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Current Issues  /  PotD
The Value Of A Well Considered Opinion
October 3, 2016
charles i. letbetter - the value of a well-considered opinion

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance. —Plato

 

charles i. letbetter -the value of a well considered opinion

When we think we know it all is when the opinion of someone else may matter most.

“You’re never as smart as you think you are. There is always someone who knows more and understands better than you. Pay attention to those people.”

The words of my late father seem more applicable today than ever. I still remember sitting next to him as he warned me about opening my mouth too soon, a bad habit I’ve had since high school.

“Almost everyone knows at least one thing you don’t,” he warned. “Other people’s opinions may seem foolish and uninformed, but dismissing the well-considered opinions of those who are more experienced,  study deeper, and have better access to information only shows your ignorance, not theirs.”

There are days I’m still not sure I’ve adequately learned that lesson. I’m careful about whose opinions I consider. “Consider the source,” is the advice that comes with much of what I read. Of the millions of opinions scattered across the Internet, most leave me skeptical of either their facts or their intentions.

Social media makes it easy to put ourselves in an echo chamber. If we don’t like what someone is saying, we can simply block them, ignoring everything they might have to say. Sometimes that act is necessary in order to avoid constant streams of drivel. When we block someone, though, simply because they have opinions contrary to ours we put our own level of understanding and knowledge at risk. We need the contrasting thought. We need friction against our own opinion.

Knowing Which Opinion To Trust

When one goes to apply for a new job, the prospective employer almost always asks for references. We choose those references based upon the assumption that those people say good things about us when asked. However, have you ever had a reference that wasn’t as positive about your skills as you’d hoped? Maybe you didn’t get the job because someone you trusted mentioned your perpetual habit of being late or not always following through on your promises. Perhaps they even lied.

One of the primary reasons we’ve come to disregard the opinions of others is because too often we find them self-serving, frequently uninformed, and too often void of any truth. The Internet has given everyone a voice, but not every voice needs to be heard on every topic. Does someone sitting in a basement in Queens really understand the political complexities of the ongoing war in Columbia? Can a person who barely managed to graduate high school actually hold a reasonable opinion on the economy?

The answer to both questions is yes, they can. The upside of the Internet is that it allows people to study things and obtain a level of knowledge without having to suffer through traditional means of education. A person who might have nearly flunked out of school because of bad grades in English and History might have a natural affinity for numbers and the nuances of economic theory. The basement dweller has the ability to reach out and talk directly to people on both sides of the equation in Columbia, side-stepping all the political protocols of the State Department. Look below superficial appearances and those opinions we’ve thrown away might actually have merit.

When An Opinion Really Matters

The second challenge of opinions is understanding whose opinion matters when. I could sit here all day and talk about feminism and women’s rights, but the value of my opinion on that topic is limited because I’m not female. I don’t have those experiences that women face on a regular basis, and cannot fully understand what they go through because no one is going to treat me as a female. The same applies to race. I hurt when I see the injustices levied against people of color, but when speaking on the matter my opinion is limited. I might know a lot about a topic, but if I can’t possibly experience what other people experience my opinion loses value.

A well-considered opinion is one that has had those experiences. I respect the opinions of Congressman John Lewis on matters of race because he has been there on the front lines. He felt the spray. He has the scars. Congressman Lewis understands the situation at a level I cannot begin to comprehend. I respect Kat’s opinion on matters of feminism and sexual identity because she has both feet in those arenas right now. She is enduring those experiences and deals with the challenges at a level I can never know for myself. The opinion of someone who has been there is always stronger than that of the person who merely observed.

Equally important, though, are the opinions of those who speak for those who would not be heard. Reporters and advocates for causes and regarding situations where those who endure the experience are not able to speak for themselves. Those who are hungry, homeless, beaten, torn from their homes, left with nothing. Those who go and look, who are hands-on in helping those in need, who immerse themselves in hostile situations, have opinions we need to trust.

Listening To The Chorus

Perhaps most important right now, in this political climate, is listening to the opinions of diverse people who agree on issues even when it does not necessarily serve them well. Climatologists, for example, did not quickly or easily support the concept of global warming. They have an understanding of weather cycles and know that some changes are inevitable. But as more of them take up the cause and warn of the dangers, theirs is a voice we do well to heed.

Perhaps the strongest chorus at the moment is that of newspaper editorial boards regarding the upcoming presidential elections. Most seasons, we expect their endorsements to follow along party lines. Conservative papers endorse the Republican candidate. Liberal papers endorse the Democratic candidate. Independent papers endorse a third party. For as long as I can remember, that has been how endorsements flow. There’s rarely any surprise.

That history does not hold true this season, though. Look at the aggregators and we see headlines like these:

After 148 Years, The San Diego Union-Tribune Endorses A Democrat For President

For The First Time In Its 126-Year History, This Newspaper Endorsed A Democrat

There are dozens of others who have followed suit, newspaper editorial boards who understand the effect of politics on their readers better than anyone. When they all start leaning in the same direction, we need to listen.

We Don’t Know Much

We are fooling ourselves when we think that what we read in our social media newsfeeds constitutes being informed on a subject. Our ignorance runs much deeper than anyone cares to admit. Egos do a great job of making us believe that we’re smart enough, that we don’t need to listen to anyone else’s opinions. We can even find plenty of quotes urging us to ignore the detractors, be our own person, and stand up what we want.

We couldn’t be any more stupid than when we ignore the well-considered opinions of others. Especially right now.

Maybe we should do more than look at headlines as they pass. Perhaps we should give ourselves more time to actually read, and think about what we’re reading.

A well-considered opinion has value that cannot be matched by our own understanding. We would do well to close our own mouths more often and listen.

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Current Issues  /  pop culture  /  PotD
Excessive Media Erodes Our Trust
September 27, 2016
charles i. letbetter - excessive media erodes our trust

There’s a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don’t have to think, you just have to get more information – gets very dangerous. —Edward de Bono

 

charles i. letbetter - excessive media erodes our trust

If you don’t trust media it might be because you’re using too much of it.

CAUTION: YOU ARE CONSUMING MEDIA. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

We changed brands of dog food this morning. We felt the dog wasn’t getting enough from his previous brand, so we did a little bit of research and switched. This morning, I didn’t feel we’d done enough research. The dog normally comes in from our morning walk, eats a little, then falls fast asleep because 4:00 AM is early even for a dog. Except this morning, after inhaling the new food, he didn’t go to sleep. He’s been bouncing around all over the place, terrifying the cats, and getting himself into trouble. So, I hit the brand’s website to double-check the ingredients. I needed specific information and found it on the brand’s website. That makes the dog food company a media provider.

A number of my friends in journalism were sharing this article from the Washington Post decrying how that there really is no such thing as “the media” and, if there is, WaPo certainly isn’t part of it. The argument author Paul Farhi attempts to make is that the term “the media” is too broad to be defining. If one defines “the media” according to the constraints given by The Oxford Dictionary, then practically everything around you is, technically “the media.” Here’s the definition:

(the media)
the main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet), regarded collectively
See the problem? If “the media” is the vehicle for all communication, all communication is “the media.”

Not Your Grandfather’s Newspaper

When I first woke up this morning, I knew that the headlines would be dominated by spin on last night’s presidential debate. Among the myriad of headlines was this one: The Media Calls Debate For Clinton. I’d link you to the article, but it has since been removed (apparently an editor woke up). My point is that the article was a case of one information source blamed another information source for communicating information. Seems rather silly, doesn’t it?

When one puts something on the Internet, whether it’s a Facebook status or a tweet or your grandmother’s cookie recipe, there is one underlying purpose: to communicate. When one puts something on the Internet, one is engaging in the digital form of publishing. That makes you part of “the media” and a consumer of media at the same time. Therefore, taking this circular logic all the way around, when one criticizes “the media” online, they are ultimately criticizing themselves.

Yeah, stop and let that sink in for a moment. Hurts the brain a little, doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, all these media sources are less than 100 years old. Only newspapers and printed leaflets existed in 1916. Even the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, was over a decade away. With so few choices for information, trust in those sources ran high. Chances are, in most areas, your grandparents or great-grandparents knew who published the local newspaper. They probably went to the same church, were members of the same civic groups. Few people would have thought of publishing their own paper or printing their own leaflets. Information needed to be important if it was going to be distributed.

Contrast that to current standards where “if you think it then you must tweet it,” or something like that.

What We Say

Gallup released a poll earlier this month with the headline: American’s Trust In Mass Media Sinks To New Low. Here’s the actual question and how the long-term graph looks:

Notice that Gallup attempts some nebulous framing of the question by adding the qualifier “mass” to “media,” so as to restrict opinions to what might once have been regarded as “legitimate” news sources—the ones your grandparents would have trusted. Given the overwhelming number of “news” sites, especially when one includes aggregators such as Huffington Post and Breitbart, Gallup’s question is still too broad to have any real, definitive meaning. If the survey tells us anything, and that point would certainly be arguable, it is that we only trust a limited number of the information sources we access.

Similarly, Hart Research, acting on behalf of NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, asked half the respondents of a 1,000-person survey to “rate your feelings” toward “several public figures, groups, and organizations.” In the total list, “the news media” ranked toward the bottom with only a 19% positive response, between Donald Trump (28% positive response) and Vladimir Putin (6% positive response). However, once again, the lack of a narrow definition calls the results into question. Some people might consider satire sights such as The Onion part of the news media. Others might consider aggregators part of the news media. Neither is there any delineation between sources that provide a majority of reporter-based editorial content and those that are merely an omnibus of collected opinion. 

What We Mean

What is generally considered “news” in this Internet-driven age is a far cry from the traditional expectations of journalism. There are millions of websites that distribute information related to current topics. For many people, that makes those sources “news.” Never mind the fact that they’re opinions we’ve written ourselves, largely to amuse ourselves. By the broad contemporary definition, this website might, at least on some days, considered a news source. That scares me because, despite the sometimes excessive amount of research we put into an article, it is never our intent to provide anything more than an opinion.

Perhaps even more frightening is how frequently people refer to social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter, as part of the news media. Neither site has reporters or editors controlling what you see or don’t see. All the information flowing through those sites is curated by one person: you. You decide what is “news” and what is “information” and what is “entertainment.”  What’s telling is that a very large number of people make absolutely no distinction between those categories. They simply toss everything under the general heading of “the media.”

And they don’t trust it. Which, again, using that circular logic, means we don’t trust ourselves. We probably shouldn’t. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve proven that we’re not terribly judicious in the media we consume. If we were, debunking sites like Snopes wouldn’t get nearly as much traffic. On any given day, we publish more false information through our own social media accounts than all the newspapers and news networks combined. We distrust “the media” because we know, secretly, that we are complicit in spreading rumor more than fact.

A Difficult Diet

Like a person whose health deteriorates from eating only fast food, the solution to our media loathing starts with a very harsh reality: we need to cut back. Continuing the fast food metaphor, we need to pay more attention to the source of what we’re consuming. Sure, there are days when ordering pizza makes sense for our schedule, but that doesn’t happen every day. Most days we’re more conscientious about what we consume. The same is true of media. Some days I need the smile I get from a video on Funny Or Die. Making that my source for breaking news and information, though, is just silly. I’m going to check my local paper, then local television news, then national news sources if applicable. I’m damn sure not going to rely on Facebook or Twitter.

We have a preponderance of choice. Media surrounds us already and as the Internet of Things grows the amount of media being thrown at us is going to get worse. We need to start making those tough choices now. Back off the Buzzfeeds and TMZs, limiting them to inconsequential topics that we probably shouldn’t care about in the first place. Pay more attention to the source of our information. Hint: anytime you see an article tagged as “sponsored,” know that it was written by someone, or on behalf of someone, who has a vested financial interest in the topic. Therefore, it’s not news. Recognise opinion for what it is: someone else’s viewpoint, not news.

If we don’t trust media it’s because both the media we create and our choice of media to consume are not trustworthy. The problem is us. We’ve gotten fat on easily available, always accessible media. Saying we distrust “the media” is like saying we don’t like mac & cheese while a fresh bowl sits in front of us. We need to put ourselves on a media diet and see just how much our opinions change.

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Current Issues  /  PotD  /  science
10 Horrible Deaths Awaiting Offspring Of Anti-Vaxxers
September 25, 2016
charles i. letbetter - 10 horrible deaths awaiting children of anti-vaxxers

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people. —Albert Camus

 

10 Horrible Deaths Await Offspring of Anti-Vazzers

Those who fail to vaccinate their children sentence the innocent to the most horrible of deaths for which there is no justification

We do not enter this conversation lightly. My words may well anger some. I don’t expect to persuade those who are already committed, but to those who are still questioning, who have not yet made up their minds, heed my words: Those who do not vaccinate their children hold the blood of the deaths of innocents on their hands. Not only is refusing to vaccinate children one of the most stupid and ill-conceived acts of selfishness ever devised, it is morally criminal for it effects not those making the decision, but those innocents doomed to endure the results.

I have not wanted to tackle this issue as it is off topic for our normal discussions. I realized, however, that I needed to get my hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, and address the matter when I snapped at Kat while she was reading aloud an especially ridiculous comment from someone so horribly ignorant, so fully deceived by all the lies and nonsense, that they didn’t even recognize the basic science of germ theory. Granted, it was still early in the morning and I only had three cups of coffee in me, but the level of nonsense being spewed by this person in a public forum was so intense my temper got the best of me. I barked at Kat to stop reading to me anything written by someone who has ceded use of their brain.

If a topic has gotten under my skin to the point that I’m being unkind to someone I love, then obviously I need to address that matter head-on and be done with it.

All Natural Was A Good Idea

“All natural.” The phrase started becoming dominant in the popular lexicon of the 1960s, when the anti-establishment movement started considering the possibility that everything we were ingesting, wearing, breathing, and eating might not be working in our favor. Back then, there was practically no regulation on the use of chemicals in the creation and development of other products. Neither was anyone watching what was being dumped into waterways. Only when the pollution began to accumulate to a point that it began directly interfering with our lives did Government intervene and pass laws limiting and prohibiting certain chemicals.

The movement was necessary and helped save the lives of millions of people. However, what is important to realize is that the “all natural” proponents of the time used science to make their point. They didn’t rely on conjecture, hearsay, or popular mythology in an attempt to make their point. Studies were done. Samples were taken. Scientific method was used to prove things such as the dangerous levels of lead and mercury in water and other products.

The “all natural” movement today has evolved into an anti-science, anti-medicine group that mistakenly thinks that nature has the solution to everything that sickens us. They are convinced that  the more we become holistic and natural in our approach to life, the better our lives will be. So, they decry genetically modified organisms, refuse to drink municipal treated water, and deny their children the safety of vaccines.

Nature Doesn’t Like Us

As it turns out, nature doesn’t like us as much as we like it. Raw milk, the non-pasteurised, non-homogenized stuff that comes directly from a cow’s udder, contains bacteria that, prior to 1864, wiped out entire tribes and cities. The same applies to less natural drinks such as beer and wine. All that alcohol actually gives bacteria a nice resting place rather than destroying it. The all-natural stuff rather sucks.

Many other food sources have similar challenges. Has anyone noticed all the recalls of organically grown leafy vegetables? Ta-da! They need some science in order to survive the process of being packaged, shipped, refrigerated, not refrigerated, and the ride home from the store. Otherwise, they develop nasty things that can KILL YOU if you ingest them. Seriously, all-natural isn’t what it’s cracked up to be!

Jeffrey Kruger, science writer for TIME magazine, wrote in an opinion piece in 2014:

“Messing with nature” is the whole point of medicine, given that it’s nature that cooked up every disease that ever existed. You want pure nature? OK, die young.

As brusque as the statement is, we have the longest life span in over 3,000 years because of science and medicine. Nature will kill you.

No One Wants To Keep You Sick

I’ve heard all the “big pharma” horseshit and I’m not buying it. No one’s best interest is served by intentionally keeping people sick. If we would take a moment to understand how numbers work, we’d see the mathematical fallacy in such a concept. There is no conspiracy. No one is trying to “keep you down.”

Instead, just a few days ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife DoctorPriscilla Chan (a pediatrician who had her own daughter vaccinated), pledged $3 billion to the eradication of all disease. In explaining the reasoning behind the commitment, Dr. Chan stated:

We are the limit of what we understand about science and disease. We want to push back that boundary. By investing in science today, we hope to build a future in which all of our children can live long and rewarding lives.

Funny, that doesn’t sound much like a conspiracy to keep everyone sick, does it? Oh, and while we’re at it, please don’t miss the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already spent over $2 billion fighting malaria and have committed another $1.6 billion to fight the spread of AIDS.

Wait, we’re not done. Viacom/CBS CEO and an all-around frequently unlikable guy, Sumner Redstone, donated $1.5 million to help eradicate polio, a disease that would have been gone already if everyone would vaccinate their children. So, let’s just put to rest that ridiculously insane notion that “big pharma” wants to do you harm.

Science Is Your Friend

I fail to understand this unreasonable concept that science and nature are at odds with each other. Science looks at nature, discovers what’s under the covers, how it works, why things respond well to certain stimuli and not others, not because it keeps them out of the bars and brothels (which are already full of politicians and lobbyist) but because doing so helps us to get along better with nature and use nature to our benefit.

For example, it is science that tells us we really need bees for something other than honey. Many of the very vaccinations and cures against which the ignorant rail have their source in a better understanding of nature. Nature is a partner in better health when we pair it with well-studied matters of science. We can all get along.

When we refuse to do so, when people start believing a ridiculous 12-person study that has been thoroughly debunked by the very doctors who participated as well as  multiple independent studies then we have a problem. Vaccinations do not cause autism and I can quite comfortably sit here and say without any bad feeling that those who claim otherwise are utter morons and a danger to society.

Yes, some people have allergies to certain medicines. Kat is allergic to penicillin, which is a damned pain when she gets sick, but you don’t find her campaigning against the medicine. I’m deathly allergic to bee stings, too, but you don’t see me out spraying the yard to kill the little buggers.

Anti-Vaxxers Are Vile People

Those who refuse to vaccinate their children are vile people because they are not the ones who ultimately suffer the consequences. Rather, they doom innocent children, theirs and others with whom they come into contact, with the possibility that they could die quite horribly from diseases that are totally preventable. This is not a judgment call. This has nothing to do with race, social standing, educational level obtained, levels of pseudo-fame, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, or anything else over which one has no control. People who fail to vaccinate their children are making a deliberate choice to put their children at risk.

We have laws that require putting children in specialized safety seats when traveling in vehicles. We have laws about the non-flammability of children’s clothing. There are even laws about how old a child has to be before they can stand at the bus stop by themselves. Our society values our children, yet we are, for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend, tolerating these utter morons who not only put their children at risk, but yours and mine as well because they believe some garbage about vaccines causing autism or some other shit.

No, these people are dooming children to DIE just as surely as did the Nazis who stripped Jewish children naked and marched them to the showers. If anything, the risk at which anti-vaxxers are putting their children is worse because these diseases, against which they should be immunized, may not strike until they’re older. Or they might even be passed on to a subsequent generation that would be born with a fatal disease. Death from these diseases is not quick, but lingers, putting a child through unspeakable pain.

Let’s Get Real About The Danger

There are ten major diseases that can doom a child to a horrible death; diseases that are wholly preventable with vaccinations. This is the risk imposed upon your children. Sure, there’s a chance your child could grow up just fine without any medical issues. There’s also a chance that a two-year-old can make it across a busy four-lane highway without getting hit, but do we really want to take that chance? These are our children we’re talking about!

Here, let’s take a look at just what can happen without the vaccinations that can stop disease.

