Rooted Cosmopolitans

Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog: The decade in review

2010-01-07T20:57:00.005-06:00

The best book I read from the past decade was a Great American Novel, in the all-caps sense, even though very few people seem to call it that just because the author is originally a Brit. Even though it fails to top my list, I see no need to insult Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which topped The Million's best books of the decade list. It was very good, and written in the serious-story-about-a-troubled-family mode that invites being called a "Great American Novel", but it just doesn't top my list. No, my favorite book written in the past decade is undoubtably Neil Gaiman's America Gods, published in 2001.

Gaiman's story, which basically casts Norse mythology onto modern-day American society is a fantastic rea, as all Gaiman's books are. More importantly, the perspective he brings to American Society as an outsider seems to have leant him a much better understanding of what makes this country tick. America is big, and it's strange in a lot of places, and many towns in Illinois and the rest of the Midwest are a little depressing for reasons that are hard to name but involve some combination of flatness and economic stagnation. Gaiman manages to somehow make a comic book out of middle America without turning it into an out-and-out caricature, identifying the quirks of the culture and the fact that our values are often centered not so much upon the God who created us in his image but rather the gods that we created to transmit images. Part fantasy, part road novel, and part musing on the nature of modern identity, it captures the spirit of the contry right before the Bush era that could have easily served as an afterword to the novel.

Others deserving mention that I've read:

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones: Set in Virginia in the decade before the civil war, this story of a black slaveowning family is a slice of history about which I knew nothing. Fascinating, and the parallels to modern society aremore than thoughtprovoking.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz: One of the best new writers out there, this tale of life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic has a strong narrative voice and a real joy for language.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon: Chabon is a much better writer when he writes about Jewish theme, and this counterfactual novel about a Jewish state set up in Alaska is his most complete work to date. His novella Gentlemen of the Road is also fantastic, for the same reasons.

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri: Another novel in which seeing both India and America as an outsider has leant the author real insight into one's place in the world and the difficulty in establishing it. Her short story collections, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, show her mastery of the genre, too.

Radiance, by Carter Scholz: The best book about scientists I've read in possibly forever, this talk of bureaucratic malfeasance at a national lab does a great and frequently hilarious job of contrasting the big pictures we all dream of with the more humdrum aspects of modern life.

Just to clarify the quote, Grouho Marx quipped that "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

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Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's assets

2010-01-06T22:26:00.004-06:00

As a relatively recent homebuyer in Upstate New York, I'd like to think I'm pretty isolated from the worst of the housing bubble's bursting. Prices around here have been fairly flat for decades, failing to go up dramatically along with the rest of the country for the past 15 years, but also failing to drop much either. When looking for a mortgage, the most exotic option we considered was a 25-year fixed, but in the end the 30-year fixed just seemed like the better option.

Many people around the country were eiter not so fortunate, or not so wise. The government's efforts to help ease the crisis be encouraging banks to modify the interest rates on mortgages have been either ineffective or actively counterproductive, since, according to experts quoted by the NYTimes,

desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences.

Banks still have bad loans on their books, home prices are still being artificially inflated, and widespread foreclosures are damaging entire neighborhoods.

The solution popular among economists is to encourage banks to modify the principal amounts of mortgages gone bad, even if this is on the government dime. Needless to say, this is often unpopular, with frequent sentiments being echoed by CNBC's resident real estate blogger, Diana Olick:

The arguments are plain and simple: Bite the bullet to save the greater housing market or don't because the moral hazard is far too untenable. Anyone who's ever read this blog before knows where I stand. I would honestly rather see my home's value go down than see the guy next door (figurative: my neighbors are lovely and fiscally responsible) who made a poor/negligent financial decision get a mulligan at my expense.

She's really fond of blaming both banks and homeowners, but especially the homeowners:

I'm sorry, but I'm just getting a little sick of all the onus being laid on the banks. Sure, they deserve half of it, but what about the borrowers?? We seem to excuse all their responsibility because the possibility exists that they could lose their homes. But realistically, many borrowers are sitting in said homes, rent free, actively refusing to take the help being offered because they'd have to admit they lied.

Principal modifications have a lot of potential benefits, including lower payments for homeowners, and a higher chance for the bank that the borrower will keep repaying a loan. Becuae it instantly increases the borrower's equity stake, they become more mobile, able to seek out better job/life opportunities and increasing the chance that the house will pass on to a new buyer rather than into the hands of the bank. The problem is that even though banks and underwater homeowners are the responsible parties, we as a society end up getting stuck with the bill. It's not pleasant, but we're long since beyond pleasant. I get worried, at some point, by frequent moral hazard arguments that manage to basically exonerate corporate misbehavior while bringing down wrath on everyone else. The basic idea is that it's better to suffer a little oneself so long as those who were foolish suffer more. Is this really the best we can manage these days? While I appreciate that times are tough all over, it's stunning to see how much concern is paid to the idea that someone undeserving might get ahead in life. It underlies the affirmative action debate, the debates over welfare from the 80's onward, a good bit of the Teabagger/anti-tax crowd, and a shockingly large part of our political culture.

