In experimental science, you have controls and you have variables. The control is that which doesn’t change, remains constant. The variables, well, vary. Ideally you want to have as few variable as possible so that you can identify what is making the difference in what we are observing. In the experiment that is our life, we are the control. We are the constant.

All the other people in our lives, all the events, are the variables. If we suffer, using James Hollis’ term, we can choose to change ourselves or continue to suffer. There are no other options.

In the eleventh desideratum—See the Old-Self-Destructive Patterns—of his Living An Examined Life Hollis begins:

Don’t you have to ask from time to time, “Why does my life keep working out this way?” or “Why are my relationships always ending?” or “Why don’t I feel good about my life when I am trying so hard?” If a person hasn’t asked these or similar questions, then they remain blissfully unconscious and my deserve what keeps happening. Jung once observed the only unforgivable sin is to choose to remain unconscious.

When we finally admit the obvious to ourselves, namely, that we are the only consistent player in that long-running soap opera we call our life, we begin to become conscious and possibly accountable. One of the best ways to get a sense of what is happening to us, through us, what is occurring in the unconscious, it to identify our patterns. We don’t rise every day expecting that we will do the same dumb things, the same self-destructive things we have been doing for a long time, but chances are if we are still conscious at all at the end of the day, we will have done precisely that, repeated self-destructive patterns. But why? p. 57

The great masses—in which I include myself—enjoy blissful unconsciousness, whether in a videogame, a bingeworthy television series, or our abused substance of choice. But this is what Hollis rails about; that the unexamined life is a poor life. He answers that last question with:

…we become servants to, even prisoners of, our maps, our instructions, our marching orders. p. 58

We think we know what’s going on, but we don’t and we never will because the moment we think we understand the present moment, the moment becomes the past and the world changes. Yet, we have to make choices, even when we choose to not choose. Hollis continues:

…without “choosing,” we choose, as we all tend to choose on any given day. We choose the safer path, the lesser journey, until finally our psyche registers its autonomous dismay and weighs in with its perspective. In doing “the right thing,” we do the wrong thing. We choose the strongly ingrained, we follow the paradigms, we stick to the known, even when the known leads only to ennui, boredom, depression, anesthetizing treatments or chronic divertissement. p. 59

We fear that the suffering we might select will be worse that the suffering we know. Known suffering is still suffering, however. That doesn’t mean we only have a choice between two evils. Hollis, and Jung, argue that suffering in of itself is constant, but the source of the suffering is important.

Jung observed that a neurosis is always found in the flight from authentic suffering . Naturally, no one wants to suffer, but Jung’s observation suggests that there is a distinction between authentic and inauthentic suffering. p. 61

Hollis details the difference elsewhere in his book, but my take away is pretty basic. Generally hard work is, well, hard. If we choose the type of work, then the suffering, the hard work, results in some outcome that we desire. Simply put, no pain, no gain. Hollis concludes:

Recognizing the patterns, especially the self-destructive patterns, is the first step. Then comes taking them on, for the rest of one’s life. Taking them on requires risk, courage, perseverance and showing up more days than not. Some days the possibility of a larger life wins; other days the ghosts win. One has to know that every day is a war between the constrictive colloquies of history and the invitation to the high seas of the soul. But such a venture is what our life is about, what real adulthood is about, and what the journey of the soul demands. p. 62

Journeys are never ended, we only stop to rest a bit before continuing on. At some point, of course, we end, but that is end we can never judge because, we’re ended.

And so it goes.

Oliver Milman, in Where is the CDC? How Trump sidelined the public health agency in a pandemic for The Guardian, writes: CDC’s …venerated expertise has been shoved to one side as Covid-19 continues to ravage the US… For the first time since 1946, when the CDC flickered to life… to fight malaria, the agency is not at the frontline of a public health emergency.

Chris McGreal, in A disgraced scientist and a viral video: how a Covid conspiracy theory started for The Guardian, writes: …the viral video of Dr. Judy Mikovits blaming the coronavirus outbreak on a conspiracy led by big pharma, Bill Gates and the WHO is the work of a discredited crank. But scientists fear that does not make her claims any less dangerous because…

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti talk with Alex Lee Moyer, the director of a documentary: TFW NO GF. From IMDB: Born from the internet, the phrase “TFW NO GF” was originally used online to describe a lack of romantic companionship. Since then, it has evolved to symbolize a greater state of existence defined by isolation, rejection and alienation.

Kenya Evelyn, in Michigan forced to recognize right to literacy after students take legal action for The Guardian, ledes: A landmark battle over four years resulted Thursday in the state of Michigan agreeing to settle a lawsuit with Detroit students… after a federal appeals court issued a decision to recognize education and literacy as a constitutional right.

Change a single letter in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous line from In Memoriam A.H.H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 27—gawd, what a title—and you get the nut of what James Hollis is getting at in his 10th desideratum (I paraphrase, of course): ‘Tis better to have lived and lost; Than never to have lived at all.. Or, as Rumi wrote in a favorite of mine:

Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.

In What Gift Have You Been Withholding From The World? from his Living An Examined Life Hollis, makes another of his assertions that astonishes when he begins his second paragraph with:

There is no one I know who is without wounds to self-esteem.

