FALLING DOWN FALL


It’s Fall definitely now in November, and, finally, the cottonwoods are changing (see photo), but my buddy in Erie PA tells me it’s in the 60s there while in Vancouver it is in the 50s today. What’s up wid dat? So, today, I was much depressed thinking of how many ways health insurers from private to Medicare try to shift as much expense onto the client as they can and do so in very sneaky ways so that you don’t see it coming until it’s halfway up your butt. It’s stealth insurance for sure. Then, also, today, I hear that my PSA jumped a little bit more than one point and that scares me since it’s that old black prostate cancer that killed my dad, a very aggressive form of it. And he died at age 77, and, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I turned 70 in October. So I’m more scared than I let myself in on until one minute I’m talking to a buddy about our lives and, suddenly, it hits me that any plans we make for too far in the future to see each other again, might be too late. Then I got a tingling sense of fear all the way from my funny bones in my elbows, all around the chest cavity into my heart.


One good thing about my walk today is that the old blue heron is back. I thought that when the city poisoned the blackberry bushes on the little isthmus where he spends a lot of time and cut down all the vegetation there that, perhaps, they scared the old bird away or, maybe, killed him with poison. But there he was today sitting atop one of his favorite pilings. Picture included.
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PALIMPSEST/GORE VIDAL

Just finished reading Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir of his life in the late 40s, the 50s and into the 1960s. Gay and atheist, he’s an inspiration to me, a decidedly heterosexual American male and atheist, myself. I don’t know if he knows it, but all his own frailties show through in Palimpsest. I can see him being from time to time as petty and as vain as those he castigates and reveals in his memoir, but, then, so often, reading him, I also see myself, being the same thing. In fact all humanity is present in his memoir. None of us is free of the vanities Gore writes about. It’s been a long time since I laughed aloud reading a book, but Gore made me laugh, aloud and freely. Interesting—when laughing aloud in an espresso joint, where many tender sensibilities abound, one catches nearby talkers wince as they wonder if one is laughing at them. I noticed that more than once.

“When Orwell writes, ‘Spain,’ or Hazlitt, ‘Napoleon,’ one's eyelids droop, Surely this does not happen when I write ‘Ron and Nancy’.... At least my characters are inherently comic, or so I find them. Today, I wonder why I am so content, inhabiting as I do a body so keen to disassemble. Then I realize why, perfect day to one side: I do not want anything, I am past all serious desire for anything—at the moment, anyway. The Buddha was right: To want is to suffer.” —Vidal, p.174

Today has also been a perfect day for me after a troubled Sunday when everything in my life seemed empty and purposeless. How odd that those days still come at my age of 70, and they always come when I am still taking myself to task for not having succeeded at that or this, when I still think I want something more than a sunny, coolish walk beside the Columbia River in the glittering light. This morning, I was also a Buddhist. Like my wife.

“I recall now, something that Jack [Kennedy] had observed about the great of this world. ‘In this… uh… job you get to meet just about everybody. You get to know all the big movers and shakers, and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.’ He said this with some wonder, even wistfulness—as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn’t.” —Vidal, p. 378

“During my ten years in the wilderness, a good deal had happened in literature. The Beats had for a time flourished, and many of us were alarmed. Was this what writing was destined to be—an endless report on what one had done the night before while listing the names of the all-alike towns that one sped through on the ever-same road? Although, as writers, Kerouac and Burroughs were not much different from such conventional writers as Philip Roth and John Updike, I feared that their imitators would, like the executors of some inexorable Gresham's law, drive literature itself out the window. All this proved to be a false alarm. Their imitators were few, while the originals either died or did not continue, and literature went out the window anyway.” —Vidal, p. 410

The ten years Gore speaks of as “wilderness” are the years during which he vowed to make himself financially independent so that he could write whatever he chose to write and live as he wanted to live. He set himself five years but it took ten, still he accomplished it. And the novel continues to die a slow death. Though opera and classical music are further along in their decline, so the novel, a Johnny-come-lately compared to those two, is following slowly behind, leaving the stage. I would mourn their passing, but, if the hope of life is that someday true peace and prosperity could reign here on Earth, I can see no evidence that the arts have contributed to that peace or prosperity. No more than has religion. Could Plato have been right when he wished to ban poets from his Republic?

