I always root for the Central and South American teams in the World Cup (and Mexico and Canada . . . proximity rooting) and so I was excited to see Costa Rica redeem the nation, after losing 7-0 to Spain, by coming up with a dramatic 1-0 win over Japan this morning . . . and I know it's got to be tough to announce an entire soccer match-- there's a lot of dead time and a lot of just knocking the ball around, but I still think that the announcer should not have called Japan "shell shocked" after Keysher Fuller's change-up chip shot goal, because of the firebombing of Tokyo and the atom bomb . . . "shocked" would have been enough-- that would be like saying, if the US team were to beat Iran, that it looks like the Iranians have been roasted by the Great Satan-- and I don't think you can say that on TV-- but soccer does bring out the hyperbole in many of us (my favorite adjective used by an announcer in this cup was a "tantalizing" pass).
Sports are Entertaining (to a point)
Yesterday was quite a day for sports: I got up at 5:00 AM to watch the epic Nadal/Medvedev Australian Open Match, but I had to interrupt my viewing to go play indoor soccer (I managed to avoid learning who won) and so I finished watching the match at 11:00 AM and then I took the dog on an epic snow hike through the park then watched some of the USA/Canada Men's soccer match -- the US team got scored on early-- and then I went on a strange bar crawl with Connell and Alec . . . we wanted to watch the Kansas City/Cincinnati game but there were no seats to be had at Hooters and no seats to be had at Arooga's, so we kept visiting bars but not drinking any beer, until we finally found a table at The Grove in Milltown-- everyone must have been stir crazy from the cold and COVID and the storm-- and we had some wings and met Rob and Dan and watched the US lose and the Bengals win (and we learned about the various Bengals cheers and found out that the lady at the table next to us was not a football fan but she found it interesting that everyone was cheering for her . . . because her last name was Bengals) and then I returned home and put on the Rams/49ers game for a bit . . . and then I shut it off and went and read my book, because that was enough sports for one day.
Dave Reads Fifty Before Cat Turns Fifty
My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:
there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .
Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .
When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country.
Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:
Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.
he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .
on imagery
We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"
on the stupid geese in the park . . .
Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.
on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:
In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.
on the past and the future
And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)
Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.
a sports essay that made me cry
Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.
and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .
And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.
Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.
more on lawns . . .
more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.
Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!
There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”
and he writes about my favorite poem . . .
There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge, And
Finished knowing - then -
and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:
“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons.
and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .
Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
These Regions Go To Eleven
Here are some important facts about traveling in North Carolina:
- All North Carolina borders are open.
- There is no national quarantine.
The United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. Six joined together to liberate themselves from British rule. Four were conquered but not vanquished by English- speaking rivals.
The borderlands on both sides of the United States–Mexico boundary are really part of a single norteño culture. Split by an increasingly militarized border, El Norte in some ways resembles Germany during the Cold War: two peoples with a common culture separated from one another by a large wall. Despite the wishes of their political masters in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, many norteños would prefer to federate to form a third national state of their own.
But the Virginia Company’s plan was based on the faulty assumption that the Indians would be intimidated by English technology, believe their employers were gods, and submit, Aztec-like, to their rule. The Indians, in fact, did none of these things. The local chief, Powhatan, saw the English outpost for what it was: weak and vulnerable but a potential source of useful European technology such as metal tools and weapons.
By a twist of history, the dominant colonies of New England were founded by men who stood in total opposition to nearly every value that Tidewater gentry held dear.
From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror.
Of course, the Deep South wasn’t the only part of North America practicing full-blown slavery after 1670. Every colony tolerated the practice. But most of the other nations were societies with slaves, not slave societies per se. Only in Tidewater and the Deep South did slavery become the central organizing principle of the economy and culture.
Until the end of the seventeenth century, one’s position in Tidewater was defined largely by class, not race. The Deep South, by contrast, had a black supermajority and an enormous slave mortality rate,
thousands of fresh humans had to be imported every year to replace those who had died. Blacks in the Deep South were far more likely to live in concentrated numbers in relative isolation from whites.
Marriage outside of one’s caste is strictly forbidden. So while the Deep South had rich whites and poor whites and rich and poor blacks, no amount of wealth would allow a black person to join the master caste.
The last of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia was the most immediately disruptive. A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those nations’ monopoly control over colonial governments,
Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society to the present day.
Indian wars and other violence in Appalachia had profound effects on the other nations, particularly the Midlands.
The way things finally shook out, The Native Americans were certainly the biggest losers . . .
The American rebellion was precipitated by the Seven Years’ War, a massive global military conflict between Britain and France that lasted from 1756 to 1763. It’s remembered in the United States as the French and Indian War, because here the British fought against New France and its aboriginal allies.