Measles

Measles, interestingly enough, is a lung disease. If someone who has it, even if they’ve not yet developed a rash, coughs or sneezes in your vicinity and you’re  not immunized, there’s a 90 percent chance you’ll catch the disease.  Or maybe you weren’t there at all. You thought you were being careful. Walking into the room, though, where that person coughed or sneezed, you touch something on which the saliva from that cough or sneeze landed less than two hours ago, and you’ve caught the disease. Measles is just that easy to catch.

Before these idiotic anti-vaxxers became a problem, measles was all but eradicated. It was extremely rare to hear of a case in the US. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE HAD THEIR KIDS VACCINATED. Are you understanding this? Prior to the anti-vaxx movement, measles was GONE from the United States! Stupid people brought it back, though, and that’s a danger. Prior to the vaccine, approximately 3-4 million people got the disease each year. 48,000 were hospitalized. 400-500 DIED.

The numbers outside the US, however, where the measles vaccine isn’t available, get really ugly really fast. According to numbers released by the World Health Organization, the number of deaths on the continent of Africa in 2012 was 41,000.  Within the Eastern Mediterranean, 25,800. Southeast Asia was hit with 52,000 measles deaths. While the numbers here have yet to exceed a hundred, consider the fact that in the year 2000 there were ZERO deaths from Measles in the US. The fact that we have ANY now is directly attributable to the carelessness and selfishness of anti-vaxxers and the people dying ARE CHILDREN. Feel good about that, do you? Do you kick puppies, too?

Whooping Cough (Pertussis)

This one sneaks up on you. Another lung disease spread by being near someone who has the disease, the cough is the primary symptom. We all cough. Coughing is our body’s way of getting bad things out of our lungs. Perfectly healthy people cough. That’s why we don’t pay too much attention when someone starts coughing, even if it’s a baby. But then, the cough continues. Normal remedies don’t make it go away. Two weeks later the cough is still there and it is much worse. The hacking is so bad and so violent that it has caused people to break ribs. As it continues, the cough causes seizures, interrupts one’s ability to breathe.

Even at this point, the dangers for adults are not too severe, unless you have asthma. For infants less than a year old  the danger is very real, though. Babies lack the ability to get their breath back on their own. They cough. They choke. They stop breathing. THEY DIE.

Whooping cough is perhaps the greatest threat to mortality among infants. Even with the vaccine, there were still a handful of deaths every year. Most of those were because parents didn’t realize their child has something more than a normal cough until it was too late. Incidents of Whooping Cough have increased, however. In 2014, there were 20 pertussis-related deaths in the US, the most since 1955.  While the number may not sound large, consider that there haven’t been that many deaths since 1955! That’s  60 years ago! Anti-vaxxers are KILLING babies.

Flu

Flu numbers are scary even with the ever-changing immunizations. Some years, supplies of the vaccine run low or isn’t as accurate and we immediately see a spike in the number of flu-related deaths. Without the vaccine at all, though, those numbers would be significantly higher.

The flu is a viral infection of the nose, throat, and lungs. Once again, being around someone who has the disease and coughs is what spreads the germs. As the flu morphs and changes each year, our body’s natural immune system has difficulty keeping up. If it were the same ol’ flu every year, it might not be a problem. But it’s not. Every year, some 49,000 people in the US die from the flu. The very old and the very young are hardest hit. That’s with vaccinations.

What happens if no one takes the vaccination? By one estimate, an H5N1 avian influenza could affect 80 million people in the US. Assuming a 20 percent mortality rate, 16 million people would die.  Stop and think about that for a moment. Sixteen million people.  More than just a health crisis, this would be a homeland security crisis, an economic crisis. Not only would people in your family die, everyone around you would have someone in their family die. Are you beginning to see the problem?

Polio

THIS DISEASE SHOULD BE GONE ALREADY! This is the disease that proved vaccines work. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, polio was the scourge of the United States. In the summer of 1916, it took the lives of 2,700 children in New York alone. An interesting thing happened, though. The vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk was approved in 1955 and you’ll never believe what happened: THE DISEASE WENT AWAY! Are you understanding the relevance here? People who got the polio vaccine DID NOT GET POLIO!

Not only did the polio vaccine work, it worked quickly. By the year 2000, all of North America was polio free! NO ONE IN NORTH AMERICA HAD POLIO! Then, along came anti-vaxxers who refused to give their children one of the most vital immunizations in human history. Care to guess what happened? POLIO IS BACK. Sure, the numbers aren’t big, yet, but the fact that a disease that had been eradicated from the entire continent has returned is reason enough for alarm.

Understand, you can get polio at any time in your life. 90% of people carrying the disease show no symptoms. While the disease can be stopped with the vaccine, once you get it, there is no cure! YOU WILL DIE and not nearly as quickly as you would like. There will be pain. There will be suffering. The World Health Organization considers a single case of polio an epidemic, it is just that frightening. Almost everyone reading this is too young to remember scenes like this:

10 horrible deaths awaiting children of anti-vaxxers

In the 1940s and 1950s, people with bulbar polio were immobilized inside “iron lungs” – huge metal cylinders that operated like a pair of bellows to regulate their breathing and keep them alive.

So yeah, skip this vaccine and you’re dooming your child to, at the least, a very miserable life, and in the end one of the most painful deaths ever. Happy now?

Pneumococcal Disease

The doctor tells you that you have pneumonia. Not a big deal, right? Stay home, drink plenty of fluids, maybe take a few doses of penicillin. Unless you don’t take the medicine and haven’t been vaccinated. With pneumococcal disease, pneumonia might be the least of your worries. Only 5 out of 100 die of pneumococcal pneumonia. The same bacteria, however, causes Bacteremia, a blood disease that is especially fatal in children under age 5. 1 out of 100 children who contract pneumococcal bacteremia die from the disease.

Then, there’s meningitis. I should mention that we’re going to see meningitis pop up more than once because there is more than one bacteria that can cause the disease. Pneumococcal meningitis kills 1 in 15 children under the age of 5. ONE IN FIFTEEN CHILDREN DIE. Even those who don’t die are likely to have life-long limitations such as hearing loss and learning disabilities. The mortality numbers run even higher among the elderly. That’s right, your vaccination decision can kill your great-grandmother.

Isn’t it wonderful to give a breeding ground to a bacteria that has THREE DIFFERENT WAYS TO KILL PEOPLE? There are vaccines available that can kill the pneumococcal bacteria quickly and easily. There’s no need for ANY child to ever suffer through this kind of death, with high fever, pain, and stiffness. Yet, when parents refuse to have their children vaccinated, this is yet another easily contracted way for children to die. None of this is necessary. All of it can be prevented. Unfortunately, anti-vaxxers are TOO FUCKING STUPID TO DO WHAT IS RIGHT.

Tetanus

When I was a child, perhaps one of the most frequently ignored dangers in our region of Oklahoma was rusty barbed wire. The stuff was everywhere and was we would be running and playing and crawling through fences, getting a scratch and tearing our clothes was inevitable. Most the time, the biggest danger was Mom finding out you’d torn another pair of jeans. Every once in a while, though, someone would get a really bad cut on the barbed wire, or step on a rusty nail in an old barn. Our parents never hesitated a second. Off to the hospital we’d go for a tetanus shot, unless we’d just had one, in which case we were still good.

Tetanus shots today are good for ten years. I remember my last one clearly, just over three years ago. Yes, those suckers hurt a bit. This is not a fun shot to get. Yet, the vaccine is infinitely better than the symptoms that come with tetanus. Get a load of this:

  • Headache
  • Jaw cramping (lockjaw)
  • Sudden, involuntary muscle tightening – often in the stomach (muscle spasms)
  • Painful muscle stiffness all over the body
  • Trouble swallowing
  • Jerking or staring (seizures)
  • Fever and sweating
  • High blood pressure and fast heart rate

Oh, and did I forget to mention that, at the end of all that suffering, YOU CAN DIE? 10-20% of tetanus cases are fatal. WOULD YOU REALLY DO THAT TO YOUR CHILD? If you would, you deserve to have very bad things happen to you.

Meningococcal Disease

Remember a few hundred words back when I said we would see meningitis pop up again? Well, here it is. In this form, it is most commonly known as “the kissing disease” because the bacteria lives in the back of the throat and is easily spread through kissing. Public schools are frequently affected. Once the disease is present, the natural amorous activities of teenagers do a frighteningly good job of spreading the disease.

Oh, but you don’t have to kiss someone to get meningitis. All you have to do is live with someone who has it. This disease is highly communicable to the point of often requiring whole families to be quarantined. There are three primary strains of meningococcal disease, referred to as serogroups B, C, and Y and there are vaccines readily available to treat all three groups. This is a reportable disease and outbreaks are frequently listed on the CDC website.

If you have an 11-12-year-old child, they need this vaccine. If you are a first-year college student living in a dormitory, you need this vaccine. If you are a military recruit, you probably weren’t given a choice. You’ve had this vaccine. There are only two reasons for not getting the appropriate meningococcal vaccine: 1. you’re pregnant, which is generally a bad time to be getting vaccinated at all. 2. You have severe allergies. If you’re concerned that you might be allergic to some of the vaccine’s ingredients, consult your doctor. Latex allergies seem to present a common problem.

However, if  you are neither pregnant nor allergic, then GET THE DAMN VACCINE. THIS DISEASE KILLS STUPID PEOPLE. Or the children of stupid people. Don’t be stupid.

Hepatitis B

Hey, here’s a nice disease you’ve heard about because there are plenty of sleazy celebrities running around with this Hepatitis B and they’re not dead yet, so it much not be all that bad, right?

Hey, stupid, those celebrities aren’t dead because they’re taking more drugs than are available at your local CVS. Had they not taken all the shots and the medicine their doctors prescribed, we wouldn’t be subjected to their continual parades of nonsense in the press.

Here’s what you need to know: Hepatitis B is 100 times more infectious than HIV, the disease that causes AIDS. While the most common means of transmission are through sex or sharing a needle, it is also very possible for a pregnant woman who has the disease to pass it on to her baby.

Hepatitis B attacks the liver. Chronic conditions (those lasting more than six months) may cause cirrhosis and lead to liver failure. Some people might qualify for liver transplant, but not everyone will. Because this is a disease that spreads primarily through voluntary risky behavior, don’t expect a lot of sympathy if you get it. The vaccine that can reduce the effect of some of the worst symptoms must be received within 24 hours of coming into contact with the disease. Next month doesn’t help you any.

Mothers who pass the disease along to their children start them off in life with a severe handicap. DO NOT DENY THESE CHILDREN VACCINATIONS. You’ve already fucked up by giving them Hepatitis B. Don’t make the situation any worse.

Mumps

I had the mumps as a child. It would seem that I survived. The first mumps vaccine wasn’t available until I was already in school. By then, I’d had the disease and was doing well. I was fortunate, though. My case wasn’t all that severe. A couple of weeks of careful care from our family doctor (I remember more than one shot being involved) and a liquid diet left me cranky but alive.

The danger of mumps is not just the only cause of parotitis, which is bad enough on its own, just look at this wonderful list of other diseases it can cause:

  • Aseptic meningitis/encephalitis
  • Sensorineural hearing loss/deafness
  • Transverse myelitis
  • Polyneuritis
  • Guillain-Barré syndrome
  • Cerebellar ataxia (with encephalitis)
  • Keratouveitis
  • Thyroiditis
  • Myocarditis
  • Mastitis
  • Pneumonia
  • Pancreatitis
  • Nephritis
  • Orchitis
  • Oophoritis
  • Arthritis
  • Thrombocytopenia purpura

Oh, and if that’s not enough, it can make adolescent boys sterile for the rest of their lives. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? So many different horrible ways to DIE all wrapped up in what too many people think of as a harmless childhood disease. Still want to put  off getting those shots?

Hib (Haemophilus Influenzae Type B)

There is a very good chance you’ve never heard of Hib. Know why? Since the development of a vaccine, incidents of Hib dropped 99%. It’s not quite completely gone, but almost. The only reason it hasn’t disappeared is anti-vaxxers.  Since they don’t see it occurring often in the general population, they don’t consider Hib a threat.

However, prior to the development of the vaccine, Hib was the number one cause of bacterial meningitis (yeah, that lovely disease again) among children under the age of 5. Before the vaccine, Hib infected approximately 20,000 children in the US each year. Of those, roughly 1,200 of them DIED.   That means this vaccine is saving the lives of approximately 1,200 children a year. Because of this vaccine, more children live to start kindergarten, learn to read, tell silly jokes, and give us snaggle-toothed smiles when their baby teeth fall out.

People who don’t vaccinate their children run the risk of missing all that. Without this vaccination, the incidence of Hib will increase. As we see the disease increase, so will the deaths. Who is responsible for those deaths? THE IDIOTIC PARENTS WHO DIDN’T GET THEIR KIDS VACCINATED!

Manslaughter Is Too Nice A Word

There you go: ten horrible ways to die. We shouldn’t have to worry about any of them because WE HAVE VACCINES THAT PREVENT THESE DISEASES! There is absolutely no excuse at all for not vaccinating your children. This isn’t a choice you’re giving them like whether to go to church or believe in a deity or what flavor of ice cream to have after dinner. No, when you refuse to have your children vaccinated, you leave them vulnerable. Even worse, you’re not leaving them vulnerable to one disease, you’re leaving them wide open TO ALL TEN DEADLY DISEASES. Every last one of them. YOUR child could get Whooping Cough AND the flu AND meningitis AND polio all in one fell swoop! Their little bodies were never meant to have immune systems developed enough to stop all these diseases. GIVE THEM THE FUCKING SHOTS ALREADY!

You know as well as I do that there is a lot of horseshit on the Internet. Unfortunately, there are a lot of really stupid people who believe everything that comes from the mouth of anyone who is on television, or used to be on television, or looks like they could be on television, or might possibly own a television. People who can look past the MOUNTAINS of prevailing evidence, scientific and medical research, clinical studies by REPUTABLE doctors with THOUSANDS of subjects (not just 12), and still choose to believe the OUTRIGHT LIES that come from the anti-vaccination community ARE COMPLETE MORONS.

I want you to get this straight because I’m tired of hearing it come out of your filthy little mouths or seeing it typed by your filthy little fingers:

VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM!

NICO LaHOOD IS STILL WRONG!

Both of those headlines are links. Click them and pay attention to the evidence for once in your miserable life!

People who do not vaccinate their children are a threat to national security. When your children become ill with one of the ten diseases we’ve listed, they weaken the herd immunity of the entire country. A nation that loses its immunity against infectious and fatal disease is not a secure nation. We all are at risk because of YOUR behavior.

ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?

YOUR behavior has ramifications well outside yourself. That’s why you don’t get to make this choice. No, it’s not yours to make. You don’t get to make a choice that puts me and my children, and the children in our neighborhood, and the children in the school my children attend, all at risk because YOUR ARE A FUCKING MORON WHO DOESN’T WANT TO BELIEVE THE  SCIENCE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE.

Yes, I’m yelling at you because you’re fucking stupid. You are a danger to humanity and a direct threat to the safety and well-being of your own children. Should any of your children die from one of the horrible diseases we’ve listed here, you are not merely guilty of neglect or manslaughter. You are guilty of PREMEDITATED MURDER because you willfully choose to make the WRONG choice and PUT YOUR CHILDREN AT RISK despite the preponderance of evidence literally being shoved in your face.

I have no patience with nor sympathy for those who are so incredibly ignorant as to continue down this path of anti-vaccination. I don’t care if what I say hurts your feelings. Your feelings are not the issue. The issue is the safety and longevity of children, WHICH YOU ARE PUTTING IN DANGER BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO STUPID TO GET THEM THEIR VACCINATIONS. THEIR DEATHS ARE YOUR FAULT!

There Are Two Solutions To This  Problem

Obviously, were everyone to decide to stop being stupid and have their children immunized, this whole problem goes away and everyone has a chance to live a reasonably happy life.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

So, let’s do this: everyone who doesn’t want to live in a vaccinated world gets to move to a lovely island somewhere in the South Pacific where there isn’t anyone else around for you to infect. You and your family get to move there, away from all the GMOs and the HMOs and the Oreos, and live completely natural lives without any interruption from anyone else. You stay there, where you can’t infect the rest of us. In 20 years, we’ll send out some folks wearing hazmat suits to collect and respectfully dispose of your remains in a manner that prevents any lingering disease from contaminating the rest of us.  You get to live the way you want, and the rest of us get to live.

How does that sound? We don’t expect anything from you. You sit there on your island, soaking up the sun, enjoying the waves, the  jellyfish stings, the spider bites, the infected fruit, maybe a wild animal or two. We won’t bother you with our modern medicine and vaccinations. You get to live your life all natural. Your deaths will be on your own terms: all natural—and likely painful.

I can get behind that idea. I’d even offer to help you pack but I’m afraid I might catch something.

So, good-bye,. Good riddance. Get the fuck out of here.

Let us know when you come to your senses. You’ll understand if I don’t hold my breath.

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Searching For Something Good
September 23, 2016
charles i. letbetter -searching for something good

It’s so easy today to get swept up in celebrity fixation and materialism and searching for some validation outside of yourself when we know it’s really found within and through meaningful connections with other people. —Geoffrey S. Fletcher

 

charles i. letbetter - Searching for good news

Weeks so full of disappointment leave us searching for good news in hopes that , maybe, there might be some left.

My body didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. This week has seen more disappointments than I care to enumerate. Searching for even a moment’s rest has too often proven futile. I don’t like much that has happened this week. Neither do I care for most of the reactions to what has happened this week. I expect better from the world and that just hasn’t happened.

Every morning I wake up and start searching all available media sources to see what if I missed anything important while trying to sleep. I fear that one day I might wake up and find half the world has been blown away and, somehow, I managed to sleep through it. As I read through the headlines, I wonder what their long-term effect might be. I see a world changing around me and, at times, wonder if we are dooming ourselves.

Searching this morning, I desperately wanted to see something good, something that didn’t involve anyone getting killed, something that doesn’t reak of humanitarian or financial disaster. I found three things that I think are worth sharing. I consider them good. You, perhaps, may not because they each have the potential to change your world. If they do, though, that change is for the better. We need something good in our lives. Perhaps one of these stories works for you.

Changing The Common Language

Pronouns. If you went to public school in the United States, you were probably taught what they are and how to use them in the first grade. When referring to boys, we use the pronoun “he.” When referring to girls, we use the pronoun “she.” When referring to more than one person, we use the pronoun “they.” We’re all comfortable with that, aren’t we? Perhaps not for much longer.

You see, the pronouns “he” and “she” are problematic at times because they inherently assign a certain gender. We assume that the person we see who dresses masculine is a “he.” We assume that the person who dresses and styles themselves effeminately is a “she.” Chances are high that we don’t realize how often we are wrong.

A couple of the nation’s leading newspapers, the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Post, have adopted use of the singular “they.” In the case of the Examiner, they have instructed their reporters to ask a subject whether they prefer to be referred to as “he,” “she,” or, “they.” Reporters are to make no assumptions and give the individual the right to be identified by whichever gender, or no gender, with which they are most comfortable.

Michael Howerton writes for the Examiner:

Our intention is to celebrate, dignify and respect the affirmations people make about their identities. We want to honor the identities of those we write about, not enforce gender binary language or diminish anyone’s right to their own. 

As we are searching for ways to be more inclusive in our daily involvement with people, using the singular “they” might be a start. The challenge: getting English teachers and school curriculum to go along. What we learn first is what sticks with us the longest.

See-Now Buy-Now Might Be Working

The early numbers are in for Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Rebecca Minkoff and Burberry and other designers are going to want to take notice: the new see-now, buy-now strategy seems to have worked. Looking at sales figures, especially online sales, for merchandise purchased immediately after a runway presentation and the labels involved are reporting some of their highest sales ever. According to an article on Business of Fashion this morning, Tom Ford reported their biggest sales day of the year. Burberry has already sold out of three items. The Rebecca Minkoff flagship store in New York reported its best day ever by more than 25 percent  despite only being open half the day.

