I am thankful for the beginning of astronomical spring.
THE PHOTO: A SQUIRREL
This Douglas squirrel munched on (what else?) a Douglas fir cone in Seward Park on Sunday. Other nature sightings included blossoming currant bushes, a spotted towhee, a Steller’s jay defending a nest, and chestnut-sided chickadees.
Someone told me that the little papery protrusions on a Douglas fir cone represent, in indigenous lore, the tails of the forest mice who fled the wildfires by burrowing under the cone’s scales.
IRAQ WAR INVASION ANNIVERSARY
I reflect today with sadness on a pointless and destructive war that cast a shadow over my young adulthood even as I, like most Americans, were mostly unaffected.
On March 20, 2003 and in the days after, I watched the cable news coverage of the US-led invasion of this distant country with some excitement at the night vision footage, dynamic maps of troop movements, and Dan Rather’s anchoring, feeling vague antiwar sentiment but with some trust that we must be doing it for a reason.
Read this article about the perplexing and perhaps unknowable reasons why the US started a war in Iraq. It points to towering hubris, failed policymaking, and failure to learn from mistakes. The author wrote the excellent “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq.”
I look on from the fiasco in Iraq to 20 years wasted fighting in Afghanistan. And now the US is sending billions of dollars and flooding the eastern European region with unknown quantities of weapons for a territorial dispute between a Vladimir and a Volodymyr.
I find myself fully agreeing with Republican Ron DeSantis on this point: Ukraine is NOT a vital US national security interest. Neither is Taiwan.
The weapons sent there will fuel conflict for decades. Next will come US-led wars in Africa or perhaps Taiwan. Oh, and then there are all the nukes. The extreme and growing size of US military spending, which both parties have repeatedly voted to increase, means we have more conflict ahead.
RECENT CAR CARNAGE IN THE SEATTLE AREA
On another downbeat note, I have noted recent human carnage on the streets of Seattle, all due to our car culture:
- Man killed in hit-and-run on Aurora Avenue in Seattle. The scum drivers sped off after killing a person.
- Driver killed after car goes off overpass in Georgetown. This one is fairly ridiculous. The fucking idiot was speeding, of course, when he drove off an obvious ledge to his death.
- A driver kills two men and then flees.
- A driver kills a woman in a hit-and-run in SODO.
- Drunk driver kills him or herself and two others in Puyallup.
I think hit-and-run drivers are the scum of the earth. But when you watch the news coverage, it turns out that every driver is potentially a hit-and-run driver. They are everywhere. The only way to reduce this carnage is to reduce the number of cars on the streets, slow them down, and separate them from moving people.
If you pay attention to car crash stories in the news, you realize the carnage is relentless. There is a recent safety initiative in Washington State with lots of good ideas, but we have a long way to go to reduce the destruction wrought by drivers and the design of our streets.
One person who is tweeting every incident of traffic violence on Seattle streets is Ryan Packer. Many of these serious incidents don’t even make the news, so these tweets are their only online mention.
CURRENT READING: THE EVOLUTION OF MINDS
Reading about the evolutionary origins of the conscious mind in “The Deep History of Ourselves” by LeDoux led me to “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” by Dennett. An example passage, following a discussion of complex acts of deception in predator-prey interactions, goes like this:
“The time has come to reconsider the slogan ‘competence without comprehension.’ Since cognitive competence is often assumed to be an effect of comprehension, I went out of my way to establish that this familiar assumption is pretty much backward: competence comes first. Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences. We have already considered the possibility of granting a smidgen or two of comprehension to systems that are particularly clever in the ways they marshal their competences but that may play into the misleading image of comprehension as a separable element or phenomenon kindled somehow by mounting competence.”
I would recommend “Deep History” for the clear writing, the art, the “single idea” nature of each chapter, and the narrative journey from the cooling of the early earth to human emotions. I trust a scientist over a philosopher any day. The Dennett book is good too, and is based on biology, but I am reading it simply for its different perspective and approach.
LAST WORD
I am grateful for the childfree lifestyle that allows me to sit down and read a goddamn book in the first place. My friend (bless his heart) had a recent sleepless night when his kid injured his other kid’s skull and they had to go the the emergency center. Then there was a another sleepless night over croup and another emergency center visit. Then he had to track down his crazy baby mama who had threatened to leave forever and then hitchhiked to the transit station in the dark.
Yet they say we need to procreate so that we’ll have workers to feed to the economy. Or perhaps to go fight in Europe, the Middle East, or Taiwan. Fuck that.
Birds, books and bikes > babies.
pseudoisaac 