Seriously, why? Perhaps some of it is corporate culture, in that every tax dollar we are forced to contribute is a dollar that we can't spend on a new electronic gadget that will revolutionize our existence as we know it (damn those underwater homeowners, now I can't afford Rock Band: Glockenspiel!). A lot of it, though, is simple acceptance of the "backhanded tenth commandment", which basically states "I will not covet my neighbor's possessions so long as I ensure that I have more than he does." It probably helps explain why so many people are often so stressed, harried, and generally unhappy:

Psychologists at the University of Rochester evaluated survey responses from 147 recent graduates, noting their achievements and their level of happiness over a period of two years. People's goals were divided into two categories: extrinsic (things like wealth, fame and personal image) and intrinsic (for example, meaningful relationships, health and personal growth). Achieving intrinsic goals led to higher self-esteem and a greater sense of well-being, the researchers statistical analysis revealed. But, in a snub for the American dream, attaining the extrinsic goals of wealth and fame led to anxiety and unhappiness.

At some point, it would be good if the dominant political mindset of the chattering class, and perhaps that of the nation as a whole, was not that of a vengeful six-year old. As is nearly always true, the best advice comes from Raffi: "All I Really Need is a Song in my Heart, Food in my belly, and love in my Family" or, if you prefer a more stoned adult perspective, from Rusted Root: "All I need is food and creative love". Decrying the fact that your neighbors and fellow citizens are not losing their houses really won't help you achieve any of these.

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Bang and Blame

2010-01-05T20:36:00.004-06:00

Lord, please forgive Brit Hume, for he knows not what he does. The sanctimonious former Fox host made headlines a few days ago for suggesting that Tiger Woods come to Jesus:

He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.

Later, digging himself in deeper, he clarified to Bill O'Reilly:

Hume said that given Woods problems, he "needs something that Christianity, especially, provides, and gives and offers."

As Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly points out, such beliefs hardly helped Gov. Mark Sanford (Adulterer/Hiker-SC), Sen. John Ensign (Adulterer-NV), David Vitter (John-LA), Larry Craig ("Wide Stance"-ID), and a host of others. In a beautifully written post, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts into words how forgiveness and redemption truly work:

We like to think about redemption in terms of getting past a sin, but we don't really think about the process as teaching us something.

As someone who's done his share of sinning, I think the striking thing about a serious process of redemption is how it humbles you. It isn't simply a process of exoneration, or making amends, it's a fundamental questioning of bone-deep philosophy. You learn about the ignorance of your certainty. Having been deeply wrong before, you come to know that as a flawed thing, you are subject to being deeply wrong again.

What Hume fails to understand in the slightest is who needs to forgive whom here. If Tiger Woods needs forgiveness from those around him, or the public at large, in theory he should make amends to the former and start leading by example for the rest of us. This obviously doesn't have to involve JC. If Tiger Woods needs to humble himself, I think it is fair to suggest that any number of religions offer means for self-humility. Quoting the Dalai Lama for instance,

"The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness."

Perhaps Brit Hume lacks the humility both to learn the first thing about Buddhism before bashing it on national TV, or perhaps he can't forgive Tiger Woods because he views him as a heathen, even though, to quote JC in Mark 11:25:

And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.

Why can't Brit Hume forgive Tiger Woods, and by his own internal projection, the rest of us forgive Tiger? At its heart lies one of the creeping sicknesses in American society.

In Judaism, to paraphrase, sins against God must be forgiven by God (Yom Kippur is the day of Atonement for this purpose), but sins against your fellow man require atonement from the aggrieved party. I don't fully understand the Christian policy as it varies from sect to sect, but it certainly seems as if God plays a potentially larger role in forgiving all of us. Because Christianity is faith-based to a larger degree than Judaism, faith is placed in a more central role for achieving forgiveness. Here is where we have to carefully follow the chain of giver and recipient:If person X has faith in God, defined in appropriately Christian terms, according to my best understanding of Christianity, then God will forgive their sins. This does not imply that for person X to forgive person Y, then person Y needs to have faith in JC. This is only a condition for God to grant forgiveness from God to person Y. Brit Hume and the others of his ilk seek to hold others to a standard they try to establish for themselves, and also take on the judgment role for others reserved for that higher authority. Their belief, even if they can't admit it to themselves, is that if person Y has faith in God, then they will forgive person Y. This is not an idle argument, as it has been suggested that Mike Huckabee essentially used this background logic for granting clemency while governor of Arkansas.

