Mom,

I am just glad we can talk to you about these things and I hope that we are all able to become more knowledgeable on the many subjects we have to in order to be informed citizens. Just so you know, as an additional Mother's Day gift, Jill and I made a contribution to the investigative fund of a good alternative publication that looks into a variety of progressive causes. They definitely have an agenda, but their investigative reporting is top notch. You will soon be receiving bi-monthly issues of their magazine, Mother Jones. If you are interested in checking out one of their recent stories, you can look at the recent set of cover stories on the way that Exxon-Mobil and other oil companies have helped to fund a large contingent of think tanks, public policy groups, PR people and even faux media outlets in an attempt to counter any and all claims that global warming exists.

Here is the full spread, with 4 or 5 stories
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/world_burns.html

and here is the main story
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html

It is a lot to absorb and should still be read critically, but the linkages they uncover--and blatent statements by these groups that they intend to spread falsehood in order to meet their public relations goals--make for a sick picture of corporate greed at its worst. Virtually every other country in the world--and all the other industrialized "civilized" nations (now even the Russians!) have seen that this is an important issue for the future of the planet. The US claims that changing anything will be bad for business.

But if our government had made this a priority ten years ago, like the Japanese, then we wouldn't be begging the Japanese to make more Hybrid cars this year and Ford and GM wouldn't have their stocks rated as "Junk bonds." The fact of the matter is that, by trying to distort the science in their favor, Exxon-Mobil have actually hurt the long term viability of US industry by trying to keep things as they are. While the president talks about the need to fund clean coal and we worry about how to protect the new oil pipeline flowing out of the Caspian, Japan has sponsored initiatives that have inspired Kyocera to make shingles out of solar panels so that it becomes possible to run much of a house's energy off of solar power. The Japanese government predicts that by 2030, they will be able to get 50%(!!!) of their country's power needs from solar energy.

As you know from walking in the Texas sun, you live in one of the biggest solar markets in the world (where you get direct sunlight almost year round.) But because of powerful interests in our country, there have been no initiatives to spur this kind of innovation. In five or ten years when the American people decide it is worth doing, it is Japanese corporations--and a few California firms--that will reap the rewards. But even this won't happen until we get the energy corporations that have benefited from deregulation over the past decade to loosen their grip on the mind of the government--and of consumers who think the only way they can power their homes is by buying energy from corporations like Enron.

A movement has been brewing for more than a decade to make it more reasonable for US homeowners and businesses to build energy supply like wind, biomass or solar into their structures. It is meant to overcome one of the persistent problems with these forms of renewable energy: they aren't always consistently available and when they are, sometimes they generate much more energy than you can possibly use. So, in addition to certain tax breaks for, say, powering your home with solar panels, many states are now requiring energy companies to offer you "net metering" or "net billing."

(link here: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy/page.cfm?pageID=104 )

Basically, it works like this. When you have your own power source hooked up to your house and you are hooked up to the power grid, if you produce more power than you need, you are actually putting energy back onto the grid for other people to use: in these cases, your electricity meter actually turns backwards. A net metering agreement with your energy company, depending on how it is set up, would allow consumers to only pay for the energy they pull off of the grid and to get credit for the energy they put back onto it. About 30 states have agreements that make this possible (as I understand it), but energy companies often fight it tooth and nail in state legislatures (whose representatives they often make donations) and courts when consumers and businesses try to do it--and very few people know about it at all.

When people think about solar power they ask where we could possibly put all the panels we'd need to supply energy for entire cities. They imagine that we would need enormous solar farms like they have in Germany. But this is because they--and our political leaders--imagine that the only way to make energy is to have it supplied by a large corporation or centralized facility. But if you imagine instead of a centralized energy field, solar panels on every roof in Texas, it becomes a little easier to imagine how it might happen. This is just the kind of issues that, if the president had any political will to actually work on solving the energy problem, if it was something that companies with a stake in the status quo didn't try to dominate, then we would be able to use all of our creative resources and just might figure out a way to have energy without relying on centralized plants--whether public or private--running on fossil fuels or nuclear power except in extreme circumstances. Of course I could be loony or clueless, but it is something that just might work. I would have to defer to the scientists and engineers in the family who have far more knowledge on such matters.

anyway, off to bed. I was supposed to be grading student speeches. I guess that will have to wait.

I love you and hope that you're all doing well.

best,

-s

On intellegent design and the scientific field

Article in the New Yorker addresses something that the scientific community cannot: the scientific claims of intelligent design. In a quote that could have been lifted out of Bourdieu's essay on the scientific field, H. ALLEN ORR notes that addressing the claims of ID are actually an act of consecration that most [actual] scientists would rather not perform.

