Strange Fruit: Perpetrator Disgust

In every culture, the pedagogy of disgust draws subtle lines of demarcation between us and them: Who should we care for? Who is repulsive and unworthy of concern? As revealed by the recent surge of research in implicit biases, feelings of disgust and discomfort can convey internalized moral values, including values that we may not endorse or believe in, even values we have forgotten about. 

http://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2023/08/perpetrator-disgust.html

The most overrated band in history is The Beatles!

I'm going to say something obscene: The Beatles aren't a good band!

Yes, they were influential and for many people, they influenced their lives. If you grew up in the 1960s, their music was both popular and culturally significant.  I didn't though.  I'm part of that generation that followed: Generation-X.

The 1960s was the start of the counter-culture movement with hippie free love, antiwar radicalism, and questioning authority.  For the most part, The Beatles weren't culture warriors.  They were commercial pop music artists selling catchy songs and records.  Seriously, "We're all in a Yellow Submarine!" is just daft. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is also just cheesy marketing.  Besides the packaging, their collective works are only marginally interesting.  Some songs have interesting lyrics.  Some songs have good riffs.  Some songs are very good.  However, the majority are not interesting on a sonic level or lyrically.

For the past few years I've been re-listening to music from the 1970s and I think it is the best music ever made in human history!  The decade was ugly.  The tail end of the Vietnam war, oil embargoes, Nixon's impeachment, unresolved civil strife from the late 1960s, cities turned into criminal war zones, declining standards of living, and rampant racism and sexism, as minorities started to integrate into American society.  Other countries may have had similar or none of these features, but that was what was going on in the USA.

You're saying how is this relevant, because The Beatles broke up in 1970.  Well lets take a look at who didn't break up or were around in the 1970s.

• Led Zeppelin (1968-1980)
• Rolling Stones (1964- current)
• Pink Floyd (1964–1995)
• The Doors (1965–1973)
• Black Sabbath (1968–2006; 2011–2017)
• David Bowie (1962–2016)
• Rush (1974-2018)
  
• Aerosmith (1970- current)
  
• AC/DC (1973- current)
• Fleetwood Mac (1968- current)
• The Police (1978-1986)

I'm sure if you are a rock music aficionado you can add many more bands. Add in the emergence of other genres like punk, funk, electronic, house, New Wave... etc. and you have one of the greatest cultural moments in history.

Look at that list, especially the top three, and tell me The Beatles were better than them.  No comparison.  

I understand music is subjective and is largely a function of where you grew up and what era you lived through.  However, I grow tired of boomers and others heralding the enormity of The Beatles as the preeminent music group of the second half of the the 20th Century.  They are not even close.  The Rolling Stones in the 60s alone, were better than The Beatles.  Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are vastly greater artists than The Beatles ever were.

Substack for thee, not me

I don't like Substack or the entire monetization stream, where people writing blogs are paid by readers.  I'm not a journalist, reporter, or media person. I've got a real job and  I've got opinions, so I'm going to say what I think here.  That sounds pretentious, but essentially you can't say lots of things on the major social media platforms.  For example, I got locked down for three days on Twitter for saying Senator Rand Paul should be punched in the face. The guy is a complete jackass.  He deserves much more!

I stopped a decade ago writing on this blog.  I tried to motivate myself to write long form, but it took too much time.  I'm back out of sheer spite. I don't want to pay for some meathead's opinion on Substack or care to subscribe to some inane newsletter.  I have Twitter for that.

In the past decade, social media took over. I can't stand much of it, because it is beneath anyone with an intellect. Memes, brain farts, likes, dislikes, comments by the guy you knew in high-school who became a fascist, and feces throwing digital warriors. That is no way to run a civilization!

I've grown old in the decade since.  I also have learned a lot of things: big and small.  So, if you think this might be useful in understanding the world, check in once in a while.

The Lifer.

Blogging is hard... so I'll make an attempt to restart!

I essentially stopped blogging when I joined Twitter.  The latter is easier to post, the range of interactions more satisfying, and ability to communicate faster.

However, blogging is more like daily journalism.  It takes more effort.  It requires an individual to think harder about the content, presentation, and argument one is offering.  I used to get some solid feedback when I wrote this blog, but mostly it was from folks interested in foreign affairs and international business.

So I'm going to make an attempt to post at least once a month on a subject I find compelling or interesting.  Maybe no one reads it other than Ukrainian bots or Chinese students, looking for an essay topic.  That's fine.  When human civilization collapses, somewhere on an abandoned server farm, will be a record of my attempt to chronicle the collapse.

