Power Shift - Naomi Klein

Necessary alternatives to attain climate justice.
Naomi Klein deconstructing the climate crises.

Paul Ryan’s nasty ideal of self-reliance

A close look at Ryan’s writings shows an intellectual style that is amateurish and parochial. His thought is just a package. The distinction between an analysis and a manifesto is lost on him. He gets his big ideas second-hand, from ideological feeders: when he cites John Locke, it is John Locke that he found in Michael Novak (who erroneously believes that strawberries appear in the philosopher’s account of the creation of property by the mixing of labor with nature). Irving Kristol and Charles Murray are Ryan’s other authorities; and of course Rand, who was a graphomaniacal demagogue with the answers to all of life’s questions. His picture of the New Deal and the Depression is taken from—where else?—Amity Shlaes. When Ryan cites Tocqueville, it is as “Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville,” and when he cites Sorel it is as “Georges Eugene Sorèl,” which is the Wikipedia usage (except for the misplaced accent, which is Ryan’s contribution). When he cites Sorel, he seems unaware that he is appealing to a thinker who admired Lenin and Mussolini and advocated the use of violence by striking unions. (Scott Walker has no greater enemy than Georges Sorel.) Similarly, Ryan cites an encomium to the United States by “Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn” without any apparent awareness that three years later the Russian writer issued a virulent denunciation of America and its “decadence.”

Ryan’s mind is inadequately aerated. His intellectual universe is a conformist, like-minded universe; he gives no indication of any familiarity with, or curiosity about, thoughts and traditions that differ from his own. I am not competent to evaluate his numbers, but no budgetary expertise is required to see that his moral and political concepts are crude and sometimes weird. The passage about “the safety net ... transform[ing] self-reliance into a vice” continues: “The Nation becomes a vast Potemkin Village in which the most important elements—its people—are depleted by a government that increasingly ‘takes care’ of them, and makes ever more of their decisions for them. They take more from society than they provide for themselves, which corrodes society itself, from the inside out. The environment also becomes ripe for exploitation and control by the few who remain ‘ambitious.’” Is Ryan one of the “ambitious”? It is hard to say. The meaning of that sentence, with its Galt-like ominousness, eludes me. It is pretty clear that Ryan does not know what a Potemkin Village is: the entitlements against which he rails are neither artificial nor ornamental.

Ryan throws around “individualism” and “collectivism” as if they are utterly transparent and self-evident terms, and as if it is 1950. The poor guy was born too late for the intellectual excitements of the cold war, so he insists upon finding them in his own lifetime by apocalyptically transposing the old antinomies onto the contemporary debate about government and entitlement. Yet the analogy between the totalitarian collectivism of the Soviet Union and the role of government in Obamacare is talk-radio stupid. “With the demise of the Soviet Marxist experiment 20 years ago,” Ryan writes in his Roadmap, “the appeal has shifted to European-style socialism, with its redistribution of resources.” What on earth is he talking about? The redistribution of resources is a common activity of government, socialist or otherwise; and the Soviet Marxist experiment was not about the redistribution of resources. It was evil in a way that “European-style socialism” will never be. Is Dodd-Frank Lenin’s ghost? The staggeringly obvious fact is that we are not, in the United States in 2012, on a road to serfdom. Free enterprise in the United States is not remotely threatened. It is merely not universally taken to be the whole of American reality, or the paramount consideration in every American discussion of every American policy. We are living in an age of paranoid capitalism.

WHAT, THEN, is so terrible about self-reliance? Nothing, unless it is promoted into an absolutism, into a cult of sacred egotism, into an “Invictus”-like illusion. (That is another classic of ego-swelling adolescent literature.) The more people do for themselves, the better. The more they assume responsibility for the course of their lives, the better. Who denies these noble banalities? Our agency is the clearest expression of our freedom. We possess extraordinary powers. It is miraculous what the works of human hands have accomplished, except that it is the opposite of miracle, because we are not supernatural beings.

