Voyager, Adorno, Mahler

The solar system’s ‘family portrait,’ as depicted by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990.  Gallery of Voyager photos here (The Guardian)

On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the launching of the Voyager spacecrafts–and on the occasion of Voyager 1‘s apparent entering of interstellar space–some comments from Theodor W. Adorno’s Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1992 [1971]), reflecting on the Jewish socialist composer’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (“The Song of the Earth”):

“To the work the earth is not the universe, but what fifty years later could fall within the experience of one flying at a great altitude, a star.  For the gaze of music that leaves it behind, it is rounded to a sphere that can be overviewed, as in the meantime it has already been photographed from space, not the center of Creation but something minute and ephemeral.  To such experience is allied the melancholy hope for other stars, inhabited by happier beings than humans.  But the earth that has grown remote to itself is without the hope the stars once promised.  It is sinking into empty galaxies.  On it lies beauty as the reflection of past hope, which fills the dying eye until it is frozen below the flakes of unbound space.  The moment of delight before such beauty dares to withstand its abandonment to disenchanted nature.”

67 years after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima

 “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” – physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, citing the Bhagavad Vita

As should be self-evident, the U.S. military’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which on 6 August 1945 ushered in the nuclear age by murdering 150,000 persons instantly and several tens of thousands more due to lingering radiation effects, was a horrific crime—as was the dropping of another atomic device three days later on Nagasaki—like Hiroshima, a civilian settlement. It will ever remain an act consonant with the labors of the Nazis, as Chris Hedges rightly notes; as with the totality of the war on Vietnam and many other historical negations experienced in the years following 1945, it certainly violates Theodor W. Adorno’s stipulated new categorical imperative, one shared by many others, demanding that “nothing similar” to Auschwitz be allowed to recur (Negative Dialectics, 365). It is a testament of the horrors for which capital, the State, and imperial-racism are responsible, ones that clearly continue in 2012.

The naked imperial racism reflected in the pathetic rationale provided by the triumphant imperial U.S. State in the wake of its victorious revenge on Hirohito’s rule is appalling for its starkness: utilization of nuclear arms on Japanese population centers was needed to “save American boys.” Nothing can ever justify such an act. The nationalist—racist—impetus to constrain one’s concern to those of similar birth-country cannot seriously stand up to reason, justice, freedom—as present and real as the regime of chauvinist barbarism is today, as we think of the shootings at a Sikh place of worship and the burning-down of a Muslim one in the U.S. Beyond the genocidal effects of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the legacy of the atom bomb lives on in a very particular and alarming fashion on Japan’s Honshu island now, considering the ongoing effects of the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear plant—the direct ones as well as the potential metaphorical or allegorical ones.

To make a point using an image from an social effort originating geographically in a space other than Japan, one that subverts the hegemonic order—the continuity of oppression—by naming it for what it is:

Solidarity with the victims of war! For the generalized development of a mass-social intervention that radically rejects racism, imperialism, capitalism, ecocide! That humanity’s life instincts prevail in time to defend itself and the multitude of other beings threatened by catastrophe! An absolute NO to world-destruction, militarism, fascism! In times of “total negativity,” TOTAL REVOLUTION!

On the G20/12

This week’s latest reunion in Mexico of the G20 country-governments—that is to say, the ‘most advanced’ States within the global capitalist system—predictably continued in the tradition of mindlessness and unreason for which the transnational oligarchy should by now be well-known. Meeting in the luxury-resort town of San José del Cabo in Baja California Sur—a locale which, like Cancún in the Yucatan, effectively functions as a beachside colony for the most privileged, whether Mexican or foreign—the parties to the G20 merely worked to attempt to stabilize their dominion over the peoples of the world and non-human nature.

