The Part That Reveals The Whole

A Wisconsin disgrace has been in the news lately. On April 20 around 1,000 Protesters gathered at a  dog breeding farm near Blue Mounds, about 30 miles west of Madison, the state Capital, in an attempt to free an estimated 2,000 beagles that have been confined there. 

The dogs were bred to be subjects of research, both on the farm and through sale to university and other researchers. There have been reports for many years about the mistreatment of the dogs, from starvation, mutilation and surgery without anesthesia. Most egregious is the practice of "debarking," where dogs have their vocal chords removed in order to silence them. 

In typical fashion, protesters in April were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and arrested by Dane County deputies. 

The dogs have now mostly been sold to rescue agencies, pending eventual adoption. The breeder, Ridglan Farms, suffered no criminal penalties, and remains in business. As long as animal testing in scientific research is legal there will be a market for live sentient beings. That includes humans, though not as zealously or ruthlessly as in times past. We now have the practice of informed consent, which, needless to say, didn't used to be the case.

I don’t see this as an isolated situation, confined to  industrialized cruelty to animals. We live in a mass system, a planetary glut of 8.2 billion people and counting. In order to accommodate such a vast number of people a method has developed that is known as industrialism. It began in the 18th century, when production shifted from small-scale, typically individual or family operations to mass production in factories and plantations.

Workers in the mass system are seen not as human beings, but as factors of production. They are components, and when combined with capital – tools, equipment, buildings - and land and management, goods can be made. When humans become no more than inputs to produce output they lose their humanity. At least to owners and managers.

This dehumanization in the mass system becomes generalized as we become more anonymous, mere faces in the crowd. Callousness ensues, and mass societies become indifferent to the lives and suffering of unknown others. In the industrial world just about anything goes in the drive for ever more goods and riches. The prospect of more keeps the system going, no matter the consequences.

The treatment of research beagles seems eerily similar to Homeland Security detention, where human beings are starved, crowded and mistreated in every way possible - similar to research animals. The brutalization and murder of protesters is similar to how the Ridglan protesters were treated.

We have nearly two million people incarcerated in this country. Officially there are 770,000 homeless people. 

Our foreign "policy" has been mass murderous since before WWII. Our latest adventure, at the behest of our client state Israel, is to surprise bomb Iran into submission. For some reason they chose not to submit. We are very slow learners.

A segment on my favorite radio show on public radio, Science Friday, offered some critical insight into this malaise. The guest interviewed was Daniel H. Wilson, scientist and science fiction writer, who also is a member of the Cherokee Nation. He offered this insight:

"So a common theme that was expressed by settlers whenever they came to North America, the first colonists, they looked out at these beautiful forests, and they compared them to the Garden of Eden. They were perfect. They were amazing. And it was clear that they were wasted on these primitive people that were actually living there.

And so I think that there’s a saying that’s appropriate here. Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that was the case for those settlers. They looked out at those forests and they saw magic, but what they were looking at was Indigenous technology. So the land had been manicured meticulously for hundreds or thousands of years using farming techniques, agroforestry techniques, and all of that stuff– I think that the key difference all of that stuff is not designed to scale up and out to feed an exponentially growing population. It was technology designed to create a sustainable balance.

And so I think to from a Western perspective, that just looks really inefficient, and that looks really primitive. And the reason is because they’re grading it on a different scale. How many millions of people will that feed? Well, it won't. It’s not designed to. It's designed to keep a certain number of people imbalanced to promote the long-term survival of that human population. And so I think that’s what defines Indigenous technology."

Therein lies the answer. Demass the system. Return to a human scale. Save the planet. This of course will not be easy, and will mean a lot fewer people. The population of the U.S. when I was born was approximately 139.9 million people. Today it is 348.8 million. But far fewer people is inevitable. Our mass, infinite growth productive system is doomed. World output is now $126 trillion. Using the rule of 72, output would be $252 trillion in 24 years if growth would continue at an annual rate of 3%. At a 2% growth rate it would double in 36 years. The system will demass whether we like it or not. 

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 Some elaboration on the treatment of protesters at the 18 event. Some more elaboration on the result of the effort to free the dogs. An interview with La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, who was appointed to be the special prosecutor of Ridglan Farms.

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On the genocide front, Palestinians are routinely raped in Israeli prisons, some by dogs. This depredation is made possible by U.S. sponsorship - our Congress, president(s) and military industrial complex. 

I think the best way to understand genocide is as a path. Once you start on the path, you continue, going farther down the path until it ends. The Israeli genocide path will end, as do all paths. The sponsor - the U.S. - will end its sponsorship for one reason or another. We may run out of money and weapons. We may have different people in positions of power and wealth. Climate change may make sponsoring genocide the least of our proclivities. Israel, a rogue state, may collapse. The U.S., now a rogue state, may also collapse. 

