SUNDAY SERMON:To stop global catastrophe, we must believe in humans again

from The Guardian:by Bill McKibben

We have the technology to prevent climate crisis. But now we need to unleash mass resistance too – because collective action does work

Because I am concerned about inequality and about the environment, I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past: a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between; a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

And those seem to me profoundly conservative positions. Meanwhile, oil companies and tech barons strike me as deeply radical, willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere, eager to confer immortality.

There is a native conservatism in human beings that resists such efforts, a visceral sense of what’s right or dangerous, rash or proper. You needn’t understand every nuance of germline engineering or the carbon cycle to understand why monkeying around on this scale might be a bad idea. And indeed, polling suggests that most people instinctively oppose, say, living forever or designing babies, just as they want government action to stabilise the climate.

Luckily, we have two relatively new inventions that could prove decisive to solving global warming before it destroys the planet. One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. Obviously, they are not the same sort of inventions: the solar panel (and its cousins, the wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery) is hardware, while the ability to organise en masse for change is more akin to software. Indeed, even to call nonviolent campaigning a “technology” will strike some as odd. Each is still in its infancy; we deploy them, but fairly blindly, finding out by trial and error their best uses. Both come with inherent limits: neither is as decisive or as immediately powerful as, say, a nuclear weapon or a coal-fired power plant. But both are transformative nonetheless – and, crucially, the power they wield is human in scale.

Before we can best employ these technologies, we need to address the two most insidious ideas deployed in defence of the status quo. The first is that there is no need for mass resistance because each of us should choose for ourselves the future we want. The second is that there is no possibility of resistance because the die is already cast.

Choice is the mantra that unites people of many political persuasions. Conservatives say, “you’re not the boss of me”, when it comes to paying taxes; liberals say it when the topic is marijuana. The easiest, laziest way to dispense with a controversy is to say: “Do what you want; don’t tell me what to do.”

If “let anyone do what they want” is a flawed argument, then “no one can stop them anyway” is an infuriating one. Insisting that some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of those who don’t want to be bothered trying to stop it, and I’ve heard it too often to take it entirely seriously.

I remember, for instance, when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “of course they did”, or “all corporations lie”, or “nothing will ever happen to them anyway”. This kind of knowing cynicism is a gift to the Exxons of the world. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naive outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the US were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense.

Innovation doesn’t scare me. I think that if we back off the most crazed frontiers of technology, we can still figure out how to keep humans healthy, safe, productive – and human. Not everyone agrees. Some harbour a deep pessimism about human nature which I confess, as an American in the age of Donald Trump, occasionally seems sound.

Of all the arguments for unhindered technological growth, the single saddest (in the sense that it just gives up on human beings) comes from the Oxford don Julian Savulescu. In essence he contends that, left to themselves, democracies can’t solve climate change, “for in order to do so a majority of their voters must support the adoption of substantial restrictions on their excessively consumerist lifestyle, and there is no indication they would be willing to make such sacrifices”. Also, our ingrained suspicion of outsiders keeps us from working together globally. And so, faced with the need to move quickly, we should “morally bio-enhance” our children or, more likely, use genetic engineering, so they will cooperate.

I hope Savulescu seriously underestimates the power of both technology and democracy – of the solar panel and of nonviolence. I believe we have the means at hand to solve our problems short of turning our children into saintly robots – which, in any event, wouldn’t do a thing to solve climate change, given that by the time these morally improved youths had grown into positions of power, the damage would long since have been done. And I’m convinced Savulescu is wrong about people’s selfishness presenting the main obstacle to solving climate change: around the world, polling shows that people are not just highly concerned about global warming, but also willing to pay a price to solve it. Americans, for instance, said in 2017 that they were willing to see their energy bills rise 15% and have the money spent on clean energy programmes – that’s about in line with the size of the carbon taxes that national groups have been campaigning for.

The reason we don’t have a solution to climate change has less to do with the greed of the great, unengineered unwashed than with the greed of the almost unbelievably small percentage of people at the top of the energy heap. That is to say, the Koch brothers and the Exxon execs have never been willing to take a 15% slice off their profits, not when they could spend a much smaller share of their winnings corrupting the political debate with rolls of cash. If you wanted to “morally enhance” anyone, that’s where you’d start – if there are Grinches in need of hearts, it’s pretty obvious who should be at the front of the line.

But let’s not win that way. Let’s operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. That we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.

• Bill McKibben is an envorinmentalist, author and journalist

This is an edited extract from Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

School of Life Monday:Who are you to say that?