As was the case with the 2010 Cancún climate negotiations, the parties to the G20 seemed not to be troubled to be the guests of Felipe Calderón’s PAN government, responsible as it is for the deaths now of more than 60,000 Mexicans since the initiation of the current president’s highly militarized war strategy against particular drug cartels (but not all of them).¹ In this is once again seen the total moral bankruptcy of the transnational capitalist class and its State protectors—the same ones who have agreed to meet next December at the invitation of the super-reactionary Qatari dictatorship to pretend to continue discussing how they might address the ever-more severe climate crisis. Following the established pattern, no indication was made by G20 member-governments that they were at all cognizant of the International Energy Agency’s recently published findings on greenhouse-gas emissions in 2011, which broke the previously established historical record of 2010, that the atmospheric carbon concentration has now reached 400 parts per million in the Arctic regions, or that the the highly respected Nature now reports depressingly that environmental collapse is indeed a possibility within a generation or two, given prevailing trends.

But enough of analyzing the priorities of l@s de arriba: these are clear enough for anyone to see; they consign humanity to oblivion, as John Holloway writes succintly and correctly.² The point it would seem should be to focus one’s efforts on analyzing responses and challenges from below to capitalism’s destructiveness and brutality. Sadly, there was shockingly little of this seen in Baja California Sur around the dates of 18-19 June, when the G20 was meeting in the luxury hotel El Barcelón and others on the beach of San José. In this sense, the resistance to the G20 in Los Cabos was not that seen in Cancún against COP-16 , let alone in Seattle against the World Trade Organization in 1999, or the mobilizations against the G8 in Genoa in 2001. True enough, there was organized an Alternative Meeting of the People against the G20 (Cumbre de los Pueblos frente al G20) in La Paz, some 160 km north of San José del Cabo, which was hosted at the offices of different labor unions (telephone workers and teachers) and saw mostly male-dominated panels examining various aspects of the multidimensional crisis for which the G20 is principally responsible—capital flow, official corruption, the condition of the working classes—but the event was poorly attended, as far as this writer could see, and it seemed ineluctably beholden to reformist/social-democratic approaches to the crises of capitalism.

The autonomist-anarchist Mexican youth groupings who intervened so prominently at the Cancún COP were glaringly (and sadly) absent from the scene in Baja California. Apparently, they had previously planned to come and organize a radical counter-summit to the G20, but they opted instead to hold protests and mobilizations in central Mexico parallel to the meeting of the G20, following with the previously planned outline of “indignation, mobilization, occupation, agitation, popular assembly, blockade of capital flow, [and] direct action.” These protests in Mexico City included an event entitled “Culture against Capitalism” as well as a decolonial caravan that traveled through Mexico state, Puebla, and Tlaxcala. In light of these developments, it cannot immediately thus be said that resistance to the G20 was limited entirely to the talking shops of La Paz, and this is not to call into question the strategy of these anarchists, but it might perhaps have been more satisfying to have seen more direct forms of confrontation to the death-drive being impelled by the global oligarchy in Los Cabos, rather than just let it and the Mexican security forces continue with their absurdities unimpeded. This is not of course to overlook the question of monetary cost in traveling from central Mexico to Baja California Sur, nor is it to deny that Los Cabos itself is, like Cancún, located in a rather remote region of the country—thus it is unsurprising that the oligarchy would choose such a site for its 2012 meeting.

Yet despite the alternative summit at La Paz and the resistance seen in and around Mexico City, George Monbiot is right to raise the question of “where is everyone?” While anti-systemic thought and action have progressed considerably in the past two years, given the revolts in the Arab-majority world, the mobilizations throughout much of Europe, and the Occupy/Decolonize movement in the U.S., it is not necessarily the case that Theodor W. Adorno’s “global self-conscious subject” is developing, in Hegelian terms, to such a point that it could—perhaps by a sustained worldwide general strike—threaten the rule of capital and the State; perhaps people in general are too consumed with labor, family commitments, and the culture industry.

And so the catastrophe-conflagration continues inexorably: thus will it ever be, as Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos writes, until—and unless—a wind from below develops and comes finally and radically to overturn insanity and world-destruction.

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1See John Gibler, To Die in Mexico (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011).

2John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2010).

Hansen, protesting climate-destruction

World-renowned NASA physicist James Hansen, author of Storms of My Grandchildren (2009) and numerous critical climatological reports, gives a TED address regarding the dire problem of climate change.  Recommendable comments, despite Hansen’s racist-reformist insistence that his suggested fee-and-dividend model be accessible only to legal residents of the U.S.

Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam

“Massacre in Korea,” Pablo Picasso (1951)

“The present struggle is directly aimed at the peaceful and happy life of our future generations on this planet.”

– Dr. Nguyen Trong Nhan

NB: Also published on Dissident Voice

The widespread employment of the defoliant and herbicide Agent Orange (AO) by the U.S. military during its barbarous war against the peoples of Vietnam should by all accounts be considered one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century. The mass ecocidal-herbicidal campaign to utilize dioxin-containing AO against the tropical environment of Vietnam, begun in 1961 by the liberal-imperialist Kennedy administration, greatly helped facilitate the murder of between 2 and 5 million Vietnamese that was prosecuted by U.S. forces in their war. Continuing in the traditions practiced previously by Indochina’s French administrators of violently defending colonial relations—and indeed, vastly extending the scope of these traditions—the U.S. military came to subject the Vietnamese people to a “chemical holocaust,” as writes Fred A. Wilcox, journalist and author of Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese government statistics cited by Wilcox, 3 million Vietnamese are presently suffering from the effects of toxic weapons used by the U.S. in its neo-colonial war, with 500,000 of this total number being children. 150,000 of these minors today suffer specifically from the effects of exposure to AO 40 to 50 years ago, given the biologically persistent properties of dioxin. As a means of considering and reflecting on these negating realities, Wilcox’s Scorched Earth is an important work, one that resists forgetting—instead attempting adequately to respond to the “call to all humans for help” made by Nguyen Quynh Loc on behalf of his children and all others victimized by AO and war.

As Wilcox reviews, the historical mass-utilization of AO aimed to suppress the Vietcong armed resistance both directly through the eradication of tropical forests that effectively served as a refuge for VC soldiers as well as indirectly by destroying agricultural communities that were suspected of nourishing the VC effort. The AO defoliation campaign, estimated to have eradicated at least 3 million acres of vegetation, comprised a true scorched earth strategy. Wilcox quotes Dr. Arthur Westing, one of the world’s foremost chemical experts on the TCCD-dioxin found in AO, as summarizing the general U.S. approach in the war as being characterized by “long term systematic fury inflicted… upon the environment of an enemy dependent for its survival upon a rural natural-resource-based economy.” It is important not to forget that this highly destructive aspect of the larger counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam was merely a complement to the mass terror-bombing campaigns carried out by the U.S.—with several hundreds of times the order of magnitude of the Hiroshima bombs being dropped in incendiary and napalm forms on Vietnam, in accordance with Henry Kissinger’s maxim of “anything that flies on anything that moves.”¹ As is to be expected, the herbicide strategy directly destroyed the lives and livelihoods of those deemed to be potential VC supporters by bringing about about widespread hunger in rural regions and provoking severe erosion and flooding-events through its devastation of forests. In part, this dual AO-bombing strategy sought forcibly to depopulate rural regions in its mass-displacement of agriculturalists who then fled to Vietnam’s cities—a vision for which the reactionary public intellectual Samuel P. Huntington famously served as an apologist, thus fulfilling his role as Geheimrat, or adviser of the sovereign, as write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or “expert in legitimation,” as Antonio Gramsci or Edward Said might call him.² The “moonscapes” or “parking lot[s]” to which Wilcox likens much of the land of Vietnam ravaged by U.S. imperial administration might serve as a symbol of the overall effects of the mad war on Vietnam’s resident peoples and ecology.

To begin to understand the devastating effects of dioxin exposure on humans, it is necessary to consider some basic biology, which Wilcox provides to us. Through experimentation on Rhesus monkeys and other animals, scientists have determined the TCCD-dioxin to be carcinogenic and fetotoxic, in addition to being possibly mutagenic, meaning that it induces mutations in DNA. Among other effectrs, it acts on animals by inhibiting mitosis, or cell division. Dioxin has been observed to remain concentrated within fatty tissues for decades—indeed, it is unknown how long it will persist in human tissues. The toxin is also transplacental, such that it passes from mother to developing fetus. These considerations thus help explain the emergence of the various disabilities and birth defects seen in children of Vietnamese parents who were exposed to AO by U.S. forces: lack of limbs or eyes, hydrocephaly (large head), musculoskeletal inhibition, severe intellectual impairment, and other neurological effects, to give only a few examples. Basic reflection on these realities demonstrate the extreme hardships impelled by imperial power relations. The photographs taken by Wilcox’s son Brendan as printed in the book are a testament to the irrevocable fate to which the U.S. has subjected these children and their families, as to its generalized destruction of the lives of millions of people, in Vietnam as in many other of the world’s societies. The anecdotal stories Wilcox shares about the means that Vietnamese fighters took to protect themselves from the effects of AO following suspected exposure by spraying—that is, taking baths and eating green beans due to their belief in the antitoxic properties of the latter—similarly well-illustrates the extreme power inequalities represented in the Vietnam War, like other colonial wars.