It is a dangerous game when people not only assume the role of a higher power in granting forgiveness, but also for passing divine judgment as well. George Bush, Tony Blair, Joe Lieberman, and a number of other religiously motivated folks seem to have a pretty good idea about who we should go about the world killing, and shockingly enough those on the receiving end always worship a different name of God. The group responsible for setting up the Death Penalty in the US recently "pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it." And yet, the death penalty is still widely popular, and even Obama supports its use in some cases. Why does the taste for blood run so deep? Why did 58% of people support torturing the underwear bomber in a recent survey, and why do we assume that torture should merely be limited to terorists? What about drug kingpins, child rapists, and billion-dollar embezzlers? It is because we embrace punishment, and relish it. We wish to inflict pain and suffering when it has been inflicted on us, the Golden Rule be damned.

In the end, forgiveness, to quote the Dalai Lama, comes from a sense of humility, and it is a bastardized version that emerges when we assume the divine mantle instead. Perhaps we are so used to being a hegemonic nation, a country blessed by the divine to lead the world, that we feel as citizens of the country that the divine rights fall to us all individually too. To quote a Bush advisor back in 2003:

"I think President Bush is God's man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility."

They keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means. As painful as it is, we should probably try to forgive them, regardless of our religiuous beliefs, even though we should also point out their deluded idiocy when appropriate. Without sarcasm, let me suggest that their understanding of their own morals is so clouded that they really no longer understand the words coming out of their own mouths. It may be a product of their own willful ignorance, but they know not what they do.

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I don't want the world, I just want your half

2010-01-04T21:16:00.003-06:00

The strangest thing about US hegemony in the world isn't so much that some people support the idea, but rather that so few "respectable" people oppose it. Recent estimates of world military spending attribute over 40% of the world's total military spending to the US alone, and when you figure that it's pretty highly unlikely we'll get into a shooting war any time soon with the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the US easily outspends all countries with whom we have any rivalry or even fairly neutral relations. China, the number 2 spender, is a factor of 7 behind us, and needless to say we have something of a head start. At the risk of being uncouth, this is frickin' insane, really. We can defend ourselves from all nations in the world for a fraction of the cost, and it appears we'll never be able to afford the cost of putting a stable, reputable government in Iraq or Afghanistan until we decide to pay off the entire populace: ($150 billion per year/36 million people = $4000 per person = 4-5 times the annual per capita income in either country). Heck, we could bribe everyone in both countries, and still cut costs in the short run!

Speaking as a fairly eager recipient of government funds myself, it's worth noting that not every military dollar we spend goes to waste: military salaries keep people employed and the defense industry afloat. Still, with a price tag for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq approaching $1 trillion, it's hard to attribute that to salary, and I think it's fair to say a decent bit of that money has gone to transporting people and stuff back and forth and blowing a lot of shit up, with little to show for in terms of infrastructure improvements in its wake, certainly not a rate of return with which we should be pleased. For comparison sake, this is more than the entire health-care bill at the moment, and that even pays for itself by most estimates. It is also sufficient to basically cure world hunger, or eliminate a handful of nasty diseases. And yet, if one suggests that perhaps these are reasonable goals, rather than hegemonic power, it's basically like shouting out that you are a crazed leftist.

It's now to the point where we are spending on toys that can only be really used against our toys, since no one else will ever be able to get in the game. As Matt Yglesias points out, we are designing laser cannons to use against enemy planes, but no one even attempts to challenge our Air Force with their own, since doing so is a quick way to eliminate one's Air Force as a useful fighting force.

Respected senators, or at least those like Lieberman who seem to have the respect of their peers for unknown reasons, call for us to consider attacking Yemen... but what exactly are we supposed to attack? One might think yet another desert conflict in a failing/failed state without a clearly defined objective might raise warning signs, but he wasn't exactly laughed off the set of Fox News Sunday. After Afghanistan, Iraq, blowback into the tribal areas of Pakistan, the collapse of Somalia, the ongoing collapse in Yemen, etc., one might think to reconsider the real gains from our hegemonic spending, but no, we're discussing whether to attack Iran and Yemen as a serious conversation. Quoting Matt Yglesias again, this isn't going to end well:

Today America is worried about chaos in Afghanistan, but there are also indications that al Qa’eda has found safe haven in Somalia and Yemen. Broken states, alas, are not all that rare. To suggest that the United States could succeed in its mission to vastly improve governance in Afghanistan, given enough time and money and manpower, hardly provides evidence that the task could be repeated in Sudan and Nigeria and Chad. If it’s true that the world’s security depends on eradicating every pocket of instability on Earth, then we really are doomed.

Given all these problems, some of the cheaper options include not advertising quite so widely our overwhelming desire to torture people, since this really doesn't help our reputation overseas. It's been noted that the underpants bomber's father actually reported on him to US authorities, and that he might have had more qualms if he suspected we were going to torture his kid, seemingly just for the sake of inflicting pain given that it hasn't been reported that he's withholding important information from the authorities at the moment. Even cheaper, though, would be basically getting out of the game, or at least cutting back by about 75%, leaving us still hegemon but at least closer to the pack.

Consider Japan, if you will. Not perfect by any means, but they live longer than we do, spend considerably less on defense, and no one is attacking them on a regular basis! This includes al Qaeda, who currently rank between lightning strikes and roller skating accidents as a cause for death for Americans since 9/11, well behind falls in the bathroom and car crashes while texting. It also includes China, even though they are in the neighborhood and we spend 40% of the world's military budget defending against them.