Of course, that might be plainly clear of his patients, but he includes, here, his family, his friends, his colleagues, literally everyone he knows. I don’t doubt for a moment the veracity of what he writes, but the sweep of those words leaves me speechless. Deeper in the paragraph he continues:

Jung observed that usually behind the wound lies the genius of the person. That is to say, where we are hurt often quickens consciousness and resolve and abundant energy to persist, even prevail. The key is not what happens to us, but how it is internalized and whether those messages expand or diminish our resilience. Again, the question is not what happened but what it makes us do or keeps us from doing. This why two people can experience comparable life difficulties and move on in quite different ways. p. 51-52

First, Jung uses genius here in the original sense. The ancients thought of genius as power outside of the self rather than an attribute of the person: we are possessed by a genius rather than being one ourselves. Second, I take Hollis’ point here, but I think he treads in dangerous territory bordering on survivor bias. I can well imagine two siblings experiencing identical family trauma and responding in very different manners that have nothing to do with choice.

I have always believed that successful parenting is found, not in the splendiferous achievements of the child, who may only be compensating for the unlived life of the parent, but in the child who understands that he or she is seen and valued for who they are, not what they are supposed to do, achieve, become. It sounds so simple yet proves so rare. p. 52

When we consider how many children’s lives have been screwed up by parents who themselves are damaged, that humanity still exists is a wonder.

How often I have said, in discussing a compelling dream or some symptomatic resurgence, “Where do you think this came from inside you?” and “What does it mean that something inside of you has expressed itself this way?” How often have I observed, “Do you now see that something inside of you exists independent of your will, your conscious life? Do you not see that something inside of you sees you and asks something of you?” Even the most troubling dream is an autonomous manifestation of something large within us that asks our respect, our dialogue. p. 52

I have no reason to believe that I dream any less than other people, but I certainly don’t remember many dreams. Looking back over my life I suppose I could point at a handful or so that I remembered at the time. Is this a sign of my general good mental health or the opposite? Who knows?

In the end we are not here to fit in, to be well adjusted, acceptable to all, or to make our parents proud of us. We are here to be ourselves. Often that is not pretty, but it is honest. And our gift to the the great mosaic of the world is our uniqueness. Each of us has something to bring to the mosaic of the time that is unfolding in and through us whether we are aware or not. p. 53

I would point to the fact that Hollis places no value judgment of that gift. Some will push humanity forward, some will pull it backward and most, I assume, will just be along for the ride. Our gift is not special, it just is. What we do with the gift, with ourselves, is what is important.

The humble, brilliant Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it in the nineteenth century. In his poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire, he describes:

     Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
     Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
     Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
     Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

With his poetic sensibility, his metaphoric leap , he understands that the Self is not an object, not a noun, but rather a verb. The Self is always “selving,” seeking expression. p. 53-54

I am reminded here of David Cooper’s brilliant book: God Is A Verb. He writes:

What is God? God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun. It does not exist, as existence is defined, for It takes up no space (or includes all space but is not limited by it) and is not bound by time. Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness.

Ein Sof should never be conceptualized in any way. It should not be called Creator, Almighty, Father, Mother, Infinite, the One, Brahma, Buddhamind, Allah, Adonoy, Elohim, El, or Shaddai; and It should never, never be called He. It is none of these names and it has no gender.

I wonder if Cooper ever read As Kingfishers Catch Fire?

Some people’s lives express themselves externally through the gifts of intellect, talent or achievement of some sort or another. The world of selfies, the Guinness Book of World Records and the need for the fifteen minutes of fame are all compensations for not feeling one’s inherent value in the first place. p. 54

This was, and continues to be, for the message outlives the messenger, the genius of Mr. Rogers.

How many times people have said to me: “I have always wanted to… (fill in the blank)—to write a book, learn to play the piano, fly a plane and so on—yet all those sentences also include a “but” that transitions the thought down to the familiar old alley of flight, denial, repression and disregard. The “but” covers a multitude of rationales, fears and old messages that keep us from our essential selfhood, from our ordinary being that is our gift to the world. p. 54

There is a joke among writers concerning a segment of people who attend writing retreats or ask to join a writers’ group: They don’t want to write, the want to have written. They want to enjoy the perceived celebrity status of being a writer without putting in the time of actually putting words to paper. This is the underlying message we send ourselves when we write—as I have—letters to our younger selves. We wish to benefit from the hard work of that earlier incarnation. There is no reason whey anyone, myself included, should wish that on someone else; we could and should, get on with doing the work. Now! Hollis concludes:

To be eccentric, not to fit in, to hear our own drummer, these are the signs of our bringing our gift, our personhood, to the table of life. It sounds so simple, but it is so difficult, not only because of all the disabling messages of the past, but also because to be that gift asks us to let go and trust that something within us is good enough, wise enough, strong enough to belong in this world. How dare one disregard what is seeking expression through us, to cower in the darkness of fear, to resist the gift that illumines this otherwise colorless world.

Hey, hey, my, my, Neal Young nailed it.

