The Weird Times

Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space

The Weird Times: Issue 22, October 11, 2020

“The stars are a memory system

For thru them

                               We remember our origin”

--Diane DiPrima. From her new book, The Poetry Deal, City Lights Press.

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“It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power” –Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1980 edition)

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In the category of “if it wasn’t so dangerous it would be funny” this story:

As Trump hails Regeneron treatment, his administration tries to block the science it used. Maggie Fox, CNN, Oct 8, 2020

“President Donald Trump has been celebrating the dose of experimental monoclonal antibodies he was given last Friday, saying he thinks it helped him vanquish his coronavirus infection in record time. "It was incredible the impact it had," he said in a video he tweeted Thursday.

What he didn't say is that the treatment was developed using technology his administration has worked for four years to ban. It has to do with abortion politics, and the science of using human tissue to test and to make medicines. Regeneron's therapy indirectly relied on tissue taken from an abortion.”

Of course Republicans and evangelicals who have opposed abortion, fetal cell tissue research and anything else to do with stem cells have not said a word. Most of us have known for years that “pro-life” was just a slogan and never an actual principle of moral thinking.

Word of the week, the year, the century: HYPOCRISY.

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“Has anyone tried unplugging” --Joey deVilla

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We can fix this. Voting matters. It is our first and best line of defense against the impending authoritarian regime.

Getting people to vote in the swing states matters most. Send this link to everyone you know who lives in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, Florida and Georgia. VOTE! Listen to the Brooklyn Grace Chorale for inspiration and joy.

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Scientists Say They’ve Determined the Total Amount of Matter in the Universe, Michelle Starr, Science Alert, September 29, 2020.

According to their calculations, normal matter and dark matter combined make up 31.5 percent of the matter-energy density of the Universe. The remaining 68.5 percent is dark energy.

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We can harness capitalism itself to end capitalist exploitation of the remaining wilderness places on the earth.

RBC Becomes the First Major Canadian Bank to Refuse to Fund Oil Drilling in the Arctic Refuge.

Julien Gignac, The Narwhal, Oct 2, 2020.

“Due to its particular ecological and social significance and vulnerability, RBC will not provide direct financing for any project or transaction that involves exploration or development in the ANWR,” reads RBC’s updated policy guidelines for sensitive sectors and activities posted.

Celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, October 12, 2020

For generations, American history has tended to focus on the “View from the Boat”- the perspective of those who have arrived in the past 450 years. More recently, museums, historians, books and movies have begun to promote the “View from the Shore”- the perspective of the Native inhabitants who were already here, and their descendants who still survive throughout the Americas.

“As our nation struggles with ideas of racial justice, it is important that we continue to be truthful about our history. It’s time to own up to the past and acknowledge the Native American narrative of the creation of the United States and the colonization of the Western Hemisphere.

That is why we hope you will join us in encouraging your community to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day.” -- National Museum of the American Indian

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Our American Mussolini on the balcony of the White House.

Trump appears to be the singularly worst person on earth right now. Perhaps he is not really a human being, but a psychic reflection of all the worst in American culture, a projection of our group consciousness onto the world, created, like a golem, to serve a profound and horrifying role in the physical realm.

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Asbestos could be a powerful against climate change (you read that right), James Temple, MIT Technology Review, October 6.

The UN’s climate panel found that any scenario that doesn’t warm the planet by more than 1.5 ˚C will require nearly eliminating emissions by midcentury, as well as removing 100 billion to 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air this century. Keeping warming below 2˚ C could necessitate sucking out 10 billion tons a year by 2050 and 20 billion annually by 2100, a study by the National Academies found.

That’s such a giant amount that we’ll almost certainly need to use a variety of methods to get anywhere close, including planting trees and increasing carbon uptake in agricultural soils. The particular promise of using minerals to pull down carbon dioxide is that it can be done on a massive scale—and would effectively store it away forever.

A shuttered asbestos mine site on San Benito Mountain, near Coalinga, California.

