How the lost constellations of Indigenous North Americans can connect culture, science, and inspire the next generation of scientists.

by Christie Taylor, on September 6, 2019 (sciencefriday.com)

Listen to a conversation on Science Friday about the historical role of science in Indigenous communities and considering a broader definition of science.

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“They’re coming out,” says Wilfred Buck. “They’re starting to come out.”

It’s a freezing cold night on the shore of Lake Winnipeg in rural Manitoba, Canada, and we are waiting for the stars. It’s early May, but I’m wearing three sweaters and huddled next to a crackling, popping campfire, listening to Buck tell us the stories behind constellations I’ve never heard of until tonight.

“Right below the grandmother spider is the Pleiades, the seven sisters,” says Buck. “And that’s called Pakone Kisik. The hole in the sky. And the hole in the sky is where we come from.”

Wilfred is Cree, also known as Ininew, one of Canada’s largest First Nations groups. He’s telling us stories he’s gathered from Indigenous communities across Manitoba—like how the Star Woman saw Earth from another dimension, fell through the hole in the sky, and became the first human on this planet.

“We come from the stars,” Buck says.

When most of us look at the night sky, we’re used to seeing stories not of Indigenous origin, but of Greek or Roman: Andromeda chained to a rock, Perseus staring down a sea monster, Hercules slaying a lion. But just as the people of early Western civilizations looked to the stars and told stories about them, so did Indigenous people around the world. In North American communities, the stars hold bears, sweat lodges, thunderbirds, and more.

Some of those stories are part of how Indigenous people made sense of the world around them—a form of science separate from, but with kinship to, the enterprise of observation, prediction, and questioning built around what we call the scientific method.

“We come from the stars.”

But how do you connect the two? That’s where Wilfred comes in. He’s a part of a growing effort to reintroduce Indigenous stories and traditions back to Cree and other Indigenous communities. This weekend is an example of that effort. Tipis and Telescopes, the name of the gathering, is a coming-together of far-flung Indigenous teachers, local youth community leaders, and, tonight, one science reporter from the United States. 

It’s a weekend of stories, astronomy, and ceremony—including hours every afternoon in the sweat lodge. Wilfred is relaying star knowledge and teachings, but also tales of science. The tilt of the Earth, the precession of our axis, the northern lights, and the peculiar path Mars takes through the night sky.

“Because Earth orbits the sun faster than Mars, at certain times Earth passes Mars, [and] it looks like Mars does a circle in the sky,” Buck says. “Retrograde motion. So they call it ‘kitom pampaniw’—circles back. Another name is ‘mooswa acak’—moose spirit. Because when a moose is startled, it’ll run in a big, huge circle, and then continue on its way.”RELATED SEGMENTWidening The Lens On A More Inclusive Science

Three days and 2,000 miles later, I’m in Ottawa, at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. It’s one of the premier science museums in the country. In their space exhibit, you can hear more star stories—alongside a hundred-year-old telescope, and displays about radio astronomy. 

David Pantalony, curator of physical sciences at the museum, is showing me around. “We have here the wall called ‘One Sky, Many Astronomies,’” he says. “We have five different languages here. French, and then the Ojibway, then the Dakota/Lakota, and then the Cree languages.”

On the display are Greek and Roman constellations in muted colors, with the constellations of Canada’s Indigenous cultures painted, bright and beautiful, on top of them: loons, fishers, thunderbirds, the hole in the sky where we come from, and Mista Muskwa, the bear that sits atop the stars we know as the Big Dipper. Buck’s voice comes out of a headset, telling the story of that bear, a bully who was defeated by the seven brave birds that form the ring Westerners know as Corona Borealis.

Here’s a question Pantalony gets sometimes: What is a series of star stories doing in a museum dedicated to technology and science? 

“People are surprised, but then it makes sense,” he says. “Of course cultures would have different stories based on this massive canopy from horizon to horizon that unfolds before our eyes every night.” Just like the telescope that sits in the museum, the story about Mars circling around in the sky like a startled moose is also an instrument of astronomical observation. 

In 2008, Canada began a major effort to right the wrongs of colonization. The process, which aimed to recognize the rights of Indigenous groups and shape a new relationship of respect, was broadly referred to as truth and reconciliation. At the museum, this took the shape of a conscious effort to include Indigenous culture and technology in the story of Canadian science—from snowshoes to star stories.

The museum was so serious about getting the details right that they brought in Buck as a co-curator, along with Indigenous astronomer Annette Lee, who is both Dakota/Lakota and Ojibway.

“As much as there’s this idea that science is all rational, science is immune from culture, that’s simply not true. Science itself is not actually separate from culture,” she says. “It came from a specific culture, and that’s Western European.” 

Lee means that our very picture of what science is was shaped by Western European history and the biases of that culture.

But science is something anyone can do, and, Lee says, everyone has done. The process on paper is simple: closely observe the world, test what you learn, and transmit it to future generations. That Indigenous cultures have done so without test tubes doesn’t make them unscientific, she says—just different.

On the day I visit the museum, a group of students from nearby Gloucester High School is there too. They’re all Indigenous, including Jessie Kavanaugh, who is Anishinaabe, from a First Nation called Animakee Wa Zhing in northwestern Ontario. “And I’m Bear Clan,” she says.

At the museum, they explore the constellations as newcomers, rotating the images of the sky to see the arrangement of stars on the day and time they were born. Animals roll in and out of the circular frame—a turtle, a spider, a thunderbird, and a marauding bear named Mista Muskwa.

But Kavanaugh tells me the stories she’s reading on the walls aren’t ones she ever learned growing up.

“I’m 18 and I’m learning this now and I still don’t know anything about it,” Kavanaugh says. “I feel like I know more about the Greek or Roman, their constellations, than I do my own.”

Wilfred says this is common in Indigenous communities. Adults and children alike have lost stories of the stars and other knowledge from collective memory. It’s direct fallout from the ways in which colonizing Europeans killed Indigenous people and weakened links to their culture. After more than 14 years of collecting star stories from Indigenous elders around Manitoba, Wilfred says he’s managed to gather only two dozen. 

“If you have a village of a hundred people, and every person knows one word to a song that has a hundred words in it, everybody getting together can sing that song. That’s the whole accumulated knowledge base of their people,” Buck says. “And then one morning, you wake up, and 85 of them are gone. And you have to piece together what you remember, and what you have.”