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Here's a song. Alternate version. John Prine. Another from Merle Haggard. Tom Jones. The Dillards. The Byrds. Brandon Rickman. Jerry Jeff Walker.
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Update, May 13:
Brown University Holocaust and Genocide Studies professor Omer Bartov was interviewed on the NPR radio show On Point today about his book Israel: What Went Wrong? The book is reviewed in a number of publications, such as The New York Times and The Guardian. He puts the Gaza genocide in historical and moral context, showing the roots of Zionism, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the regression that culminated in the genocide we are now seeing. He predicts great difficulty in Israel as its reckoning approaches.

If you happened to watch the friendly interview with Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, you might find this interesting.

Update, May 15:
I had forgotten a couple of experiences I had with animal research. In 1980 I was working as a patient transporter in the Radiation Therapy clinic at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. It was an easy job, only about ten patients a day to bring to the clinic on stretchers (known as gurneys elsewhere) and return them afterwards. Down the hall was the animal research facility, and every time I passed the place there was a cacophony of dog barking, howling, whimpers and whines. They were the pleas of desperation. I wanted to set them free. My dad raised dogs as kind of a hobby and to have his own line of hunting dogs.

I had become a casual acquaintance of a guy about my age who worked in the animal clinic, having much free time to roam around the area. He was probably the most negative person I have ever known, routinely complaining about some general malaise in society, though never specific. The one complaint I remember he had was "Why do they always have to throw money at problems?" A complete nothing complaint. Looking back on those times it seems pretty clear that he was suffering from depression, and hated his job. I don't blame him. He was facilitating the wanton abuse of animals. Last year PETA ranked the University of Michigan as the fourth-worst violator of animal abuse regulations.

The other experience was in early 1977, also In Ann Arbor, when I was driving a taxi. The cab company I worked for had a contract with the University of Michigan to drive 35 miles the Detroit airport to pick up shipments of rats that were used for research. I was given the assignment one night bring a load of rats to the U of M hospital. I was told I could decline, that some drivers refused, but I did it anyway, not yet being troubled by animal research.

The rats came in a large box, about 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, a perfect fit for the back seat of a taxi. There must have been about 25 rats in the box, all squeaking and scurrying around in the box. I loaded them up and drove them to the drop-off point at the university hospital.

Looking back on it, during the drive to Ann Arbor I became attached to the rats. They seemed harmless and scared, and I was taking them to their death. They were my passengers, "fares" as they were known in the taxi business. An ethic sets in when you drive a taxicab, where you kind of unconsciously become dedicated to giving your passengers a comfortable and safe trip to where they are going. Even rats. I never did another rat run. I quit the job not long after this, being hired by the University Hospital for the first of several temporary jobs. It was handy, living in an ashram at the time, working to pay the rent.
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Update, May 16:

Democracy Now had an interview Thursday with Molly Crabapple, author of the book Here We Live Is Our Country. The book is about the origins of Zionism, and how it was opposed by the Jewish Labor Bund is Czarist Russia.

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli is interviewed on Zeteo about how Palestinian prisoners have been raped in Israeli prisons since 1948, including by dogs.

Then, on Electronic Intifada, Adam Johnson is interviewed about his book How To Sell A Genocide, how mainstream U.S. media are complicit in giving Israel journalistic cover for its massive crimes against humanity. Here's the YouTube version.

Also from Electronic Intifada is a debunking of the reboot  of Israeli claims of massive Hamas rapes on October 7, 2023.

Identity Crisis

When I heard the news report that the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Congressional maps in Louisiana were unconstitutional due to racial bias, my first inclination was to be angry that it meant disenfranchisement for "black" voters. After a bit of pondering, though, I realized that I, believing there is no such thing as race, had no reason to be angry. Legislative maps that gerrymander to carve out "black" districts are based on the supposition that there is such a thing as a "black" voter.

I am old enough to remember when the term for people of African descent changed from "negro" to "black." It was in the early to mid 1960s, when politicians, journalists and various know-it-alls from the former colonies of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa referred to their indigenous subjects as "blacks." They didn’t need to refer to themselves as "whites" because they didn’t need to. They were the people who mattered, and the native people, the "blacks," didn’t matter, except as low-wage workers.

Then, as the Civil rights movement matured, more militant groups took up the mantle of "black" in a kind of reverse psychology, proudly expressing themselves as the embodiment of the most extreme skin tone – black. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) comes to mind as the leader of this linguistic change. He started using the term Black Power to promote advancement of African Americans in business, government and society in general. This was a fundamental departure from the assimilationist approach of Martin Luther King. 

