The Weird Times
Desultory Reporting and Inner Monologues from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times Issue 36 January 17, 2021
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare
—William Butler Yeats
“You can’t have the mass radicalization that we’ve seen without extraordinarily wealthy people funneling money in,” —Michael Edison Hayden, Southern Poverty Law Center.
“America is Mississippi. There’s no such thing as a Mason-Dixon line. It’s America. There’s no such thing as the South. It’s America.” —Malcolm X
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” —MLK Jr.
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The Trashing of the Republic: The only response to the carnage in Washington is to banish Trump and his traitorous collaborators from civil society, Frank Rich, New York magazine, 1/8/21
So what is to be done? I’d say for starters let’s not forgive, let’s not forget, and let’s not delude ourselves. Let’s stop saying, “This is not America” every time “rogue” white cops kill a George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, or when white supremacists foment violence, whether in Charlottesville or Kenosha or Washington. Let’s stop pretending that if we read cynical best sellers like Hillbilly Elegy in book clubs and empathic magazine and newspaper interviews by mainstream journalists with those Trump-loving “folks” in diners and bars that we’ll suddenly unearth some conscience that isn’t there. Let’s stop taking seriously NeverTrumpers like David Brooks who as recently as August enthused about the “intellectual ferment” in the Republican party and touted to Times readers four senators who embody the “post-2020, post-Trump Republican future”: Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Ben Sasse. (No Black men need apply, of course.)
You can’t go home again to the Republican party. It’s the party that invented the modern mutation of the toxic racial politics that has flipped between both parties since Reconstruction – and that Trump brought to its current apocalyptic apogee. It was just as Dr. King was murdered that Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, criminals both, embraced the “Southern strategy” of exploiting white racial grievances after they saw that the party’s 1964 presidential nominee Barry Goldwater had flipped the once solidly Democratic South by opposing the Civil Rights Act (even as leading Republicans in the Senate supported it). And so it has been in the G.O.P. ever since, from Ronald Reagan’s vilification of “welfare queens” and “young bucks” on food stamps, to George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton campaign, to the party’s Obama-era elevation of Sarah Palin and veneration of the Tea Party to capitalize on the racist backlash against America’s first Black president. Yes, we all love the NeverTrumpers and the Lincoln Project’s brilliant and brutal ads, but with the conspicuous exceptions of Stuart Stevens and Joe Scarborough, too few of them have owned up to their complicity in some of this history even as they rebrand themselves on MSNBC to utter silence from their liberal co-stars. We should start to take such NeverTrumpers as Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt as serious allies only when they fully account for their outsize roles in this sordid past.
Most House Republicans Did What the Rioters Wanted, Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic, 1/13/21
The most dangerous part of that day for the country as a whole, however, was not what happened when the insurrectionists fought their way into the Capitol in the afternoon, but what happened just a few hours later on the floor. After all that mayhem, the legislators were escorted back to the chamber under heavily armed escort, and a stunning 139 representatives—66 percent of the House GOP caucus—along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded.
Unlike the insurrectionists, they were polite and proper about it. But the danger they pose to our democracy is much greater than that posed by the members of the mob, who can be identified and caught, and who will face serious legal consequences for their acts. Donald Trump’s ignominious departure from office—whether he is impeached and removed, resigns, or simply sulks away in disrepute—will leave us to solve the problem of the politicians who worked hard to convince millions that the election had been stolen, and then voted to steal it themselves.
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Mass Delusion in America, What I heard from insurrectionists on their march to the Capitol, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 1/6/21
We will find out shortly if today’s insurrection was also a super-spreader event. What I do know, after spending hours sponging up Trumpist paranoia, conspiracism, and cultishness, is that this gathering was not merely an attempted coup but also a mass-delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety. One man I interviewed this morning, a resident of Texas who said his name was Don Johnson (I did not trust this to be his name), told me that the country was coming apart, and that this dissolution presaged the End Times. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible. Get yourself ready.”
The conflation of Trump and Jesus was a common theme at the rally. “Give it up if you believe in Jesus!” a man yelled near me. People cheered. “Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump!” Louder cheers.
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Even though by the time you will be reading this newsletter, Trump will have been impeached, the article below is important. Trump is not the first, nor will he be the last demagogue to plague America.
The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists: Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it, Tanya Lewis, Scientific American, 1/11/21
The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.
One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition. Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejected the American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline, known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”
On January 9 Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition put out a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office.
What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?
The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.