The result is generations of people who are fighting to even know their own language. And young Indigenous people look up to the sky at night and see only the stories of the Greeks. 

At the museum, none of the students—all 17 and 18, and thinking about the future—thought they wanted to be scientists. These are students who said they loved learning about botany, medicine, engineering. One even designed entire science curriculums for kids at summer camps. 

“Astronomy was really cool, because I’m obsessed with the stars,” says Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh and her classmates are exactly the kinds of students you’d want pursuing STEM degrees. And yet Jessie says she feels like she won’t fit into the way science is done.

“I don’t want to do Western science,” she says. “I don’t want to have to write everything down all the time. I keep it in my head because it’s in my blood to do that, you know?” 

In 2012, the Obama administration set a goal of increasing STEM undergraduate degrees by 1 million to meet growing economic and technology needs in the next decade. But how do you recruit that many young scientists? And how do you invite everyone—like Kavanaugh and her classmates—who feels left out? Pantalony says broadening the image of science—and who does it—is a first step. He recommends giving credit to more non-Western scientists, both past and present—not to mention looking beyond the stereotypes of lab coats, test tubes, and particle accelerators.

“When you find out what science really is—observing, making, doing, asking good questions, failing…” he says. “That’s what I love about science. You hear that from kids and you hear that from Nobel Prize Winners.”

Jordyn Hendricks, another student at the museum, is Métis from Red River Nation. They say that recognizing the contributions of Indigenous people to science and technology matters for its own sake.

“We’re seen as primitive or not super smart. But we were super smart,” Hendricks says. “And it’s important to bring that in and recognize it.” 

For both Lee and Buck, bringing star stories to the mainstream halls of Canadian science museums isn’t just about sharing Indigenous knowledge with Western visitors, or expanding the vision of what science is. It’s also about the future of Indigenous communities, still recovering from the damages of colonization.

In both Canada and the U.S., Indigenous youth have the highest suicide rate of any other racial or ethnic group. Indigenous communities have also been hit hard by the opioid epidemic, and young Indigenous people also have high rates of homelessness. 

Literally, and figuratively, Lee says, youth are leaving. There is a lack of hope.

“That’s part of what the star knowledge brings,” she says. “This sense of purpose, the sense of hope, this lifeline, that each person is connected. To the bigger whole, the universe, the stars. Those stars are more than just balls of gas. When we do Indigenous science, those stars are our oldest relatives.”

“I found a piece that was missing from my life.”

Lee says this sense of connectedness is a unique part of Indigenous science. In Western science, knowledge is often considered separate from the people who discover it, while Indigenous cultures see knowledge as intricately connected to people. 

“So it’s not like we’re just outside observers watching this,” she says. “The key thing is we’re a part of it.”

Can stories about the stars bring broken communities back together? For Buck, that connection to his history was a key part of his thriving. As a teenager, his family was scattered by poverty and he was homeless on the streets of Vancouver. Then, Cree elders invited him and other youth back to Manitoba to learn about their culture.

“I found a piece that was missing from my life,” he says. “I found something that made sense to me. I found something that was ours.

“It was a powerful thing.” 

It was a journey that led him, ultimately, to the stars.

10.14.20 (thewire.com)

Herd immunity proposal draws the attention of the White House, Eli Lilly halts antibody treatment trials, and new research highlights the impact of the pandemic on digital freedom worldwide. Here’s what you should know:Headlines A proposal for herd immunity denounced by scientists gains traction in the White House Last week, advisers of the president, including Department of Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar, met with a group of scientists who have advocated for letting the virus spread naturally among young people to hasten herd immunity. They’ve dubbed their strategy “Focused Protection,” and they boast support online, but many in the scientific community are skeptical, with one epidemiologist calling it a recipe for “carnage.” A White House official told reporters that the plan supports what has been Trump’s policy for months: Protect the vulnerable, but don’t keep the country closed. Eli Lilly halts trials for antibody treatment due to an unspecified “potential safety concern” Government-sponsored trials for Eli Lilly’s antibody treatment for Covid-19 were paused yesterday due to an unspecified “potential safety concern.” The drug is similar to the Regeneron treatment that the president touted as a “cure” for Covid-19 after he received it. Both drugmakers applied for emergency use from the FDA after Trump was treated. While a pause may seem bad, they exist to help ensure the drug doesn’t hit the market until it’s safe. Scientists point out this is a good thing, the very reason we have clinical trials in the first place. Research finds that the pandemic fueled wide-ranging crackdowns on digital freedom worldwide New research has found that the pandemic enabled governments worldwide to crack down on digital liberty. People in at least 45 countries have been charged with criminal offenses for coronavirus-related online speech. The pandemic has also led to the creation of new surveillance technologies, including contact tracing apps, that don’t adequately protect civilian privacy.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

Some of humanity’s greatest and most fertile minds — including Oliver Sacks, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Aldous Huxley, and Friedrich Nietzsche — have contemplated the power of music, and yet the question of why music moves us so remains unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable. Why is it that music can permeate our deepest memories, help us grieve, and save our lives?

Four years after his increasingly timely case for shedding the culture-crushing shackles of workaholism, the German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) explored the abiding puzzlement of music’s power in a speech delivered during intermission at a Bach concert in 1952, later published under the title “Thoughts About Music” in his small, enormous posthumous essay collection Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (public library) — a set of reflections titled after Augustine’s beautiful assertion that “only he who loves can sing” (which Van Gogh echoed in his insistence that art and love are one), exploring what Pieper argues is the “hidden root” of the richness of all music, fine art, and poetry: contemplation.

Art by Carson Ellis from Du Iz Tak?

Piper begins his Bach speech by examining our age-old preoccupation with pinning down the elusive source of music’s singular enchantment:

Not only is music one of the most amazing and mysterious phenomena of all the world’s miranda, the things that make us wonder (and, therefore, the formal subject of any philosopher…) [but] music may be nothing but a secret philosophizing of the soul… yet, with the soul entirely oblivious, that philosophy, in fact, is happening here… Beyond that, and above all, music prompts the philosopher’s continued interest because it is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence.

Pieper considers the question of what we actually perceive when we listen to music. Surely, he points out, we perceive something greater and beyond the sum total of the specific sounds and words, something of additional intimacy and meaning, just as in poetry we “perceive more and something other than the factual, literal meaning of its words.” Echoing Aldous Huxley’s exquisite assertion that “after silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Pieper writes:

Music opens a path into the realm of silence. Music reveals the human soul in stark “nakedness,” as it were, without the customary linguistic draperies.

