Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want, or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

Saddam Hussein is dead, and to be perfectly honest, we're just as fucked in Iraq as we were last week. It's tradition to make New Year's predictions, so here are mine: At least 120,000 US troops in Iraq by the end of next year, with at least 900 deaths during that period, and any slowing of the Iraqi death rate due to the combination of a.) ethnic cleansing being much more complete, and thus fewer people in need of killing, and b.) fewer Iraqis left around to kill after hundreds of thousands either flee the country or are already dead. Happy fucking New Year!

There is a great deal of debate about whether or not his evil justifies hanging him. Call me European, but I think much of the discussion on the "pro" side is somewhere between deranged and psychotic. Let's just state, for the record, that he was a hideous criminal who deserved to be tried for all his crimes. For more on why the administration doesn't want too much about the Hussein's Anfal campaign to massacre Kurds coming out any time soon, you can google for rumsfeld and hussein, or check out this article from The American Prospect:

George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, where he embraced Hussein and, together with Bush Senior, secretly supplied the dictator with whatever he asked for in his fight against the Kurds and other opponents. A National Security Directive of Nov. 26, 1983, aided the counterinsurgency campaign, called Anfal, with money and materials (anthrax, botulinum toxin) with which Iraq was able to develop and use chemical weapons, resulting in the systematic slaughter of 100,000 people. When stories of the atrocities reached the press and the world reacted in horror, the U.S. Department of State launched an "Iran, too" gambit, claiming that both sides used poison gas. "It was a horrible mistake," observed Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm. "My fellow CIA analysts and I were warning at the time that Saddam Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."

Hussein should have been tried before the International Criminal Court, the body set up to deal with war crimes, but in doing so we would have had to let him live the rest of his life in prison. For that price, a dictator who lives out the rest of his days as a sad symbol of fallen power, we could have gained back some sliver of the international credibility we've spent the past five years pissing away as rapidly as possible. Instead, we got to experience the animal satisfaction of seeing a defanged former dictator die (the snuff video is available online if you really want to look for it), after a mockery of a trial in a mockery of a democratic state. In the meanwhile, just so we're clear, try to realize that literally every time Bush talks about "fair trials", or anyone in the government talks about spreading democracy and the rule of law, the rest of the world laughs at us while continuing to point out the hypocrites we are as a nation. We'd better hope we remain the world's most powerful nation for a long time coming, because the gross violations we've committed against international law might not stand up against Hussein's, but they remain crimes against international law just the same, and in a fair world they'd actually get their day in court. It's sad that we've utterly forgotten about this, but principles are not merely slogans that you can sweep under the rug when times are tough and bad guys lurk in the shadows; respect for law and due process is the fundamental building block of a democracy, and we have done nothing to promote any of those for the past five years.

I've got a ton of things to say about the death penalty in general, but more than anything else, I worry about what it does to society (yes, more than what it does to the criminal, who in all honesty doesn't have much by way of good options if this topic is relevant). It conditions us to believe that killing a bad guy is acceptable, even though history has shown nearly endlessly that we as a society are unable to tell exactly who the "bad guys" are. Moreover, it also conditions us to think that the death of a perpetrator is somehow required to get "closure", one of the worst psychological crutches ever invented. Speaking as someone who was shot and nearly killed, I can reassure you that closure has nothing to do with the criminal. Whether he lives or dies in no way determines the quality of my life, and anyone who believes otherwise is only letting someone else hold their life hostage long after the crime is over. We live in a culture that frequently allows us to duck our responsibilities (I was drunk/have an addiction/am traumatized/etc.), and this is a case where it actively results in blood being shed. To achieve closure after a crime, live your life and honor any and all victims by acting in a way that would make them proud; don't just call for more frickin violence.

This may strike some as an uncivil post, especially around the New Year, but honestly, fuck it. Civility has its place, but life and death issues will forever trump that, and anyone who pretends otherwise (for some reason, I want to suggest George Will and David Broder), can go to hell. It was pointed out that Gerald Ford's great achievement was healing the nation after Nixon, in about a million tributes to him this past week. David Kurtz at TPMCafe points out the obvious flaw here:

It had not occurred to me (although it probably should have) until listening to Gergen and Smith that for many people Ford's signature service to the country was calming the waters so that the rabble quieted down and went home. It is in that sense that the pardon of Nixon helped "heal" the country (clearing the way three decades later for Smith to reminisce about the Ford children playing in Statuary Hall on Saturdays in a quaint Washington of a different era). All these years later, you can still discern a liberal from a conservative by whether she perceives the protesters or all the President's men as a greater threat to democracy.

Civility should never take priority over doing the right thing; in this case, it was to keep the executive branch from grossly violating its legal limits. If people we're getting angry they should have been! When people are dying in a war for which we are still searching for a strategy and a goal, we should be angry. All calm does is make life easier for those in power to use power without facing a back reaction. That is not some kind of new societal good; it is not their right; it is not our obligation. Civility leads to the current farcical state of affairs where those who have been wrong about the war for the past three years are considered to be more respectable members of the commentariat, so long as they use nicer words and ignore the mounting body count. Many people got Iraq right from the beginning, but three years ago we were called unpatriotic, and now we are called shrill. In the end, it is better to be right and unpopular than to be wrong and respected, Sunday morning news shows be damned. About a thousand of America's finest, and upwards of 100,000 Iraqis are going to die next year, in part because polite people have civil discussions about the war while the madmen leading the administration continue on their messianic quest to remake the Middle East without bothering to check now and again with reality. The time for politeness has long, long since passed.

Happy New Year's, everyone. My first resolution: I'm not going to kill anyone in 2007. You should try this too.

No cigar, no lady on his arm, just a guy made of dots and lines

Next time you see a constellation ride across the sky, try to picture to yourself just how far away those stars are. It's humbling, and does a good job of giving life some perspective. But how far away are they, you ask...how can we be so sure? It turns out that this kind of measurement forms the cornerstone of modern astronomy, and the technique to do it has been known for centuries. It was used to determine the size of the solar system itself in 1672, and first turned to distant stars in 1838. The method is parallax, and it can best be tried at home if you have a finger and a distant object. Close one eye, and take your finger and hold it in front of the distant object. Keeping the finger still, Open the closed eye and close the open one. Note the position of the finger, which should have moved. If you can measure the difference in angle between the two places you saw your finger, you have measured the distance to it, assuming you know how far apart your eyes are. A good picture of the process can be found at Wikipedia, or by searching for "parallax".

Anyway, this technique was used in1672 to find out the distance to Mars, which in turn allowed us to figure out the size of the entire solar system. You will notice that this discovery had to wait for the era of colonization, since it required Giovanni Cassini to send a colleague to French Guiana in the Americas while he stayed in Paris. This is also one of the many, many examples of the advantages of seniority in the sciences, as it will shock you to no end to learn that 17th century Paris was considered a more comfortable place to reside than a boat to South America. In any case, the measurement established the distance to Mars, and in doing so the distance to the sun as 140 million kilometers, or 86 million miles. It turns out that it is actually 150 million kilometers (93 million miles), but what's 7 million miles between friends. For comparison's sake, the moon is 239,000 miles away, or about 1/400th the distance.

It would prove to be over a century and a half before the distance to the next nearest stars were measured. In 1838, Friedrich Bessel measured the distance to the star 61 Cygni, finding it to be 11.4 light years away, or 3.5 parsecs (or about 60 trillion miles; nearly one million times further than the sun). Parsecs, as the name suggest, are the distance at which a star has a parallax angle of 1 second of arc. A star 3.5 parsecs away has a parallax angle of 1/3.5=0.28 arcseconds, or about 1/100,000 of a degree! The same year, two other astronomers measured the distances to the stars Vega and Alpha Centauri, the latter of which is the closest star to Earth besides the sun, located at about 1.3 parsecs, or 4.4 light years away. In all of these cases, the star whose distance was being measured was considered "close", like your finger in the experiment above. The "distant" stars are actually much farther away: the star Deneb, among the 25 brightest in the sky, is over a thousand parsecs away, and the furthest visible to the naked eye are a couple times further than that. With telescopes, we can see bright stars located most of the way across the galaxy, but more on that next week.

