Especially in light of Michael Sainato piece two days ago Exploited Amazon workers need a union. When will they get one? for The Guardian this week and another piece by Clevelander Mac McClelland that I’ve cited several times, we all need to read Sam Allard’s column, An Essay on the Failed Amazon Bid and the Defective Philosophy Undermining Cleveland’s Progress for Scene. Allard begins:

Like others in the ramshackle local press corps, I assumed that Cleveland’s heavily redacted Amazon bid, released last month after no shortage of fuss, wouldn’t have much journalistic value.

I almost didn’t bother reading it. On a recent episode of WCPN’s Reporters’ Roundtable, host Rick Jackson remarked offhandedly that there was more redacted material in the bid than there was available to the public. Cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn dismissed it as well, suggesting that the unredacted content explained nothing that we didn’t already know. At the time, I nodded along. I had my own views about the city’s shortcomings, but only the bid’s incentive package (still under lock and key) would definitively tell the story, I thought.

Because the story, surely, was how and why Cleveland failed to make the list of 20 cities that Amazon named as finalists for its second headquarters back in January. This seemed cut and dry.

Now, I’m not so sure.

You shouldn’t be either. Go read. Engage in the conversation and let Allard know what you think.

I didn’t vote for Hillary. I didn’t vote for Hillary because I thought we’d be in a worse place right now with a solidly Republican Congress and a solid majority of Republicans in in our state capitals. Hillary represented a repeat of the past 18 years of crumbs instead of real subsistence on our nation’s plates.

As dark as America seems right now, I can see more light in the rising of a revolutionary left, driven by democratic socialism the likes of which we have not seen since the ’30s, than I have seen in my lifetime.

People are getting pissed/scared/frustrated enough to get up off their asses and take action.

Perhaps we’re all grasping at straws, but when straw is all that you can grasp, go with that.

George Monbiot, writing in America’s new revolutionaries show how the left can win for The Guardian, suggests that the strategy could be working. He ledes:

Even at first sight it is exhilarating. The overthrow of one of the most mainstream and senior Democrats in Congress by a 28-year-old Democratic socialist with a radical programme and one tenth of his funding is, you might think, interesting enough.

But since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th district (meaning she will almost certainly enter Congress in November), I’ve been interviewing some of the people who lit the fuse that caused this detonation. What has emerged is just how marginal and improbable their movement was when it began, and how quickly it is now gaining momentum. A revolution has begun in America, and it is time we understood what it means.

In 2016 I thought that either Clinton would destroy the Democratic Party or Trump would kill the Republican Party. Both it seems now, are now true. What will replace them, however, is still a mystery and what happens in November and will tell us much. On the left, Monbiot points to Brand New Congress and an apparent successor, Justice Democrats, as one possibility. He continues:

In a way, this tiny group, Brand New Congress, which evolved into the Justice Democrats, marginalised itself. It wanted nothing to do with a traditional left it saw as being obsessed with positioning. It wanted to escape the shadow of people who seemed stuck in the 1980s, who didn’t take environmental issues seriously or understand the need to challenge structural racism and gender inequality, or to reach millennials trapped in terrible housing and miserable non-jobs. They were mocked, ignored and dismissed as well-intentioned but hopeless idealists. One of them told me how he was literally patted on the head by an older Democrat.

At first, it was chaotic. Most of the volunteers they recruited had little or no experience. Some turned out to be wonderful, others less so. Their original aim was to find 400 candidates to challenge both Democratic and Republican incumbents. They sought bartenders, factory workers, small-business people, community organisers, teachers, nurses—ideally people who had never held public office before. While Democratic candidates are usually chosen on the grounds of how much money they can raise, the Justice Democrats looked for people who could not be seduced by big funders. They reasoned that if the people they met had served their communities instead of themselves, they were unlikely to sell out once they were elected.

They found plenty of brilliant potential recruits, but without mainstream support they didn’t have the credibility required to convince hundreds of people to give up their lives for an improbable cause.