Art by Julia Kuo from The Sound of Silence by Katrina Goldsaito

With an eye to the canon of ideas about music in Western philosophy — including Schopenhauer, who believed that music is superior to all other arts for they “speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence,” and Nietzsche, who dramatized his monumental regard for music in the proclamation that “without music life would be a mistake” — Pieper summarizes the landscape of thought:

The nature of music variously [has] been understood … as nonverbal articulation of weal and woe, as wordless expression of man’s intrinsic dynamism of self-realization, a process understood as man’s journey toward ethical personhood, as the manifestation of man’s will in its aspects, as love.

All of these ideas, he suggests, can be summed up in a single formulation. A decade after the trailblazing philosopher Susanne Langer framed music as a laboratory for feeling and time, Pieper writes:

Music articulates the inner dynamism of man’s existential self, which is music’s “prime matter” (so to speak), and both share a particular characteristic — both move in time.

Much as the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky would argue decades later that cinema is the art of “sculpting in time,” Pieper argues that this temporal element of music gives us a vital tool with which to sculpt our personhood:

Since music articulates the immediacy of man’s basic existential dynamism in an immediate way, the listener as well is addressed and challenged on that profound level where man’s self-realization takes place. In this existential depth of the listener, far below the level of expressible judgments, there echoes — in identical immediacy — the same vibration articulated in the audible music.

We now realize why and to what extent music plays a role in man’s formation and perfection… beyond any conscious efforts toward formation, teaching, or education.

One of Arthur Rackham’s rare 1917 illustrations for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm

In a passage of even more jarring pertinence to our own era of formulaic mass-produced mediocrity marketed as popular music, Pieper writes:

If we now look at our society … we observe how much the most trivial and “light” music, the “happy sound,” has become the most common and pervasive phenomenon. By its sheer banality, this music expresses quite accurately the cheap self-deception that on the inner existential level all is fine… We observe how much attention is demanded by — and willingly given to — the rhythmic beat of a certain crude and orgiastic music… Both kinds of music, the “happy sound” as well as the numbing beat, claim legitimacy as “entertainment,” as means, that is, of satisfying, without success, the boredom and existential void that are caused and increased by each other and that equally have become a common and pervasive phenomenon. We further observe how music … is frequently selected and consumed as a means of personal enchantment, of escapism, of a certain pseudo-deliverance, and as a means to achieve delight that remains merely “skin-deep” (von aussen her, as Rilke said)… We observe all this with great alarm, aware that music lays bare man’s inner existential condition, removing veil and façade (and it cannot be otherwise), while this same inner condition receives from music the most discreet impulses, for better or for worse.

Pieper returns to the subject of his speech, extolling Bach as a timeless counterpoint to this debasement of the soul in music — a supreme example of the kind of music that ennobles our personhood by inviting existential contemplation:

We observe and ponder all this and then are moved to rejoice as we become aware again and acknowledge anew that among all the various kinds of music today there still exists, also and especially, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach!

Obviously, this implies a challenge to ourselves, a challenge not easily nor “automatically” satisfied. That we are willing to listen attentively to the essential message of this music and that we let this message find an echo, as if on reverberating strings, within the immediacy of our soul is decisive. This will lead to new and rekindled clarity, authenticity, and vigor of our inward existence; to the dissatisfaction with entertaining but hollow achievements; and to a sober and perceptive alertness that is not distracted from the realities of actual life by the promise of easy pleasure proffered in superficial harmonies. Above all, this will guide us to turn with resolve, constancy, courage, and hope toward the one and only Good by whose grace our inner existential yearning finds fulfillment; the one Good praised and exalted particularly in Bach’s music with such ever-present “wordless jubilation.”

Complement this particular portion of the wholly jubilant Only the Lover Sings with Franz Kafka on the power of music and the point of making art and Aldous Huxley on why music speaks to our souls, then revisit Pieper on the neglected seedbed of creative culture.

Learning to separate ego and truth

12th October 2020 (iai.tv)

Michael Patrick Lynch

Convictions are integral to our identity, which is why they so rarely change. We should all beware of mistaking our tribal values for our reasoned beliefs, warns philosopher Michael P. Lynch.

There are times, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted, when reasons run out, when our “spade is turned on bedrock.” When that happens, evidence for or against our beliefs seems beside the point. All that is left, he suggests, is the deed.

Those of us living through the polarized politics of 2020 can sympathize. In the United States in particular, it certainly seems like people have dug in all the way to bedrock. Donald Trump famously suggested four years ago that he could shoot someone and his supporters would still back him. This struck some as darkly funny then, but no one is laughing now.  It seems that for some people–and not just on the Right—nothing will change their minds.

All of which begs a simple but difficult question: why is it so hard to change our political convictions? One part of the puzzle lies in the nature of conviction itself. 

A conviction is not just a strongly held belief. I strongly believe I am writing on a computer but that is hardly worth calling a conviction of mine. As Wittgenstein’s allusion to bedrock suggests, we think of our deepest convictions as the ground on which our worldview stands. They become part of the landscape, our frame of reference, our “picture of the world”.  As a result, convictions feel certain. But not everything we feel certain about is a conviction.

To change your convictions means changing the kind of person you want to be. It means changing your self-identity. And that is not just hard, it is scary.

What makes a conviction a conviction is not its logical certainty or how well supported it is. It is not the content of the conviction that matters; what matters is its connections, or its perceived connections, to our way of life and to what matters to us.

Most importantly, convictions signify to ourselves and others what kind of person we want to be—even if we often lack the courage to live up to them. In short, convictions reflect, and partly compose, our self-identity. It is this fact that makes a conviction feel certain to us, whether or not it really is.

Adnrew Bowie, Edwina Currie and Julian Baggini ask if our convictions are dangerous

By “self-identity” I mean my aspirational self, or what is sometimes called my self-image. That’s a matter of not just who I am – my religion, my job, and so on – but what I care about, and the groups and values with which I wish to identify myself.

Because they reflect our self-identities, our convictions carry authority over our lives. Most obviously, they have authority over our actions; they obligate us to do some things and grant us permission to do others. A religious conviction, for example, can give believers the moral permission to blow themselves up, or cause them to engage in nonviolent protest in support of civil rights.

