Upside down

       On Thursday, February 14, Amazon announced that it would not be building a second headquarters in Queens New York as it had earlier announced. The company cited recent moves by Queens city council to block construction. Supporting Amazon's plans to create offices in Long Island City, Queens were New York's governor, New York City's mayor, most New Yorkers, and the union of construction workers who would have built the office complex and related public and private works. Opposing construction were  rather fringey anti- corporate, anti- capitalist community activists and members of city council elected from their ranks.
     Newly elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was ecstatic, announcing on Twitter " Anything is possible: today was a day a group of dedicated New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon's greed, it's worker exploitation , and the power of the richest man in the world. "
      Amazon has spent the last few years searching for a new location from which to administrator it's growing business empire in addition to its original headquarters in Seattle. Many cities, including Denver vied for the honor. Their enthusiasm is easily understood. A business the size and wealth of Amazon in your backyard brings in billions in local and state taxes, high paying jobs, along with the taxes they provide, and a generous donor for local projects . Ultimately ,Amazon decided to divide it's proposed headquarters , creating one in New York and the other in Northern Virginia outside of Washington DC. Amazon planned to employ 25,000 at the New York office. Wages would be at around $ 150,000 for most office workers, which I understand is enough money to live even in New York. A business that size doesn't exist in a vacuum. The knock on effect of all those people working there is estimated to include an additional 67,000 jobs in the vicinity ( not including those construction workers mentioned earlier ). Over a twenty- five year period Amazon would have paid out an estimated $27 billion in taxes to the state and city. On a more immediate basis they had agreed to funding $ 600 ,000,000 worth of infrastructure improvements . The city would accept those improvements in lieu of that amount in taxation. Other tax breaks would equal an additional $2.4 billion over twenty-five years. The resulting $3 billion in projected tax breaks to Amazon became a rallying cry for the opposition, although in principle this is pretty standard in corporate - municipality agreements. The only difference is scale.
       In an interview with a television reporter Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said " if we are willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to. " . Her misunderstanding of basic economics is phenomenal. It's as if she were relying on her ideology rather than facts and logic to do her thinking for her. Of course there is no $3 billion lying around for the city to spend on whatever the city believes would be a it's best use. That $3 billion was not a " gift" from New Yorkers to Amazon. It would be money created by Amazon and left to their use. That's a distinction she is unable to appreciate or acknowledge.
    I've never heard anyone say that all the wealth of America belongs to everyone. I have heard a lot of people make remarks that seem to be based on this assumption.  If you believe that it is the duty of government to redistribute wealth to promote the greater good then you have bought into this way of thinking. There's no school of economic or political theory compatible with this principle outside of Socialism. Marx would have recognized it.
       Cortez goes a step further by claiming that even the wealth you ( or Amazon) may produce in the future is properly the people's wealth.  In her mind the taxes New York agreed to release Amazon from paying in lieu of services amount to theft from the people. Nevermind the enormous wealth Amazon would have brought to the city, or the tens of billions in taxes the corporation and it's employees  would have added to it's coffers, the only relevant fact for her was the $3 billion exemption. Prominent Democrats often rail against  companies taking advantage of legal tax exemptions, and refer to this as corporate welfare. For them all the money businesses produce is not wealth that would not otherwise exist. It is stolen money. It is greed that fuels their empires. They are takers, not givers, and government, which produces nothing but vast stacks of paperwork is the only true giver. Keep in mind that government can not give anything to anyone until after it has taken it from someone else. It's all a zero sum gain, which is exactly the way the fans of unlimited government imagine businesses operating. It's the world seen upside down.