Today, we can measure the distance through parallax to hundreds of thousands of stars, of which we know the distance to about 7,000 to within 5 percent thanks to the Hipparcos satellite. This may seem like a lot, but it represents only our local neighborhood in the galaxy. Still, these distance determinations are critical, since they provide us with unambiguous measurements that span light years. Next week, we'll extend our reach a bit further extending outward to cover the entire galaxy.

Most of what I wrote here can be investigated further by going to wikipedia and following the links there. For basic science, it really is an invaluable tool. Give it a whirl!

Field goal / Lightning Jazz / Daily Kos (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #2)

Friday Catblogging
The kick is up, and it's GOOD!!! The Giants win the ballgame and claim the final playoff spot in the NFC!!!

Friday's Concert Clip
Having started out the week on a rather blasphemous kick (Monday we looked at how our independence seems to vanish in the haze; Wednesday we tried imagining there's no heaven; Tomorrow we're going Across the Universe), this week's musical clip seemed pretty obvious, and no, it's not actually going to be a Beatles song. Instead, we're going with Dan Bern's "Lighning Jazz", a.k.a. "Hey God, How's It Hanging Tough Guy?". If you're browser is being kind, you can go to his

March 28, 2004 show

at Joe's Pub in NYC, which is available, free and completely legal, from Archive.org's etree service, and try track 15 using the embedded player that should open up in the upper right corner of the page. If that fails, you can download the song directly using

this link to the MP3 file.

Again, this is completely legal; many smaller folk artists encourage people to tape their shows and distribute them, and they encourage you to spread their music as widely as possible. Honestly, check out all the songs from this set. I'd name my favorites, but I love most of them, and much of the fun is in the discovery. If you like his stuff, you can buy it here.

Better Know a Blog
Well, I put it off for a week, but this week we go with the grand-daddy of them all: Daily Kos. To explain the name, "kos" is the online handle of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who created the blog after being a prominent poster at MyDD, which is also in our blogroll to the right. Daily Kos, though, cannot be defined by just one person; it has grown to be the largest liberal political blog in the country, if not the largest of any political stripe, because it is a community effort. Thanks to an amazing software package known as "Scoop", anyone can register for an account at dKos and post one diary per day about anything they want. If you like what someone else has written, you can comment on their diary, or on one of the main page stories, leading to active discussion threads that can reach up to hundreds of comments. You can quickly make online friends (or enemies, I suppose), finding kindred spirits who share your particular interests. Several prominent diarists are chosen each year to be "Frontpagers", who, along with Kos himself, get to post stories to the main page, typically about politics, but not exclusively. One of last year's frontpagers, DarkSyde, rose to prominence by writing a weekly popular science column, and throughout last year had a bigger science readership than just about any other writer in the nation, hundreds of thousands of readers per week.

Separating dKos from many of the other liberal political blogs is its focus on electoral politics. Simply put, it is not really a policy forum. Long-term strategies and position papers are often mentioned, but the organizing principle behind the "Kossack" community is electing Democrats, primarily those from the progressive wing of the party, and trying to grow a grass-roots progressive movement that can become a force in American politics. This is not just a pipe-dream; a collaboration between dKos, MyDD, and the Swing State Project helped to raise $1.5 MILLION dollars last cycle through the online Democratic fundraising website Act Blue. The approach they take, which encourages debate and embraces partisanship, strongly frowning on Democrats who attack other Democrats (paging Joseph Lieberman!), stands in marked contrast to traditional democratic single-issue groups (NARAL; Sierra Fund, etc.) that try to acheive policy goals through a bipartisan approach that failed pretty miserably under the previous Republican leadership, since moderate Republicans often gave nice speeches but supported a leadership that blocked any pro-choice, pro-environment or pro-labor bill from ever seeing the light of day.

Dkos takes some getting used to, as it is a pre-existing and tight knit community, but it does contain more content than just about any other blog out there, admittedly with a lower signal to noise ratio than most. If you are feeling unadventurous, check out the Recommended Diaries in the upper right; these are the diaries from the past few hours of which the community itself thinks most highly (they're chosen by you, the viewer!). If you like what you see, lurk for a while and then sign up for an account. Heck, I may even cross-post some of the entries from here over there sometime, to reel in more unsuspecting innocents into our dastardly schemes, just as soon as I figure out what we're dastardly scheming.

moderation in moderation

When you're out of balance, there is motion, commotion, pain. But if you're perfectly balanced, motionless and tense, you might as well be dead.

Allow me to posit the anti-positivist proposition that we all ultimately arrive at the limits of our reason. It may be a failure of our human intellect, or a reflection of human depth. Either way, I reject the reasonable, don't-drink, don't-smoke, work-some, play-some, rent-a-movie life.

I'm not expressing this feeling well, because it's damn contradictory. I don't mean that being prudent is bad, or that routine is necessarily soul-crushing. Nor do I mean that hedonism and chaos is edifying - it's a different side of the same coin, or maybe the same side of a different coin. You don't need a lot of drama for a rich and fulfilling life. But you do need to claw a little window out of your own skull, reach for a little transcendence.

People do it differently. Two things that don't go together, but may serve this grand purpose, are kids and drugs. Neither is for everyone - you can OD on both, they suck up your money and time, take a toll on you physically and mentally. From a cost-benefit calculus, we should all be teetotaling and child-free, able to travel, attend cultural events, and enjoy copious amounts of safe sex. But cotdamn, what's the point if that's all you do for the rest of your life!

I'll save rhapsodies to child-rearing and paeans to altered states for another post. For now I'll let the great British singer Amy Winehouse make the case for the latter. Happy New Year and don't reproduce or imbibe any more than me!

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 2: Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami

Before the book review, a quick digression on judging a book by it's cover. Here are the eight cover designs I found between British and American versions and the original Japanese paperback.











Picture number 1 is vastly more explicit than the book tends to be, and while 2 and 3 are at least relevant to the Greek Island part of the book, the same complaint applies. Number 4 is more abstract, and does accurately reflect the notion in the book of characters who feel split in two, but the tone is still wrong, as this design was originally chosen for Murakami's other romantic books, like Norwegian Wood and the like. 5, taken from a critical scene in the book, and 6, a picture of Sputnik, are just a bit too literal for my taste. My favorites are 7, the version I own, and 8, both of which combine the joke in the title with the romantic aspect of the story. Honestly, though, some of these designs are so different that I wonder if the text would seem different between the covers as well; the first visual impression you get from a book isn't trivial after all, maxims about judgment be damned.

Anyway, on to the book Review:

Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami ISBN: 0375726055 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: Asian authors, UIUC Book Club

Murakami ranks highly on the list of my favorite authors, and in many ways this book helps to explain why. It is a smaller, more compact effort that his quasi-science fiction classics like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Wind-up Bird Chronicle, lacking their scope but able to bring more focus to its topic. Like all Murakami books, our protagonist is a lonely man who feels detached in his day-to-day life. He is in love with a woman, Sumire, who feels nothing for him but falls madly in love with another woman, Miu, setting up a rather strange love triangle of frustrated desires and heartbreak.