Why are Americans such Assholes: Part IV

I don't know what it is about southerners, guns, and their inability to conduct themselves in a civil manner in public spaces, but once again I am forced to ask a simple, yet seemingly inexplicable, question: why are Americans such assholes?

Let's turn our attention to the rock star of dipshits; Florida.  Today, a retired police officer, not some greasy convict that just fell out of a state prison, but a former officer of the peace, decided he didn't like his fellow citizens texting activities in a movie theater, so he killed them.

Local News stated

Curtis Reeves Jr., 71, was charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Chad Oulson, 43, Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said late Monday afternoon. The theater was evacuated and remained closed after the shooting, which occurred about 1:20 p.m. ET.

Oulson was shot in the chest after a verbal and physical confrontation with Reeves, and his wife, Nichole Oulson, was shot in the hand. Chad Oulson was pronounced dead at a hospital, and his wife was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

I cede the point that the activity of others talking/ texting/ flashing her tits (although given that this is America there is an equal probability that man-boobs could have been involved) during the commercials prior to an actual movie is an affront to civilized cinema watching behavior.  I also know Florida has the death penalty and more so, that if you are a person of color, a member of a distinct ethnic or social minority, your death is just a routine statistic in America's infatuation with homicide.  However, the attempted murder of two innocent person over such issues is beyond comprehension.

Why are you bringing a loaded gun to a movie Deputy Dog?  Do you think someone is going to steal your popcorn?

Why are you arguing with people at a movie during a matinee?  Could you have used the lesser lethal action of simply moving to another set of seats?

The United States of Honey Boo Boo is a wasteland of semi-literate, small dicked retards, too juvenile to control their emotions and too stupid to realize what detestable human beings they and their nation have become.

Other fine installments to this worthy anthropological collection are:

Part 1 - Murdering a bicyclist and then leaving the scene of the murder to go to a party
Part 2 - Advertising hate after the attempted murder of a congresswoman and civilians
Part 3 - Florida Man attacks random tourists, because they look like potential terrorists

Charlie Rose interviews Guardian editors Alan Rusbridger & Janine Gibson

The methodology pursued by the mainstream American press on the matter of the NSA's global data mining operations has been to question the nature, psychology, and patriotism of  Edward Snowden, the leaker. Understandably, rather than discussing an abstract, unconstitutional and criminal operation that has Orwellian dynamics, those who manufacture consent would much rather the public consider irrelevant personal trivia. Similarly, reports in the American press about Julian Assange/WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning typically have misidentified the actual topic at hand; that being deliberate government lies and state criminality conducted against their own citizens and foreigners.  So instead of zeroing in on the copious deceptions of the state, we are left with banal inquiries into the legitimacy of the data breaches.

The interview above with the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson is an example of this infuriating process.  While I think Charlie Rose has produced some wonderful and thoughtful interviews on many subjects, his line of inquiry into the motivation of Mr. Snowden belies deference to state propaganda.  The Guardian editors clearly articulate that there has been no evidence by either the US government or any other sources that these leaks have been harmful to anyone or the US government.

Is it really too much to have television journalists ask questions like:

• Why has this program been running, when the public clearly said it was unacceptable back in the middle of the decade of the zeroes?
• Why are members of the US Congress so woefully ignorant of the scope of these programs?
• What penalties shall be administered upon those members of the military and government, who have been lying to the public about these programs?
• Under what authority does the US government have in stealing all the private and personnel data of non-citizens not located within the United States? 
• Why does the US government continually prevent these programs from being adjudicated and subject to constitutional review, if they deem them truly legal?
• Why doesn't the press call those in government who lie to the public and engage in illegal behavior traitors?
• Why are private corporations used to such an extent in gathering and processing clandestine information?
• Why does the current US government engage in prosecuting and penalizing whistleblowers to the extent that they do?

As others have said on this matter, the only reason a universal monitoring program is in place is that the state believes its true enemy is its own citizens.

A rebuttal to China crashing soon

Minxei Pei writes an interesting article in The Diplomat titled "China's Economy: Seizure or Cancer".

In it he outlines a number of the obvious features that have been discussed on this blog about China's overall economy.  He dissects the current situation and asks whether there will be an immediate heart attack that hobbles the beast or a systemic cancer that eventually kills it.

