Fluid ImaginationFrom This team is playing Celtics basketball the way it is supposed to be played:
It’s not just that these Celtics are really, really good. They’re an absolute joy to watch, an aesthetic godsend. They’re reveling in sharing the basketball. They’re wearing out the bottom of the nets with their shooting. No matter who is on the court under what circumstances, they are playing complementary basketball in the spirit of Celtics Big Threes both original and sequel.
From The Authoritarian Right Is Regrouping:
[E]lected [GOP] officials are quiet [about Trump courting anti-semites] because they know their voters, and the tolerance of the GOP base for Trump is…deep and resilient. But in the end, it is not the job of Mike Pence or Ron DeSantis to halt Trump’s attempted return to power. That responsibility belongs to Republican voters, who must decide whether they care if Trump is yukking it up in Florida with an anti-Semitic rapper and an odious, racist punk.
From 20 climate photographs that changed the world:
They are the images that made us sit up and take notice. As world leaders gather for Cop27, these pictures prove that global heating isn’t a distant possibility – it’s already here
In 2020, a millionaire named Raj Bhakta purchased my alma mater and neighbor, Green Mountain College. He didn’t know what he’d do with the old girl when he purchased it (I had some ideas), but two years later, he has a better sense of things.
According to the development papers he recently submitted to our town, he now “seeks to turn the property into a regional destination for agrotourism, hospitality, small businesses, and post-graduate food and beverage education.” He imagines that “the campus will become the incubator for entrepreneurs developing new businesses who seek to locate in a dynamic and energetic work community.”
The estimated $100 million plan has three phases to be developed over the next decade:
The first part of the plan requires developing a significant number of new parking lots and some new road construction (to avoid traffic on the residential terrace beside the property). They hope to shield most of the parking behind three-foot-high brick walls (similar to the walls already on campus) with “dark-sky friendly” lighting. They hope to build enough parking for 549 vehicles (an increase of 412 from what the college had).
Finally, he would like to add a helipad to the circle in front of the college. Because the property anchors the west end of Main Street, the helipad would dominate the view on Main Street.
To attract investors to the project, Bhakta asked the town in March to stabilize his property taxes for the next ten years. He argued that he already pays more taxes than the college ever did (since the college was a non-profit educational institution), and he’s not asking for a tax waiver — just tax stabilization. He suggested in a presentation to the town that he would use “his current $100,000 tax bill as a base to which a surcharge equivalent to a quarter of a percent of the development’s gross revenues would be added.”
When he made the presentation, he added a veiled threat: a religious group had contacted him about purchasing the property, and if the town didn’t back his development plan, he might have to sell to them; as a religious institution, they’d be tax exempt, so stable taxes with him would be better than no taxes at all.
About a week after the presentation, the town voted to give the select board the power to explore a tax stabilization deal with Bhakta. Still, any agreement would be subject to the approval of the town’s voters.
The tax stabilization deal is perhaps the only leverage the town has over what happens at the former college. We learned the hard way that zoning, permitting, and democracy doesn’t work. Despite the zoning board and the town’s voters rejecting the construction of a Dollar General in town, the developer had deep enough pockets to fight it in court, and the town ran out of money to keep up our appeals. The Dollar General should open at the front gate of our town any month now.
Outside of the helipad (which I’m entirely opposed to from a noise pollution standpoint), I’m not opposed to Bhakta’s plan. It supports the goals of our official town plan, which seeks to “grow Poultney’s outdoor recreational economy, support existing businesses, and encourage new ones.” With a focus on agrotourism, the renovation of dorms into a 100-room hotel, and the conversion of other dorms into condos (I’m guessing for short-term rental purposes), it could bring the tourists every Vermont town needs to survive and thrive.
I have concerns about the destruction of the trees on campus and how the added parking lots will contribute to run-off pollution into the Poultney River. I hope regulations around Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law, may help balance those concerns.
With all of that, the tax stabilization deal does give the town some leverage over Bhakta’s plan. One of my neighbors suggested the select board could use that leverage to ensure Bhakta hires a certain percentage of contractors, construction workers, and service industry folks from the local pool (however that gets defined). The town could also require he set aside a certain percentage of the 40+ apartments built in Phase 2 for low-income Vermonters. I support both of those proposals and encourage the town’s residents to brainstorm even more.
Bhakta said in his presentation that the town’s support of his development is vital to his success. If that’s true, let’s ensure (in writing) that his development contributes to the town’s success as well.
From A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan:
When Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2016, he got a lot of stick. The man wrote songs! But did he deserve the accolade? Leonard Cohen, one of his most literary contemporaries, had it right. Awarding Dylan the Nobel, he said, ‘is like pinning a medal on Mt. Everest for being the highest mountain.’
My kiddo jumped on a trampoline at our neighbor’s house. My wife took her mother to a couple of stores in town. The foliage in my region may have hit its peak. The calendar read Friday. The clock read 4:20 in the afternoon.