In other hands, this would be a book that cuts to the heart of pain and loneliness, but that is hardly Murakami's style. Instead, he pushes their fears and desires into the dreamworld, where metaphors for detachment (disappearing into oneself, feeling split in two) become literal physical manifestations, and where his evocative but introverted prose has its maximum effect. In some sense, we all understand how an interior monologue works, but there is new ground to be found in a world where such thoughts are made flesh while remaining unconstrained by ordinary notions of reality and logic. I am not sure if this reading is correct, but it struck me that the two crucial incidents in the lives of the female characters, described here in dreamy and relatively unthreatening tones, are very suggestive of much darker analogues in the real world. If this is intended, then the book becomes a more disturbing work, in which we use out fantasies not to explore potential fates outside our control but to protect us from real life and all its associated unpleasantness. Either way, Murakami remains the master of tangential feeling, allowing us to see into his characters in a way that they themselves cannot. If his books tend to leave an ambiguous aftertaste, that is almost certainly the point; we live not in a world of absolutes but rather one of shades of meaning that we impose over external reality. This one fits that description well, bizarre at times but ultimately a satisfying exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we deal with it.

Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend; we were all equal in the end

As some of you may have heard, Gerald Ford died last night. So far, the news coverage has been relatively restrained, focusing more on his unfailing decency and impeccable statesmanship rather than his candidacy for immediate sainthood, thus falling short of the literal definition of hagiography even if it meets the pejorative one. As I was born early in the Carter administration, I can't say I have any real feelings either way about him; he seems like an exceedingly decent human being and I think he was wrong about pardoning Nixon for the reasons cited by Matt Yglesias in a post with which I agree wholeheartedly:

Promoting "healing" and a sense of "moving on" was, in fact, arguably more important than seeing Richard Nixon spend years in a jail cell. But there's a proper way to handle situations of that type designed to promote precisely those goals. It's the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model where ancien regime figures confess to their political crimes in exchange for amnesty.

As could be expected, Atrios nails the sainthood angle:

Our elites repeatedly redefine "getting past it" as "sweeping it under the rug" based on their apparent opinion of themselves as necessary moral and spiritual leaders for the riffraff. If they are revealed to be greatly flawed then without them as a shining beacon to light the way the riffraff will go astray and the country will collapse.

Oddly enough, I heard neither of these perspectives on the news today, in part because the media hates a narrative that questions their role and collective wisdom, but also because it's considered unseemly to point out that the recently deceased were recently human, as full of flaws as those still living. They will claim this is a simple courtesy done out of the respect for the family and loved ones, but they are lying. No such courtesy is shown to the living when scandal erupts, nor to the families of those killed in strange circumstances (a news network staple). No such courtesy is even shown for those who may be dying, as evidenced by the macabre coverage of Senator Tim Johnson's stroke ("Tim Johnson's illness has threatened the Democrats' majority. But that may not be such a bad thing" was the subhead of a Time Magazine article published two days after it happened).

No, speaking no ill of the dead is one of those games we play where we all put on our mask of civility and pretend that we don't notice everyone else faking it. We do it to feel like good people, taking up to a few days away from our standard daily sniping and overall nastiness, because that is what society demands of us. We revere the dead in a way that none of us would think to honor the living, even though it should be fairly obvious that the latter would appreciate it more. It is tradition, and like most traditions associated with death and its aftermath, it makes almost no sense at all.

Speaking as a Jew, I understand that thousands of years of tradition demand that a body should be buried whole, which makes the acts of suicide bombers even more horrific in their implications, if that is possible. Still, when Israel or any other country negotiates with its enemies for the remains of dead soldiers, I am left to shake my head. If nothing else, doing so increases the value for your enemies of killing your troops or taking them hostage, which is never a wise trend to encourage. If a dead body is just that, then you are negotiating for what is no longer a person; taking a more religiously oriented view, do you really care to believe in a God that judges souls based on the state of their mortal remains rather than their beliefs or actions? I'll happily take a Jewish funeral (closed casket; no flowers; burial within two days of death) over the more showy Christian versions, but I'd be happier to see more people donate organs to the living and their bodies to science. Mind you, I have to admit a preference for a nice Irish wake instead of a year of mourning, so I can be interfaith with the best of them.

More than anything else, I think most of our more bizarre death-related beliefs spring from our own fear of death. I'm not talking about talking to the dead seance-style, about which little more need be said (hint: the voices you hear are inside your own head). No I'm talking the elaborate fictions that people build for themselves under the moniker of "heaven". Needless to say, I'm pretty much convinced that people who believe in the afterlife are fundamentally kidding themselves, constructing childlike fantasy worlds for their future selves because they are unable to deal with their own transience. Even Jews, whose philosophy is that the dead live on in the memories of their loved ones, are kidding themselves to an extent. Let's call it the Chester Arthur rule. Name three facts about Chester Arthur. Who is he, you ask? He was the 21st president of the USA, and a century later no one remembers him at all; most of us will be lucky to leave memories that last more than a generation or so. This bothers me not a bit. If our existence is fleeting, our effect on humanity minimal, our presence on this planet inconsequential to anyone outside a small circle of friends, family, and acquaintances, so be it. No one ever promised us that we inherently matter long after we're gone, and in many ways it serves as a security blanket that allows us to ignore our more immediate failings and weaknesses. Rather than concentrating on all the lives we are eventually going to touch, it's good to go out and do it now. The moments you spend on some project for yourself (like writing a blog!) are moments that could probably be spent on others as well, and its the same story for your money. Give up both and lead a life of poverty in service to others? Nah, life is about compromise. Everything in balance, because the world is more than happy to crush your spirits if you forget to look out for yourself. No, the point to be made here is that wagering on an eternal life because of a 2,000 year old book is a good way to overlook the present one. Live a good one now, and if it works out for the very best, you've got eternity to take part in some kind of weird angelic choral competition while wearing white robes and wings.

Like a rock, chargin' from the gate; Like a rock, carryin' the weight

Certain members of my family have cute little cars from Toyota that get ridiculously good gas mileage because of their hybrid engines. Yes, they drive Priuses (hereafter referred to as Prii), and until this year they could claim they got 55 miles per gallon. Those days are no more, however. Under new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, mileage will be calculated under a new formula that involves more stop-and-go driving, use of the air conditioning during the test, and cold weather driving, all lessening the amount of time during which the cars can run using their electric motor. As a result, Prii will now officially be credited for 44 MPG, a 20% drop that is, in percentage terms, among the largest changes for any make of car. As is to be expected, Toyota executives are furious, and they're not afraid to express it. According to an interview at commondreams.org:

Toyota Motor Corp., which makes the popular Prius hybrid, now rated at 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 on the highway — a combined rating of 55 mpg — supports the changes.

"This doesn't change the car or the technology, just the way the mileage is calculated," said Ming-Jou Chen, spokeswoman for Torrance-based Toyota Motor Sales USA. "It makes the estimate closer to real-world numbers, and we fully support that."

What what what? They support the program? Apparently, besides showing some of the largest improvements in quality over the past twenty to thirty years, Toyota executives actually prepared for the patently obvious increase in mileage standards by being among the first to market with a hybrid, and are now more than ready to deal with the new fuel economy standards.

The Japanese automakers aren't the only ones who see the writing on the wall. Ford, which lost $5.8 billion (yes that's billion, as in losing approximately $20.00 per American, or about $1 for every human on the planet) has a plan. The plan is.... to copy Toyota. Today, Ford executives met with Toyota executives, apparently to learn about Toyota hybrid electric technology. Of course, Ford has a great track record with that:

Ford also has its own hybrid program, but it cut back on hybrid development earlier this year, when it decided to place more of an emphasis on developing flexible fuel vehicles that can run on gasoline and another type of fuel, such as ethanol.

OK, that was a great plan, how did it work out? Oh yeah, lost $5.8 BILLION in the third quarter alone.

Of course, Ford is only America's second largest automaker, after General Motors. I know you're wondering, how did they react? Are they prepared to embrace the future? According to GM's vice-chairman, Bob Lutz, not quite:

"For one thing, it puts us, the domestic manufacturers, at odds with the desires of most of our customers, namely larger vehicles," Lutz said in a year-end posting on a Web site maintained by GM.

He added: "That effectively hands the truck and SUV market over to the imports, particularly the Japanese, who have earned years of accumulated credits from their fleets of formerly very small cars."