 

None of the labels reported a downturn and most department stores, such as Bergdorf Goodman and the Neiman Marcus Group, all reported significant increases in sales around the labels that had just shown their lines. What may be even more interesting is what people are buying. As of the article’s writing this morning, Ralph Lauren only had one remaining SKU for it’s $15,000 “Houston” overcoat. Burberry’s $5,249 Cavalry jacket — a deep red wool jacket with military-style braided stylings, was the brand’s top seller, surprising even chief creative officer Christopher Bailey.

The time to declare complete victory for the marketing shift is still several months away. If there are not new pieces coming into stores, if brands are unable to replenish looks that sell out early, then sales may not hold and could potentially lead to a downturn in lagging months. The fact that we’re going into the holiday season helps, though, and even if January sales are not stellar, chance are pretty strong we’ll see more labels switching to this approach next year.

We Really Are Family

We’ve known for some time that all humans migrated from Africa. What has been more of a mystery has been the timeline for that migration. While paleontologists have claimed to find skulls, skeletons, and tools scattered across Europe and Asia dating back over 100,000 years, it has been difficult to establish enough evidence to support the concept of any migration that old. While there is evidence of group splintering and separation within the African continent and the development of language as much as 200,000 years ago, there has not been a DNA study that supported a specific migration period. Until now.

Actually, what we’re looking at is three separate studies from three different sets of universities, that all came to roughly the same conclusion: We all left Africa about the same time, some 50-,000 to 80,000 years ago. Changes in climate and the search for food seem to be the primary reason for the exodus. What’s interesting, though, is that everyone, including aboriginal populations once thought to have migrated separately, left Africa at the same time.

Center to this hypothesis is the testing of indigenous groups of people around the world, something that had not happened before. Prior to these three studies, most DNA sampling had occurred among Africans and Europeans. Researchers expected that studying indigenous people would provide deeper insight into migration patterns. What they didn’t expect was evidence that everyone pretty much up and left at about the same time.

This research also shows that we are even more interconnected as a species than we ever thought. We are one race. We all descended from one people. We are all part of a family. We left Africa together and scattered ourselves across the globe in search for the resources we need to live and to grow. From there, we simply adapted to our environments. There is no race that we have not concocted of our own doing. We are one.

Searching For Something Good

Our searching this morning came up with some very interesting topics for discussion. They are good topics, I believe. We are improving how we treat each other, how we do things, and how we view the world. Despite frequent evidence to the contrary, on the whole we are moving in a positive direction.

It’s Friday. Take this information into the weekend with you and continue searching. There are good things out there. Embrace them. Enjoy them. Learn something.

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Hiding From The Glare Of Our Own Sins
September 22, 2016
charles i. letbetter - hiding from the glare of our sins

Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, Is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, Utters another. —Homer

charles i. letbetter - hiding from the glare of our own sins

We’re quick to find fault in others, but we are hiding from the truth

 

An  entire professional sports team took a knee during the national anthem last night. Notice, as often as we’ve seen people using the national anthem as a means of protest, it’s always been limited to a few members here and there. This was the entire Indiana Fever WNBA team, on a knee. Why? Because they’re tired of us hiding the prevalence of institutionalized violence against black people.

Charlotte, North Carolina is still rioting this morning. The governor of that state has called out the National Guard. Hiding the systemic hate and violence against black people in that state is no longer an option. The sins of the state and its cities have come out of the shadows where they have existed for the past 160 years and good folks down there are taking to the streets to end the nonsense.

Meanwhile, the Republican nominee told supporters at a rally yesterday that he supports a stop-and-frisk policy, illegally detaining people simply because a police officer doesn’t like the way they look, or the way they walk, or the color of their skin. Only one person walked out. The room should have been empty, but we’re still foolishly trying to hide our racism.

We, Americans, have become quite talented at hiding our sins, especially those we commit toward people groups that are different from us. We have created institutions to perpetuate those sins and even ingrain them in our educational methods that ignore the presence and contributions of marginalized people. As the light dawns, however, those sins become far too clear.

Hiding Behind Tradition

“We’ve done things this way for years and no one’s every complained before.”

Maurice Maeterlinck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911, wisely said: “At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.” We don’t give up on tradition easily, no matter how horribly flawed we know it to be. We hang on to these “sins of our fathers” as though they were some kind of sick birthright to which we have no choice but to uphold.

Hiding behind tradition is a lazy excuse, though. We dump tradition in a heart beat when it suits us. When we say, “It’s always been that way,” what we are in fact saying is that we want it to always stay that way. We invoke tradition because we are comfortable with our sins. The traditions are so much a part of us that we even try to claim them as part of our culture and heritage. Yet, we know damn good and well we’re wrong.

Remember this song by Bruce Hornsby and The Range from 1986? Even then, as the song pointed out the sins we are trying to hide by saying, “That’s just the way it is,” we listened to the song and just dug ourselves in deeper. Here, let me refresh your memory.

Hiding Behind Religion

Talked about entrenched. When people have been misinterpreting a writing they’ve declared holy, whether intentionally or through ignorance, the shadows created for hiding our sins run deep. We find it all too easy to excuse our behavior, and often our indignation and intolerance, with the simple phrase,”The Bible tells me so.”  Conveniently, there are plenty of places throughout the holy texts of multiple religions where deity instructs us, or someone eons before us, to behave like complete assholes. That whole “go here and kill those people who don’t believe in me” concept is something we’ve translated into an excuse for hate, discrimination, abuse, imprisonment, wars, and other atrocities too horrible to mention.

Ironically, while providing these deep shadows for hiding our sins, religion simultaneously tells us we are supposed to love each other, to be tolerant of the strangers and foreigners among us, to embrace those who are different. This is the message that makes us feel good on a Sunday morning. We look around the congregation at the end of the service and proclaim, “I just love everybody.” Yet, before you’re even out the door you’re casting side glances at old Mrs. Talkstoomuch so you don’t get stuck listening about a lonely old widow’s aches and pains. You drive past 15 perfectly good restaurants to get to the one whose wait staff has the right color skin. Then, after dinner, you sit in your easy chair to watch a ball game and complain about how “those people” are ruining the game. Tell me again, please, just exactly who it is your religion told you to love?

Hiding behind religion is inexcusable. If you think your religion tells you that some people are inherently worse than others, you need a new religion. No holy book covers your sins. You’re guilty and you know it. You want to clap your hands about that?

Hiding Behind Ignorance

One of the greatest sins of my generation is that we have intentionally institutionalized hate by only teaching history from the perspective of a white, anglo-saxon protestant existence that was never more than horseshit in the first place. For far too long, everything we taught in school was based on a white-washed, brain-washed, hand-sanitized view of the world designed to marginalize, criminalize, and oppress anyone who wasn’t white and middle class. While the textbooks have changed in some places, there are still plenty of instances where the secession of Confederate states is justified, where the holding of slaves is taught as an economic necessity, and the Ku Klux Klan is referred to as a religious civic organization.

We were raised with readers that only contained illustrations of white children with names like Dick and Jane. We were taught that the extermination of native peoples was necessary to “advance the frontier.” Even in television programming and movies taught us that the “indians” were always the bad guys, nothing more than blood-thirsty savages. With such ignorance being taught in schools is it any wonder we’re now faced with situations such as the Dakota Access Pipeline where far too many people don’t seem to have any problem with polluting tribal water or desecrating tribal land? We justify our sins with the claim that, “we didn’t know,” or even worse, “I don’t understand why they’re so upset.”

One member of the Oglala Lakota Nation said yesterday:

“We’re not just some hashtag out there just making a scene. We want to be heard. We want you guys to understand that we are fighting for our lives, for our children, for our people, the way we have, our culture, our identity.”

There is no excuse for our ignorance and that shadow is insufficient to hide our sins.

We Are In The Wrong

Let’s get real: If you can justify police murdering an unarmed man in Tulsa, you are wrong.

If you think that police have a reason to be afraid of a person just because of the color of their skin or the neighborhood in which they live, you are wrong.

If you think it is okay to take away the land and culture of an entire tribe in the name of profit, you are wrong.

If you think that it’s acceptable to spit at, hurl insults toward, or even commit acts of violence against someone because they are gay, lesbian, bi, or transgendered, you are wrong.

If you think that people who profess a religion different from yours should be barred, banned, or given a different set of rules, you are wrong.

These are the sins that justify the protests in Charlotte. These are the sins that have thousands camping and protesting at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. These are the sins that, if allowed to linger in the shadows, will most certainly become the justification for an uprising of marginalized people who just aren’t going to take our horseshit anymore.

Maybe we should step out of the shadows, confess our sins somewhere other than a fucking closet, and change the situation. Don’t wait for anyone else. We must be our own leaders.

End this nonsense now.

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Fashioning A Future Of Our Own
September 18, 2016
charles i. letbetter - fashioning a future

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. —Ray Bradbury

 

charles i. letbetter - fashioning a future of our own

What we do now, the things we believe, the acts we commit, all participate in the shaping of our own future

The future is a difficult topic when today has a strange and different feeling to it. Shortly after 3 AM, five cars rolled up at our next door neighbor’s, apparently bringing home the party that started at a local club. An hour later, the dog and I went for our morning stroll. We couldn’t help noticing lights on where normally there are none, an absence of cars where there normally are some, and then, there was the couple who decided to leave the light on and the window open as they had sex. The dog was curious.

Of course, I woke up to the news of the bombing in Chelsea (New York) this morning. At this point, it is still far too soon to know the intent or purpose of the act. Chelsea is a very active area at night. That no one was killed is nothing short of amazing. That hours have passed and the topic is not trending, however, is frightening. We have become comfortable with acts of terrorism.

All of these experiences, from the neighbor’s party to the bombing in Chelsea, become part of how we shape our future. We respond to these events, even if they don’t directly affect us, in ways that, in turn, affect how we respond to other events that have not yet happened. With everything that we do, everything we see, everything that enters our conscience becomes part of what we do next. Do we run? Do we hide? Do we go back to bed? The interconnectedness of it all is mind boggling.

How Children Imagine The Future

The folks over at Hasbro, you know, the place where making sure your kids are well-occupied is a business, decided to ask children to imagine life in the year 2076—60 years from now. Looking into the future is fun when one has their entire future in front of them. At my age, it starts to get a bit frightening.  The answers kids gave back, though, weren’t too surprising: flying cars, flying shoes, houses extending up into the clouds. You’ll be glad to know that we all get pet unicorns and stoves cook the food for us.

Oh, and the aliens are our friends at that point.

Hasbro took those answers and did something cool: imagined them in Play-Doh. The process was caught in time lapse photography. Here’s the future of fashion for you:

There are others, equally amusing. What I noticed, though, is that children did not see a future full of fear. We’re friends with aliens. We have unicorns. Everything is okay.

We All May Be Jerks

One of the articles I’m half-reading between fashion shows is  How To Tell If You’re A Jerk.  I’ll admit that I’ve not been overly enthused about completing the article. I didn’t have to read too far to realize that, yes, there are times I am totally a jerk. So are you. In fact, using the criteria set forth in the article, it would seem rather inevitable that we are all going to be jerks in one way or another.

What is likely more important  is whether, or when, we’re going to be jerks in the future. Notice how children see the future. Everything is innocent in their eyes. There are no jerks for them in the year 2076. While I wish we could make that reality come true, I doubt very seriously if we can help ourselves. In order to give today’s children a society free of jerks we would have to:

  • stop diminishing the humanity of others
  • accept criticism and realize we are all fallible
  • acquire an ability to actually listen to others
  • realize the amazing potential in others

I don’t doubt for a moment that we might want to adopt those traits and attitudes. Certainly, we would like others to treat us with such kindness. Yet, our ability to apply those qualities toward others is strained. We find ourselves in tense situations and our best intentions snap.

A Future Where We All Live

Another article that crossed my path this week comes from The Atlantic and sets a rather ominous tone with the title, The World Is A Thriving Slaughterhouse. My, isn’t that the cheeriest thing you’ve read all day? The author is an award-winning writer who has spent most of his career covering places of conflict, talking to refugees and those who somehow managed to survive the most audacious travesties of war. He points out the fact that over the length of his career, the killing has never stopped. Rather, it only changes locations.

My mind flashes back to New York. Most streets in the Chelsea district are open now. The second device has been defused. Mayor DeBlasio is calling the act “intentional” but still isn’t saying that it’s connected to a specific intent of terror. No one died this time. For that, we are thankful. Yet, the question in the back of my mind still asks, “Is it only a matter of time?”

Children don’t imagine a future where people are constantly dying. Why can’t we give them that? Why can we not make it our goal to create for them a future where, at the very least, humans aren’t killing humans. We may not be able to rid the world of all the horrible diseases. We certainly can’t prevent those acts of nature that wipe out thousands at a time. We can, however, stop intentionally killing each other. Why do we not do that? Why have we not done it before?

The Chance To Make Things Happen

No matter what we try, I don’t think we can make the unicorn thing come true. I’m sure we really want flying shoes, either; I see some potential danger there. There are other things we can do with our future, though. We can make it better than what we have right now. We can make tomorrow brighter. We can make nex week happier.Next month, we can all be in a better place.

What has to happen is we have to start changing our responses to the things that occur around us today. So the neighbor’s party is still going at 5:00 AM. Cool. Be glad they’re having a good time and that no one is getting hurt or driving home drunk. Worry less about what’s keeping others up late and more about we mgiht respond if/when they need help.

More than anything, how we fashion our future depends on us recognizing and valuing the humanity of other people. Even if they’re just as big a jerk as you are. We make a better future one thought, one response at a time. Start now.

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Truth Gets Ugly And Brutal. Deal With It.
September 13, 2016
charles i. letbetter - truth gets ugly and brutal. deal with it

In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act. —George Orwell

 

charles i. letbetter - truth is ugly and brutal

Truth is rarely as pretty or as palpable as we want. Truth is rather brutal and we need to deal with it.

I had a conversation early this morning, before walking the dog, with a friend who is sitting with his father, waiting for him to die. I’ve sat in that chair, where there’s nothing one can do to bring them back or make their exit from this plane of existence more comfortable. Truth is, we’re all going to be there. If we’re not in the chair holding the hand of a parent, we’re the one in  the bed.

I teased elsewhere this morning that I looked in the mirror and realized that I’m too old and too ugly to die young and leave a good-looking corpse. Mirrors force us to face truth in ways we don’t especially enjoy. Truth is often brutal. Perhaps that’s why we  tend to avoid it so much. Try as we may, though, truth catches up with us sooner or later.

An article came across my desk recently, 20 Brutal Truths About Life No One Wants to Admit. While some of the points are a bit redundant (that happens when an editor insists that lists be in conveniently round numbers), the truths he mentions are valid for all of us. We don’t like acknowledging them, to be sure, but if we’re going to get through life with any level of contentedness, we have to deal with things we don’t like.

There’s No Escaping Death

You’re going to die. Your friends are going to die. Everything and everyone around you is going to die. Furthermore, no one controls when that might happen. As much as I like to say I’m going to live long enough to be a pain in the ass to my grandchildren, the truth is I don’t control when I’m going to die. None of us do. I could just as easily step out the back door and be taken out by a random rabid owl. While that scenario isn’t exactly likely, there are far too many things over which we have no control that could cause us to die suddenly and unexpectedly. An unknown space object could come crashing to the earth. Volcanoes could suddenly swallow North America. North Korea.

We don’t deal with the thought of mortality well and that needs to change. Realize that all those awards, the size of your bank account, all those accomplishments don’t mean a damn thing when you’re lying on your death bed. That’s assuming you even get a death bed. There are myriad paths to fatality where you’re alive one moment and not the next. We might think we’re going to die of cancer then get hit by a bus on our way to the clinic.

A lot of people talk about leaving a legacy. A lot of that talk is horseshit. Just because your name is on a half-dozen buildings doesn’t mean anyone actually cares about who you were or that your goals and ideals live on. Charities happily take your money and then, once you’re dead, do what they damn well please with it. If you want your money to do something, do it now.

Do Something That Actually Matters

Hard truth: accumulating wealth doesn’t matter. You don’t take it with you and you can’t really control what happens to it when you’re gone. The best you can hope to do is guide how your money is spent and even that is dubious. Even giving your money away isn’t nearly as impactful as charities like to make you believe. If you really want to make a difference: donate your time. Being hands on with a cause that is important makes much more difference than just giving money.

What we do with our lives, how we spend those waking moments, are what lead us to happiness and fulfillment. Searching for happiness itself is a fruitless effort; you won’t just find it sitting in a cafe somewhere waiting for you . Happiness happens when you do things. Good things. Things that help other people. Things that make a difference to the planet.

Don’t over think everything you do. You can’t be perfect nor can you please everyone. Don’t waste your time telling other people what to do, get in there and do it yourself and let everyone else follow if they want. It is much more important that you set a good example than trying to lead everyone else from the sidelines. If you want to leave a legacy, make it one of achieving what no one thought you could achieve.

Time Matters

Since  any one of us could croak at any minute, that makes every moment in which you’re not dying all the more important. That means, truth be told, you need to set some priorities and start managing the hell out of your life. Love someone? Don’t just tell them, show them. Spend time with the people who mean the most to you. Show them you care. I promise, when they’re lying in a bed dependent upon constant IVs and other assistance in order to exist, it doesn’t matter how fucking busy you thought you were or how important you thought you were being. Nothing matters more than the time you spend with the people you love.

The truth of our mortality also dictates that if you want to do something you’d best get busy doing it now. Don’t wait to ask for permission if you don’t need to. Don’t wait until the timing is more convenient because that never happens. Timing is never convenient. So, if you want to start a family, take the steps necessary to start a family. If you want to learn a language, start talking. If you want to travel, start walking.

One of the biggest mistakes we make is that we sit back and let life happen to us. We are being lazy and stupid when we do that. No one is going to show up at the front door and just hand you a bundle of cash. No one is going to walk up to you on the street and just offer you a dream job. We have to make life happen for ourselves. Otherwise, we look up one day and realize we’re 70 years old and all we’ve done with our lives is wait.

Take It From Someone  Who Failed

At the end of the article I mentioned earlier is a brief video conversation with Bill Bartman. Bill understands the truth about how nasty and ugly and terribly inconvenient things can be. He has had it all and lost every last bit of it. He understands, though, that we don’t let failure stop us from taking risks, living life, and getting things done. So, I’ll leave you with that video. It’s only five and a half minutes, so take the time to watch. Then go. Do. Live.

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Behind The Scenes  /  Just For Fun  /  PotD
The Dog Eats Popsicle Sticks And Cat Poop
September 12, 2016
charles i. letbetter - the dog eats popsicle sticks and cat poop

I am called a dog because I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals. —Diogenes

 

charles i. letbetter - the dog likes Popsicle sticks and cat poop

Not everything in our world revolves around fashion. I still have to walk the dog.

I’m taking everything that happens this morning as a sign from the universe, and it’s not looking good at this point.

We have a cat tree in our living room positioned right by the entrance to the hallway leading to/from the bedrooms. When I woke up this morning, all three of the adult cats were sleeping on the tree. As I pass, the eldest cat, and only male of the bunch, reaches out and baps me upside the head. Normally, he’s rather gentle but not this morning. There was some claw in that bap. I consider that a wake-up message. I need to pay attention—and give the big guy some love.

Taking the dog out, I was enjoying the cool 57° as we traversed our route around the neighborhood. Being away from the computer screen at the start of the day helps me clear my mind, sort my thoughts, and avoid stepping in someone else’s dog’s poop. I needed that time away this morning. I was pissed that after spending so very much time creating yesterday’s picture of the day only seven people actually saw it. Seven. Everyone’s off looking at the fashion reviews, which is flattering in a way. But there’s more to life.

