumed that no thinking person would buy the fake news idea. After all, Trump has such a long record of compulsive lying on matters large and small that the most reasonable assumption about his latest statement is that it is false. He also reflexively resorts to the schoolkid move of flipping any attack, as in, “You can’t say I’m a bully — you’re the bully!” As his preferred “news” organ, Fox News, beams out praise for him and attacks on his opponents without regard to reality, it makes a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland sense that he’d call all other news “fake.”

The traditional media has struggled to survive in an online world, with newspapers closing left and right. But other than the Trumpian claims, there’s no reason to think that our long established and respected media organs, like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, have switched from their traditional business of reporting on actual events in a relatively balanced way to just making things up. The charge of fakeness generally comes with no back up evidence or proposed corrections. But the claim of “fake news” seems to really resonate with Republicans.

Why? I have some ideas. First, there’s the information bubble. Our online world has made it easy to surround oneself entirely with information sources that fit one’s own preferences and biases, and avoid any contrary information. Fox News has been a trailblazer in the dark art of stylish disinformation, while Facebook, Twitter, and others have enabled the creation of alternative realities.

At the same time, human thought processes are far from reliable. Our brains are generally subject to confirmation bias, which makes us tend to believe what fits with our prior beliefs. We avoid cognitive dissonance, or information that calls into question those beliefs. We are prone to mistakes based on our likes and dislikes. We’re also inclined to think whatever the tribe says we should think. Even with the calmest, most rational among us are subject to these tendencies.

And Trumpism does not encourage calmness and rationality. It encourages fear and anger. Trumpism sounds the alarm as to various non-existent threats that are declared to be dire: hordes of brown-skinned people invading across the southern border so they can rape and pillage and take over jobs, minorities that are predominantly criminals, child molesting gays, secularists destroying traditional religion, Jews, etc.

But the most dire, most hated threat in the Trumpian universe is liberals. This is so bizarre that it took a long time for liberals to see it. Liberals thought they were engaged in ordinary life and politics, in which having diverse views was normal. That is, liberals thought of themselves as normal people, and of Trumpian Republicans as basically normal people who just disagreed with them. Liberals assumed the feeling was mutual.

That turned out to be wrong. In the Trumpian world view, liberals are not just ordinary political opponents. They are a threat to the social order and basic values. They are subhuman animals. They are evil.

As Michelle Goldberg recently pointed out in a good op ed piece, Trump treats liberals as “the enemy” and subjects them to a constant barrage of dehumanizing propaganda. Liberals are “scum.” Repetition and amplification by Fox News and its allies fills the Trumpians’ information bubble.

So the Republican legislators’ recent behavior — the lies, the insults, the shouting — probably seems to them well justified. Fearful for their careers and their tribe, they feel that they’re under violent attack and must defend themselves. For them, facts that implicate Trump are ipso facto just “fake news.” Those who say otherwise are evil liberals.

When we get excited or scared, it’s much harder to think reasonably and to be our best selves. This is one of the reasons I spend some time every day doing mindfulness meditation. It settles me down emotionally. It also helps in understanding more about how the mind works, and recognizing that it is just the mind. For a timer, I use a free app called Insight Timer, which also has a collection of good instructive talks. I’ve also benefited from the guided meditations from an app called Calm.

Tag: birds