In the end, the French were defeated, and all of New France (save the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon) was handed over to the British Empire. This had two consequences for the people of the continent. First, it removed from the political and military stage the only European society on which Native North Americans could rely.
During the start of the Revolutionary War, New York and New Jersey weren't particularly interested in freedom, liberation and revolt (perhaps because we are so well situated for trade . . . why rock the boat?)
New Netherland’s patriot uprising met with sudden and complete defeat in the summer of 1776 following the arrival of a British armada of 30 warships, 400 transports, and 24,000 soldiers. This invasion force scattered General Washington’s army, retook the city, and by the end of September occupied an area conforming almost exactly to the boundaries of the New Netherland nation. The rebels dispersed and ecstatic townspeople carried British soldiers around on their shoulders. New Netherland had fought a war against liberation and had lost badly.
New Jersey simply fell into anarchy. “The state is totally deranged [and] without government,” a Continental Army general observed before the British moved in. “Many [officials] have gone to the enemy for protection, others are out of the state, and the few that remain are mostly indecisive in their conduct.”
Why does Canada exist? Perhaps to show us the things that we screwed up . . .
If you’re an American, have you ever really asked yourself why Canada exists? When the American Revolution came about, why did only thirteen rather than eighteen North American colonies wind up revolting?
We’ve been taught to think of the ratification of the 1789 Constitution as the crowning achievement of the American Revolution. Most people living in the United States at the time, however, didn’t see it in quite those terms. Outside Tidewater and the Deep South, many were alarmed by a document they regarded as counterrevolutionary, intentionally designed to suppress democracy and to keep power in the hands of regional elites and an emerging class of bankers, financial speculators, and land barons who had little or no allegiance to the continent’s ethnocultural nations. Indeed, the much-celebrated Founding Fathers had made no secret of this having been one of their goals. They praised the unelected Senate because it would “check the impudence of democracy” (Alexander Hamilton), and stop the “turbulence and follies of democracy” (Edmund Randolph), and applauded the enormous federal electoral districts because they would “divide the community,” providing “defense against the inconveniences of democracy” (James Madison).
The competing philosophies of these eleven nations become abundantly clear during the Civil War.
There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.
The planters’ loathing of Yankees startled outsiders. “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics who implanted in the north.
“There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption
From central Pennsylvania to southern Illinois and northern Alabama, Borderlanders were torn between their disgust with Yankees and their hatred of Deep Southern planters. Both regions represented a threat to Borderlander ideals, but in different ways. The Yankees’ emphasis on the need to subsume one’s personal desires and interests to the “greater good” was anathema to the Appalachian quest for individual freedom; their moral crusades
On the other hand, Borderlanders had already suffered generations of oppression at the hands of
aristocratic slave lords and knew that they were the people the planters had in mind when they talked about enslaving inferior whites.
And there are some fables of the Reconstruction:
Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village . . .
In 1955 the three nations of the Dixie bloc were still authoritarian states whose citizens—white and black—were required to uphold a rigid, all-pervasive apartheid system.
In Mississippi, it was illegal to print, publish, or distribute “suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes,” with perpetrators subject to up to six months in prison. Klansmen and other vigilante groups tortured and executed blacks who violated these rules, often with the public approval of elected officials, newspaper editors, preachers, and the region’s leading families.
Across the Dixie bloc white Southerners initially reacted to the movement with disbelief, having been conditioned to think that “our Negroes” were “happy” to be oppressed, patronized, and deprived of basic human and civil rights.
Another New Yorker, President Theodore Roosevelt, pioneered federal government involvement in environmental protection, founding the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge systems. Roosevelt’s Yankee cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the National Wildlife Federation in 1936.
Not every region is as concerned about the environment (or the people who work in it) as Yankeedom.
Taxes are kept too low to adequately support public schools and other services.
From the gas fields of Louisiana to the industrial hog farms of North Carolina, environmental and workplace safety rules are notoriously lax.
The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.
There is some discussion of one of my favorite books on regionality:
This is the strategy Thomas Frank described in What’s the Matter with Kansas? which revealed how the oligarchs of his native state used social and “moral” issues to rally ordinary people to support the architects of their economic destruction.
Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking.
Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.
The important thing to understand is that within our country there are regions that predominantly believe and value completely different things than you.
Tom DeLay proclaimed in the early 2000s, “The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” “Nothing,” DeLay told bankers in 2003, “is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.”
After the 2010 BP oil spill, Representative Joe Barton (from Deep Southern Texas) publicly apologized to the company for having been pressured to create a fund to compensate its victims, calling the initiative—but not the spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.”
I'm not very keen on George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on. But some people love this stuff:
By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression.