Getting agreement on big questions has become ever harder because we either put our trust in science or insist that everyone’s opinion is equal to everyone else’s. That might not be quite true

Carl Reiner political comment

What is on my mind will be coming out of my mouth as you watch this: pic.twitter.com/fZkyGg8rlU

— carl reiner (@carlreiner) October 30, 2018

In America, the young find distinguishing fact from opinion easier than their elders

from Boing Boing:

A recent Pew poll challenged subjects to distinguish between factual statements and statements of opinion in news articles; it found that there is a large gap in accuracy between 18- to 49-year-olds (32% of whom correctly labeled 100% of the facts, and 44% of whom correct labeled 100% of the opinions) and those aged 50 and up (20% correctly labeled all facts; 26% correctly labeled all opinions).

Young people performed well regardless of the ideological nature of the facts and opinions, while older subjects' ability to sort fact from opinion was more likely to struggle when such sorting cut against their ideological bias.

For example, 63% of 18- to 49-year-olds correctly identified the following factual statement, one which was deemed to appeal more to the right: “Spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget.” About half of those ages 50 and older (51%) correctly classified the same statement. Additionally, 18- to 49-year-olds were 12 percentage points more likely than those at least 50 years of age (60% vs. 48%, respectively) to correctly categorize the following factual statement, which was deemed to be more appealing to the ideological left: “Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have some rights under the Constitution.”

Among the opinion statements, roughly three-quarters of 18- to 49-year-olds (77%) correctly identified the following opinion statement, one that appeals more to the ideological right – “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” – compared with about two-thirds of older Americans (65%). And younger Americans were slightly more likely than older adults (82% vs. 78%, respectively) to correctly categorize this opinion statement, one appealing more to the left: “Abortion should be legal in most cases.”

Younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news statements from opinions [Jeffrey Gottfried and Elizabeth Grieco/Pew]

This is the most dangerous time for our planet by Stephen Hawking

from The Guardian:

We can’t go on ignoring inequality, because we have the means to destroy our world but not to escape it

As a theoretical physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town, centred around one of the world’s great universities. Within that town, the scientific community that I became part of in my 20s is even more rarefied.

And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle. In addition to this, with the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.

So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.

It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.

I am no exception to this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward, and the electorate – or at least a sufficiently significant proportion of it – took no more notice of me than any of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice to the rest of the country.

What matters now, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react. Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible mistake.

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.

But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

The consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.

For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.

Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it.

To do that, we need to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations. If we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more than at present.

With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.

We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility.

• The writer launched www.unlimited.world earlier this year

One more time.

Peoples' not caring about OTHER people as much as they should will bring the end of humans on this planet, sooner rather than later.

What makes me say that today? The fucking news, the overwhelming majority of politicians, and business people who put profits over people and the planet.

Shortsightedness, greed, ignorance, manufactured fear. Made painfully obvious by "healthcare" co$ts, GUNS in this country and peoples perceived need for them, when they should be totally banned. That a pig like Trump dominates any discussion of any kind is a pathetic reflection of what much of the worlds reality has become. It's fucking foul.

Make some fucking noise in any way you can, big or small, and stop this mis-direction of humankind.

Please.

-GEF

(yes I originally posted this on my Social media a few weeks ago, but i believe it needed to be shared again, here at this time of year)

Thanks for your interest and support.

Important Sunday Message

Peoples' not caring about OTHER people as much as they should will bring the end of humans on this planet, sooner rather than later.

What makes me say that today? The fucking news, the overwhelming majority of politicians, and business people who put profits over people and the planet.

Shortsightedness, greed, ignorance, manufactured fear. Made painfully obvious by "healthcare" co$ts, GUNS in this country and peoples perceived need for them, when they should be totally banned. That a pig like Trump dominates any discussion of any kind is a pathetic reflection of what much of the worlds reality has become. It's fucking foul.

Make some fucking noise in any way you can, big or small, and stop this mis-direction of humankind.

Please.

-GEF

(yes I originally posted this on my Social media a few weeks ago, but i believe it needed to be shared again, here at this time of year)

Thanks for your interest and support.

A Q&A With Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys Who Shares His Strong Opinions on Basically Everything

from the SF Weekly:

On Thanksgiving, we're betting you got together with friends and family, watched the parade, ate and drank a bunch, then slipped into a food coma on the couch. Well, we took a break from that this year because Jello Biafra decided that Thanksgiving was the perfect time for a chat with SF Weekly. The former lead singer/songwriter for The Dead Kennedys — who, in recent years, has turned to spoken word and political activism — spoke with us about everything from ISIS and "pulling a Kurt Cobain" to tech-related gentrification in San Francisco and his upcoming show at Slim's with his band, Guantanamo School of Medicine. For someone who once wrote an open letter of suggestions to President Barack Obama and tried to incur a law forcing businessmen to wear clown suits, Jello was every bit as charismatic, entertaining and opinionated as you might expect. Here are some highlights from what turned into a very long conversation ...

SF Weekly: You're the last person I thought I'd be talking to on Thanksgiving...