The best test of an idea is often to bring it up out of context and ask if it stands in its own right or merely because it's always been the case. Imagine we were not the world's hegemon: how much would we as a nation wish to spend on the military? I have trouble that the answer is seven times as much as China and more than all the non-EU states in the world combined. The only reason it is considered reasonable is because we did it last year and the year before that and on backwards. It was almost certainly rather crazy back in the days of the Cold War, and it's only getting nuttier since.

Perhaps the problem is that we refer to it as the "defense" budget. Clue to those who haven't figured this one out: it doesn't cost this much to defend oneself. Many countries manage it for much cheaper. Who in the world is really going to attack us militarily at this point. The Navy and Air Force essntially own their respective domains, and the Army is unattackable. Why are we doing this? To the extent we are vulnerable, it is because of our hegemony, and the attackers are not states whom we can smash, but random people armed with explosives and hand-to-hand weapons. Throwing billions after billions isn't really getting us anywhere, maybe we could try spending a few billion less. After all, save a few billion here and a few billion there, and pretty soon we are talking real money...and healthcare...and an end to world hunger.

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I'm looking through you

2010-01-03T20:16:00.003-06:00

I'm pretty sure that it's not the correct quote nor the meaning of the correct quote, but it is hard not to think these days that "the media is the message", in that many of the stories that they dwell upon endlessly are basically the stories that only they feel the need to dwell upon endlessly. The shoe bomber sequel is perhaps the most recent example, in that the media is in a panic, Republican operatives are having a field day making attacks that they themselves would have called treasonous way back when in 2001 when Richard Reid tried the same exact thing, and honestly I'm not sure if anyone else really cares. By this point, if you haven't figured out that much of airline security is theater designed to make us feel safe, learn to love Teh Google, as there are 63,000 hits that can basically go over the concept for us. No, I think we all realize to some extent that while the government is good at retroactively preventing attacks that have already been attempted, there is inevitably a chance that someone will come up with a new way to attack a plane.

Quick aside: Like Kevin Drum in the following link, I think it is true that the fact al Qaeda always attacks planes and/or buses is a sign of weakness. Since 9/11, Afghan militants, Filipino militants, several African generals, and a bunch of other groups have figured out clever ways to slaughter the innocent. Al Qaeda likes to attack planes using shoes and underpants. They've tried twice in a decade, and failed both times, with the gravest injury being to the crotch of the most recent attempted bomber. As Nate Silver points out, airline travel is not just safe, it's ridiculously safe:

Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

If you are content leaving home without a lightning rod in your pocket, you should probably feel ok to fly. Honestly, I think people already know this, and the media freakout is basically an orchestrated show for the right wing to land free potshots and the hyperventilators to show how panicked all the rest of us should be. Remember during the past decade, of course, when across America the government and media hypervintilated about terrorism and New Yorkers, the people hit hardest and most likely tobe hit again, almost universally said "Al Qaeda? Fuhgeddaboutit. Fuck 'em." and managed to live life while small midwestern city governments built concrete fortifications around obscure county buildings.

The situation is so bad that David Brooks of the NYT is being held up as a voice of reason for his New Year's column. While agreeing in part with him, I think he misses a key point:

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.
But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.

We do have a resilient society, by and large. The outraged calls and demands are a product of the media, by the media, and for the media. The rest of us were singing Auld Lang Syne badly, watching football, and other similar pursuits.

That said, while I think those calling for random insulting ways to racially profile Muslims really have no grasp of what drives a lot of the hatred of the US, I have to say that the proposal to put in many more full body scanners in airports doesn't really bother me. Even the two year old is starting to learn the names for various parts of herself, and I hope it comes as no surprise that there really aren't that many variations in all our parts. To put it mildly, even though many of us spend way to much time obsessing over penises and boobies, I'm pretty sure that after an airline scan technician looks at a few hundred, most of the prurient thrill will be gone. Your first glimpse of unobscured anatomy is a thrill, the thousandth, not so much. If this is what it takes to make a few people feel better, I can live with it, as the idea of just having everyone fly naked is hampered by sanitary and climate control issues. For those worried about privacy, the big threat is not a full-body scan, it's google if you've ever posted a single detail about your life on the internet, or if someone else has (hint: someone else has, trust me). Between google, facebook, and all the other easily searchable ways to find out info about people, our private lives are rarely private these days. If you haven't done so recently, try googling yourself. The only hope any of us has for anonymity these days is not a high level of privacy, but rather a common name. Matthew Smith, you are in luck. Me, somewhat, as there are a few of me and my googlegangers to obscure exactly who is who and who did what. In light of this, I just have trouble getting worked up about the idea of an airline screener staring at the outline of my genitalia for three seconds in a day full of body after same generic body.