If you're someone from New France, Yankeedom, the Left Coast or the New Netherlands and you want to drive yourself batshit crazy, imagine this . . .
Comparative early-twenty-first-century sociological surveys have found that New France is the most postmodern nation in North America. It is the region with the lowest proportion of people who believe in the devil (29 percent) and hell (26 percent). Asked if they agreed that the “father of the family must be master in his own house,” only 15 percent of Québécois said yes, compared with 21 percent of Far Western Canadians, 29 percent of New Englanders, and 71 percent of respondents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Another academic pollster found them to be more tolerant of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, prostitution, abortion, divorce, and having neighbors with AIDS, large families, drug problems, or emotional instability. Québec, one scholar found, was the region of North America with the highest degree of enlightened individualism and the least respect for traditional forms of authority.
While the Dixie bloc pulls the U.S. federation hard to the right, New France pulls Canada well to the left.
So Woodard sees this scenario playing out over and over, until there's something so cataclysmic that it tears us apart:
We don't have a shared cultural history in this country. Woodard believes our only hope is this:
The Usual Quarantine Stuff
Earlier Thursday, it was more TV. So much TV. I watched some Bosch with the wife, The Expanse with the kids, and The Wire with the wife and kids. I tried my best to watch some of the Parks and Rec reunion but found it awkward and sluggish. Headed back to Zoom pub night (which is also awkward and sluggish, I think that's just what Zoom is like).
I woke up at 4:45 AM this morning. Decided to get up and get some grading done. Waded through a bunch of narratives and some other assignments. Then went back to bed. That's a plus about remote learning: you can work on your own schedule.
Zoom meeting with the English Department at 8:30 AM.
Then I did some community service and went shopping for an old guy. Bought the usual stuff: liverwurst, ham turkey, pineapple chunks, soup soup soup, grapes, applesauce, etc. Old person food. I'm getting quicker in the store. Listening to electronica helps (Amon Tobin and Boards of Canada).
When I dropped the food off, a cute lady finally witnessed my community service! She answered the door. She was either a relative or some sort of aid. It's nice when someone cute sees you doing community service, but-- unfortunately-- I was dressed like a homeless person.
Note to self: if you wear a mask and you forgot to brush your teeth, you're going to smell some bad breath. Your own bad breath. And there's no way to escape it.
Ian and I did our usual three-mile run. It started pouring rain ten minutes in and didn't stop until we got home. Huge drops. Now it's warm and sunny. Springlike.
Ian stumbled on a fawn while walking the dog.
I just finished my second Josephine Tey mystery: a Shilling For Candles. She's a great writer. Weird characters, a run-of-the-mill detective without the tortured past, and a great ear for dialogue.
Here is a sample passage, summarizing the information the police received about possible sightings of an alleged murder suspect on the run:
By Tuesday noon Tisdall had been seen in almost every corner of England and Wales, and by tea-time was beginning to be seen in Scotland. He had been observed fishing from a bridge over a Yorkshire stream and had pulled his hat suspiciously over his face when the informant had approached. He had been seen walking out of a cinema in Aberystwyth. He had rented a room in Lincoln and had left without paying. (He had quite often left without paying, Grant noticed.) He had asked to be taken on a boat at Lowestoft. (He had also asked to be taken on a boat at half a dozen other places. The number of young men who could not pay their landladies and who wanted to leave the country was distressing.) He was found dead on a moor near Penrith. (That occupied Grant the best part of the afternoon.) He was found intoxicated in a London alley. He had bought a hat in Hythe, Grantham, Lewes, Tonbridge, Dorchester, Ashford, Luton, Aylesbury, Leicester, Chatham, East Grinstead, and in four London shops. He had also bought a packet of safety-pins pins in Swan and Edgars. He had eaten a crab sandwich at a quick lunch counter in Argyll Street, two rolls and coffee in a Hastings bun shop, and bread and cheese in a Haywards’ Heath inn. He had stolen every imaginable kind of article in every imaginable kind of place—including a decanter from a glass-and-china warehouse in Croydon. When asked what he supposed Tisdall wanted a decanter for, the informant said that it was a grand weapon.
And here is my favorite line from the book:
It is said that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram reading: All is discovered: fly, will snatch a toothbrush and make for the garage.
It's interesting what people lose themselves in during quarantine. Some people are watching old sports. My buddy Whitney is mainlining music documentaries. All I want is crime stuff. The chase scenes, the investigation, the freedom of movement, the bars and dives, and the various localities pull my mind from the reality of quarantine confinement.