No one is black. Some people with third degree burns that char the skin might have the appearance of blackness until healing takes place, but even that doesn’t make them "black." It isn’t who they are. No one is their skin color. People whose ancestry is from the continent of Africa, parts of Asia and indigenous Australia have a wide variety of skin colors that range from dark brown to not brown at all. In the United States of America they are all called "black" for reasons of convenience, stupidity and social custom. We define people here by skin color, by ethnic background, by education, by intelligence, by income and wealth, and by social position. And by any characteristic we can come up with.

The easiest and laziest classification is by race. That doesn’t mean race exists, just that it is what we use. It is so embedded that hardly anyone questions whether such a thing as race is a meaningful and useful narrative. Except, of course, scientists. Geneticists concluded long ago that the sorting out of humans into races is arbitrary, not based on evidence, and is therefore inherently, duh, racist. To believe that race exists is to be a racist.

A perfect case in point is former president Barack Obama. When he was running for president in 2008 he avoided the question for a long time, then bluntly declared himself to be ""black." It was a political decision. He thought, correctly, that declaring himself black would attract enough voters who also thought of themselves as black to vote for him. His mother was "white." He could just as easily have declared himself "white," since in America you have to be something or other. He of course doesn’t look either black or white, so like all who identify with skin color, choosing one or the other is choosing something that doesn’t exist.

I, of Irish and Scot descent, would qualify as "white" by the usual mistaken identity. But just as no one is "black," no one is "white." Caucasian skin color is not white, but more of a "burlywood," "rosy brown," "tan," or "peru," and, like "black" skin, manifests in a wide variety of hues. Certainly not constituting a "race."

We also call other "people of color" brown and yellow. It all is so silly. I always bristled at the term “people of color.” First, because it defines people as “of” something, and then because the thing they are "of" is color. They are "of" their skin color. No matter that they exist in complete biological organisms. Skin color is all that matters as who they are.

Where this matters most is that by identifying other people by "race" means you also have to identify yourself by race. Identity, whether true or false, inevitably leads to the natural human tendency to find a way of feeling superior to those who identify differently. If through accident of history one identity becomes the one that dominates, other identities necessarily becomes the dominated. "Whites" dominate "blacks," "browns," and "yellows." And n’er the twain shall meet.

It is 2026. Racism, dominance and "othering" are the rule of the day. In what may be the saddest irony in human history, the "Jewish" state of "Israel," born as a gift in the wake of the worst "racist" mass murder campaign known to man, has devolved into a genocide state, and with full U.S. sponsorship. Politicians who vote repeatedly to fund Israel’s genocide couldn’t care less about Jews or the "Jewish state." They care about being reelected. By and large, they will vote for anything if it keeps them in office. Conforming with AIPAC keeps them in office.

So don’t be fooled by the hand-wringing among knee-jerk "leftists," "progressives," "liberals" and "Democrats." These are identities, not mutually exclusive, but conformist to the false ideology of "race." The sooner we give up on this bogus ideology, the sooner we can start healing our species of the division and hatred that plagues the entire planet. Gerrymandering by any political party is intended to keep incumbents in power, no matter the "race." Those who are divided among gerrymandered districts find themselves disenfranchised, and their skin can be "black," "white," "brown," "yellow" and any other color. One solution to this criminality is to amend the U.S. Constitution, making the gerrymandering of elections illegal.

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Here's a song. John Lennon. The Beatles. Bob Marley. Leadbelly. Koerner, Ray and Glover. Louis Armstrong. Gil Scott-Heron. Sam Cooke. Another from Sam Cooke. Another from Gil Scott-Heron. And another. Bob Dylan. Elton John. Bob Dylan.

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60 Minutes aired a segment titled "When the volunteer helping after a hurricane is a white nationalist," in which they reported on how "white" nationalists (Nazis of one stripe or another) are showing up after natural disasters to "help," more about polishing their images than lending meaningful assistance. 

I don't look at these people so much as ideologues as psychologically troubled. I was reminded of my years of substitute teaching. Every so often there would be a boy who didn't just misbehave, but was insolent and sometimes threatening. It could be in grades as low as seventh - 12 year-olds, but most often it was boys in 11th and 12th grade. They didn't mind being suspended from school, and that was often their goal. After troubled school lives they went on to troubled lives. Their personalities were like the "white" supremacists in the 60 Minutes segment.

Racism and Nazi-like identities fit their personalities, and in today's world of the Internet and easy communication they can easily find each other and organize into violent groups. They also are perfect recruits for ICE and other violence-prone law enforcement agencies. Belief in "white" supremacy - a belief in the dominance of something that doesn't exist - is a variation on what Marxists call false consciousness. I would place it on the low end of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Another way of wasting your life.