Is such a step necessary to feel safe at the airport? Not at all! Driving in snow is a vastly bigger risk than a flight, and the biggest fear I have of air travel is having to sleep overnight in some of the country's lovely connecting airports after the restaurants have closed. Still, it's just not a big deal, and if it helps us as a society to get over some of our bizarre body issues, all the better. In the end, our genitals are our own, but they are basically like half of everyone else's too.

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I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill

2010-01-02T20:29:00.003-06:00

An incredibly hostile FAQ about healthcare reform (aka, HCR):

What is the key issue to remember when discussing HCR? That Congress is broken, and to the extent it works, it's generally to funnel money to the lawmakers themselves.

Wait, what about HCR? We're getting there, hold on a sec...

OK, why is Congress so broken? Well, one party acts like we have a parliamentary system, where party discipline is king and there is no need to negotiate across the aisle, whereas the other is famously disorganized, full of corporate sellouts, and actually does take no steps to maintain party discipline, as Chairman Lieberman can attest. The House passes stuff, but is full of idiots from both parties who don't even understand the work of the committee they chair, speak loudly without saying anything, and needless to say the one nuclear scientist in the room must often feel like he's talking to the furniture.

Wait, if they are so useless how do they pass stuff? Two answers: Nancy Pelosi and lobbyists. In Pelosi's defense, her job is to pass decent legislation, and the house does do so. To go into more depth, congresspeople don't write legislation, they put their names on lobbyists' legislation. Their job is to choose which lobbyists get to write it. I'm pretty convinced lobbyists earn their money not by being evil, but rather by appealing in broad ways to the interests of sitting legislators and then working in sweet deals fro their clients at the margins of bills. I can say for darn sure that the average house member has no concept whatsoever of the content of an average bill, even if they wrote it. Think of it like a university research time. The legislator (professor) is busy with meetings and other important functions, so they hire a team of aides (postdocs) who do know their stuff, but can't handle all the volume of what they have to do, so much of the grunt work is done by lobbyists (grad students), who work for peanuts (large comissions) and scrape by (live comfortably) based on leftover free food (hefty payments by their clients). See, it's a nearly perfect analogy (not a perfect analogy).

Anyway, what about the Senate. How does it work? Bribery. Mary Landrieu was bought off for $100 million, which is pretty cheap considering that they really needed her vote. Ben Nelson got such a sweet deal that he's now actually embarassed by it. Lieberman is just a prick.

So the bill is a product of corruption and idiocy? Yes.

So we should hope it goes down to defeat, right? WRONG!

We should support it, because it is a product of corruption and idiocy? No, as we established, all Congressional bills are like this, but this one happens to help millions of Americans get health insurance.

Why shouldn't they blow up the current bill and start from scratch on a better one? Naive sucker, Congress. Congress, naive sucker. It never gets better, it's Congress. It only gets worse over time. To draw a historical analogy of which my wife is fond, Lincoln was attacked viciously during the civil war because the Emancipation Proclamation was seen as overly compromised, not freeing all slaves in the country. I think his judgment looks OK in hindsight, because it was better than not doing anything.

Why should we make people buy insurance with an individual mandate? Because that's how social contracts work, people. The whole point of insurance is to have the healthy pay for the sick, otherwise, we wouldn't need it. Something has to make the healthy overpay, on the chance they might become sick, or otherwise the sick have to pay the full amount, and that's really not a good thing.

What about the increase in the stock prices for the health insurance companies? They think it's a great deal for them... The stock market is driven by people not much more accurate than Jim Cramer over the long run. They basically put a finger to the wind and then say to buy if some idiot on CNBC says he has a hunch. It's also been pointed out that food stamps are a great boon to supermarket chains and the tycoons of companies like ADM, who are hardly liberal heroes, but that doesn't argue for cutting off food stamps.

I still want Medicare for all. Why can't I have it? Congress! How many times now? It takes $100 million to bribe a powerful senator, and much less for the average congresscritter. For any issue that could cost an industry more than several billion dollars, they will generally be able to bribe their way into getting what they want, since it is in their economic interest to act that way.

Medicare-for-all pretty please? Look, I agree with you, which is why they should have pushed for lowering the eligibility age over time down to 55, maybe by 1 year per year or two. They didn't, and instead the public option was basically stripped of all its power in the house, then killed completely by jackass centrists in the Senate, and then Lieberman poked a stick in everyone's eyeby pushing for, then against, the Medicare buy-in option.

I'm depressed, we should blow up the whole system and rebuild something better from the ashes... This was actually the argument of a popular post at Daily Kos, arguing that the "technocrats" like Ezra Klein (who along with Jon Cohn and Nate Silver are the three people everyone should consult on this issue on a daily basis) were wrong about Iraq, while the Dirty F'in Hippies were right, and the same split is playing out on the left over Health Care reform. Unfortunately, the argument is backwards. As a general rule, it is very worrisome when people agree to risk immediate harm to others in return for some greater good in the future. In Iraq, we were fighting for some sense of security in the future (read: oil profits) that was never really at risk (read: oil profits going to other countries instead!). Those many deaths were traded for the broken and illusory promise of a brighter future, which remains a moral stain on our nation and will continue to do so long into the future.

