Buying Guns in Beverly Hills

I live in New York City and have read or heard about the rise in crime here. I have not been affected (yet), and my neighborhood seems relatively quiet. I have noticed, however, that things are not tidy. It sounds petty, but since the pandemic the street cleaners have not been active in residential streets. Lately that means that the falling leaves are clogging the gutters. (It's not like the street is a forest, but things are looking very messy, )

Lately, it struck me that beggars and homeless people, when on the move, hang out at places where middle-class people like me are to be found: in front of the local bank when I exit after making a deposit, or on the corner near Zabar's. And of course in the subway, a moving procession of the indigent. In other words, they plague the consciences of people who have to go out and earn a living. I say to myself, why do they not hang out on Park Avenue or other places where really moneyed people live? Probably because they would be chased away.

In any case, the title of this post is from a report in Los Angeles Magazine. It was not only Schadenfreude (look it up!) that caused me to be amused to see that California types in favor of defunding the police are buying guns to defend their property. (Yes, I know, I am labeling an entire class of people, but, really, that state is out of control, and mostly because of the pieties of such types.)

What's Your Paw Print?

 The current climate conference is coming to an end. The vacuity of it all is overwhelming, especially the pronouncements and virtue signaling of Western leaders who are without leadership. Do they get up every morning and feel oppressed at having to go through motions that will have no outcome? Come on: no one in the West is going to give up their goodies, and why should the rest of the world not want the goodies that come from exploitation of the Earth? The conferences, the protests, the disaster scenarios are so much fury sounding. Below is a piece I wrote and published in the New York Sun in 2007. Don't get me wrong: I am all for better use or our Earthly resources. The piece, however, concerns the fatuity of the liberal mindset.

I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the U.S., zipcode 10024, full of people who carry cloth shopping bags, who swear by fluorescent light bulbs, and who think that George Bush is evil for not signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.  The neighborhood also ranks high in the nation in the number of pet food deliveries.  (The highest is the adjoining zipcode, 10023.)  Parents and children now compete for space on the sidewalks and in the parks of the Upper West Side with the owners of medium-sized and large dogs or, increasingly, of multiple small dogs.  I wonder if these pet owners have calculated their dog's carbon paw print.

By this I mean the canine variation on "carbon footprint," a concept invented by environmentalists for measuring our energy consumption and, hence, our damage to the environment.  The more energy we consume, so it is claimed, the more carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere and, ergo, the more damage to the thermal equilibrium.  When we are not being told to hang out our laundry to dry, we are encouraged to visit websites where we can calculate our personal carbon footprint, based on household fuel use and travel.  On the larger scale of things, the so-called Carbon Trust in the U.K. is trying to force companies to publish the size of the carbon footprint required to bring their products to market.  It is only by submitting to such behavior-modifying protocols, say the environmentalists, that the polar bears, the rain forest, the earth itself can be saved.  As with most seemingly well intentioned but trendy projects, one can't help feeling that a great deal of obfuscation and hypocrisy is at work.

I'm not talking about Laurie David (living on Seinfeld royalties while traveling on her private Gulfstream jet to save the pl
anet) or Al Gore (spending $30,000 a year for electricity for his 20-room house with pool), but about my pet-rich neighbors on the Upper West Side.  According to the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, a moderately active 80-lb dog requires 1,955 calories a day, in other words, the energy requirement of a 120-lb woman.  A lactating dog of that weight requires 3,900 to 7,800 calories daily.  Smaller dogs of, say, 20 pounds, consume energy disproportionate to their weight compared to large dogs: translated, that means two miniature poodles consume more than a small German shepherd.  So, when calculating one's carbon footprint, dog owners should add an extra individual (or two or three) to their household size.

While it is true that some of the carbon dioxide released into the environment as a result of the metabolism of pet food is renewable, the energetics required to produce this food fare — the factories, the delivery trucks, the metal for the cans — are often nonrenewable or renewable more in principle than in practice.  "Tin" cans, for instance, made of iron, require about half a pound of carbon (in the form of coke) per pound to manufacture.  After use, they go to the city dump, where they may or may not be recycled.  Even the best metal-recycling systems recover only a fraction of the metal, while using huge amounts of nonrenewable energy in their operation.  A dog's natural diet is heavily weighted toward protein, while the fertilizer chemicals required to produce cattle feed or the high-protein legumes and grains that make up some pet foods are highly energy intensive.

