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You knewESCO

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations with the aim of promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.

A sort of civilization interlocutor,  UNESCO helps set global norms and standards, develop tools for international cooperation, generate knowledge for public policies and build global networks of sites and institutions that reflect the world’s cultural and natural diversity of ‘outstanding universal value.’

So, for obvious reasons, the US is of course now withdrawing from UNESCO:

“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” says Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, in the statement. Bruce asserts that UNESCO’s vote to admit Palestine as a full member in 2011 was “highly problematic” and “contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.”

Audrey Azoulay, director general of UNESCO, denied the anti-Israel claims, arguing in a statement that they “contradict the reality of UNESCO’s efforts, particularly in the field of Holocaust education and the fight against antisemitism.”

“UNESCO has supported 85 countries in implementing tools and training teachers to educate students about the Holocaust and genocides, and to combat Holocaust denial and hate speech,” writes Azoulay, adding that the agency’s work has been “unanimously acclaimed” by leading Jewish organizations.

That’s according to the notoriously hot-headed Smithsonian Magazine.

Yes, all is political, everything. Must learn how to politics.

Instead, we choose to deal with highly complex political, scientific and cultural questions by magically making them simple and easy.  If only there was an international organization designed to serve as arbiter on such matters, rather than re-drawing them as cartoons stick figures.

Image: Credentials from my documentary film project a few years ago.

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A Noteful Hope

At the outset of the newest year, with walls incoherently at the center of our discourse as we contemplate how best to keep people out rather how best to help them up, a bit of perspective provides a reminder that we might be mixed up about parts of the story:

For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilization properly speaking. Civilization meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriarchy, slavery…) but also made possible written literature, science, philosophy, and most other great human achievements.

Almost everyone knows this story in its broadest outlines. Since at least the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it has framed what we think the overall shape and direction of human history to be. This is important because the narrative also defines our sense of political possibility. Most see civilization, hence inequality, as a tragic necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial equivalent to ‘primitive communism’, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the basic structure of the story.

There is a fundamental problem with this narrative.

It isn’t true.

Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. Still, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public­ – or even scholars in other disciplines – let alone reflect on the larger political implications. As a result, those writers who are reflecting on the ‘big questions’ of human history – Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Ian Morris, and others – still take Rousseau’s question (‘what is the origin of social inequality?’) as their starting point, and assume the larger story will begin with some kind of fall from primordial innocence.

It’s from earlier this year in 2018, but read the whole, etc. There is no ‘them’ but there are assumptions and many of ours may be wrong or at least worth re-considering.

Banksy image from the original.

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Yesteryear’s Iowa

Soon-to-expire tax cuts for the wealthy might be sexy, but soon-to-expire ethanol subsidies are really going to complicate things for the Fondu Republicans, aka the teabagger set.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post has gotten a hold of a letter being circulated on Capitol Hill. Authored by Senators Diane Fienstein (D-CA) and John Kyl (R-AZ), the letter draws a bi-partisan line in the sand: “Let the subsidies expire.”

We are writing to make you aware that we do not support an extension of either the 54 cent-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports or the 45 cent-per-gallon subsidy for blending ethanol into gasoline. These provisions are fiscally irresponsible and environmentally unwise, and their extension would make our country more dependent on foreign oil.

Subsidizing blending ethanol into gasoline is fiscally indefensible. If the current subsidy is extended for five years, the Federal Treasury would pay oil companies at least $31 billion to use 69 billion gallons of corn ethanol that the Federal Renewable Fuels Standard already requires them to use. We cannot afford to pay industry for following the law….

Really? Says you. Is free government green for the agricultural sector really on the block? The presidential politics of this thing that have always cemented the giveaway are worth watching if anything does change. Pandering to the big farm states will kick into high gear, but will a fictional concern over deficits lead to real environmental progress?

What the ethanol does that mean?

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HFCS

This is not at all unrelated to passage of the health care reform bill, health care generally, diet or the environment. What could be so voraciously dynamic as to pertain to all of these areas at once? Oh, and fits the truest definition of ‘teh socialism’ more than anything currently on offer?

Why – it’s high-fructose corn syrup, of course:

While there has been extensive evidence thatfructose is harmful to human health and associated with metabolic diseases like diabetes and liver problems, the fact is that plain old table sugar is itself 50 percent fructose. HFCS does have a higher concentration of fructose at 55 percent but it’s close enough to table sugar that most experts continue to dismiss claims that HFCS is on its own more dangerous. And certainly the claim that the introduction of HFCS in the ’80s directly led to the current obesity epidemic continues to be a highly controversial view.

You would have to be at least quadruple major in one of our finest business schools to qualify as a proper apologist defender for HFCS by now. Nothing stands for competition like monopoly sweetener like a substance we can manufacture and put all those little sugar cane-growing country out of business, all in one fell swoop. We must protect our vulnerable little farmers from the predations of those foreign sugar conglomerates.

Rejection of something real, with an actual purpose, in favor of something manufactured, that twists that purpose into something not only grotesque but literally poisonous on several levels, fits our collective sociopathy to an uncomfortably elegant tee. Systematic rejection and defense of this rejection as patriotic and/or linked to our very destiny as a country is something else, something I am unwilling to quantify with words – or maybe just the words I know now. Maybe I should collect my books and get on back to skewl.