He refers to a "heart attack" scenario where a cascade of events, precipitated by a slowdown and excess debt, cripples China.  In his perspective China's communists will force the banks to defer losses and provide a backstop to prevent further contagion.  He states:

But China is different. Because the banking system is effectively owned and controlled by the state, a banking crisis won’t materialize unless the state itself is insolvent and Chinese depositors have completely lost confidence in the state’s sovereign guarantee of its banks. This unique character of the China’s state-owned financial system is the cause of the country’s inability to allocate capital efficiently. However, in the short term, this structural flaw may turn out to be an asset in averting a seizure of the financial system.

As in the global meltdown of 2008 and earlier banking system upsets in China, this approach has worked.

On a second level, if the economy doesn't crash immediately over the course of the next several months, the author perceives a potential "cancer" in the nature of the communist-capitalist hybrid.

Despite the threat of a seizure in the near term, the greater danger to the Chinese economy is its structural inefficiency, which is deeply imbedded in a state-led development model...

The investments made by the Chinese state may have given the Communist Party a lot of prestige (think of the country’s modern infrastructure and ambitious high-tech plans), but delivers preciously few real benefits to its people. Chinese state-owned enterprises have thrived because of their access to practically free capital, but their efficiency remains abysmal compared with domestic private firms or their Western rivals.

No country can keep pouring unlimited amounts of capital into unproductive infrastructure projects. China doesn't have the ability to keep blowing this current bubble and then dismissing colossal financial losses when the bills come due.  With Europe sinking into recession, America limping along, and much of the emerging market turning negative, there is little reason to believe they can pull the same rabbit out of the hat again.

America's strange obsession with criminalizing abortion

A rather strange event has occurred in Indiana.  A severely unstable and pregnant woman attempted to commit suicide.  She survived, but her child died because of her actions.  Neither suicide nor abortion is illegal in the state of Indiana or in the USA; however, shortly after the incident, a state prosecutor charged the woman with murdering her fetus and attempted feticide.

The Guardian UK newspaper elaborates:

On 23 December 2010 Shuai became so depressed after she had been abandoned by her boyfriend – a married Chinese man who broke his promise to set up a family with her – that she decided to end her life. She consumed rat poison, and after confessing to friends was rushed to the Methodist hospital.

Doctors took steps to save her, but on 31 December there were signs that the baby, then at 33 weeks gestation, was in distress and a Caesarian was performed. On the second day of Angel's life the baby was found to have a massive brain hemorrhage and on 2 January was taken off life support.

Many countries in the world criminalize abortion.  Most Latin American countries routinely prosecute and incarcerate women who undergo treatment and doctors who perform abortions.  The moral argument is that a fetus is a person and subject to the same rights as an actual person.  However, by that same logic there is always two people involved in the gestation process: the mother and the child.  In the above case, we have a mentally unstable women who attempts to commit suicide and a child who was born prematurely but dies soon afterwards, because of the mother's actions.  The fetus was 32-weeks old when Shuai attempted suicide.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the woman's lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to have the charges overturned on the following basis.

Defense attorneys argued in court documents filed March 9 that prosecuting a woman based on the outcome of her pregnancy violates constitutional rights to due process and equal treatment and is cruel and unusual punishment.

Women's rights and legal groups have intervened in the case:

Several medical and women's rights groups, including the National Organization for Women and the National Alliance for Mental Illness, have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Shuai, claiming that prosecuting Shuai could set a precedent under which pregnant women could be prosecuted for smoking or other behavior that might deemed a danger to their fetus. They said that could discourage women from seeking prenatal care.

The prosecution claims that they are only following the law and the three-judge appeals court stated that "Shuai had not proven that common-law immunity exists for pregnant women who harm their own fetuses".  So what does this really mean?

In America's southern and conservative states there has been an outbreak of prosecutions against mothers.  Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi was accused of murdering her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

In Alabama, Amanda Kimbrough a mother of three was was arrested at her home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child.  Just prior she gave birth to a child that lived for nineteen minutes.  The basis of the prosecution was that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy; a claim she has denied.

"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."
She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars.

This bizarre infatuation of the religious and conservative right with women's reproductive organs and their individual liberties is appalling.  In Latin America, despite abortion's illegality, the abortion rate is higher than in either Western Europe or the United States.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

If the objective of these prosecutoral zealots is to increase the welfare of newborns or reduce abortions, their mission will fail.  In the first case, anyone who thinks they may be subject to prosecution  just will simply get a legal abortion.  In the second case, as the evidence above shows, by creating legal barriers to abortion all you end up doing is forcing women into back alley clinics where their lives are jeopardized and where ultimately more deaths will occur due to a lack of proper medical supervision.