Rather than be a work that examines horror triumphant, Scorched Earth also examines the litigation efforts undertaken by Agent Orange victims against Dow Chemical and other manufacturers of AO in 1984 and 2004. The proceedings of the two cases as related by Wilcox are at once disconcerting and typical of established power. The same Judge Weinstein who presided over both cases practiced legal positivism in denying the plantiffs’ claims regarding the willfull destruction of human life resulting from AO exposure, perpetuating the reactionary view that the U.S. government was unaware of its effects on humans at the time of its employment, and did not in any case intend directly to harm individuals by using it as an herbicide. A similarly absurd argument is one advanced by the chemical companies’ legal defense, which claimed that the plaintiffs’ claims, if taken seriously in a court of law, would “risk a stark lack of respect for the Executive Branch” and potentially set a precedent for interfering with its war-making capacities.

Wilcox rightly likens the outcome of this attempt at legalistic redress as being governed by a “Realm” of power, a disorienting and Kafka-esque “magic show” in which dominant social forces hold sway. As Kafka himself might argue, the fate of the Vietnamese litigants subjected to dioxin poisoning serves as yet another example of the radical inadequacy of approaches that would pursue struggles for justice within established institutions. It should be evident that the millions of cases of Agent Orange victims to begin with are themselves embodied condemnations of established society, responsible as it is for the “bourgeois-democratic holocaust” that was Vietnam.³ Justice for these persons and all others similarly brutalized by imperial violence cannot be achieved within existing social relations: Wilcox’s elucidation of the juridical proceedings should be seen as confirming this.

This is not to say that Wilcox himself presents his testimony on the Vietnam War within a frame that is expressly anti-racist or revolutionary—however much his findings could be seen to serve these ends. He invokes the slaveowning Thomas Jefferson to argue against the absurdities of the chemical companies’ legal defense, likening the hegemony of these corporations to that of kings. Beyond this, Wilcox questionably claims that the US and its allied South Vietnamese military “intended to warn” rural Vietnamese of their plans for mass-application of AO to the environment—as though this postulated intention, never actualized in reality, lessened the actual crime, if it can be said to have existed at all in the first place. Furthermore, the listing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is glaringly absent from a brief list Wilcox assembles of the usage of chemical and other non-conventional weapons throughout history. Imperial Japan, Saddam’s Iraq, and Nazi Germany are listed, but the advent of direct employment of nuclear arms against persons is strangely overlooked. Moreover,Wilcox’s closing words in the book—that we onlookers “ignore” the ongoing suffering of Vietnamese “at our own peril”—seem puzzling: Is the legacy of chemical warfare in Vietnam really about us? These lapses aside, Wilcox’s book importantly represents a broadside against prejudice, egotistical narcissism, and self-induced blindness.