Republicans For The Rule Of Law in support of a national, universal vote-by-mail option, are targeting 10 Republican senators: Tillis (N.C.), McSally (Ariz.), Kennedy (La.), Ernst (Iowa), Gardner (Colo.), Shelby (Ala.), Lankford (Okla.), Collins (Maine), Blunt (Mo.) and (gawd help us) McConnell (Ky), and asking them to Keep Our Elections Safe.

Naomi Klein, in How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic for The Guardian, writes: It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. …Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen… a living laboratory for a permanent—and highly profitable—no-touch future.

Slovakian graphic designer Martin Vargic’s maps look historic but depict modern phenomena, from internet to climate crisis and, soon, the world according to Trump. According to Vargic: My Map of the Internet includes the land of YouTube, the islands of Deep Web and Great Southern Land. This last is a forgotten wasteland full of obsolete services and websites.

Rafia Zakaria, in I lied about living in New York to fit into the literary bubble—not anymore for The Guardian, writes: In New York, the myth goes, these aspiring gods and goddesses of arts and letters can mingle among themselves and recreate contemporary fantasies of literary commingling past. Every gathering in a dingy apartment with bottles of…

Amy Fleming, in More birds and bees, please! 12 easy, expert ways to rewild your garden for The Guardian, writes: …whether or not people are growing new things, terraces, balconies and gardens are receiving unprecedented levels of attention… If we employ a few biodiversity-boosting tricks, we can keep the nature party in our backyards going…

Jeremy Scahill talks with David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom to discusses the era of Reconstruction and Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America discusses the New Deal… and analyzes what such a program would look like after the Trump presidency.

I’m in no way agoraphobic. I enjoy the big outdoors as much as anyone, but I’m happiest when I’m in a small space. I think that this is because in a small space I minimize the distractions from my head space. Like Jack, I find what’s inside my head often far more fascinating than the mundane muggle world. This may be one reason why I enjoyed the Navy so much.

When I tell friends how cheek-to-jowl (nut-to-butt in nautical parlance) we lived at sea they often ask how I could stand it. I loved it. And, I could stroll topside anytime I wanted and enjoy a 360° vista of the largest expanse anyone can imagine. As a child,I built a cave from boxes under my train table, installed a reading lamp, a few pillows and that was where I like to read. Although we never discussed this, I think my dad felt the same way because he was always building forts and hidey-holes for me and my fascination with Tiny Houses is a natural consequence of my predilection.

James Hollis, in the ninth desideratum—Choose The Path Of Enlargement—of his Living An Examined Life has given me another insight as to why small is so attractive: the smaller we make our surroundings, the larger we can make our lives. He writes: …most of us, quite simply, live lives too small for us. p. 46

I find that assertion damning yet inspiring. Hollis goes on:

In his various essays on personhood, Jung writes that the summons to personhood is a calling, a true vocatus, in the original sense of a calling from the sacred. To obey the calling is tantamount to religious obedience to that which is larger that we. And herein lies the path and the conundrum. p. 46

We all have a calling. For some it will be found in our capacity for caring for the needs of the suffering around us. For others it will be the work of hands. For some it will be the work of the mind that opens doors and shatters shackles. For still others it will be the exploration of the natural world. For some it will be pushing back the boundaries of our limited sense of the possible. But for all of us, there is a large summons. p. 47

Our internal worlds, that which is bounded only by our capacity to imagine, is so far grander than that which is outside of our minds as to be infinite. We are called to the grand, but we fear that which is bigger than we can grasp. Courage, paraphrasing one of my heroes—Maggie Kuhn—is following your calling though your body shakes.

Only when we risk our own journey can we begin to pull back the projections we have on others. Everyone we meet is beset with their own problems. Most of the time they don’t want you to know that, and they are also trying to figure out ways not to know that for themselves. p. 47

This is one of the reasons I enjoy biographies so much. As a young reader I devoured hundreds of them and I learned that my heroes had problems. What made them heroes was their ability to act despite those problems. One that I’m reading right now is Rickover: Controversy And Genius by Normal Polmar and Thomas Allen. Admiral Hyman Rickover is another of my heroes (and one of the few that I ever met) and I’ve long made kept these two words from him in my mind: courageous impatience. They’re from a paper he wrote after he left the Navy:

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience.

A life lived with courageous impatience can never be small. Hollis continues:

Because we grow facile in this self-denial, we forget over time that what we really feel matters. As a counterpoise, we must recall that we do not choose feelings. Feelings are autonomous responses of the organism to how things are going from its perspective.We can choose to ignore feelings, project them onto others, anesthetize them, and so on, but we do not choose them. It took me quite a while, as a thinking type, to realize this elemental truth. p. 47

That elemental truth is how I think of spirituality: our emotional response to our perceived personal reality. Our physical, our shared reality, to quote yet another hero, is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. But the ways we process what is around us is as multitudinous as ourselves. Hollis goes on:

To reiterate, the choice of the large is not in service to grandiosity or to inflation; it is quite the contrary. It is in service to our growing recognition that something else besides security, fitting in and protection asks our recognition. Rather than be enslaved by our fears, in service to our limiting heritage or our debilitated, even devastated, history, we understand finally that we are called to something large. p. 48

The trick, of course, is to answer the call.

Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through and then realizing that we are not on the other side of that issue. While the child is dominated, even devastated, by the loss of approval of others, the person who goes through finds something within that supports, approves and carries. p. 48

Being a writer, I like to say, is easy. All you have to do is strip yourself naked and stroll down main street at noon.

