Awkward 23 year-old dude, William James, in Brazil 1865. 

Functionalism, early movement in the study of psychology credited to James, denies the principle of introspection, which tends to investigate the inner workings of human thinking rather than understanding the biological processes of the human consciousness, says Wikipedia. I'm getting a lot of shade and attitude towards psychoanalysis and Freud in that mission statement. And who might counter, I'll add, why overlook what tremendous insights the inner workings of human thinking can tell us about biological processes? Foremost, sex. But also childhood development and neurosis and the promise of offering some relief to those suffering neurotic conditions through clinical psychoanalysis or a talking cure. Isn't sex or sexual reproduction one of the most basic and fundamental biological processes? Maybe your puritan modesty and laudably fierce commitment to individual privacy rights, Professor James, obstructs your view but it's the behavioralism, Skinner et al, that grew out of your prudish functionalism that, unfortunately, lends itself to applying surveillance and coercive mechanisms of social control to biological processes. In psychoanalysis we are trying to help liberate humans from a traumatizing and haunted past. In behavioralism they attempt to reduce the human subject to a rat in a cage and data collection, although I understand you cannot be blamed entirely for any of that. But maybe a little? 

Lee "Scratch" Perry's Upsetter's 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle 1973

 

Deep soundtrack to A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James searing and sprawling 2014 novel about Jamaica in the 1970s and violent crucible of gang cultures and colonial control and CIA guns and a Jamaican diaspora. 

Actually, the whole album, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, and arguably the first dub album (1973), is a grower and a complex affair. Soundtrack music expansive and subtly orchestrated. Five drummers, three bass players (including "Family Man"), four guitar players, three organists, two pianists, melodica (Augustus Pablo), trombone, trumpet (New Orleans in the house), three more percussion guys (including Noel "Skully" Simms and Uziah "Sticky" Thompson), and Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby engineering the sound system, mixing and matching uncannily simple and impossibly Island-time seductive "riddims" with echoey accents and dub reverb into this moody vanguard vortex of exquisite sufferers lamentations and ebullient keep-on-keeping-on Blackboard Jungle Dub groove power. I've picked up gossip somewhere that Perry gets too much credit for the production that should go to King Tubby. I don't know about any of that other than to note Perry is listed as a musician (percussion) and Tubby isn't. Always with the office politics, I'm afraid. Well, despite or because of the these frictions the record is grandiose and sentimental but humble and organic and catchy and undeniable and absolutely bravura in its indelible studio dub music soundtrack to Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s. An homage to The Black Ark studio in Perry's backyard. And deep backdrop to James' epic story of Bob Marley's Jamaica. 

And if this 1970s Jamaica story interests you at all you gotta know Timothy White's epic biographical treatment of Marley, Catch a Fire, latest edition because it never stopped expanding until White's early death in 2002. 

Blackboard Jungle Dub. One of the great world pop sounds of the 20th century, which is one of the things the last century did have going for it. Lots of great popular music. 

    

Did A Billionaire Tech Bro Buy And/Or Hack the Election?

 And scary takes on where the denial of reality leads-- 

From the 1500s: Pieter Bruegel’s famed Tower of Babel, depicting societies driven apart when they lost a shared language to describe reality. In the Biblical version, it was an angered God who left human beings in destructive confusion, as his punishment. Now similarly divisive work is underway, engineered by earthly creatures driven by power, vengeance, and greed. (Getty Images.)

"In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News.... Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did." -James Fallows

"Words whose purpose is to portray life as it actually is: That’s a rare and even radical act in a time where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell us something--a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda.  Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb us out and dumb us down--or to put it another way, the language of advertising…

What do you suppose our prospects are for living long and happy lives… if our world-view is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies?  Or take it to the macro level: What do you suppose is the life expectancy of a country that’s lost its grip on reality?  Whose national consciousness is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies? ..Without the tools for seeing and describing things as they truly are?" -Ben Fountain 

"After the election, as I started watching the blame game unfold, I received clarity from a despondent Biden staffer. He asked, ‘How do you spend a billion dollars and not win?’ The staffer missed that one of Trump's new supporters spent 44 times that much to buy Twitter and control the narrative. We have to observe that it worked." -Josh Carter 

James Fallows @ Breaking the News

"Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?"

Nathan Heller on the Ambience of Information @ NY-er

The claims for hacking remain obscure but sound credible enough to me that you gotta hope some Dem officials are checking this out seriously asap. 

Duty to Warn Letter to VP Harris

Is Grump a foreign policy dove? If only

"In fact, I have lost count of the number of leftists who have told me in recent months: “Trump didn’t start any new wars.” Sorry, what? Trump spent his four years in the White House escalating every single conflict that he inherited from Barack Obama. Many have forgotten that Trump bombed the Assad government in Syria twice; dropped the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan; illegally assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil; armed Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen; and made John Bolton his national security adviser. Few are even aware that Trump launched more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Obama, dubbed “the drone president”, did across eight years in office.

But this time, we were told, it would be different. This time Trump meant it. No more war!"

Mehdi Hassan @ The Guardian

Besides, just check the partisan inference in these so-called "leftists" comments, Grump didn't start any "new wars," as if Biden, or Obama, or Dems have and are starting "new wars" all the time. In fact, Biden did not start the war in Ukraine or the Middle East, and hasn't entangled US troops in either, and ended a war that has lasted for nearly two decades, the longest running armed conflict in US history, that was one of the last "new wars," like Iraq, both started by Republicans.   