With healthcare, we have the chance to make a tangible gain now, admittedly one that falls far short of what many of us would have liked to see. Blowing that chance up for some possible future healthcare panacea is just as immoral in a priori terms, as there are real people who will suffer while we place our trust in the American healthcare system to break down and then Congress to step in and fix it. Needless to say, while the former is certainly decent bet, the latter is pure fantasy. While imperfect, the current bill helps a great number of people, an that is the true standard on which it needs to be judged.

New decade, new post

2010-01-01T21:44:00.003-06:00

So, somehow since this blog was last updated the decade managed to end. This is the point where I'm supposed to say how terrible it was, but despite the obvious issues we all had to deal with, I can't complain about the past ten years personally. Indeed, what with meeting the wife, fathering a small but energetic human child, getting what might become a longterm job, and buying a house, it was a fairly productive decade.

No, if there is something that needs to be complained about, it is not my own life but rather those who have managed to make so many others miserable for the past ten years, draining their investments (see point #2), driving them out of their homes, and creating all sorts of other problems. For once, I'm actually not talking about Republicans, who are currently out of power and seemingly intent on staying that way. No, as a new decade begins, I want to start it off, and restart this blog, by complaining about Baby Boomers, particularly the early cohort born between 1946 and 1955 (specific individuals, of course, are exempt, this is a generational thing I'm talking about). In the 70's, they gave us disco. In the 80's, greed was good. In the 90's, they didn't give us the internet boom, as the most useful development of my lifetime was the work of the much maligned Gen X. In the aughts, they gave us W. In '08, we gave them Obama. Is there really any debate on which side stuck it to whom?

Seriously, for all the attention paid to "Gen X slackers" a while back, you'll find very few as the CEOs of the banks that managed to crash the world economy, and Ben Bernanke is clearly a boomer. We do slack in our opposition to gay marriage, admittedly, but that hardly counts against us. The boomers can have their teabags, as far as I'm concerned, so long as we get to count Ta-Nehisi Coates in our column. Seriously, if you take the time to read this, you should take the time to read him.

And yet, with all that said about past generations, I'm a little concerned where the world is going to end up once we're in charge, since the kids these days, to put on my fogie hat, like a LOT of handholding and expect quite a bit of instant gratification I'm not really sure we'll be able to provide. At some point, they are not going to settle for being cast into reality TV shows and start to want results, like an end to global warming, and I hope we are up to the task...

In our next installment, I'll perform something of a feat for myself and describe what is was like to argue in favor of health care reform from the right side of the argument. Until, then, I'll leave you with this:

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Now playing: Green Day - My Generation
via FoxyTunes

A Dying Breed

2008-02-16T12:32:00.001-06:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27cow-t.html?_r=2&sq=ankole%20cattle&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=all

GERSHOM MUGIRA COMES from a long line of cattle-keepers. His people, the Bahima, are thought to have migrated into the hilly grasslands of western Uganda more than a thousand years ago, alongside a hardy breed of longhorns known as the Ankole. For centuries, man and beast subsisted there in a tight symbiotic embrace. Mugira’s nomadic ancestors wandered in search of fresh pasture for their cattle, which in turn provided them with milk. It is only within the last few generations that most Bahima have accepted the concept of private property. Mugira’s family lives on a 500-acre ranch, and one sunny day in November, the wiry 26-year-old showed me around, explaining, with some sadness but more pragmatism, why the Ankole breed that sustained his forebears for so many generations is now being driven to extinction.

Ankoles play an important role among Uganda’s pastoral people, but they produce much less milk than imported breeds.

As we walked down the sloped valley path that led to a watering hole, we found a few cows lolling beneath a flat-topped acacia. They looked like the kind of cattle you might encounter in Wisconsin: plump and hornless creatures with dappled black-and-white coats. Mugira, a high-school graduate, was wearing a pair of fashionably baggy jeans and spiffy white sneakers. To a modern African like himself, he said, the most desirable cattle were the American type: the Holsteins.

In recent decades, global trade, sophisticated marketing, artificial insemination and the demands of agricultural economics have transformed the Holstein into the world’s predominant dairy breed. Indigenous animals like East Africa’s sinewy Ankole, the product of centuries of selection for traits adapted to harsh conditions, are struggling to compete with foreign imports bred for maximal production. This worries some scientists. The world’s food supply is increasingly dependent on a small and narrowing list of highly engineered breeds: the Holstein, the Large White pig and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens. There’s a risk that future diseases could ravage these homogeneous animal populations. Poor countries, which possess much of the world’s vanishing biodiversity, may also be discarding breeds that possess undiscovered genetic advantages. But farmers like Mugira say they can’t afford to wait for science. And so, on the African savanna, a competition for survival is underway.