But crucially, convictions don’t carry just moral authority. They also have authority over what we believe. Once something becomes a real conviction, it is difficult for us, from a psychological standpoint, to doubt, and as a result they are resistant to counter-evidence.

This connection to self-identity explains why attacks on our convictions feel so personal—because, in a real sense, they are. But it also explains why they are so hard to change. To change your convictions means changing the kind of person you want to be. It means changing your self-identity. And that is not just hard, it is scary.

Among other things, changing a conviction can feel like an act of self-betrayal and a betrayal of one’s tribe. And naturally, the tribe may well agree. So, as the Yale psychologist Dan Kahan has emphasized, COVID-hoaxers and climate change deniers are, in a weird way, being rational from the standpoint of self-interest by being epistemically irrational—that is, by ignoring the evidence and sticking to their convictions come what may. No one wants to crush their self-image, betray their tribe and be voted off the island. 

When we are trying to change other people’s convictions, we need to understand what we are asking them to do: to change their self-identity.

Once we understand the relationship between convictions and identity, it can seem hopeless to try and change them. How can we engage in the sort of rational persuasion that real democratic politics demands in the face of our instinct for psychological preservation?

But at the same time, we know it is possible. People do change. Consider the case of Derek Black, for example, a committed and well-known white supremacist who changed his views after getting to know some Jewish students at his college. He came to realize, he later wrote, that the worldview he cherished was truly frightening to others, something he had always dismissed before.

This should tell us something. The philosopher Otto Neurath once said that changing our belief system was a bit like rebuilding a ship while at sea. We stand on one part in order to fix another. When we are trying to change other people’s convictions, we need to understand what we are asking them to do: to change their self-identity. But in order to do that, they need something else to hold onto—some other part of their identities to treat as solid ground. Remove everything and they are adrift. That may have been how it was with Black: he aspired to be a non-threatening, non-harmful person, but he also aspired to be a white supremacist. Change occurred when he realized he couldn’t be both. He had to choose who he wanted to be.

If we want to change people’s convictions—or our own—we need to acknowledge that we may only be able to do so piecemeal. And it may take time.  It can, and often does happen gradually over the course of living, adopting new customs, moving to a new place, speaking a different language or falling in love. The gradual nature of these processes can mean changes in our self-identity happen largely without explicit conscious attention. But not wholly so. No change in our aspirational vision of what kind of person we are can be wholly without an impact, on our conscious decisions about how to represent ourselves to both ourselves and others.

When we make everything a matter of conviction, our self-identity expands in a dangerous way.

Understanding the nature of conviction means we also need to be careful about expanding our convictions into every frame of our life. That’s one reason social media is such a barrier to constructive discourse. Sharing our outrage or amusement online about e.g. the kinds of cars or coffee or music our political opponents favor can be fun and comforting. But it is also a way we signal to each other about what our tribe values.  We signal to each other that these choices too should be seen as a matter of conviction. And we signal that it would be dangerous to change our minds. As a result, commitments that we think are principled, a result of our individual story of our best self, can actually be just fragments of a larger tribal narrative. Social media can be a very effective conviction machine.

We all need convictions, because we all need a self-identity—a picture of who we want to be. But when we make everything a matter of conviction, our self-identity expands in a dangerous way. We risk confusing our ego with truth, the shifting sands with real bedrock.

Michael Patrick Lynch
12th October 2020

By Gary Zukav The photograph was taken by Noah Berger from the Associated Press ( AP ) The fires at home and the global pandemic teach us the same thing in the same ways. Driving to Central Point from Ashland, I saw some of the ashes of the fire in Phoenix from the freeway. I cried in the car. I was not prepared. I saw the videos of these neighboring towns on fire. I had seen the videos of Napa and Sonoma counties on fire, where our friends evacuated their homes, too, but I was not prepared. Why did these ashes beside the freeway move me to my core? Why did my soul stir? Who in Ashland has not thought, “What if the wind had been blowing south that day?” Who in Talent and Phoenix and Medford has not thought, “What if the wind had been blowing south?” I realized that whether my home burned or my neighbor’s home burned, a home burned, lives were changed, and I would not be the same. The deep connections I feel with my neighbors — here in the valley and around the world — came into me with a depth and richness I had not felt before. I intend to keep that depth and richness, that love, alive in me long after new houses are built, and the shock of changed lives evolves into the power of new and deeper lives, awake with the wonder of neighbors so dear, of love around us, and of life. I felt the same things while talking with a friend who was brought home after five days in an ICU with the coronavirus, with barely enough strength to hold her phone. “Today I thought I was going to die,” she told us — not only about the ICU, but about the day when we were speaking to her. My spiritual partner, Linda Francis, and I read her chapters from “The Seat of the Soul” until her strength began to return. She lived. Others did not. Our home still stands. Others are gone. The hugeness of the change is the same. The pandemic shows us that we are all in this together. The fires show us that we are all in this together. The opening of homes to those without them, giving of food to those without food, and the care and support that flows toward our neighbors here shows us the same thing. We are one. If we were not, why would we be so deeply affected? What lines of communication transmit grief, despair, hope and love from one of us to another? They are experiences of love. If we are as separate as I once felt, why would driving by ashes of homes I seldom noticed before bring tears to me? Our adopted Lakota brother, Phil Lane, Jr., told us, “The honor of one is the honor of all, and the pain of one is the pain of all.” So we cry for one another, even while driving on the freeway, because their pain is our pain, and our pain is their pain. In every way, at every moment, we are one. That does not change and has never changed. Only our awareness of it changes. The fires at home and the pandemic everywhere are showing us this in the tender and resilient ways of the heart. They are teaching us the greatest lesson that we can learn, if we are open to learning it. We are one. What greater lesson is there? Gary Zukav is the author of “The Seat of the Soul,” a former Special Forces (Green Beret) officer with Vietnam service, and a supporter of the Ashland Culture of Peace Commission.

(Submitted by Sara Walker.)

(RationalWiki.org)

The iron law of institutions, usually attributed to political blogger Jon Schwarz, states:^[1]

“”The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

Schwartz was originally describing Nancy Pelosi‘s unwillingness to consult with Iraq War protestors in 2007 — and more generally, Democrats‘ failure to embrace disaffected leftist voters, as it would affect their power within the party, and in turn, the party’s standing among the overall electorate. (This leaves aside the question of whether there would be enough disaffected voters for this to pay off, and whether it would alienate enough current voters to nullify any gains.)