Kickin' Off BHM with a Classic (by a white lady)
There's also a lot of deepfelt Christianity, probably because the novel primarily functions as a persuasive tract, and-- as Annette Gordon Reed explains in her New Yorker piece “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND THE ART OF PERSUASION: How Harriet Beecher Stowe helped precipitate the Civil War:
Currently, "Uncle Tom" is a black person who sells out his race and is excessively obedient and servile to the powers that be. Even Urban Dictionary recognizes that this is a bastardization of the term. This is probably because of the many piss-poor overly melodramatic stage performances of the novel that made Uncle Tom into a fawning sycophant.
Unemployed! In Greenland!
"You could go to college . . . or you could read this book. It explains EVERYTHING about the world. And it's a lot cheaper."
I held up Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.
The book is rather deterministic in its thesis: you can't escape the rivers, mountains, flatlands, harbors, oceans, and jungles in your country. And they will determine how you interact with your neighbors and how you will interact within your own country. You may have great natural resources, but no rivers and easily built roadways with which to interconnect your cities and towns-- which is much of South America. You may be at the mercy of the flatlands to your east, which is why Russia is always mucking about in the Ukraine. You might be-- like South Korea-- constantly worried not only about the threat of war, but also about a massive flood of refugees. In Africa, rivers don't go very far before they plummet downward in waterfalls. In the Middle East, borders were drawn up after World War I and don't correspond with geography (not to mention the Sykes-Picot agreement).
In America, our rivers are navigable and they lead to safe harbors. We also don't have ot worry about out neighbors (unless you're Donald Trump). Canada doesn't have enough people and there is too much desert between us and Mexico for that border to be a military threat.
And as the ice melts, there will eventually be employment in Greenland.
The best thing about the book is it contains lots of maps. I love looking at maps, and I don't have a very good visual memory. I can look at a map, and then two paragraphs later, I'll have to turn back a page and look at it again. Where is Sweden? Oh there it is. Got it. Wait? Where is it?
Trump Causes More Shit
Last week, after visiting the dog park, I tried to walk home along the river. It was damn near impassable. The grass and the path were strewn with goose poop. Disgusting for me, and a health hazard for my dog. She loves to eat the stuff, and it's laden with bacteria and parasites. The last time she chowed down on it, she threw up all over my van. Yuck.
This was the last straw for me. The geese never shit on the river path. There are a few areas in Donaldson Park that are consistently covered in fecal matter (and they are easy enough to avoid) but this winter-- perhaps because we never got solid snow cover-- the entire park was littered with the stuff. Every sporting field, every paved path . . . from the grassy meadows to the muddy banks. Poop poop poop poop. The only spot in the park not covered with goose poop was the dog park. But I couldn't walk through the other sections of the park to get to the dog park. There was too much shit. So I had to take the street along the park and cut into the park on the trail just past the public works building and the diesel fuel tank. This route is not scenic at all. It's damn near tragic. I live next to Donaldson Park so I can walk around in Donaldson Park.
My New "Scenic Route" to the Dog Park
I generally managed to keep Lola from eating goose poop on my way back from the river, but it was not pleasant or relaxing. So I was pretty irate when I got home. I had been through a scatological minefield, and I was certainly suffering from PTSD: Post Traumatic Shit Disorder. I was fired up. But instead of my usual complaining into the void, I decided to do something: I would write an email to the powers that be. I cranked out a couple paragraphs of crackpot commentary to the county parks director. I was vivid. I was livid. I was graphic. I was gross. I mentioned bacteria and parasites. I recalled that there used to be a guy that would come in and scare the geese away. He would set off fireworks and place silhouettes of dogs in the fields. What happened to that guy? Donaldson Park needed that guy! My tone was polite but frustrated. What other tone is there when you're dealing with goose-shit?
Here's what I got back. I was very pleased with the prompt reply (and properly indignant about the causes of the excessive poop).
A Prompt Clarification on the Shit Storm
Mr. Pellicane,
Thank you for your message regarding Canada goose numbers at Donaldson Park. The County currently contracts with the Wildlife Services Division of the USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services for Canada goose management on all County properties. This include harassment and egg treatments. They cover over two dozen sites throughout the County. With our proximity to water, open space and mild winters, controlling geese is always a challenge.
The biggest problem we are having this year is with the somewhat milder winter. Many geese that pushed southward last year, simply did not this year. Additionally, with the federal government shutdown for 35 days in December and January, all contracts were suspended. Harassment during this time was minimal – only what our staff could get to.
We are certainly behind on behavior modification and it is apparent in many of our parks. Our USDA tech is back on the job (for now, anyway) however, we are playing catch up across the County. I have asked for increased visits to Donaldson Park over the next week and if there is not another shutdown, continued aggressive harassment for the next few. This should hopefully help alleviate some of the pressure on Donaldson Park from the geese.