Despite having had tachycardia the past four times I smoked cannabis, I wondered, would one hit actually hurt? I tucked the leaf of my hybrid strain of Banana Punch with 20% THC into the blown-glass bowl, stepped onto our back porch, sparked the lighter, put my lips to the hole, and inhaled the smoke.
Would one hit actually hurt?
~~
The day before, I spent roughly four hours with my butt in a chair reading and writing about how close the Russian Federation and the United States are to starting a nuclear war. Ever seen the movie Thirteen Days, the one where Kevin Costner works in the Kennedy White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Remember how intensely scared they all were?
Later that night, President Biden compared this moment to that moment.
Would one nuclear missile actually hurt?
~~
Earlier that week, the longtime town manager of my hometown died suddenly from a heart attack while mowing his lawn. He was seventy years old with a short, rotund body. I did not know him well enough to call him a friend, but I knew him enough to have laughed with him several times, and I respected him greatly. I am so grateful for his skills and dedication, him being the person who managed the town where I chose to start a family.
He retired a few years ago but stayed involved, volunteering, fundraising, and offering his skills and advice wherever it was needed. He made an impact, and he will be missed.
Today, I ate two slices of supreme pizza from the local gas station for lunch. With our school having gone remote this week due to too many teachers testing positive for COVID-19, retrieving the pizza was only the third time I stood up between 10 am and 3 pm, and it was the most prolonged period I stood until the end of the workday when I took my dog for a mile long walk.
Would mowing the lawn actually hurt?
~~
My brother tells me I need to chill out.
He says learning about nuclear war, the devastating effects of climate change, the rise of fascism, the increase in school and police shootings, the local impacts of the opioid epidemic, the worrying trends in children’s mental health, the greed of the capitalists, the exploitation of laborers, the rising costs of food, the horrific nearness of sex offenders and human traffickers, the villainy of the military-industrial complex, etc. is contributing to my anxiety.
He also says reading dystopian science fiction makes me overthink the problems of our current time and the future. He believes thinking too much is bad for me.
Would one more article actually hurt?
~~
I took the hit, got the dough started for tonight’s dinner (homemade pizza), opened a Conehead IPA, retrieved my Kindle (Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power), opened my front door, and with my dog at my side, sat in a gliding chair (the one we used when rocking our kiddo to sleep ten years ago) and started to read.
The tingle started immediately, a message from my body to my brain that something had changed and my brain better take notice.
~~
I’m teaching a high-school class this quarter on evolution. I possess just enough knowledge to lead a high-school classroom but not enough to be genuinely confident. Darwin and I shared the same lack of knowledge: Darwin knew nothing of chromosomes and DNA, and outside of the Punnett square, neither did I.
I began a layman’s shallow dive into the current state of genetic knowledge using Khan Academy’s AP-level lessons on heredity to learn the basics, then pursued the questions that remained in academic journals.
I listened to the popular-science book, The Gene: An Intimate History, in half-hour segments as I drove to and from my students’ homes.
As a result, I now have a dilettante’s understanding of DNA, RNA, and proteins.
Because human evolution involves the development of our brain, I continued my investigation by reading a book by a neuroscientist from Northeastern titled Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, which eradicated some of my misunderstandings (for example, that whole “lizard brain” thing? Totally not true).
When my body created a tingling sensation, I understood that the cannabinoids within the flowers of the cannabis plant (which we think evolved to protect the plant from insect predation and UV light) bind to CB1 receptors in my central nervous system.
The structure of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is similar to a chemical naturally produced by the body that sends messages between nerve cells, particularly messages related to “pleasure, memory, concentration, movement, coordination, and sensory and time perception.” The similar structure allows THC to co-opt those messages, causing strange effects on all of the above.
Sitting in the glider, feeling the tingling come on, I knew exactly what it was and why it was happening.
But I didn’t understand why my heart rate soared from a typical 68 bpm to 130 bpm in less than two minutes.
~~
“Okay,” I thought. “You’re fine. Tachycardia happened before, and you’ve survived. Try taking a shower and see how it goes.”
I stood from the glider, walked inside the house, and climbed the stairs to my bathroom. By the time I reached the top, my heart rate was 149 bpm, and I felt lightheaded.
“Okay,” I thought. “Maybe instead of standing in a shower, you might want to sit down.”
I moved to my bedroom, sat on the edge, pulled my iPhone out of my pocket, and said, “Hey Siri, play the Grateful Dead.” I put the phone directly behind me so the sound waves would hit both of my ears simultaneously, placed my hands on my thighs, and took control of my breathing.
In through the nose. Hold for five seconds. Out through the mouth. In through the nose. Hold for five seconds. Out through the mouth.
The sweats and hot flash started just as the first notes of Jerry and the boys came through the speakers. Siri decided what I really needed to hear right then was “Fire on the Mountain.”
I chuckled and kept breathing.
~~
In low doses, cannabis increases the chemicals in the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). The SNS affects several organs in the body. It dilates our eyes, tightens our digestive systems, and causes us to sweat, among other things.
It also tells our heart to beat faster.
