AmbivaBlog

Flip-Flops Integral to Obama's Identity.

His Hawaiian identity, that is.  (Another one of his multi-identities.*)  The rubber kind, that is.

Mark A. Kam, president of the Punahou Alumni Association, said Obama's repeated visits to Hawaii show he hasn't forgotten where he came from.

Kam lightheartedly pointed to Obama's flip-flops as evidence of how deeply Hawaii is ingrained in him.

"Granted he's in Chicago now, he's cut his teeth in politics in Chicago. But when I saw him walking around town in rubber slippers - I said, OK, that's who he is. That's the local boy that grew up here," Kam said. "How many other people go away, come back, and slip right back into rubber slippers?"

*Coming from me, this is not a criticism, nor is it an unqualified endorsement.  I know this way of being from the inside, including its drawbacks. 

More substantively, Kam said that Obama carries with him an ability to work with people of different backgrounds that he learned in Hawaii, where there is no majority but a mix of whites, Chinese, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Japanese, Koreans, Samoans and others. About 20 percent, like Obama, are mixed-race.

"He can reach out to both sides of the aisle, he can communicate effectively with all types of people," said Kam.

I didn't grow up in Hawaii, but Kenwood, the Chicago neighborhood just south of Hyde Park and just north of "Bronzeville," was kinda like it, only colder.  (Do a "find" on "Kenwood" at that link to cut to the chase.)

Woo Woohoo!

In his ongoing project (that's such a weak word:  campaign?  obsession?  crusade?) to document the intimate connections between New Age mysticism and fascism, aka Mystic Bourgeoisie, Chris Locke hits a mother lode.  Don't miss this amazingly creepy stuff -- how about a photo op of the Dalai Lama beaming beside a man who wrote a book on "Esoteric Hitlerism"? --  especially if you love it when the paranoid turn out to be right.

I'm Not Much of a Jew, But . . .

What's going on between Israel and Palestine right now feels like a cancer in my own body.

Jews being killed, and Jews killing, both make me sick.

"But where does all this money come from?"

And how can a country that got itself in peril by borrowing and spending without limit now borrow and spend its way back to safety?

In the case of the Fed, the money comes from its authority to print dollars from thin air. Since late August, the Fed has expanded its balance sheet from about $900 billion to more than $2.2 trillion, creating $1.3 trillion that did not exist to replace some of the trillions wiped out by falling house prices and vengeful stock markets. The Fed has taken troublesome assets off the hands of banks and simply credited them with having reserves they previously lacked.

Excuse me, but isn't this just like the "Monopoly" banker handing out fistfuls of play money from the box top to bankrupt players just so the game can go on? 

What sets the limits to this game?  Food, I suppose, ultimately.  Nature used to set the limits.  You could make better spears, but not more mammoths.  Then along came technological innovation -- agriculture and pastoralism -- to expand those limits.  Fast-forward 10,000 years.  Fossil energy is now tied into food production in so many ways:  mechanical cultivation, transportation, freezing, petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.  "Drill, baby, drill!" and push "peak oil" off a few more decades (though some think demand is going to fall before supply).  I know technological optimists who believe it's within human capacity to feed a much larger population, providing only that innovation is unfettered. 

Are there limits or aren't there?  It seems that when humans are involved, the limits become elastic.  The banker figures out a way to cheat, or stretch, or spread risk, and the game goes on.  Yet what does it do to our moral universe if actions and choices don't have consequences?  ("The conditions of existence determine consciousness.")  We consider it a good thing to set limits, or call them "boundaries," for our children.  That's how you build character.  When bottom is never hit, who bothers to sober up?  What's "real," if only what we say is real, and we keep moving the markers?

Is this the need the "global climate crisis" fills -- the panic, the nostalgia, for limits?  Who are the relativists now?  If Marx was right about the conditions of existence determining consciousness (and I think it might be the only thing he was right about), then economics is ultimately the foundation of morality.  (Think about this before you dismiss it.  I'm not a materialist, dialectical or otherwise, yet I am forced to conclude that even the forms of religious belief and the moral codes people hold are enforced or enabled by their economic circumstances.  People do rise above this, but few, and not far.)

There is a connection between the therapeutic and nanny-state mindset that is indignant and overprotective and wants people not to suffer, and the economics of bailouts.  It's a conundrum, because no one argues that terrible suffering is good.  It is good to prevent and to relieve it.  And yet it makes things a little unreal, like touching a hot stove and not burning yourself.  Just sayin' . . .

Where's the Good News?

Here.

(H/T:  Stephanie West Allen.)

Einstein, 4 Centuries Early?

I'm fascinated by this quote from Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), which sounds like a quantum physicist's or string theorist's insight:

Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.

He had a lot of amazing things to say (how he would have loved to live now!), striving to see beyond his time's limited concepts and instruments to what his mind knew was there:

The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us.

Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language.

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.

Besides physics, optics, astronomy, and invention, he had some pretty cool things to say on life, death, time, and age:

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.  [No worries, Leo.]

As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.

Life well spent is long.

Movement will cease before we are weary of being useful.

Not surprisingly, he could be gloriously pissed off, too:

Some there are who are nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.

It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.

Ever notice that the greatest people are the ones you feel you could just reach out and touch?

Culture Dropout

J's Screen Actors Guild Awards ballot arrived today.  I looked through it and I hadn't seen a single one of the movies or watched a single one of the TV shows up for awards.  I might as well be living in a foreign country, where everything's in Swedish.