Justice Democrats, like the fledgling Republicans in 1854, are playing the long game.

extraordinary local campaigners combined traditional fieldwork with the big organising tactics developed during the Sanders campaign: using proliferating networks of volunteers to fill the jobs usually reserved for staffers.

Remarkable as [Ocasio-Cortez] is, there are others like her. Cori Bush in Missouri, Jess King in Pennsylvania and Kerri Evelyn Harris in Delaware are just a few of those now fighting for Democratic nominations or seats while renouncing big money, relying instead on the enthusiasm of the communities they hope to serve.

The Justice Democrats are not expecting all these candidates to win, but hope for a few spectacular victories at the congressional elections in 2018 and 2020, not only replacing corporate, money-tainted Democrats, but flipping a couple of Republican districts as well (look out, for example, for the campaigns by Brent Welder and James Thompson in Kansas). As soon as such people take their seats in Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti, one of the core organisers, tells me the aim is to “legislate the hell out of everything, like the Republicans do … proposing the boldest, biggest ideas on day one”. By 2022, using the momentum gained from a few strategic victories, they hope to run a full slate of new or re-energised candidates. The aim is to create a genuinely populist Democratic party, which neutralises Trump’s brutal demagoguery and speaks to people across the political spectrum who have been alienated by the corruption and drift of mainstream politics.

Monbiot concludes:

By understanding how the great reversal in New York happened, we can begin to understand what this movement of outsiders might achieve. It could yet change the world.

To which I would add: Thank you Bernie, the kids have this…

George Saunders, writing in Little St. Don: A reading from the Book of St. Don for The New Yorker, instructs:

A sparrow fell from a tree. Little St. Don ran over it with his bike, on purpose. A white-haired lady from down the block came and unfairly accused Little St. Don of knocking the sparrow out of the tree with a rock, then running it over with his bike on purpose. Her old coot of a husband doddered over to see what the trouble was. Little St. Don quickly hid the rock with which he had killed the sparrow. Then he hired a spokesperson. That girl Traci, from homeroom.

And Little St. Don thoughteth to himself, Man, was that a good throw. One of the best throws ever.

Quoth now the old lady to Traci, “This young man hit that sparrow with a rock and then ran over it on purpose, with his bike.”

“Truly,” answered Traci, “it is sad that all animals must, in time, die.”

“No, he killed it,” the old lady said. “With the rock. Then the bike.”

“Which one was it, the rock or the bike?” answered Traci. “Can’t be both. If you’re going to make a serious accusation like this against a sitting saint, you should get your story straight. Otherwise, you seem a little, you know . . .”

Then Traci did that thing of circling a finger around the ear area, suggesting: “Senile? I’m not saying that. But some people are discussing that.”

“But I saw it,” the old woman replied. “Saw it with my own—”

“Ma’am, I think you need to calm down,” sayethed Traci to the old sinner. “Accusing a saint of murder—that’s a big deal. Also, I’m not sure it’s ‘murder’ if it’s just a bird. Kind of disrespectful to all those actual human beings who’ve been murdered. And their families. Especially in combat.”

•••

After the old sinner and her old, weak sinner husband left that place in confusion, Little St. Don went unto the place he was staying, and thought upon many things, while playing Legos. He built a factory and a farm and did skillfully arrangeth the people therein so that it seemed that they were looking up at him. Being Lego people, they had movable arms, and he raised one arm on each, so it seemed that they were waving up at him. Or taking some kind of pledge.

Then Little St. Don noticed that a few of the little Lego people’s arms had slowly begun to drop. Stupid failing Lego company—couldn’t even make an arm that stayed up. And now it seemed that the little Lego people, or at least a few of them, were looking up at him skeptically. Doubt dawning on their tiny noseless faces. What? What, you stupid hicks? thought Little St. Don. Get those little arms up, pronto. You think anybody else is interested in you at all? Where are those little coal miners?

•••

Then St. Don left that place and went unto the living room. And turning on the TV he heard, from some preacher, the words of Jesus, as follows: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” And he took these words to heart, and would recall them, and abide by them, wisely, years later, when there were some issues at the border, but only a few of the words, like the first four.

