IN A NUTSHELL -- WORLD TROUBLE

There’s a funny little website that specializes in scary or complex or science-informed topics.  It’s cartoony, which makes it seem like a kid’s website, but the narrator has a formal English accent which we are conditioned to respect as educated and authoritative.  It’s called In a Nutshell – Kurzgesagt .  Kurzgesagt means the same thing as “in a nutshell” in the location language, German.  http://kurzgesagt.org/profile/

Here’s their “about” : Kurzgesagt (German for „in a nutshell“) is a Munich based youtube channel and design studio with a distinctive perspective on design and animation within the fields of education, science and commerce.

Founded in 2013 by Philipp Dettmer and Stephan Rether, the studio engages in information design projects of all kinds. We love science, minimalism, colors and music. But most of all combining them to tell stories.

I came to this nutshell through the website “Aeon” which is an online platform for writing that is serious and informed, sometimes on the line between science and religion.

Here’s their “about”.  It’s a little grandiose, but they’re Aussies, which means they are a little like Unitarian Universalists, whom Blackfeet would described as “proud of themselves.”  But, hey, this is a marketing world.

"Since September 2012, Aeon has been publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web. It asks the biggest questions and finds the freshest, most original answers, provided by world-leading authorities on science, philosophy and society.

Aeon has four channels, and all four are completely free to enjoy. Most weekdays, it publishes Essays – longform explorations of deep issues written by serious and creative thinkers.

From Monday to Friday, it also publishes Opinions – short provocations, maintaining Aeon’s high argumentative standards but in a more nimble and immediate form.

Aeon’s Video channel streams a mixture of curated short documentaries and original Aeon content, including a series of interviews with experts at the forefront of thought.

Finally, Aeon’s Conversations channel invites the reader in to put their own arguments and points of view, asking and answering questions. With Conversations, old-style web comments give way to a new form of collective inquiry.

Aeon was founded in London by Paul and Brigid Hains. It now has offices in London, Melbourne and New York. It is not affiliated with any other organisation or political group. Aeon is committed to big ideas, serious enquiry, a humane worldview and good writing. That’s it.

A few months ago I was participating in a prototype, but got exasperated because it was IMHO trivial and patronizing.  Since then, it has take a major jump in quality and relevance.  For instance, this re-post on Aeon led me to Kurzgesagt and this essay.  It is a good description of my world-view, though it is based on Western science which seems to be creating a new body of believers for whom this narrative has deep meaning.  Some call it "mystical science".

https://aeon.co/videos/our-existence-is-both-cosmically-trivial-and-linked-to-everything-that-ever-was

Previous meaning structures based on tribalism and one-celled cultures such as those derived from the Abrahamic Biblical kernel, will hate this and try to destroy it, partly because it is SO effective in providing a new meaningful life in a dynamic time.  Other indigenous belief systems may be quite compatible.

The crucial difference I see is that for the Abrahamic mind, virtue (as described in the Koran,Bible or Torah) will be repaid for the suffering and inequity in this world by eternal gratification in a next world which is somewhere else and can only be accessed by dying.  To the modern scientific mind it would seem simpler to move to California.  (Not that that’s fool-proof, taking into account plate tectonics and drought.  And there might be a bit of a shortage of virgins. -- it’s rather transparent that Abraham’s heaven is for men.)

Modern scientific understanding shifts the paradigm from conditional eternal bliss -- that is only idealized in earthly terms and never confirmed by anyone returning from Heaven -- to already present participation in existence (connection to all we can perceive), and we CAN perceive millions of connections while knowing there are still more without limit.  We CAN make decisions about small things that become large forces and our rewards come daily.

Now the swerve:  

Former acting CIA director John McLaughlin says: “You have to do three things to combat terrorism: 1) Destroy the leadership, 2) Deny terrorists safe haven and 3) Change the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon. At this point, we have to focus on the first two, because the third is too complicated and long-range.”  This is cynical and self-serving, aside from arguing from "is to ought," a common logical error.

If one has a “Christian” worldview (which is one-third of the Abrahamic worldview) then the first two items are obviously what to do about terrorism and what will also make a lot of money in the process.  Here’s another Aeon essay that’s relevant.  First the qualifications of the writer:  “Bruce Hoffman  directs Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies and is a senior fellow at the US Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. His latest book is Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (Knopf, 2015).”  He offers a checklist of terrorist successes in spite of the first two “do-able” responses.  (I would argue that even with predator drones and Google Earth, denying safe havens is not possible when so many people are in sympathy with terrorists' goals.)