Like popsicle sticks, apparently. We returned from our walk and I filled the dog’s bowl. Most days he nibbles a bit then lays back down and naps. The cats happen to like this particular brand of dog food, though, and steal it from his bowl.

Subheadings Make Copy More Readable

They also interrupt the story at awkward moments. As I was saying, the cats keep stealing the dog’s food.

So, this morning, the dog decides he’s had enough of the culinary theft and devours his morning ration the instant it hits the bowl. Then, apparently still not satisfied, he goes sniffing around the couch to see what else he can find. What he found was a popsicle stick that Kat had left out on the couch. Of course, dogs don’t need popsicle sticks, what with splinters and all. I took the stick away and put it in the trash.

Five minutes later I hear a crunching sound behind me. Sure enough, the dog had retrieved the popsicle stick from the garbage and was continuing his treat. I took the stick away again and gave him a stern warning to stay out of the trash.

Dogs understand human logic; I’m sure of it. Don’t laugh at me.

I sit back down to look at the morning’s news, something about the Democratic candidate passing out from boredom or some other nonsense, when I heard sounds coming from the vicinity of the cats’ litter box. That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that all three cats were back in their tree. I check and sure enough the dog was back there eating the cat poop.

Good thing we use an all-natural cat litter.

Other Things Happened This Weekend

Football. You know, those guys who get paid millions of dollars to give each other concussions. I like football at the college level, but the so-called pros bore me. Besides, there were fashion shows to watch. Lots and lots of fashion shows.

There were also neighbors that needed some attention.

We’ve known for a while that our friend across the street was struggling. Some of the bitchier old ladies in the neighborhood have made it impossible for him to do the minor mechanic work he was performing in his driveway. Not that he was doing anyone any harm, mind you, just changing oil (with appropriate disposal), adjusting and replacing belts, swapping out the occasional fuel pump. Quick, easy things he could do without needing a rack or a lot of other heavy and expensive equipment. The old biddies in the neighborhood would call code enforcement every time they saw a car in his driveway. It didn’t matter whether any codes, it was the constant harassment that mattered. As a result, they’ve eliminated his sole source of income.

The poor guy was sitting over there quite literally starving to death. When Kat found out he had nothing in his refrigerator, we had no choice but to act. Kat’s good about that. While I was watching people parading around in costumes that retail for more than most people make in a month, she ran to the store and made sure our neighbor had enough food to get him through the next few weeks. We have to watch out for each other like that.

Turn The Lights Out When You Leave

There was a full-size tractor-trailer going out of the neighborhood this morning. Talk about zoning violations. It wasn’t a moving truck, either, which would be the one logical explanation. The dog and I heard a lot of banging and clanging while we were on our walk this morning. I’m assuming it was whoever was loading that truck. Perhaps they were disassembling their meth lab and moving it. If so, good riddance.

There’s also a school bus that goes through picking up kids at 6:00 AM. I don’t get it. That’s too damn early for children to be up.

I just started the third pot of coffee brewing. It really shouldn’t take me so long to write these articles, but it does. Between the dog snatching popsicle sticks, cats leaping around the room, and trying to get the kids to school completely dressed, I don’t get to write too many words at once. I’m fortunate if I make it through a sentence without being interrupted.

I’m still pissed at how few people read yesterday’s article. I worked really hard on that, dammit.

Sigh. There are more fashion shows to cover this morning. If I get a break from that, there are pictures to edit. There is no such thing as down time around here. In fact, we’ve been keeping track and there’s typically only about an hour a day, between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, when no one is up and busy. One hour.

No wonder we burn through so many lightbulbs.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for sharing. Oh, and did you know there are people who make eight figures off YouTube?  None of them are over 50. Sigh.

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Current Issues  /  PotD
A Moment Of Silence Is Not What We Need
September 11, 2016
charles i. letbetter - a moment of silence is not what we need

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. —Archibald MacLeish

 

charles i. letbetter - a moment of silence is not what we need

The 2,753 people who died on this date do not benefit from our silence. We honor those who died by speaking out.

My youngest son, the 18-year-old, was only three when this date became noteworthy. He doesn’t have any real memory of that day. His mother had taken him to a play date and was unaware of what was happening. I called her after the first plane hit and told her she should probably grab the little guy and head home just to be safe, away from downtown Atlanta. I was stuck at the convention center, my car unretrievable from the CNN Center where I had parked. He has no memory of how tight I held him and his brothers that night. Neither is he able to understand just how frightened we all were in that moment.

For all the controversies about who knew what when and what actions were taken, the numbers from that day are concrete: 2,753 died. 1,402 were employees in tower one. 614 were employees in tower two. 115 nations were represented among the dead, not just Americans. Only 291 bodies were found “intact.” Fires continued to burn for nearly 100 days afterward. Approximately 3,051 children lost a parent.

Other numbers are important, too. 12, 962 civil rights complaints were opened at the Council on American-Islamic Relations nationwide from 2002 to 2008. The average benefit received by each NYPD and FDNY widow was $1 million, but some families of World Trade Center employees received less than $50,000. An estimated $600 million was spent on the cleanup, not including subway repairs that cost over $7 billion and an additional $970 million spent by FEMA.

Blindsided By Fear

Twenty-six days later, the US started bombing Afghanistan. 2,343 US troops died in Operation Enduring Freedom. Fear gripped the nation in ways not imagined by anyone since World War II. An estimated 1.4 million people changed their travel plans for that holiday season, choosing to drive rather than fly.  Applications to the CIA jumped a full 50 percent. Over 400,000 people still suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. What happened on this date shook us to our very core. Our collective response was to have a moment of silence, not as much out of respect as because we didn’t know what to say.

The problem is that scared people don’t always think rationally. Fear motivates us to do things that are unreasonable. We freeze when logic says to move. When we do move, we tend to turn in directions that ultimately put us in even greater danger. Acting on fear rarely works out to anyone’s advantage. That is why horror movies tend to have such a high body count. Fear makes us stupid.

Even worse, the fear turned us on each other. We started looking sideways at everyone. We enacted legislation that changed how we travel, how we come and go between countries, and even who can get a job. None of those things have proven to make us any safer, but we are still so scared fifteen years later that the majority of Americans oppose any kind of roll-back of post-9/11 laws. We have latched on to fear and refuse to let go.

Our Own Worst Enemy

Over the past fifteen years, we have allowed fear to turn us upon ourselves and upon humanity. We have tried to close our borders and when we were not able to do so we started hard-core discrimination against anyone who talks with an accent we find strange or looks remotely foreign. Every September 11, we have these moments of silence and the start yelling at each other about who is more American.

Since 2001, we have become more racially divided than we’ve been in 150 years. Blacks distrust whites (with good reason), Latinos distrust blacks, and anyone who looks to be of Middle Eastern decent had best be wearing body armor. Incidents of white privilege are more obvious than ever, but anyone who dares to say anything is bullied into silence. When a political party says that they’re going to “Make America Great Again,” what they’re saying is they want to make the US more white-centric, more pandering to the religious right, and basing even more of our actions on fear.

We have done more damage to our own country in the past 15 years than those three airplanes ever could. Our backs have been turned on the poor, the uneducated, the homeless. and even the veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom. We have become more selfish, more self-centered, and amazingly more intolerant of everyone who is not us. Together, we have torn our country limb from limb until all that remains are pieces. Millions of individual pieces too scared to consider doing anything cohesive.

Not A Time For Silence

Hundreds of thousands of people will take time today to observe a moment of silence. Even New York Fashion Week is observing a moment of silence. Who does that really benefit, though? Silence does not honor the dead if our actions on either side of that silence are committed to taking the lessons of that moment 15 years ago and improving. Unfortunately, we have been cowering in fear rather than learning anything. We don’t need silence, we need action.

We need people like Colin Kaepernick and Brandon Marshall who are willing to make some noise over continued racial injustice.

We need people who stand up and make noise, even in the face of tear gas and dog attacks, to stop oil companies from desecrating native tribal lands.

We need people who fight for the right of women who are never “asking for it,” who should always have complete control over what they do with their bodies, and whose rights have been stopped on by old white men for centuries.

We need people who refuse to be quiet about the economic injustice that leaves children without food and families without shelter for the winter.

We need people who yell, scream, and throw fits over the deplorable conditions of the American healthcare system.

We need people willing to go to the mat for veterans of our too-many wars, especially in regard to long-term mental health care.

We need people who are not silent in the face of illiteracy, discriminatory voting regulations, college debt, religious intolerance, our continuing rape culture, and elder abuse.

Mind you, every last one of these things existed prior to 9/11/2001.  What has happened in the past 15 years, though, is we let the fear that consumed us on that day to force us into silence. In that silence of fear, we let these problems become worse. In some cases, we deliberately made them worse.

We don’t need any more moments of silence. If we are going to honor those who died 15 years ago, we need moments of action.

And that action is going to make some noise.

(statistics courtesy New York Magazine)

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Current Issues  /  Mythology  /  PotD  /  science
When Empires Fall, Dark Ages Follow
September 4, 2016
charles i. letbetter - when empires fall, dark ages follow

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages. —Gertrude Stein

 

charles i. letbetter - when empires fall, dark ages follow

While politicians make claims of greatness the reality is that we are much closer to falling into return of the dark ages

Helping my 18-yr-old with his homework is bringing back some often painful memories. This week, his English class started studying Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I saw the title and shuddered. I remember struggling with the old English and not doing terribly well. The allegory was easy enough to follow once it was explained, but trying to get through the particular challenges of a language that was still trying to emerge from the Dark Ages was a formidable challenge. Fortunately, he actually likes this stuff. He’s doing well without me.

Looking back at that time period, though, when few people read and “publishing” was still not yet a thing got me thinking about how desperate and hopeless the conditions were in the period following the fall of the Roman empire. The decimation of anything remotely resembling that government was so complete that calling that period the Dark Ages is almost an understatement. The late William Manchester studied and wrote about that frightening point in history extensively. In his 1992 book, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, Manchester makes the following observation:

Very little is clear about that dim era. Intellectual life had vanished from Europe. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor and greatest of all medieval rulers, was illiterate. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, which lasted some seven  centuries after Charlemagne, literacy was scorned; when a cardinal corrected the Latin of the emperor Sigismund, Charlemagne’s forty-seventh successor, Sigismund rudely replied, “ Ego sum Romanus et super grammatica”— as “King of Rome,” he was “above grammar.” Nevertheless, if value judgments are made, it is undeniable that most of what is known about that period is unlovely. After the extant fragments have been fitted together, the portrait that emerges is a mèlange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.

His last sentence is what frightens me. Compare the qualities with which he defines the Dark Ages to our conditions today and the parallels should shake us to our core. Perhaps we should be concerned. Let’s take a look at each area.

Incessant Warfare

For all the talk about peace, the United States hardly knows what the word even means. I talked briefly with my middle son, the Marine, last night and briefly discussed how tensions over the South China Sea keep everyone on the base in Okinawa in a constant state of preparedness. There is no real relaxing even when they appear to be celebrating the long weekend.

The US military doesn’t know how to relax. We don’t want them to relax. If we look at the list of military conflicts in which the US has been involved, we don’t just see the major activities such as world wars, but an ongoing litany of one engagement right after another. Most of these have slipped our memory. Some were even ignored by the public in general. Yet, our taste for incessant warfare dirties our history from its inception. Consider this list, compiled by The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, for the decade from 2000-2009. How many of these do you remember?

  • 2000 – Sierra Leone: On May 12, 2000, a U.S. Navy patrol craft deployed to Sierra Leone to support evacuation operations from that country if needed.[RL30172]
  • 2000 – Nigeria: Special Forces troops are sent to Nigeria to lead a training mission in the country.[10]
  • 2000 – Yemen: On October 12, 2000, after the USS Cole attack in the port of Aden, Yemen, military personnel were deployed to Aden.[RL30172]
  • 2000 – East Timor: On February 25, 2000, a small number of U.S. military personnel were deployed to support the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). [RL30172]
  • 2001 – On April 1, 2001, a mid-air collision between a United States Navy EP-3E ARIES II signals surveillance aircraft and a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) J-8II interceptor fighter jet resulted in an international dispute between the United States and the People’s Republic of China called the Hainan Island incident.
  • 2001–2014 – War in Afghanistan: The War on Terror begins with Operation Enduring Freedom. On October 7, 2001, U.S. Armed Forces invade Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks and “begin combat action in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban supporters.”[RL30172]
  • 2002 – Yemen: On November 3, 2002, an American MQ-1 Predator fired a Hellfire missile at a car in Yemen killing Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an al-Qaeda leader thought to be responsible for the USS Cole bombing.[RL30172]
  • 2002 – Philippines: OEF-Philippines, As of January, U.S. “combat-equipped and combat support forces” have been deployed to the Philippines to train with, assist and advise the Philippines’ Armed Forces in enhancing their “counterterrorist capabilities.”[RL30172]
  • 2002 – Côte d’Ivoire: On September 25, 2002, in response to a rebellion in Côte d’Ivoire, U.S. military personnel went into Côte d’Ivoire to assist in the evacuation of American citizens from Bouaké.[11][RL30172]
  • 2003–2011 – War in Iraq: Operation Iraqi Freedom, March 20, 2003, The United States leads a coalition that includes the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland to invade Iraq with the stated goal being “to disarm Iraq in pursuit of peace, stability, and security both in the Gulf region and in the United States.”[RL30172]
  • 2003 – Liberia: Second Liberian Civil War, On June 9, 2003, President Bush reported that on June 8 he had sent about 35 U.S. Marines into Monrovia, Liberia, to help secure the U.S. Embassy in Nouakchott, Mauritania, and to aid in any necessary evacuation from either Liberia or Mauritania.[RL30172]
  • 2003 – Georgia and Djibouti: “US combat equipped and support forces” had been deployed to Georgia and Djibouti to help in enhancing their “counterterrorist capabilities.”[12]
  • 2004 – Haiti: 2004 Haitian coup d’état occurs, The US first sent 55 combat equipped military personnel to augment the U.S. Embassy security forces there and to protect American citizens and property in light. Later 200 additional US combat-equipped, military personnel were sent to prepare the way for a UN Multinational Interim Force, MINUSTAH.[RL30172]
  • 2004 – War on Terror: U.S. anti-terror related activities were underway in Georgia, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Eritrea.[13]
  • 2004–present: The U.S deploys drone strikes to aid in the War in North-West Pakistan
  • 2005–06 – Pakistan: President Bush deploys troops from US Army Air Cav Brigades to provide Humanitarian relief to far remote villages in the Kashmir mountain ranges of Pakistan stricken by a massive earthquake.
  • 2006 – Lebanon: part of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit[14] begins evacuation of U.S. citizens willing to leave the country in the face of a likely ground invasion by Israel and continued fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli military.[14][15]
  • 2007 – The Mogadishu Encounter, on November 4, 2007, Somali Pirate‘s boarded and attacked a North Korean merchant vessel. Passing U.S. Navy Ships and a helicopter that were patrolling at the time responded to the attack. Once the ship was freed from the pirates, the American forces were given permission to board and assist the wounded crew and handle surviving pirates.
  • 2007 – Somalia: Battle of Ras Kamboni, On January 8, 2007, while the conflict between the Islamic Courts Union and the Transitional Federal Government continues, an AC-130 gunship conducts an aerial strike on a suspected al-Qaeda operative, along with other Islamist fighters, on Badmadow Island near Ras Kamboni in southern Somalia.[16]
  • 2008 – South Ossetia, Georgia: Helped Georgia humanitarian aid,[17] helped to transport Georgian forces from Iraq during the conflict. In the past, the US has provided training and weapons to Georgia.

The Roman empire made the same mistake that we’re making: trying to secure the whole world on their own. Granted, the “world” of the Roman empire was actually just most of one continent, but given capabilities and geographic knowledge of the time the comparison is still apt. When the Romans proved to be stretched too thin, the Huns breached the Northern borders, opening the doors to every other barbarous tribe that wanted a piece of the action. The once great Roman army fell with surprising speed.

With the fall of Rome, wars between the invading tribes were non-stop. The constant battles sucked up every last ounce of resources leaving nothing for even basic items such as the maintenance of roads. By the time of Chaucer, only the best of the ancient Roman roads were still passable. Most were muddy, rutted, paths barely suitable for foot traffic.

Today, the US military spend $829.1 billion annually. Only health care takes a larger portion of the US budget and many in Congress would dearly love to dismantle those programs. Of that $829 billion, the vast majority goes not to equipment or veteran’s care or personnel, but the direct cost of involving our troops in constant rotating areas of conflict.

Could we be making the same mistake that Rome once did? Could we be taking steps toward our own Dark Ages? Military activity on its own is not enough of a precursor. Let’s continue.

Corruption

Where would you like to start, the Democratic presidential candidate’s private email server or the Republican presidential candidate’s ties with the Russian oligarchy? I’m not sure there is anyone within the borders of the United States who would deny that our government is rife with corruption from one end to the other. Even officials such as town councilpersons and county sheriffs have been convicted of things such as bribery and influence peddling.

What we often overlook, though, are the devastating effects of corporate corruption. It was the illegal dealings of traders on Wall Street and large banks, not the government, that led to the economic depression of 2008. Whistleblowing organizations such as Wikileaks are inundated daily with a constant stream of corruption accusations from around the world. Courts are full of lawsuits never fully heard as both corporate executives and the average Joe next door look for ways to exploit the system.

The effect of so much constant and thorough corruption is to destabilize all of society. We have, in just the past twelve years, seen the complete elimination of anything we once considered the Middle Class. Both legal and illegal corruption bring us constantly closer to that Medieval class system where one is either born rich, serves in the military, or exists in poverty as a serf with no hope of ever changing one’s station in life. As we refuse to reign in such rampant corruption, our march toward the next Dark Ages grows every closer.

Lawlessness

Remember when we were growing up and our parents and teachers taught us that the police were our friends? We naively believed them as they  protected us from the violence that was going on right under our noses. I can sit here and see now that such an attitude toward law enforcement is a benefit of white privilege. Sure, for me and my family, the police are our friends. I can flag down a police officer as he patrols the neighborhood and know that they are going to respond to the best of his/her ability. To them, we appear like a normal, law-abiding, Caucasian family. I’ve never had any reason to fear them.

Too many people cannot say the same thing, though. Even as you are reading this, Native peoples fighting against a pipeline that would destroy their only water source (thanks to more corruption) are being attacked with dogs and tear gas. Here’s the video from yesterday’s activity:

At the same time, police in Santa Clara, California threaten to not do their sworn jobs, to protect and keep peace, because a black quarterback is protesting the brutality of law enforcement against people of color.

Over the past several years, we’ve seen violence erupt across the nation in direct response to the lawlessness perpetrated against people based on racial and religious grounds.  Law enforcement has  too often decided that they get to pick and choose whom they get to protect. Courts have followed suit, repeatedly giving reduced or no sentence at all to white offenders while filling prisons with black and Latino citizens. Our concept of justice has been warped to serve the opinions of whichever political ideology happens to be popular at the moment.

Lawlessness may be the one area where we are already as bad as the Dark Ages. When people mysteriously die on their way to jail and spend countless months imprisoned without a trial we cannot call our society enlightened. Do you feel the darkness closing in yet?

Obsession With Strange Myths

Today is a Sunday. How many people are making their weekly pilgrimage to a place of worship where they will bow in honor to a deity and belief system they don’t really understand? Our propensity to believe in, and obsess over, strange myths is greater now than it has ever been. In fact, the citizens of the Dark Ages would be confused and probably even frightened by some of the religions that prosper in the United States. With over 600 denominations of Christian sects alone, our country’s somewhat dubious guarantee of freedom of religion has given rise to a plethora of belief systems that range from the ancient and honored to the recent and ridiculous.