“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
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D.C. Statehood is more urgent than ever, Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic, 1/9/21
Many local advocates saw Wednesday’s attempted coup—which left five people dead, including a police officer—as further evidence that D.C. should be a state. The attack at the Capitol was carried out by “people fooled by political leaders that there was fraud in the election, [but] what they were fighting against is mythical fraud,” Josh Burch, a co-founder of Neighbors United for DC Statehood, told me. “The real fraud is that we call ourselves a democracy yet deny the people of our capital political representation.” Now, following a day of mayhem and fear, all Americans have a clearer window into the stakes of granting D.C. statehood.
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US Police three times more likely to use force against leftwing protesters, data finds, Lois Beckett, The Guardian, 1/14/21
Police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against leftwing protesters than rightwing protesters, according to new data from a non-profit that monitors political violence around the world.
In the past 10 months, US law enforcement agencies have used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and beatings at a much higher percentage at Black Lives Matter demonstrations than at pro-Trump or other rightwing protests.
Law enforcement officers were also more likely to use force against leftwing demonstrators, whether the protests remained peaceful or not.
The statistics, based on law enforcement responses to more than 13,000 protests across the United States since April 2020, show a clear disparity in how agencies have responded to the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, compared with demonstrations organized by Trump supporters.
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A common thread — the Koch network and the Mercer family — are the money behind the seditious coup attempt in support of Trump. The billionaires who finance the radical anti-democratic right need to be exposed along with their businesses. Defund the insurrection.
ARIZONA GOP CHAIR URGED VIOLENCE AT THE CAPITOL. THE MERCERS SPENT $1.5 MILLION SUPPORTING HER: The billionaire Republican megadonors have funded numerous organizations now peddling baseless claims about the election, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Intercept, 1/14/21
THE STORMING OF the U.S. Capitol on January 6 has brought to the fore a host of activists on the extreme right whose violent rhetoric helped to create the conditions for an assault that left five dead. One of the most prominent of those activists is Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward…. Ward’s role could bring attention to her biggest financiers in politics: hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer. The Mercers were the largest donors to Ward’s super PAC in both the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, giving $1.5 million in total as well as over $33,000 in direct contributions to her campaigns.
The Mercers have funded numerous other organizations now peddling baseless claims about the election.
Rebekah Mercer is a principal investor in the Parler social media network and has an equity stake in Breitbart News, which has propagated false information about the election being stolen, and she is a close associate of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and current Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway as well as Flynn. Robert Mercer was a major investor in Cambridge Analytica, which mined data on behalf of the Trump campaign and shared office space with Mercer-funded conservative advocacy group Reclaim New York….
In 2016, the Mercers spent over $22 million on efforts to support Trump and other Republicans like Ted Cruz, who helped lead a dozen senators to baselessly challenge the election results. While they spent much less publicly this election cycle, they still pumped over $1.8 million into efforts to elect Republicans. Robert Mercer donated over $300,000 to the Republican National Committee and an additional $1.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s super PAC. McCarthy, R-Calif., was the highest-ranking member of Congress who sought to challenge the election results on January 6…“The Mercers have been more than willing to finance efforts to blow up the political system altogether. That seems to be part of what they’ve done,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center.
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Take Action Now: Demand Accountability for the Koch Funded Coup, unkochmycampus.org
13 senators from across the country vowed to unite against the confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden. In doing so, not only did they fail to uphold their oath to defend the Constitution, but they also gave the green light to right-wing protestors who had been vowing to take to the streets over the belief that the 2020 election results are fraudulent. These protestors marched to the Capitol and violently overtook the building. The fallout of this insurrection lays at the feet of these 13 senators and they must be held accountable.
It’s no surprise that each of these senators has been bankrolled by the Koch network. For years the Koch network and its vast coffers have been connected with misinformation campaigns -- whether it be climate or COVID-19 related, white supremacy, and much more
Join us in calling on House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer to hold these Koch-funded politicians accountable for their actions today.
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Removing Parler from Amazon Web Services caused an uproar among conservatives who (wrongly) claim free speech rights were being violated. But we must not ignore the real concerns about the corporate control of society based on the now ubiquity of the internet. Because the internet is now critical infrastructure of our society, why not treat the companies that provide the backbone of the internet as public utilities to make them much more accountable and subject to greater regulation?