Representative in this sense is Wilcox’s quoting of Professor Ken Herrmann, an ex-veteran who has dedicated time to researching the effects of AO in Vietnam, as posing the question of why the unavoidably monstrous ongoing legacy of the U.S. military’s crimes in Vietnam does not “haunt the conscience of America.” Part of the reason for this disconcerting suspension of mind may be due to a lack of awareness, one that Wilcox hence has crucially and helpfully addressed with Scorched Earth. Yet this absence of awareness is likely associated more broadly with prevailing society’s tendency to render-invisible the lived experiences of those persons who suffer the myriad ill-effects of imperialist power-arrangements—the dismissal of the interests of those Chomsky terms “unpeople,” who are even preconsciously denied interests altogether.⁴ The task of overcoming the “bourgeois coldness” Adorno observes as perpetuating life-negating political projects is a decidedly pressing one, given the various threats to life contemporarily observed around the planet, from the endless massacres in Afghanistan to Israel’s continuous bombings of Gaza and the plight of malnourished and ill children or those subjected to radioactive exposure, whether from depleted-uranium rounds, as in Fallujah, or from the melted-down nuclear reactors of Fukushima.⁵ In his comment that the fate of Vietnam is the “toxic mirror into which avaricious corporations do not want ordinary people throughout the world to look,” Wilcox points to the potential collective-power of the now-subordinated multitudes, hence perhaps pointing to a future possibility that could dismantle imperial rule and so finally succeed in preventing the recurrence of anything resembling the genocidal Vietnam War.

Thus, Wilcox is mistaken to claim that “all we [observers] can do is promise that we will tell [other] people” about the tragic realities of Vietnam. Documentation and bearing witness—“lend[ing] suffering a voice,” as Adorno advocates—surely are important projects for the present and likely futures, but they are not all.⁶ We observers of the myriad negations perpetrated and overseen by constituted power can instead of mere spectators be subjects and agents—actors who rather than resign themselves to world-destructiveness rebel against it, seeking to overturn it. Against the catastrophe that “just goes on,” in the words of Walter Benjamin, and the “normality” of “death”—the reign of genocidal-imperial racism and environmental devastation, or capitalism—a conscious humanity must labor, abolishing the institutions and ideologies that perpetuate brutality and unreason.⁷

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1Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “’Losing’ the World: Amercan Decline in Perspective,” Truthout, 15 February 2012.

2Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin, 2006).

3Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: Verso, 1984).

4Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 133.

Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models , trans. Henry W. Pickford, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 201.

6Ibid, Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973), 17-18.

7Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940 (trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 184; Adorno, Minima Moralia, §33.

Understanding and Preventing Suicide

Fernando Martí, “Quetzal”

 “Suicide is never born out of exaltation or joy; it is a child of the negative emotions.” — Edwin Shneidman, The Suicidal Mind

With her Understanding and Preventing Suicide (2009), psychologist Kristine Bertini seeks to explain some of the factors that can contribute to the development and completion of suicide; in her own words, the book is written as a “map of how the suicidal mind can develop.” Like many other investigators of the human mind, Bertini seeks generally to inform her audience about the issue of suicide toward the end of identifying risk factors for this phenomenon in an attempt to do away with these. Bertini herself admittedly exhibits “a great joy for living” and “a ferocious life instinct”; this may inform her view of suicide as psychopathology, as is reflected in her claims that “[l]ife… seeks to replenish itself and survive,” that “[t]he desire to live is instinctual.”

On Bertini’s account, a great deal of vulnerability to suicide in life is related to one’s early life experiences, in addition to genetics; like Freud, Bertini focuses much of her attention on early childhood. Predisposition to suicide can thus develop out of biological and personality formation or in response to particular life moments of hopelessness. For her, the emergence of suicidal proclivities can be inhibited by one’s experiencing expressions of love and warmth in infancy and childhood, for these allow the self to develop a sense of security as well as an unconscious knowledge that one will be cared for. These life-conditions generally permit for the subsequent development of independence and self-esteem. Conversely, childhood neglect and challenging social environments such as those plagued by racism material impoverishment can increase one’s susceptibility to depression and other neuroses. In this sense, children of more socio-economically privileged parents are at an unfair advantage in terms of the potential for suicide (not to mention much else), though Bertini importantly notes that adverse social conditions can be largely overcome if one is afforded a loving and supportive family environment, which can help establish a foundation in which the developing self can flourish, despite negating surroundings. Some children are more vulnerable to depression and suicide simply because of genetics, as they can inherit predispositions to these conditions from their parents; if to this propensity to mental-health issues is added a lack of understanding or supportive parents—ones who are absent or unavailable—the child’s emotional vulnerability and subsequent development are considerably exacerbated. Moreover, one’s own medical vulnerability or the experience of that of a close loved one can contribute to depression and suicide ideation, especially among children. In general terms, Bertini argues that a child’s disconnection from her parents can lead to the development of a “bleak, impoverished inner world” that can contribute to depression and suicide ideation. If a child is rejected by her parents, she may come to think of herself as unlovable and hence experience low self-worth, depression, and anxiety. Children who are victims of sexual abuse are particularly susceptible to depression and suicide. As Bertini notes, these individuals may wish for death to escape the fear, pain, and confusion to which they are subjected by their oppressors, hence the turn to suicide; if interpersonal trust is violated at an early age, the victim of abuse is more likely to isolate oneself and use avoidance patterns in her dealings with others. As regards the struggle against childhood and adolescent depression and suicide, the author stresses that it is critical that adults “be aware that each developing soul needs to be considered special and cherished.”