This is the word of the Lord.

More than three years ago the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s GreenCityBlueLake published Is there a safe alternative to Roundup? with this lede:

Update 3/23/15 — Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been classified as a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Details here.

Roundup® is touted as a safe, environmentally friendly and easy to use herbicide. It’s also denounced as a toxic, hazardous chemical. Which is right? Are there any alternatives to using Roundup?

Roundup® is a broad-spectrum herbicide, meaning that it has negative effects on nearly every plant with which it comes in contact. It is used for spot treatment of gardens, lawns, paved areas, and some agricultural crops. Although it is toxic, the active chemical, glyphosate, binds with soil. This means that glyphosate that comes in contact with the ground will not run off into water systems and becomes inactive. The substance also appears to be mostly nontoxic for mammals, including people, who eat food which was near plants treated with Roundup.

However, when glyphosate reaches rivers and streams, it is very toxic to aquatic life. Glyphoste can travel to waterways if it falls on asphalt or blows away on the wind. In addition, glyphosate is not the only chemical in Roundup®, simply the only one considered “active” by the EPA. The EPA only requires herbicide manufacturers to provide proof that the “active” ingredients are safe for the environment, not “inactive” or “other” ingredients. Herbicide manufacturers are not even required to list non-“active” ingredients on their packaging.

Polyethoxylated amine (also referred to as POEA or polyethoxylated tallowamine) is a surfactant, a chemical used to transport glyphosate from the leaves of a plant to the roots in Roundup®. POEA has been shown to be significantly more toxic to aquatic life—including algae, frogs, shrimp, and fish—than glyphosate. POEA is not trapped by soil like glyphosate and stays in the environment longer before degrading, creating an environmental hazard. In addition, recent studies indicate that the POEA in Roundup® may be toxic to human embryos.

The short answer to the question is, thankfully, yes, there are alternatives, and you’ll find three listed in the above article.

Full disclosure, I was one of the people duped by Monsanto’s hype. My bad.

So, why has it taken us three years to get to this headline: Monsanto ‘bullied scientists’ and hid weedkiller cancer risk, lawyer tells court in today’s Guardian?

I began hearing about the growing evidence of cancer risks associated with Round Up earlier this spring. While the horrible damage to individuals cannot be diminished, I confess that my first reaction was: Oh fuck! This could collapse American (and world?) agriculture. This could trash the world’s food basket.

Why? Because industrial farming depends upon Round Up. So much so that the company invested millions (billions?) in developing a genetically-modified strain of corn that was Round Up resistant. Take away Round UP and those corporate farms dependent upon the chemical are royally fucked. Could Round Up be too big to fail?

Sam Levin, reporting for The Guardian, writes:

Monsanto has long worked to “bully scientists” and suppress evidence of the cancer risks of its popular weedkiller, a lawyer argued on Monday in a landmark lawsuit against the global chemical corporation.

“Monsanto has specifically gone out of its way to bully … and to fight independent researchers,” said the attorney Brent Wisner, who presented internal Monsanto emails that he said showed how the agrochemical company rejected critical research and expert warnings over the years while pursuing and helping to write favorable analyses of their products. “They fought science.”

Wisner, who spoke inside a crowded San Francisco courtroom, is representing DeWayne Johnson, known also as Lee, a California man whose cancer has spread through his body. The father of three and former school groundskeeper, who doctors say may have just months to live, is the first person to take Monsanto to trial over allegations that the chemical sold under the Roundup brand is linked to cancer. Thousands have made similar legal claims across the US.

I dropped a note to Levin this morning, along with copies to editors at The Guardian, who ought to be interested in the Too Big To Fail angle. We’ll see how that plays out.

I think the time has come to boycott Nestlé, again.

This morning I had a skidmark moment (similar to these) while listening to David Greene interview Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action. At the very end Greene totally misses this statement from Rundall:

…it’s all about trading and trading goods that really are misleadingly marketed. So they’re marketed almost as if they are infant formula for babies, [emphasis mine, JH] which is important and is something good. These are look-alike products that are not correct for babies, and they’re fueling the obesity epidemic (ph) and undermining breastfeeding.