What pushes us ever closer to a  Dark Ages-style of existence is that what one believes can affect their place in society. I have watched with interest this weekend as the Republican candidate for president has capitulated to church leaders of questionable legitimacy. Desperate to appeal to a wider group of voters, the candidate is pandering along religious lines offering preference in exchange for votes.

Where the poverty-stricken and uneducated Medieval masses were committed to what we would call superstition and legend, we have organized our mythologies so as to give them some sense of legitimacy. Yet, the ferociousness with which we defend these legends of deities that raise from the dead and so-called prophets and saints who miraculously heal select people (but never a whole hospital) ends up sounding every bit like a populous that was illiterate and ignorant of science.

Impenetrable Mindlessness

We easily dismiss illiteracy in the Dark Ages because the printing press had yet to be invented. Access to books and scrolls was limited to those in power, and as we’ve already mentioned not even emperors were especially well educated. We, however, are supposed to be different. The United States is supposed to be the smartest, most well-educated, most intelligent country in the world. At least, that’s what we like to keep telling ourselves. Reality, however, is considerably different.

Statistics from the Literacy Project Foundation show that 44 million adults in the US are unable to read even a simple story. 44% of Americans do not read a book of any kind over the course of a year. Over three million students drop out of high school each year. Those who do graduate are unable to complete any form of higher education because of insurmountable costs that require incomprehensible debt.

Combine those statistics with an anti-intelligence attitude in government that rivals that of Sigismund and we are creating an atmosphere sending us hurtling toward the Dark Ages. Medieval citizens at least had the excuse that modern science did not yet exist. Copernicus wasn’t even born until 1473 and even then his views were considered so heretical that the Church prohibited them from being discussed.  We have every benefit of science imaginable and still there are people who discard such knowledge and information as unsubstantiated rumor not worthy of discussion.

I’m not the first person to notice that we have the wealth of the world’s knowledge  literally at our fingertips and yet we choose to remain ignorant. This, perhaps more than anything else, spells most certain doom for the whole of society.

No One Is Listening

As I sit here near the completion of this missive, hours of research and work poured into it, I wonder how many people will even read these last few lines. We don’t like being told that we are destroying our own civilization. We know that we know better. Yet, our actions continually push toward an edge that, once crossed, could take centuries before there is any recovery.

I wish you would listen. I wish you would share this article. I would love to see people insisting that we take these problems seriously.

There is some comfort in knowing I’ll likely be dead before we really see a return to the Dark Ages. What hurts is knowing that we have gone there with full knowledge of what we are doing. We are turning our back on advancing  civilization and choosing ignorance. History has no choice but to look back on us with shame.

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Current Issues  /  PotD
American-Branded Hate Dominates
September 2, 2016
charles i. letbetter - amerocan-branded hate dominates

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

charles i. letbetter - American-branded hate dominates

There’s more hate speech from American sources than anyone in the Middle East

Today’s pictures are only there to get your attention. They have nothing to do with the topic.

Okay, that statement’s not completely accurate. We have a picture of an ass. If you are a racist, bigoted, xenophobe who spreads hate, then you are an ass. So, I guess there is a distant relationship to the topic. Sort of.

Nonetheless, it appears that America is number one in yet another area of distinction: spreading hate online, specifically on Twitter. The research done by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism was released yesterday. I had planned to write this article then and was too ill to do so. This much hate makes me sick to my stomach.

We’re not especially surprised by the outcome of the study. At least, we’re not surprised that Americans spew more extremist views than anyone else. We’ve been watching the mountains of filth grow from the moment President Obama was elected to office in 2008. Every neanderthal in the country suddenly felt a need to go online and express their rage, ignorance, and outright stupidity. Half the time the statements don’t even make sense.

The numbers are higher than we expected, though. Much higher. Even that Mid-East terror fountain we refer to as Daesh (because it’s insulting and they really have nothing to do with Islam) doesn’t put as much hate online as do Americans.

Numbers Difficult To Count

Just how proliferate is the extremism we’re talking about?

“White nationalists and Nazis outperformed [Daesh] in average friend and follower counts by a substantial margin. Nazis had a median follower count almost eight times greater than [Daesh] supporters, and a mean count more than 22 times greater.”

Concrete numbers are difficult to come by because Twitter, which the report specifically targets, is constantly doing its best to eliminate accounts known for producing hate speech or content that incites or encourages violence. However, that effort has been very  lopsided. While the social media company has shut down, by its own account, over 360,000 accounts “for threatening or promoting what it defined as terrorist acts,” those efforts have been directed specifically toward Daesh. Nazis and white supremacists, on the other hand, have gotten by with saying just about anything they want.

What’s important to realize is that it’s not just the number of accounts but the number of followers that matter. A group might post a racist statement and be largely ignored if they have a low follower count. But when one has a following the size of the white nationalists and Nazis studied for the report, nothing gets ignored. Instead, the hate gets liked and retweeted over and over, spreading its vile poison around the globe. The final reach by these mostly American-based hate groups is in the millions.

Everyone Gets A Chance To Speak

Remember that point in Plato’s Republic, along about Book VII I believe, where he uses the allegory to describe why Democracy fails? He might as well have been looking right at us when he wrote that passage. For democracy to work, there must be learning, understanding, and reasoning across the board. Everyone must have a base level of intelligence if everyone is going to get a vote. Otherwise, the system fails.

The great promise of the Internet was that it would “level the playing field” by giving everyone a voice. Sure, the big corporations would have the biggest and flashiest websites, but that wouldn’t prevent Joe Redneck over there from creating his own website as well. Freedom of Speech. First Amendment. Rah, rah, rah. We were so convinced this w as a good thing and in many ways it has been. Then, along comes social media like Twitter and its ability to amplify all those millions of voices. Everyone gets 146 characters, no matter who you are. Equal footing for everyone. Sounds great.

And then the hate begins. Small at first, more of an annoyance than anything. But the hate grows. People start following the hate. They start retweeting the hate. Suddenly, extremists groups we thought had all but disappeared are popping up with huge audiences. They play to the fears and the lies and the misinformation of an under-educated and largely ignorant populace. The extremism spreads from Twitter to real life as the number of Klan and Nazi rallies increase. The next thing we know, not only is hate back stronger than ever, but it’s running for President!

Shutting The Barn Door

Ask the good folks at Twitter what they’re doing about the problem of extremist hate speech and they’ll direct you to their terms of service. They try to emphasize the parts that “prohibit promoting terrorism, threatening abuse and hateful conduct such as attacking or threatening a person on the basis of race or ethnicity.” The rules are there. The problem is getting anyone to follow them. Twitter, like Facebook and other companies. relies on users to report inappropriate activity. However, one cannot report activity they don’t see.

There has been a lot of discussion over the past few years as to how we create “echo chambers” with our social media accounts. We like, friend, and follow those people and organizations that hold values similar to our own.  When someone repeatedly makes statements that we don’t like, things that we find offensive,  we unfriend or unfollow them. Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. If offensive hate-filled behavior isn’t reported, then it continues whether we see it or not. When everyone following a hate group agrees with that point of view, nothing gets reported. Instead, the hate is shared, re-distributed, turned into a meme and shared again. The very systems that allow us to choose what we see and who we follow end up allowing the hate and the extremism to grow.

Complicating matters even further is the fact that, unlike Daesh, American-branded extremism isn’t cohesively organized and planned. Individuals are as likely to make offensive statements as are known  hate groups. Shutting everyone down becomes difficult.

Finding A Solution

The report states that its data represents only a subset of all the extremists and hate-based groups on the Internet. They are legion.

Where we begin turning the tide against hate is first by filling Twitter and other social media with more love. Support those who fight against injustice. Demand equality for your Muslim neighbor, your Latino neighbor,  your black neighbor. Fill your life, and your friends list, with those who are the targets of hate. Show more kindness and generosity toward those most likely to be the subject of online trolls and bullies.

Then, when you see injustice and hate, put it down. Don’t merely unfriend someone. If what someone is saying threatens another person or group, speak up. Report them. No, you’re not being mean or vindictive. You’re sending a message that hate and extremism are not tolerated.

Hate kills. No one has a right to kill. Stop the hate. Embrace your brother and sister. Spread the love.

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Current Issues  /  Music
Replacing The National Anthem
August 31, 2016
charles i. letbetter - change the national anthem

If you forget the words to your own song, you can always claim artistic license. Forget the words to the national anthem, and you’re screwed. —Lyle Lovett

 

charles i. letbetter - change the national anthem

The National Anthem is difficult to sing, is fraught with negative connotations, and fails to fully represent our country. So why do we still use it?

I’m looking at recent headlines and having an incredible sense of having been here before. Once again, we’re arguing about the National Anthem. This instance happens to be the result of some random football player exercising his right to sit during the pre-game ritual. This isn’t the first time someone has done that. It won’t be the last. This whole incident has been played out multiple times during my life. Yet, for all the talk, nothing has actually changed.

I’ll admit that, as a musician, I rather like the music portion of The Star-Spangled Banner. I like that not just anyone can sing the song well. The song harmonizes well when arranged correctly. The melody is open to a lot of personal interpretation. As a piece of music, The Star-Spangled Banner works well for me.

However, as a national anthem, the song sucks. The language is stilted and the entire third verse is offensive. Textually, the song doesn’t so much say, “Hooray for the United States,” as it says, “Hey, we didn’t get beaten this time.” As a nation, we have been divided over the anthem since the middle of the 19th century. Continuing to force it upon generation after generation just for the sake of tradition removes any real meaning. What we sing at the beginning of ballgames and political events today does not represent us. We need a national anthem that speaks for us all.

Why Have A National Anthem?

If we’re going to get all riled up about the issue of a national anthem, we first must consider why we have an anthem in the first place. Why is it an anthem and not just a national song? I don’t find it unrealistic should we just have a national jingle. After all, we are one of the most commercially driven and materialistic people on the planet. Perhaps an anthem isn’t what we need at all.

Most music dictionaries define an anthem as a song that identifies the ideals and values of a specific group of people. For example, when our friends directly to the North of us sing Oh, Canada it’s pretty obvious from the start what the song is about and who it represents. Russia’s national anthem (which is not without similar controversies itself) is also highly recognizeable. That one starts out:

Russia – our sacred homeland,
Russia – our beloved country.
A mighty will, a great glory –
These are your heritage for all time!

Sort of. The translation is a little rough, but the general sentiment is there. My point is that an anthem makes it clear that it holds a relationship with a specific group of people.

The Star-Spangled Banner doesn’t exactly fit that definition. People only relate the song to the country because we keep playing it every time we decide to get sweaty or have an election. The song does not contain the name of the country. The song does not represent our ideals. Our song is about a flag not getting blown to smithereens. That’s it. So, it fails in the definition of an anthem.

A National Anthem Should Be Inclusive

Singer/songwriter John Legend, who I respect, went on record yesterday as saying he believes we should change the national anthem to America The Beautiful. A lot of people have made the argument for Katherine Lee Bates’ song before. At the very least, it is certainly more descriptive of the country and contains the word “America.” That’s more than the current anthem does. Plus, it is easier to sing and is already well-known. There’s just one little problem in the chorus:

America, America,
God shed his grace on thee.

Uhm, yeah, there are going to be a lot of people have a problem with that reference to a specific deity. The case isn’t made any stronger by the fact that the original poem has at least eight verses, one of which contains a phrase some might find a bit frightening:

America, America,
God shed his grace on thee;
‘Til nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

What the fuck? Okay, if we give Miss Bates the benefit of the doubt, she might have meant “whiter” in the sense of more heavenly, maybe. Still, the inference here is totally unacceptable in a national anthem. The same is true for God Bless America and I’m Proud To Be An American. The religious references divide us, not unite us.

Some (Slightly) Better Suggestions

We have some existing songs within the American catalog of music that have the potential for being a great national anthem. If we’re going to get all caught up in the flag thing, then perhaps the late George M. Cohan has the answer:

You’re a grand old flag
You’re a high-flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
The land I love,
The home of the free and the brave.
Ev’ry heart beats true
‘Neath the Red, White and Blue,
Where there’s never a boast or brag.
But should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Keep your eye on the grand old flag.

The song only works, however, if we just adopt the chorus. The first verse has an uncomfortable reference to, “Way down yonder in the land of cotton.” I can understand a lot of people not being particularly fond of that little element.

Perhaps we just do away with lyrics altogether. After all, that seems to be what largely upsets folks about any of the songs. Maybe John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever, which is already our national march, could fit the bill. We like singing, though, and again, it doesn’t match the definition of an anthem.

Time To Write Our Own

We need a new national anthem. We need a song that is singable, one that unites us  rather than divides us. The United States deserves a national anthem that actually contains the name of the country in its text. A song that can be sung by little children or mass choirs should be the goal of our effort. Any anthem representing our country needs to reflect all of us, not just the privileged few. To have a song that marginalizes so many of our own people is unacceptable.

We have too many wonderful and talented composers in our country for us to not have one kick-ass national anthem. We need to get behind the concept and tell Congress, who ordains such things, that we demand a new song. Maybe have John Legend write it, or maybe Beyoncé and Taylor Swift could team up. Anyone accept Kanye. Please, don’t let that idiot near our national anthem.

For too long, we have argued and fussed over a national anthem that fails to represent us well. We need to get over the whole aspect of tradition and write something new; something  that gives us all a reason to stand with pride and sing.

Or maybe we just need a jingle.

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PotD  /  science
Does History Care If We F*#k Up?
August 31, 2016

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. —Mark Twain

 

charles i.letbetter - does history care if we fuck up

Humans may very well be responsible for one of earth’s greatest calamities, but 100,000 years from now will anyone care?

Humans like to think we’re the smartest beings that have ever inhabited this planet. We may be correct. History indicates that whatever preceded us didn’t have a great deal of luck when it came to surviving what the universe threw at them. We, on the other hand, are pretty sure we’re different. We are convinced that we have everything under control and can almost certainly mitigate any natural disasters. Confident beings, we are.

However, given the choices we’re making, history may judge us no more intelligent than the dinosaurs. We gleefully ignore science. We intentionally pollute our air and water, the very things we need to survive. Our planet is over-populated beyond its ability to sustain life. Yet, we refuse to use genetically modified foods that could feed the planet. We love war. Not only that, humanity has a long history of people not getting along with their closest neighbors. Anyone looking at us in retrospect would consider our violent tendencies a negative character trait.

Humans, however, are focused on the here and now. We pay attention to us. The past is the past. Let the future worry about itself. The earth is slowly baking? Meh, it’s just a periodic thing that happens. Humanity may be in the process of committing one of the biggest fuck-ups in the history of the planet. Yet, does history actually care? Looking beyond our meager existence as a species, we are as easily forgettable as Australopithecus afarensis. The fact you don’t know whether I just made up that name proves my point.

How We Look At History

Humans are the latest, but most likely not the last, in a long evolutionary line of hominids. Our earliest bipedal ancestors existed some six- to eight-million years ago and were considerably smaller than we are now. Our best connection with this time is a single skeleton from about three million years ago. Scientists named the skeleton Lucy because she was, in a very real way, a person. Lucy’s skeleton was found in 1974 in a shallow Ethiopian stream bed. Researchers announced this week that we finally know how Lucy died. She fell, feet first, from a high distance, most likely a tree.

Studies of Lucy’s skeleton take a lot of time. She is the only one of her species we have encountered. She is the only one of her species we are likely to ever encounter. Therefore, while anthropologists study her remains at the microscopic level they try to make conclusions not only about Lucy’s life but her entire species. Did Lucy live or sleep in the trees? When she fell, why was no one around to save her? Each question answered raises a dozen more.

Inevitably, someone asks about the accuracies of these findings. We’re using the best CSI-like technology available. We’re drawing conclusions and making discoveries about Lucy’s time period that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Yet, we have no way of knowing exactly how accurate the findings are. No one from that period in history, nothing written, no form of communication still exists. Lucy’s life matters because it is the only glimpse we have into her species. Without her, we wouldn’t have a clue. History wouldn’t care.

How History Looks At Us

Back in 2011, geologists and other scientists who study history in large time frames declared that we have entered the Anthropocene—Age of Man. They all agreed that the impact of humans on this planet was significant enough to deserve its own epoch. In a National Geographic article on the topic, writer Elizabeth Kolbert relates an experience she had with stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz. As they were examining an outcropping of rock in the Scottish Highlands, Zalasiewicz pointed toward a particularly dark-colored stratum about three feet wide and said, “Bad things happened in here.”

By “bad things,” Zalasiewicz was referring to mass extinctions, a global calamity of some sort that was so severe as to change the color of the sediment left behind. Known as the end-Ordovician, this was one of the biggest earth-shaping extinction events in the last half-million years. The event is significant because, without those changes, humans might never have evolved on this planet. Even if they did, we would have been very different creatures.

Flash forward 100,000 or even a million years now, and realize that the way in which Zalasiewicz views that stratum of rock is exactly how future scientists will view the sedimentary remains of the Anthropocene. At some point all that will remain of us, of our society, of our technology, of our philosophies, our quarrels, our wars, and our politics is sediment. Our means and methods of communication might give researchers more insight into us than we have into Lucy’s time period. Ultimately, however, it’s all just a giant slab of rock underneath other giant slabs of rock.

History Isn’t Detail Oriented

I’m going to be blunt: History doesn’t give a shit about the petty details of our lives. We don’t’ give a shit about the petty details of Lucy’s life. Future inhabitants of this planet, whatever they may be, won’t give a shit about the petty details of our lives. Even if they are somehow able to access and decode this strange mess we call social media, they won’t care. They have no reason to care. What future species want to know about us  is the same thing we want to know about Lucy: How did her species affect our species?

Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis species represents a link in an evolutionary chain. We are another link in that same chain. What matters to the ultimate course of history is whether we make that evolutionary chain stronger or weaker. We’re arrogant bastards sure that we are strengthening that chain, but our estimations may be biased. Where we stand now, we can either start paying attention to our planet and focus on preserving both it and us or we can fuck it all up and end up being the weak link in our evolutionary chain. This is how history ultimately views our species.

When you ask yourself whether your life matters, consider this context of history. Does  your life make us stronger, weaker, or indifferent? If your life is represented by a stratum of rock, do you change the color or do you blend in with those around you? If we, collectively, fuck up this evolutionary chain, history is not going to be kind in its view of us. They’ll look back and, regardless of the details of our lives, consider our whole species imbecilic.

So yeah, history cares if we fuck up. Maybe we should as well.

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PotD  /  science
Be My Friend, Live Longer & Happier
August 29, 2016
charles i. letbetter - be my friend, live longer & happier

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day. —Dalai Lama

 

charles i. letbetter - be my friend, live longer & happier

The secret to both longevity and happiness, it turns out, is to have good friends and deep relationships

“How many Facebook friends do you have?” There’s only one group of people to whom that question’s answer actually matters: Marketers. They look at the number of friends as a ratio for the number of people you influence. You like something, they are more likely to like the same thing. You buy something, they may buy something similar. Marketing looks at a friend not as a relationship but as leverage for selling.

You know was well as I do that social media “friends” or “followers” aren’t actually relationships, though. Those people, or the numbers, might make us feel a little better about ourselves but they’re not going to come help you move. That sympathetic online friend isn’t likely to buy you the drink you really need. The random Twitter follower isn’t likely to lend you the money you need to fix the car. While there might be the occasional exception, most online friends typically stay that way: online. We don’t develop real relationships with them.

The people who are really our friends, though, have a bigger impact on our lives than we might have thought. Mainly, the depth of those relationships and the number of them we have, help us to live both longer and healthier lives. Being my friend, in real life, is good for you, even if I’m occasionally a pain in the ass. What’s more, there’s actual science to prove it.