Continuing her investigation, Bertini highlights three specific factors that contribute to adult suicide: internalized despondency, learned helplessness, and distorted belief systems. Internalized despondency, or despair, she ties to several causes: biology (genetics), traumatic life experiences, and depression; she notes that this hopelessness may well have served as a coping mechanism for difficulties in childhood that has been carried on later into life. The worry here is that a prolonged period of living this way tends to convince one that there is no chance for an alternative to hopelessness; in this sense, suicide can be seen by the potential victim as a means of control and a measure to put an end to pain (suicide can thus be considered an “oasis of peace and calm, beckoning like water in the desert”). Learned helplessness Bertini situates as being a response to the environment; she stresses that this is a common reality for members of marginalized social groups, who are alienated from the mainstream-dominant culture either because of culture or psycho-physical status (the disabled and those who “look different” are especially vulnerable to this, Bertini says, as are the impoverished). Many experiencing learned helplessness choose interpersonal relationships that reinforce alienation, thus contributing to the view that there can be no escape; as a result, suicide is again seen as a possible exit or as punishment of those who administer systems of exclusion. Those exhibiting a distorted belief system have developed a “strong negative belief system”; they feel that there is no option but suicide, that they are powerlessness to change destructive and hopeless patterns, and that their helpless and despondent state will always be. They often hold, based on past life experiences, that they that will never be loved, and hence that the future is bleak. Suicide ideation and completion in this regard holds out the prospect that the victim be remembered after she is gone by those who grieve her death; perhaps ironically then, self-death can lead others to express their love for the subject, the very absence of which is driving one to suicide. In this section Bertini links depression strongly with suicide, noting the former potentially to be a “silent killer,” as it can easily go unrecognized.

Systematizing risk factors for suicide, Bertini identifies those with mood disorders, low self-worth, a history of abuse, family history of suicide or mental-health issues, serious medical problems, a lack of an “important other,” loss, exposure to racism, low socioeconomic status to be of high risk. In terms of U.S. populations, she emphasizes adolescents, the homeless, the elderly, white men, LGBTQ individuals, Native Americans/Native Alaskans, and Pacific Islanders as being especially vulnerable to suicide attempts and completion. Against these trends, the reconstructive point for Bertini is for those contemplating suicide to replace negative thought-patterns with positive self-talk and hopeful messages. Drawing on her own clinical experience and research, she states that individuals can be made to recognize the internal resources they have for changing own destiny, in addition to externally derived ones: some examples are basic coping skills (walks on the beach, hot baths, music, exercise, good food), surrounding with loving others, engaging in therapy, and taking medication if necessary. She recommends that those who are suicidal must “reach out for help,” perhaps following their instincts for self-preservation, if they are to successfully avoid completion; she suggests that observers or friends of suicidal persons engage with that person toward the end of referring her to professional help.