Mark Hurst, Creativegood.com founder and CEO, writes frequently and pointedly on this subject. His newsletter can be found here. With his kind permission, I am quoting from the most recent issue:
The aftermath of insurrection: Big Tech's lame response and the dangers of censorship
But now there's a new crisis, around deplatforming and censorship. This was precipitated by two events:
1. Facebook and Twitter deactivated the criminal-in-chief's main account (though he's still active on both platforms), and
2. The Parler app, which billed itself as a conservative alternative to Twitter, was totally shut down by a ban from Apple's app store, Google's app store, and Amazon's web hosting service.
The crisis can be expressed in a question: What sort of precedent are we setting, if the CEOs of five companies - Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter - can silence a public figure, or an entire slice of the electorate, with a click?
I have an answer, which I'll get to, but first - as I did above - I feel obligated to allow our feudal lords to speak first.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, posted a thread with his deep thoughts, which were also covered by a short Wall Street Journal article. The decision to ban the criminal-in-chief's account was due to "an extraordinary and untenable circumstance," Dorsey writes - not specifying, of course, that it was a circumstance explicitly and intentionally built by his own profit engine. Twitter had enabled, promoted, and profited from this account for years - but Dorsey took no responsibility for that, except to write that "we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm." (Might??)
As for the dangers of censorship, Dorsey did have an answer. And here Dorsey deserves an award alongside Sheryl Sandberg and Tim Cook. Dorsey, in response to claims that he has too much power, wrote that "we need more transparency in our moderation operations." And that, in an award-winning segue, is why "I have so much passion for #Bitcoin."
The man who helped bring about Jan 6. Is now. Trying to sell us on Bitcoin.
(Sorry, I'm just staring at the wall here for a moment.)
Actually it was more annoying than that, because he actually put an emoji next to the stupid hashtag.
Ladies and gentlemen, Silicon Valley's best and brightest.
OK, now that we've seen - whatever that was - I'll go ahead and share my own thoughts on the takedown of "that" account, and the Parler app.
First, it's absolutely the case that Big Tech leaders have too much power. These takedowns were decided behind closed doors, in the executive suites of monopoly platforms where American citizens have no voice, and no leverage, and as such they're perfect examples of the seriously dangerous concentration of power in Silicon Valley. And the takedowns set a terrible precedent. As venture capitalist Albert Wenger posted this week:
What is the worst that can happen? I believe there is a high likelihood that we are witnessing the visible emergence of the government-IT infrastructure complex. Government will be even less inclined to try and generate competition in this space. It is so much more convenient to have just a few large entities that an executive agency can influence behind the scenes rather than having to bother with the rule of law.
If you were cheering the takedowns of "that account" and Parler, be careful. Next time, Big Tech leaders may decide to take down someone you do agree with. (And that account might be yours.)
However.
Having said that, in a kind of "stopped clocks are right twice a day" situation, I thought the takedowns were necessary, in the moments after an armed insurrection. I give Big Tech leaders no credit, no applause, no points whatsoever for making the decisions: I think they were acting solely in the interest of "growth at any cost," as always - what's more, the insurrection was caused directly by Big Tech, as I explained last week. (And I've called for the criminal-in-chief's account to be deleted for years, given his repeated threats of violence and other terms of service violations.) But in that singular moment, after a threat to lawmakers' lives, and the murder of a police officer defending the lawmakers, it was the right and necessary decision to shut down any further organizing of domestic terrorism.
It's a gamble, though, and those who are crying "censorship" have a point. This sort of takedown - Big Tech instantly snuffing out anything it finds threatening - must not be repeated. We must break up Big Tech and destroy their unchecked power to rule our national media. And we need competition, soon, so that every community - liberal, conservative, and centrist - can go online for healthy, lawful, democratic debate.
First, though, I sincerely hope that we'll see consequences, to the full extent of the law, handed to the people who caused January 6. That goes for the terrorists and the Big Tech leaders who profited from them.
Insects are vanishing at an alarming rate—but we can save them: Insects aren’t just pests. They’re crucial for the planet and our food supply, and scientists say we can all pitch in to help, Christine Peterson, National Geographic, 1/11/21
EVERY YEAR, THE number of insects flying over, crawling on, or burrowing in some parts of the planet drops by a percentage point or two. That means areas of severe decline could lose as much as much as a third of all their insects in two decades.
That’s the bad news, scientists reveal today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Dozens of insect experts contributed to a series of reports in the journal on just how bugs are faring around the world, for better or worse.
The good news—if good news is to be found—is that not all insects are declining so quickly. Some are even flourishing. And most important, researchers say, there’s hope for keeping our planet buzzing with its most abundant and diverse creatures.