Based on a report by MarketResearch.com, the U.S. pet food market is experiencing healthy growth: "marketers continue to convert pet owners to better quality, higher priced, more upscale fare."  This glowing report (from October 2006) mentions the "bases" that premium pet food makers manage to cover: among others, natural/organic, fortified/functional, weight control, breed-size specific, and gourmet.  People who purchase organic pet food would hardly be so cruel as to leave Fido in a warm apartment in the summer months without air conditioning.  Besides eight hours of cool air, don't forget to factor in the TV to keep him company, or the electric lights when he is home alone in the evening.  In very round numbers, a single 6000 BTU air conditioner run for eight fihours has the carbon footprint of 15 gallons of gas, which will drive a car for about 300 miles.  Over its ten-year life span, a dog enjoying the benefits of air conditioning will consume about 150 gallons of fossil fuel -- and that's assuming the system is operating at 100% efficiency! Don't get me started on cats, who compete with humans in consuming annually millions of tons of various fish varieties from overfished seas.

This exposition is not about animals, however, but about the hypocrisy and willful ignorance of the liberal mindset.  After all, what is the point of feeding "natural/organic" food to animals that lick the behinds of other animals, drink from toilets, chew on shoes (dyes and other chemicals in the leather), and sniff up dirty curbs and sidewalks?  As with the cloth shopping bags, the fluorescent light bulbs, and the Kyoto Treaty, Upper West Siders want to appear virtuous, all the while polluting the ground under our feet and fouling the air we breathe.

Alice Neel's Canonization by the New York Times

I was at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday, finally able to wander into the galleries displaying the works of artist Alice Neal. It was one of those times (very frequently these days) when I felt myself at odds with the Zeitgeist as proclaimed by the New York Times.

Neel's paintings are fun to look at. I was reminded of David Hockney's paintings, although they lack the sociability of Hockney's work. In any case, as I read today online such is the company in which the NYT places Neel: "This array confirms Neel as equal if not superior to artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and destined for icon status on the order of Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney."

But, really, Vincent van Gogh?

I am not an art critic, have not studied art history, but I have looked at a lot of paintings. There are many paintings by Neel that I find pleasant to look at, for instance, the one at the top of the post of "Two Dominican Boys of 108th Street." (Click to enlarge.) It is really quite charming, but from today's perspective (it was painted in 1955), one can't help feeling that it is a little patronizing.

Is she really a major artist? Why do I suspect that if she were not a "radical feminist" she would not receive this accolade? Would not indeed have major galleries of the Museum given over to her work. It is one of those exhibitions where the Met's publicity machine brings in the numbers, with people carefully reading the captions that reveal Neel's political and social ideas. Not much about the art itself, the craft. The other painting shown here is entitled simply "The Marxist Girl" (from 1978). It is not patronizing, like "The Dominican Boys," but it is evidence of Neel's bona fides. If you hear people talking about the show, be sure you will hear them talking about Neel's "radical" vision.

The Stasi = Cancel Culture

For a while I have been wondering who the cancelers are. I mean who are these people who jump out of the woodwork demanding blood when someone is incautious enough to say something they find offensive? I thought we lived in a time in which everything is relative, right? To be serious, however, does anyone reading this perchance know such a person? I know lots of people who foam at the mouth at the mention of the name of Donald Trump, but they are not cancelers. So who belongs to this invisible crowd?

It just hit me the other day that our current cancel culture works like the Stasi. For those who don't remember East Germany, the Stasi was the State Security Service, which, according to Wikipedia, "has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed." It's worth looking at the Wikipedia article, just to see the complexity of its resources. Alongside tens of thousands of official employees, the Stasi also relied on almost 200,000 "civilian informants, in other words almost 2.5 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 60. The purpose of which, lest we forget, and this is why the Stasi reminds me of cancel culture, was "to root out the class enemy." Cancel culture is rooting out deviant ideas.

Isn't that exactly what is going in the United States now? A very small percentage of people have a large majority of people scared to open their mouth to offer an opinion. Like the "civilian informers" in East Germany,  the cancelers are ordinary people. And invisible, hiding behind the anonymous nature of the internet.

 Image: LifestyleInquirer

A more unxious and hectoring Hillary Clinton

I am surprised that no one has yet compared Meghan Markle to our former First Lady. It should not come as a surprise that Meghan Markle is reportedly running for president. Unfortunately for Meghan, the draw is Prince Harry, just as it was Bill, who gave Hillary her outing in the public eye.