Mr. Lutz, allow me to play you a dirge on the world's smallest violin. If GM was really doing well by it's customers, then why is Toyota expected to pass them next year as the world's largest carmaker? Why did GM boast a $10 BILLION loss last year? Is it really a good sign when the $3 BILLION loss so far this year is a significant improvement? Perhaps more importantly, how is it that the same rules crush GM but allow Toyota to sell so many more cars? Why isn't Toyota at odds with the American customers?

No, GM has fallen victim not to new mileage standards, but to a billion-dollar case of making a car that is widely considered to be a piece of crap, or at the very least one that can't hold it's value:

And while all of the top 10 models have either Japanese or European nameplates, nine of the bottom 10 are domestic models.

and can't challenge the Japanese automakers in overall quality:

When it comes to picking the best, this year hats are off to Japan, according to Consumer Reports' 2006 Best Car Picks. While Japanese cars have long had a significant presence on the consumer ratings magazine's top picks, this is the first year since it started publishing the list in 1997 that they fill all 10 spots.

Let it be known, I criticize because I care, speaking as the owner of a lovely and occasionally reliable 1998 Saturn, which runs really well so long as the weather is warm and dry (like your average Illinois winter...NOT!).

Beyond failing to match Honda, Toyota, et al. in quality, the Big Three companies have punted away their future profits, primarily because it seems that the personal politics of their leadership blinded them to the proper business strategy. GM especially is being crushed under the weight of the benefits owed to retired employees, and should have been way ahead of the curve pressing for some form of national government-provided universal healthcare plan. Instead, they seemed to view this as a bunch of leftist claptrap, and decided to suck up the billions of dollars of long-term liabilities rather than work with the people who could help them out of their mess (Read: Democrats). How Detroit never got behind this push is frankly beyond me; the short-sightedness should have provoked share-holder lawsuits.

Detroit also managed to drink the kool-aid by listening to their own anti-environmental propaganda. It's nice to believe that gasoline reserves will last us indefinitely, but it's also nice to believe in Santa Claus. Many, many, MANY people have been predicting a growing oil crunch (just google for "peak oil"), and an accompanying rise in gas prices to $3 per gallon and beyond (way beyond; I'm willing to bet a non-trivial sum on the price of gas being higher in the future). Detroit seems to have viewed this too as leftist hippie patchouli-incense latte-drinking sushi-eating agitprop, and forgot to hedge properly against the likelihood of high gas prices and a return to fuel efficient cars instead of the ridiculous Urban Assault Vehicles polluting our roadways today.

Just like the Bush administration has repeatedly claimed that situations in Iraq are worse that we expected, so does Detroit view high gas prices as a surprise, which sounds like a fine excuse until you realize it represents a complete dereliction of duty. Repeat after me: Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. If you plan for the best (remember "we'll be greeted as liberators!"), you are completely unprepared for what happens if your most wildly optimistic fantasies don't come true, and you end up losing thousands of lives getting enmeshed in someone else's civil war, or, if you're really really lucky, losing only $10 BILLION dollars in a year (BTW, it goes without saying that the airline industry is just as guilty of wild flights of fancy, pardon the pun). In the end, watch for Detroit to go into an even more hyper-patriotic mode to fight the onslaught of better cars built in the US by companies headquartered overseas, and watch as they continue to get pummeled. To paraphrase John Mellencamp, we'll get pummeled
From the east coast to the west coast
down the dixie highway back home
After all, this is our country.

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose freewill

Oddly enough, even though I am about to argue against the principle espoused in the title above, I have to say I'm sympathetic to Rush, who managed to write a popular song about atheism. In the spirit of Christmas, I though it the perfect time to explain why free will is likely an illusion, and how this rather undercuts just about every major western religion at a fundamental level.

There are at least two reasons to doubt the idea of free will. From a physics perspective, there is very little fundamental difference between a person (or any other form of life) and a computer. We both have a neural network that transmits information via electronic means; carbon-based for life and silicon-based for the computer. Admittedly, the brain has a different, more non-linear architecture, but given that the laws of physics are deterministic in a probabilistic way, we have to choose one of the following possibilities:

1. The brain follows the laws of physics, and its deterministic state controls our conscious experience (the favored "scientific" approach).


2. The brain follows the laws of physics, but its deterministic state does not control our conscious experience (the disembodied conscious model).


3. The brain doesn't follow the laws of physics (the divine intervention model).

Needless to say, as a scientist I reject the latter possibility until someone somewhere comes up with a shred of evidence to demonstrate the macroscopic laws of physics being broken, and I am very much not alone in this among scientists according to an opinion piece in the LA Times today.:

Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not.

I note for those that would ask if there is uncertainty in what "the laws of physics" are, a la Thomas Kuhn, that quantum and classical mechanics provide a nearly complete system at the scales and energies appropriate for describing the brain, though admittedly the system is too complicated for us to use it in a predictive manner.

We are left with a pair of alternatives: either our consciousness is produced by the physical state of our brain, or it is not. The evidence, which everyone out there already knows, is that the former is true. We are readily willing to believe that sugar and caffeine make us hyper, marijuana gets us stoned, and that beer clouds our judgment. If you accept any of these, you are tacitly agreeing that chemical substances affect our brain, and by doing so affect our thoughts and actions. More proof of physiological determinism is suggested in an article that appeared in The Economist that begins:

In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

From this premise, the article goes rapidly downhill in vastly misapplying ethical principles, but more on that later. This type of story is hardly new, having been popularized by the case of Phineas Gage back in 1848. On a more subtle level, Benjamin Libet demonstrated that the physiological pathways in the brain are activated before we think we have actually made a decision, implying that when we think we are "making a decision", we are really rationalizing a choice that has already been made on a sub-conscious level.

Philosophers have a great deal to say on this topic, but when it comes to describing actual phenomena they are essentially full of crap, though it is admittedly mellifluous crap. In the end, we are only really left with one out: our brains control our thoughts, and they are deterministic electromechanical systems. In other words, no real free will.

Obviously, this cuts the heart out of Western religion, which is based upon the whole notion of free will, except maybe for Calvinism, which I have never been able to understand whatsoever with its simultaneous predestination and free will. How can we live in a world where we don't actually make the choices for ourselves? The answer is to deal with the system like a physicist does with a person: you treat it as a phenomenological issue, because there is no other reasonable way.

Notice before I said that the brain can in theory be predicted by the laws of quantum mechanics, but that it is too complicated to do so in real life. Honestly, as my co-blogger can tell you, we can't even use the very straightforward laws of quantum mechanics to describe water. The brain is like water, only infinitely more complicated. Thus, we can only deal with it phenomenologically: we make approximations, some very crude approximations in practice, until we have a system that is more manageable, at the cost of a great deal of information lost. The same approach, completely missed by the Economist article quoted above, applies for moral issues as well. Even if we don't actually have free will, we go about our days as if we do. Look, we don't actually walk on the floor, since electric repulsion at the atomic level keeps us slightly above it, but there is no need to mention this fact in daily conversation. Effectively speaking, we walk on a floor, just as effectively, we have free will. Maybe we don't at some fundamental level, but as long as we all go around as if we do, society works just fine. Can we punish criminals, even if they had no real choice? Of course! We have no choice in applying punishment, so we go with what we think is right, even if our brain's physiology thinks it for us. It does suggest one thing, though: our notion of criminality is way the heck out of whack. People are not evil because they "wish to be bad", any more than people "wish to be good" in this model. In many ways, we already do this as a society at a different level, what with the explosion of Ritalin and Prozac into the national bloodstream to cure those behaviors we find unacceptable.