Jello Biafra: Well, you've gotta kill this day somehow. It's not everybody's favorite holiday. It's basically Euro-Supremacist Day, when you think about it. Someone on a cable comedy show said the other night, "Every time there's been a wave of immigrants coming into this country, people have been worried that they're going to come in and wreck the place and destroy the whole thing. And it has absolutely never happened — except for the ones that showed up and created the holiday that we're celebrating now."

Talking of invasions, as someone who's been in the Bay Area since the late 1970s, you've already seen one dot-com boom and bust ...

... I usually call it dot-com holocaust ...

Do you see any way for the city to recover culturally?

It's hard to say what's going to happen. It's a different crop of people this time, for one thing. Some of them strike me as being meaner, more conservative and more money-grubbing, even compared to the first batch. A lot of people are running around wishing they were Gavin Newsom or Ron Conway. There's no idealism involved. Hearing people say, "Hey man! Now the Summer of Love is a start up!" That's when I wish I had a grenade in my back pocket. Where's ISIS when you need them? It has changed the demographics and the flavor of the city.

Is there any way out?

As far as coming back from this, I think it's just going to depend on who shows up and votes. Proposition F never should've lost and the only reason it did was because it was an off-year election when the mayor and other high officials were all running unopposed, so people weren't paying attention and didn't vote. A lot of what turned things around the last time was when we got a progressive Board of Supervisors. They came in and said, "Enough is enough." It's always possible. I mean, I have hope. I wouldn't call it optimism, but I do have hope.

How much of the fabric of the city is left at this point?

I would say quite a bit. I mean, there's still a lot of Mom and Pop Latino businesses [in the Mission] that have been there since before I moved here. Not as many as there were, but they are still there, and their customers are there.

What is all this doing to music?

A lot of us, myself included, are a lot more unaware than we should be of other areas of culture and underground coolness going on in San Francisco, that doesn't necessarily involve white people. There are a lot of other things going on that we could be dipping into. I've had people tell me that they're thinking about moving to Vallejo. I mean, what's next? Concord? I hope not!

What do you find more satisfying on a personal level: spoken word or Guantanamo School?

Well, I've been back to rock the last couple of years, which I missed — it just didn't happen as quickly as I thought because there were so many adventures happening. Once the band got going, it eats up a lot of the time I might have spent putting together another spoken word show. It would be nice to have both at all times, but I just haven't had time.

What keeps you from getting burned out?

I would say that my sick sense of humor is what sustains me in all areas of life. Knowing what I do about the way our city and the whole world is really run, if I didn't have my sick sense of humor, I would've pulled a Kurt Cobain years ago.

I once read a review that said: "Jello Biafra is a man who's never really happy unless he's plenty pissed off." Is that accurate?

I guess that's one way of putting it! It's not quite right. Yeah, I enjoy ranting and raving and making fun of things. I'm sarcastic and I'm cynical and, yeah, I enjoy that. More to the point, I'm in a unique position where I can actually do something with those feelings. I'm really grateful that, at my age, I can still eke out something of a living just from my big mouth and bad attitude. It doesn't hurt that I'm still pretty good at making up words and music and cool songs, but I'm just glad there are some people still around who want to listen to me.

Is there going to be a new Guantanamo School of Medicine record soon?

I was hoping I'd have that done by now but I've fallen behind in my writing, which is my own personal problem to try and solve next year. Sooner or later, I'll get my shit together. I'm one of the few people my age who has all these fresh ideas — it's just a matter of getting away from all of these things yanking at me in my daily life. I really need to immerse myself and get everything written and arranged.

What can we expect from the Slim's show?

If you've seen us before, you know what you're in for. For those who haven't, it's in some ways, a heavier, fiercer version of Dead Kennedys, but because I finally have my own band again, the surf and the psyche moves have come back in. It'll mostly be newer GSM songs, with a little bit of Dead Kennedys sprinkled in as well. I'm not a retro act, for crying out loud! Even in places like Germany, when people are yelling for "Too Drunk to Fuck" three songs into the show, as soon as they hear the new songs, they're happy.

Do you find you have a new generation coming to see you now?

It depends on the place. The one at Slim's is all ages, which I try to do as much as possible because, when I started going to punk shows in San Francisco, I was 19. Where would I be now if I couldn't have gotten in until I was 21? It would've left me more likely to stay in school and get my degree!

I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO REPAY MY DEBT TO EUROPE: Henry Rollins

from his column in The LA Weekly

Just days ago, I was in Belgium and England. At this point, I have no idea how many trips I have made to either country or to the rest of what is called Europe.

For me, Europe is very much like Africa: It is many countries and cultures as well as something that can sometimes be considered as an entity larger than itself. What I mean is, when something is termed "European," it isn't being described as being of any one country but in more collective sense. When we use such a term, we are often trying to get at a far bigger idea for the sake of conversational expediency. We're putting an infinitely large concept into a context so small, it can be immediately vague and unintentionally disingenuous.

I went to European countries as a child with my mother. My memories are of interesting accents, a sense of antiquity, the vastness of time and museums.