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From the Association of University Presses:

"As a global community of scholarly publishers dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) is appalled by the Executive Order on Combatting Race and Sex Stereotyping, issued by the US President on September 22.

By labeling difficult conversations about race and privilege as “stereotyping,” accusing citizens of advancing “pernicious and false beliefs” in areas of legitimate historical interpretation, and attempting to ban members of the federal workforce, uniformed services, and government contractors—as well as recipients of Federal grants—from conducting anti-racist training, this order has the potential to set chilling and frankly un-American precedents. If fully implemented, it not only could slow the arduous, but vital, progress towards equity, justice, and inclusion in this country’s workplaces and public spaces, but also could hamper the essential exercise of intellectual freedom, through which new fields of inquiry, such as critical race studies, are articulated and make valuable contributions to the breadth of human knowledge."

Complete Statement here.

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Researchers at MIT and the Ragon Institute of MIT, MGH, and Harvard are now working on strategies for designing a universal flu vaccine that could work against any flu strain. In a study appearing today, they describe a vaccine that triggers an immune response against an influenza protein segment that rarely mutates but is normally not targeted by the immune system. The vaccine consists of nanoparticles coated with flu proteins that train the immune system to create the desired antibodies. In studies of mice with humanized immune systems, the researchers showed that their vaccine can elicit an antibody response targeting that elusive protein segment, raising the possibility that the vaccine could be effective against any flu strain. “The reason we’re excited about this work is that it is a small step toward developing a flu shot that you just take once, or a few times, and the resulting antibody response is likely to protect against seasonal flu strains and pandemic strains as well,” says Arup K. Chakraborty, the Robert T. Haslam Professor in Chemical Engineering and professor of physics and chemistry at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. (via MIT News, Cell Systems)

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby continues to resonate perhaps more than ever, as the excesses of the Roaring Twenties are echoed 100 years later.

“They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Who will clean up the mess we have made?

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Kit Robinson

HELL NO!

Where there’s smoke there’s causality

Going all the way back to before before

When the backbone of the American economy

Arrived from Africa

When Crazy Horse went to the White man’s fort

And never came back

A bayonet stuck in his back

Before before

Wild World War Three

Guns, Fire & Plague

Sat down to tea

Under a red sun

To rough out a plan

For the consummate consumption of any and all land

The other night Jacob Blake

Was shot seven times in the back

By the police

While getting into his car

Where his three young sons

Witnessed the crime

Today the NBA players

Canceled their playoff games in Orlando

In protest

I’m a cancel this poem

This here shit is more important

8/22-26/2020

Literary magazines and independent presses are where writers are born, raised and supported. It is a highly diverse community of voices, and in today’s challenged times, greatly in need of support. The easiest way to provide help for America’s literary publishers is to support the only nonprofit service organization for magazines and independent presses, CLMP (the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses). This organization, on whose board I serve, has been around since the mid-1960s, when it was founded by a group of independent literary magazines. It does important work, especially now. Every year “in normal times,” CLMP runs a fun gala fundraising event in New York City, but these are not normal times, so CLMP is doing what so many other nonprofits have done and is doing a fun gala online featuring writers and editors like Joy Harjo and Bradford Morrow, and many others. Honorees include Lisa Lucas of the National Book Foundation and Martin Riker & Danielle Dutton of Dorothy, a Publishing Project.

You can buy tickets or make a donation here, and I hope you will join us on October 22 at 7 pm EST. And check out the very cool online auction, featuring limited editions and unique literary opportunities.

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There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way that you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
– Diane Di Prima, “Rant”

(photo of Diane DiPrima (c) Bill Wilson)

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Books mentioned in The Weird Times and others that may interest you are available at The Weird Times Bookshelf on Bookshop.org, sales of which will help support independent booksellers.

If you enjoy reading The Weird Times, please share it with your friends. And feel free to respond to any story, leave comments, tell stories of your own. Contributions for future issues are always welcome. Stay strong, stay healthy, and change the world for the better whenever you can. All best - David