tales of copper city

"Crazy Heart"

Well, we saw "Crazy Heart" the other afternoon in Sierra Vista and Carole and I both loved it, if that's the right word.  It was a very painful movie for me; I know a little about a life that can drift out of control, running on empty, even as it might seem to some as if things are all right.

Jeff Bridges played the part of an aging, alcoholic country and western singer who had become a legend and was fading from view, playing in bowling alleys.

The brain, the environment, and life itself

I have long been interested in what I term "life itself," a bracketing of the word life to bring our attention to the existential experience of life as well as to heighten our appreciation of the miracle we are "given," engaged in, dancing with, and so forth. Life itself is in front of us, is something that we experience, even enact.

I am also interested in consciousness and the unconscious, or the brain or what some call "the shadow" and in what ways does consciousness produce what we think of as life itself.

Alva Noë is a philosopher at UC Berkeley and he warns of making the serious error of assuming that we are our brains;  this is a serious fallacy. We have a brain and with remarkable capacities but consciousness and our awareness of the processes of life are an achievement, an upshot of the interaction with our environment that we participate in, not something that is produced within our brains.  

Callie

When our retriever Dexter died shortly after we returned to Bisbee, we vowed we wouldn't get another dog, at least not for a very long time.  But then about six months later I was walking with Carole in the Farmer's Market in Bisbee, a block behind our house, and passing the Border Animal Rescue (BAR) stand, I noticed this small puppy sort of cowering under a chair from a group of playful children trying to lead her around with a short leash. For just a moment I caught her dark, mournful eyes---eyes that had seen too much in her short five months of life, as we found out later.

I turned to Carole and said, "We're screwed.  I think I've just seen our next dog."

Three days latter we brought Callie home.  She was frightened, spooked, anxious, suspicious and fearful.

She had been raised in a "hoarder" house in Douglas with as many as 20 or 30 dogs at a time.  She likely never had a moment when she felt secure and safe. And then she was adopted by an older man who abused her and BAR took her back.

She will be a year next month.  She's still nervous but she has grown from 15 pounds to almost 40.  She's happy, playful, and a little manic.  She has gone a long, long way to fill the empty place in our hearts when Dexter died. 

 The things we miss about Dexter we still miss, but when we turn, we see Callie, part retriever, part Australian shepherd or Border Collie, and totally tubular joy.

 
 
 
 

Across the border line

I spent the morning across the U.S.-Mexico border at Naco, commemorating two years of operation for El Centro de Recursos para Migrantes, the Migrant Resource Center.  A special part of the ceremony was to dedicate our new toilet, a much appreciated addition by volunteers and migrantes.  The baño was built by some of the volunteers and others who are friends of the Center.

Founded by Cecile Lumer and Peter Young, both of Bisbee, the purpose of the center is to offer food, clothing, water, limited medical attention, a telephone call to family, and, for many, money to return home by bus, if the returned migrants so wish.  

What day is today?

We watched JFK, Oliver Stone's riveting film last night, mainly because I have started reading JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, by James Douglass, another (and very good) case for the assassination of Kennedy by groups connected to the CIA and to the Special Ops group within the military, the group that during and after WWII assassinated foreign leader, rigged or stole elections, and overthrew governments.  

Douglass's book focuses on Kennedy's turn toward struggling for peace, ending our involvement in Vietnam, and the growing menace of the CIA and the national security state.  Kennedy was far from perfect but it seems certain he was turning toward nuclear disarmament with Russsia and there were enormous pressures resisting this turning, including many leading generals and the Joint Chiefs who wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia.

It's not over until it's over

The historic vote last night in the House of Representatives for health care reform is incredibly important. We should all celebrate and thank Speaker Pelosi for pulling it off.  Yet, as most know, the 220 to 215 majority reminds us that the struggle between strong democracy, majoritarian democracy and weak, anti-majoritarian democracy within the Democratic Party is not over, and will likely continue for some years into the future. 

If the Democrats succeed in the Senate and if they make the most of this victory next year by reminding the electorate, time and time over, how historic this shift is, then the future of a stronger, more progressive majority in the U.S. may be in the cards.

Chilling out

Matt Miller's column, "Take a Chill Pill," in The Daily Beast has it about right.  The critics (and that includes yours truly, quite often) need to stop wringing their hands and start acknowledging that we will likely get a health care reform bill this year, probably later than we want but almost certainly this year. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight also agrees and gives detailed reasons why.

As Miller, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress points out, the critical move will come when the Senate finally reports a bill and then it goes to conference between the House and the Senate.  That's when the White House and President Obama will step up with a full court press, marshaling supporters that have been at work for over a year, and hitting the hustings to galvanize public opinion.

Sarah Palin's "death panel" and Rush Limbaugh's, "Obama's a Nazi," and the hubbub at the town hall meetings are the rantings of a core within the Republican Party that's totally out of control and totally out of the picture, and they know it.  And a lot of Democrats in Congress know they can't possibly let this group shout our futures down.

Roseanna, a novel

I have just finished reading Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's police novel, Roseanna, the first in a ten-book series of novels about members of the special homicide commission of the national police. According to Per Wahlöö, the novels were written to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly" of the Swedish body politic of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Many who write and or read "police procedurals"---I dislike the term---proclaim these to be the best of alI and I agree. There is a haunting, spare, plain-spoken quality in the writing of Sjöwall and Wahlöö as they tell the stories of the lives and work of  the national homicide squad and its head Martin Beck.  

I love a certain kind of mystery, a mystery rich in the story of a place or time, a story that often serves as an autopsy. I spent a week in Sweden a few years after the last novel appeared and found the novels helped me understand the rather stiff and standoffish manner of many of the health officials I encountered. My time in Sweden felt very different than Finland or Norway.

Our higher power is a lower power

I have finished The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size,  by Tor Norretranders and, as some of the reviewers said, it's a real tour-de-force of some of the major controversies in science of the past 150 years or more, especially biology and physics. 

The author, an internationally-known Danish science writer is trying to show why some of the basic conflicts in the history of science turn on what we mean by information, communication, entropy, and consciousness, and this in turn requires us to understand how our brains work in its transactions with the world.  

As it turns out, consciousness plays an almost negligible role in communication, understanding and learning.  Most of this work is accomplished by our vast unconscious.

Consciousness is something of a fraud, as Norretranders argues, largely a bystander to the work of our larger unconscious, our bodies and our brains as they conduct the huge bulk of our transactions with the world moment by moment.

What is consciousness? A preview of coming attractions

The below is a blurb about a book by Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, on the Flipkart book mart website.  I don't know the outfit but I love the description of the book and I will be reading the book next week. I had already ordered my copy from Amazon before I found this wonderful description.

As John Casti wrote, "Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness." This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer [Tor Norretranders] draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the "Me" that the "I" draws on for most of our actions -- fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.