I have no idea what these look-alike products might be and I can’t find an answer online.

Anyone have a clue?

[Update on 10 July at 1641—reader Mary Jo provides the answer in her comment. Thank you very much.]

[Update on 10 July @ 0454: Breastfeeding: it’s bad for business!]

Americans love socialism. They really do, but like Lou Costello, what you name something changes everything. It you think President Donald John Trump hates his predecessor, remember that conservatives have never stopped hating on our first socialist president since The American Liberty League.

Socialism rips money out of the bank accounts of the super rich and helps everyone else. As new political candidate Melissa Wheeler puts it:

We agree everyone’s entitled to adequate healthcare coverage, to clean air and water, to a living wage, to protection from consumer fraud and we agree on economic inequality, that our political system unfairly favors corporations and the wealthy who don’t pay their fair share!

Then the S-words pops up. What the feck is going on here? Mehdi Hasan, writing in Why Is Nancy Pelosi So Afraid of Socialism? for The Intercept, explores the question. He ledes:

Is democratic socialism now in the “ascendant” in the Democratic Party? That was the question posed by a reporter to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi last week, in the wake of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock primary victory in New York’s 14th Congressional District.

And Pelosi’s response? “No.”

Elaborating a bit, she qualified that “it’s ascendant in that district perhaps. But I don’t accept any characterization of our party presented by the Republicans. So let me reject that right now.”

Who is she kidding? Ocasio-Cortez, a “Democratic giant slayer” (New York Times) who “rocked the political world” (CBS News), is now a household name. From the pages of Vogue to the studios of ABC’s “The View” and CBS’s “Late Show,” the Democrats’ newest star has been eloquently explaining — and detoxifying — democratic socialism to millions of apolitical Americans. “No person should be too poor to live,” she told Stephen Colbert, to cheers and applause, when asked to define her ideology.

Then there’s Bernie Sanders. Who’d have imagined that a self-proclaimed democratic socialist from the state of Vermont, who was pilloried for going on “honeymoon” to the Soviet Union, would become the most popular politician in the United States?

Not Pelosi, that’s for sure. Democratic leaders of her generation are accustomed to seeing political messaging from a defensive posture only. So it wasn’t surprising that Pelosi would reject democratic socialism as a “characterization of our party presented by the Republicans,” when the characterization is being presented, in reality, by Democrats themselves.

Hasan naturally goes for the roots of mainstream socialism in America: the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

…the modern, liberal, progressive America that is so cherished by Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party elites might not exist today—were it not for socialists!

Take the New Deal. “FDR’s borrowing of ideas about Social Security, unemployment compensation, jobs programs and agricultural assistance from the Socialists was sufficient to pull voters who had rejected the Democrats in 1932 into the New Deal Coalition that would sweep the congressional elections of 1934 and reelect the president with … the largest Electoral College win in the history of two-party politics,” writes John Nichols in his book “The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism.” Elsewhere, Nichols cites a 1954 New York Times profile of Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, which described him as having made “a great contribution in pioneering ideas that have now won the support of both major parties,” including “Social Security, public housing, public power developments, legal protection for collective bargaining and other attributes of the welfare state.”

How about the war on poverty?

In 1962, socialist intellectual Michael Harrington — who would later go on to found the Democratic Socialists of America — published “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” and it became an instant classic. “Among the book’s readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing anti­poverty legislation,” wrote Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman. “After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address for an ‘unconditional war on poverty.’ Sargent Shriver headed the task force charged with drawing up the legislation, and invited Harrington to Washington as a consultant.”

Then there is the civil rights struggle.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, was organized by proud democratic socialists Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. King himself would later remark that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth.” “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

Go beyond politics, too.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Nate Silver once remarked, “American sports are socialist.” Consider the NFL, which operates a strict salary cap for players, while also ensuring that each NFL team receives an equal share of the league’s revenue from TV deals. To quote Art Modell, the late owner of the Cleveland Browns, the league is run by “a bunch of fat-cat Republicans who vote socialist on football.”

