I know some of my friends think I'm a raving lefty, a signed-up member of Antifa WAAAY to the left of Bernie Sanders, a very vocal supporter of Alexandria Ocasio.Cortez and her squad. Even if you do, I urge you to take a look at a blog called Bracing Views written by William J. Astore, a twenty-year veteran of the US Air Force who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the US Navy Postgraduate School. He is a captivating writer as well as extremely insightful. LOOK HIM UP!
September 08, 2019
August 03, 2019
July 30, 2019
We MUST deal with the climate crisis. EVERYTHING depends on it.
This is the link to the following article and comments on it.
The White House Blocked My Report on Climate Change and National Security
Politics intruded on science and intelligence. That’s why I quit my job as an analyst for the State Department.
By
Dr. Schoonover was a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.
Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities. It was important work. Two words that national security professionals abhor are uncertainty and surprise, and there’s no question that the changing climate promises ample amounts of both.
I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Trump administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.
That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.
After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and State Department, at the eleventh hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute verbal summary of the 11-page testimony. However, Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.
In blocking the submission of the written testimony, the White House trampled not only on the scientific integrity of the assessment but on the analytic independence of an arm of the intelligence community. That’s why I recently resigned from the job I considered a sacred duty, and the institution I loved.
As a tenured professor trained in physics and chemistry, I was admittedly an unusual fit for the intelligence community. I likely would never have considered the move if not for a program run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that connects Ph.D. scientists to roles within the U.S. government to shape and inform policy. I found a home in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the oldest civilian intelligence agency in the government and well known for its history of analytic sharpness and courageous dissent.
Science has long intersected with intelligence analysis. Indeed it would be difficult if not impossible to elucidate the ramifications of nuclear materials, near-Earth objects, infectious diseases and many other pressing national security concerns without a deep understanding of the foundational science of each. This too applies to climate change.
Decades of scientific measurements have established that global temperatures are increasing and ocean waters are acidifying. These changes produce shifts in a vast number of Earth system processes: in the atmosphere, ocean, freshwater, soil, ice masses, permafrost and organisms comprising the biosphere. Some effects are well known, like increased frequency and intensity of heat waves and droughts and rising sea levels. Others are less familiar, like decreasing oceanic oxygen levels and the redistribution of species.
With these environmental changes we should expect disruptions to global water and food security, reduced economic security and weakened livelihoods, worsened human and animal health, and risks to the global supply chain on which the United States and its partners depend. Political instability, heightened tensions over resources, climate-linked humanitarian crises and adverse effects to militaries in some places are likely to increase. Migration will probably increase both within and between nations, with sociopolitical and resource implications already becoming clear.
Despite the increased politicization of climate change, I embraced the opportunity to participate in an unclassified congressional hearing on such an important matter. In particular, I welcomed the chance to engage Republican members of Congress on the topic because of the party’s historically strong support of other science and technology issues. Previous closed-door discussions persuaded me that at least some Republican lawmakers were open to the argument that climate change was a national security concern. I believe that once one accepts that global temperatures are increasing, a fact that only the most ardent climate disbeliever rejects, the case for that fact’s relevance to nation security directly follows.
When I joined the government in 2009, leadership was generally receptive to environmental security analysis. After the administration changed in 2017, my job was arguably even more important because of the skepticism within the Trump administrative over climate change. The intelligence community tries to deliver objective truth to decision makers — truth that persists irrespective of who occupies the White House.
I take great pride in the many positive and productive interactions I had with senior officials in my 30 months in the Trump administration. But the decision to block the written testimony is another example of a well-established pattern in the Trump administration of undercutting evidence that contradicts its policy positions.
Beyond obstructing science, this action also undermined the analytic independence of a major element of the intelligence community. When a White House can shape or suppress intelligence analysis that it deems out of line with its political messaging, then the intelligence community has no true analytic independence. I believe such acts weaken our nation.
My last day on the job was July 12. In the weeks since the hearing I came to understand that there was little left for me to achieve in my position. More than most officers in the intelligence community, I interacted often with the public in discussions of environmental security issues. After the experiences of the prior two months, I wondered whether I could continue public engagements without being tainted by questions about my own analytic independence.
Grappling with the implications of climate change and biodiversity loss, the two primary security concerns I’m focused on, is too important to me to wait around for a possible change on these issues in a future administration. We need to better understand and anticipate the challenges facing the nation and its partners. Whatever my next step might be, I believe these issues remain critical, and I will try to continue this work going forward.
Rod Schoonover was, until recently, a senior analyst in Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. He also worked as director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
July 29, 2019
June 09, 2019
A few comments on the Centro Estatal de Cancerología in Xalapa
In the olden days I was an expert at inserting photos. Times have changed. I'm still learning the New Ways. All three of these are photos relating to this post. First is the front of CeCan, second is a hallway, to the right of which is the waiting area for people receiving injections and chemo, third is a view from the drive looking downhill and away in the distance to Cofre de Perote. Everywhere we look, we see mountains.