Everybody Needs A Friend

I’m drawing results from the longest-running study of human wellness and development, the Harvard Grant Study. The Grant study started in 1938 with 730 men. Half were Harvard sophomores. The other half were young men from the slums of Boston. For over 75 years, researchers followed these men through their lives, through war, through marriage, through various employments, and into retirement. They looked at everything, including their health. They even did brain scans. And what was the top takeaway from all that research? Friends, good, strong relationships, keep us  healthier and help us to live longer lives.

This goes beyond just having a best friend, though that is definitely a strong factor. The larger one’s real-life friend network is, the more likely they are to live longer and be more satisfied with the content of their lives. Having friends who share experiences, who are sympathetic and supportive, and who just “hang out” are all important. These are the relationships that stay with us. A friend that is with us at age 50 is more likely to still be our friend at age 80 and beyond.

What’s important about this level of friendship is that a friend is encouraging. Friends that create and promote conflict are not helpful. Relationships that are constantly in turmoil actually do us more harm than good. Divorce can be healthier than living in a high-conflict marriage. Yet, where we have a friend on whom we can depend, a friend that makes us smile, we are more likely to be healthy.

Loneliness Kills

What is equally important to realize is that just as quality relationships prolong our lives, the absence of them shortens our lives. At any given point, on any day you choose, one in five Americans says they’re lonely. Loneliness kills. Those who are isolated from society are more likely to die sooner.  Those who do not have a friend to whom they can talk are more likely to develop terminal diseases that lead to death.

By contrast, one should note that it is not merely the presence of friends that keeps us healthy, but the depth and quality of those relationships. A line that seems to be important is the age of 50. Prior to reaching middle age, friends are more numerous but they are also more likely to come and go with some frequency. As we get older, however, the number of friends begins to solidify. The relationships that matter get deeper and have more meaning in our lives.

This does not mean that having more friends makes life easier. The Grant Study started in 1938 and right away a majority of the participants were flung into World War II. Some who were well off and privileged plunged to the depths of poverty. Some who were raised in Boston tenements rose to the top of social standing. The ranges of experience varied dramatically. What remained consistent is that those with a good friend, those with strong relationships, weathered the storms better.

Friends Protect Our Brains

I find it especially interesting  that having multiple strong relationships not only helps us live longer, but they also help protect our brains. Looking at study participants who are now in their 90s, those with a healthy dose of friends experienced the effects and diseases related to dementia at a much slower rate and later in life than those who did not have a strong friend network. Having friends keeps our brains functioning more strongly, helps our memory recall, and keeps our brains more nimble.

When we are young we collect more friends to help us feel a part of society. We surround ourselves with those who are like-minded in an effort to validate our own opinions and lifestyle. As we get older, however, we begin looking for that friend who is going to be there long-term, even if they are not physically close. The friend who we may not see every day but is there to talk with even on the boring days is invaluable. Having friends who don’t judge, with whom we can be ourselves, keep us healthy and happy.

Interestingly enough, among the 60 study participants still living, which happens to include one former US President (think about it), every last one of them has repeatedly confirmed over the years that friendships are a  dominant factor in their happiness than either money or fame. Some have done well financially, others are barely getting by, but they all agree that it is those deep, abiding relationships that make life worthwhile.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always open to more friends; the real ones. Let’s do coffee. Perhaps we’ll both live longer.

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Current Issues  /  Fashion
Is Fashion Week Flying Off The Rails?
August 26, 2016

You really do have the license during fashion week to wear the things that you wouldn’t necessarily wear to dinner, because it really is a fashion parade. —Brad Goreski

 

charles i. letbetter - is fashion week flying off the rails

With Fashion Week less than two weeks away, the traditions surrounding the month-long event seem to be disappearing

We’re now less than two weeks from the start of New York Fashion Week and I’m not sure at this point whether to bother consulting the schedule or not. Normally, shows would be pretty much locked down by now. We would have a good sense of the schedule and could begin preparing for where we need to be at any given moment. Not this season. At least, not yet. I suspect the calendar will straighten itself out eventually, but there are some big names still missing and some will stay that way.

Fashion week as we knew it a year ago no longer exists. Everything is in a state of flux and it is this season that is seeing a lot of the transition that is likely to become the norm for coming years. Digital media and online buying having taken over. With that comes a complete change of attitude, strategy, and availability. What we once expected from a fashion week just doesn’t happen any more. This is the season we start making that shift and it’s making more than a few people uncomfortable.

What We Know

Without going into any boring detail at this point, here are some of the changes we are aware of:

The waves of change are  all over. Even how sets are constructed and shows are structured is changing. We’re expecting far fewer traditional runway shows this season. Who gets invitations and who doesn’t, who sits where, and what is allowed into a venue is all different than it was last season. Very little of what one expects from fashion week is staying the same.

Consumers Want Current Season

Folks in Italy may have to do some backtracking on their February statements against current-season show strategies. They came our pretty strong against the concept last season and Italian designers seemed to largely agree that shows needed to stay a season ahead of retail. Consumers, however, seem to have other ideas.

A report was released this week by Verdict Retail showing exactly the opposite of what the Italian Fashion Council wants. 85.6% of shoppers say they want to shop current season and support a see-now, buy-now strategy. 85% is a scale-tipping number. Labels can either get with the program or suffer the consequences of continually declining sales.

Unpredictable weather and social media are the primary culprits behind this change in consumer expectations. When everyone around the world can see a collection the instant it walks, the demand to have that collection now increases significantly. With weather often blurring the lines between seasons, a heavy coat is appropriate for summer as much as s short shorts are part of the winter collection.

Discounters Rule

The other aspect that is spurring changes on fashion runways is the fact that luxury labels are having difficulty keeping up with discounters and outlet stores that are digging into their profits.  Large department stores such as Macy’s and Nordstrom are having to run sales 50% and even 75% off in order to compete with the likes of H&M. This leaves designers increasingly narrow margins and effects how they approach fashion week.

Even discounters, though, may soon face declining sales. A Moody’s retail analyst told Bloomberg TV this week that consumers make $80 billion in interest payments on student debt each year, leaving them with increasingly less expendable cash during that time of their lives when they should have the most money available to spend. Gen-X and older Millennial shoppers are having to adopt a more frugal spending plan. Historial studies show that once such a mindset is established, consumers typically don’t change habits even when they do have more money

This leaves luxury labels looking for new ways to entice cash- and credit-strapped shoppers. Traditional runways are not selling the clothes as effectively. Fashion week is, in some cases, too old school to hold the effectiveness it once did. Labels are actively seeking alternatives.

Hang On For A Wild Ride

We’re expecting even more shifts and changes as we get closer to the September 8 start date of the season. We’ll do our best to keep up with the most important. Stay with us.

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Advertising  /  Fashion  /  PotD
Will You Look Good When You Die
August 23, 2016
charles i. letbetter - will you look good when you die

If you don’t look good, we don’t look good. —Vidal Sassoon

 

charles i. letbetter - will you look good when you die

We can’t control when we’re going to die, so perhaps we should make sure we look good all the time.

I looked in the mirror the other day and wondered just who that person was staring back at me. Kat had just cut my hair, but my beard, which is now nothing more than a bib of gray at the bottom of my face, was still long and a bit ragged. I see that image, especially with my shoulders slightly slumped, and I don’t think I look good. Kat says I’m being preposterous but I know she’s biased. I think I look more like a retired Canadian logger in search of a plaid shirt.

I’m not the only one who wants to look good. Even when we say we don’t care, more often than not we do. The entire fashion industry exists not just because we need to get dressed, something we discussed yesterday, but we want to look good when wearing those clothes. In fact, we depend on clothes to make us look good because you’re not confident that we look good without them. As a result, we wander from retailer to retailer, searching from one label to the next, trying to find that look that makes us more attractive.

Here’s the question of the morning, though: are all our efforts to improve our appearance ultimately futile? How many people woke up this morning, put on their favorite ensemble, and are then killed on their way to work? It happens. Every day. When might it be my turn?

Can that existentialist angst be used to sell more clothes?

A Fatalistic Approach To Advertising

I was looking through new ads this morning, because I like the creativity found in them, and I discovered this piece from BBDO Dubai. Before I say anything more about it, just imagine this popping up in the middle of your favorite program:

As if the title alone shouldn’t cause some concern, the moment the ad tells us that the universe is not our mother and doesn’t really love us we’re in dangerous territory. The ad goes on to pretty much sum up how all of us feel at one point or another:  Life sucks and no one gives a shit. Then, just to end the commercial on a low note, the ad ends with the attractive young couple, apparently too bored with life to bother getting out of  the car, get plowed by a speeding train.

Oh look, the pretty young couple is dead. Does anyone want to go shopping?

No, it’s not your imagination. The whole concept is rather morose, at least in one sense. Consider who the audience is for this commercial, though. Centrepoint is a Middle Eastern retailer. They have no stores in the EU or US. Their primary customer lives with a reality that most Westerners can’t begin to comprehend: Life can be disappointingly short. They live in a world where going to a friend’s wedding can get you killed. Unexpected moments of death surround them. So, why not make sure you look good when that 14-year-old kid running through the party detonates a bomb?

Leave A Good-looking Corpse

The picture above is one of my favorite exhibition pieces. The saying is well known across Indiana: “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.” Folks in these parts want to attribute the saying to James Dean, but the origins actually go back much further, all the way to 1855, if one is really interested. From it’s beginning, though, the sentiment has been the same, that the younger generation was too shallow, too concerned with looking good. I had to laugh when I found an 1870 use of the phrase directed toward “electrified Americans.” That damn electricity is going to be the ruin of us all.

I had to laugh when I found an 1870 use of the phrase directed toward “electrified Americans.” That damn electricity is going to be the ruin of us all.

All the way through history, though, the phrase is directed toward the bourgeois

Dressing For Death

Still, if we’re honest, life is frighteningly uncertain no matter where one lives. I couldn’t help notice over the weekend that there were three different Interstate accidents involving more than 20 cars each. With each pile-up there were deaths. We don’t like to think about it, but almost certainly none of the victims got into their vehicles that morning with any thought that this might be their last road trip. Death happens.

Does it really matter how we look when we die?  Going back to the commercial, one has to assume that getting trashed by a train probably isn’t going to have a good effect on that well-tailored suit he was wearing. Those expensive hair styles probably wouldn’t look so wonderful when caked in blood. If one dies through unexpectedly violet means what one is wearing becomes rather irrelevant.

We like to think we look good in our final minutes, though. Even if no one sees us. Even if no one cares.

 

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Art  /  Photography
Showing Some Respect For The Photographs
August 22, 2016
charles i. letbetter - show some respect for the photographs

Respect is what we owe; love, what we give. —Philip James Bailey

 

charles i. letbetter - showing some respect to the photography

There are pictures everywhere on the Internet now but few are getting any respect

When one visits the Louvre, there are certain rules one must follow. Actually, there are a lot of rules one must follow. No smoking, drinking, eating, raising your voice, touching artworks, or running in the museum exhibition rooms. The museum houses some of the world’s most fantastic pieces of art and curators there are adamant that guests respect the art. They even put up signs to remind visitors how to act. They look like this:

charles i. letbetter - showing some respect for the photograph

Louvre mode d’emploi – Respecter les collections

There are times when I wish I could put a similar label on my photographs. I find it interesting that when a photographer puts any kind of identifying or security mark, such as a watermark, on their photographs people complain that the mark “interrupts the aesthetic value of the picture.” At the same time, though, those same people fail to show any respect for the photograph in the way it is treated and displayed. Comments are brutal and insulting without having any knowledge of  all the photographer went through to create that image.

The Internet, and especially social media, thrives on photography. Whether professional or amateur, the Internet needs photography and video or else it quickly becomes boring. Few people realize that early editions of the Internet didn’t have photographs. The first browsers had no way to display images. Everything was text. The Mosaic browser changed all that in 1993 and the Internet has never been the same. But with all those pictures out there, we’ve lost our respect for the pictures and the medium.

Respect The Process

Photographs appeared on the Internet a full decade before digital photography became a reasonable alternative to film. Before digital photography, the path from camera to Internet was long and trying. The film had to be developed, processed, finished, and then scanned into a digital format. Scanning was unreliable and often multiple scans had to be created before a usable copy was obtained. It was the fallacies of those early scans that necessarily gave rise to tools such as Photoshop.  The digital image had to receive further processing and editing to make it ready for online use. Weeks could pass before a  photograph was ready.

Today, even professional cameras come wi-fi equipped so that a photographer can instantly publish a photo to Instagram or other application if they desire. Still, that immediacy does not take away from the skill, talent, and effort the photographer put into that photo. More involved photographs, such as the ones at the top of this page, can take several hours over the course of multiple days before they are ready for public exposure. Months of planning may take place before the frame is even snapped. Nothing about a professional photograph is easy or accidental.

Respect for the process shows respect for the hours of training, the multiple specializations brought to bear, the difficulty of knowing which adjustments to make  and when a line has been crossed. Just because one can see a photo instantly after it is taken doesn’t mean that the photo is done. Raw images are seldom as perfect as they might appear on the back of a camera. A lot of hard work and creativity goes into almost every professional image.

Respect The People

One of the biggest disgraces of the Internet are those mean-spirited people we refer to as trolls. The problem has become so severe that Time magazine saw fit to devote a cover story to the topic. Writer, Joel Stein describes the problem thusly:

…if you need help improving your upload speeds the web is eager to help with technical details, but if you tell it you’re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building.

Such overwhelming disregard and complete lack of respect for both the creators and subjects of photographs is why you are not allowed to comment publicly on my pages. I would love to hear kind thoughts and might even entertain technical questions. Unfortunately, opening up comments to allow for any intelligent conversation on a topic is an open invitation to trolls who, by their very definition, don’t know how to control the tongues.

I am especially likely  to lose my temper when someone shows a lack of respect for a model. Disparaging the physical appearance of a young woman has caused me to block more than one person. I can tolerate questions about a pose or whether a highlight is out of gamut, but insult a model and were it possible to reach through the Internet and punch someone, I would.  People who risk their self-esteem and personal identity to pose in photos don’t need anyone tell them they’re too short or their head is awkwardly shaped. Shut the fuck up.

Respect The Work

Not all that long ago I would occasionally give someone a signed print as a gift. I would carefully choose a photograph, perhaps one from a set they claimed to really like, go through the trouble of additional processing necessary to pull a print, and then sign and date them for authenticity. After all that effort, only once in the past  eleven years have I seen one of those works actually hanging anywhere. Instead, they’re put in the back of closets, forgotten and unappreciated. In one instance, I found a print torn, mangled, and shoved behind a file cabinet. The recipients of those gifts not only showed disregard for the gift, but failed to show any respect for the work.

Image theft, which has been a constant problem on the Internet, also exhibits a lack of respect for the work. Doing a google search for a photograph then copying it and using it for your own purposes, whether online or in a brochure is theft and lacks respect. Failure to credit photographer in the work is another form of theft and disrespect. Cropping out the photographer’s watermark is a sign that one fails to respect the image and its source.

I would be tempted to say you wouldn’t go into the Louvre, take a picture of the Mona Lisa and then try to pass it off as your own work, but, astonishingly, I can’ t. People have so little respect even for masterworks as to think that they can claim some right to misuse whatever they see.

Respect For Everyone

Failure to show respect for others ultimately reflects back on yourself. A lack of self-respect causes a failure of respect for others. We do not value in others what we do not value in ourselves. No one is fooled. All the mean-spiritedness does not hide the self-loathing. Trolls are more transparent than they realize. Photo thieves are merely trying to make up for their own shortcomings. No one is fooled.

I don’t blame photographers who feel acrimonious about the misuse of their photos and pull back permissions. The person who posts photos on Facebook without tagging the photographer disrespects both the photo and the person who took it.  After suffering that slight more than a few times a photographer has a right to say, “No more.”

I grow tired of seeing people who know absolutely nothing about photography disrespect my work. I know many other photographers feel the same. If you enjoy the pictures a photographer presents, please say something. If you don’t, there’s no need to say anything at all. Please, respectfully, keep your mouth shut.

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Advertising  /  Fashion  /  PotD
Why Do We Get Dressed Everyday
August 22, 2016
charles i. letbetter - why do we get dressed everyday

I always say: To be well dressed you must be well naked. —Oscar de la Renta

 

charles i. letbetter - why do we get dressed everyday

A growing fashion retailer asks why we get dressed. We think that’s a damn good question.

My alarm goes off at 4:00 AM and the first thing I do is reach for my clothes. I get dressed quietly, in the dark, one of the benefits of having a monochrome wardrobe. I don’t have to worry about whether colors or patterns match. By the time I get my shoes on, though, I’m sensing a nip in the air. Checking the weather app on my phone, I see it’s only 60°F outside. I pull on the sweater draped on the back of my office chair, attach the leash to the dog’s collar, and out we go for our morning walk. 4:00 in the morning and I’m already dressed. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Chances are, especially if you live in the Midwest, you  don’t think of not getting dressed. Even when we tell people we’re not feeling well and aren’t getting dressed today, we’re still wearing something. Running around naked always sounds fun until one actually does it. Then, we discover our skin sticks to things in uncomfortable ways. Little pointy objects we’d never noticed before reach out and grab at us. The slightest breeze makes us shiver. And those damned mosquitoes are a constant nuisance. Okay, time to put on some clothes.

Fashion retailer Uniqlo, which is just starting to make serious attempts at the US market, thought this might be a good time to ask the question: Why do we get dressed? The question is at the center of their very first global ad campaign and it smartly addresses a question with which many of us wrestle every morning. Why are we doing this?

We Have Our Reasons

Whether one believes ancient mythologies of how we were created or prefers the scientific explanation of evolution, we find that we’ve been covering ourselves pretty much from the moment we learned to walk upright. Even now, high school students are taught the five main reasons we get dressed:  protection, adornment, identification, modesty, and status. We break each of those down into subcategories based on things such as tradition, social class, occupational requirements, religious intervention, and comfort. We want to look acceptable even when we’re drenched in sweat.

Fashion is a $1.2 trillion industry built on one primary concept: we need to get dressed. Different labels offer different answers to the how, what, and how much of it all, Some take the quality route. Others go for practicality. Still others are nothing more than utilitarian in their scope. Our reasons are as many and varied as the styles of underwear found in our drawers. As much as we might complain, we actually like getting dressed and can be damned picky about it.

This careful choice of clothing is what Uniqlo is trying to tap with this campaign. Despite being one of the largest fashion retailers in the world, they’ve had trouble getting a foothold in the US market. The campaign focuses on both the diversity and quality of the clothes the store carries. Here, take a look at their new ad:

https://youtu.be/AKwd_0q7-mw

Not So Easily Defined

While quality and selection are wardrobe choices are important, they’re not the only reason we choose to wear what we wear. Color, for example, not only reflects certain styles and trends but also reflects our mood and our physical condition when we get dressed.  If you’re feeling a bit depressed, you might choose to wear something pink because it cheers you up. On days you need to tackle tough situations you might choose black or a dark navy because they give you a sense of power. Maybe you just really like a particular shade of green. We all have our reasons.

Some have expressed fear in the past that fashion styles are erasing our sense of nationalistic or cultural identity. I can see where someone might feel that way. Look at the ad and one notices that, while the two main characters are both white, everyone else is Japanese. This is Uniqlo’s way of staying true to their roots in Japan.  At the same time, though, we notice that everyone is wearing a distinctly Western style of clothing. Remove any racial identity and we might have trouble discerning whether this is a scene in Japan or Moscow or Paris or Minneapolis. Large retailers do tend to create a homogenous fashion palette that leaves all the customers with a certain sameness to their look.