To recap: The most popular politician in the United States today is a socialist; the most admired American of the 20th century had a soft spot for socialism; and the most popular sport in the country is basically a “government-sanctioned socialist utopia.” So much for socialism, then, being somehow un-American or some sort of foreign import.

Hasan never goes here, but perhaps, just perhaps, Pelosi—and the rest of the Democratic Party—doesn’t like Socialism because because her current net worth is just under $30 million?

Hmmm, could be.

*With apologies to Wavy Gravy…

There is something comforting to know that we’re not alone in the sinking ship.

So, several years ago I began reading the Paris Review’s The Art of Fiction interviews, but stopped for a variety of reasons and when I got back to them I discovered that they were behind a pay wall. Acquiescing to my mantra of so many books, so little time I moved on because there was far more reading available for free than I could read in a thousand lifetimes.

A few weeks ago I buckled under and paid for a subscription to The New Yorker and yesterday, perhaps, prompted by that decision, I subscribed to The Paris Review. While my first copy won’t be here for a few weeks, I did get instant access to the archives and I went back to the Art of Fiction series. Yesterday I read No. 13, the interview with Dorothy Parker from 1956.

This morning I’m reading the most recent interview, No. 239 from this year’s spring issue. This interview is of Charles Johnson by Cary Goldstein. I have some reading history with Johnson, and while I expect more will come to my attention, this exchange struck me first:

CARY GOLDSTEIN—Late in the novel, you take a kind of authorial pause to talk about something called the “first-person universal.” What is that?

JOHNSON—Oxherding Tale has two essay-ish chapters. The first one is on the nature of the slave narrative as a literary form, its conventions. The other one is called “The Manumission of First-Person Viewpoint,” and in it I’m looking at the first-person narrator of the slave narrative and trying to ask questions about the “I.” And it takes a kind of Buddhist turn. What is this “I”? Either the self is nothing or it’s everything. That’s where I introduce the term “first-person universal.” In other words, it’s meant to take us away from a Cartesian view of subjectivity.

Partly because I had a conversation with one of my students this past week about defining point-of-view, but also because my current novel project is written in a traditional first-person limited point-of-view. I was sufficiently intrigued by Johnson’s concept to order Oxherding Tale so that I could, at a minimum, read the aforementioned chapter. I expect I’ll read more.

Also, Terry Gross, in Boots Riley Mines His Experiences As A Telemarketer In ‘Sorry To Bother You’ for Fresh Air, talked with Riley and set up the interview this way:

My guest Boots Riley wrote and directed the new movie “Sorry To Bother You.” It’s a social political satire starring Lakeith Stanfield, one of the stars of “Get Out” and the TV series “Atlanta.”

This is Boots Riley’s first film, but he’s had a long career as a rapper with his group The Coup, a self-described revolutionary music collective. Their music is on the soundtrack of the film. Riley grew up the son of political activists who moved from Chicago to Oakland when he was 6. His grandmother ran the Oakland Ensemble Theater. “Sorry To Bother You” is set in Oakland. It takes aim at corporations that underpay or otherwise exploit workers. It’s also a story about race, relationships and conscience.

When the movie begins, Lakeith Stanfield’s character is broke and living in his uncle’s garage. He talks his way into a telemarketing job, but everyone he cold-calls hangs up on him. An older, more experienced telemarketer played by Danny Glover offers some advice. Use your white voice.

Riley describes the film as: an absurdist, dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction inspired by the world of telemarketing, and attributes his own success as a telemarketer to his: Willingness to use my creativity for evil.

