View of the Fremont Bridge at twilight this evening.
Note how much haze obscures the West Hills in the background.
This anniversary, of course. And no, I’m not going to link the Wikipedia page on those protests here. Yesterday, they spurned the N30 protests on their “on this day…” sidebar while listing some utterly forgettable and obscure bits of trivia that had nowhere near as much historical impact as the protests did. A pox on their house.
The two most significant facts about the N30 protests are as follows:
The correct response to the anniversary of N30, therefore, is to celebrate how resistance from below can in fact work, while realizing that successful resistance in the future depends on surprising the ruling elite with unexpected (to them) new strategies, instead of planning to play right into their strategy book by giving them more of what they expect.
A Seattle-style mass mobilization will work again only if the tactic is not attempted for a number of years, and the ruling elite get tired of spending large amounts of tax money paying for lots of riot cops that end up with nothing to do.
I really don’t like quoting Derrick Jensen because when I do, people tend to assume that just because I agree with the guy on some things, I must therefore agree with him on all things. Which I suppose is more those peoples’ problem than mine. But anyhow, the recent news out of Washington State underscores yet again the correctness of the following premise of his:
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
A stake-out involving a hundred or more officers? For a lone perpetrator? Coverage of the event in newspapers worldwide? There wasn’t that kind of coverage for Capitol Hill Massacre, and that killed more people than the recent cop shooting.
And both of those death tolls completely pale compared to the number killed by medicine-for-profit, which reserves the right to kill people if they don’t have enough money to afford health care.
Maurice Clemmons’ crime wasn’t that he killed four people, but that he, a nobody in society’s eyes, killed those above him in the social hierarchy.
View of the Fremont Bridge at twilight this evening.
Note how much haze obscures the West Hills in the background.
At least, that’s what I think it is. Nothing else really makes any sense. There’s Arctic outflow winds coming out of the Gorge today, so the air is super-dry and it can’t be moisture haze. The winds are coming from the Columbia Basin, and there’s not enough of a concentration of heavy industry and urban development there for it to plausibly be air pollution, especially with the brisk wind rapidly diluting any such pollution.
But the basin is very dry, with a desert climate, and prone to dust storms. I lived there for a short while, and I hate dust storms. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t stay there.
This is the first time I’ve noticed east-side dust on the west side of the Cascade crest, so it’s more of a curiosity than an irritant.
So, I try to open the canopy gate on my pickup truck tonight, and get a trip down memory lane to when I lived in cold country: thanks to this week’s arctic front, the lock is quite frozen.
So, Google to the rescue. Enter the phrase “thawing frozen locks” and start reading hints. Ideas I had thought of, like using a butane lighter to heat the key before inserting it, or using a hair dryer, are suggested. All things I had thought of and rejected because they seemed like they would take forever.
Then I see a warning against using hot water, because it will just get cold and freeze again. Aha! But not if you wrap a plastic bag around the lock to keep the water out. Water has a much higher heat capacity than air, so it should heat the lock much faster.
Worked like a charm. After I freed it up, I gave the lock some generous squirts of 91% isopropyl alcohol to displace the water and hopefully prevent what remains from refreezing. We’ll see how well that idea works by tomorrow morning.
Update: It worked perfectly. The alcohol cleaned out more than just water; it cleaned out the crud that was making the lock stick a little even before it froze. It works like new now.
Lows well into the teens have been the rule rather than the exception this week. That’s a bit of a surprise, since El Niño winters tend to be pretty mild and boring here, yet in terms of low temperatures this has been by far the coldest cold snap in over a decade. It’s provided a reminder of what winters were like back in the Rockies, and also a reminder of why I don’t live in places that are regularly that cold any more.
But I’d miss it (and did, when I lived in coastal California) if it never got wintry at all. Being between jobs has meant that I finally had the chance to drive out to the Gorge and see the frozen waterfalls. True to form, a winter storm is forecast to be in full swing by the time the weekend dawns tomorrow morning, so if I were working, I’d have missed yet another opportunity to see them.
Still, at this stage, I’ll be just as happy when it’s all over and I no longer wince at the cold when I open my door in the morning.
The principle of a spelling checker is that it only checks to see if each word matches the correct spelling of a word in its word list. As such, it is unable to help you if your principal problem is using the incorrect word.
I received an interesting letter recently. It’s from someone who claims to be a small-time dairy farmer who says her family will somehow be taxed into the poorhouse by a new $150 minimum corporate tax (which it asks me to vote against in a referendum). I guess I’m supposed to find that plausible, as if a farm $150 from insolvency is somehow financially healthy and not about to be ruined by, say, an unexpected tractor repair bill.
And that’s not the only thing fishy about it. It claims to be from a farmer in Tillamook yet the return address says Salem. It’s almost as if it comes from a lobbying firm in the state capital.
Well, surprise, surprise.
Amongst other things, I scored 100% “collectivist” on this quiz.
Yet I’m also a very individualistic person. Is this a contradiction? I don’t think so. Not when one considers what the test’s designers consider to be “collectivism.”