The third goal, “change the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon,” is self-addressing.  The surface of the planet and the human networks that inhabit it are always changing.  Ideas are changing as a result of that change -- which is now coming very quickly -- and then changing more as a secondary result/cause.  Most people like John McLaughlin have no idea about this and cannot predict or grasp the kind of forces that motivate sub-groups who feel the larger culture is possibly evil, and certainly oppressing them.  McLaughlin and his like are sealed off from reality.  If they cannot improve the conditions of poverty, inequity, and suffering, neither will those conditions persist unaddressed.

McLaughlin is an old man, standing with those other old authorities who are willing to sacrifice young people in order to keep the world the way they understand it, a way that gives him power.  Like the ATF and FBI controllers at Waco, they feel they must have powerl, obedience.  Because they have militarized government authorization, they can set up a situation that escalates to death and scandal.  They feel they “own” what is good, which empowers them and not the group they attack.  

Pat Burns  (I'm not sure of the name of the terrier.)

There is a set of statistics going around that may have high impact.   It is documented with a vid.  Both are made possible by computers and "smart phones". The earliest version I’ve found so far is a story by Nathan J. Robinson, a Ph.D. student in sociology and social policy at Harvard University.  The statement is that police can shoot your dog for no reason . . . and they do.   

The most coherent version of the story is at http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2015/11/in-police-state-where-they-kill-lot-of.html 

Patrick Burns, who writes the blog, is a demographer and terrier expert who lives near the Pentagon.  He takes terrorism rather personally.  "Last year, American police killed more unarmed American citizens than Isis and Al Qaeda combined."  I’m unclear about whether that includes civilian collateral damage from our military attacks in other countries.

The first thing the ATF officers did at the Branch Davidian Compound was to shoot all the dogs.  They were a mother and pups in a fenced enclosure.

It's one thing to kill people who are stigmatized even if they are the children of other people on our own streets.  It's an entirely different issue to kill people's dogs.  The people that civil authorities empower with military level actions, giving those officers the power to kill American family members (dogs count), is the kind of callous drift that causes empires to be overthrown.  It’s a step too far.  Wars have started over less.

Widely known, it could have a major impact on elections.  As much as Mitt Romney's dog terrified shitless in a kennel on top of the family car.

CSI IN IMAGE AND SONG

POSTED EARLY IN VIEW OF EVENTS

CSI IN IMAGE AND SONG

This post is about an essay entirely in music and images

Un essai entièrement en musique et en images

or

مقال تماما في الموسيقى والصور

CSI: Paris

CSI: Waco

I watch CSI shows. Here’s a quote from one of the best:

“It’s typical of aging and collapsing cultures that they become preoccupied with beauty, wealth, and hedonism” — “Bones,” the cultural anthropologist who is a beautiful woman AND an expert needed by federal authorities but who must fight them to do her job. Much of her work is with burned corpses.

By accident I was watching “Waco, the Rules of Engagement” just as the ISIS attack on Paris began. I saw that the simulations of burned people on “Bones” were accurate. I was still thinking about James Hillman’s structure of “Puer vs. Senex,” the young (esp. young man) versus the old (esp. authorities) because I think in metaphor and what some call “boxes” and I call “pot handles,” that is, bundled concepts. I have written about boxes versus bundles as ways of thinking: grammars, if you will.

This morning, before dawn, I came to the computer to see the newest work of le-too.tumblr.com, called “secretly, a little.” Their essays are entirely in image, music and poetry. They work as a consortium of boys (some of them men by now) who cooperate around the planet to photograph and compose images that are “puer vs. senex,” boys in a landscape formed by the aging exhaustion of industrial cities. This puts the boys (the photographers) in danger, partly from their own struggles to maintain identity and partly from authorities who are invested in secrecy about their own lives but determined to out everyone else. This is not new — it used to be the content of the news. One episode, reacting to the idea of “visceral” identity, follows up David Lynch’s literalisation in “Eraserhead” by using butcher’s offal.

The material is managed in something like chapters, gathered by musical themes, but images recur throughout: tender, serious, confrontive boy-faces and streets or trails that two or more of them travel along, seen from the back, possibly hooded, carrying only one rucksack each. The viewer should FEEL what is being said, without comment or deconstruction, but I am an old wordy woman and can’t resist. When I first turn on the computer before dawn or at 3AM, I leave the sound off so I don’t wake the cats, esp. “Hop” the Puer of the chowder who devotes himself to shredding old things like curtains or my socks. Or me.