Gross tells Riley, Keep going…

So, for instance—I mean, the last time I did telemarketing, it was actually telefundraising, which is ostensibly better than regular telemarketing. So we were calling from the Bay Area to Orange County on behalf of LA Mission, for instance, which is a homeless shelter. But as we know Orange County is very conservative, Republican, racist—all of those things. And my job was to get money for the LA Mission. So my pitch was something like, hello, we’re calling to ask you how you’re doing. And they’d be like, fine, what are you calling about? OK. So no break-ins today. No – nothing wrong with your car or anything like that. They’d be like, no, why are you asking? Well, there’s been a series of break-ins, and, you know, people are worried. And we understand the police can’t do anything about it. So we’ve come up with a solution. And they’re all ears because I’ve just scared them. And I say, so what we want to do is we want to move all the homeless people from your area to downtown Los Angeles to the Los Angeles Mission. And they’re—you know, we’re going to teach them how to take baths and interview for jobs and give them God. And they’d always give money. So—and it was terrible. You feel bad. You could make yourself feel good about raising money for a homeless shelter. But you’re saying all this messed up stuff.

Wow. Dr. Evil, or President Trump, was never that good at using their creativity for evil.

Last Sunday, in A REPORTING LEGEND CHATS WITH INTERCEPTED…, I wrote about Seymour Hersh’s interview with Jeremy Scahill for the podcast Intercepted. All week I’ve been puzzling out what Hersh meant when he told Scahill:

The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I’m being very fuzzy about it, it wasn’t about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, [Emphasis mine, JH] and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us.

This comes in the middle of a much longer response to Scahill’s question:

I’m wondering, a year ago, a year and a half ago when we spoke, you were very critical of the way that the broader news media was reporting on the so-called Trump-Russia affair. Has your assessment changed at all and is that a legit story?

Hersh’s response—I’d block this out as extending from Scahill’s question to the line, You know, Jesus, Jeremy. Now I’m being coy—I don’t want to be coy.—turns the whole Mueller investigation on its head. This is an angle on the story that I have heard or read nowhere else.

How can that be?

One of the hardest prejudices to work one’s way past—and at the root of the hard problem—is the misconception that somehow our reality, our individual understanding of what we perceive to be real, is universal. This problem extends beyond individuals to include families, tribes, societies, nations and ultimately humanity as a whole.

Paradoxically we all want to feel special by being unique in the universe. We need to get over that. Take the centuries during which we labored under the myth that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Not only is the Earth not the center of our solar system, our mostly harmless star system is so far out in the galactic boonies—and don’t get me started about how unimportant our galaxy is—that the idea that other creatures would want to visit us is just silly.

The last bastion to yet fall is the idea that what makes Homo Sapiens Sapience—just labeling ourselves thinking was a mistake—special is our consciousness.

Tom Bartlett, writing in Out of their minds: wild ideas at the ‘Coachella of consciousness’ a Guardian long-read, explores the current thought:

He was nursing a Stella Artois and appeared as if he would rather be talking to anyone but me. This is what he said: “The scientists who pooh-pooh the mystical stuff can’t explain the hard problem.”

That is true. Though it is also true that the scientists who embrace the mystical stuff can’t explain the hard problem of consciousness either. No one can explain it. Why does it feel like something to be you? What is it that makes us more than just information processors with feet? Why are the lights on, and who, precisely, is at home? Nobody knows.

Well, some people think they know. There is something about the topic of consciousness that, unlike other scientific fields of inquiry, inspires an unearned feeling of expertise. If you don’t know much about, say, the life cycle of a protozoan, you probably would not pretend you did at parties. But because you are conscious, you might feel as if you can say something significant about the profoundly complex phenomenon of consciousness. You might even wish to write down what you feel, laminate it and thumbtack it to a free-standing bulletin board for all to see.

Consciousness is, for now at least, an undiscovered country where there be dragons; possible machine dragoons. Bartlett continues:

That is not to say there is not serious, fascinating consciousness research going on – there is plenty, and some of that research was presented in Tucson. Nor would it be right to imply that consciousness is a trivial topic. In fact, it might be the single most important topic around–the topic lurking behind all other topics. Minus consciousness, nothing really matters, does it? The permanent loss of consciousness is what often accounts for our dread of death. Who is and who isn’t conscious is crucial in a number of weighty moral and medical dilemmas, like figuring out when to pull the plug on someone in a coma.