When I started touring with a band, Europe became more than just a list of countries you could perform in as you did states in America.

For decades, Europe has been a haven for artists and musicians. It was where Charlie Parker could go and eat in the same restaurant as any member of his audience, something that wasn't always possible in his native state of Kansas or what should have been his native land, America.

Having racial epithets hurled at you and being treated as a subclass of human might not stoke the furnace of your patriotism. It's no wonder Europe became a welcoming place for so many great American artists, from Lightnin' Hopkins to Henry Miller, whose work for years was banned in the land of the First Amendment, while he was hailed as a literary hero in Europe.

f you are in an alternative band, if you make noise that is rarely heard on the radio, if you are in any way strange or "arty," there is a good chance that many people will find value in your output if you take it to Europe.

In 1988, I took the legendary writer Hubert Selby Jr. to Europe as my opener, for a series of speaking dates. It was amazing to watch his mind get blown on an almost daily basis. Preshow, while I was at the venue, Selby often was being whisked around town for radio and television appearances. People hugged him on the street and brought hardcover editions of his books in translation, to be signed after his appearances. When we would do the shows, after his performance, many people would leave. He was the one they came to see. I don't think he had ever experienced anything like it.

To watch him be so appreciated and respected, as the truly great writer he was, was one of the most inspirational things I have ever witnessed. It moved him to tears more than once. I can't thank Europe enough for that.

I will never be able to repay Europe, the geographical place or the concept, for the decades of kindness, respect and generosity it has heaped upon me. There were, on the first few tours, some rough experiences — that's life — but the far larger experience has been amazing and hugely impactful.

I love the countries of Europe. Love them. They are a part of my life. It's great to be somewhat familiar with so many streets in so many European cities, from Belgium to Portugal. It is like having a home as big as the world. It is something that those who do not travel will simply never know and never be served so well by. Travel makes you a better person.

Although the areas that comprise Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and continental Europe are pretty spread out on the map, I think that, to a certain degree, they all share a connection that is as deep as it gets. World War II has united every European country, even neutral Switzerland, through blood, sadness and incalculable loss, in ways that are still detectable decades later.

The destruction leveled upon these countries — what they have had to recover from and what they have done in order to prevent anything like it from happening again — is as much part of the European identity as anything else.

I think this is why Europe places such emphasis on the arts. It is a safeguard against ignorance and the more obscene acts perpetrated by humankind. And I think international sporting events keep the conversations between European countries continuous and healthy.

The people of every country in Europe understand that almost everything can be lost, and that war takes several generations to fully recover from. Humanity should not have to be so resilient, but what we sometimes do to one another really leaves us no other choice, which is one of the things that makes our species so amazing.

This is why the recent attacks in Paris are more than horrific headlines from an incredible city. It is a stab in the collective heart of Europe, and the world.

Cornel West: The Fire of a New Generation

from The Opinion pages of the New York Times

By George Yancy and Cornel West

This is the 15th in a series of interviews on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s discussion is with Cornel West, one of the most prominent and provocative intellectuals in public life. He is a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including “Black Prophetic Fire” and “The Radical King.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: Recently, on Aug. 10, you were arrested along with others outside the courthouse in St. Louis because of the collective resistance against continued racial injustice and police brutality. What was the political atmosphere like there?

Cornel West: The black prophetic fire among the younger generation in Ferguson was intense and wonderful. Ferguson is ground zero for the struggle against police brutality and police murder. I just wanted to be a small part of that collective fight back that puts one’s body on the line. It was beautiful because part of the crowd was chanting, “This is what democracy looks like,” which echoes W.E.B. DuBois and the older generation’s critique of capitalist civilization and imperialist power. And you also had people chanting, “We gon’ be alright,” which is from rap artist Kendrick Lamar, who is concerned with the black body, decrepit schools, indecent housing. This chant is in many ways emerging as a kind of anthem of the movement for the younger generation. So, we had both the old school and the new school and I try to be a kind of link between these two schools. There was a polyphonic, antiphonal, call and response, all the way down and all the way live.

G.Y.: One of your newest books is entitled “Black Prophetic Fire.” Define what you mean by “black prophetic fire.”

C.W.: Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.

I think in many ways we have to begin with the younger generation, the generation of Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and Oakland. There is not just a rekindling, but a re-invigoration taking place among the younger generation that enacts and enables prophetic fire. We’ve been in an ice age. If you go from the 1960s and 1970s — that’s my generation. But there was also an ice age called the neoliberal epoch, an ice age where it was no longer a beautiful thing to be on fire. It was a beautiful thing to have money. It was a beautiful thing to have status. It was a beautiful thing to have public reputation without a whole lot of commitment to social justice, whereas the younger generation is now catching the fire of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s.