Mugira was just about to tell me what made the Holsteins so valuable when suddenly, Dr. Grace Asiimwe, a veterinarian and my guide through western Uganda’s ranchlands, shouted, “The Ankoles are coming!”

In the distance, I glimpsed a bobbing line of white horns swooping down the hillside. Without a word, Mugira dashed down the dirt path, hopped over a fallen tree branch and disappeared around the side of a huge weed-covered anthill. “He has to keep them separated,” Asiimwe told me, lest the Ankoles gore the Holsteins. We found Mugira by the watering hole, whistling and waving a wooden switch called an enkoni, frantically trying to keep his Ankoles away. His herdsmen were supposed to bring the two contingents to the water at different times, but someone made a mistake.

“You know, in Uganda, we have to look for survival of the fittest,” Mugira said once he finished sorting out the confusion. “These ones, they are the fittest,” he went on to say, gesturing toward his Holsteins. In physical terms, there was really no contest between the tough Ankoles and the fussy foreign cattle, which were always hungry and often sick. But the foreigners possessed arguably the single most important adaptive trait for livestock: they made money. Holsteins are lactating behemoths. In an African setting, a good one can produce 20 or 30 times as much milk as an Ankole.

Mugira explained that, unlike most of his peers, he was holding onto some longhorns, mostly for sentimental reasons. His father, who died in 2003, loved his Ankoles. One of them wandered over and nuzzled Mugira, who placed his hand gently on its forehead. In the days before Christianity arrived in this part of Africa, the Bahima made offerings of milk to herdsman gods. Their language contains a vast catalog of cattle names, which refer to characteristics like color and hide pattern. This cow was called Kiroko, indicating it had some white patches on its face. The ideal Ankole, Mugira told me, has a lustrous brown coat and gleaming horns that curve out and then inward, forming a shape like a lyre. “They are naturally good,” Mugira said. “They are beautiful. In our culture we preferred these. But then we developed another culture, from Western culture.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency of the United Nations, recently reported that at least 20 percent of the world’s estimated 7,600 livestock breeds are in danger of extinction. Experts are warning of a potential “meltdown” in global genetic diversity. Yet the plight of the Ankole illustrates the difficulty of balancing the conflicting goals of animal conservation and human prosperity. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s rural poor, some 630 million people, derive a substantial percentage of their income from livestock. Increase the productivity of these animals, development specialists say, and you improve dire living standards. The World Bank recently published a report saying it was time to place farming “afresh at the center of the development agenda.” Highly productive livestock breeds, the World Bank asserts, are playing an important role in alleviating poverty.

“You do have local animals with various kinds of disease resistance and whatever other kinds of things you don’t want to do away with,” said Chris Delgado, an agriculture policy adviser at the World Bank. “But there’s a problem: They are kept by very poor people, and they don’t want to stay poor.”

Every cow in the world is the product of some human agency. The extinct feral ancestor of all cattle, the auroch, was a fearsome horned creature that could grow to be six feet tall. There are two theories about the taming of wild aurochs. The traditional view holds that it happened around 6000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent. But recent archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that domestication may have first occurred in Africa 2,000 years earlier, in the then-lush plains of the eastern Sahara. Then, beginning around 2,000 years ago, Arab merchants introduced humped cattle of Indian origin to East Africa, which were crossed with the indigenous longhorns to produce breeds like the Ankole.

For millennia, changing a breed’s genetics through husbandry required a long trial-and-error process. But today it can happen in an evolutionary eye blink. Multinational breeding companies, many of them based in the United States, collect semen from prime bulls, freeze it and export it to the developing world. Official estimates say there are about three million Ankole cattle in Uganda and smaller populations in bordering nations. An unknown — though by all accounts large — percentage of them are in the process of being turned into something else. After one cross with a Holstein, the brown Ankole cow will produce a black calf with darkened horns. After two, the horns will shrink and a dappled coat will appear. The third generation will basically look like American dairy cattle. With each cross, the offspring will produce more milk. The World Bank estimates that 1.8 million small-scale farmers in East Africa are benefiting from such genetic changes to their cattle and that some 100 million cows and pigs are created through artificial insemination in poor countries each year. Those numbers substantially understate the extent of genetic interchange, because half the offspring produced by artificial insemination are male and spread their genes the old-fashioned way.

To see the evolution in Ugandan dairy cattle, I visited a farmer named Jackson Sezibwa, who lives down a reddish dirt path outside the central Ugandan town of Mukono. A weather-beaten man of 46, Sezibwa greeted me in a torn, muddy shirt. He showed me to the metal-roofed stall where he keeps his Holstein, Kevina.

Before he received the cow, Sezibwa said, he was hungry and destitute. All he owned were some banana trees and a one-room house roofed with thatch. Then he and his wife were given Kevina by a charity called Heifer International. Founded in 1944 by Dan West, an Indiana farmer, Heifer’s mission is to take quality livestock to impoverished places. In Uganda, the cattle breed Heifer prefers is the Holstein. “The American cow,” said Dr. Margaret Makuru, Heifer’s deputy country director, “once you feed it, it is a factory.”