If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scientists take seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-design movement on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires: recognition that its claims are legitimate scientific ones.

The article looks at two of the main theorists who have challenged the theory of evolution and it seems that the main challenge is that it seems implausible on some level that these things have evolved in the way that they have in some "natural" manner. The main focus is on the questions of cellular structures which are so complex that it doesn't seem possible that they evolved. It is quite a leap in logic to say that because something seems implausible the only possible explanation is that they were created by an intelligent individual. On some level, the problem from my perspective is that there is a belief in God being some uber-human sitting on a cloud somewhere, thinking things up and coordinating the movements of 6 billion humans and trillions and trillions of other life forms. A more dispersed notion of god--as an energy that flows through the universe that we channel in some way--as touchy feely and utterly unacceptable to a judeo-christian tradition of monotheism would be much more able to explain the intricacies of development and the possibility of there being some sort of intention or goal in the design of organisms. This is an idea which I never feel comfortable considering and realize the ways that it is very likely a partial result of the intellectual current I am swimming in and, possibly, the result of the current state of capitalist social relations, a point recently made by Zizek

But I also have seen some of these ideas reference to Feurerbach's Essence of Christianity. The latter, according to Robert Tucker was a key influence for Marx in that he helped to make Hegel's philosophy of history viable again. Here I will quote at length from Tucker's description of F's innovation:

Briefly, Marx created his theory of history as a conscious act of translation of Hegel's theory into what he, Marx, took to be its valid or scientific form. In this he followed the procedure of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity (1841), who had argued that Hegel's philosophy could reveal scienticif truth if subjected to "transformational criticism." This consisted in the inverting of its principle presuppositions, meaning that one transposed subject and predicate in them. For Hegel man is spirit (or God) in the process of self-alienation and self-realization, i.e. man presents himself in history as self alienated God. The truth, says Feuerbach, is just the reverse. Instead of seing man as self-alienating God, we must see God as self alienated man. That is [and here's the key section that I find stimulating] when man, the human species, projects an idealized image of itself into heaven as "God" and worships this imaginary heavenly being, it becomes estranged from itself; its own ungodly earthly reality becomes alien and hateful. To overcome this alienation man must repossess his alienated being, take "God" back into himself, recognize in man--and specifically in other human individuals--the proper object of care, love and worship.--Marx Engels Reader, 2nd ed., Norton, xxii-xxiii.

This idea of god being something that works through people or through nature is a longstanding pagan belief, but it is also pivotal to what I understand to be the fundamental of Gnostic Christianity. The ideas of that tradition, which are, arguably, coeval with the dominant Christian traditions today and possibly even connected to buddhism and what we now call hinduism, are very much about overcoming this self-alienation and preventing this division, projection and idealization of god by seeking knowledge of the self and the world; as Pagels summarizes, "According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were... whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth. Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis."

Though maybe I am weaving too many disparate threads here together, it seems that there is a way that this connects with a tradition of study and theory of the way that spiritual forces are distributed throughout "creation." This understanding of god is, again according to Tucker, central to Marx's theory of civil society as being the source of the production of value. [ Rosenberg says this creation is contingent on the development of a separate political realm of the sovereign state, i.e they are mutually constitutive rather than cause and effect and by separating civil society from the possible realm of politics (even, as Polanyi points out, if the constitution of that divide was also, in part, a political act enacted by people who believed in the existence of the divide)]. Tucker says that Marx "inverted the Hegelian proposition on the relation between the state and "civil society" (bürgerliche Gesellschaft, by which Hegel meant the realm of private economic endeavor). Civil society was not an outgrowth of the state, as in Hegel's view; rather, the state was an outgrowth of civil society. The primary sphere of man's being was not his life as a citizen of the state but rather his economic life in civil society." (Ibid, xxiv)

There is a lot to unpack here--and I am certain contradictions abound above, but all of this is to say that it doesn't make much philosophical sense to join a libertarian philosophy of human relations with fundamentalist Christianity. In some ways, I am a bit shocked that adherents of free market capitalism can adhere to these notions of God as they do. The author of this article on ID often makes analogies to other forms of human social formation and techological creation and one such discussion seems ripe for comparison to both Hayek and Marx:

It’s true that when you confront biologists with a particular complex structure like the flagellum they sometimes have a hard time saying which part appeared before which other parts. But then it can be hard, with any complex historical process, to reconstruct the exact order in which events occurred, especially when, as in evolution, the addition of new parts encourages the modification of old ones. When you’re looking at a bustling urban street, for example, you probably can’t tell which shop went into business first. This is partly because many businesses now depend on each other and partly because new shops trigger changes in old ones (the new sushi place draws twenty-somethings who demand wireless Internet at the café next door). But it would be a little rash to conclude that all the shops must have begun business on the same day or that some Unseen Urban Planner had carefully determined just which business went where.