Without sound the dance of the images is just as powerful as with the music but the Puer needs music — their lives are full of song: it’s the beat, the plaintive repetitions, the sharing. There is no dance in this essay except for the skateboards, a jump-and-glide choreography.

ISIS is a Senex organization, old men trying to control the new by destroying it, using the young as their cat’s paws. The protest movements (“I Can’t Breathe,” “Hands Up”) are young who seek justice rather than control. The Waco film is a governmental genocide of ideas in which the Senex is willing to burn alive the women and children united by a breakaway (renewal) branch of the Seventh Day Adventists. The film juxtaposes the closely analyzed visual records of what happened, with the lying and denial of the panel supposedly investigating.

I was shocked by who I saw and what they said. The most obvious excuse was that they were acting only on the information they were given, which showed how totally detached from reality they had become. The truth was that they were punishing disobedience, like a man who beats his defiant children, killing them. On the news of the time, Janet Reno sounded judicious and in control. With an unedited camera and uncensored testimony, she is plainly a fool, whose gender meant that she was designated to be the sacrificial goose from the beginning.

The citizens of the Texas area included those killers who are controlled only by their cowardice. “Let’s end this. Kill them all. I’m tired of this story on the news all the time.” The tanks came in, plowed away the carefully landscaped yard, smashed the cars innocently parked (these were working people who lived communally), and deliberately pumped the buildings full of poison and flammable gases. Inside, the people mistakenly took refuge in a concrete bunker with no ventilation that became a death trap when everything burned.

Boys see this. Their mothers try to limit them to their families, to prepare to be husbands and fathers, to be seduced and safe, protective providers. The boys collect “trace”’; they look for blood and tracks. They ask, “What kind of people do this?” Sometimes they set out for the horizon, but it’s the same everywhere.

Meanwhile, what is an honorable Senex to do? The old men with long beards in the hooded robes, the carriers of wisdom, the rescuers of the young, the men who walk the ridges carrying staffs with magic properties. Merlin, Castenada, Gandalf, Dumbledore. In the newest fantasy, “Game of Thrones,” there are NO wise old men. In the Waco hearings they are more scarce than women. They’re watching the clock because time is running out.

Our current political conversation has revealed that the Republicans have destroyed themselves and the Democrats have a gap in their genealogy where all the middle-aged politicians should be. Thus the Puers have no fathers — even George Bush the First has now rejected his foolish sons — and the Senex might be female, combining old with control issues, and forsaking gender roles. Using plastic surgery to seem like a Puer.

Words fail. Images are eloquent. Insectoid cartoon figures replace the humans who were reducible to gut piles.

The usual print platforms on the Internet, even the ones who welcome the color-hyped gorgeous images of National Geographic or the clever home-snaps of pets, do not know how to handle social indignation composed as image-flow. Where are the lines between the obscene, the upsetting, and the truth? Who is the intended audience? Not techies or MFA grads discussing their mood shifts. It is the person of the street, who now luckily carries a handheld, a receiver of a different sort of story than the public has known before. It changes who we think we are.

The sun is up now and the day is bright. The cats are onto me so there was no choice but to open cans and find clean dishes. (Sometimes I serve them on paper plates.) The day’s wind is just beginning. The forecast is a high of 55f and it looks like this will be the last day to clear the gutters before freeze-up. Human beings must serve their domestic environments in order to survive. But a major part of environment is other people, no matter where we go.

Oh, the pain and the blood and the burning! Paris, city of lights and guillotines, Da-da daring and catacombs of bones, artist outcasts and Napoleonic law. Cinematheque and Smash Street Boys and Show Me Your Life, the photographers of this essay, first began to define themselves a decade ago in Paris, in a hotel room not far from the Eiffel Tower. They were not bombers, but shuttershockers. People watch their work in Texas, Harlem, Germany, Russia without needing translation.

From Ozy:

http://www.ozy.com/pov/the-paris-attacks-former-cia-chief-weighs-in/66155?utm_source=dd&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11152015&variable=ac8b58c42e681fdd9c96521328de923d

Former acting CIA director John McLaughlin says:

J.M.: “You have to do three things to combat terrorism: Destroy the leadership, deny terrorists safe haven and change the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon. At this point, we have to focus on the first two, because the third is too complicated and long-range.”

My comment: “And the third will interfere with income streams of the rich.”