What could be easier?

Bonus No. 1: Conspiracy theories used to be fun! Now everyone is freaking out…

Robert Reich, in Under Trump, American exceptionalism means poverty, misery and death, writes: Congress’s “payroll protection program” has been a mess. …banks have raked off money for themselves and rewarded their favored customers. Of the $350bn originally intended for small businesses, $243.4m has gone to large, publicly held companies.

Mano Singham, in The mysterious video of the jogger’s murder, writes: There was always something strange about this whole case and the video. Why was no one charged for over two months for killing an unarmed man on a public street? Who took the video and what was their connection to the victim or the killers? …answers are coming out and the picture is not pretty.

I’ve always been a goal guy, a disciple of Charles Hobbs. This year I trying a different path: systems. And I’ve turned to the Systems Guru James Clear who, in Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead, writes: Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

Sam Levine, in ‘It’s all rigged’: Trump foreshadows how he could undermine presidential election, writes: Donald Trump falsely accused Democrats of trying to “steal” Tuesday’s special election in California amid the Covid-19 pandemic by adding a polling place in one of the most diverse sections of a district. …at the request of the area’s Republican mayor.

President Donald John Trump likes playing golf because when you own the course, people don’t complain that you cheat, lie and give yourself trophies. When he moved into the White House Trump carried this attitude with him, believing that the presidential manse was his and not ours. And when guests reporters didn’t show deference, he ran to his safe space.

Rose Garden events yesterday mark a turning point. Robert Mackey, in Two Female Reporters Refused to Let Trump Bully Them Into Silence, So He Ran Away for The Intercept, ledes:

When an actual press conference threatened to break out in the Rose Garden on Monday, as two White House correspondents refused to let Donald Trump silence them, and a third declined his request to change the subject by asking a new question, the president abruptly turned and walked away.

It was a sudden ending to what Trump had clearly expected to be a largely self-promotional event—during which he told Americans, on the day that the coronavirus death toll passed 80,000, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.”

What prompted the president’s retreat was a rare moment of cooperation among members of the White House press corps who, for once, refused to play Trump’s game of ending an exchange with a reporter whenever he is under pressure by calling on someone else. That dodge usually works because correspondents from rival networks are so eager for their turn in the spotlight that they let the president decide who speaks and when.

But when his signature move suddenly failed on Monday, as the CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang pressed him on the racist undertone of his comment to her, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN and Yamiche Alcindor of PBS both refused to bail him out, Trump simply called time on the proceedings and fled.

After Trump’s debacle, Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted:

Pretty pathetic. Mr. Trump is a coward who tears down others to make himself feel powerful.

Mackey is absolutely right about the cooperation among journalists. While Trump sees this as a conspiracy against him, I, and Mackey, see this as a concerted effort to refute Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy that he has been allowed to repeatedly use in the past.

If Trump can’t hold rallies—I expect that when he next can they will be too soon and sparsely attended—and he can’t dominate press conferences we can expect oval office addresses next.

Bonus No. 1: Trump’s Rose Garden Hissy Fit, Plus The Dumbest Thing The President Has Ever Said.

Bonus No. 2: The further exciting adventures of Jack (and Reagan).

Bonus No. 3: The experts are saying it’s safe to go out again.

Bonus No. 4: And people excuse me of being anal…

Natasha Lennard, in The Perversity of Needing to See Ahmaud Arbery Die on Video to Recognize That His Black Life Mattered, writes: There can be little doubt that, without the viral spread of a video capturing [Ahmaud] Arbery’s harrowing final moments, no [murder and aggravated assault] charges would have been brought.

Ted Rall, in We Need a Centralized Medical System Too writes: There’s a reason that other rich countries treat healthcare as a taxpayer-financed social program. Employer-based health insurance was stupid pre-COVID-19 because our economy was already steadily transitioning from traditional full-time W-2 jobs to self-employment, freelance and gig work.

Republicans For The Rule Of Law, through former governor of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman, makes the case that: Trump Thinks He’s Above the Law. The founders had just fought a bloody war, says Whitman, to get out from under the tyranny of a king and they took concerted action to prevent a strong executive.

Elise Swain, in With Tara Reade’s Allegations, Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Only the Latest Chapter of America’s Accountability Problem, writes: An embattled population barrels toward a national election between two accused rapists and known liars: President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden.

Richard Partington, in Trump is culpable in deaths of Americans, says Noam Chomsky, writes: Donald Trump is culpable in the deaths of thousands of Americans by using the coronavirus pandemic to boost his electoral prospects and line the pockets of big business. [Chomsky] argued the US president was stabbing average Americans in the back….

Ted Rall, in The 25% Solution, illustrates (and writes): People are still dying, but lockdowns make us antsy. So some businesses will reopen at 25 percent capacity and some states are allowing businesses to begin to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown by allowing them to do so. How exactly will that look like?

Republicans For The Rule Of Law, think that President Donald John Trump Acts Like A King and because both the Congress—through the Republican-controlled Senate—and the courts—with a 5-4 conservative majority—are powerless to rein him in, only voters still have the power to restore our founders’ vision of Democracy..