In short, the sympathetic nervous system regulates our “fight or flight” function.
Simultaneously, cannabis decreases the chemicals in our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). One doctor characterizes the PNS’s targets as our “rest and digest” function. It contracts our pupils, relaxes our sphincters and urethras, and…surprise, surprise…lowers our heart rate.
At high doses, cannabis has the reverse effect, increasing the chemicals in our PNS and decreasing the ones in our SNS, making us feel highly relaxed; hence, the stereotype of a stoner sitting gonged out on his couch.
I took one hit: a low dose.
~~
In through the nose. Hold for five seconds. Out through the mouth.
My heart rate came back down to about 110 bpm. “Okay,” I thought. “That’s doable. Let’s take a shower.”
I stood up. Bad idea.
Immediately, my vision contracted to a point, and my sense of legs felt weak. Deep, slow breath. Deep, slow breath.
Downstairs, the back door opened, and my 10-year-old kiddo and their friend entered the house.
Uh-oh.
They went right into the living room and turned on the Nintendo Switch. Like any good ten year old, they couldn’t care less where their dad was.
Siri decided to follow “Fire on the Mountain” with “Help on the Way.”
Good call, Siri. I lay on the bed, retrieved the phone, and called my wife.
“Um, honey. I’m having a really bad panic attack. You have to come home.”
This is not the first time we’ve been through this. She was in line with my mother-in-law at the grocery store around the corner. “I’m just putting stuff on the conveyor,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
I told her I felt like I was going to faint, and our child had just come home. I teared up as I told her I really didn’t want our kiddo to come up the stairs and find me unresponsive on the bed. The sadness of that vision overwhelmed me, and I had difficulty talking. “Can you leave your mom there and maybe go back after…” I trailed off. This wasn’t an option; who knew how long the effects would last? I pictured my mother-in-law standing outside the grocery store, wondering if everything was all right.
“Just keep talking,” I begged. And my wife did. All through putting the groceries on the conveyor, getting them checked out, putting them in the bag, carrying them to the car, and coming home. Just her voice.
Like a child she is pure; she is not to blame.
~~
My wife came home, and we got through it together. I cried about failing as a father, husband, and provider, being unable to save all of my students from the traumas in their lives, and my lack of self-discipline with exercise, diet, and addiction.
“How many warnings are enough?”
Later that evening, I threw all of my cannabis in the trash.
Are you nervous about a nuclear war yet?
I’m co-teaching a survey course this quarter on 20th Century American History for my high schoolers. We’re trying to cover one decade per week. We can only scratch the surface this quarter, but the students will choose one event for us to investigate deeper next quarter.
After surveying the Progressive Era, World War I, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, we just finished summarizing World War II. We used this interactive timeline to guide our discussions.
Here’s what I want you to remember:
These things don’t happen all at once. Five years passed between Germany’s first acts of international aggression and the United States’ declaration of war.
In 2014, the Russian Federation annexed Crimea from Ukraine, setting off the still-ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. For the first eight years, the war was relatively underground. The Russian Federation claimed the Ukrainian people in the eastern regions were rising against the “neo-nazi” government in Kyiv, a puppet regime installed by Western elites.
But in February 2022, the Russian Federation openly invaded its neighbor after months of military buildup. Contrary to all expectations, the Ukrainian people put up an impressive defense and counteroffensive, and now the army of the Russian Federation seems in disarray.
As the right-centered Atlantic Council recently wrote:
More than six months since the onset of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion, it is now obvious that his army is in fact a deeply flawed institution that bears almost no resemblance to the immaculate fighting force of Red Square parades and Kremlin propaganda. Instead, the Russian military suffers from endemic corruption, low morale, and poor leadership, with individual initiative in short supply and commanders deeply reluctant to accept personal responsibility.
In response to these defeats, President Putin annexed four more regions in Ukraine. He gave a speech earlier this week celebrating and defending the annexation, using the opportunity to denounce “the western elites” who have united against the Russian Federation’s efforts.
Meanwhile, Western elites heard in his words a defeated man willing to do anything to hold on to power. According to Foreign Policy, hardliners in Russia’s government have increased their pressure on President Putin to unleash hell on Ukraine. The pressure led to the federation’s attempted mobilization of 30,000 more troops.
With the Russian Federation now claiming sovereignty over the four eastern regions, we must view Ukraine’s attempt to recover them through President Putin’s latest speech, where he said, “In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country…we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us [emphasis added]. This is not a bluff.”
In response, the United States (in the form of President Biden) warned that the Russian Federation would face a “consequential” response if they introduced chemical or nuclear weapons to the battlefield.
President Biden did not elaborate, so neither the American public nor the Russian Federation knows what he meant by “consequential.”
I fear the threat may become the equivalent of President Obama’s “red line” in Syria.
But I fear even more that the criticism of President Obama’s failure to act in Syria will persuade President Biden to go the extra step and respond to the Russian Federation’s use of nuclear weapons with nuclear missiles of our own.
No one knows.
No one knows.