Thank you,
Rick Lear
Director
Office of Parks and Recreation
Department of Infrastructure Management
Let's Assign Some Blame!
Trump! This was Trump poop. Caused by his government shutdown. And even better, Rick Lear alluded to Trump's arch-nemesis. He didn't call it by name (perhaps, like the EPA, he's forbidden). But when he refers to the "mild winter," we all know what he's talking about. Climate change! So I had stepped in Donald Trump's shit, caused by something he refuses to believe in, the Chinese hoax. I couldn't have been happier. English teachers love irony.
The biggest problem we are having this year is with the somewhat milder winter. Many geese that pushed southward last year, simply did not this year. Additionally, with the federal government shutdown for 35 days in December and January, all contracts were suspended.
Rick Lear
I was also happy because getting upset about Trump shit is fun. This is because Trump is temporary. His ideas are outdated. He's a throwback, a dinosaur, soon to be extinct. A last gasp. In fact, despite the bipartisan quagmire and the incorrigible stupidity and corruption of the Trump administration, I'm feeling pretty good about the world, goose poop and all. This is mainly because I'm nearly done with Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. It's also because my wife is doing a lot of Zumba and looking great (but that's besides the point).
Pinker uses an avalanche of charts and statistics to remind us that we are living in the best of times. And this is because of th enlightenment values mentioned in the title: science, reason, secular humanism, liberal democratic ideas. The world has never been less violent, more healthy, more prosperous, safer, and more liberal. Despite what the naysayers prophesy, more people have rights than ever before, less people are at war than ever before, knowledge is more accessible, and democracy is on the rise. While there are challenges, we keep coming up with solutions. And the two existential threats-- the things that worry Pinker the most-- the environment (including global warming) and nuclear war . . . both of these things are improving. Slowly, but they are definitely improving. As countries grow richer, they do a better job preserving the environment; they reforest and recycle and use less fossil fuels and look for alternate energy sources. And we are slowly whittling down the number of nuclear weapons on earth. That number may never reach zero, but it doesn't have to. As long as we accept and understand the challenges, there are solutions on the horizon.
The Robots Are NOT Coming
Pinker also dispels some of the ridiculous notions that cause folks unnecessary anxiety: artificial intelligence experts don't fear the singularity. AI is not going to rebel and replace us. It's too hard to make a semi-conductor. It's too hard to make anything. It takes teams and teams of people and many highly technical factories and lots of resources. And we humans control all that. We are the kings of meat-space. And most of this perceived conflict is online. This is also the reason we probably don't have to fear technological nightmare scenarios caused by lone wolf lunatics. It takes too many smart people to create technology that advanced. Your computer may get a virus (but nothing as serious as Y2K) but you need a team of specialists to make a nuclear bomb or a super-virus, and it's hard to assemble that many people down with destroying the human race.
This is why rational people don't fear Donald Trump. He's not the face of the 21st century, he's a wart that will soon dry up. And fall off. He's an old wart.
Pinker does acknowledge that Trump will have an effect-- especially if we let him-- on some of these precious enlightenment ideals that have served us so well. He's an impediment to "life and health" because of his anti-vaxxer rhetoric and his role in dismantling our healthcare system. He's a threat to worldwide wealth because of his idiotic zero-sum notions about trade. Countries that are tied together economically cooperate. They don't go to war. He's certainly not helping economic inequality, nor is he a boon to safety, on the job or otherwise. He hates regulations, which often spur progress and make business seek solutions to problems (such as car crashes, plane crashes, poisoning, tanker leaks, lead levels, mileage restrictions, etc). He's not particularly keen on democracy and seems to have a penchant for dictatorial strongmen. He's no fan of equal rights, and his speeches and Tweets often have an undercurrent of xenophobia and racism. And he's a liar liar pants on fire. So he's not an ambassador or advocate to the wonders of available and accurate knowledge.
The Glass Is Half Full? So Lame . . .
Optimism is not cool. Pinker is an utter nerd. It's more fun to obsess over Trump and predict the end of civility, the end of civilization. Trump is certainly a shitshow, and Michael Lewis does a nice job illustrating some of the consequences of his incomptetence. And he's an environmental disaster. But we are progressing despite him. You need proof? Listen to Adam Ruins Everything Episode 1, where Adam talks at length with the Los Angeles DOT Seleta Reynolds. Streetcars, bike lanes, public transport, walkable neighborhoods and plazas . . . in the car capital of the country. In LA? Sounds like a hippie's dream and a conservative's nightmare. But this progressive vision is happening, despite Trump, and with federal funding. There are difficulties, of course, but when you hear this dedicated and intelligent government employee explaining that the market won't solve these problems of morals and values, it's really heartening. She's also really funny.