I find myself circling back to themes and idea that have gripped my imagination and one of those is tumultuous years following our Second War of Secession commonly known as the American Civil War. Yesterday I listened to a discussion on The Rising with Zaid Jilani focused on the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to the New York Times for its 1619 Project.

The project, published in the 18 August 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine was intended to be a reëxamination of the legacy of slavery in the United States timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia sometime in August, 1619. No conversation on slavery is without controversy, but I was not aware of the particular aspects that Jilani spoke about.

After watching the video, I went looking for other parts of the conversation and found these, and many more, headlines:

The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy by David Waldstreicher in Boston Review.

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.

And these two pieces in The Wall Street Journal:

The ‘1619 Project’ Gets Schooled by Elliot Kaufman, and

‘The 1619 Project’ Tells a False Story About Capitalism, Too by Allen C. Guelzo, both in The Wall Street Journal. by Allen Guelzo.

While our nation’s history is rooted in this—then mundane but ultimately transformative event—four centuries ago, we would face, and then stumble badly nearly 250 years later, to set right that terrible decision in the years known as Reconstruction, a period that I knew little about before reading a blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coasts reviewing Eric Foner’s, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. My copy is ragged and highlighted after many readings and I consider the work—as does Henry Louis Gates—the bible on Reconstruction. (I’m waiting on my copy of Foner’s most recent work—The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution—to arrive from Mac’s Backs.) Reading Foner would ultimately lead to my present novel project: Absent Son, the story of a young man who is absent from the defining events of his generation and returns home to find a world he does not know or even understand.

After watching and reading yesterday, I circled back to the the four-part PBS series hosted by Henry Louis Gates: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War embedded in its entirety below.

Gates spoke with Terry Gross at length about the series—and his associated book: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow—in Henry Louis Gates Jr. Points To Reconstruction As The Genesis Of White Supremacy, broadcast on 3 April of last year.

You cannot understand The United States of America, my fellow citizens nor our shared history if you do not come to grips with how we got here. As Gates makes the case , President Donald John Trump is intimately entwined, through people like his senior advisor Steven Miller, with this monolith in our story.

History is merciless.

Bonus No. 1: His name is Morris! He lives in the Ebergrapes…

Bonus No. 2: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (official); Last Week Tonight (full).

Bonus No. 3: First Dog On The Moon: Introduced!

Yesterday, watching Mark Blyth and Carrie Nordlund, their exchange on nostalgia for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal caught my attention because I agreed with Blyth when he said: First of all, what is it with the Democrats. The only imagination they can ever grab on to is 90 years ago and it’s Roosevelt and you know it’s not even plausible today.

No, it isn’t. Building dams and bridges in the 21st century is very different from that work in the 20th. And this 21st century depression, while it may be worse in this moment than the Great Depression, this is not my Grandparent’s depression and we do ourselves no favors by simplifying reality to the point of absurdity. In the 1930s the bulk of Americans were employed in either agriculture or industry; we grew food and built products. Labor was physical and the Work Progress Administration made sense. In the 2020s we mostly sell food grown and products made by machine or immigrants to each other.

We very well might be in completely different place in 2020 if events on 20 July 1944 had gone differently, if Florida Senator Claude Denson Pepper had been a few seconds quicker up the steps to the convention podium, if the Democratic Party bosses hadn’t gone all-in for the hack Harry S. Truman.

I’ve written about Henry Agard Wallace before, but I can’t seem to get enough of the progressive vice president of the United States who was to the left of Bernie Sanders and paid the price for his belief that people were more important than dollars.

If only we hadn’t allowed the 1 Percent to Undo The New Deal.

Finally, Carrie and Mark nail the whole Tara Reade story…

Bonus No. 1: THE NECESSITY FOR US TO LET GO OF THE OLD…

Bonus No. 2: How I stay focused—10 tips for focusing.

Bonus No. 3: INSIGHT, COURAGE, ENDURANCE, A GOOD LITANY…

Bonus No. 4: A Brief History of How We Got Here and Why. (from 16 July 2019).

Bonus No. 1: MY READING IN THE MIDST OF THE PANDEMIC…

Bonus No. 2: …think of it as binge-watching on Netflix, but actually using your brain.

Bonus No. 3: NOT GROWING UP IN AN AGE OF NO THRESHOLDS…

Bonus No. 4: BOTH GENIUS AND WARRIOR RESIDE INSIDE OF US…

I enjoy a good hardware store as well as anyone, but I’ve always been more than a little bit of a geek and I’m in my element in any office supply store. I can wander the aisles for hours just seeing what’s new and I’m about as anal-retentive as you can get when talking organizers and systems. Some of my favorite blogs have focused on life hacks.

So, this morning when I read in the technology section of The North Royalton Post about the Rocketbook, my heart gave a little happy blip. I watched a couple of reviews on YouTube and had begun to think that the time had finally come for me to buy a not-so-stupid phone. Then I hit the lefty wall.

The ink in the required FriXion takes 10 seconds to dry to a smudge-proof finish. If you’re left-handed, that just won’t work.

Still, as a happy/time-suck? consequence, I have found another category of YouTube videos—10 Japanese Office Supplies You Didn’t Know You Needed.—to burn time with.