But Ryan’s concept of self-reliance, the gospel of John Galt (“you are your own highest value ... as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul ...”), is devoid of all humility—it is the very vainglory against which the Bible, Ryan’s ultimate book, warned. My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth! Ryan may have disavowed Rand’s atheism, but he has not quite escaped her revolt against human finitude, her deification of the individual. This radical individualism is a delusion of impotence made over into a delusion of omnipotence.

It is also, analytically, a colossal mistake. The splendid isolation of the trader, the builder, the innovator, the entrepreneur, the superman, does not exist. It is one of the many flattering legends that successful people in this country devise about themselves. (Like the legend that success is a proof of personal virtue.) The individual—even the individualist individual—is always situated densely in the customs and the conventions of society. Where is Burke when you need him? And where are the otherwise ubiquitous metaphors of the network and the web? If, for conservatives, the market can serve as a model for society, surely it is because the market is web-like, society-wide, a social entity, a thicket of bonds and connections and influences in which creativity flourishes not least because it is enabled and implemented by others who, gratefully or opportunistically, recognize it. Competition is itself a kind of social compact, and in this sense a kind of cooperation.

El perverso ideal de autosuficiencia de Paul Ryan

La soberbia capitalista y el delirio de omnipotencia.
La mitologia individualista radical y el salvaje culto a si mismo que yace en el corazon de la idea conservadora del capitalismo
Pobre tipo el individuo aislado con tarjeta de credito

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle

when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 Beers.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.
They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly.
The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was
Full.
They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.
Of course, the sand filled up everything else.
He asked once more if the jar was full.
The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'
The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.
The students laughed..
'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.
The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car..
The sand is everything else---the small stuff.
'If you put
The sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.
The same goes for life.
If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.
Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.
Spend time with your children.
Spend time with your parents.
Visit with grandparents.
Take your spouse out to dinner.
Play another 18.
There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.
Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter.
Set your priorities.
The rest is just sand.
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented.
The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.'
The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.

Bob Dylan on His Mystical Rebirth

In a startling stretch of his interview with Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan assigns a special spiritual significance to the death of Robert Zimmerman, the president of the San Fernando chapter of the Hells Angels, in the Sixties.

"Have you heard of transfiguration?" Dylan asks Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Mikal Gilmore, referring to the New Testament account of Jesus Christ's transformation from physical to spiritual form. "Well, you're looking at someone that's been [transfigured]."

Bob Dylan first learned about the death of Zimmerman in the book Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels. Dylan even brought the book to his interview, and he asked Gilmore to read a passage aloud. Dylan was struck by the fact he and the Hells Angel had identical names and both had motorcycle accidents a few years apart. "I didn't know who I was before I read the Barger book," says Dylan.

The biker Bobby Zimmerman died during a Hells Angels' run to Bass Lake in California when a muffler fell off his motorcycle. When he turned around to retrieve it, he was accidentally run over by another biker.

Later in the interview, Gilmore presses Dylan for more details on his ideas.  "You can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church," Dylan says. "You can learn about it in some old mystical books, but it's a real concept . . . So when you ask your questions you're asking them to a person who's long dead. You're asking them to a person that doesn't exist."

http://www.elboomeran.com/upload/ficheros/noticias/dylan.pdf

Greenpeace: From hippies to lobbyists

Where did it all begin?

In 1971, it took just a handful of individuals who were strongly opposed to nuclear testing to give birth to this worldwide organisation.
The Greenpeace story started in late 1960s Vancouver, where - as in many other North American cities at the time - a protest movement was in full bloom. With the US embroiled in the Vietnam war, many deserters and conscientious objectors had sought refuge in neighbouring Canada.
And it was against this backdrop that a new idea began to win adherents.  "Stopping the war in Vietnam was important to me and we wanted to ... we were peace activists," explains author and photographer Rex Weyler. "But we knew that there was something else brewing and this was the environmental movement, this was ecology; we kept saying ecology is the next big thing."

Quantum optics

Serge Haroche and David Wineland have won the Nobel prize in physics for their work on quantum optics.