I could claim this gives me a timeless quality. 

Or, I could freely admit that the "foreign country" I live in is called "old age."  That thing of losing touch with the endless iridescent writhing and metamorphosing of your culture, like a snake shedding bright skins every year.  You're not nimble or supple enough to bend your mind into new shapes any more, so you get stuck in a stagnant backwater, playing the same dead music over and over, trying to resurrect your own time of discovery.

It isn't exactly that either. 

Partly it's living on Planet Jacques, always in the same room with him, which limits my watching to what he will tolerate.  Too much drama and dialogue, too much sophistication, too little action, and he gets antsy and scornful.  For obvious reasons, the "problems" people make whole movies about often strike him as ludicrous luxuries, and he doesn't like the gratuitous grimness that Hollywood often wallows in.  I tend to underestimate him, though.  After a slow start, he became absolutely fascinated by Children of Men, and by Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. 

He's never liked going to movie theaters.  I wonder if it's because the visual overstimulation made him feel seizure-y.  We did see American Gangster in a theater, and not that day, but a couple of days later, he had the only (mild, partial) seizure he's had since quitting Dilantin.  I wondered if there was a connection.  We watch movies at home, mostly on cable, and we are very casual about it.  Almost never do I rush out to rent the latest thing.  (I may make an exception for Valkyrie, his kind of thing.) We get around to seeing the movies we made a note to see, two, three, four years or more after their release.

It feels like an abdication of a cultural duty to keep up, especially for someone who presumes to blog.  But I keep up with the news.  I've always been kind of a nonfiction person.  Which is another way of saying that fiction has to be really, really, really good to get to me.

On Christmas day we watched two movies that departed from the usual action/repetition pattern (he must have seen The Negotiator, and anything with Steven Seagal, fifty times).  Typically, they were fifteen and ten years old.  The first was The Secret of Roan Inish, which I'd always wanted to see and finally made him watch.  It could have been better done, acting- and directing-wise, but the premise is so haunting that it almost doesn't matter.  It's the same premise as the song "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry" that all the long-haired, long-faced folkie women used to sing, and it was haunting then, too.  The second was Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch's movie with Forest Whitaker as an urban samurai.  It takes a little while to realize that it's a comedy -- a subtle, melancholy one that nonetheless makes you laugh out loud often.  We watched it with the 23-year-old residential karate student, who informed me that the rap soundtrack was by RZA of Wu-Tang Clan.  I liked it quite a lot.

See, I'm not dead.  Just a little late.

The Man in the Santa Suit [UPDATED]

. . . who gunned down his ex-in-laws, the whole family, then burned their house down:

That's the kind of thing most of us only fantasize about doing.

(He later killed himself.  Incredulous neighbors described him as the nicest guy -- a quiet, churchgoing man.  I flashed on my road-raging churchgoer.)

UPDATE:  "Pardo fled with severe burns and his Santa outfit seared into his flesh, police said. He still had $17,000 in cash strapped to his body."  He had planned to take off, not off himself. 

Grimm justice, there.  Especially the Santa suit seared into his flesh. 

Big Stick Diplomacy.

The CIA is giving Afghan warlords Viagra in exchange for cooperation and information.  The WaPo files it under "novel incentives and creative bargaining."  Sources insisted on anonymity, and "the CIA declined to comment."

"[A]s the economy collapses, machines are neglected and many humans fade away or turn ugly."

Facing the recession with Asperger's syndrome.  A unique point of view, rendered with rare honesty:

Thanks to my Asperger's, I have a remarkable insight into machines. I can see what I do with machines, and I know it's real and it works and it has value. The machines may not thank me, but I know I've made them last longer and run smoother. I've made them, in a sense, happier and healthier, and it's something I can feel good about. I feel a sense of accomplishment from my work with machines.

But I also know I am part of the community of humans, and therein lies the problem. I cannot see into people like I see into machines; like a neurotypical person. I cannot sense another person's joy or acceptance. Instead, I must deduce those feelings from careful observation. Most of my opportunities to deduce such feelings with respect to me are in the context of my work. Unfortunately, other people's responses to what I do are driven by more than just me. They are driven by a person's own emotional state, their ability to afford my work, and their own self image. All those things are unknowable to me.

Yet I want to know them. I want to be part of human society.

All I see is this: as the economy collapses, machines are neglected and many humans fade away or turn ugly.  I'm fairly blind to individual expressions of emotion, but I now sense new feelings of unease, fear, and worry in the world around me.  Today's humans make choices that are bad for machines against my best advice. They become critical. The acceptance that was observable six months ago vanishes. At the same time, my own economic security evaporates, and I find myself terrified and anxious in response.

What do I do about it? I cannot derive comfort from other people in the way neurotypicals can, because I can't read their emotions or share my own.

Reminds me of reading this book, years ago, and realizing that as genuinely different as autism or Asperger's is, it also, when someone achieves the triumph of expressing it, shines a revealing new light on "neurotypical" experience as well.  John Elder Robison imagines that "we" are consolable in a way that he's not, and no doubt he's right, but that consolation has its limits.  Any of us could say with him, at times -- at precisely the worst times -- "It's times like this that I realize how truly alone some of us really are."  When it comes to the limits of giving and receiving emotional signals and solace, we're all somewhere on the spectrum.