G.Y.: When I think of black prophetic fire, I think of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin L. King, James Baldwin and so many more. In recent weeks, some have favorably compared the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to Baldwin. I know that you publicly criticized this comparison. What was the nature of your critique?

C.W.: In a phone conversation I had with Brother Coates not long ago, I told him that the black prophetic tradition is the collective fightback of sustained compassion in the face of sustained catastrophe. It has the highest standards of excellence, and we all fall short. So a passionate defense of Baldwin — or John Coltrane or Toni Morrison — is crucial in this age of Ferguson.

G.Y.: In what ways do you think the concept of black prophetic fire speaks to — or ought to speak to — events like the tragic murder of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.?



C.W.: Charleston is part and parcel of the ugly manifestation of the vicious legacy of white supremacy, and the younger generation — who have been wrestling with arbitrary police power, arbitrary corporate power, gentrification, the land-grabbing, the power-grabbing in and of the black community, and arbitrary cultural power in terms of white supremacist stereotypes promoted on television, radio and so forth — has become what I call the “marvelous new militancy,” and they embody this prophetic fire. The beautiful thing is that this “marvelous new militancy” is true for vanilla brothers and sisters, it’s true for all colors in the younger generation, though it is disproportionately black, disproportionately women and, significantly, disproportionately black, queer women.

G.Y.: Why the metaphor of “fire”?

C.W.: That’s just my tradition, brother. Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall. So, you straighten your back up, you take your stand, you speak your truth, you bear your witness and, most important, you are willing to live and die. Fire is very much about fruits as opposed to foliage. The ice age was all about foliage: “Look at me, look at me.” It was the peacock syndrome. Fire is about fruits, which is biblical, but also Marxist. It’s about praxis and what kind of life you live, what kind of costs you’re willing to bear, what kind of price you’re willing to pay, what kind of death you’re willing to embrace.

That was a great insight that Marcus Garvey had. Remember, Garvey often began his rallies with a black man or woman carrying a sign that read, “The Negro is not afraid.” Once you break the back of fear, you’re on fire. You need that fire. Even if that Negro carrying that sign is still shaking, the way that the lyrical genius Kanye West was shaking when he talked about George W. Bush not caring about black people, you’re still trying to overcome that fear, work through that fear.

The problem is that during the neoliberal epoch and during the ice age you’ve got the process of “niggerization,” which is designed to keep black people afraid. Keep them scared. Keep them intimidated. Keep them bowing and scraping. And Malcolm X understood this better than anybody, other than Ida B. Wells — they represented two of the highest moments of black prophetic fire in the 20th century. Ida, with a bounty on her head, was still full of fire. And Malcolm, we don’t even have a language for his fire.

G.Y.: Does this process of “niggerization” in American culture partly involve white supremacist myths being internalized by black people?

C.W.: Yes. When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case. And, of course, in late capitalist culture, the culture of superficial spectacle, driven by capital, driven by money, driven by the market, it’s all about image and interest, anyway. In other words, principle drops out. Any conception of being a person of integrity is laughed at because what is central is image, what is central is interest. And, of course, interest is tied to money, and image is tied to the peacock projection, of what you appear to be.

G.Y.: Can we assume then that you then would emphasize a form of education that would critique a certain kind of hyperrealism that is obsessed with images and nonmarket values?

C.W.: That’s right; absolutely. It’s the kind of thing that my dear brother Henry Giroux talks about with such insight. He’s written many books providing such a powerful critique of neoliberal market models of education. Stanley Aronowitz, of course, goes right along with Giroux’s critique in that regard. The notion has to do precisely with that critical consciousness that the great Paulo Freire talks about, or the great Myles Horton talked about, or the great bell hooks talks about in her works. How do you generate that kind of courageous critical consciousness that cuts against the grain and that discloses the operations of market interests and images, capitalist forms of wealth inequality, massive surveillance, imperial policies, drones dropping bombs on innocent people, ecological catastrophe and escalating nuclear catastrophe?

All of these various issues are very much tied into a kind of market model of education that reinforces the capitalist civilization, one that is more and more obsessed with just interest and image.

G.Y.: What do you see as the foremost challenge in creating a common cause between past generation and the current generation now “catching fire,” as you put it?

C.W.: For me, it is the dialectical interplay between the old school and prophetic thought and action. I’m an old Coltrane disciple just like I’m a Christian. You can be full of fire, but that fire has to be lit by a deep love of the people. And if that love is not in it, then the fire actually becomes just a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal that doesn’t get at the real moral substance and spiritual content that keeps anybody going, but especially people who have been hated for so long and in so many ways, as black people have.

For me, the love ethic is at the very center of it. It can be the love ethic of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane or Curtis Mayfield, but it has to have that central focus on loving the people. And when you love people, you hate the fact that they’re being treated unfairly. You tell the truth. You sacrifice your popularity for integrity. There is a willingness to give your life back to the people given that, in the end, they basically gave it to you, because we are who we are because somebody loved us anyway.