From a more practical standpoint, is there any kind of moral principle we can take from this. Basically, I would default to the safest standard in the book: the Golden Rule. Doing unto others and being done unto you makes people happy, and regardless of the nature of free will, happiness is a good thing. I would say this would argue for not picking on Gay people, helping out those in need, and generally not being an ass, but to each their own. I'd settle for people finally realizing that much of Western morality is built on a collection of mythology and linguistic gymnastics, and re-establishing some moral principles that actually make sense. More during the next science installment on why the size of the universe argues against humans being so frickin special, and why this bothers me not a lick.

But don't talk about revolution, That's going a little bit too far

Just for clarity, that's not a Beatles' line, rather it's this guy, from this song.

So, the news from Iraq is that the generals rolled over and we're sending more troops, exactly as I said in part one of my tribute to Country Joe and the Fish. There is a rather strident discussion in some left-leaning circles as to the exact mechanics of the process within the Pentagon. Consensus seems to be that Abizaid stepped down early to stay out of it, that the guys currently in charge in Iraq either had to agree or step down (you can't follow orders while questioning them publicly; that's called mutiny), and that while Casey just pulled a flip-flop, the guy who'll be in charge of our escalation is a raving looney-tune. If you're not feeling depressed enough, it is important to realize that while the new troops have to fight somebody, we haven't yet decided who that'll be. The problem here is that the administration apparently believes its own bullcrap, and has trouble with the following chart:

Militia	Sect	Leader	Power Base	Iraq/Iran	Wants to Kill
Badr Brigades	Shi'ite	Abdul Aziz al-Hakim/The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq	Southern Iraq	Linked closely to Iran	Everyone else on this list, plus Kurds when possible
Mahdi Army	Shi'ite	Muqtada al-Sadr	Baghdad/Basra	Iraqi nationalist	Everyone else on this list, plus Kurds when possible
iraqi Sunnis/al Qaeda(?)	Sunnis	God only knows	al Anbar province in Western Iraq	Hate both, but have Saudi support	Everyone else on this list, plus Kurds when possible

We are currently supporting SCIRI, even though they have the closest ties to Iran, and seem itching to fight Sadr, even though the latter's Iranian ties are much weaker, he controls much of the capital plus Basra, the key oil city in the south, and would likely win in a fight between the two. Note that US press releases rarely mention the last column, and the fact that every time someone decides to cleanse a Baghdad neighborhood, the Iraqi army either participates actively or sits the fight out to avoid having to fight the police, and they always inform the Americans that our help is not necessary.

Anyway, this post is really supposed to be a response to dkon's remarks on moderation, in which we seek out a way to become the bleeding-heart liberals we want to be without turning everyone off (BTW, it's Kossack, even with all the unsavory connotations, not Kossian). Let's start with why I'm still a good little capitalist at heart:

It would be nice if all large corporations were inherently evil capitalistic enterprises, and we just had to smash them to achieve peace and justice.

I would argue it is just as silly to argue that large corporations are evil as it is to argue that they are good; you are trying to assign morality to an entity that is fundamentally amoral, not immoral, and the distinction is critical. What is the purpose of a corporation? At least in America, to maximize profits for shareholders (my impression is that in Europe stakeholders are given more weight, e.g., employees and customers). Welcome, my friends, to the Chicago school and the aforementioned tragic ascendancy of economic theory into daily life, in this case like so many thanks to the Chicago School. In modern practice, it seems that while corporations are non-moral creatures, their executives are often the scum of the Earth, twisting the system for their own personal enrichment. If one wishes to impose a moral system on capitalist America, it has to be externally implied. Let me suggest that Republicans dropped the ball because it was worth billions for them to do so; one can only hope that some Democrats, especially the resurgent economic populists, might do a tad bit better. If nothing else, the revival of unions in America certainly couldn't hurt, at least to provide a counterbalance.

Development and even intervention by the derided West can lead to very positive results (is Bosnia better off now or in 1994? How about India with all the evil globalization?).

I think this argument may reflect living in a part of the country, like Madison or among my family in Rochester, where Greens and Democrats battle for the mantle of the left. I, along with many Democrats, supported the Bosnian intervention before the government finally went in, as well as intervention in Afghanistan. If the latter has exposed one flaw in US policy, it is that we lose interest before finishing the job, and this does undercut the justification of war, which ends not when hostilities cease but when some measure of civil society is established. Unlike Iraq, which was predicted by many unheeded voices to be a disaster in the making before the war, Afghanistan was fundamentally a manageable conflict in which we had the support of virtually every major world power. Doing good through multilateral exercise of power is in no way an illiberal approach, and remains a valid theory of international relations. Obviously, I could never support another military action under Bush (or McCain) given that he has proven his inability to commit to the long-term steps necessary after a war, but that does not mean that at some point in the future, under competent leadership, that we don't have a role to play in conflicts like Darfur. The same goes for economic development as well: the problem is not globalization itself, but rather how it is managed.We are happy to sign all sorts of agreements, but unwilling to give up the domestic agricultural subsidies that are killing people in the third world, or to negotiate the conditions that will allow wealth to be spread more widely in the developing world. If people complain about the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, it is not necessarily because they are inherently evil, but rather that on a good day they do a half-assed job with many aspects of their policies. Admittedly, in this case there is a strong argument to be made that the perfect can be the enemy of the good, but one should remember that the entrenched interests that benefit from globalization aren't going to be the ones to point out the flaws they themselves built into the system.

As a final note, the left vs. right comparisons are telling. Noam Chomsky is by any standard in the far left-wing of American politics, whereas Condi Rice is considered a centrist Republican. Mother Jones is pretty far to the left (further away from the center than The Nation, The American Prospect, and the New Republic, which is so contrarian by nature that it serves as its own opposite in the political spectrum. The National Review, which is equally as crazy as MoJo, if not vastly more, is not so far to the right (that's the Weekly Standard's role). We are in a situation where we can now debate if the center-right is more deluded than the fringe left. Similarly, look at the craziness and outright racist and bigoted garbage one gets from perfectly acceptable right-wing pundits: Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan. Honestly, who amongst leading Democratic voices is anywhere near that crazy? We need not go off the deep end of the left, but it is important to remember that on a host of issues (Stop Teh Gayz; Down with Evilution; Cutting taxes while increasing spending is teh s#!t), we really are right and they really are wrong. There's just no polite way to say it.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 1: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. -Groucho Marx

As some people may know, I reviewed a bunch of books at my old department website, and figured this would be a good venue to continue the tradition. In a bit of fortuitous timing, the first book I'll review here is by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, although some have suggested that he earned it as much for his political stances as for his writing. He was recently put on trial for "insulting Turkishness" for making comments about the Armenian genocide, before the charges were eventually dropped. I cannot psychoanalyze the Nobel committee, but I can at least say that his most recent book is a fine work of modern political literature.

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk ISBN: 0375706860 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: European Authors, Magical Realism, Post-modernism (?), Nobel Prize Winners

Just to clear up one misperception quickly, Pamuk is often referred to as a post-modernist, which some people regard as a literary turn-off (I love PoMo literature myself, but more on that in later reviews). In this case, it is because Pamuk has inserted himself into this novel as a narrator. However, the narrator by any other name would leave us with essentially the same book. Pamuk just happened to name his literary alter ego after himself, which is a rather mild flavor of post-modernism if it qualifies at all. Let me suggest instead the book is more properly classified as being in the magical realist school, albeit the more Eastern European-inflected introverted school (a la Ismail Kadare), rather than the extroverted South American version.

Our protagonist, a poet known to us as Ka (I have trouble not seeing it as a Kafka reference), revisits his hometown in Eastern Turkey after many years away. Upon arrival, he sets out to woo an old acquaintance, even as the town is taken over by a theater troupe-led coup his first night there. In many ways, the action in the book is secondary to its meaning, as in some ways are the characters, who stand in for the political archetypes to be found in the region: Islamists, Kurdish nationalists, secularists, students, soldiers, police, and more. Opinion is mixed online as to how well he draws characters; I found them to be intentionally sketchy, as what they have to say is more important that who they are and what they do.