LOVELOCK LOCKS AND LOADS

In the November 1st, 2007 Rolling Stone Magazine, Jeff Goodell interviews and features the ideas of James Lovecock, the scientist who came up with the idea that our Planet Earth is a living being. Still controversial among some, many other scientists are now accepting of Lovecock’s ideas about the planet. Frankly, I like the idea that, in my interaction with the atmosphere, I’m just like a fish swimming in its environment. It just opens my imagination to so many creative ways to think about life’s existence on the planet.

The interesting thing about Goodell’s writing is that it’s so logical that I’ve excerpted pieces of it, and they make sense even though they are small fragments of a much longer piece. Best, though, is buy a Rolling Stone and read the whole article.

[SNIPPET]
[A]s a scientist, he [James Lovelock] introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia—the idea that our entire planet is a kind of superorganism that is, in a sense, "alive."

Our air "is not merely a biological product," Lovelock wrote, "but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat's fur, a bird's feathers or the paper of a wasp's nest, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment."

"You could quite seriously look at climate change as a response of the system intended to get rid of an irritating species: us humans," Lovelock tells me in the small office he has created in his cottage. "Or at least cut them back to size."

Lovelock put out a book called Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. "The Gaia hypothesis," he wrote, "is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here." Gaia, he added, offers an alternative to the "depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship, forever traveling driverless and purposeless around an inner circle of the sun."

Of course, scientists like Broecker rarely used the word "Gaia." They prefer the phrase "Earth system science," which views the world, according to one treatise, as "a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components." In other words, Gaia in a lab coat.

"The whole system," he decided, "is in failure mode."

One of the questions that fascinates Lovelock: Life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3 billion years—and to what purpose? "Like it or not, we are the brains and nervous system of Gaia," he says. "We have now assumed responsibility for the welfare of the planet. How will we manage it?"
[PASTE]

FALLING OUT OF BLOGLOVE

Again, time has passed. George Bush seems well defeated, I’m adjusting to Vancouver and making friends and acquaintances at last. I’m not so urgently driven to communicate in this blog. My marriage continues to be wonderful. I’m drawing again, writing some poetry, working algebra problems, reading and drinking lattes at some interesting coffee shops around Vancouver. I drive over to Portland almost every Sunday morning to join my fellow humanists for interesting lectures, then go to lunch with another small bunch of humanists. I feel pretty good, and I’m much pepped up by the knowledge that my potential heart disease turned into a clean bill of health by angiogram. I’m meeting some people in the apartment complex too. Currently I’m reading poetry by Marvin Bell, Loewen’s book and also Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest. I really like Gore Vidal, I do. Sense a kindred spirit there, even though I’m heterosexual as all get out, but sometimes Gore’s writing makes me love him. Life is pretty damn great.

EVEN JEFFERSON CORRUPTED BY SLAVERY

In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen studies 12 textbooks of American history to demonstrate just how distorted American textbooks are in order that they might portray America in a much too favorable a light. Even in my minor in history, I don’t recall the following information being presented to me.

[SLICE AND DICE]
… slavery and it concomitant ideas, which legitimated hierarchy and dominance sapped our Revolution idealism. Most textbooks never hint at this clash of ideas, let alone at its impact on our foreign policy.

After the Revolution, many Americans expected our example would inspire other peoples. It did. Our young nation got its first chance to help in the 1790s, when Haiti revolted against France. Whether a president owned slaves seems to have determined his policy toward the second independent nation in the hemisphere. George Washington did, so his administration loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the French planters in Haiti to help them suppress their slaves. John Adams did not, and his administration gave considerable support to the Haitians. Jefferson's presidency marked a general retreat from the idealism of the Revolution. Like other slave owners, Jefferson preferred a Napoleonic colony to a black republic in the Caribbean. In 1801 he reversed U.S. policy toward Haiti and secretly gave France the go-ahead to reconquer the island. In so doing, the United States not only betrayed its heritage, but also acted against its own self-interest. For if France had indeed been able to retake Haiti, Napoleon would have maintained his dream of an American empire. The United States would have been hemmed in by France to its west, Britain to its north, and Spain to its south. But planters in the United States were scared by the Haitian Revolution. They thought it might inspire slave revolts here (which it did). When Haiti won despite our flip-flop, the United States would not even extend it diplomatic recognition, lest its ambassador inflame our slaves "by exhibiting in his own person an example of successful revolt," in the words of a Georgia senator. Five of the twelve textbooks mention how Haitian resistance led France to sell us its claim to Louisiana, but none tells of our flip-flop. Indeed, no textbook ever makes any connection between slavery and U.S. foreign policy.