Bertini closes her work by examining human resiliency, the a “dynamic process of healthy adaptation in the face of severe adversity.” She observes that this may be the result of “unknown genetic determinants”; one’s temperament at birth is seminal in this sense, though the basis for the nature of this temperament is at a certain point seemingly random. Reviewing psychological findings, she stresses that one of the principal factors guarding against suicide is having a supportive environment. Under such conditions, one’s own mental-health problems and possible struggles with suicide can be dealt with and resolved in a loving and caring manner, making the emergence of these less likely. In general, then, social support serves as a buffer against the difficulties of life. For children, there is often an “important other” different than one’s parents who can “help the child feel a sense of being loved and esteemed by someone in the world,” especially if such love and esteem are lacking in the domestic setting: “little kindnesses that others can provide in the early years foster hope and resilience and improve the individual’s ability to combat despair and suicidal tendencies throughout the life span.” Similarly, love as expressed by one’s friends and companions helps to create hope in that person, thus helping her to flourish. Beyond this, having an adaptable personality has been seen to aid individuals in navigating life’s many challenges. Additionally, cultural identification and religious/spiritual affiliations can help to promote sense of belonging, reducing isolation and depressiveness. Interestingly, a child’s escape into fantasy may allow her greater resiliency in the sense that this engagement with fantasy can foster the belief that life can be different; the recall of pleasant memories can serve similar functions. As Bertini concludes, “[t]he ability to hope that a positive outcome will be eventual is essential to ensure emotional well-being.” Self-efficacy and optimism—the belief that one has the ability to change one’s circumstances—lead to action, reducing despair. Hope fosters the desire to survive!

Blue marvel

A “blue marble” image focusing on the northern half of Earth’s Western hemisphere, this was taken by the Suomi SPP satellite on 4 January 2012, following the example of the Apollo astronauts of the 1970′s.

As Dr. Jeff Masters writes, analyzing the photo:

“The image is very interesting meteorologically, and extremely strange. It is obvious that it is a winter image, as revealed by the large area of stratocumulus clouds off the U.S. East Coast all the way to South Florida, caused by cold Canadian air blowing offshore. However, the U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

On the other hand, the tropical waters off Florida, the Yucatan Peninsula, and Cuba look beautiful.

Some chemical and biological implications of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster

Ngo Van, “Saigon Insurrection” (1945)

The .pdf below is a copy of the presentation I delivered on 14 December regarding the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill-disaster.

Deepwater Horizon Macondo.pdf

Creation and Revolution with Camus

The close to the section “Creation and Revolution” from Albert Camus’ L’Homme Révolté (The Rebel)–the end to Camus’ chapter “Rebellion and Art”–as translated by Anthony Bower in 1956 (the emphasis is mine):

“Meanwhile, the triumphant revolution, in the aberrations of its nihilism, menaces those who, in defiance of it, claim to maintain the existence of unity in totality. One of the implications of history today, and still more of the history of tomorrow, is the struggle between the artists and the new conquerors, between the witnesses to the creative revolution and the founders of the nihilist revolution. As to the outcome of the struggle, it is only possible to make inspired guesses. At least we know that it must henceforth be carried on to the bitter end. Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists. In the long run, therefore, art in our revolutionary societies must die. But then the revolution will have lived its allocated span. Each time that the revolution kills in a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the world according to their laws, it will not prove that quantity is king, but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair. Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary mentions a German lieutenant—for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone. And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man [sic] cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want construct the dignity of existence and of labor. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolution. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in….”

No hay para celebrar II

Part II of an n-part series

@ Favianna Rodriguez

Headline 5 of the Democracy Now! 5 July show reports the following:

Japan: 45 Percent of Children Near Stricken Plant Exposed to Radiation

“Officials of the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission say around 45 percent of children in the Fukushima region have experienced thyroid exposure to radiation following the nuclear reactor disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi facility. But officials said only trace amounts of radiation were detected. The survey was done in late March and does not reflect any exposure since then. Meanwhile, a new survey of soil at four locations in the city of Fukushima found that all four samples were contaminated with radioactive cesium at levels well above the legal limit. One sample was found to be 90 times the legal limit and higher than the limit for compulsory resettlement after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.”

Such revelations come 6 weeks after the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported global capitalism to have released 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2010–the highest annual total in human history, this under conditions of recession (i.e. decreased economic growth rates, that is value-production for the capitalists).  A 4 July Guardian article cites “aid agencies” which suggest the conditions presently obtaining in the Horn of Africa–the region’s worst drought in 6 decades, a situation defined by the United Nations as being “pre-famine”–are largely the result of recent erratic and extreme weather, with the region’s torturously violent past and present contributing to the breadth of negation as well.