Tree of Life

We are heartbroken.  Our thoughts and prayers are with you.  It's what everybody says after the all-too familiar catastrophes, especially mass shootings.

To some extent they mean it, of course.  But this time for me, for Margaret and me, it's more personal than usual.  Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh was once our home.

The candlelight gathering Saturday night after a heavily armed anti-Jewish ultra right bigot shot up a Squirrel Hill synagogue during services, was held on the corner of Murray Avenue and Forbes Avenue, a spot I know very well.  My heart is there with them now.

News stories rightly emphasize that many Jews live in Squirrel Hill, the historic center of the Jewish community well beyond Pittsburgh, and at least some stories also mention that it is now a very diverse area, as it has been for decades.  I'm sure many of the people at the memorial were not Jews but there to bear witness to solidarity with their neighbors.

I lived in Squirrel Hill in the 1990s.  Margaret and her children lived near its northern edge for longer than that, close to Wilkins Avenue where 11 people were shot dead and others injured.  I lived at its southern border, but at the foot of the steep hill that forms Murray Avenue, the neighborhood's commercial center.

Though it is likely I have some Jewish ancestors, I was raised Catholic. I have never been more comfortable in a neighborhood than I was in Squirrel Hill.  I walked up Murray Avenue, and then up Forbes nearly every day.  People in Arcata are courteous.  People in Squirrel Hill were friendly, in a personal way.

A CBS affiliate story included a brief interview with the rabbi who until this year ran the Tree of Life, where the gunman attacked:

Meghan Schiller: Did you ever as rabbi think that you were gonna have to deal with this?

 Diamond: “I thought about it all the time, I have to tell you. When I was there, in the back of my mind, I always have the thought of something like this happening and what I would do, unfortunately, because of the world we live in.”

Or at least the country we live in.  The times we live in.

Steph Inflection

As I withdraw from following the daily chatter on civilization's fall into the abyss, I renew and revive my interest in the meaningless but at least aesthetically pleasing worlds of sports.

So in Major League baseball's postseason I've gone easily from a Yankees fan (because Andrew McCutchen was starting) and Brewers fan to a Red Sox fan, and there have been some beautiful games.  A couple of catches in the outfield last night were classic. The Sox infield is amazing.

I've even gone back to football despite my misgivings.  That's how heinous the news is.

But the NBA season has begun and that's golden.  As in Golden State Warriors, and Steph Curry.  A two-time MVP and 3 point shooting phenom who literally changed how NBA basketball is played, he's been kind of an afterthought the past two seasons.  But in this young year, he's back.

He's scoring at around a 30 point game average, but last night he had one of those signature Curry games.  He scored 51 points in three quarters (really, in two quarters plus a little more.) He hit 11 three point shots, and extended his series of records for 3s that is too dominant to go into. The Warriors were so far ahead after 3 quarters that he didn't play in the fourth, so there's no telling what records he might have set.

Here are two things I think about now when I think about Steph Curry.  First, that he ends his daily shooting regimen with 100 three pointers.  That's 100, to end  his workout.

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Second, there are these video ads on YouTube with famous people in various fields--acting, film directing, writing, etc.--advertising their Master Classes.  In his, Curry talks about what shooters focus on when they shoot.  The front of the rim of the basket?  The square over the basket on the backboard?  Curry says he focuses on the metal rings through which the nylon of the basket are threaded.

He said that from any angle he can usually see at least two or three of them.  He focuses on these as he takes his shot.

Consider then that Steph Curry, the documented best long range shooter in NBA history, is often shooting from about 30 feet away, or a little less and a lot more.  He hit a couple from 40 feet last night.

He is also known for one of the quickest releases in basketball--and he's even quicker this year.  No stare at the basket, dribble and set his feet and shoot.  His shot is off in a shot, as you can see from several long-range shots in the above video from last night.  How can he even see those metal rings from 30 feet and beyond, let alone focus on them in a millisecond?

Apparently Curry was hitting regularly from half court in his warmups last evening.  But it isn't until the game starts that shooters know if they're hot.  Game announcers often suggest that a particularly long range shot after several makes is a "heat check."  Once a shooter is hot, teammates look for them to shoot.  And in the first and third quarters last night, Curry's shot was on fire.  Several shots were not only from amazing distances and in difficult situations, they were beautiful.

So it's more than distraction.  It's wonder.

The Tantrum Defined (in Context)

Richard Powers:

"History is filled with moments when doomed regimes redouble their own insanity by speeding up self-destruction rather than capitulating to accountability. We are in one such moment, perhaps the most catastrophic one ever.