Pinker is an atheistic utilitarian who may not have enough feelings about anything to move the stalwarts on the left or the right. He glosses over some pretty bad shit. But that's because he's looking at the numbers, not at the emotions. Not at identity politics or anything particularly political. He's in the same corner as President Obama, who wrote a miniature version of the Pinker book for Wired Magazine. It's an essay called "Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive." It's not nearly as fun as visions of rusted out towns full of drug-addled opiate addicts (not the whole story) and porous unwalled borders which allow terrorists, criminals and rapists to pour into our nation. Statistically supported optimism can't match Chinese bandits stealing our intellectual property, black people who don't know their proper place (let's make America Great Again! And Institutionally Racist!) and liberal socialists who want to empower the government so that it controls every aspect of our lives. The end of times. That's what gets the clicks.
But I'm siding with Rick Lear. He's going to be around long after Trump is gone, directing county parks and rec infrastructure, fighting the good fight against the geese. He'll suffer mild winters and government shutdowns, deal with cranky emails, and continue to make this country greater than it's ever been. I have faith that he's going to make my local park greater. He's going to get rid of those geese (and their shit).
I believe.
Pinker's incremental pragmaticism does have it's problems. Robert Gordon, in his comprehensive work The Rise and Fall of American Growth claims that we've captured all the technological "low hanging fruit" and that advances will be tiny and slow for a long time. And Charles C. Mann provides a much more balanced picture in his new book, The Wizard and Prophet. Pinker is a fan of Norman Borlaug, the agricultural engineer who founded the Green Revolution, but there are those scientists who don't believe technology will bail us out of every dilemma. We might need old-fashioned conservation to preserve our way of life. Mann uses ecologist William Vogt to represent this perspective. It's one worth noting.
Pinker is also not very romantic. There's no room for honor and zealotry and fanaticism and mysticism and martyrdom and certain types of selfless ascetic heroism in his philosophy. He's no Hamlet, who says to his buddy Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But Hamlet has seen a spirit, his father's spirit. The time is out of joint. Something is rotten. That's not so in Pinker's secular, statistical view of progress. Society will be less varied, but I have to admit, I don't really care. I won't miss the zealous fanatical whirling mystical martyrs one bit.
I'd much rather have a river blindness vaccine. And people are working on it.
Luigi Explains Capitalism For Da People!
1) the thesis of the book is that the US free-market system has degenerated into crony capitalism, and Zingales uses Silvio Berlusconi as the paragon of this model; Berlusconi ran an insulated system of business and government corruption and comparisons between Berlusconi, who essentially ran Italy like his own private business, and Trump are inevitable and easy to make, so while the book was published pre-Trump, in 2012, Zingales does make the Berlusconi/Trump analogy in this episode of Conversations with Tyler . . .Trump succeeded in the real estate business, where it is more important to have strong relationships with government entities rather than creating something new in the market (and he's always relied on bankruptcy and the kindness of that system) and like Berlusconi, Trump has rewritten what is appropriate for a politician and member of the government;
2) Zingales starts with the proposition that fair markets are hard to manipulate and markets- while not perfect-- establish more efficient and accurate measure of value than say, an academic committee creating tenure requirements or statist regime doling out consumer products;
3) the problem is when large institutions, corporations, conglomerates and firms become "too big to fail" and both politicians and institutions recognize this because politicians, who aren't in office forever, would rather quell the chaos during their term-- avoid Armageddon, even if it's only a five percent chance of Armageddon-- with a bail-out, rather than be the person who lets the economy tank . . . but this doesn't allow the markets to do their job and accurately measure value;
4) he then explains how institutions that get "too big to fail" and understand this decimate the system-- he explains this with an analogy: if you play roulette yourself, you've got the same pay-out odds and vigorish whether you bet red/black or bet on a single number . . . for every hundred dollars you play, over time, you are likely to collect back $94.73-- the $5.27 is the amount the 0 and 00 extract . . . but if you pay an agent to play for you and promise him 20% of the winnings, but he doesn't have to pay anything if he loses, that agent is going to take risks and hope for a big payout . . . if he bets red with the $100 dollars, he only makes twenty bucks, but if he bets a single number, he stands to $700 . . . and if he loses, he loses nothing; so managers of funds take big risks, and the big investment banks encourage this because they know that either the lenders will lose out, as they are over-leveraged, or the taxpayers will bail the entire mess out;
5) lobbying is a monkey wrench in keeping markets fair and keeping large financial institutions and the government from becoming inexplicably intertwined-- and Zingales proposes something scary-- since the government controls trillions of dollars in subsidies and monies, the 3.5 billion spent by companies to lobby Congress and the 2.5 billion spent in political contributions may grow larger and larger, as business learns just how important it is to control the government . . . and this political climate of winner-take-all and fuck the other party isn't helping things;