The fascinating aspect of this book is its introverted perspective (our narrator has Ka's extensive journals from his three days in Kars), which lends an air of detachment that defines the whole novel. In the midst of a coup featuring arbitrary imprisonments, executions, and tanks in the street, Ka spends his time looking for love, even as he goes back and forth and back again on behalf of virtually every major political faction in town. While it takes getting used to, such detachment has real-life examples, most recently to my knowledge the coup in Thailand. In a city (or country) under the gun, there is a very odd combination of panic and daily routine; some people find themselves on one end or another of anarchic violence while some just try to pass the time waiting for stability. Even though no reference is made to conditions in Iraq (the war must have started either during or immediately after the book was finished), it is hard not to view events there in this light; imagine, if you will, tens of millions of people trying to feed their families, be a part of their community, and not get blown up by a car bomb. Ka, as an outsider, is detached both psychologically but also practically from those he meets, the bearer of mostly bad news of great relevance to everyone but himself. On a day where we find American and Iraqi politicians debating the political motives of Iraq's leading cleric and Islamic scholar, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, it is hard not to see a parallel in Ka's philosophical discussions with the local Islamists and rebels, whose beliefs and actions possess the same complicated and convoluted relationship. Ka is very much Pamuk's doppelganger, but for a western reader he is clearly ours as well, looking around at an unfamiliar culture that we can describe in words but barely begin to understand. As a cultural critique alone this book is a worthy addition to anyone's reading list; that he is a gifted wordsmith and storyteller only adds to the enjoyment.

my friday concert clip: Sly Stone

Not to try out-do my co-conspirator, but I'd like to share a concert clip too.

I love a lot of artists, but for my money there's no popular musician better than Sly and the Family Stone. They are in that pantheon of true geniuses (Beatles, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, to name their contemporaries) who are music, but Sly is the most slept-on, having tasted some success in the late sixties, and then flaming out in the most spectacular fashion outside of Syd Barrett. So here they are, competing in a talent show in 1968 - and although the sound isn't great, it's effing amazing.

Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging

Friday Catblogging!!!

Never one to pass up a tradition started by others that requires next to no work on my part, I though I'd join the multitudes in the blogosphere who enjoy Friday Catblogging.

Here is Karina, who rules the lap with an iron fist and gravelly tongue:



Friday Concert Clip

For today's concert clip, we'll take the easy way out and go with my favorite song of the year (at least, I heard it first this year), "Not a Crime ", by Gogol Bordello (h/t Atrios for the vid). Their live show is utterly insane, and let's face it, how many other gypsy punk bands are there?

BTW, if you haven't heard of it, check out the incomparable Archive.org music library for over 35,000 free, completely legal concert recordings (thx Alex for reminding me).

Better Know a Blog

Ok, the title is ripped off from Colbert, but it seemed appropriate. If you look to your right, you will likely see a mouse and a mousepad. Look less to your right, so your eyes still have the monitor in view. Over in the righthand column, there are a bunch of links to other blogs. As a blog, we have the blogospheric responsibility to link to blogs, blog about blogs, and especially to link to blogs blogging about other blogs and their links. Anyway, to save you some trouble, I will begin a multipart series describing what each of those websites is like, since clicking on each one in turn would take at least three minutes of your time, if not a full five minutes. Ahh, but where to start. The obvious choice is the biggest blog out there (Daily Kos), but I'll start with the one I've linked to the most so far, which is undoubtedly Eschaton, by Atrios, a.k.a. Duncan Black, who sat in front of me at a Gogol Bordello show in Philadelphia. Did I mention the show was insane?

Anyway, Eschaton is one of the biggest liberal blogs out there, certainly in the top five in terms of overall traffic. This may seem strange at first, since Atrios doesn't actually say all that much, often content to limit himself to a snarky comment and a link, like this, or even just a comment with no link at all. Keep up with him (he has 10-20 short posts per day), and you will find that beyond just being incredibly sarcastic, he has extremely good political instincts, links to every major happening in politics in a given day, and dispenses less BS than just about anyone else around. My esteemed colleague may worry about empty lefty rhetoric, but I would argue a quick read will show how much more actual content there is in Eschaton's snark than in much of what passes for news.

Recurring themes include Friday Catblogging, the always fun "wanker of the day", and late night links to cool youtube videos. More recent recurring themes include calls for a "blogger ethics panel" when journalists are guilty of the same low standards that they always accuse bloggers of having, finding examples of "journamalism" where the mainstream media just basically punts their credibility, and my personal favorite, actually writing down the lengths of time various pundits and politicians claim are crucial for determining the fate of Iraq, and then calling them on it when these periods expire. This latter item has led to the introduction of the "Friedman Unit", or F.U., named after Tom Friedman of the NYTimes, who said "the next six months are crucial" every six months from November 2003 until this past May! Suffice it to say, when I grow up, I want to be like Einstein, but if I ended up like Atrios I'd be pretty happy anyway.

on moderation

Dkon here!

Like Chuck D I got so much trouble on my mind
All these no-talent artists gettin' signed -
they can't rhyme!
-A Tribe Called Quest

My illustrious co-blogger broached the political topics of American foreign policy, right-wing economists' opposition to a minimum wage, etc. I'm largely on board with all the bleeding-heart, Kossian agenda. Hell, I supported various netroots candidates in the midterm election, and was ecstatic watching the returns on Fox news (the sour look on Brit Hume's puss was instantly gratifying). So why is my reaction to a lot of left-wing rhetoric, whether in the blogosphere or in person, somewhere between boredom and irritation?

Two reasons:
1. Nothing is simple.
2. Groupthink never leads to a glorious workers' paradise.

It would be nice if all large corporations were inherently evil capitalistic enterprises, and we just had to smash them to achieve peace and justice. In fact, working for a large company usually provides better benefits, less stressful working conditions, and more job security than work in a mom-and-pop store. I don't believe in the libertarian phantasmagoria, either, where the only problem is the evil government imposing its onerous regulations on hard-working businesses (see Somalia, Afghanistan).

It would be fabulous if the world were full of nice, loving and rational people whose only problem is oppression by the neo-colonial powers. Development and even intervention by the derided West can lead to very positive results (is Bosnia better off now or in 1994? How about India with all the evil globalization?). It can also be royally FUBAR-ed (duh).

These points are so boringly obvious, they're easily ignored. It's much more intellectually and morally satisfying to be either a virtuous, compassionate socialist/anti-globalist, or a clear-eyed, rational libertarian/free-trader. Or to think that America is either an evil parasitic tick (hello, Noam) or a beacon of democracy and freedom fries (hi, Condi). And you do have to take a clear stand sometimes. But when these folks coalesce into groups, publish magazines (right-wing or left-wing) and start duking it out for ideological purity merit badges, truth is inevitably replaced by truthiness. And I respect and fear the truth, because you can't run away from it, like you can from a smelly hippie or a chainsaw-wielding tax-cutter. If you run, it'll just bite you in the ass.

Einstein's down on the beach staring into the sand, 'cause everything he believes in is shattered

In theory, I am a scientist (that's actually a pun, if you think about it). As some may have noticed, I tend to delve frequently into politics. Now, these two fields are certainly not totally distinct, given that the vast majority of science funding comes from the government via science agencies like NASA, NSF, and NIH and certain departments of the government, Defense and Energy being the primary ones for physicists. Suffice it to say, one need not follow politics too closely to be a scientist, and vice versa, though there are the rare exceptions (Rush Holt in particular). Economics, on the other hand, is certainly more central to political discussions, but like any physical scientist, you will have to forgive me if I view any theoretical economics statement with a bit of suspicion until it is well-proven by actual data. Oddly enough, a discussion of this very topic appeared recently on both science and politics blogs, motivated by the following quote:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

You will not be too surprised to find that I disagree with this in multiple ways. First of all, his main economics point may very well be wrong. The reason why goes to the heart of my main philosophical complaint against economics: complicated systems are hard to generalize like that. No self-respecting physicist would

1. claim anything more than a relationship, noting the rough size of the statistical errors,


2. fail to indicate if there are exceptions or modifications to the rule that need to be noted, or


3. make such a claim without a great deal of supporting data, including independent means of validating the relationship.