I don't know if it's social media, A.I., or what, but it's like the "leftists" are getting dumber just as the right is getting more desperate and violent. Not good. 

The Lesson of This Election: We Must Stop Inflation Before It Starts

"Countercyclical price stabilization through buffer stocks is important beyond oil. We also need it for critical minerals to encourage investments in the green supply chain and for food staples like grains to avoid violent commodity price fluctuations in the wake of extreme weather events.

In addition to buffering essentials, we need policies that align public and private interests with resilience. As long as corporations see profits go up thanks to threats of shortages in times of disaster, we cannot assume that they prepare for emergencies in the best interest of the public. Price-gouging laws and windfall-profit taxes are relevant policy tools here.

Of course, the main task remains tackling the root causes of the emergencies. But this is a momentous task, especially in our climate change era, and in the interim a systemic set of buffers, regulations and emergency legislation is necessary. Without this economic disaster preparedness, people’s livelihoods and the outcome of elections remain at the whim of the next shock."

 Isabella Weber @ NY Times

These recommendations reflect closely the insights in Weber's fascinating book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy (2021). No small irony then that this should appear in a newspaper whose house economist called Weber "truly stupid" just last year and has ignored studiously the greedflation element in recent price increases and helped legitimize a return of an indicted campaign that claims it is about to embark on the biggest project of free market shock therapy ever attempted in the world. The neoliberal order, corporate rule since 1980, anyway, precludes and scorns as "socialism" the kind of government buffering and stabilizing of markets that Weber proposes as essential. This feels, frustratingly, a little bit like the NY Times publishing their big story about Grump's decades of financial fraud a year after he's elected POTUS in 2016. Where were you guys when this was up for debate? Continuing to thrive and prosper economically while confronting climate change in the coming years and decades will require "industrial policy," government leadership and coordination, and the electorate just launched a new government hellbent on "deregulation" and "destroying the administrative state" forever. Not smart, and terrible for workers and the earth and everybody but the oligarchs. 

Hot Tub Time Machine: Morning After World Blues Rock

 "Toxika," Plastic People of Universe (1974): I've been thinkin' maybe it's ab time to pull out those Milan Kundera novels again or take another look at that German film The Lives of Others (2006). But some Plastic People will have to do, for now. This track comes off an album called Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned. So definitely no "Good Day Sunshine," even if that song comes off Revolver. The Plastic People recorded Egon Bondy in 1974 but the record circulated only by cassette until 1978 because it could not be officially released under the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia. Sometimes in my sampling of their work they sound like musicians trained to play orchestral music trying too hard to play rock music. And then there's "Toxika," where they make rock music with the serious, relentless, rigor of chamber music and it all makes sense. Work it, worry it, grind it, and pound away at it until it feels right again, and then get up and do it again tomorrow. Enduring the wasteland. Jamming as a blues thing, with an Eastern European folk music backbone. Job well done. 

"Engel Der Gegenwart," [Angel of The Present], from a soundtrack to a Werner Herzog film, Heart of Glass (1976). The story is set in an 18th century Bavarian village known for producing brilliant ruby glass. When the master glass blower dies, the secret of the production of the ruby glass is lost. The villagers are driven mad trying to recover the lost secret that provided an identity to their home town, and they more or less took for granted only a short time before. Weirdly, maybe even illegal somewhere, all the acting was performed under hypnosis. The people look like harmless zombies, in my dim memory of seeing the film at Cinema 21 in Portland in the early '80s. Popol Vuh's audio accompaniment is warmer, not quite so austere and melodramatic as the narrative, more bucolic, ritualistic, grieving, slow building acoustic and electric guitar grandeur that promises some spiritual release in little evidence in the story. The music is consummate bluesy ambient folk music with historical gravitas, even if entirely imagined by Florian Fricke in a house in the German country side in the 1970s. BTW, check out the Spaghetti western music allusion in the intro. 

"It ain't easy, it ain't easy, it ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down." "It Ain't Easy," David Bowie (1972). Gives Three Dog Night song more of an epic blues rock My Generation-feel, the way Bowie gives mythic glitter to everything he touches at this point. Turn it up. 

Reactionary and Progressive Laws in the Economic and Social Sciences

 "The history of social science [post-Enlightenment] could actually be written in terms of the history of the search for these two kinds of laws [laws of stability or laws of motion]. Here a thumbnail sketch must suffice. 

Ever since the natural sciences came forward with laws ruling the physical universe [Newton et al], thinkers on human society have set out to discover general laws that govern the social world. What economists, for once under the influence of Freud, have lately taken to calling the "physics envy" of their discipline has long been a characteristic of all the social sciences. The aspiration found the early expression in the assertion that the concept of "interest" provides a unified key to understanding and prediction of human and social behavior. This conviction was already widespread in the 17th century and carried over into the 18th, as Helvetius wrote triumphantly, "As the physical world is ruled by the laws of motion so is the moral universe ruled by the laws of interest." 

The interest paradigm found its most elaborate and fruitful application in the building up of the new science of economics. Here it was used both for elucidating timeless principles underlying the basic economic processes of exchange, production, consumption, and distribution and for understanding the specific economic and social changes that were visibly at work during the second half of the 18th century. 

It was Karl Marx's proudest claim...that he had "come upon the traces" of what he would call precisely "the economic law of motion of modern society." 

Any proposition to the effect that human societies pass necessarily through a finite and identical number of ascending stages [laws of motion] is a close relative, on the progressive side, of what has been described as the reactionary futility thesis [laws of stability that cannot be altered by reforms].  

Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991)