In using “iron law” for this, writers might have been thinking of the iron law of oligarchy (Michels, 1911), which is roughly the same in operation. This “law” is a consequence of how people think and work, normally. It is probably not possible to completely “break” the law, but there may be institutional structures that harness it, by limiting the central power of the organization. An oligarchy will still form if the organization is large. Look around!

OCTOBER 13, 2020 (counterpunch.org)

BY RICHARD C. GROSS

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Donald Trump didn’t receive the Nobel Peace Prize but he did get to impersonate fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as he spoke to his fans from the White House balcony at high noon Saturday.

The American Il Duce (Italian for The Leader) doesn’t speak Italian but delivered his usual standard campaign bundle of lies and cut them to about 20 minutes in his first in-person appearance since he returned Oct. 5 from a four-day hospital stay suffering COVID-19. It’s said he’s not now contagious.

Soapboxes and stages, not balconies, are more of a mainstay for American political leaders. But Trump’s occasional penchant for jutting his chin is so reminiscent of Mussolini’s similar posture and how he addressed his people from a balcony outside his office above Rome’s Piazza Venezia. Their girth is comparable.

As Hitler’s fascist partner, Mussolini, a true orator, wound up being dragged through the streets, his dead body hanged upside down amidst World War II.

Though he didn’t get the Nobel, for which Trump was nominated by a Norwegian right-winger (maybe he didn’t make enough peace beyond Bahrain and the United Arab that normalized relations with Israel), his consolation prize was being unleashed from his White House crib to appear before his public, contagious or not, to stop him from ranting about being locked up.

Trump’s balcony performance in blue suit, white shirt and blue and white striped tie was staged after a week of confusion about the contagion factor, a duel with his rival Joe Biden about attending an Oct. 15 debate, which eventually was canceled, and his nixing then approving negotiations about a second virus relief package, which is stalled.

He bragged from behind a lectern on the balcony that he had “great poll” numbers in several battleground states. But The Washington Post said he was behind Biden nationally by an average of 53 percent to 42 percent of all polls. He just likes to make things up, numbers included.

The latest polls show Trump support collapsing nationwide “as he alienates women, seniors and suburbanites,” The New York Times reported Friday. It said private Republican surveys indicated “he is repelling independents” in solidly red states that include Montana, Kansas and Missouri so that Biden “has drawn closer.”

That could be because of his disastrous performance dealing with the virus and his incredibly antagonistic showing during the “debate” with Biden.

“There are limits to what people can take with the irresponsibility, the untruthfulness, just the whole persona,” said former Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who served notice he’s voting for Biden, the Times reported.

The virus and its follow-on dreaded COVID-19 appears to be the No. 1 topic on American minds and could be the deciding factor in the election. But Trump still is dismissing it despite its being America’s worst health calamity in a century.

“People are going to get better like I did,” he told Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show Friday, a day when the Post said 850 Americans had died. “And I recovered immediately.” Of course, few people receive the intensive care and experimental drugs that he did. They should.

More than 213,000 Americans have died and another 7.5 million have been infected with the virus. About 44,000 Americans contract the disease daily as it spikes through much of the country for the second time.

Yet Trump still insists on dismissing the seriousness of the virus; said his infection was a “blessing from God,” —  whatever that means – and claimed immunity and still his campaign recklessly conducts indoor rallies with surrogates. ABC News reported Oct. 7 that 34 White House people and others have contracted the disease.

“When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent,” said the highly respected, authoritative New England Journal of Medicine in an editorial Oct. 7. It was founded in 1812.

“We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs,” it said.

The president has been getting it from all sides as his critics have become less reticent in holding back their opinions of him, his administration and his irresponsible and irrepressible behavior, much of it juvenile. The criticisms have become more blatant, more strident the more he trails Biden in the polls.

Trump made the mistake of calling Republican strategist Steven Schmidt a ”total loser” and a “blathering idiot” in a tweet. Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy against President Barack Obama, is a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Its clever biting ads have gone viral.

Schmidt fired back in a lengthy scorching Facebook against Trump:

“Everyone is laughing at you. You are a joke. A splendid moron turned deadly clown.” And:

“We hear from the White House and the campaign every day. They are betraying you. They are looking to get out alive and salvage careers and their names.” And:

“It’s almost over now. You are the greatest failure in American history. You are the worst president in American history. Disgrace will always precede your name. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will grow up ashamed of their names.” And, finally:

After labeling Donald Trump Jr. a loser, Schmidt closed with, “But it is you who will be remembered as America’s greatest loser. You will be crushed in the election!”

Richard C. Gross, a career journalist at home and abroad, retired as the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.

“There’s more than one up there,” the former Senate majority leader says in the new UFO documentary “The Phenomenon.”

By Ed Mazza

October 12, 2020 (huffpost.com)

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the U.S. government has been hiding key details about UFOs for years. 

“Why the federal government all these years has covered up, put brake pads on everything, stopped it, I think it’s very, very bad for our country,” Reid said in the new documentary “The Phenomenon” from director James Fox. 

“Are you saying that there’s some evidence that still hasn’t seen the light of day?” asked Fox. 

“I’m saying most of it hasn’t seen the light of day,” Reid replied. 

The film examines the history of UFO sightings in the United States and abroad, including new details about the military-confirmed encounters off the coast involving U.S. Navy pilots. It also details a 1967 report in which an object appeared over a U.S. missile base at the same time 10 of the missiles became inoperative. 

“If they had been called upon by the president to launch, they couldn’t have done it,” Reid said in the film. 

Reid, who was among the lawmakers behind a classified but since-closed U.S. government UFO program, has become increasingly outspoken about the phenomena since leaving office. However, he stopped short of confirming evidence of other-worldly activity, writing in August on Twitter that he wants the issue studied and that “we must stick to science, not fairy tales about little green men.”

He repeated that point of view in the new film. 

“Nobody has to agree why it’s there. But should we at least be spending some money to study all these phenomenon?” he asked. “The answer is ‘yes.’” 

UFO expert Lee Speigel, a former HuffPost reporter, served as a co-writer and co-producer on the film, which he said took seven years to come to fruition. 