Our economist friend failed all three, essentially because he assumed his decidedly oversimplistic model of human behavior was inherently correct. Speaking as a theorist, I can safely say that while I may be confident in my results, they exist solely at the level of supposition until they are experimentally verified. Going back to the silly example from the quote, if a string theorist claims there are eleven dimensions (and some believe this is probably the case) , he cannot claim it as fact until he either uses it to explain observations that were previously unexplained, or makes a testable prediction for future experiments. Of course, just to pile on the economist, there will be no end of possible interviewees willing to argue with our friendly string theorist, as physicists love to argue about these things. If a journalist fails to find outside sources to discuss the issue, then blame the journalist. I think what happened here, actually, is a confusion between a news article that has to meet journalistic standards of public skepticism with a scientific press release, which is at heart an advertisement for a scientist's work.

Perhaps more crucially, our enterprising economist may someday be hired to make decisions that affect millions or billions of people, and if he does it based on theory alone you get some kind of publicly harmful nonsense like supply-side voodoo economics or the more public failures of the IMF. Our string theorist friend will get a nice research grant from the NSF that pays for an additional post-doc or grad student or two, helping to educate the next generation of scientists, and will find that numerous colleagues are trying to confirm, falsify, modify, or extend his/her model. Put simply, physicists should be humble in trying to explain the workings of the universe, and economists equally humble in trying to explain the workings of humanity. Those who ignore this principle risk their own reputation, and in the case of economists working in public policy, the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. That is why skepticism is incredibly necessary, and should be welcomed, not kvetched about.

Why do we always come here, I guess we'll never know. It's like a kind of torture to have to watch the show.

That's the muppet show for all the google-challenged. So, the point was raised in comments:

The real problem with cartoons is that they, more than ever, reflect reality rather than provide an escape from it. On the other hand, so-called reality programming (like I would want to be on an island with several people I don't particularly like striving not only to survive, but all the while harboring the suspicion someone might give me a million dollars if I were successful) has increasingly less to do with any reality that I have ever seen.

While admittedly there is very little redeeming value to be found in most reality TV (look, it's yet another edition of MTV's The Real World, featuring 7 alcoholic collegians, three of whom are gay or from a recognized minority, each of whom behaves like a different one of the Seven Duffs from the Simpsons: Sleazy, Queazy, Edgy, Surly, Tipsy, Remorseful, and Dizzy!), many of us, nay, all of humanity can learn various lessons from Survivor. First of all, fire is a necessity for life. It's mythology come to life, people. Second, you need to eat protein to maintain your strength. I don't know why being on an island for two weeks makes every person into a dietitian, but so help me, it does. They never stop jabbering about protein literally all day long. Third, it is good to be in the majority, for they have all the power. If you are able to flip yourself from the minority to the majority, let the other side have it. Make them clean up around camp, make them hunt for food, and whatever you do, don't let them privatize social security because you just took over Congress tribal council. Most importantly, many people will try to befriend you during your 39 days on the island, but they want to cost you and your family one million dollars (say it Dr. evil style, it sounds better). When the time comes, screw them over, and remember what you can do if you had a million dollars. Side note, if you do choose Kraft Mac and Cheese, remember it is made only two miles from my apartment in lovely Champaign, IL.

Ok, having completely failed to address the issue of escapism in reality shows, let's move on to cartoons. Why are they so real these days? The obvious answer is that life has become cartoonish. Remember, America's most informative source of news is a fake news program, the Onion reports actual news two years ahead of time (dkon gets credit for showing me this one, which was published in 2001 [!?!]), the people we choose to lead us are certifiably insane, and the most powerful man in the world still says "nukular". If Karl Marx was once right in suggesting that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce", the proper approach is now more Groucho, in that it's often hard to tell the difference between tragedy and farce the first time. Remember "Heckuva job"? How can a cartoon be more buffoonish than real life in these conditions? The Simpsons sent Homer into space in 1994, the Russians sent tourists there in 2001. South Park started out with "Jesus vs. Santa in 1995 (after JC vs. Frosty in 1992), explaining the true meaning of Christmas; Bill O'Reilly has yet to get the memo. Honestly, how can any fictional work really push the limits of believability these days. Okay, I'm sure a few brave souls can manage it, but in general, when life becomes a daily farce, satire is the proper medium to excoriate it.

The incredibly hostile FAQs about: Teh War

More tomorrow on TV, cartoons, and escapism. In the meanwhile:

This is the first in what I hope is a recurring series. Today, we answer silly questions about Iraq.

1. So, are we going to send more troops? Hell yes! Bush just needs to have someone to tell him that it's not the frickin stupidest idea he's come up with yet, and the 11 percent of Americans who support this option (patron saint: John McCain) just don't cut it anymore.


2. The American people are such a disappointment. Who's got the president's back? Here's a hint: he's a Dick, and he shot a 70-year old man in the face. If you will, think of Cheney as being Bush's BFF, there to counsel him about a bad relationship by just repeating back neutral words to the president until Bush decides to do what he always wanted to do anyway, only in this case he's confusing the current ex-girlfriend who has killed 3,000 people with a different one that blew up a building with 3,000 people inside, and he seems to want to escalate matters by buying an engagement ring even though all three of her multiple personalities just tried to kill him and all of his other acquaintances are telling him that his plan is nuts.


3. Will it work to send more troops? Hell no. We'll have the same "success" that we did with Operation Together Forward II, Operation Together Forward, and the other seventeen attempts we've made to pacify Baghdad.

• What are we fighting for? Don't tell me, I don't give a damn. Next year we'll bomb Iran...


• That's great, but I still don't understand. Can you use a burrito as an analogy? But of course!! Imagine that victory in Iraq is like eating a nice hot burrito, but we don't have an oven, or a microwave, or any obvious way to make fire. We had a balky hot plate called the IAEA, which would have slowly warmed up the burrito so that we could have eaten eventually, but we were impatient and tossed it out the window. Some clever fellows from the Project for a New American Century wrote a paper a few years back saying that if one runs rapidly into a wall, the kinetic energy can be turned into heat, so we decided to try that instead. Having run into a wall headfirst about eight or nine times, we've got a splitting headache, our ears are bleeding, the burrito is coming apart and has been dropped on the floor a few times, and we're considering what to do next. John McCain says we haven't been running into the wall headfirst hard enough, so he recommends putting on roller skates and skating into the wall at twice the speed. Some members of the democratic leadership of the senate are hinting that they may go along with that once, but have begun to backpedal away from that. Liberals have been saying we should just give up on the burrito and order a pizza instead, but people accuse them of being hippies and say that they're not "serious", whatever that means.
  
  Is that clearer now?

Television dreams of Tomorrow. We're not the ones who're meant to follow.

Proving that great minds think alike, or not, Dmitry and I had our question raised by the illustrious David Foster Wallace in a more condescending form:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

(found at ben.casnocha.com via Marginal Revolution via Brad Delong)

I disagree with this quote most-heartedly. TV is not vulgar in the sense of offensive, regardless of the ridiculous censorship rules imposed by the FCC. As Tom Lehrer explained some 40 fucking years ago, "Dirty words are fun". As for sex and nudity, which will take out DFW's prurient comment as well, they are a good thing that we are biologically conditioned to enjoy. Let's leave repression for medieval peasants named Dennis, shall we? If you think that sexuality is in any way unnatural, we'll have Alex in to guest post on the topic of the sex life of Bonobos, the primates that love to party. DFW may have meant TV is vulgar in the older sense of the word, "of the common people", but if so the point was obvious to begin with.