          If you watched the two minutes of video footage from the Lincoln Memorial steps on Saturday ,January 19th , or saw the resulting memes on Facebook you saw something appalling occur there. Native American activist Nathan Phillips beating a drum and singing for peace in his tribal tongue was being menaced by a rowdy group of boys wearing red MAGA caps ,shouting racial epithets, shouting " build that wall! ", jostling, and laughing, ready to riot in the manner of lynch mobs . It was a disturbing picture. One boy  was seen facing down the 64 year old Phillps , smirking. That smirking expression brought him in for particular criticism by a host of celebrities and journalists on Twitter. It was said to be the smirk of white privilege, hateful ,intolerant ,and self satisfied. All of this was clear on Saturday, unless you were there at the time or waited around for the dust to clear and the truth to be revealed.  Longer, less carefully edited tapes were posted and other voices were heard. When the truth was revealed it completely overturned Saturday's tailored narrative. Journalists and pundits were forced to admit jumping to conclusions too early. They were had. We all were had.
      According to Phillips account he was peacefully proceeding up the steps of the memorial during the Native American march on Washington when he was suddenly set upon and surrounded by dozens of young men who were howling at him, mocking him and threatening violence. He saw two groups facing off and growing tension. One was made up of black men and the other a large group of white teenagers. " These young men were beastly and these old Black individuals was their prey, and I stood between them... " he told the Detroit Free Press on Saturday. He added , " It was ugly what I saw these kids were involved in. It was racism. It was hatred. It was scary. "
      It turns out the children were a Catholic high school group from Kentucky who had been on the Mall to participate in the annual March for Life. They were at the monument waiting for the buses that would take them home. Before the buses arrived they had been noticed by four members of the the Black Hebrew Israelites who are known for the confrontational tactics they employed against them, calling the white teenagers " crackers " and a black member of the group by the " n " word, and homophobic slurs for good measure. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists them as a hate group. The SPLC throws that designation around far to freely, but in the case of some congregations of the Black Hebrew Israelites, it is well deserved. The boys did not know why they were being assaulted ,nor how to react. One boy asked a teacher if it would be alright if they were to respond with the cheers they shouted at sports events at school and was given permission. At least cheering would drown out the insults being hurled at them.
       This is the scene Phillips walked into after falsely interpreting it. Video released after the original posting shows him walking deliberately into the boys assembled there and stopping in front of Nick Sandmann. Sandmann claims not to have intended to threaten Phillips ,or to have smirked. He believed his actions, or lack of action ,were necessary to diffuse a situation that was getting out of control and growing more bizarre by the moment. His smile, was a nervous smile, widly misinterpreted as a smirk. Proof of his true intentions  is available in longer versions of video where he's seen gesturing to another student not to engage in an argument with one of Phillips group of protesters who tries to goad him. Proof of Phillips lack of sincerity is also there. Why not walk up to the aggressors in this unfortunate fracas to calm them down and not confront it's victims instead? How does beating a drum inches from someone's face have the pacifying effect Phillips claims he was after?
     Covington high school students are not without blame in all this. They are often seen acting just like boys do. They're not angels.  Chants of build that wall and derogatory remarks hurled at Phillips group are not in evidence and are likely figments of his imagination. He has an active imagination and an axe to grind. 
      Change the respective races of the participants and you have an entirely different picture. Imagine white men in Make America Great Again hats shouting invective and profanities at a group of predominantly native or African American boys without provocation. Imagine a white man in Nathan Phillips place. Imagine  any of those who so quickly went to Twitter to condemn the children taking the word of the perpetrators over the testimony of the students or later video evidence. That's not imaginable because in the universe of social justice advocates like these politics ,power, and race are paramount, truth is irrelevant.

Fremont river valley, Utah

Camping and cycling through Green River desert Utah last week

Fire sale: everything must go

        "Fire Sale, Everything Must Go". You've seen signs like this. It doesn't always mean there's been a fire. The term's gone generic. Fire sale can stand for any last ditch effort to liquidate inventory and move on. I used to know a Sikh in Edinburgh Scotland who specialized in fire sales. He'd rent a store, sometimes in a posh commercial district like Prince street and sell clothes that had been the inventory of someone else's failed enterprise. He'd give them one last chance, putting a 50% discount on one rack, and 60% off on another, and let everything on the table go for 10 pounds. Well, people love a bargain don't they? When he'd sold everything he thought he was likely to unload he would just pull out in the middle of the night. The next day there'd only be an empty store and perhaps a landlord somewhere wondering what had happened to that damn rascal in a turban and the remaining rent he'd been promised.
         I'm feeling a lot like that Sikh today. I'm getting rid of everything. When my creditors look for me tomorrow they'll only find an empty camp , an empty studio space, and a gaping hole in the air where I should be standing. That's alright . Someone else can occupy that empty space on the sidewalk . As for creditors, no one is going to be out a penny. I've taken care of the money, but I still owe lots of you more than I could ever repay for your generous kindness, friendship, and love.
         I began coming to Telluride in the late eighties. Back then I was a bike bum, now and then a kayak bum. I really had nothing that didn't travel with me .I carried little on that bicycle, a slightly bigger pile loaded into a sea kayak. I painted and drew and worked a few short term jobs. Settling down hadn't occurred to me. While passing through Telluride in 2006 a strange thought hit me, why not put down some roots here? A new phase of my life began on the spur of the moment, and it grew into the life I created in Telluride.
        Deciding to pull up stakes was almost as sudden for me. At this point I can only see next year and what remains of this one. First I get rid of the stuff that won't travel, then I make a short ride in the desert, then I prepare for a much longer ride in Europe.
        Back in my free floating days there were spots I loved returning to again and again on the other side of the Atlantic. I'd found towns and cities there that were so paintable and so liveable, and so irresistible, they drew me back again and again. And in turn, I drew them. I may have been romantisizing life in small European cities. My tendency is to walk a bit above the ground ,I'll admit. The fact that you can romanticize anything at all  these days is encouraging.  I call the missing element of modern life magic. To me, a hopeless romantic, life without  magic is hardly worth living. I can go there for a few months and bike around to my hearts content and hardly escape this prosaic existence. To make that leap into the magical takes something more . I'll have to spend more time. I'll need to depend on my brushes and pencil to sustain me. I'll have to burrow deep to extract whatever magic I can find and expose it. Another piece of magic occurs when someone sees a painting I've created and responds to it ,then buys it . It's as if I was led to paint that picture and they were led to buy it. The whole damn process was magic from start to finish . Time to celebrate at an outdoor cafe with a good meal and a glass of wine. Why wouldn't i want to return to that?
         I'm using the word magic as a substitute for what i really mean but don't have words for. Often you know you've arrived when coincidence leads to coincidence, and the commonplace and the unexeptional fly right out the window. If life is going as planned, and every thing is just as you expect it you are seriously missing the boat. Someone said that coincidence is just God wanting to remain anonymous. I'll drink to that.
       How long will I be gone? Will I return at all? I don't know. The answer to the last question is that's very likely. Not knowing is part of  letting go. I need to let go now. Will there be more columns in the future? Just try and shut me up.
        