“Whether you’re a UFO ‘believer’ or debunker, those in-between or still undecided, it’s important to present accurate information that potentially affects the national security of all nations and the safety of all citizens of our planet,” Spiegel said. 

“The Phenomenon” is currently available via VOD.

After the First World War, the members of the Vienna Circle tried to put European thought on a rigorously logical footing. Then the times caught up with them.

By Adam Kirsch October 12, 2020 (NewYorker.com)

Influenced by Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle aimed to make language logical.Illustration by Yann Kebbi

Philosophy often flourishes in the aftermath of wars, especially lost wars. Socrates served in the losing Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War; Thomas Hobbes wrote “Leviathan” while in exile in Paris after the defeat of the royalists in the English Civil War. At moments of humiliation and confusion, when people need to rebuild their understanding of the world, they are willing to rethink assumptions that go unchallenged in normal times.

The defeat of the Central Powers in the First World War gave rise to one of these historic bursts of creative thinking. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, served in the war as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Captured just days before the Armistice, in November, 1918, he spent nine months as a prisoner of war in Italy before returning home to Vienna, an imperial capital suddenly stranded in a small, parochial new state.

It was while on leave in the summer of 1918 that Wittgenstein completed his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which was published in 1921. Today, it is Wittgenstein’s later work that commands the most attention, but the “Tractatus”—a brief, dense book that, like Euclid’s treatise on geometry, takes the form of a series of numbered propositions—magnetized readers from the start with its radical ambition. It aimed to tear Western philosophy up by the roots, just as revolutionaries on the left and the right were doing to societies all across postwar Europe.

For Wittgenstein, the renovation of philosophy had to begin with language. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers had tried to understand the world using terms such as “being” and “becoming,” “substance” and “essence,” “real” and “ideal.” But these abstractions gave rise to complicated arguments that went around and around, never reaching any definite conclusion. Now, in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory were redrawing the map of reality in ways that could be verified by experiment and given precise mathematical expression. In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?

By declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course. For the analytic philosophy he helped inspire, many of the discipline’s traditional problems are actually just misunderstandings, based on an erroneous use of language. What philosophers need isn’t profundity but clarity: as Wittgenstein says in the “Tractatus,” “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”

This way of thinking about language—what it means, what it can grasp, and how it should be used—became the particular obsession of the Vienna Circle, a group of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers who met regularly from the mid-nineteen-twenties to the mid-thirties, mainly at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Vienna. The best known of its dozen or so core members are the logician Rudolf Carnap, the sociologist Otto Neurath, the mathematician Kurt Gödel, and Moritz Schlick, who turned to philosophy after earning a doctorate in physics under Max Planck, the pioneer of quantum theory. These thinkers and their students helped set the agenda for postwar academic philosophy in Britain and America, where most of the Circle’s members ended up teaching after they fled the Continent in the thirties.

Taking its cue from the “Tractatus,” the Vienna Circle sought to make language as precise and rigorous as a mathematical proof. The English philosopher A. J. Ayer, who studied in Vienna and helped popularize the Circle’s ideas, summed up its definition of the purpose of philosophy: “to dispel those confusions which arise from our imperfect understanding of certain types of sentence in our language.” If this “linguistic turn,” as it came to be known, sounded uninspiring or even priggish, so much the better; philosophy had been led astray for too long by grand, seductive illusions.

David Edmonds’s new book, “The Murder of Professor Schlick” (Princeton), offers a lively and accessible introduction to this much written-about group. Rather than plumbing the depths of the Vienna Circle’s work, which is formidably technical, Edmonds mainly explores how its ideas reflected the group’s tumultuous time and place. His research has also uncovered important new biographical information, including about its lesser-known female members.

Wittgenstein never attended a meeting of the Vienna Circle, but he knew its key figures, and his ideas dominated its proceedings. In Edmonds’s book, too, Wittgenstein ends up stealing the focus, simply because he played the role of genius so perfectly—intense and charismatic, unworldly and unpredictable, shockingly arrogant yet capable of remarkable self-sacrifice. It didn’t hurt that he was also handsome and rich, having been born into one of Austria-Hungary’s leading industrial dynasties.

In 1919, however, Wittgenstein gave up his share of the family fortune. He spent the next seven years teaching elementary school in remote Austrian villages, where he made himself loathed by regularly beating his pupils and pulling their hair. In 1926, after he returned to the capital, he made contact with the Vienna Circle, whose members had been studying the “Tractatus.” The wife of Schlick, the group’s leader, recalled that the first time her husband dined with Wittgenstein he returned “in an ecstatic state.” Another philosopher, Friedrich Waismann, “began, subconsciously, to imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking patterns.”

Edmonds’s subtitle, “The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle,” suggests a closer connection between the group’s work and the titular murder than the book actually establishes. Schlick’s death had nothing to do with his ideas; he was killed by a psychotic former student, Johann Nelböck, who had been stalking and threatening him for years and finally shot him, in June, 1936, on the steps of a university building. But what happened next, Edmonds shows, was indeed shaped by what the Vienna Circle had come to represent in the ideological frenzy of interwar Austria.

No sooner had news of the crime broken than the nationalist, anti-Semitic press began to extenuate and even to praise it as a blow against degenerate Jewish thought. Schlick was accused of damaging “the fine porcelain of the national character” and of embodying Jewish “logicality, mathematicality, [and] formalism,” qualities inimical to “a Christian German state.” One writer urged that the murder should “quicken efforts to find a truly satisfactory solution of the Jewish Question.” Nelböck, at his trial, played to this sentiment, claiming that he had killed Schlick for ideological reasons. That defense didn’t keep him out of jail, but after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, in 1938, Nelböck was released, on the ground that his crime had been inspired by “strong national motives and explicit anti-Semitism.”

In this deranged atmosphere, no one was deterred by the fact that Schlick was not Jewish but, rather, a German Protestant. Some of his defamers probably didn’t know this, but others simply didn’t care, since in their eyes Jewishness wasn’t defined only by religion or ethnicity. It was also a mind-set, characterized by the modernism and liberalism they saw as sources of spiritual corruption.

In this sense, Nazis and Austria’s Christian fascists were right to see the Vienna Circle as an enemy. In Edmonds’s words, the Circle was “contemptuous of superstitious thinking,” including myths about race and religion. The group included Christians and Jews, but its members’ real creed was what they called “the scientific conception of the world.”