G.Y.: This idea relates to the collection of Dr. King’s writings you edited, called “The Radical King.” Why did you undertake the job of curating and editing the book?

C.W.: Because Martin had been so sanitized and sterilized. He has been so Santa Claus-ified, turned into an old man with a smile, toys in his bag to give out, and leaving everybody feeling so good. It was like we were living in Disneyland rather than in the nightmare that the present-day America is for so many poor working people, especially poor black working people. So, we needed a kind of crystallization.

But there has been a variety of different voices talking about the radical King. You know my closest friend in the world, James Melvin Washington, was the only person that the King family allowed to bring the collection of sermons and writings together. It’s one of the greatest honors for me to be the second person that the King family allowed to bring those kinds of writings together across the board, laying out a framework. You’ve got James Melvin Washington’s “A Testament of Hope.” You’ve got other wonderful scholars like James Cone, Lewis Baldwin and others who have done magnificent work in their own way. But, you know, as I pass off the stage of space and time, I want to be able to leave these love letters to the younger generation. I want to tell them that they’re part of a great tradition, a grand tradition of struggle, critical, intellectual struggle, of moral and political struggle, and a spiritual struggle in music and the arts, and so on.

Contrary to when people talk about King every January, there is in “The Radical King” in fact a particular understanding of this moral titan, spiritual giant and great crusader for justice. So you get a sense of who he really was beyond all of the sanitizing and sterilizing that are trotted out every year in celebration of him. I consider it the most important book I’ve ever done.

G.Y.: King is well known for quoting the American reformer and abolitionist Theodore Parker’s words, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What’s your assessment of King’s claim now, in 2015, particularly in the light of the kind of existential plight and angst that black people and poor people are experiencing? Is there an arc of the moral universe?

C.W.: I think King had a very thick metaphysics when it came to history being the canvas upon which God was in full control. As you know, I don’t have such a thick metaphysics. I am closer to Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett and a bluesman. I think that King at the end of his life became more of a bluesman. He began to think: “Lord, have mercy. That arc might be bending, but it sure is bending the wrong way.” After all, he’s dealing with white supremacist backlash, patriarchal backlash and capitalist backlash against working people and the possibility of ecological catastrophe. He was already wrestling with the possible non-existence of life on the earth in terms of the nuclear catastrophe that we were on the brink of. So, he made a leap of faith grounded in a certain conception of history that was heading toward justice. I don’t accept that. I just do it because it’s right. I do it because integrity, honesty and decency are in and of themselves enough reward that I’d rather go under, trying to do what’s right, even if it has no chance at all.

G.Y.: I was thinking about your existentialist sensibilities that would in fact be critical of the claim that the universe is moral at all. Yet, both you and King share a blues sensibility that places emphasis on touching the pain and yet transcending the pain, and also the importance of the Christian good news.

C.W.: Oh, absolutely, we are both very similar in terms of never allowing hatred to have the last word, not allowing despair to have the last word, telling the truth about structures of domination of various sorts, keeping track of the variety of forms of oppression so we don’t become ghettoized and tied to just one single issue. Yet, at the same time, we’re trying to sustain hope by being a hope. Hope is not simply something that you have; hope is something that you are. So, when Curtis Mayfield says “keep on pushing,” that’s not an abstract conception about optimism in the world. That is an imperative to be a hope for others in the way Christians in the past used to be a blessing — not the idea of praying for a blessings, but being a blessing.

John Coltrane says be a force for good. Don’t just talk about forces for good, be a force. So it’s an ontological state. So, in the end, all we have is who we are. If you end up being cowardly, then you end up losing the best of your world, or your society, or your community, or yourself. If you’re courageous, you protect, try and preserve the best of it. Now, you might preserve the best, and still not be good enough to triumph over evil. Hey, that’s the way it is. You did the best you could do. T.S. Eliot says, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” T.S. Eliot was a right-wing brother who was full of wisdom. All you can do is to try; keep on pushing. That’s all you can do.

G.Y.: When it comes to race in America in 2015, what is to be done?

C.W.: Well, the first thing, of course, is you’ve got to shatter denial, avoidance and evasion. That’s part of my criticism of the president. For seven years, he just hasn’t or refused to hit it head-on. It looks like he’s now beginning to find his voice. But in finding his voice, it’s either too late or he’s lost his moral authority. He can’t drop drones on hundreds of innocent children and then talk about how upset he is when innocent people are killed. You can’t reshape the world in the image of corporate interest and image with Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and then say that you’re in deep solidarity with working people and poor people. You can’t engage in massive surveillance, keeping track of phone calls across the board, targeting Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and others, and then turn right back around and say you’re against secrecy, you’re against clandestine policy.