It also matters because, as our computers become evermore sophisticated, some artificial-intelligence researchers worry that those computers will acquire consciousness. When they do, they might decide to become our best friends. Or they might, in their algorithmic wisdom, decide to delete their troublesome flesh-and-blood creators. With that in mind, it is probably a wise idea to get a firm scientific grasp on consciousness before we carelessly bestow it on our future machine overlords. And that is the sort of issue the Tucson gathering is about. At least in theory.

How are we doing on the whole making-theory practical thing? Bartlett talked with David Chalmers, a sort of thinker zero on the subject:

For Chalmers, the easy part of consciousness entails mapping exactly what the brain is doing, whether it is oscillations in the cerebral cortex or re-entrant loops in the thalamocortical system. The neurochemical nitty-gritty, in other words. He is not saying it is easy like diagramming a sentence; in fact, it is likely to take several more generations, at minimum, before the dots get connected. [Emphasis mine, but Clarke’s 1st law surely applies.]

Perhaps, and I think this may be definitively true, René Descartes had the final word back in nearly 400 years ago when he wrote: Cogito, ergo sum. Everything after that is just jerking off.

I’m pro-organized labor. Unions delivered the 40-work week, a living wage, vacation time, over-time and, most importantly, dignity to labor where little or none existed before. They also were instrumental in creating, in the post WW II-era our now-shrinking middle class. If you’ve never even been asked to join a union, stop and think where you’d be without them.

There has been much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v AFSCME, but I don’t think the terrain is as bleak as the wailers portend.

The battle circles around the concept of Right To Work laws. These laws are to labor as Right To Life is to women. Ever regressive Nevada—except when it comes to gambling and prostitution—has had a Right To Work law on the books since 1952, yet public-sector unions have done, and continue to do, well in the state whose motto is All For Our Country.
Ruben Garcia, writing in Nevada’s unions show how organized labor can flourish even after an adverse Supreme Court ruling for The Conversation, explains how unions in the other 49 states can fight back.

American labor unions have long been bracing for a “post-Janus” future in which collecting dues would be harder than ever.

The Janus case has been moving through the courts for two years and addresses the question of whether a public employee can be forced to pay dues to a union that represents him or her.

On June 27, the Supreme Court said no, which means the much-feared poorer future is now upon organized labor. While some pundits argue that this may “cripple” certain unions across the country, my research in Nevada suggests it doesn’t have to be that way.

Nevada unions have been operating under this very constraint for 65 years and yet have managed to thrive. As such, I believe they offer three important lessons for labor unions in other states as they grapple with an indisputably bleak legal environment.

The three lessons, briefly are:

Shoe-leather organizing—Most unions around the country are familiar with the kind of shoe-leather organizing that the Culinary has utilized over its lifetime, such as house visits, worker-to-worker contact and, increasingly, social media strategies. This has led to a nearly 90 percent unionization rate on the famous Las Vegas Strip.

Political engagement—The political engagement of the union has enhanced its importance among the state’s politicians because it supports their candidacies through get-out-the vote campaigns, election monitoring and social media outreach.

Delivering for the rank and file—Finally, the success of two depend on and contribute to the third lesson: The Culinary is able to deliver the kinds of extra services and benefits for its members that ensure they keep paying their dues.

In our age of Denaturalization Squads (seriously, they are a thing) Garcia’s points about the vital importance of women and immigrant labor cannot be understated. He writes:

The [Culinary Workers and Bartenders Unions in Las Vegas, which are separate entities but bargain as one.] stands out for the success of its efforts, which has included working hard to recruit immigrants and women. For example, it proudly calls itself Nevada’s largest immigrant organization, with members from 173 countries, more than half of them Latino.

In addition, about 55 percent of its members are women, which is higher than the national average of about 46 percent.

The sole commenter (as of Saturday morning) to Garcia makes some additional points that I think are also valid. The very best way that I know to make America great again is to make union labor strong again.

This is serendipitous because two days ago I read Brooke Jarvis’ The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger.

An African American mother, protecting her children, shoots a carjacker in the face. I’ll be watching how much time will pass before the National Rifle Association picks this story up.

