Peak Civilization

I detest when people like high school teachers and random lecturers try to torture meaning out of pop or rock music that doesn't exist. U2's "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" seems to be a particular magnet for that kind of mental abuse. Corrosion of Conformity's "Voting with a bullet" is probably used in some social studies classes somewhere, and the title of the song reminded me of some lectures I've heard in the past. The main thesis in these lectures was that the vote is a legal surrogate for physical violence. If you stop and think about it, voting is essentially saying that people want to adopt a majority position, with the implication of forcing the minority to adopt the position of the majority. They don't want to play ball? Prison, exile, or death. The (in)famous joke about democracy is that it's two wolves and a sheep arguing what to have for dinner. Of course, take it a step farther, and you have two wolves argui...

I've always been addicted to watch news coverage on hurricanes. There's probably some deep-seated psychological reason for that and Freudians are free to comment. Maybe it's because I love the coastal regions of the country, or it's the sheer raw power these storms have, or the sense foreboding doom I've had when having to evacuate ahead of them before. Maybe it's just the entertainment value of people on the Weather Channel wearing snazzy jackets and trying not to be knocked down. On the not-so-fun back side of that is seeing the misery and damage inflicted and collecting supplies and donations to send down to people who have been affected by them. My favorite moment was Geraldo Rivera being bowled over while covering Hurricane Ike, and also the saddest moment seeing the Balinese Room destroyed. The contrast between the two hurricanes is interesting. Katrina dumped more rain, while Ida had significantly higher wind speeds. On a preliminary level, it seems like ...

I'm not really sure what's been going on with Biden lately, but I don't see a single bit of the spark he used to have years ago. Go back to the Obama years and Joe was pretty much a firebrand, whatever you thought of his politics. I never saw the appeal to him as a candidate or politician, as he has essentially been nothing but a careerist schmoozer most of his life, not that it makes him any different from anyone else in Washington who has been around for decades. Knowledge of how to govern and good civics really has nothing to do with pressing the flesh and winning votes. Sometimes they overlap, but not often. I get the desire to so badly see Trump booted from office that running the person with name recognition and deep pockets and connections, whatever his weaknesses, seemed like the most desirable move. I don't have a lot to say about Trump as a president, because I don't think there was a lot there. Lots of bluster and bragging, not a lot to back it up, and a ...

For all the bluster of how mankind has conquered nature and tamed the earth, the natural world always likes to call mankind's bluff. For one, we haven't exactly figured out how to stop hurricanes (though I hear dropping a nuclear bomb into the eye of a hurricane was proposed by Trump...why not have a radioactive hurricane instead of just a normal one?). Every time one scoots across the Gulf, oil production is impacted and it makes life pretty miserable for people. Then there's the forest fires. While we don't have a record going this year, they're always dangerous and terrifying. Then there's earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, wild animals, plagues of locusts, and who knows what kinds of disease just lurking in a swamp or jungle someplace. Again, we're pretty much unable to stop all of these things and can only mitigate them. Civilization has largely figured out what to do with all of these, even if they can't be stopped. The problem arises when civilizat...

In Texas, there is a leader of anti-covid protests who is near death.  I feel sorry for his family and three (soon to be four) kids who will grow up without a father, but how exactly do we as a civilization deal with this mindset? People can talk about passing laws, but laws only work as long as people feel they should be obeyed. Why do 99 percent of people not murder each other? Even without laws doing so, they would feel it's morally wrong. Why do so many people use drugs, even though it's illegal? Because they don't feel like it's not hurting anyone else and is their choice, and so on. We have always tossed around the idea of the common good or public good. At some point, we need to decide which side of the street to drive on and tell horrible parents they can't raise their kids any longer. We have laws against pollution for this reason. And so on. In this case, we had regulations for how to mitigate the spread of covid. These regulations were developed by people...

 Mel Tappan, in his classic and hopelessly dated book "Survival Guns" outlined how most people of the time thought about "survival weapons." They generally said the perfect weapon was a .22 rifle, a black powder muzzle loader, a bow and arrow, or a .30-30 level action. Of course, Tappan went into gun porn for the rest of the book, as we all know that firearms can be used to plow a field, cure infections, and keep people warm in cold weather. For that matter, any "preparedness" magazine usually comes with at least two or three gun reviews or something like that. While I don't have much to do with the prepper culture, the assumption there always seems to be that a basement full of beans and toilet paper will be more than enough to get someone through a crisis and emerge on the other side, back to the mall and work.  People can be wiser, and recognize that if the lights go off, it will likely be a long time before they ever come back on. Planning for this...