So that, unfortunately, if he had come right in and asserted his moral authority over against Fox News, over against right-wing, conservative folk who were coming at him — even if he lost — he would have let the world know what his deep moral convictions are. But he came in as a Machiavellian. He came in with political calculation. That’s why he brought in Machiavellians like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, and others. So, it was clear it was going to be political calculation, not moral conviction.

How can anyone take your word seriously after seven years about how we need to put a spotlight on racism when, for seven years, you’ve been engaged in political calculation about racism? But then you send out your lieutenants. You send out all your Obama cheerleaders and bootlickers and they say to his critics that he is president of all of America, not black America. And we say white supremacy is a matter of truth. Are you interested in truth? It’s a matter of justice. Are you interested in justice? It’s a matter of national security. Are you interested in national security? Well, we talk about black America. We’re not talking about some ghettoized group that’s just an interest group that you have to engage in political calculation about. When you talk about black people, you’re talking about wrestling with lies and injustice coming at them and their quest for truth and justice. If you’re not interested in truth and justice, no politician ought to be in office, and not just the president. So, we’ve actually had a major setback in seven years; a lost opportunity.

G.Y.: But is it really possible to speak courageous speech while acting as the most powerful country in the world? Of course, we also have to admit the history of racism preceded Obama’s tenure and will exceed it. My point is that there is a deep tension that exists for someone who desires to embody prophetic fire and yet be in charge of an empire.

C.W.: I think that’s true for most politicians, actually. Now when it comes to the intellectuals who rationalize their deference to the politician, so they want to pose as prophetic even though they are very much deferential to the powers that be, they need to be criticized in a very intense way. That’s why I’m very hard on the Obama cheerleaders, you see, but when it comes to the politicians themselves, it is very difficult to be a prophetic politician the way in which Harold Washington was or the way Paul Wellstone was or the way Shirley Chisholm was, or the way my dear brother Bernie Sanders actually is. He is a prophetic politician. He speaks the truth about wealth and equality. He speaks the truth about Wall Street. He speaks the truth about working and poor people being afterthoughts in terms of the kind of calculations of the oligarchs of our day. He shows that it’s possible to be a politician who speaks the truth.

Once you occupy the White House, you are head of the empire. Then you have a choice. We’ve had two grand candidates in the history of the United States. We’ve had Abraham Lincoln and we’ve had Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them are full of flaws, full of faults, full of many, many blind spots. But they pushed the American experiment in a progressive way, even given their faults. And that’s what we thought Obama was going to do. We were looking for Lincoln, and we got another Clinton, and that is in no way satisfying.

That’s what I mean by, we were looking for a Coltrane and we ended up getting a Kenny G. You can’t help but be profoundly disappointed. But also ready for more fightback in post-Obama America!

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth and others) can be found HERE.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.

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The Great American Class War: Plutocracy Versus Democracy

By Bill Moyers

Crossposted from TomDispatch via Michael Moore

I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and -- in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular -- the defense of a free press.

Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”

Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.”

That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration. How I wish he were here now -- and still on the Court!

My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution. Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967. It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath. Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom.

I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him. Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision. The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.” Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him. Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.”

Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known -- the Framers knew -- that liberty is a fragile thing. You can’t give up.” And he didn’t.

The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.

We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,

“So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics... When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

Class Prerogatives

Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.

Ten years ago the Economist magazine -- no friend of Marxism -- warned: “The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.” And as a recent headline in the Columbia Journalism Review put it: “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.”

We are this close -- this close! -- to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.

When Justice Brennan and I talked privately in his chambers before that interview almost 20 years ago, I asked him how he had come to his liberal sentiments. “It was my neighborhood,” he said. Born to Irish immigrants in 1906, as the harsh indignities of the Gilded Age brought hardship and deprivation to his kinfolk and neighbors, he saw “all kinds of suffering -- people had to struggle.” He never forgot those people or their struggles, and he believed it to be our collective responsibility to create a country where they would have a fair chance to a decent life. “If you doubt it,” he said, “read the Preamble [to the Constitution].”

He then asked me how I had come to my philosophy about government (knowing that I had been in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). I don’t remember my exact words, but I reminded him that I had been born in the midst of the Great Depression to parents, one of whom had to drop out of school in the fourth grade, the other in the eighth, because they were needed in the fields to pick cotton to help support their families.

Franklin Roosevelt, I recalled, had been president during the first 11 years of my life. My father had listened to his radio “fireside chats” as if they were gospel; my brother went to college on the G.I. Bill; and I had been the beneficiary of public schools, public libraries, public parks, public roads, and two public universities. How could I not think that what had been so good for me would be good for others, too?

That was the essence of what I told Justice Brennan. Now, I wish that I could talk to him again, because I failed to mention perhaps the most important lesson about democracy I ever learned.

On my 16th birthday in 1950, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a racially divided town -- about 20,000 people, half of them white, half of them black -- a place where you could grow up well-loved, well-taught, and well-churched, and still be unaware of the lives of others merely blocks away. It was nonetheless a good place to be a cub reporter: small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something new every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old-timers in the newsroom were on vacation or out sick, and I got assigned to report on what came to be known as the “Housewives’ Rebellion.” Fifteen women in town (all white) decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers (all black).