Racial slavery also affected our policy toward the next countries in the Americas to revolt, Spain's colonies. Haiti's example inspired them to seek independence, and the Haitian government gave Simon Bolivar direct aid. Our statesmen were ambivalent, eager to help boot a European power out of the hemisphere but worried by the racially mixed rebels doing the booting. Some planters wanted our government to replace Spain as the colonial power, especially in Cuba. Jefferson suggested annexing Cuba. Fifty years later, diplomats in the Franklin Pierce administration signed the Ostend Manifesto, which proposed that the United States buy or take the island from Spain. Slave owners, still obsessed with Haiti as a role model, thus hoped to prevent Cuba's becoming a second Haiti, with "flames [that might] extend to our own neighboring shores," in the words of the Manifesto. In short, slavery prompted the United States to have imperialist designs on Latin America rather than visions of democratic liberation for the region. (pp.142-143)
[RECONSTITUTE AND PASTE]

Photo a nice one along the Columbia River as one drives westbound on I-84.

GOD DID IT FOR US

The cold-blooded reality of fundamentalism in America is demonstrated time and again in American history. Cold-bloodedness began very early. It was Catholic as well as Protestant in the New World. Now it’s also and insanely Moslem. But here’s an early take on how the hyper-religious imagine that their imaginary god works in the interests of Christianity. It’s from the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen (p. 72).

[CLIP]
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. European Americans also contracted smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but they usually recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." 
Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side. 
John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague 
"miraculous." In 1634 he wrote to a friend in England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection ...." God 
the Original Real Estate Agent!

Many Indians likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them. Robert Cushman reported that "those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." After a smallpox epidemic the Cherokee "despaired so much that they lost confidence in their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe." After all, neither Indians nor Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease.
Indian healers could supply no cure; their medicines and herbs offered no relief. Their religion provided no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol, converted to Christianity, or simply killed themselves!
[PASTE]

Less malevolently, but in exactly the same manner, golfer Gus Johnson’s claims his imagined god aids his golfing exploits.

WHIDBEY ISLAND SUNRISE

The photo is from a recent trip I took to Whidbey Island to visit old pal from Spokane, Doug. Looking from near Clinton toward Everett.

THE PRES. WHO WOULD BE KING AND ONE OF HIS BEMEDALED HENCHMEN


This is an entry which has lying around the computer for quite some time, but when I looked into this more recent medal business, I thought some more kingly stuff ought to be mentioned. PS: Guess which man on the right is not the bemedaled Bushite fool? What is the thing with these modern military men and their medals? With our chief political figures having such problems with arrogance, could we expect less from our modern generals?

The following passages show how we're messing it up around the world because we got a bullheaded Texan in the White House. From Newsweek, Dec. 19, 2005 p. 40:

[OPEN QUOTE] Most leaders who are consulted are simply informed of U.S. policy. Senior American officials live in their own bubbles, rarely having any genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, let alone other foreigners. "When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can't take it in," explained one senior foreign official who requested anonymity for fear of angering his U.S. counterparts. . . .

"Attending any conference abroad," Patten continues, "American cabinet officers arrive with the sort of entourage that would have done Darius proud. Hotels are commandeered; cities brought to a halt; innocent bystanders are barged into corners by thick-necked men with bits of plastic hanging out of their ears. It is not a spectacle that wins hearts and minds."

. . . . To foreigners, American officials increasingly seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running. "There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without," says Kishore Mahbubani, formerly a senior diplomat for Singapore and now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Because Americans live in a "cocoon," Mahbubani fears that they don't see the "sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world." [CLOSE QUOTE]

THE VALLEY OF ELAH

I recommend this film for it’s emotional power and for the performances by all concerned, but if you don’t like films with unhappy endings, you don’t want to see it, but if you are addicted to the truth, then you must see it. The screenplay is a knockout. Films which get under the skin of a situation are rare, and this one gets far under the skin of the Iraq situation. It works at so many levels, it’s a Twin Tower of Power all in itself. There’s one line at the end of the film about the American flag that works at so many levels, your head will spin—“It’s been used a lot.” You’ll see what I mean when you actually see the film.

OKAY! IT’S FALL IN OLD FORT VANCOUVER!

BOY! I’M SURE NOT MOTIVATED THESE DAYS

to make any blog entries. Could it be because Bush is on his last White House wafers and the Republican Party is showing us its true colors in every public bathroom around the country, and, thus, I do not feel that my nor America’s freedoms are as threatened as they were back when I started this blog?