C’est la vie. My dumb-phone lives yet another day.

Bonus No. 1: Mark & Carrie: If You Open It, They Won’t Come. Re: Ohio.

Bonus No. 2: How I take notes—Tips for neat and efficient note taking.

There ought to be a law preventing congress from passing laws with twisted names the make up neatly packaged acronyms that mislead or completely mask the true intent of the legislation. The 2001 Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act jumps to mind. Jump to 27 March and our current crisis.

That was the date when President Donald John Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act into law. If you’re getting into the weeds of a law named the Don’t Give A Fuck CARES Act, and Section 4022 in particular, a sentence you don’t want your source to utter might be:

Whoever wrote this bill didn’t have the faintest fucking clue how mortgages work.

What’s the problem? Well, Section 4022 of the CARES Act provides for loan forbearance of up to 360 days to homeowners having difficulty making their mortgage payments. If you were dealing with George Bailey, or even Mr. Potter, there probably wouldn’t be a problem. This is where the above quote comes in play. Matt Taibbi, writing in The Bailout Miscalculation That Could Crash the Economy, explains:

When homeowners take out mortgages, loans are bundled into pools and turned into securities, which are then sold off to investors, often big institutional players like pension funds.

Once loans are pooled and sold off as securities, the job of collecting home payments from actual people and delivering them to investors in mortgage bonds goes to companies called mortgage servicers. Many of these firms are not banks, and have familiar names like Quicken Loans or Freedom Mortgage.

The mortgage servicing business is relatively uncomplicated—companies are collecting money from one group of people and handing it to another, for a fee—but these infamously sleazy firms still regularly manage to screw it up.

And you can bet they’ll screw this up. Taibbi continues:

Because margins in the mortgage service business are relatively small, these firms try to automate as much as possible. Many use outdated computers and have threadbare staffing policies.

Essentially, they make their money collecting in good economic times from the less complicated homeowner accounts, taking electronic payments and paying little personal attention to loan-holders with issues.

They rely on lines of short-term financing from banks and tend to be cash-poor and almost incompetent by design. If you’ve ever tried to call your servicer (if you even know who it is) and failed to get someone on the phone, that’s no accident—unless you’re paying, these firms don’t much want to hear from you, and they certainly don’t want to pay extra to do it.

If they have to pay, you know damn well that they’ll find ways to make sure their sources pay.

Enter the coronavirus. Even if homeowners themselves weren’t required to make payments under the CARES Act, servicers like Quicken Loans and Freedom Mortgage still had to keep paying the bondholders every month.

It might be reasonable to expect a big bank like Wells Fargo or JP Morgan Chase to front six months’ worth of principal and interest payments for millions of borrowers. But these cardboard fly-by-night servicer firms – overgrown collection agencies – don’t have that kind of cash.

How did the worst of these firms react to being told they suddenly had to cover up to a year of home payments? About as you’d expect, by trying to bully homeowners.

These people are flat out scum, but that should be no surprise based upon our special experiences of the Great Recession. Their main tool is the baldfaced lie.

David Dayen at the American Prospect started hearing stories that servicers were trying to trick customers into skipping the forbearance program. As David wrote a few weeks ago:

I started hearing from borrowers that they were being told that they could apply for three months forbearance (a deferment of their loan payment), but would have to pay all three months back at the end of the period…

It soon came out that many servicers were telling homeowners that even if they thought they were getting a bailout break, they would still have to make it all up in one balloon payment at the end of the deferral period. This was a straight-out lie…

Taibbi does his usual clear and methodical job of showing in which corners the brightest lights need shone. Go. Read. Enjoy.

Bonus No. 1: Donald J. Trump on PROTESTING FOR FREEDOM THE AMERICAN WAY.

PEN AMERICA CONDEMNS EFFORTS TO CENSOR NEW MICHAEL MOORE-BACKED
FILM PLANET OF THE HUMANS AND MOORE RELEASES NEW STATEMENT:

Calls to pull a film because of disagreement with its content are calls for censorship, plain and simple. Those who take issue with the film have every right to make their concerns and arguments heard, but first and foremost, the public also has the essential right to view Moore’s film and make their own judgements.

Every individual, every organization that has he even suggested that Planet of The Humans should be pulled from the Internet is censorship at a level progressives might more closely associate the far right. The response to objectionable speech must never be censorship, but rather more, vigorous speech.

The three demands of Extinction Rebellion:

First—Tell the truth. Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.

Second—Act Now. Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. And,

Third—Beyond Politics. Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

Back in the early ’90s I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Hawken after he delivered an address at a recycling conference. He started his talk, however, with a presentation unrelated to the topic of recycling. He started with a video (similar to this one) that showed that humanity was the problem; that we are the virus infecting Planet A; there is no Planet B.

There is one central message to Jeff Gibbs film Planet of The Humans: There are too many of us consuming too many resources from a very finite source and we must take one of two actions: either, we must immediately begin to drastically reduce global population, focusing first on the industrialized nations or we must drastically reduce the amount of consumption by the population. Tinkering with sources of energy—unless we can develop fusion reactors—and recycling aren’t going to save us.