No one should be fooled: the motive behind all of this “deregulation” is not primarily economic. Any reasonable accounting reveals that the sum of these measures carries external costs far greater than the hoped-for benefits. (Did you know that the number-one killer in the world is pollution? And that doesn’t even include premature deaths from climate change.)

The push to remove all environmental safety strikes me as mostly psychological. It’s driven by a will to total dominance, underwritten by the hierarchy of values that George Lakoff calls “stern paternalism,” putting men above women, whites above minorities, Americans above all other countries, and humans above all other living things. Trumpism calls it a return to greatness (a.k.a., “Grab ’em by the…”). It might better be called a tantrum in the face of a crumbling control fantasy."
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"Of course, the real question about optimism and hopefulness is: Hopeful for what? I have zero hope that our current culture of consumer individualism will survive. How could it? Its basic principles are at war with real real life, and fantasy can’t defeat inexorable biological truths. There is no place for a system predicated on endless growth in a world of finite resources being infinitely recycled. Anyone who can’t conceive of a way for humans to exist other than capitalism will find herself pinned under overwhelming despair.

But hopeful for life? It’s a pretty good long-term bet. The planet has several times come back from the brink of nothing, even from perturbations in the planetary systems as violent as the one we have set in motion. That kind of hope, though, requires thinking on the scale and time frame of forests, not people."

Richard Powers
Interview with the Los Angeles Times Book Review on his novel Overstory. Emphasis added.

I don't necessarily agree that deregulation isn't primarily economic--that is, based on greed-- as it benefits a small number of wealthy corporations and rich Republicans, and therefore their corrupt political minions.  But I do agree that the "crumbling control fantasy" is a major component of what's going on now, especially its emotional power.  Anyone can have a control fantasy, even those oppressed by the wealthy who identify with those who were used to controlling things; identifying with them on the basis of race, gender and ideology.  Powers articulates this well.

The Context Defined

Meet tomorrow's headliner today.

There's news, and there's news that tells the future.  Which is more significant?

The insects are dying out. According to the Washington Post, one recent study of a Puerto Rico forest showed that beetles, bees and other invertebrates have declined in number by 45%--nearly half--in just the past 35 years.  In German nature preserves, flying insects have decreased by three-fourths.

In that Puerto Rico forest where the insect crash was calculated, there is also a noticeable decline in birds, as well as lizards and frogs--animals that feed on insects.  This trend appears to be global.

The report concludes that "climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance, indirectly precipitating a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web."

In other words, when the insects go, all lifeforms are threatened--from plants and on up the food chain.

If this trend continues, there is no way that the current global population of humans, and probably its current interconnected and interdependent civilization, can survive.

But we might just call that the nail on the coffin.

 Civilization is threatened now in many parts of the world, and will be likely be in most or all of the world in this century, with conspicuous challenges evident everywhere--even the US and other rich nations-- before the century is half over.

One look at the climate crisis data concludes:

"It’s already bad. But when will things get so bad that it is obviously — obviously — the worst problem in the world? How long until we go over the cliff? That depends on how much we’ve heated up already, and how fast we’re getting hotter.

Bottom line: at the rate we’re going, we’ll hit extremely bad, possibly intolerable, probably between 2040 and 2045. Maybe a couple years later, maybe a couple years earlier, but it’s not far away."

That comports with other views. A few years ago, by the way, that date used to be 2050, but the climate news has been worse that expected.

Could the worst be avoided?  Probably, though it's too late to avoid it completely.  Twenty years ago, experts said we had ten to twenty years to address the climate crisis.  They meant take meaningful if gradual steps to reduce the output of greenhouse gases.  But not much was done.  So that option is no longer available.  Nothing will stop the climate crisis--it has started, and it's unlikely to go back to the way it was for a very, very long time.

Now you may hear some saying we have ten to twenty years to act in order to avoid climate catastrophe.  But this time, they mean going all out--transforming global civilization to reduce carbon and other greenhouse outputs to nothing-- immediately.  In the meantime, it will still be getting hotter.

There's a lot going on that doesn't make headlines.  A lot of local and regional plans, many promising new energy and carbon sequestration technologies, a high proportion of them involving sophisticated uses of plants, but also conceptually simple tasks such as planting trees (as well as a complete end to cutting down existing forests.)

But there isn't the political will, the consensus on any level, that is necessary.  Not now.  So...

So in a couple of decades, or maybe sooner, there will be no news that isn't in one way or another climate crisis news.

Among the big newsmakers will be insects.