Here’s a photo of my own artsy-fartsy rebellion (that's my foot on the grass) and a little interesting website for you to munch on while I try and work up better fare in future days.

AIN'T IT OBVIOUS?

[SNIP]
In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon's mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders. Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus's recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.
[PASTIE]

A DYLAN MOVIE BY DIRECTOR OF "FAR FROM HEAVEN" AND "SAFE"

The movie "Safe" has long been one of my favorite movies. Now Todd Haynes is making a movie about Bob Dylan. When Haynes makes a film, it's always interesting and challenging. His films aren't gimmicky or surreal but the feel of them is always a little off center. Go watch one if you don't believe me.

[NIPPLE]
TORONTO (AP) - Bob Dylan is not at the Toronto International Film Festival. But six shades of Dylan are present with "I'm Not There," a swirling, shifting ramble through the many lives of one of the most enigmatic figures in music history.

Different actors—including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett—play incarnations of Dylan at various phases of his public and private life.
[PASTIE]

Preceeding is by DAVID GERMAIN

That's right—that's Kate as Dylan in his early days.



(AP Photo/The Weinstein Co., Jonathan Wenk)

RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM IS AN “EVOLUTIONARY STABLE STRATEGY”

In the past I’ve copied information into my blog from Pinker’s writings about reciprocal altruism. Now here’s a long passage by Dawkins from his The Selfish Gene (pp. 183-186) about the evolutionary mechanisms by which altruism worms its way into the human psyche by means of Dawkins’s selfish gene theory, contrary as that process may seem to the concept of a “selfish” gene. In short, The Golden Rule is based in human evolution and may prove to be the way by which the human species survives and thrives. I know I’ve said the same thing in other places in this blog. I hope the idea isn’t getting to be boring.

[OPEN QUOTE]
Suppose a species of bird is parasitized by a particularly nasty kind of tick which carries a dangerous disease. It is very important that these ticks should be removed as soon as possible. Normally an individual bird can pull off its owns ticks when preening itself. There is one place, however—the top of the head—which it cannot reach with its own bill. The solution to the problem quickly occurs to any human. An individual may not be able to reach his own head, but nothing is easier than for a friend to do it for him. Later, when the friend is parasitized himself, the good deed can be paid back. Mutual grooming is in fact very common in both birds and mammals.

This makes immediate intuitive sense. Anybody with conscious foresight can see that it is sensible to enter into mutual backscratching arrangements. But we have learnt to beware of what seems intuitively sensible. The gene has no foresight. Can the theory of selfish genes account for mutual back-scratching, or 'reciprocal altruism', where there is a delay between good deed and repayment? Williams briefly discussed the problem in his 1966 book, to which I have already referred. He concluded, as had Darwin, that delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals. Trivers, in 1971, took the matter further. When he wrote, he did not have available to him Maynard Smith's concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy. If he had, my guess is that he would have made use of it, for it provides a natural way to express his ideas. His reference to the 'Prisoner's Dilemma'—a favourite puzzle in game theory shows that he was already thinking along the same lines.

Suppose B has a parasite on the top of his head. A pulls it off him. Later, the time comes when A has a parasite on his head. He naturally seeks out B in order that B may pay back his good deed. B simply turns up his nose and walks off. B is a cheat, an individual who accepts the benefit of other individuals' altruism, but who does not pay it back, or who pays it back insufficiently, Cheats do better than indiscriminate altruists because they gain the benefits without paying the costs. To be sure, the cost of grooming another individual's head seems small compared with the benefit of having a dangerous parasite removed, but it is not negligible. Some valuable energy and time has to be spent.