Ok, then why is TV so dumb? Remember that there are some criminally good programs on TV right now: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Office, Scrubs, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, Dexter, The Wire (taking this one on faith based on about thirty positive reviews from random strangers), etc. No, TV is very conservative, and the highest rated shows are frequently dumb because people like familiar programming, networks LOVE familiar programming, and originality is only occasionally rewarding to viewers but always risky for the network. See the demise, with no small influence of the networks, of Arrested Development, Firefly, Deadwood and a bunch of others. Many people fear change, and will continue to watch endless reruns of Murder She Wrote and Everyone Loves Raymond and laugh along with the laugh tracks forever, but with several hundred networks out there, it just takes some looking, and a huge cable bill, to see some good programming.

On a random note, when it came to buying Hanukah presents, my wife and I both secretly went for cartoon t-shirts (an Uglydoll for her, Cheat Commandoes for me had it been in stock; she went with Colbert Nation as a backup). Why do smart people enjoy cartoons and all sorts of youthful type stuff? Because they're fun. One can enjoy post-modern literature and the Cartoon network, although preferably not simultaneously. These things are fun, and if kids are the only ones smart enough to realize it, then maybe most adults are fools....no, that's too harsh. Most adults are wise, using their hard-earned smarts to behave responsibly in all sorts of ways, like voting for a former alcoholic with no grasp of world politics because they think he'd be more fun to have a beer with than his opponents, decent men who just don't have the charisma and fratboy charm it takes to make decisions about the global economy and international relations....

The Worst people in the World, Timothy Leary style

Stealing shamelessly from Keith Olberman, the three worst people (or entities) in the world, according to the weekend's news:

• Tune In: and I mean, tune in all the time to the radio playing non-stop if you blow the whistle on fraud in Iraq and the Americans decide to detain you for months without trial.


• Turn on: Eli Lilly is alleged to have promoted the use of their drug Zyprexa for seniors with dementia, when it is only indicated for schizophrenia. Did I mention it increases the risk of death for seniors with dementia?


• Drop out: Ten California yuppies/hippies decide not to buy new stuff for a year, dooming the capitalist system and freedom as we know it. Chamber of Commerce presidents attack these heathens for trying to undermine our very way of life.

Okay, maybe one of those things was not like the others...

Stupidity, democracy, and blogging

Although I could really care less about the honor bestowed on me by Time magazine, comrade Faber raises some important points in his screed below. Specifically, are people truly stupid, and if so, do they like it that way?

Socrates used this as his main argument against democratic governance, and similar complaints have been made about the wisdom of wikipedia and the banality of blogs. Despite the nay-sayers, I think overall stupid people manage to govern themselves somewhat reasonably and even create content which is at least amusing, and in certain ways improves on the traditional derided MSM, mostly by cannibalizing the information, and regurgitating it with added digestive juices of opinion. And we all eat it up like the dogs we are.

So I thought it appropriate to share something that relates at once to (allegedly) democratic self-governance, bloggy content, and stupidity. The back story is horrendously complicated, but to summarize, it started with a show trial of Comrade Clarke for his offenses against the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party (WAAGNFNP). In his defense, he presented the following video:

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The best piece of opinion journalism about the Iraq war that I've come across is "The Incompetence Dodge", by Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect magazine. As a side note, TAP is IMHO the finest liberal political magazine in the country, and their blog Tapped is a must read if you want some smart policy discussion with your politics. Anyway, they argued in November 2005 that the failure of the war was not that it was a good idea marred by incompetence at the top, but rather a bad idea from the beginning, because there was little chance whatsoever the Iraqis could forge a working stable government between themselves, and no number of US troops could bring that result about.

More recently, as public opinion in America turns to the idea that the problem in Iraq is irresponsible Iraqis, it was pointed out that both our leaders and the media have a habit of infantilizing the leadership of foreign nations, buying into a reward and punishment model for dealing with foreign nations while ignoring their interests. The media, I would argue, does this habitually. Whether it be politics as theater, the complete inability to determine the difference between facts and opinion, or the complete unwillingness to challenge well-worn narratives (McCain is an independent maverick!!), they really do a shoddy job of delivering in-depth news when they break away from missing pretty white woman stories. For politicians, however, we should ask for more. They, as powerful people, should know better.

Thus, the Man of the Year, as has been the case five years running, is George W. Bush (it should have been Bin Laden in 2001, may he rot in hell). Forget Rumsfeld; to quote Brad DeLong, the Kossacks work for the Czar. BTW, skipping forward 50 years or so, I'll leave it to you, DJ EZ D, to explain this blog's clever title. The only alternative should have been Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, the last two Prime Ministers of Iraq. Why are they both such failures, having come into office in a wave of purple fingers and purpler press releases? Because Iraq can't work at the moment, and no amount of bargaining on our part will bring that dream back to life (I'll leave denial to the administration, anger to the voters, take depression for myself and recommend skipping acceptance altogether). Without some semblance of security and the prospect of common goals, it will get much worse before it gets any better, and neither they, nor anyone else, will be able to do a thing about it. If there was a chance to save Iraq, and I doubt there was, the key words snuffing out hope belonged to Rumsfeld, and many people realized at the time how deeply disturbed they were: "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes". Who will eventually restore order? The guy who can establish control. It could be some combination of either Moqtada al-Sadr and/or SCIRI, since they both have militias, living in uneasy truce with the Kurds, but it won't be pretty, and we should have freakin' known that, and those who ignored the fact were foolish, criminally foolish to ignore that fact. In the end, the ultimate description of Iraq may have been provided by the aptly named movie Army of Darkness. "Good....Bad...I'm the guy with the gun."

Time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

My co-blogger was too humble to mention it, but not three hours after we created this blog, and before we even had a post up, Time Magazine declared us to be "The Person of the Year". Well, technically it was for all of us netizens, the posters of content and meta-content on the world wide web (so it doesn't really include Ted Stevens, but does include the guy who remixed him).

Suffice it to say, this is the kind of print journalism that explains why people blog about how print journalism is dying a sad and increasingly irrelevant death, in no small part because of their complete mystification about blogs. Like most topics, I pretty much agree with Atrios, who agrees with one of the finest web comic strip writers out there.

To put my spin on things, let me just say that in a world currently featuring two wars in which the US has been enmeshed for years, as well as a number of growing civil wars in which we should have intervened but didn't, Time magazine chose to focus on the makers of viral videos and descriptions of what they think about the book they read last week (yes, that's me, the previous comment is supposed to be ironically self-deprecating). Salon, to its credit, chose a specific online incident, S.R. Sidarth being called "Macaca" by the former junior Senatorial wanker from Virginia, which did in the end flip control of the Senate away from the dark side and back to the forces of not entirely evil.

I don't expect much more from Time Magazine, who really aren't pretending to be this dopey, but you should. More tonight on why assuming rampant stupidity is a problem, in light of the book I am going to review next week and the right choice for person of the year, which is supposed to be given to the most important person for shaping world events, for good and ill.

The inaugural

Vanity of vanities, all blogging is vanity.

Jfaber and I are two old friends, separated by space and smoothed by time, aiming to add our own vocals to the symphony of the blogosphere. While our motivations are mostly egotistically graphomaniacal, we intend our writing to be entertaining, enlightening, and emotionally resonant with the unwashed masses. And that means all of you.

Besides charming manners, we are in possession of vast scientific knowledge, a modest interest in literature, film (advantage: jfaber), music (advantage: dkon), every imaginable variety of sports (all jfaber), Russian language and idiosynchrasies (all dkon), and a proclivity for amateur philosophizing and politicking. Our hope is that these disparate flavors organically meld into a unique and appetizing cuisine, so that pajama-clad keyboard bangers across the internetted world will grow tired of typing, "rooted cosmopolitans is teh bomb", and just say RCITB, prompting the inevitable backlash, followed by the anti-backlash, and finally, the merciful break-up due to creative differences.

And the world will live as one.