ospreys | The Casual Blog

March 7, 2021

Ospreys, crock potting, and the Trumpist campaign against fair elections

When I went out to Jordan Lake late Wednesday afternoon, I saw my first osprey of the year perched in a pine across the river. I put my camera on the tripod and waited for it to fly before dark, but it didn’t. However, when I went back on Friday afternoon, there were a couple of them patrolling, and in the last patch of sunset on the river, I caught one catching a fish. I also saw many great blue herons, and one young bald eagle.

I’ve been learning to cook with an old school crock pot, which has generally worked out fine, though this week I had a near disaster. I tried to adapt a recipe for spinach lentil soup with lemon. Crock potting is a good style for me. It gets to the point without much fuss, but allows for improvisation, and after a long simmer, the result is usually surprisingly good.

But I was well into adding a lot of chopped vegetables before I realized there wasn’t room in our crock pot for everything, and I had to start subtracting. The lentils came along much slower than expected, and were not nearly ready by dinner time. So we ordered takeout falafel. We had the lentil soup the next night, and it wasn’t bad. In fact, Sally said she really liked it.

Speaking of disappointments, I was hoping the Trump Show was over, but unfortunately, it’s not. Since 2015, our Disgraced Former President (DFP) has taken up way too much of my brain space! Whatever you think about the DFP, you have to admit, he is not a quitter. Last weekend he recycled his patented mix of pomposity, ignorance, and fear mongering to a gathering of Republican leaders in Florida, and guess what? They cheered him on.

It’s no surprise that the DFP won’t shut up (has he ever?), but I was surprised that the Republican establishment wouldn’t seize the opportunity to change course and dump him. Surely most of them know perfectly well that his election fraud claims are absurd and despicable lies. Don’t they? Is it possible that these accomplished and privileged people have been infected by a mass delusion?

If so, it would not be a first. Starting in the eighteenth century, American political movements were built on and amplified hysterical fears of Native Americans, Germans, Mexicans, Asians, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Croats, and the list goes on. Not to mention movements against Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and other non-mainstream religions. And of course, witches. Last and also first, there was and is the hateful ideology of white supremacy used to justify enslavement of Black people, and their continuing oppression.

Each of those sad chapters was partially driven by ignorance and fear, but there were also political opportunists who exploited such fears. The current Republican leaders mostly look like opportunists. Some of those now cheering the DFP truthfully acknowledged his leadership of the January 6 insurrection just weeks ago. Last week they were not only supporting the outrageous lie of a stolen election, but were joining the attempt to blame the Trumpist insurrection on antifa and left wingers. Have they no shame?

Apparently not, and so we’ve got some hard work ahead of us, with the next elections not far ahead. The reliably incisive Charles Blow recently reported on work by the Brennan Center for Justice finding that state lawmakers have legislation in the works to restrict voting access — meaning suppressing voting by minorities to maintain power by mostly white elites — in 43 states That’s a lot of states — 86 percent! As Blow notes, similar voter suppression happened after the Civil War, and subverted democracy. The current Republicans appear to have decided there is only one way for them to win a fair election: not to have it.

Fortunately, their efforts to further unlevel the elections playing field are now out in the open, and defensive measures are in process. The House has passed H.R. 1 with much needed election reform going in the fairness direction, and it is conceivable that the Senate will modify the filibuster and do likewise. Maybe someday we’ll go further with a commitment to fair elections by simplifying the process and incentivizing participation with paid leave and cash.

Along with the big challenge of having fairer elections, we also have the separate challenge of how to fashion a government that better serves ordinary people, rather than tilting in favor of corporations and plutocratic elites. This week I heard a podcast introduction to the proposal of Helen Landemore, a political scientist at Yale. She sounded brilliant and unafraid to experiment with new ideas for practical improvements to democracy.

Landemore proposes setting up counsels of randomly selected ordinary citizens to work on important problems. In an interview by Ezra Klein, Landemore explained that even at its best, our existing system systematically excludes minority and other voices, and that including these voices would improve decision making. Landemore had some real world examples suggesting how to move forward along this line, including experiments in Iceland, France, and Switzerland. I’ve got a bit of a reading log jam at the moment, but I’m thinking her book, Open Democracy, could be worth reading.

May 10, 2020

Ways of looking at fishing birds, The End of Nature, Fellow Creatures, and the appeal of slavery denialism

Osprey at Jordan Lake preparing to dive

Again this week I spent some time at Jordan Lake looking at the water, trees, and birds. The birds weren’t as numerous this week, but I saw ospreys and great blue herons catch a number of fish. Even watching the inherent violence of animals eating other animals, there is something peaceful. They’re doing what nature designed them to do, as they’ve always done.

I got my first relatively high end photo printer this week. Hunt’s photo supply offered a big discount on a Canon Pixma Pro 10, and with the pandemic lock down still in force, I decided to experiment with some home printing. It was not a smooth take off. After putting some parts together, I ran into software problems, and ended up spending the better part of an hour on the phone with the Canon customer support guy. There is definitely a learning curve to making good prints, but after watching a few instructional videos, I managed to make a couple that I thought were promising.

As I worked on my prints, it occurred to me that there are a lot of levels of nature photography, and different ways of looking at the pictures. A photograph can pull us closer to a moment of reality, but it can also do the opposite. When I see a picture of a bird catching a fish, I might just think, that’s a picture of a bird catching a fish, and not think much else. That is, I might mistakenly think the photo fully contains the event, and for that reason not even bother to look carefully at what can be seen of the event. I could be thinking, I could always look at it later, and never do it.

Great blue heron and fish

On the other hand, I might decide to look harder, and consider the species of bird, the species of fish, their ages, the location, the weather conditions, and other particulars of the moment. At the same time, I might get some sense of the existential terror of a particular fish and the ecstasy of a particular bird. I sometimes notice how certain birds can look beautiful and repulsive at the same time, the last remaining dinosaurs.

Speaking of extinction events, I’ve been reading The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben. The book was published in 1989, as the possibility of massive environmental destruction from manmade climate change was coming into focus, so it is dated. But the basic science hasn’t changed, and a lot of his account is dead on target. As with his recent book, Falter, he has a gift for putting these difficult issues in perspective, which makes it possible to think productively about them.

I’ve also been re-reading Fellow Creatures, Our Obligation to Other Animals, by Kristine Korsgaard. Korsgaard, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, makes the case that we are not justified in treating non-human animals as objects to be exploited, and that they are entitled to respect.

Her argument is built on her extension of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which I find difficult. I suspect that if I fully understood Kant, I would not be a Kantian, though it’s doubtful I’ll ever know for sure. Still, struggling with his theory of morality seems like good exercise — brain calisthenics. And Korsgaard is surely doing something worthwhile in investigating our relationship to non-human animals and whether any system of morality can exclude them.

I was happy to see that Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her remarkable work on the 1619 Project. Her original introductory article is here. As I’ve noted previously, the series published in the New York Times along with a podcast proposed new ways of thinking about the role of slavery and white supremacy in forming America.

It was surprising that George Will used his column to attack and distort the message of the 1619 Project. Will is a very intelligent person, and his column is a reminder of how being intelligent does not at all inoculate people against such mental tendencies as denial and bias.

That is, one can be both smart and prone to denial and delusion, including denial that slavery was an essential, formative element in American democracy. Will’s attack on the 1619 Project does not, of course, mean he is himself a racist. But it is a reminder of how deeply white supremacy is woven into our culture, and how uncomfortable it is to look straight at the racism of our past and present. Will’s anger at the challenge to some of our founding myths is understandable, but his obfuscation is a regrettable service to white supremacy.

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.