They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that -- here’s my favorite part -- “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer -- none other than Martin Dies, Jr., the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the witch-hunting days of the 1930s and 1940s. They went to court -- and lost. Social Security was constitutional, after all. They held their noses and paid the tax.

The stories I helped report were picked up by the Associated Press and circulated nationwide. One day, the managing editor, Spencer Jones, called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing the reporters on our paper for the reporting we had done on the “rebellion.” I spotted my name and was hooked. In one way or another, after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government, I’ve been covering the class war ever since.

Those women in Marshall, Texas, were among its advance guard. Not bad people, they were regulars at church, their children were my classmates, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all, so it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary defiance. It came to me one day, much later: they simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives.

Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations -- fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves. The black women who washed and ironed their laundry, cooked their families’ meals, cleaned their bathrooms, wiped their children’s bottoms, and made their husbands’ beds, these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show for their years of labor but the creases on their brows and the knots on their knuckles. There would be nothing for them to live on but the modest return on their toil secured by the collaborative guarantee of a safety net.

The Unfinished Work of America

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize “the people.” You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said:

“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses... Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”

And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.” That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.

-----------------

Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism. He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism. He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy. This is his first TomDispatch piece.

Marshall McLuhan on the dangers of television and the rise of the one-liner

from DangerousMinds

Marshall McLuhan explaining how the “one-liner” is symptomatic of the shortened attention-span of children. It’s all to do with television, which McLuhan claims, has a negative effect on the nervous system.

MELT THE GUNS

Here's a cool post from my friend Alex's blog Flaming Plablum:

I don’t generally delve too deeply into “current events” here, but speaking as the father of two elementary schoolchildren, today’s events in Connecticut (to say nothing of Wednesday’s events in Oregon) have left me – much like everyone else – deeply demoralized.

As many others have said far more eloquently, I think it’s the PERFECT time to escalate the debate on gun control. Back in August, I suggested that I wasn’t going to wade into the Second Amendment debate, as it was "far too complicated to get into here,” but fuck that. Stop waving that around like it’s a magic golden Wonka ticket – that was written for people who were afraid of being ATTACKED BY MUSKET-WIELDING REDCOATS! It shouldn’t mean that any bozo can go out and buy an automatic assault weapon. These are toys you simply don’t need.

And to the people who suggest that today’s events transpired because “we removed God from schools” – I’m talking about shitheads like Mike Huckabee and Ryan Fischer – Go fuck yourselves. You sicken me.

XTC sang it best…

Right On Alex!

Chris Rock on Tea Party Racism

In the March issue of Esquire magazine, Chris Rock is interviewed by Scott Raab and manages to put a hopeful spin on the Tea party movement:

“Like many nice Caucasians, I cried the night Barack Obama was elected,” said Raab. “It was one of the high points in American history. And all that’s happened since the election is just a sh—storm of hatred. You want to weigh in on that?”

“I actually like it, in the sense that—you got kids?” asked Rock. “Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last—this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them—and the next thing you know, they’re f—-ing knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.”

A sage perspective, indeed.

Thanks, DangerousMinds

Old people give most honest advice (also, harshest)

Seems like i may have gotten this a bit early in life...

from BoingBoing

Apparently, as your ability to control impulses declines with age, so does your ability to smooth over other people's feelings via white lies and omissions. The upside to this: Advice from old people is more likely to be honest ... if a little on the painful side.

Scientific American reports on a recent study that's supposed to show how dwindling executive function can simultaneously impair your social graces and improve your Dear Abby skills.

Researchers recruited 19 undergrads and 32 adults in their 60s and 70s. They split the older adults into two groups, based on the adults' abilities to control their behaviors and impulses--called executive function, which naturally declines with age. Then the researchers showed all three groups a photo of a visibly obese teen, along with a list of her complaints, like trouble sleeping and lack of energy--symptoms associated with childhood obesity.

What advice could they offer this girl? Well, only half of the higher functioning adults and a third of the college kids brought up the girl's weight as the possible source for her problems. But 80 percent of the adults with cognitive declines mentioned weight. They also gave twice as many helpful tips, like more exercise, a better diet, and delivered them with more empathy.

Sadly, I'm not sure we can declare this an unequivocal win for cognitive decline. After all, "honesty" is a relative thing, dependent on your own beliefs. The same process that might prompt your Grandma to offer useful and empathetic weight-loss advice is probably also the driving force behind somebody else's Grandma's tendency to yell racist epithets at the mailman.

Both old ladies are telling you what they really think—which seems to be what this study is actually about. But being willing to tell people what you really think doesn't necessarily equal good advice.

Image: Some rights reserved by Sukanto Debnath