*****
My husband is at the moment a patient at CeCan, Centro Estatal de Cancerología, here in Xalapa. It is on the side of the hill called Macuil
tepetl which rises above the city and is mostly covered in forest. He started at a fancy clinic in Puebla which was pretty and well furnished and had glitzy publicity and was private and very expensive. A friend convinced him to meet with the hematologist at CeCan. She sat with him and me and our friend in a small office (someone else's) for over an hour and explained his illness and who she was and the services at CeCan, so he switched.
CeCan is a full service cancer center. They don't turn anyone away. To use it, you have to receive Seguro Popular which everyone here who is a permanent resident of Mexico and does not have other Mexican insurance is eligible for. It is part of the government's ongoing effort to provide universal health care.
So Jim applied for and received Seguro Popular and then went for certification of his illness and THEN enrolled at CeCan. I guess we brought some prejudices with us. Or I did. I wondered if it would be a raggedy, ratty, dirty overcrowded place like some of the places I took clients on Medicaid to years ago in the USA.
It isn't, by any stretch of the imagination. It is clean, attractive, and relatively cheerful and busy with staff as well as patients. And staff AND patients are kind, helpful and truly,I don't know the right word, but friendly and warm. I think a real cultural difference that I've experienced is that as opposed to USAers, Mexicans here are comfortable with strangers, at ease speaking to them, and not afraid of standing or sitting close to each other. It means a lot of warm contacts. CeCan is a large institution with several connected buildings and lots of hallways and turns which are different on different floors. It goes without saying that beginners at navigation there get lost. So you ask where something is, and people don't just tell you, they take you: both staff and patients do. Waiting on lines, people chat and laugh with each other. One woman received bad news on a line we were also on. She turned and her eyes filled with tears. I am learning to be a bit Mexican. Without thinking, I reached over and put my hand on her back. She put her head briefly on my shoulder and then lifted it and smiled at me before heading out. Old people are routinely offered chairs, including (groan) me. (Recently a woman said how young my HUSBAND looked! What can I say?)
April 22, 2019
February 06, 2019
Informing People of Stuff They Ought to Know -- Public Service Announcements
Last Wednesday we went to the Xico city hall to pay our predial, or property tax for this year. It wasn't quite the last minute, but almost. The city hall is an old stone building. The original facade has recently been uncovered and it is now fashionably old colonial looking. I will try to remember to post some pictures. This time I am posting photos of two public service posters distributed by the Comisión Nacional de las Derechas Humanas, a federal organization. Click on them to make them big enough to read. The first one, translated into English, says:
"Do you know what you are buying? Some products which you buy have been made by people captured for the purpose of exploiting them in forced work or services. Don't be an accomplice. Behind what you buy there could be a story you don't want to be a part of."
This second image which is definitely eye-catching says, "Seduction is one of the means most used by human traffickers to capture women for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Take care! Look past appearances. Behind what you think you want may be a story you don't want to be a part of."
This final notice, stuck on the wall with masking tape, is anything but arty. But it is a nice notice. It advertises on behalf of the State of Veracruz that you can get free civil marriage for a period of time: "The general public is invited to participate in the free matrimony campaign inspired by The Day of Love and Friendship [Valentine's Day here]. Information in the office of the Civil Register from 9am to 3pm.Requirements: Birth certificate, electior credential, CURP, kids' birth certificates."
Here in Veracruz and maybe all México, the civil marriage by a civil officer is required for a legal marriage, followed by a church marriage. For poor people, both can be too costly to afford. Many people just move in together and consider themselves married for this reason. After eight years, it is considered a legal marriage. Even before, both partners are entitled to some right of marriage. But this gesture will certainly be welcomed by some couples. You can see that after a few years, they may very well have kids.
Here we often see public service notices addressing all kinds of issues like these. There are many public health messages on safe sex, taking care of yourself in pregnancy, how to avoid illness, etc. They tend to be quite direct. Also, I am also struck by how art is used, how arty, if you will, the illustrations are. I thought you might enjoy this glimpse into everydayness.
January 19, 2019
Empathy might help.
Recently discovered prisoner writings on the wall of Lyon’s notorious Montluc prison from which résistant and historian Marc Bloch was taken and executed by the Nazis on the night of the 16 June 1944. A noted historian, Bloch wrote: ‘The task of the historian is understanding, not judging.’ Photo by Bony/AP/Rex.
As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called ‘a culture of “calling out”, a culture of outrage’, she asked students to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’. She could have been speaking as a historian.
History, as a discipline, turns away from two of the main ways of reading that have dominated the humanities for the past half-century. These methods have been productive, but perhaps they also bear some responsibility for today’s corrosive lack of generosity. The two approaches have different genealogies, but share a significant feature: at heart, they are adversarial.