That was the title of a 1929 manifesto in which the Circle announced its intellectual program. Written as a tribute to Schlick, who was returning to Vienna after a stint at Stanford University, the essay explained that the members of the Circle, though they didn’t agree on everything, were committed to two basic principles. First, “there is knowledge only from experience, which rests on what is immediately given. This sets the limits for the content of legitimate science.” Second, “the scientific world-conception is marked by application of a certain method, namely logical analysis.”

Together, these ideas gave the new school of thought its name, logical empiricism. For logical empiricists, philosophy doesn’t deal with ideas or things; it deals with statements, sentences, propositions. By putting together a series of true statements, it’s possible to create what Wittgenstein, in the “Tractatus,” called a “model of reality,” a representation of the world in language. The content of statements about the world is determined by experience, including the refined and controlled type of experience that comes from scientific experiment.

Philosophy’s role in the search for truth is to examine the form of our statements, to insure that they are syntactically and logically correct. To this end, the Vienna Circle drew on the symbolic logic developed by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, which offered a way to reduce any sentence to a series of symbols and formulas. Many pages of Carnap’s 1934 book, “The Logical Syntax of Language,” look as if they could have come from a math textbook.

Symbolic logic is useful because statements can go wrong in ways that ordinary usage makes it hard to detect. In most cases, determining whether a statement is empirically true or false is fairly straightforward. If someone says that the moon is made of green cheese, there are various ways to check: you could look at the moon through a telescope, or examine a moon rock, or calculate how a moon-size ball of green cheese would behave in outer space. Even if false, “The moon is made of green cheese” is still a meaningful proposition, because it makes an assertion about the world that can be tested.

Some statements, however, can’t be proved true or false, because they are constructed in a way that violates the rules of language. Carnap labelled these “pseudo-statements”—“a sequence of words [that] looks like a statement at first glance,” but whose syntax or vocabulary renders it meaningless. He gave as an example “Caesar is and”: if someone said this to you, you wouldn’t say that she was right or wrong, just that she didn’t know English syntax.

For the Vienna Circle, the best hunting ground for pseudo-statements was metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with fundamental concepts like being and essence, time and space. Since Aristotle, who called it “first philosophy,” metaphysics had been seen as the highest and most disinterested form of thought. For Immanuel Kant, it was “the queen of all the sciences.” But, for the members of the Vienna Circle, metaphysics was a queen like Marie Antoinette—imperious, out of touch, and ripe for the guillotine.

The problem with metaphysical statements is that they are generally unverifiable, which to the logical empiricists meant they are meaningless. In Carnap’s 1932 essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” he asks us to imagine a man who invents a new adjective, “teavy,” and who, when we ask him how to tell whether or not something is teavy, replies that “there are no empirical signs of teavyness.” In that case, Carnap says, “we would deny the legitimacy of using this word.”

The same principle, he argues, should apply to metaphysical terms, from Plato’s “Idea” to Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” Such impressive words may provoke “associated images and feelings,” Carnap writes, but they have no actual meaning, so any explanation that relies on them is saying nothing at all.

Metaphysics wasn’t just a ghost from the past to be exorcised; it was still on the march, with important consequences for both philosophy and politics. Carnap’s essay was written as an attack on Martin Heidegger, the other great German-language philosopher to emerge after the First World War. If Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” is a fundamental work of analytic philosophy, Heidegger’s 1927 book, “Being and Time,” is equally important for “Continental” philosophy—a catchall term used by the Anglo-American analytic school to refer to all those benighted Europeans who still take metaphysics seriously.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein shared an ability to inspire awe and devotion, but in most respects the two were opposites. Wittgenstein was raised in privilege in Vienna; Heidegger grew up poor in Messkirch, a small town in rural Germany, where his father was the sexton of the Catholic church. Wittgenstein was a wanderer who moved back and forth between Austria and England, and between academia and other pursuits; Heidegger spent his entire career at the German university where he had been a student, and did his thinking in a remote cabin he built in the Black Forest. (That cabin, the most famous dwelling in twentieth-century philosophy, is the subject of its own book, “Heidegger’s Hut,” by Adam Sharr.)

Above all, the two men differed in their opinion of the value of metaphysics. In 1929, the year that the Vienna Circle published its manifesto, Heidegger delivered a lecture whose title, “What Is Metaphysics?,” was a red rag waved in the face of the logical empiricists. Indeed, he began by acknowledging that modern science has no use for metaphysics. According to the scientific conception of the world, only things we can experience directly are real; the domain of knowledge is “beings themselves—and nothing besides.”

The second part of that statement, he argues, far from being a throwaway phrase, reveals a fundamental truth: in addition to beings, there is the nothing. We come to understand the nothing not through reason but through the experience of anxiety; in moments of existential angst, “beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round.” It is only because we encounter the nothing in this primal way that we are able to understand logical concepts like negation and nonexistence. As Heidegger puts it, “das Nichts selbst nichtet”—a strange phrase that English translators have rendered as “the nothing itself nihilates,” or even “the nothing itself noths.”

For Heidegger’s many admirers, his dislocation of language gave metaphysical concepts back the power and strangeness they had lost over the millennia. The way he roots philosophy in mood, rather than in mere intellection, makes his work imaginatively engaging in ways that logical empiricism can’t achieve. One might say that Heidegger wanted to make philosophy more like poetry, whereas the Vienna Circle wanted it to be more like math. For Carnap, the poetic dimension of Heidegger’s thought was precisely the issue, since it depended on misusing language to create an illusion of profundity. The problem, he writes in “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” is grammatical: because German (like English) treats the word “nothing” as a noun, it can be used as the subject of a sentence. For instance, if someone asks, “What is outside?,” you might reply, “Nothing is outside,” just as you could say, “Rain is outside.” This creates the illusion that “nothing” is an entity like rain, whose properties and actions can be described. Syntactically, “The nothing reveals itself” seems to be the same kind of statement as “The rain falls down.”

This is exactly the kind of error we need logic to rescue us from. When we say “Nothing is outside,” Carnap argues, we’re using a kind of verbal shorthand; what we really mean is “There does not exist anything which is outside.” Phrasing it this way shows that the word “not” can properly be used only to negate a proposition. Using it as the subject of a proposition, as Heidegger does, is at best a sign of mental confusion, and at worst a deliberate attempt to mystify and mislead.