Image credit: Toons Mag

New York Headlines of the Day NOT

I just tried to set up a blog with the above title and was told by Google I could not do so. The idea for such a blog came to me, as it occasionally does, because the headlines in the New York Times regarding Trump and conservatives generally (and today's, October 9, 2020 are a doozy) are from the get-go biased. My idea was to set up a blog giving an alternate headline of the day if, for instance, Obama were in office or, alternately, if the New York Times were predisposed to Trump. Today's headline reads:

"AS VIRUS JOLTS WEST WING, TRUMP ENDS TALKS ON AID"

Let's say that Obama were in the White House on this date, would you be surprised to see the following headline:

"AS VIRUS JOLTS WEST WING, OBAMA TEAMS CONTINUES SEARCH FOR VIRUS"

In the second scenario, insert TRUMP for OBAMA.

I think everyone can see what is meant.

From the get-go, however, the New York Times has led the way in maligning an elected president, as can be seen in the image above, right after the election in 2016. I encourage folks to keep their own record.

The true downside of this media bias is its effect on the people of the Upper West Side, where I live. Their blood pressure rises every time they look at the front page of the Times. They have been turned into haters. They wish an elected president would die. These are people who are well educated, have a good income, and so on. But the worst part is that well-educated people have simply stopped thinking. I have friends who have law or literature degrees who nowadays reading nothing but The New York Times. One recently told me he finds even the long essays in the New Yorker too long. How pathetic is that. People in the former Soviet Union read through the bias, knew what the papers reported was false or biased. Americans, living in a free country, have given up thinking.

Group Think

In these times, when one feels despair about the intellectual state of America, it is enlightening (a word used advisedly here) to look at other times, other places. I speak of the Enlightenment itself. In connection with a book I am reviewing concerning literary journals in 18th-century Germany, I have been led to read a piece that appeared in an online forum called Republic of Letters, in which appeared, in 2008, a piece by the scholar Elena Russo, entitled "Slander and Glory in the Republic of Letters: Diderot and Seneca Confront Rousseau." It is of course an exceedingly arcane subject, concerning a quarrel between two of the major French philosophes. Diderot, it seems, was channeling the Roman philosopher Seneca in order to demolish intellectually the status of Rousseau. In a familiar tale, the two had as young men been friends, but in the course of time fell out. Rousseau could be quite contrary, and Diderot seemed to fear for the slander that Rousseau might publish about him. So, intellectual feuds come and go.

The terms of the argument in Diderot's essay, however, strike a familiar note in respect of contemporary attacks on people with different opinions. Herewith two quotes from the essay. In the first, the author is discussing Rousseau. I include the footnote, which renders Rousseau's own words:

1. "The Dialogues and the Essai [writes Elena Russo] evoke a world in which individuals cannot endure being alone, but are eager to make themselves subservient to the opinion of the majority, regardless of what evidence and reality tell them": 'Once the spin is set in motion, each and everyone follows the current and increases its force. How can one mistrust one’s own opinion when one sees that it is shared by everybody else?'”[19]

[19] “Quand une fois le branle est donné, chacun suivant le torrent en augmente l’impulsion. Comment se défier de son sentiment, quand on le voit être celui de tout le monde?” (ibid., 892).

2. The other quote is from Diderot, in which he speaks of the intellectual fraternity that should guide public opinion, i.e., men like himself, which he calls an "invisble church."

"I am talking about that small flock, that invisible church which listens, observes, meditates, and speaks in muted tones, but whose voice prevails in the long run and shapes public opinion." [24]

[24] Je parle de ce petit troupeau, de cette église invisible qui écoute, qui regarde, qui médite, qui parle bas, et dont la voix prédomine à la longue et forme l’opinion générale.

Finally, the author says the following about Rousseau:

Rousseau, who had always seen the philosophical church as a malevolent secret society entirely devoted to his personal destruction, had been living in that hell for a long time.

"Invisible church" is an interesting expression, for it conveys rules and dogma such that they become established, every bit as much as those of a "visible church, but, unless you are contrary (like myself), you accept the dogma and even believe that there is nothing intellectually conformist or repressive about it. It becomes "naturalized," indeed "enlightened"; after all, everyone YOU know thinks the same way, right, and even use the same words. Faced someone who disagrees with the dogma, the "muted tones" that Diderot invokes disappear, to be replaced by screams that drown out the words of heretics.