The questions used to determine collectivism vs. individualism were purely economic ones. They were asking about how many things a person can have, not what non-material choices a person can make in his or her life (such as: what religion, if any, to adhere to; which gender to love; or which opinions to profess).
Moreover, they’re all related to how much one supports the sort of unlimited, or virtually unlimited, degree of material inequality one sees in the class hierarchy today. There’s no questions about the desirability of allowing a variation in the amount of personal material possessions in a classless society.
I’m being asked, in other words, how much I support one absolute extreme of individualism in one particular aspect. Any wavering from support of that extreme is interpreted as collectivism. It is as if my commitment to free speech were assessed by a set of questions asking how much I supported the freedom to engage in unfettered libel and slander.
Now, when it comes to what a person deeply feels in his or her heart, external observation can tell us very little. You basically have to ask that person and take his or her word at it. External testing, measurement, and verification are impossible. The scientific method just doesn’t apply to human feelings.
Yet it is easily possible to determine that a person is being physically harmed by, say, not being allowed access to sufficient food. (And in a world where agricultural surpluses get burnt or dumped, it is a case of not being granted access, not a case of a shortage.)
It’s not so possible to do on the individual level, but on an environment-wide level, it also is quite possible to determine that the current rate of resource consumption is not environmentally sustainable, and that this lack of sustainability is going to hurt everyone big time in the future.
So there’s definite, identifiable, verifiable harm being done by both the excess consumption of the wealthy and the insufficient consumption of the impoverished. In other words, it’s not all pure individual choice completely impenetrable to outside analysis (and by implication any application of a moral standard).
Yet the Right accuses us Leftists of being the moral relativists!
And now we get to intelligence and hierarchy, something I’ve commented on previously.
Intelligence is valuable and should be honored, rewarded, and respected. However, to focus on rewarding intelligence by allowing unlimited personal gain warps intelligence to serve these ends. It’s basic economics: if you reward people for doing something, they will tend to do more of it.
Yet the Right accuses us Leftists of being the ones who are ignorant of the power of economic motivation!
It is no more unreasonable to expect an intelligent person to use her intelligence in ways that do not harm or subjugate others than it is to expect a strong person to likewise use his natural gift of physical strength responsibly. To assume there are no such obligations is to falsely assume equality where none exists in nature.
Yet, again, the right accuses us Leftists of being the ones who ignore natural human inequality!
The more I think about it, the less Establishment political discourse makes any sense whatsoever.The “comment on this” links, which have been broken for altogether too long, now have at least a stopgap fix in place. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but it beats a bunch of dead links.
OK Cupid puts me in the “less spiritual” crowd, about which it says:
For some people, the non-physical world is a vast cornucopia of unexplored and unexplained phenomena. For others, it’s a disinteresting gray void. These users fall into the latter category. They rarely have much use for religion, organized or not.
Much of that’s spot-on, but I really take issue with the “disinteresting gray void” bit. First, I’m not even sure such a “non-physical world” exists, though at this stage I actually suspect one does. However, whether or not it exists, it appears to be pretty impervious to all our attempts to repeatedly and testably qualify or quantify its characteristics. Heck, to say it’s either “gray” or a “void” is presuming altogether too much.
If such a world exists, it is in all likelihood so profoundly different from the one we’re familiar with that any concepts from this world would fall far short of describing that other one.
What really irks me about religions and spiritual traditions is that they then go on to assert that they definitively know it anyhow, that (despite the lack of any hard proof) it’s the most profound truth on earth, and you’re evil/wrong/damned/unenlightened for doubting it. And the latter is a relatively new and enlightened development. Traditionally, that last part has been more like “… and we’ll kill you if you doubt it.” Oh, and when they describe that world, they anthropomorphize the living daylights out of it.
Color me decidedly unimpressed about the whole concept of organized, formalized, spirituality. I’d rather just take a walk in the woods.
Note the arrows.
It was only supposed to be rain below 2,000 feet, but an unforecast cold east wind made this afternoon’s moisture fall as snow.
I was hiking with friends east of Estacada in the foothills. Some flurries fell, which wasn’t a complete surprise because it was chilly and it was within 1,000 feet of the forecast snow level. Just as we left, it started snowing hard and continuously, quickly sticking to the pavement.
I thought there might be a chance of there being a few flakes back in the city, given how hard it was coming down and how readily it was settling on the road. But no more than a momentary dusting on the lawns, I thought. It will probably be mostly just wet by the time we get out of the foothills.
As I expected, it changed to rain when dropping down the big downgrade into Estacada. Then, unexpectedly, it changed back to snow again as we hit the cold air from the Gorge. By the time we hit Estacada, it was sticking on the ground again.
It was then I knew the rest of the trip home would be interesting, as Estacada has a valley floor climate and so seldom sees sticking snow. If it’s snowing in Estacada, it’s probably also snowing in Portland. As it was, about 2½ inches worth.
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