Shoppers have proven, though, especially in recent years, that they want more say in how they put a look together. Advertisers might style a look one way, but everyone tends to put their own individual twist on things. How we look when we’re dressed says something about us individually. Uniformity is passè and, for many, insulting. We are not likely to wear head-to-toe Chanel but a certain coat or handbag might be the perfect touch for a look pieced together from discount stores  and second-hand shops. How we put ourselves together is a complicated matter for some people.

How You Should Get Dressed

Style experts, who seem to be getting younger every time I blink, tell us to utilize the three F’s when getting dressed: Feel, fit, and flatter. Granted, that approach seems a bit simplistic if your occupation requires something specific, whether it be a suit for the boardroom or dungarees for working with heavy equipment. Such restrictions can make the flattery element challenging but if the feel and fit are on point then the look is probably going to be flattering anyway.

Fit is probably where we fail most often. As our weight fluctuates between seasons and levels of activity, we find ourselves trying to squeeze into clothes that are too tight or trying to find creative ways to hold up something that’s a touch too large. People at either end of the spectrum, either very thin or very large, have the most difficulty finding something that both fits and flatters. Retailers like Uniqlo best serve the mainstream. Anyone with special challenges can find getting dressed more like a nightmare.

Perhaps the question of why we get dressed is one we should ask more often. Too often we pull on whatever is close and convenient with no regard to even how it feels, much less fit or flatter. We all might be happier if we considered the reasons we wear what we wear. Certainly, it would make our society more interesting and less like a homogenous blur. Express yourself in what you choose to wear.

Even if you’re only wearing underwear.

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Art  /  Mythology  /  PotD  /  science
Why People Believe Stupid Sh*t
August 21, 2016
charles i. letbetter - why people believe stupid sh*t

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. —Maya Angelou

 

charles i. letbetter - why people belive stupid sh*t

People will believe some really stupid shit. Turns out, there’s a damn good reason for that.

What if I told you that the bra shown in the picture above was the latest style from Victoria’s Secret and we got a look at it months before it is scheduled to hit stores. Would you believe me? Some of you would without question. Some might think it a bit odd but would go along with the story. A few, definitely the minority, would know that I was full of shit because you were there when we shot these images.

The truth is that the bra is the creative work of one Sasha Starz, along with both the hair and makeup (if I remember correctly). She took one of Taylor’s old, ugly bras and completely revised it so that it would be photo-worthy. Pretty good work, isn’t it? So good, many of you would have no problem believing that it came from a major lingerie retailer. Cool, huh?

We find it easy to believe a lot of things, from who made a bra to the practicality of building a defensive wall along our Southern border. We like to believe things such as walking on water, that wafers become human flesh (ICK!), and a zombie apocalypse. We’ll believe a politician’s nonsense, that Wall Street predictions come true, and that anything the Internet says is unrefutable. In fact, we’ll even believe that aliens provided NASA with special secret technology. When you stop and think about it, we’ll believe some incredibly stupid shit. Are we just brainless about some things or is there a reason we believe such nonsense?

A Little More Than Science

We were in the car yesterday when the TED Radio Hour came on our local PBS station. I enjoy the TED Radio Hour because of the way they explore a topic from many different perspectives. I always end up learning something. Yesterday, they were talking about lying and one of the segments was a conversation with Michael Shermer discussing why we believe unbelievable things. Here, take nine minutes and listen:

Shermer is a professional skeptic. In fact, he is so involved in using science to challenge what people believe that he created a quarterly magazine on the topic. One can do much worse than spend some time on their website. He has delivered TED talks twice, but it is his 2006 appearance that is most appropriate to our topic this morning. In it, he makes a statement I find quite amusing in summing up some belief systems. He says:

Anyone can talk to the dead. That’s not a problem. The problem is getting the dead to talk back.

So, why do we believe in things like people rising from the dead and seances and fortune telling? Where do we get such nonsense?

The science, Shermer explains, is that our brains are hard-wired to believe everything. Believing things that we have not experienced, things we have not seen or heard for ourselves, is largely a self-defense mechanism. He uses the example of ancient hominids who hear the grass rustle nearby and have to make a quick decision:  is it just the wind or is there a creature nearby waiting to eat them? To investigate increases the risks of becoming lunch. Therefore, they believe that the grass is hiding predators to keep safe. That belief system then spreads and might possibly become part of a larger religious system.

This Sounds Familiar

Listening to Shermer, I immediately think of the 1980 movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy. The premise revolves around a Coca-Cola bottle dropping from an airplane and hitting a bushman on the head. The bushman does not see the airplane nor does he have any concept of commercial flight. Therefore, he assumes that it is the gods who must have hit him on the head with this strangely shaped glass object. The consequences of that belief are what fill the remainder of the movie, often with humorous results. But no one from his tribe challenges his initial belief. A bottle fell from the sky. A god did it.

Since we are programmed to believe pretty much everything, we are often hesitant to challenge what we are told or what we read. Skepticism is something that has to be developed. If we grow up in an environment where we are encouraged to believe fantastic things then we are much slower to develop that skeptical need to step back and ask questions. In fact, within many belief systems, skepticism is actively discouraged. “Accept what we tell you on faith,” we are told. This early learning habit delays our ability to think critically and to apply reason to things we might not immediately understand. We create religions not based on factual information, but because we want to believe something even if there is evidence what we believe is not true.

Extrapolate that need to believe out to modern media. Why did our parents trust what Walter Cronkite told them each evening? Because in their need to know what was going on in the world they needed to believe what the man on the television was saying. When the Internet came along, we immediately applied the same need to believe and a huge problem was born.

Undermined By Our Own Biology

Since we are hard-wired to believe everything, re-wiring our brains requires some intent and intervention at an early age. When we encourage fantasy and fiction as a form of early childhood entertainment, such as fairies and Santa Claus, we discourage critical thinking, putting it off to an older age. There is little harm in believing a myth or two as toddlers perhaps but when we perpetuate mythology on top of mythology we end up with a tremendous lack of reasoning skills. As a result, people are likely to believe in the efficacy of electing someone as President whose corporate debt exceeds half a billion dollars. We might also believe that funding public education is wrong because it somehow defies freedom of choice. Someone might believe one race is inferior to another. Another might belive in rigid gender roles. The nonsense grows out of control.

At the bottom of it all, we’re not all inherently stupid, we just want to believe desperately in Santa Claus. We want to believe that everything is going to be okay. There are presents at the end of this life, aren’t there? Call it heaven, call it Nirvana, what it all comes down to is hoping there’s a giant Christmas tree on the other side of this life that is full of presents.

Maybe some people need that belief system. They need to believe that there is a reward for putting up with such a crappy shit-filled life. We believe in a Presidential candidate based on their ability to fashion the Santa Claus we want. People need to believe that life can and will be better, safer, and more comfortable. We believe in deity because we need to know that someone has a handle on all the fucking chaos.

Those Who Do Not Believe

Being skeptical is healthy. People who don’t believe, who have developed a lack of trust in the face value of any statement, don’t make the same mistakes as those who do believe. Skeptical people don’t invest with Bernie Madoff. Those who question everything are less likely to strap a bomb to their chest before attending a wedding. We live longer because people question things and are careful about what they believe.

Not that we shouldn’t believe anything. Believe in what can be proven. Vaccines work. Genetically modified foods save lives. The earth revolves around the sun. The speed of light is 299792458 meters per second. I like coffee. And scotch. And a good cigar. There is imperialistic evidence to support those claims.

But we need to not yell and scream, as I am prone to do, when a child asks “why?” for the 456,978th time this morning. We need to discourage the belief in myths that lead to unrealized expectations. There is no Santa Claus. There are no presents waiting for us after death. Person A is not better than Person B.

Don’t be just another hominid. Stop believing stupid shit. Evolve.

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Art  /  Fashion
Burberry Adapts Virginia Woolf For Fall
August 20, 2016

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. —Virginia Woolf

charles i. letbetter - Burberry Adapts Virginia Woolf

Burberry blurs lines of both fashion and society with its adaption of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

An article earlier this week in Business of Fashion discusses the changes in fashion as “Fashion’s Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Everything from how material is made to how clothes are purchased and consumed is changing in ways that a decade ago would have been impossible. What we’re experiencing is a seismic shift that redefines the most basic concepts of fashion.

Burberry and its creative director, Christopher Bailey, have put themselves at the center of that change. Earlier this year Bailey announced that the label would be combining its men’s and women’s wear runway shows, shifting to a straight-to-consumer strategy, and showing current season fashion rather than next season’s, which is traditional. Any one of those changes on its own would be significant. To bring them all to bear, with much more, at the same time changes the landscape not only for Burberry but for every other British fashion label, if not the entire industry.

What Burberry announced today is that their fall presentation is based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 gender-fluid novel Orlando. If you’ve not heard of the work don’t feel surprised. Critics has long attempted to downplay the story of gender-fluidity as they felt it was too far out of step with society.  However, as gender-bending androgyny has become a major theme in both society and fashion, more people are giving the book another look. Additionally, Burberry is changing the time, place, and duration of its presentation.

About The Book

Bailey’s choice of inspiration may challenge the non-Oxford educated members of fashion society. When one thinks of Virginia Woolf, one typically thinks of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. If one experienced Ms. Woolf’s writings, it was most likely in college and that only if one was truly attending a forward-thinking liberal arts institution. While Orlando is not unknown, it has only recently become more socially acceptable as attitudes toward gender fluidity, gender identity, lesbianism, and androgyny in general. Still, especially in the United States, Orlando is banned at more conservative-minded schools. If that doesn’t make you want to pick up a copy immediately I have to question your humanity.

Orlando is based on Woolf’s dear friend and frequent lover, Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West frequently slipped between male and female identities, which was much more shocking in 1928 than we might think now. In fact, Woolf’s elegant telling of her friend’s life and exploits is so fantastic that censors of the time may not have even recognized much of the eroticism in the book. These are not characters who hold back on their feelings or desires. In a word, this book is hot.

We tend to see Orlando now as a must-read for women’s studies. Woolf champions not mere gender fluidity or bisexuality but a complete separation of gender from identity. In Orlando, we find a character that is neither male nor female, but both and either at the same time. Gender does not define personality nor characteristics. Everything is fluid and dependent upon the needs and desires of the current situation.

About The Fashion

There shall be ruffles. Lots and lots of ruffles. Orlando covers a 400-year time period, which is rather unusual for a biography. This gives Bailey plenty of room to play with the history of British fashion, however, and adapt it to serve his own needs. Will we be able to tell the difference between men’s and women’s wear? Does it really matter? Expect there to be an emphasis upon the androgynous aspects and plenty of sets that could reasonably be worn by either gender. Certainly, the gender of the model at the presentation is not indicative of for whom the garment is meant.

Burberry has already announced that they will be introducing a new bag, The Bridle, for both men and women. The bag emphasises equestrian and outdoor themes that are also likely to be found in several of the clothing styles. Equestrian themes are not uncommon among British fashion and the utilization of those characteristics is almost inherently gender neutral.

Burberry’s overcoats have long been without gender specification, at least from a practical standpoint. While there might have been some minor tailoring differences between men’s and women’s coats, they’ve always been practically insignificant and more than one chap has complained about a girlfriend absconding with his favorite Burberry trench. To a large degree, Burberry is well positioned to take on this shift in fashion and style.

About The Presentation

What may shock Burberry fans the most is that they’ve given up their afternoon showtime. This fall’s show, scheduled for September 19, doesn’t start until 7:30 PM London time (2:30 PM EDT in the US). What that time change might mean for local traffic I can only imagine. Getting to the Burberry show on time has always been a challenge with many guests arriving two or more hours in advance to avoid traffic congestion. The late time puts the show at odds with London traffic, so the typical 30-minute delay might stretch several minutes longer.

The Burberry show is also abandoning its traditional Hyde Park location for a place called Makers House in London’s Soho district. In addition to the presentation on the 19th, Markers House is open September 21-27 to showcase the works of the craftspeople involved in helping create the Burberry collection. Ceramicists; potters; leather, textile and jewelry designers; woodworkers; silversmiths, and illustrators are all part of the week-long presentation.

Then, to top everything off, the company plans to unveil a consumer app later in September to help make those instant as-you-see-them purchases easier. The impact of this development alone has the potential to send shockwaves throughout the industry if it is successful.

There is a lot going on with Burberry’s Virginia Woolf collection this fall. Perhaps this is the beginning of separating gender from fashion and fashion from seasons. Everything is different from this poinforwardrd. I’m sure this is just the beginning.

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Art  /  Fashion  /  Nature  /  Photography  /  PotD
Celebrating World Photo Day 2016
August 19, 2016
charles i. letbetter - world photo day 2016

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo. —Erma Bombeck

 

charles i. letbetter - world photo day 2016

Today we celebrate the joy of taking a photo, of preserving a memory, of telling a story

Welcome to World Photo Day 2016! This is a day in which we’re going to play along nicely and pretend that the organization behind this day isn’t just trying to sell their book. We like this day because it celebrates something we feel rather passionate about: photography! I mean, who doesn’t like it when someone captures a good photo of you? Granted, for some people that is excessively more difficult than for others. I will also admit that there are times, even when the photography is good, we don’t especially like how we look. I mean, that whole passport photo quote above is way too accurate.

Still, we like to celebrate World Photo Day. Mind you, we don’t celebrate because this was the day photography was invented. The date was determined based on the Daguerreotype, which showed up in 1837. Even that wasn’t really the first photo process. The first fixed-image process was the Heliotype in 1826. What this date actually celebrates, though, is your access to photography. The French government purchased the rights to the Daguerreotype on this date in 1839 and made them open to the public. This allowed for further development of the camera so that you can take selfies with your phone.

Photography has come a long way since 1839. Photography will go a lot farther. This has never been a static industry. Change is constant as someone is continually trying to find a way to take a better, more real photo. Every time someone snaps a shutter, they capture both a moment in time and a moment in photographic history.

The Joy Of A Photo

I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of photographs over the years. From the first time until today, I still get excited when I look at the finished product and find that I have captured something special. Of course, there are times when I’m the only one who thinks a particular image is special, but many of them hold a lot of meaning.

Your pictures are the same way. Sometimes the pictures we hold most dear are those that are not technically stellar. It’s that picture of someone special, or that moment that gave you an incredible feeling, or the last time you saw the person who gave you life. Photographs tell our life’s story. They mark the moments of highs and lows. They remind us that we’re human.

So, we’ve chosen a group of photos for today that spans a range of events and emotions worth remembering for different reasons. Some pictures were chosen not because of the photo itself but because of the people involved behind the scenes. Danelle French did make up for some really great make-up on several. Some are special because of where they were taken. And several are of Kat. That’s a good excuse on its own.

We’ll take more pictures. It’s not always convenient or easy, but we keep going. Some we share. Many we don’t.  What follows is a mix of both. And if you want us to take your photos, just ask!

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Current Issues  /  Fashion  /  PotD
Terrorism Gives Fashion A Shake
August 18, 2016
charles i. letbetter - terrorism gives fashion a shake

Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities. —Pope Francis

 

charles i. letbetter - Terrorism give fashion a shake

Recent terrorism around the world has given the fashion industry reason to worry

Western media often turns a blind eye toward problems in the East, but as radical acts of terrorism continue to grow around the world the effect comes closer to impacting our own lives every day. For fashion, one of the most critical areas of the world is Bangladesh. Only China assembles more clothing than the many garment factories here. Over 4 million people are employed in the nation’s garment industry, making it a critical economic element. We’ve expressed concern about conditions in Bangladesh before, but now matters are more critical.

Last month, terrorists attacked a cafe in Dhaka. Twenty people were killed. Among those were two Italians with connections to the fashion industry. Seven Japanese were also killed in the attack, some of whom were there on fashion business. Almost immediately, buyers started canceling trips to the city. Retail brands began calling their staffs back home.  The ripple effect sent shivers throughout the Bangladesh garment industry.

Terrorism is not new here, nor in any of the Asian countries struggling to pull themselves from Third World status. Recent attacks, however, have given international companies reason to worry more about the safety of their employees. Employees are worrying more about the safety of simply trying to get to work of the morning. As fashion’s buyers become more reluctant to visit the impact to the fashion industry begins to grow.

Reason To Be Concerned

This time last year, terrorism was a topic whispered carefully in backrooms. While care was taken to keep presentation venues safe, no one was willing to admit that any direct efforts were made to prevent any kind of attack. Then, a Paris nightclub was hit. That act of terrorism shook one of fashion’s most important cities to its core. People wanted to know that attending fashion events would be safe. No one wants to be a victim.

Since then, another attack in Paris as well as attacks in Brussels, another city with strong fashion connections, has put the topics of terrorism and security at the front of fashion discussions. As we mentioned a couple of days ago, event organizers in all four major cities have dramatically increased their security plans for this fall’s shows. Every effort will be made to keep those security factors in the background, though. No one is planning on having armed troops standing at the doors.

For garment workers in Bangladesh, those armed troops might be a welcome sight. The rise of terrorism in that country has thrown everything into turmoil and created questions about the safety of both garment workers and retailer’s representatives in the country. Should workers begin to feel unsafe going to work, production could see a significant decrease. If buyers refuse to travel to the country, orders decline. Without retailer’s representatives keeping an eye on factories, working conditions are likely to deteriorate again. There is a lot that could be lost.

Everyone Is Affected

For those of us in the US especially, it is still very easy to dismiss terrorism when it occurs elsewhere in the world. Yes, we “Stand With Paris,” and sympathize with Brussels, but beyond the reach of social media, we don’t see those events touching  our daily lives. Our stores are still full, our prices are still low. We’re happy and completely oblivious to the dangers others face. That naivitè may be short-lived, however.

Start with the very fabrics necessary to create clothes. Much of the weaving and looming of natural fabrics is done in places where terrorism is nearly a daily occurrence, from Afghanistan to the Sudan to Third World parts of Asia. Here, terrorism threatens to disrupt the supply chain, keeping Western visitors out while preventing textile factories from being able to run at full production. As production falls, prices begin to increase.

Then, when assembly factories such as those in Bangladesh are affected, the very availability of clothes is threatened. Fast fashion retailers such as H&M are especially vulnerable to terrorism as disruptions both in ordering and supply chain threatens the regular arrival of new clothes on their store floors. Inevitable price increases threaten the already razor-thin margins that allow discount retailers to stay profitable. Another major disruption could cause holiday profits to disappear with price increases.

Responding Appropriately

Anytime terrorism raises its ugly head we face the question as to how to appropriately respond. Corporate statements carry little weight as they are carefully crafted so as to not offend anyone or commit to anything that might affect their bottom line.  Individuals assume that there’s nothing they can do beyond keeping victims “in their thoughts and prayers.” We leave it up to governments to handle the official response and assume they’ll do the right thing.

They don’t. Towns in France that ban Burkinis, Muslim swimwear that keeps a woman fully covered, are only adding to the problem, not solving it. Terrorism thrives on recruiting disaffected and marginalized people who feel betrayed by the society and government of which they long to be a part. Any time we respond in fear, any time we limit the rights of any marginalized group, we are feeding terrorism. The not-quite-under-your-breath remark made when passing someone wearing a turban helps feed terrorism. Getting Arab-looking people tossed off airplanes just because of their appearance is feeding terrorism. Supporting xenophobic politicians threatening to ban entry to the United States is feeding terrorism.

Higher prices and fewer choices are the price we will ultimately pay for terrorism against the fashion industry. With the luxury market already taking some severe hits the past two years, any additional decline could see retailers cutting back on inventory, orders dropping, labels making cuts, quality suffering, and prices jumping dramatically. What we say and how we treat people can have a much larger  effect than we realize.

Terrorism isn’t going to stop overnight. More attacks will happen. Much of what happens we cannot prevent no matter what we do. Power-mad ideological extremists don’t employ reason when determining their actions. We can keep those attacks from changing how we respond to people, though. We must care more about people now than we ever have. Fashion is good at caring. We just need to emphasize those actions a lot more.