Let the population consist of individuals who adopt one of two strategies. As in Maynard Smith's analyses, we are not talking about conscious strategies, but about unconscious behaviour programs laid down by genes. Call the two strategies Sucker and Cheat. Suckers groom anybody who needs it, indiscriminately. Cheats accept altruism from suckers, but they never groom anybody else, not even somebody who has previously groomed them, As in the case of the hawks and doves, we arbitrarily assign pay-off points. It does not matter what the exact values are, so long as the benefit of being groomed exceeds the cost of grooming. If the incidence of parasites is high, any individual sucker in a population of suckers can reckon on being groomed about as often as he grooms. The average pay-off for a sucker among suckers is therefore positive. They all do quite nicely in fact, and the word sucker seems inappropriate, But now suppose a cheat arises in the population. Being the only cheat, he can count on being groomed by everybody else, but he pays nothing in return. His average pay-off is better than the average for a sucker. Cheat genes will therefore start to spread through the population. Sucker genes will soon be driven to extinction. This is because, no matter what the ratio in the population, cheats will always do better than suckers. For instance, consider the case when the population consists of 50 per cent suckers and 50 per cent cheats. The average pay-off for both suckers and cheats will be less than that for any individual in a population of 100 per cent suckers. But still, cheats will be doing better than suckers because they are getting all the benefits-such as they are-and paying nothing back. When the proportion of cheats reaches 90 per cent, the average pay-off for all individuals will be very low: many of both types may by now be dying of the infection carried by the ticks. But still the cheats will be doing better than the suckers. Even if the whole population declines toward extinction, there will never be any time when suckers do better than cheats. Therefore, as long as we consider only these two strategies, nothing can stop the extinction of the suckers and, very probably, the extinction of the whole population too.

But now, suppose there is a third strategy called Grudger. Grudgers groom strangers and individuals who have previously groomed them. However, if any individual cheats them, they remember the incident and bear a grudge: they refuse to groom that individual in the future. In a population of grudgers and suckers it is impossible to tell which is which. Both types behave altruistically towards everybody else, and both earn an equal and high average pay-off. In a population consisting largely of cheats, a single grudger would not be very successful. He would expend a great deal of energy grooming most of the individuals he met-for it would take time for him to build up grudges against all of them. On the other hand, nobody would groom him in return. If grudgers are rare in comparison with cheats, the grudger gene will go extinct. Once the grudgers manage to build up in numbers so that they reach a critical proportion, however, their chance of meeting each other becomes sufficiently great to off-set their wasted effort in grooming cheats. When this critical proportion is reached they will start to average a higher pay-off than cheats, and the cheats will be driven at an accelerating rate towards extinction. When the cheats are nearly extinct their rate of decline will become slower, and they may survive as a minority for quite a long time. This is because for anyone rare cheat there is only a small chance of his encountering the same grudger twice: therefore the proportion of individuals in the population who bear a grudge against any given cheat will be small.

I have told the story of these strategies as though it were intuitively obvious what would happen. In fact it is not all that obvious, and I did take the precaution of simulating it on a computer to check that intuition was right. Grudger does indeed turn out to be an evolution¬arily stable strategy against sucker and cheat, in the sense that, in a population consisting largely of grudgers, neither cheat nor sucker will invade. Cheat is also an ESS [Evolutionary Stabile Strategy], however, because a population consisting largely of cheats will not be invaded by either grudger or sucker, A population could sit at either of these two ESSs. In the long term it might flip from one to the other. Depending on the exact values of the pay-offs—the assumptions in the simulation were of course completely arbitrary-one or other of the two stable states will have a larger 'zone of attraction' and will be more likely to be attained. Note incidentally that, although a population of cheats may be more likely to go extinct than a population of grudgers, this in no way affects its status as an ESS. If a population arrives at an ESS that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad.*

It is quite entertaining to watch a computer simulation that starts with a strong majority of suckers, a minority of grudgers that is just above the critical frequency, and about the same-sized minority of cheats. The first thing that happens is a dramatic crash in the population of suckers as the cheats ruthlessly exploit them. The cheats enjoy a soaring population explosion, reaching their peak just as the last sucker perishes. But the cheats still have the grudgers to reckon with. During the precipitous decline of the suckers, the grudgers have been slowly decreasing in numbers, taking a battering from the prospering cheats, but just managing to hold their own. After the last sucker has gone and the cheats can no longer get away with selfish exploitation so easily, the grudgers slowly begin to increase at the cheats' expense. Steadily their population rise gathers momentum. It accelerates steeply, the cheat population crashes to near extinction, then levels out as they enjoy the privileges of rarity and the comparative freedom from grudges which this brings. However, slowly and inexorably the cheats are driven out of existence, and the grudgers are left in sole possession. Paradoxically, the presence of the suckers actually endangered the grudgers early on in the story because they were responsible for the temporary prosperity of the cheats.
[CLOSE QUOTE]

By the way, extinction is a possiblity in certain species, when grooming doesn’t take place. Mice who are kept in seclusion from their mates, can sometimes die from head infections. And think about the example of small fish that clean the teeth and gills of other larger fishes.

Photo: The once upon a time steps up which early Vancouverites climbed from the Columbia River upon arriving in the thriving outpost of Vancouver, Washington.