Note: I’ve edited out the phrase would-be in the head and body of the story below because there was nothing would-be about the carjacker. He drove the car away with the mother and two children inside. That makes him an actual carjacker.

Monique Judge, writing in Texas Mom Shoots Would-Be Carjacker After He Tries to Steal Vehicle With Her Children Inside for The Root, has the details:

A would-be carjacker in Dallas picked the right one on Wednesday when he jumped into a car with the 2- and 4-year-old sons of a black mother in the back seat. When the man refused to get out of her car, he caught a bullet to the face for his trouble.

Michelle Booker-Hicks told Fox 4 News she was on her way to a family function when she stopped at a gas station in the southern part of Dallas around 10 p.m. on Wednesday night. As she was paying for her gas, she saw a man jump into her vehicle.

“I proceeded to jump in my backseat and told the gentleman to stop, to get out the car. He would not get out of the car. He turned around and looked at me. I reached over the armrest to get my glove compartment and that’s when I fired at him once I got the gun from my glove compartment,” she said to the news station.

The man, identified by police as 36-year-old Ricky Wright, ran the vehicle off the road and crashed into a fence. He was arrested at the scene and taken to a local hospital for treatment. Neither Booker-Hicks nor her children were harmed in the incident.

An African-American woman packing a 9 mm in an open-carry state. Ollie’s head must have exploded.

One of the reasons I choose to post this particular word is because if I were to select a single word to characterize the administration of Donald John Trump, I would pick sophistry in a heartbeat.

Another, more proximate reason, is that two days ago, in reading a feature in The New Yorker, I came across this sentence:

Whether a sophist like Milo Yiannopoulos may speak at a public university like Berkeley is less a question of what the law is than of what the law should be.

According to Merriam-Webster:

The original Sophists were ancient Greek teachers of rhetoric and philosophy prominent in the 5th century B.C.E. In their heyday, these philosophers were considered adroit in their reasoning, but later philosophers (particularly Plato) described them as sham philosophers, out for money and willing to say anything to win an argument. [Emphasis mine, JH] Thus, sophist—which can be traced back, via the Greek sophist?s (“wise man” or “expert”) and sophizesthai (“to become wise”), to sophos, meaning “clever” or wise”—earned a negative connotation as “a captious or fallacious reasoner.”

Yeah, that Plato knew his field.

I hate daylight saving time. I mean I really, really hate daylight savings time.

Daylight saving time doesn’t save me shit!

The primary reason is that I’m a morning person and I get robbed of precious dawn light. Arizona gets along just fine without daylight savings time. Why can’t the rest of the nation?

Europeans are actually getting to vote on the topic. AJ Dellinger, writing in Vote Down Daylight Saving Time for Gizmodo, has the details:

The European Commission is giving citizens of the European Union the opportunity to cast their vote in a public poll that could lead to the elimination of the sleep-depriving practice of changing clocks twice a year for the sake of daylight saving time.

The poll, spotted by The Verge, launched Thursday and running until August 16. During that time, members of the 28 European countries that recognize daylight saving time will be able to vote if they want to change the practice of turning back the clocks come winter and setting them forward to add an hour of evening sunlight in the summer.

I’m betting that most Americans would vote against the practice simply because they don’t like the hassle of resetting all their clocks. Of course, this would mean reprogramming all the devices that are now automatically making the change, but that would be a small price to pay.

For a couple of decades I have kept a list of Books To Read Someday. The list is long, too long to ever finish. Ticktock, ticktock…

So, in the spirit of Trevor Noah’s Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That, I present Books I Just Didn’t Have Time To Read:

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of the Wire by Jonathan Abrams.

The Enneagram And Kabala: Reading Your Soul by Howard Addison.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Ruth Benedict.

Native American women writers edited by Harold Bloom.

There are far too few Native American voices. There is a very small collection on my own shelf—mostly the works of two writers I’ve met and spoken with: Sherman Alexie and Russel Means—clearly the depth of my shelf is sorely lacking