One mode of reading, first described in 1965 by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur and known as ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, aims to uncover the hidden meaning or agenda of a text. Whether inspired by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud, the reader interprets what happens on the surface as a symptom of something deeper and more dubious, from economic inequality to sexual anxiety. The reader’s task is to reject the face value of a work, and to plumb for a submerged truth.
A second form of interpretation, known as ‘deconstruction’, was developed in 1967 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It aims to identify and reveal a text’s hidden contradictions – ambiguities and even aporias(unthinkable contradictions) that eluded the author. For example, Derrida detected a bias that favoured speech over writing in many influential philosophical texts of the Western tradition, from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The fact that written texts could privilege the immediacy and truth of speech was a paradox that revealed unarticulated metaphysical commitments at the heart of Western philosophy.
Both of these ways of reading pit reader against text. The reader’s goal becomes to uncover meanings or problems that the work does not explicitly express. In both cases, intelligence and moral probity are displayed at the expense of what’s been written. In the 20th century, these approaches empowered critics to detect and denounce the workings of power in all kinds of materials – not just the dreams that Freud interpreted, or the essays by Plato and Rousseau with which Derrida was most closely concerned.
They do, however, foster a prosecutorial attitude among academics and public intellectuals. As a colleague once told me: ‘I am always looking for the Freudian slip.’ He scours the writings of his peers to spot when they trip up and betray their problematic intellectual commitments. One poorly chosen phrase can sully an entire work.
Not surprisingly, these methods have fostered a rather paranoid atmosphere in modern academia. Mutual monitoring of lexical choices leads to anxiety, as an increasing number of words are placed on a ‘no fly’ list. One error is taken as the symptom of problematic thinking; it can spoil not just a whole book, but perhaps even the author’s entire oeuvre. This set of attitudes is not a world apart from the pile-ons that we witness on social media.
Does the lack of charity in public discourse – the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent – stem in part from what we might call the ‘adversarial’ humanities? These practices of interpretation are certainly on display in many classrooms, where students learn to exercise their moral and intellectual prowess by dismantling what they’ve read. For teachers, showing students how to take a text apart bestows authority; for students, learning to read like this can be electrifying.
Yet the study of history is different. History deals with the past – and the past is, as the British novelist L P Hartley wrote in 1953, ‘a foreign country’. By definition, historians deal with difference: with what is unlike the present, and with what rarely meets today’s moral standards.
The virtue of reading like a historian, then, is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.
The French medievalist Marc Bloch wrote that the task of the historian is understanding, not judging. Bloch, who fought in the French Resistance, was caught and turned over to the Gestapo. Poignantly, the manuscript of The Historian’s Craft, where he expressed this humane statement, was left unfinished: Bloch was executed by firing squad in June 1944.
As Bloch knew well, historical empathy involves reaching out across the chasm of time to understand people whose values and motivations are often utterly unlike our own. It means affording these people the gift of intellectual charity – that is, the best possible interpretation of what they said or believed. For example, a belief in magic can be rational on the basis of a period’s knowledge of nature. Yet acknowledging this demands more than just contextual, linguistic or philological skill. It requires empathy.
Aren’t a lot of psychological assumptions built into this model? The call for empathy might seem theoretically naive. Yet we judge people’s intentions all the time in our daily lives; we can’t function socially without making inferences about others’ motivations. Historians merely apply this approach to people who are dead. They invoke intentions not from a desire to attack, nor because they seek reasons to restrain a text’s range of meanings. Their questions about intentions stem, instead, from respect for the people whose actions and thoughts they’re trying to understand.
Reading like a historian, then, involves not just a theory of interpretation, but also a moral stance. It is an attempt to treat others generously, and to extend that generosity even to those who can’t be hic et nunc – here and now.
For many historians (as well as others in what we might call the ‘empathetic’ humanities, such as art history and literary history), empathy is a life practice. Living with the people of the past changes one’s relationship to the present. At our best, we begin to offer empathy not just to those who are distant, but to those who surround us, aiming in our daily life for ‘understanding, not judging’.
To be sure, it’s challenging to impart these lessons to students in their teens or early 20s, to whom the problems of the present seem especially urgent and compelling. The injunction to read more generously is pretty unfashionable. It can even be perceived as conservative: isn’t the past what’s holding us back, and shouldn’t we reject it? Isn’t it more useful to learn how to deconstruct a text, and to be on the lookout for latent, pernicious meanings?
Certainly, reading isn’t a zero-sum game. One can and should cultivate multiple modes of interpretation. Yet the nostrum that the humanities teach ‘critical thinking and reading skills’ obscures the profound differences in how adversarial and empathetic disciplines engage with written works – and how they teach us to respond to other human beings. If the empathetic humanities can make us more compassionate and more charitable – if they can encourage us to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’ – they afford something uniquely useful today.
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