6) with all this lobbying and bailing out and government/business intertwinement, we're not getting the beneficial long-term consequences of markets-- the accurate measurement of value and the benefits of competition . . . imagine that any time your kids are acting up and there's a conflict in the family, grandma and grandpa rescue the kids from any discipline . . . in the short term, these interventions lead to harmony and happiness, but in the long-term, you end up with spoiled kids and unhappy parents . . . Zingales uses another analogy to explain this analogy-- you gotta love all dese metaphors!-- he says that at the Grand Canyon, there is a sign warning people not to feed the wild animals, as if you do they lose their instincts and their ability to feed themselves . . . now the animals would love if people fed them but we need to "protect" them from the corruption of free food, for their own good . . . Zingales has seen this go down in Italy, and he sees America headed down the same road;
7) cronyism and unfair markets lead to winner-take-all scenarios, instead of healthy diversity and competition, and this is especially prevalent in the race to get into college-- while the number of people attending colleges in the US has skyrocketed, the size and amount of colleges has not . . . so there's winner-take-all competition to get admitted to the best schools and parents are spending much more time and resources on their children in order to get them in . . . this hasn't happened in Canada, where the admissions process isn't as competitive; so a tiny head-start when you are young can be very very important and wealth ensures this; Zingales uses a sports analogy-- if you allow professional teams to spend as much as possible, the riches teams will amass the best players and defeat everyone handily, which is great for one team but not particularly fun as a spectator or participant, so a salary cap-- which sounds non-competitive-- actually preserves competition . . . this is true for education and for lobbying, if money can buy success, then lots of money will be spent to ensure success and rules and social norms must be enacted to prevent this and encourage competition;
8) Zingales is certainly more conservative than me, and he's in favor of school voucher systems-- which I am not, for various reasons-- but I understand the logic of why he is in favor of the system, he brings up Finland, which has a much more rigorous method of selecting teachers-- in essence, they have to be smarter than American teachers-- and this means you're going to have to pay teachers more to attract smarter people; I do agree with him on this account-- if we could just get rid of the worst teachers, the bottom ten percent, that would help things enormously; I think it's hard to measure the difference between fairly good and good teachers, because it depends on the metric . . . some teachers are better at improving test scores, others at making kids passionate about a subject, others at letting kids learn on their own . . . but there's no question that some teachers are just terrible and probably get too much protection from the union, and it's also true that the best teachers tend to be in richer schools, so vouchers can change this balance and create a "salary cap" situation that makes things more fair and competitive for more students;
9) if you can wrap your request for subsidies and protection in a noble cause, you'll really screw up the market . . . Zingales uses student loans and Pell grants as an example-- government-backed subsidies that have helped make the price of college double, as there is more demand, space constraints at elite colleges and a high cost and difficulty in starting new institutions;
10) the SEC and other regulators have had trouble enforcing inside trading, and Zingales sees the onus of responsibility for stamping out this on business schools and alumni networks: they need to publicly shame and disavow people who participate in these practices, instead of only celebrating whoever makes the most money . . . it's tough because those are the people that donate;
11) Zingales is in favor of fewer regulations and simpler regulations-- but not the Trumpian dismantling of all regulations without a counter-balance; the way to offset the removal of regulations is with Pigouvian taxes . . . so instead of having insanely complex environmental codes, which leads to employment for lobbyists and lawyers, and costs the taxpayers money in the form of the government agency and all the market distortions caused by the big-business lobbying . . . instead, tax pollutants, tax the amount of harm a factory does, and you are much more likely to capture revenue (or curb pollution) so this is a compelling example of a conservative thinker proposing a "good" tax . . . as opposed to a bad subsidy; subsidizing ethanol enriches ethanol producers, but a tax on gas could curb driving, could lessen greenhouse gases, could capture revenue, and could incentivize the electric car industry . . . without redistributing wealth and enriching the ethanol producers for doing nothing more vital than having a noble idea . . . I'm sure no conservative thinker has made it this far in the post, but this is a really important concept which Trump and his lackeys seem to be totally ignorant;
12) while it is in a voter's best interest to remain uneducated in most political forums-- it's not worth the time and effort-- Zingales does illustrate how shame, muck-raking, and a little bit of knowledge can go a long way in affecting policy and political outcomes . . . and deep into the book, he acknowledges that some people have an interest in public affairs, or they wouldn't have read his book, which tackles a complex subject in a detailed manner . . . anyway, these ideas are really important to understand; we need to harness the power of markets in America, often by separating big business and government; as anyone involved in sports knows, making things fair and competitive means more than simply removing all the rules . . . it takes thought, creativity, flexibility, and rigor; Zingales makes a fantastic case for a market-based ethic and hopes that breaches of this, in the form of cronyism and incestuous relationships between business and the government, will someday be stigmatized the way smoking is today . . . I hope he's right.