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Nature  /  Personal  /  Status
Weathering Persistent Weather
August 16, 2016

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself. —Annie Leibovitz

 

charles i. letbetter - weathering persistent weather

weather is taking its toll and the forecast is looking grim.

Holding the dog’s leash in my hand, I check the current weather conditions one more time before we walk out the door. “High chances for tornadoes and severe storms,” the app says. I look at the dog as I put on my hat. We’ve made these early morning walks in the rain the past two days. He doesn’t seem to mind all that much.

I open the back door and we step out. The dog instantly puts his nose to the air and takes a big sniff. A cat has taken shelter under the carport during the night and he looks to see if the poor creature is still there. It’s not. We step away from the house and are met be a stronger-than-usual wind. He stops and sniffs the air again then turns and looks at me as if to say, “One of us is fucking crazy.”

“Let’s get this over with,” I tell him. He turns around and heads for the sidewalk. He knows the routine. I hardly need to hold the leash. There’s nothing falling on us this morning, but that wind is eery and brings the fragrance of storms from across the horizon. I’d like to say this weather sucks, but that would just be stating the obvious. Besides, it’s going to get worse.

Weather Has A Hold On Me

The Old Farmer’s Almanac released its winter forecast last week. That forecast is a climatological event that makes the folks at NOAA jealous. According to the Almanac, which claims an 80% accuracy rate, we’re in for a colder and wetter winter than we’ve seen in quite a while. Buy an extra snowplow if you live in the Northeast. Here in the Midwest, ya’ might want to buy an extra shovel and a lot of salt. This one could get nasty.

Of course, the Almanac’s forecast is exactly the opposite from what NOAA is saying. According to the so-called professionals, we’re looking at drier and warmer conditions than normal. Whether that weather news is positive or negative depends on what one considers normal. If the baseline is 45°F, then a degree or two warmer isn’t bad at all. Rather nice. However, if the baseline is -10°F then a couple of degrees warmer doesn’t make a lick of difference.

Yeah, I pay an inordinate amount of attention to the weather. I always have. When yesterday’s storms hit, I sent the kids and animals into the bathroom for protection. Then, I went outside and watched. I’m told that’s an Okie thing. I learned it from my father. You can’t trust the sirens. You need to see the funnel for yourself, then  you take cover. I didn’t see the funnel. The weather system stayed to our West and North.  We barely got a sprinkle.

With Weather Comes Pain

With this morning’s rain, we have now had precipitation for the past seven days straight. Fortunately, we’re not flooding like Louisiana has. Our rains have been light for the most part. While walking across the lawn feels like stepping on a wet sponge, we’re not in danger of needing to be rescued. The situation could be a lot worse.

Yet, for me, we’re nearing a breaking point. Such weather is hard on my arthritis any time it occurs. Having endured it for seven days straight now, I’m ready to scream. There’s no way to describe the amount of pain that has built up across my body. Neither is there any amount of pain killer that addresses that problem without making me lethargic and unproductive. I can either stay awake and deal with a limited range of motion, or go to bed and get absolutely nothing done. I can tell you now, no editing is getting done today.

So, I look at the two competing long-range forecasts and wonder: do I bother trying to put together a photography project for the winter? I don’t want to get people excited about a concept and then not be able to follow through. If NOAA is correct, then there’s no problem. We can probably shoot all winter long. If the Old Farmer’s  Almanac is correct, though, then I’ll hardly leave the house all winter. I know who  has the better track record. This isn’t looking good.

Weather-Driven Planning

What I need is a creative art director who can grab hold of a concept and find ways to make sure we pull it off no matter what the weather. There’s no way I’m going to be successful on my own.  I need help, but it has to be that kind of creative help that knows how to guard against Murphy’s Law. When the weather is in charge of the planning, there’s no doubt that things will go wrong. I need someone who can recruit models, find locations, handle styling, and create backups so that once we set a date we know something creative is going to happen.

I don’t have that person, though. Kat’s school schedule is too demanding for such activities. I’d offer to take applications but I’m not sure anyone’s actually interested in the position. After all, we’ve already determined I have anger issues. Bad weather doesn’t tend to put me in a good mood. Does anyone want to expose themselves to such a situation?  Not likely.

What I do know is that I’ll likely have the spend much of today in bed. I’ll take what meds I can, but they won’t do much good. I’ll try to keep complaints to a minimum, but I reserve the right to curse like a sailor every time I fall or drop something.

Tomorrow’s another day. Maybe by Thursday we will be able to mow the lawn. Life goes on, right?

Stop looking at me like I’m crazy, dog. You’re the one who keeps eating cat poop.

Oh look, it’s raining again. Damn weather.

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Fashion  /  PotD
Fashion Is Changing Its Look. Again.
August 16, 2016

Fashion doesn’t look good only on models; it can look good on different people of different ages and different body shapes. —Alber Elbaz

 

charles i. letbetter - fashion is changing its look - again

The next round of fashion weeks is just around the corner and the whole system is changing its look

We are now less than a month away from New York Fashion Week. One of the most frequent statements made back in February was, “we’ll have to wait until September.” Many of the changes that were announced early in the year com into fruition with next month’s set of shows. Not only have designers swapped seats, attitudes about the shows themselves have changed. Even more, the economy surrounding fashion has changed. What we experience through the fashion shows this season is likely to be a very different look than what we saw this time last year.

Change is a given in fashion. We wouldn’t need to do these dog-and-pony shows twice a year if fashion wasn’t always changing. We complain if we see two collections in a row that look too terribly similar. What’s important this season is the degree of change. Major wheels were set in motion back in the spring that change not only what we see now, but how we see it. The very structure of the presentations is changing and that may influence our perspective of the shows as well as our buying habits.

As I type this, schedules for New York are being finalized. There are some names we’ve come to expect that we won’t see on the roster this year. London, Milan, and Paris are getting ready as well and it’s just not the same as it was back in the Spring (if you can call February  Spring). The whole attitude is different. Let’s consider some of the changes.

Designers Swapping Seats

The number one topic at the beginning of each season is always which designers have switched to different labels. We didn’t see a tremendous amount of significant movement back in February, but we’ve certainly had some major changes since then and now all that jostling around has to prove its worth. These are going to drive changes in look for a number of labels.

  • Raf Simons has moved to Calvin Klein. You had to be hiding under a rock to miss this announcement. Everyone knew Raf was moving almost from the moment the first phone call was placed. The timing could have perhaps been a bit better. Simons works fast but it would be out of the ordinary even for him to create a full set on his own by  September 15, which is when CK is likely to show. Still, he’ll  be anxious to demonstrate the direction in which he wants to take the line. Anxiety and anticipation are very high here.
  • Peter Copping left Oscar de la Renta. What the fuck? This one almost knocked me out of my chair when the announcement was made last month. It’s been less than two years since Oscar de la Renta named Copping as his successor and then promptly died. The match looked perfect. The past two season’s shows have been well received. What the fuck happened? No one on either side is talking. Copping promptly moved back to the UK. De la Renta will run with a design team for the time being. We are very confused and very sad.
  • Bouchra Jarrar makes her debut at Lanvin. This looks to be one of the most highly anticipated shows of the season. Jarrar brings a different look, a more feminine look, back to Lanvin. That being said, shareholders are watching for a collection that resonates with buyers and increases sales. Will it work? We’ll see.
  • Anthony Vaccarello takes over at Yves Saint Laurent. The whole attitude has changed at YSL. Vaccarello comes from Versus Versace and almost certainly is going to bring some of Donatella’s influence with him. Expect a sexier, more defined, and perhaps even a little edgier look than YSL saw under Hedi Slimane.
  •  Maria Grazia Chiuri changes things up at Dior. Following Raf Simons isn’t going to be easy. Dior took its sweet time replacing the famed designer and makes a bold statement in appointing the label’s first female creative director. Chiuri makes the leap from Valentino where she was co-creative director. Pierpaolo Piccioli now has sole authority over there.

Spending this season on the sidelines, still, are Alber Elbaz and Hedi Slimane. One really has to wonder why they’ve not been snatched up.

A Little Less Fur

Fur has long been a mainstay of luxury fashion and Angora has been the go-to fur for quite a while given the endangered status of wild sources. Then, Peta, the animal rights group, took aim at the Angora industry in 2013, claiming harvesting methods were cruel. Now, it seems Peta has won. Orders for the fur dropped dramatically for this season after more than 100 major labels suspended use of fabric. Other types of fur have seen dramatic declines as well. I have to admit that I’m curious as to whether Dennis Basso is reducing his use of fur at all. Historically, he’s been unapologetic about using fur and animal skin in general.

What’s next? Wool. A recent op-ed takes aim at the ubiquitous fabric, claiming that large-scale harvesting methods are just as cruel as those used on angora rabbits.  Will this movement catch hold? The atmosphere certainly seems to be ripe for it, but the global use of wool peaks for the fall/winter season. We’re not likely to see any change until February.

What Season Is This?

We talked back in February about designers skipping the fall shows to go real-time this September.  Well, September  is here and we get to find out whether that strategy is going to work. Be sure, all eyes are watching Burberry, Tom Ford, and Rebecca Minkoff, among others, to see how they handle the straight-to-stores approach. Critical to this new look is whether consumers are confused by seeing both fall/winter looks and spring/summer looks in the same season. The seasonal look has been muted the past few years, with coats in spring and shorts in the fall almost being normal.

This change may work well, though, as designers look for alternative presentation methods. Criticism of the traditional runway approach grew rather heated back in February, but we’re not hearing much talk about the alternatives leading up to this season’s shows. Will Gloria Vanderbilt return to a runway approach or will she go with another fashion event that confuses the hell out of everyone? Talk back in the spring held that we would see more such presentations this fall, but as budgets have been trimmed to match declining profits much of that talk has disappeared.

A Little More Security

For people in Paris and London, the world feels less safe than it did back in February. Organizers in Milan and New York aren’t taking any risks, either. Whereas some designers had been flirting with the idea of open-to-the-public presentations, more care is being taken this fall to ensure the safety of everyone involved. Invitation requests are vetted with increased scrutiny and press credentials are more difficult to obtain. Guests lucky enough to attend an event will find security lines longer than ever. Restrictions on what guests can bring with them, including nail files and hair spray, are taken seriously.

Paris saw dramatically increased security last season but it didn’t seem to interfere with the overall spirit and celebration of the events. This season, though, there is a palpable difference in the tone. Multiple attacks across Europe have everyone looking over their shoulder. Supplier lists are under greater scrutiny. Location accessibility is a concern. In some cases, labels who might have traditionally sought a larger audience are scaling back a bit to reduce the risk.

Everyone wants fashion week to be fun and exciting, but the shadow of terrorism is impossible to escape.

Side Glance To Retail.

Macy’s is closing 100 stores. The announcement wasn’t a surprise. In fact, the retail conglomerate said earlier this year that store closings were coming. Yet, the impact was still like dropping a ton of bricks across the fashion industry. At the same time, China’s luxury market, which had been the one strong point in the industry, has begun a decline. No one is sure yet how much a hit global fashion brands might take but the Chinese government is making it clear they want those Yen to stay at home.

Meanwhile, both H&M and Lululemon are anticipating continued growth. Low-priced fast fashion is eating away at the luxury sector and forcing major labels to  make changes to their corporate look. As much movement as there has been among designers, there’s been even more seat swapping among fashion’s corporate CEOs. Even Burberry’s Christopher Bailey had to take a back seat in the boardroom over the summer.  No one wants to make a knee-jerk move that spooks the fragile market, but if sales don’t improve we may see even bigger shifts in the look of fashion by next February.

We Can’t Stop Watching

All that being said, interest in fashion is as high as ever. Fashion schools are experiencing prime enrollment numbers. Fashion magazines have retooled their look and enjoying higher numbers than this time last year. Instagram and Snapchat are full of fashionista-wannabes taking selfies of their latest look. Interest in fashion hasn’t waned one bit.

Everyone is being cautious, though. With so many changes hitting at the same time, this could be a very exciting season. We are hoping for a very exciting season. Strong interest in shows next month could do wonders for a slumping retail market. Don’t expect anything that looks like last year, though. This fashion look has changed dramatically. You may need to clean out your closet and start all over.

Prep your credit cards now. NYFW begins September 9.

Photo credits:

Model: Presley Stewart (LModelz)
Makeup: Danelle French
Hair: Jenise Norgaard
Styling: Nativa (Allyson Brooks and Lila Palomares)

Photography: charles i. letbetter

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Photography  /  PotD
Photography Education: What We Need To Know
August 15, 2016
charles i. letbetter - photography education: what we need to know

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. —William S. Burroughs

 

charles i. letbetter - photography education: what we need to know

What is the best education for a photographer, a school or real life experience? (Photo by Polina Osherov, 2012)

This is a first. I’ve had a long-standing rule for myself that only my own pictures would accompany the articles here. Today we are making an exception for the point of education. The picture at the top was taken by Gary Watson, New Year’s Eve, 2012. The photo above was taken by Polina Osherov in June of 2012. Sometimes we have to let someone else take the pictures. That’s an important lesson. See? Education. It’s everywhere.

Well, not everywhere, exactly. Specifically, you’ll not be finding photography education at the Brooks Institute in Ventura, California anymore. The school announced late last week that they are closing. Founded on the heels of WWII by Ernie Brooks, Sr., the Brooks school was unique during the 20th century in that it put as much emphasis on the non-camera-related aspects of photo education as it did the picture-taking portions. Graduates during that period, and there were a bunch of them, were grounded, knew how to handle themselves professionally, and, for the most part, took damn good pictures. I’ve run into Brooks grads several times over the past 30 years.

Visit the school’s website today, though, and on the front page is posted the announcement:

With deep regret, Brooks announces that the school will close on October 31, will continue to offer administrative and student services support.

On the Brooks Facebook page, both current  students and incoming freshmen are pissed, and understandably so. Formal photography education isn’t what it once was.

This Specific Instance

For-profit schools have been taking a beating for a while now. Just ask anyone who has gone to or been affiliated with the Arts Institutes or ITT Tech, both of which have had to weather both investigations and fines from the federal government as well as numerous lawsuits from former students and faculties. Education and profit are not generally compatible in the first place. Throw in the temptation to defraud the federal government through the student loan program and bad things start happening quickly.

There is no indication that Brooks suffered from that particular problem, though. Instead, according to an article in the Ventura County Star, Brooks simply did not have enough students. Only 350 students were scheduled for this fall. In 2005, enrollment was 2,563. With or without federal financing issues, that’s a pretty big hit. While the article doesn’t go into particular detail, I assume that the school had already started laying off instructors and trimming administrative staff. The school had changed ownership multiple times over the past few years and its current owners,  Green Planet, were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to turn those numbers around.

In all likelihood, Green Planet is going to be hit with a class action lawsuit for defrauding students. Brooks was not part of recognized accreditation systems, so credits earned at Brooks do not transfer to other California schools. With recent administration changes, the charge that administrators knew that closing was imminent is one that is difficult to deny. What was once a well-regarded photography school has met a very sad and possibly unnecessary end.

Who Needs Photography Education?

On one level, there is a very legitimate argument that photography schools are no longer necessary, if they ever were. Think of the great photographers we’ve known: Horst, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts. You’ll not find a photography degree among them. Avedon enrolled in Columbia University as a poetry major but dropped out. Herb went to Bard College and majored in economics.  Neither Horst nor Helmut gave the matter any consideration. Even now, I’m not immediately aware of anyone I would consider an above-standard photographer who is running around with a photography degree tucked in their belt.

From its inception, photography has been one of those skills developed outside the classroom, most typically as an assistant for another photographer. There are too many exceptions to the rules, too many instances where one has to shoot on the fly, for classroom instruction to hold a great deal of real-world value. Those who do the best are those who learned on the job and developed their own style that allowed them to stand out from the rest.

Yet, even there, Brooks was different than the rest. Talk to the few remaining photographers who came out of the 1940s and they’ll tell you they picked up photography during the war, most often while serving in the Air Force. And who was teaching pilots and others to use photography during WWII? Ernie Brooks, Sr. After the war, his first ten students were vets who wanted to transfer what they had learned in combat into a marketable skill at home and Ernie Brooks was the right person to teach them. His education system was practical, rooted in reality. Only when the school stepped away from that model did their enrollment and reputation decline.

Arguing For Specialization

As cameras have developed, especially in this digital age where everyone thinks they’re a photographer, some would argue that specialization is the key to photographic success, at least from a commercial standpoint. While I don’t think that argument holds water universally, within certain locations, such as California, it has some validity. There, formal education might not be such a bad idea.

Brooks Institute included some courses that might be difficult to find just anywhere. For example, Brooks had an in-water diving photography course. First off, getting credit for underwater photography sounds incredibly cool. However, it’s not one of those things one just picks up randomly. One benefits from not only having a professional dive instructor, but one that understands the effects of increasing pressure on their photography equipment and other underwater dangers. Brooks also had degree courses in science and technological imaging and other specialized courses.

When dealing with elements that contain a high degree of difficulty, specialized equipment, or a significant amount of danger, finding a school that teaches those skills is probably a better bet than attempting to learn them while assisting someone else, or worse yet, on your own using YouTube videos. Highly specialized aspects of photography need a highly specialized mode of education. Unfortunately, those programs are expensive and a for-profit school is likely to find the investment not worth the return.

More Than A Shutter Click

I am not likely to ever get behind the notion that a formal photography education makes one a better photographer. What makes one a better photographer is getting out there and taking pictures. Take bad pictures at first. That’s okay. Lord knows I certainly wasted more than a few rolls of film trying to figure our the whole damn process of measuring light and angles and reflectivity. With practice, most of us get better (I’ve met a few exceptions). If one is dedicated to becoming a good photographer, one will become a good photographer.

The problem with formal photography education, however, is that not everyone who takes a class is truly dedicated.  Let me reference back to last week’s article about not doing what you love. While this is true of many areas of study, photography is especially prone to the problem. Someone just loves taking pictures and their friends think they look professional. So, why not go to school and get a degree in what you love? If only what we think we love were the things we are actually good at doing. I know almost as many former photography students as I do former music students and in both groups, there is a high percentage of those who don’t remain in their field  of study. I’m one  of them (I have a music degree, remember?).

If there is an argument for being part of a formal photography education system it is the camaraderie found among fellow classmates. One of the biggest challenges to survival as a photographer is the ability to network with others. Photographers who attend schools with graphic arts departments, illustration departments, and more, build relationships across those lines that can serve them well in the real world. In fact, to some degree, the ability to build up a network of peers and professional relationships is at times more valuable than learning how to work a camera. Replicating that opportunity in the real world is almost impossible.

Learning To Change

I feel sympathetic toward the 350 Brooks Institute students who now have nowhere to learn. Many had traveled from other countries and diverse places across this one. Apartment leases were signed. Arrangements made. Money spent. They have every right to be angry with the school’s owners.

What we ultimately take away, though painfully, is that in photography as in everything else we must learn to change. What Ernie Brooks, Sr. built doesn’t fit well in the modern world of digital photography. Were he or his son still living, perhaps they could have guided the school through the change. But when the eyes are on the bottom line positive change is extremely rare. What’s good for the investors is rarely good for the school. Welcome to the real world, kids. Here’s your first lesson in adapting to sudden change.

The lesson should not be lost on the rest of us. I never thought I would need to understand computers in order to be a good photographer. If I remain in this profession another 30 years, I’m likely to have to adapt to more change, including virtual reality and 3D imaging. There is no way I can sit here and predict the severity of change that might be in our future, but I am sure it will change and we will still need to learn.

And the biggest change of all is still out there: letting go and letting someone else take the pictures. Sometimes learning is hard.

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