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PFAS exposure found to increase risk of severe Covid-19, Rebecca Trager, Chemistry World, 1/12/21
Toxicologists are expressing concern that exposure to per- or poly-fluorinated substances (PFASs) can increase a person’s likelihood of developing severe Covid-19. There are also warning that PFASs could also diminish the effectiveness of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus.
A number of studies in the scientific literature have now linked elevated PFAS levels with immune system suppression, as well as decreased response to vaccines. Philippe Grandjean, an adjunct environmental health professor at Harvard University, and colleagues have found that higher levels of the PFAS perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA) in the blood are associated with increased severity of Covid-19 infections.
PFBA, a breakdown product of other PFAS chemicals, is known to accumulate in the lungs more than any other compounds in its class. It is a short four carbon PFAS with a half-life of three to four days, compared with two to three years for long-chain PFASs like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS).
The Radical Case for Growing Huge Swaths of Bamboo in North America: The grass has a bad rap in the U.S. as an invasive nuisance, but the plant can quickly sequester at least double—and maybe even six times—the amount of carbon as a similar stand of trees, Audrey Gray, Inside Climate News, 1/11/21
Given sway, bamboo’s roots will move intelligently toward water, and when many bamboo species (there are over 1,500) find a good place, they will mature into a true phenomenon: a fast-growing forest.
Emphasis on fast. In Japan, researchers clocked a Phyllostachys edulisgrowing 47.6 inches in one day. Over the last year, as the world has watched its timber forests eaten alive by wildfires, the idea of a replacement, carbon-thirsty forest that could grow to full maturity in a decade rather than a century is incredibly compelling to scientists desperately seeking ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before we trip more global warming feedback loops. As Virginia Tech bamboo materials researcher Jonas Hauptman put it, “It grows so damn fast, you can sort of stop the clock.”
Conservationist Bronson Griscom, who authored a landmark paper on “natural climate solutions” in 2017 and has planted bamboo in his own Virginia backyard, notes that while bamboo can suck carbon into its elaborate root system at a rate faster than many trees for a decade or two, a forest of native trees will catch up and outpace the sequestering potential of bamboo over a century or two.
“I wouldn’t point to bamboo for long-term carbon storage, but it does have its superpowers,” said Griscom. He favors it as a replacement for high-emissions building products, like steel or plastic pipes.
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As the Arctic Melts, a Regime Shift is Taking Place, Ben Deacon, ABC Weather, 1/12/21
Large areas of the Arctic Ocean are seeing long periods of sun for the first time in thousands of years.
It is fuelling the explosion in plankton, according to marine biologist Mike Behrenfeld.
“When you remove the ice, what you’re essentially doing is you are removing a large reflector of sunlight,” he said.
“And so when the ice goes away, you get a lot more sunlight onto the surface of the ocean and that can fuel a lot more photosynthesis.”
It’s now the dead of winter in the Arctic.
The sun has set there for months and the waters should be freezing solid, yet, incredibly, vast areas remain open ocean.
It is “persistently peculiar”, according to scientists from the US Government’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC).
Dr Meyer said that in the 1980s, an average of one-third of the sea ice was very thick, more than four years old.
Today, less than 2 per cent of the sea ice is that old.
“We can directly attribute the loss of sea ice in the Arctic to global climate change that’s human-driven,” Dr Meyer said.
“It’s a feedback mechanism where the more it happens, the more it happens.”
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Perfect timing: Robert Lisak and David Ottenstein, have spent years taking photographs of our state capitols. Their current show of this work is at the mActivity Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2016, I published David’s book, Iowa: Echoes of a Vanishing Landscape.
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Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
—Miller Williams, from “Of History and Hope,” written for the 1997 inauguration of Bill Clinton.
Millions of us in love, promises made good
Your own flesh and blood
Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes
The beat, the rhythm, the blues
The pounding of your heart's drum together with another one
Didn't you think anyone loved you
See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world
—Lucinda Williams, “Sweet Old World”
“But Hopes are Shy Birds flying at a great distance seldom reached by the best of Guns,” —James Audubon
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope,” MLK Jr.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” MLK Jr.
“Impermanence and selflessness are not negative aspect of life, but the very foundation on which life is built. Impermanence is the constant transformation of things. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Selflessness is the interdependent nature of all things. Without interdependence, nothing could exist.” —Thích Nhất Hạnh
I want to express my gratitude to all of you who read TWT each week. In these weird times, connection and community help so much to overcome our isolation and inclination to despair.
The truth buried does not rot, it roots.
The King buried does not die, he blooms. —Aurielle Lucier