Prepare to Be Confused, Then Outraged, Then Confused Again
You may have heard some news about the exorbitant price increase for the Epipen, the ubiquitous life-saving anaphylaxis injection, and that the Heather Bresch-- the CEO of Mylan, the company that produces Epipen-- is the new Martin Shkreli, but the the issue is more complicated than a couple of greedy executives incentivised by stock prices and financial gains; if you really want to understand some of the context and the big picture, listen to the first third of Slate Money in their Worse Than Marxism edition, as they can explain it better than me; their point is this: sometimes markets and capitalism work worse than Marxism . . . markets are great for fungible items that aren't totally necessary and don't need to be on constant flow-- oranges, sneakers, houses, milk-- but crazy things happen when markets and regulation coexist (because the item or service is necessary for day to day infrastructure) so when you have electricity markets (Enron) or health care markets, where there is regulation, monopolies, the hurdle of the FDA, middlemen (pharmacy benefit managers) and no consumer transparency, and so in this instance, Mylan has increased the price of an Epipen from 100 dollars in 2007 to over 600 dollars today AND they did an incredible job marketing the need for the product (which remains mainly unchanged) so that dental offices and schools and Disneyland are required to have these things, generally in first aid kits-- which rarely get used, as most people who need an Epipen carry one-- and so most of these Epipens will gather dust and expire in a year (do they really?) and so you've got to replace them all and while, of course, we should try to have Epipens in as many places as possible, we should have them in as many places as is reasonably possible-- without incurring insane expenses (and I recognize this is cold utilitarian morality in the face of peanut and bee sting deaths, and so I'll let Louie CK do his thing . . . I put it up top, go 40 seconds in) while Heather Dresch is saying the system is broken, deductibles are too high, and we never wanted consumers to pay full price for these items, and then she's offering a 300 hundred dollar rebate card to consumers, this means that the health care system is going to foot that bill, and unless a big story breaks like this, most of the time-- because of opacity, collusion, and the inability for our government to negotiate and regulate prices on drugs-- we'll be unwittingly paying for all this because we never know what anything costs . . . and Heather Bresch, in her CNBC interview, blames the system for the price and she does offer a silver lining-- which is probably specious-- is that Americans are subsidizing drug prices for the rest of the world . . . because you can get an Epipen in Europe and Canada for less than 100 dollars-- the problem with this logic is that there hasn't been many blockbuster drugs developed recently, as big pharma has been more interested in researching older very specific drugs that have no generic, improving them slightly, and then jacking the price way up and marketing these drugs effectively, and so getting Epipens into restaurants, hotels, etcetera and we will again unknowingly foot the bill in increased deductibles and health care costs . . . so Heather Bresch has shown she can be just as big an asshole as one of the guys, but she's a product of the system . . . in Australia, Europe and Canada, health care is treated like water and electricity and there are bureaucratic means to set prices so that the services flow steadily . . . markets and capitalism work well in some instances, but without the right regulations they can also produce things like the institution of slavery (supply and demand . . . Europe needed sugar!) and the stock market crash of 1929 . . . near the end of the interview Bresch finally says, "I'm running a business" and she's right, that's what health care is in America, and--like education-- it probably shouldn't be.
A Book Makes Dave Feel Emotions
The Chinese Curse, American Style
None Shall Pass
Dave (Inadvertently) Appreciates Canada!
Back in 2012, I made a New Year's Resolution to appreciate Canada more, but apparently that's not the kind of thing you can force yourself to do . . . despite my abject failure at deliberately appreciating our neighbors to the north, I'm pleased to report that sometimes you can end up appreciating Canada by accident (which seems fitting for a country with a capital city that no one can identify) and I've been doing just that: two years ago I learned to play Gordon Lightfoot's ominous and excellent song "Sundown" on the guitar (and my friend Rob coincidentally learned it as well) and then a couple days ago I heard a snippet of a song on the radio and vaguely recognized it and wanted to learn it on the guitar and so I looked it up, and it turned out to be another Gordon Lightfoot song ("If You Could Read My Mind") and so I did some research and not only is Gordon Lightfoot Canadian, but he is one of the most appreciated Canadians; for example, but Robbie Robertson considers him a "national treasure" and Bob Dylan wishes his songs would all last forever . . . anyway, I like his lyrics more than I like his voice, but he's a hell of a lot better than Nickelback.