       

The presumption of evil

        From the beginning the Kavanaugh hearings before the judicial committee of the Senate have provided high drama and outrageous spectacle. Most of that spectacle has occurred outside the formal hearings themselves. The allegations of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that the Supreme Court nominee attempted to rape her when she was 15, came after the conclusion of the hearings but not before the vote. Another woman has stepped forward to claim that judge Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were freshmen at Yale. Michael  Avenati, the lawyer for Trump accuser Stormy Daniels , claims that he has a client who will testify that while in high school the nominee was present while she was gang raped . Whether you believe the claims of these accusers or Kavanaugh's claims of innocence is determined largely by whether you supported Kavanaugh  before these accusations came to light, or believed he must be stopped.
      One Senator on the committee, Mazie Hirono, D. of Hawaii, has made up her mind. When asked by Jake Tapper of CNN, whether Kavanaugh warrants the presumption of innocence  she said that she  would be putting into context his attitudes and legal opinions, particularly his stance on women's reproductive rights. The correct answer to this question  is an unequivocal yes. I think a yes answer is the least we could expect from a lawmaker representing Hawaii, or any other State sworn to affirm the Constitution. Her answer demonstrates  either ignorance of ,or contempt for it's principals and plain meaning. Her implication is that because the judge does not share her views on abortion he no longer falls under the protection of the bill of rights. It's one thing to declare that a person is guilty after an investigation has taken place, or after they have admitted  guilt, or even when evidence exists making their claims to innocence ring hollow, but prior to that, condemning them over a political disagreement is astonishingly callous.                                                                                                          For the record, judge Kavanaugh has not made his personal views on abortion public except to affirm that Roe v Wade is the law of the land. She basis her inference that he is hostile to abortion and will seek to overturn Roe v Wade on statements by Donald Trump who suddenly became pro- life when contemplating running for President as a Republican.
    David French, of National Review writes about the place that the presumption of evil plays in today's politics and particularly in the argument over judge Kavanaugh. He uses as examples of this trend Senator Hirono and others, some on the right , some on the left. People who care deeply about national issues are often prone to assume the worst about those they disagree with. It's as if they're always asking themselves " what's the most diabolical reason I can come up with to explain my opponents actions? " and then going with that. You might expect this sort of thing from politicians. They're always throwing out stuff about opponents and hoping it sticks. What's shocking is when you notice how far this virus has spread among the rest of us.
      Abortion opponents don't care at all about unborn babies, or federal encroachments on State power, their sole agenda is to keep women in their place. Someone who wants to do that would probably be likely to molest a woman while they were both drunk at a teenage party years ago, or stand by as another teen girl was gang raped. Anyhow if you question the claims being made against the judge you are further victimizing the victims. Victims ought to be heard!  I believe survivors!  There you go, that's how the opponents to Kavanaugh sound to me. Am I mischaracterizing the opposition to Kavanaugh?  I hope so. I hope they're more rational than that, but I wonder.
         Here's the funny thing ,I'm writing this before the hearings into the Ford accusations on Thursday. I'm writing this before the committee vote on Friday. For all I know Dr. Ford may drop some bomb shell she's been hiding and there will be some shred of evidence, or corroborating testimony for the committee to con beyond just her words. For all I know judge Kavanaugh will withdraw himself from consideration. For all I know the apocalypse will occur on Thursday night and hold up the Friday edition. But all of that seems pretty unlikely. What does seem likely is there will not be a Perry Mason moment where the accused admits " Yes, yes, I did it" as they're dragged off the stand sobbing. What does seem likely is that even after the hearings and the vote we'll continue in our  divisions, easily believing the worst about each other, dividing into tribal identities, waging tribal warfare, and believing the "facts" that best suit us. That's an easy one to predict.
       