When I was the executive editor of GIE’s Recycling Media Group back in the ’90s, I had many conversation with other environmentalists about how recycling was not the first, but the last step in reducing waste, but no one was really interested in reducing (step one) or reusing (step two) because there was no profit to be found there. If consumers buy less then sales suffer. If consumers avoid single-use products (ditch the bottled water people!) or reuse—by taking actions like buying thrift store clothing or, better yet, getting hand-me-downs from friends and family (Hasan Minhaj had a great show on this)—then, again, sales suffer. The industrial nations are on a hamster wheel of consumption. Even New Green Deal environmentalists—to steal the live from Wavy Gravy—still believe capitalism isn’t that weird.

Gibbs critics in the environmental community are many (see the first comment below) and they are focusing on attacking the first because they need to save their livelihoods in the form of the second.

There is a moment in the film where Gibbs asks: Is it the profit motive? (See embed video below.) The answer, hidden beneath layers and layers of rhetoric, is yes. But Gibbs goes deeper, existentialist, speaking with Sheldon Solomon who invokes Albert Camus: Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.

I wrote about Camus nearly three years ago and that one post has consistently generated traffic for Have Coffee Will Write way past any expectation I might have had. My fellow humans are fascinated by Camus’ marginalia from one of his notebooks—seized upon by Solomon—concerning death.

The traffic to the post has been a steady trickle that has still managed to generate 1,000 visits over the three years. With the release of Planet of The Humans, however, I’ve seen a surge in visits of some 900 percent. Who knew that so many people would wonder about Solomon’s quote of Camus.

There is another moment in the film when Josh Schlossberg then with the Energy Justice Network answers a question from Gibbs:

How did the environmental groups get pulled into this?

with:

Obviously, the main factor is delusion.

The inconvenient truth is that technology is not the answer, behavior is. Either we consume much much less or we stop making babies at our present, alarming rate. Fail doing one, or both, and we’re doomed.

Gibb’s must feel more than a little like Detective Thorn.

Bonus No. 1: Armed black citizens escort Michigan lawmaker to capitol after volatile rightwing protest.

Bonus No. 2: Australia We’re Full Party or an Independent?

Bonus No. 3: Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds.

Bonus No. 4: Marine Veteran Supports Vote By Mail.

I have said this before, but give the pandemic we are all in the midst of and the topic of Ralph Nader’s essay this week, I’ll repeat myself. An aspiration to be famous is meaningless. Plenty of people are famous for acting in insanely stupid ways. I have many heroes, and many could be said to be well known, but none are famous or worthy of a Robin Leach profile.

Ralph Nader—when we are giving grudging recognition to the thousands of front-line health workers and others who are doing heroic work every day—draws the tight distinction between fame and heroism. Nader, in We Honor What We Value—Entertainers Over Saviors, writes:

“We honor what we value,” goes the old saying. In our hedonistic culture we value most those who can put a ball in a hole. We ignore those who save lives through civic action.

The sports champions—golf, basketball, football, and baseball—receive riches and accolades from the masses. They are inducted into “Halls of Fame” and are the subjects of biographies, and documentary and feature films. As for the mass life-savers—few even know their names, much less their dramatic victories against overwhelming odds.

I was reminded of this contrast by a major New York Times Sports feature on Tiger Woods and his comeback win in the 2019 Masters Tournament, which was watched breathlessly by millions of golf fans around the world. Praises poured in on social media and many articles, features and editorials covered every nuance of this golf match.

Barack Obama tweeted, “To come back and win the Masters after all the highs and lows is a testament to excellence, grit and determination.”

What about the excellence, grit and determination of economist James Love? In the midst of the horrendous HIV epidemic, Love brilliantly organized, argued, wrote and traveled the world before he found Dr. Yusuf Hamied and Cipla, an Indian company that took down Big Pharma’s $10,000 price for HIV drugs per African patient per year to $300 per patient. Neither Love nor his allies William Haddad and Robert Weissman were the subjects of features in major media outlets.

Others in the unsung circle of self-motivated stalwarts are David Zwick, Clarence Ditlow, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, and Joan Claybrook. Zwick helped write the Clean Water Act of 1972 and then started Clean Water Action which canvassed tens of millions of homes, distributing materials sparking local citizen action and nationally lobbying against water pollution for over four decades.

Engineer and lawyer Clarence Ditlow ran the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, DC and over forty years caused the recall of millions of defective cars. He also got the states to enact “lemon laws” to give voice to new car owners getting justice when their new car turned out to be “lemons.” Over roughly the same time span Joan Claybrook repeatedly blocked the auto-giants’ constant efforts to weaken or stop federal safety regulation that protected motorists.

As for Dr. Wolfe, with his small team, he produced three major books: Worst Pills Best Pills, Pills That Don’t Work: A Consumers’ and Doctors’ Guide to Over 600 Prescription Drugs That Lack Evidence of Effectiveness and Over the Counter Pills That Don’t Work reaching millions of consumers through mass audience outlets such as the Phil Donahue Show. Dr. Wolfe also persistently pushed the FDA and drug companies to remove hundreds of ineffective and/or dangerous drugs from the market, thus preventing health-threatening side-effects and saving consumers billions of dollars. That’s just a few of the successes of Dr. Wolfe’s Public Citizen Health Research Group.