Harper's contempt for Science and Canadian values

One of the fundamental differences between the previous Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney and the current Harper Conservatives (Reform-Alliance Party; i.e. CRAP) has been the complete abandonment of progressive environmental policies and investment in the basic sciences.

First, let us consider what Mulroney did in his two-terms that has lead some environmentalists to call him the "greenest Prime Minister" in Canadian history.

• In 1987, the Tories helped establish "The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer".  The global treaty placed a ban on the destructive CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and jeopardizing life on this planet.  
• Acid rain pollution was dramatically curtailed through cooperative legislation with the Americans.  
• A moratorium on fishing Cod, which twenty years later has yet to recover
• At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the United Nations Environment Programme was championed by Canada, and Canadians served as their leaders.

Whereas, Mulroney could be considered the high-water mark in environmental protection, the Harper government without any doubt is about as low and dirty as a clogged drainage pipe.

Plenty of people have talked of the Conservative's fealty to market based approaches, which is vaguely strange given that the current Prime Minster has never held a real job or career outside politics; his Finance Minister Jim Flahery was a motor vehicle accident and personal injury litigation lawyer (aka Ambulance chaser); and key Minsters Peter MacKay, Tony Clement, John Baird, and Jason Kenney have spent much of their adult lives as professional politicians.  So having established that none of these men has any experience in actually running anything but their mouths off, on the tax payers dime, it is less than obvious why anyone would believe that they understand what they are doing when it comes to making decisions about science funding in the public's interest.

Stephen Harper's desire to constantly control the message and limit the information that reaches the public has become legendary.  Like the Republican Party under George W. Bush, Harper has fought to manipulate the press and machinations within the government to serve his exclusive political goals.  The influence and taint of lobbyists peddling preferred laws, as it is done in Washington DC, is now the norm in his majority government.  Legislation is proudly rammed through parliament without adequate review or discussion from opposition parties or committee members input.  Through this unsightly metamorphosis into a corporate state, impediments such as empirical data, scientific facts, and international treaties to protect the environment have been removed.

Harper has pursued a global embargo on the speech of research scientists affiliated with the Government of Canada for the past few years.  For example, prominent scientists have been barred from granting interviews, providing opinions to the public on their subject of expertise, or discussing  their publications at conferences.  Environment Canada prevented  Dr. David Tarasick from "published findings about one of the largest ozone holes ever discovered above the Arctic."  Similarly, Kristi Miller was prevented from discussing her research into  a virus that might be killing British Columbia's wild sockeye salmon, despite her research being published in the journal Science.  An article in the scientific journal Nature further illustrates the problem:

Carefully researched reports intended for the public — Climate Change and Health, from Health Canada, and Climate Change Impacts, from Natural Resources Canada — were released without publicity, late on Friday afternoons, and appeared on government websites only after long delays.

The government demands that any information provided to the public must be vetted and cleared with a local propaganda officer from the Conservative party.

Science that offends the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists, the same group that makes up Harper's western base, is also edited from public disclosure.

When Scott Dallimore, a geoscientist for Natural Resources Canada in Sidney, British Columbia, reported evidence of the colossal flood that occurred in northern Canada at the end of the last ice age (Nature 464, 740–743; 2010), he was put through the message-moulding machine. As a result, Canada's taxpayers, who funded the research, were left in the dark. While the news broke elsewhere, journalists in Canada who had previously had open access to Dallimore, a gifted communicator, were left spinning their wheels while deadlines passed. The flood happened 13,000 years ago, so how can this work be construed as politically sensitive?

Recently, the Harper government changed the laws so that not-for-profit groups that engage in political criticism are penalized to prevent them for so-called abusing their registered charitable status.

The nearly paranoid and conspiratorial nature of these acts, stems from the Conservative's desire to prevent any information that may run counter to their pro-corporate or religious minded policies from reaching the public and interfering with their program.

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It is not just the message that Conservatives loath; it is the scientists that accumulate all these facts that make Conservative-backers so angry with the fact-based world.  Over the past year, the Harper government has engaged in a systematic withdrawal of funding for Environment Canada projects and the scientists involved in those research projects.  A student researcher at the University of  Toronto discusses his perspective:

Over the past several months we have seen major cuts to Environment Canada that are leaving it without any real scientific or research power. We have seen many prominent scientific jobs cut, research funding slashed, and our ability to effectively do environmental assessment and management largely neutralized.