What I find interesting is that both Hayek and Marx would probably agree with the historical narrative of how this city developed and the only difference would be that Hayek would say that there was no need for a state at all and the city would develop on its own without any intervention and based solely on the mechanism of the market, Marx, in my crude understanding of both, would probably agree if only one could dispense with political power in general and the presence of classes who would insist on the alienation of some others.

[would be interesting to consider the problem of use-value production in both cases and the emergence of vapid strip malls in place of a vibrant urban setting with something more than commerce in mind.]

Either way, it is entirely contradictory to claim that human society, with it's complex rules, mores, inventions, practices, etc. is possibly the outcome of a simple interplay of natural motivations which balance each other out and lead to the "survival of the fittest" while simultaneously claiming that in nature this idea seems so unplausible that it can only be explained by introducing a single intelligent planner.

If I do get a chance to elaborate on this, I would point out the way that Darwinism, according to Hielbroner, as an idea, both fed into and on the economic philosophies of the nineteenth century, leading eventually to the social darwinism that helped to justify all sorts of economic and political injustice and, in many ways, still informs the mainstream belief in the fundamental character of the market--what's best and most worthy, rises to the top. Yet the people who advocate most strongly for the market as a mechanism in this country are also those who seem most adamently opposed to the idea of Darwinism in explaining natural development. The opposite, or vice versa, of course, is true of some unreflexive leftists. But all of this is to be saved for another time. I have class to teach tomorrow.

Danny Glover pulls out of Haiti visit citing concerns over legitimacy of currently installed government as well as human rights concerns. I was really surprised to hear him speak passionately about the trip he was making and the work he was doing to make this cruise happen when I heard him on the local NPR station last mont. But I am equally, if not more impressed to see him take such a principled stance. When I heard he was pulling out I thought it would be for some bullshit celebrity reason. But this is pretty reasonable and must have been a big deal for him and his group to make this decision. On the other hand, it was the right thing to do and really adds to their cause even more than actually carrying through with the cruise. He manages to give a short history of the Haitian revolution and makes an interesting correlation that can't be completely without merit--it even sounds completely reasonable, even if it is not something that the US would ever accept as history proper:

The defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte's army, and the French failure to regain control over San Domingue, as Haiti was then known, contributed to the end of French colonial ambitions in the western hemisphere. In 1803 France sold its North American province of Louisiana , a region of more than 800,000 square miles west of the Mississippi River, to the United States .

ShopNetDaily.com - A WorldNetDaily Exclusive!: "God has brought hundreds of people back from the dead, mostly in the last 15 years. These are not near-death experiences, but real resurrections of actual corpses. "

eeek. WTF. This has to be some wierd "Virgen de Guadelupe" kind of thinking. ANd this guy is celebrating it as a positive development! I hope there is intelligent life on other planets because someone will need to piece together the history of our decimation at the hands of fundamentalists of all kinds.

Other articles...

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?p=1

Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand
May 2005

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

...

This one quite disturbing. Perhaps the best reason to stay away from Diamonds yet. would be great to start a campaign about the effect they have on these women. They may last forever, but they certainly aren't a girl's best friend.

http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2005/congo.asp
“Not Women Anymore…”
The Congo’s rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS

Ms. Magazine
by Stephanie Nolen

British Intelligence Warned Blair of War: "British Intelligence Warned Blair of War
Prime Minister Was Told of White House's Resolve to Use Military Against Hussein
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 13, 2005; Page A18
Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was 'being fixed around the policy,' according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street."

The Onion | What Do You Think?: "'If we outlawed everything some people find offensive, there wouldn't even be a Texas in the first place.'"

It seems that Texas is trying very hard to look like some sort of fundamentalist paradise. If things don't change, it certainly won't be worth going back to.

Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of �mistaken identity� - Sunday Times - Times Online: "THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as �a critical victory in the war on terror�. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists� third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as �among the flotsam and jetsam� of the organisation. "

oops. I'm sure the major networks will print a retraction soon.