Unanimity of folly

     I'm thrilled that someone had the idea to create an Original Thinkers festival and put it right here in Telluride and Mountain Village during this moment of jaw dropping color and extreme weather ( including the first snowfall of the season ). I'm guessing that someone is David Holbrook ,founder and head honcho of this newest festival .  Telluride is original. It's been that way for a long time. We once produced gold and silver by the bucket full, now we produce characters. It's more accurate to say we attract characters, but however they got here it's nice being surrounded by so many eccentrics. They add color to the place and give all sorts of oddballs, myself included, some cover. Eccentric characters are not exactly the same thing as original thinkers , but its in the neighborhood. 
      Someone really ought to start a conventional thinkers festival. Original thinkers are celebrated all the time. Right now they're handing out Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature. Every single one of those prizes goes to an original thinker. When will we give prizes to people who never had an original thought in their lives? Mediocrity deserves recognition too. We bled the sick from ancient times until relatively recently and later came penicillin. Penicillin represents original thought along with scientific rigor , bleeding was commonplace and conventional Maybe conventionality does have its limits .
      
      Conventional thought is a branch of what social psychologists call groupthink. Irving Janis popularized the concept of groupthink in his 1972 book Victims of Groupthink where he demonstrated how this phenomenon lead to three American catastrophes, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and Pearl Harbor. In each case presidents relied largely on advisors who shared his point of view and rarely disagreed or offered contrary arguments. An atmosphere of thought conformity led to foreign policy disasters. Surrounding ourselves with yes men ( or women ) may make us feel good initially, but it's bound to come back to bite us at some point. Among our thought allies we often bend to conform and extend to them unwarranted deference. It's just the opposite when it comes to the people we see ourselves at odds with. Nothing they do or say can be right, there must always be a hidden motive to their words and actions. Janis identified this as " in group " , " out group " thinking. It's human nature to form tribes and nothing unifies the tribe better than having a distinct enemy. The unity of tribe A is built on it's enmity for tribe B , and B's unity feeds on that hostility. It's a great example of a circular self sustaining feedback loop.
         Does this sound anything like politics in 2018? Actually it describes politics in any era. Washington warned the nation against the rise of factionalism even as his cabinet were preparing for the political wars that would follow his departure.. Washington was successful as  president because he surrounded himself with the opposite of yes men, but these strong personalities with strong opinions would  be at each others throats as soon as the great man left office. Since then we've gone through many phases of increased unity ,followed by increased division. It's been suggested that the cycles last about 60-80 years. For a nation founded on the principle " from many, one" or " e pluribus unum", we haven't often offered the most shining example of that idea. We probably fit the motto best while engaged against some other nation or group of nations as in the Cold War, and World War II. Since the fall of the Eastern block we've been increasingly divided and nasty. Where we are today in that awful trajectory is as bad as I've ever seen it. If you doubt me you weren't watching the Kavanaugh hearings.  Nasty on steroids!
        I've just started reading Glen Beck's new book Addicted to Outrage. So far he hasn't brought up groupthink, but he does address tribalism.  This being the latest incarnation of Glen Beck it's all about reconciliation and how right and left need to talk to each other and find common ground. I wonder if trends and cycles like this can be turned around so easily? The kumbaya approach works for me, it works for any of us who care to try it. It certainly works on the individual level but how many individuals are willing to try it, and how many individuals will it take to make a difference.. History demonstrates that these trends do eventually turn around, though it may take a civil war to get us there. Maybe the personal approach will do the trick, or maybe we'll just have to go to war. I hear the Chinese brushed an American destroyer in the South China sea a few days ago. There's a provocation for you. I'll consult my advisors and see if we all agree.