Indeed, in “What Is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger explicitly says that he wants to get rid of logical thinking, so that “the very idea of ‘logic’ dissolves in the whirl of a more basic questioning.” This was the fundamental disagreement that separated Heidegger from the Vienna Circle: he believed that language could discover truths deeper than logic; the Circle believed that language without logic could yield only nonsense. As Wittgenstein warned in the last sentence of the “Tractatus,” “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Whereof the Vienna Circle could speak, however, it had a lot to say. Its 1929 manifesto gave rise to a new journal, a series of conferences to bring together leaders in various scientific fields, and an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which aimed to summarize all of scientific knowledge in two hundred volumes. Still more broadly, the manifesto announced that logical empiricism entailed a particular approach to “questions of life”: “Endeavors toward a new organization of economic and social relations, toward the unification of mankind, toward a reform of school and education, all show an inner link with the scientific world-conception; it appears that these endeavors are welcomed and regarded with sympathy by the members of the Circle, some of whom indeed actively further them.”

That was certainly true of Otto Neurath, one of the main authors of the manifesto and the most vivid personality in the Circle. Neurath, a committed leftist who had participated in the failed revolution in Munich in 1919, was an adept publicist of ideas. He was the one who named the group, hoping, in the words of a fellow member, Philipp Frank, to evoke “other things on the pleasant side of life,” such as Viennese waltzes. When he wasn’t philosophizing, Neurath worked on public housing, adult-education programs, and a new method of representing data in easily comprehensible pictograms, known as Isotype, which resulted in the visual vocabulary now used in infographics throughout the world.

But not everyone in the Circle was happy to be dragged into political debates—including Schlick, whom the manifesto was intended to honor. Edmonds brings to life the volatile political and cultural scene in nineteen-twenties Austria, a small country created after the First World War out of the German-speaking lands of the former Habsburg Empire. Vienna, a city of two million people, had been the right size for the capital of a far-flung multinational state, but now it found itself in a country of just 6.5 million people.

“Red Vienna,” as it was nicknamed, had a socialist government, a cosmopolitan culture, and a large Jewish population. All three aspects made it thoroughly hated by the rest of the country, which was rural, conservative, and Catholic. Austria came to the brink of civil war in the twenties, and in 1933 it became a fascist dictatorship under the rule of the Fatherland Front. In these circumstances, the Vienna Circle had much to lose from becoming publicly identified with the left.

In 1934, the group came under scrutiny from the police, prompting Schlick to write letters to state agencies insisting that it was “absolutely unpolitical.” The letters didn’t help; the Circle’s official sponsoring organization was dissolved, and some members were forced out of their jobs or arrested. Though the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany was still four years away, the members of the Circle began to look for opportunities to emigrate.

Many ended up in America, where they helped shape the next generation of academic philosophers. Herbert Feigl went to the University of Iowa in 1931; Carnap was hired by the University of Chicago in 1936. Kurt Gödel, famous for his “incompleteness theorem” and his complete unworldliness, didn’t wake up to the danger until the Second World War began. After receiving a job offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, in January, 1940, he had to go the long way around, crossing the entire Soviet Union, the Pacific Ocean, and the United States to get to New Jersey.

For the lesser-known members of the group, things were tougher. Edmonds documents the struggles of Rose Rand, a Jewish woman who earned her doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1938 but couldn’t find a secure academic job in England, forcing her to rely on the grudging charity of émigré organizations. Wittgenstein intervened on her behalf, but even he found her demanding and difficult to deal with. Still, she survived, living and teaching until 1980. Remarkably, no one from the Circle was killed by the Nazis.

Meanwhile, as the logical empiricists fled for their lives, Heidegger was on the rise. After Hitler’s takeover in Germany, in 1933, the philosopher was appointed rector of the University of Freiburg and given the responsibility of bringing it into alignment with Nazism. An enthusiastic Nazi, Heidegger saw his task in metaphysical terms, declaring in his inaugural address that the essence of science is “the questioning standing of one’s ground in the midst of the constantly self-concealing totality of what is.” Carnap would have scoffed at this language; but as the Vienna Circle knew, and Germany and the world were about to find out, pseudo-statements can have very real consequences. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 19, 2020, issue, with the headline “Losing Propositions.”Adam Kirsch is a poet, a critic, and the author of, most recently, “Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?”

October 13, 2020 • (TheOnion.com)

Aries | March 21 to April 19

You’ll feel a strange mixture of pride and terror when NASA announces it will replace the space shuttle with you in launches starting late next year.

Taurus | April 20 to May 20

Considering how easy it is to get them these days, you’re starting to regret choosing “hugs” over any number of things that rhyme with them.

Gemini | May 21 to June 20

Your theory that your life eerily echoes the events in Casablanca is disrupted even further by the disparity in people’s emotional involvement with their endings.

Cancer | June 21 to July 22

Every marriage is like a little nation unto itself, and the failure of yours is a textbook example of how investment in education, the arts, and maybe a puppy are desirable goals for civilization.

Leo | July 23 to Aug. 22

Often it feels as if everything is too hard for you and that anything you try ends in failure, but take heart: Those feelings have to be wrong eventually.

Virgo | Aug. 23 to Sept. 22

Sometimes we find amazing things in places we least expect them, whether it’s true love, peace of mind, or, in your case, a pack of furious marauding cannibals.

Libra | Sept. 23 to Oct. 22

You have no idea why you’ve been experiencing laughter, tears, a sudden desire for fried chicken, or an impulse to call the law offices of Marvin Falbaum, but it’s probably the TV.

Scorpio | Oct. 23 to Nov. 21

Decent people everywhere will be shocked and appalled by the treatment you received and the conditions under which you were held, but it’s not like their jobs are any better.

Sagittarius | Nov. 22 to Dec. 21

You’ll find yourself curiously unfulfilled, if not a little frightened, when you finally learn the answer to the question of who watches the birdwatchers.

Capricorn | Dec. 22 to Jan. 19

In retrospect, you should have paid more attention to the obvious warning signs, which were of course placed there by the Department of Transportation for just that purpose.

Aquarius | Jan. 20 to Feb. 18

You’ve been fooling yourself for so long that you’ve lost track of your sense of identity, your joy in life, and which one is actually the real Shroud of Turin.

Pisces | Feb. 19 to March 20

If you somehow magically had the chance to do it all over again, you’d do everything in your power to make her happy. You don’t, though, because that’s not the way it works.