In 1971 three scientists spun off from our organization to start the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Still turning its pistons nearly 50 years later, its long-time leader Dr. Michael Jacobson went after the junk food/drink industry and the deadly amount of high salt, high fat, and high sugar content in processed foods with scientific rigor and persistence. CSPI publishes the very popular health newsletter Nutrition Action and uses litigation and regulatory interventions to educate the public. CSPI arguably changed the nutritional habits of millions of people and exposed the slick and deceptive ads and crude direct marketing to children by the fast food chains and the cereal manufacturers. These companies are heavily responsible for the childhood obesity epidemic and its ongoing malignant health consequences.

Then there are Karen Ferguson and Karen Friedman running the Pension Rights Center in Washington, DC. They provide members of Congress and labor unions with technical advice on pension policy, inform the press, and help thousands of pensioners who are being ripped off by employers. Only trillions of dollars are at stake.

For these and many other long-term fighters for justice up against cruel or reckless corporations and their political toadies, there are few accolades, almost no recognition, and no citizen Hall of Fame.

It is time for foundations or the enlightened super rich to start an annual “Citizen Academy Awards” to correct this imbalance of recognition and offer the mass media some inspiring content. This big-time dramatic event would elevate our priorities as a society and showcase motivating role models for our youngsters. Perhaps Barack Obama could be the first MC for this authentic reality event.

To put the spectator mania for professional sports in perspective, we can listen to the words of the great all-round Hall of Fame superstar, the late Al Kaline of the Detroit Tigers. At his peak in the nineteen sixties, he told New York Times reporter Ira Berkow:

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing, if I’ve wasted my time all these years. And sometimes I think I have. I would like to have more to contribute to society. I don’t know, maybe a doctor. Something where you really play an important part in people’s lives.

Al Kaline was one humble, great athlete, compared, with some luminous exceptions, to the “me, me, me” narcissism of too many sports stars today. Sports superstars could easily direct more support and attention to those little recognized citizen advocates who protect the serious necessities of life on shoe-string budgets.

Moreover, in these critical times the selfless dedication of the nurses, doctors, grocery store clerks, postal workers activists, sanitation laborers, and other truly essential workers should spark long-overdue recognition of these valiant heroes and their critical contributions to our lives beyond the stage or stadium. ESPN has just broadcast a ten-part series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bills’ triumphant years of putting balls in holes for championships. Someday a network may produce a ten-part series on how citizen leaders historically built the justice safeguards that benefit us all. We should make it happen as owners of our public airwaves.

Who are your unsung heroes? Not the general categories—nurses, first responers, &c.—but the ones you know personally. Why do you think they’re a hero?

Bonus No. 1: Andrew Yang saves Bernie Sanders on the ballot in New York state.

Jeremy Scahill, in Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the Politics of Sexual Misconduct for The Intercept, ledes:

The Democratic and Republican parties are set to run candidates for president in 2020 who have been accused by women of sexually assaulting them. This week on Intercepted: Two dozen women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault, including rape. Trump has responded by denigrating, mocking and attacking his accusers. Eight women have made allegations of misconduct against Biden and one of them has accused him of sexual assault.

Biden, who is running on a campaign to restore dignity and honesty to the White House, emphatically denies he assaulted his former staffer Tara Reade and has sought to explain away his conduct toward his other accusers by portraying his unwanted touching as his way of being affectionate. The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant discusses Reade’s allegations, Biden’s response and the broader discourse in the media and Democratic Party surrounding the actions of the presumptive nominee toward women.

And former Nevada lawmaker Lucy Flores says Joe Biden touched her inappropriately, kissed her head and sniffed her hair when he was campaigning for her. She says she didn’t report it to the Obama White House at the time for fear of retaliation or rejection, but when Biden began to run for president she felt an obligation to speak out. Flores was soon followed by seven other women sharing similar stories. She discusses her experience with Biden, what it means that the Democratic party is standing by him and the impact of a choice between Trump and Biden.

There can only be one standard here or #Me Too is a joke.

Bonus No. 1: They should have never cast John Boyega in The Force Awakens.

Bonus No. 2: Now we can pretend the worst of Covid-19 is over …winners and losers?

Bonus No. 3: Stephen King: Which …Character Would Make The Worst Quarantine-Mate?

Bonus No. 4: The Country Is Gone but At Least We Don’t Have a National Debt.

Bonus No. 5: From the Veterans Administration: Snacking Smart During Isolation.

Joe Concha, in Washington journalist: ‘I want a coronation’ of Biden, not an investigation of allegations for The Hill, writes:

Washington journalist Martin Tolchin in a letter to the editor published Tuesday in The New York Times argued that he wants a “coronation” for former Vice President Joe Biden and not an investigation of a sexual assault allegation against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” Tolchin, a founder of Politico who is also a former top editor of The Hill, wrote in the piece.

“Would he make a great president? Unlikely. Would he make a good president? Good enough. Would he make a better president than the present occupant? Absolutely,” Tolchin wrote in a letter headlined “Joe Biden and Tara Reade: Whom to Believe?”

Krystall and Saagar give Tolchin full props for having the chutzpah to write what ever Biden apologist is thinking as they pretend to be interested in due process of law.