 Probably to no one's surprise, there have been terror attacks in Kabul. Well, maybe to the surprise of people who haven't paid attention to the last half century of events in the region. Although, it is interesting to see that there was at least one suicide bombing. You'd think that with the Taliban being firmly in control, having won the war, that tactics like that would be falling out of favor. Unless, you know, someone might've gotten a bomb dropped on their family and just really, really doesn't like the U.S. military. Civilization is always a battle between chaos and order, and the effectiveness of a civilization in maintaining a balance on the side of order is a marker of how healthy it is. This isn't to say that order is always a great thing, as it can be expressed through tyranny just as easily as it can be through civic well-being. However, it takes a pretty rotten government to make chaos seem like a good alternative. Maybe a bad government is better ...

 The preponderance of evidence for global warming - let's not use the PR-friendly term of "climate change" is overwhelming. One quick Google search for "global warming" brings up plenty of pages with news and evidence showing the data and the effects of global warming. Rain in the mountains of Greenland, extreme drought in the west and other parts of the globe, shrinking ice. Oh, and the actual measurements done by those pesky scientists who have shown a steady rise in temperatures over the past few decades. Oops. So, when people wake up to snow on the ground and say that global warming isn't really, they might want to get out weather records and look to see that snowfall amounts have diminished as well. And yet, around half the people in America say that global warming isn't real or it's a natural process or it's a scam pushed by the elites to impoverish everyone and make themselves richer. Given that the elites seem to be doing just fine and sc...

Biden should realize that nobody's buying what he's selling. When even CNN is dumping all over a Democratic politician, that politician should realize they have a real problem on their hands. Of course, it's even worse for Biden, as he ran on a platform of restoring trust that had been lost during Trump's presidency, of experience, and bringing normalcy back to the White House. The contradictions of the last few days and an unwillingness to speak consistently on Afghanistan really isn't helping him. It's not quite as tone-deaf as Bush the Lesser's skit of looking for WMDs under his desk, but it's getting there. Government as an institution, particularly in a democratic nation, requires an implicit recognition of the social contract by both sides. For the most part, it boils down to "don't let us starve and don't shoot us for random reasons and we'll put up with being oppressed and build your palaces." Even earthly paradises like Nor...

 The esteemed Jane Jacobs, who had a pretty good handle on what was wrong with people, wrote about what failing cultures had in common. A biggie was that people quit thinking in terms of "logos," that being knowledge and reason, and started thinking in terms of "mythos," which were basically half-baked ideas based on what people thought they remembered about the past. Another good observation she had was how "elites" backed into a corner double down on what got them backed into the corner in the first place. All of it is a sign of people running out of ideas. Can't make the crops grow, everyone is starving? Just sacrifice some people to the moon god or hang some witches! That'll fix everything. The unwashed rabble getting restless and angry because the nobles are screwing them good and hard? Don't reform anything, go oppress that unwashed rabble and throw bigger parties! That'll fix everything. Running out of ideas is the same as running ou...

 By now, everyone is starting to have a pretty good handle on what is going on over in Afghanistan. That is to say, they really have no idea, but if you sound pensive enough and throw some names and video clips around, you'll look smart enough to fool people. Maybe, except that people have been told how great things have been going over there since 2002, but it's a little hard to hide the reality now. People hanging onto the sides of a C-17 until the airflow is strong enough to blow them off to their deaths is a little hard to sugarcoat as success. But, when you're in the media, you have a job to do. It's called anesthetizing the public. The upside is that we're finally catching up to Saddam's Iraq. We have our own legion of Baghdad Bobs, trotting out to state that things are proceeding to plan in Kabul, that things will be fine, that everyone who wants out will get out, and that the Afghan Army is to blame for all this after we were told how strong it was. Unfo...

From 1833 to 1836, the painter Thomas Cole worked on a set of paintings titled "The Course of Empire." It consisted of five paintings, each one showing a stage in the life cycle of an ancient city, starting from a primal wilderness to the ruins of the city after it has been sacked and abandoned. It is both a lush and stark set of paintings, with rich American romanticism contrasted with a view of civilization that is pessimistic at best. While Cole himself explicitly stated the nature of each painting, culminating with the ultimate destruction of the empire, contemporaries basking in Manifest Destiny did not see it that way. They believed that it represented an upward cycle to newer and greater progress. How anyone could possibly see that in these painting is a mystery. However, the people who saw Cole's work as being something other than what he described and intended to show are not unlike the people we have in the modern day, who place unlimited faith in social media, ...