Given that public funding is the main source of revenue for environmental sciences at Canadian universities, which has now evaporated, researchers are packing up and leaving Canada en mass.

In 2011-12 Environment Canada had its budget cut by 20% to 854 million dollars.   Eleven percent of the department personnel was cut last year, with a total of 776 employees told that their jobs may be terminated.  Those affected include engineers, meteorologists, scientists, chemists, and biologists. Given the extent of previous cuts imposed by previous budgets, the department is said to be barely functioning.  Treasury Board Minister, Tony Clement (aka Mr. hundred thousand dollar Gazebo),  facetiously told reporters that “Environment Canada is open for business, they’re doing their job, and they want to do it more efficiently.”

Canada was a pioneer in ozone monitoring technologies, which "led to the discovery that the world's ozone layer was dangerously thinning in the 1970s, which in turn led to the successful Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances."  The internationally renowned ozone monitoring network, has about one-third of the ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic region. The data produced by this network is heavily relied on by scientists around the world.  A single person was running the entire archives, until the conservatives closed down the The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka, Nunavut.

Not convinced at stopping the flow of information, eliminating the funding of  researchers, and closing down research stations, the conservatives have decided to destroy Arctic ice core bores that provide evidence of the atmospheric gaseous concentrations for thousands of years.  Mark Twickler, director of the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colo said, “These ice cores are so valuable that the international community, including the U.S., will do whatever we have to to preserve these remarkable archives of past climate.”

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is undergoing a similar budget slashing process. Budget cuts have lead to the closing of the Experimental Lakes Area. The program used a region of 58 freshwater lakes near Kenora, in western Ontario, where scientists conducted experiments on the effects of pollution.

The Environmental Lakes Area program was launched in 1968 and led to important discoveries about the effects of pollutants such as phosphates in household detergents and mercury on bodies of fresh water, prompting tighter regulation in Canada and the U.S.

Researchers from across the world are claiming disbelief at the action.  Harvard University aquatic sciences professor Elsie Sunderland said:

[she] was pretty shocked... This is one of the foremost research projects and places to do research in the world. To have it shut down is just appalling. It's just embarrassing. 

Cynthia Gilmour, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, said  she "was stunned".  Jim Elser an aquatic ecologist at Arizona State University said in an article in the journal Nature,  titled "Canada's renowned freshwater research site to close," that it was "completely shocking".  Elser said it was equivallent to the "U.S. government shutting down Los Alamos — its most important nuclear-physics site — or taking the world's best telescope and turning it off."

In a separate incident, 625 prominent scientists have written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and warned him not to "gut fish-habitat protections they say would put species at risk and damage Canada’s international standing."  The legislation being implemented as part of the Fisheries Act in Bill C-38, the omnibus budget bill, would eliminate components of federal law that bans activity that results in "harmful" alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat.  The new law consists of a  prohibition against activity that results in "serious" harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or aboriginal fishery, or any fish that supports one of those three fisheries.

David Schindler, ecology professor at the University of Alberta said the “pro-development” Conservative government was determined to abrogate long standing environmental protections.  Others are equally pessimistic of Harper's infringement on established environmental protections and resource management:

Nick Dulvy, a Simon Fraser University professor who worked formerly as a fisheries scientist in the British government, said the two moves add to his growing alarm about the Harper government's "misuse" of science.

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Hannah McKinnon of the Climate Action Network Canada (CAN Canada), an environmental NGO, made the comparison between funding essential scientific research that monitors the health of the nation versus providing 2-billion dollars to build ships for the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard and another 29 billion dollars allocated in a non-competitive and rigged bid for 65 F-35 fighter jets that don't even meet the Department of Defense's own minimal specifications.  The government can find billions of dollars to spend on pet projects, fighting Middle Eastern wars, and providing billions in subsidies to petrochemical companies -some of which are the most profitable in the world- yet it can't find the funds to monitor the environment or maintain reasonable scientific competency.

John Bennett, the executive director of Sierra Club Canada, puts it more bluntly, “It will give the polluters what they want, a toothless Environment Canada with no scientific or enforcement capability."

Quote of the Day: Wall St. Bankers & Fraud

A huge portion of Wall Street’s earnings were built around the model of ‘I’m going to bet against my clients. I’m going to regard my clients not as clients — and you can hear it in their language, but as counterparties.

- Edmund Clark, Chief Executive Officer Toronto-Dominion Bank, "No Trading for Dimon Principle With CEO Clark: Corporate Canada"