Like any factory owner, Jackson Sezibwa had to think about inputs and outputs. Making milk requires energy, which means eating grass. Holsteins require much more grass than Ankole cattle, but unlike Ankoles, which need to roam, Holsteins can be kept in pens. Sezibwa owned just a small plot of land, so the Holstein was perfect for him. All day long, Sezibwa refilled Kevina’s trough with feed, a mixture of elephant grass and protein-rich leaves and legumes that he grew in his field. Each time he milked the cow, he fed her a store-bought meal full of nutrients. Otherwise, his largest expense was medicine. Holsteins originated in Northern Europe and were taken to America in the 19th century. They don’t have any resistance to tropical diseases like trypanosomiasis — colloquially known as sleeping sickness — and East Coast Fever, which is spread by ticks.

With intense maintenance, Sezibwa’s cow functioned marvelously. Kevina churned out around six and a half gallons of milk a day. (A typical Ankole would have given him between a quarter and a half gallon.) His family drank some of the milk, and he sold the rest, netting around $100 a month after expenses. In a country where an estimated 85 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day, that’s substantial income. The money finances school for Sezibwa’s six children. There were ancillary benefits too. Kevina was impregnated four times via artificial insemination. Sezibwa gave away her first calf to a neighbor, in keeping with Heifer’s philosophy of “passing the gift.” The next two — both males — he sold to farmers eager to acquire Holstein genetics, making enough profit to build himself a nice brick house. He kept the fourth calf, another female, for the future. Heifer also paid to install an underground system that harnessed methane from the cows’ manure to power gas burners and a light inside his house.

Jackson Sezibwa is just one man, but Uganda’s economy is made up of millions like him. Agriculture accounts for 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and 10 percent of that comes from the livestock sector. The World Bank’s October report claimed that “G.D.P. growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty” as other types of growth. The report pointed out that the industrialization of Europe and North America that began in the late 18th century was preceded by a period of farming innovation, and that the Green Revolution that took place between the 1940s and 1960s catalyzed Asia’s fantastic economic growth.

During the Green Revolution, scientists invented high-yielding strains of corn, wheat and rice and planted them around the third world, and they also promoted the introduction of better livestock. But then, broadly speaking, foreign-aid donors moved away from such interventions, which were viewed as meddling with the free market, and shifted financing priorities to areas like education and AIDS. Today, even after recent increases, the World Bank devotes less than 10 percent of its development assistance to agriculture, down from 30 percent a quarter-century ago. Recently, the notion of helping poor farmers by making farming more lucrative has been dusted off by a new generation of economists. And Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation have promised to finance a second Green Revolution. But governmental aid agencies have been slower to rediscover the importance of agriculture. Farming initiatives now account for just 4 percent of the assistance distributed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of the world’s most developed nations.

The U.S. Agency for International Development budgeted $392 million for agricultural programs last year, including a significant proportion to promote milk production. Crossbreeding is an important component of its strategy. In Uganda, where the agency recently completed a five-year, $8 million dairy-modernization project, about half the money went toward artificial insemination. One partner in the program was Land O’Lakes International Development, the aid arm of the Minnesota butter company. “We should be able to do farming as a business, not sentimentally,” said Dr. Paul Kimbugwe, the Land O’Lakes country manager. “Making money means you have to crossbreed. And crossbreeding means that you are doing away with the genetics of that cow,” meaning the Ankole, “which I also encourage.”

Not everyone in Uganda, however, agrees that the foreign breeds are an upgrade. President Yoweri Museveni once imposed a ban on imported semen. Museveni belongs to the Bahima ethnic group. When he was a baby, in a sort of Bahima baptism ritual, his parents placed him on the back of an Ankole cow with a mock bow and arrow, as if to commit him symbolically to the defense of the family’s herd. Museveni, now in his 60s, still owns the descendants of that very cow, and he retains a strong bond to the Ankole breed. Two years ago, I accompanied a group of Ugandan journalists on a daylong trip to one of the president’s private ranches, where he proudly showed us his 4,000-strong herd of Ankole cattle. At one point, a reporter asked if the ranch had any Holsteins. “No, those are pollution,” Museveni replied. “These,” he said, referring to his Ankoles, “the genetic material is superior.”

If the Ankole cattle are able to mount a comeback, it will be because circumstances have endowed them with a unique set of defenses, both evolutionary and political. Members of President Museveni’s ethnic group populate the upper ranks of Uganda’s government. Some prominent Bahima have started an organization devoted to preserving Ankoles, under the patronage of a one-eyed army general who spends his free time painting rapturous portraits of cows. One afternoon, at a pricey restaurant in Kampala, I had lunch with the organization’s chairman, Samuel Mugasi. Dressed in a dapper gray suit and a French-cuffed pale blue shirt, he told me he was a civil servant and part-time rancher.

“They have tasted the money,” Mugasi said of the farmers who switched to Holsteins. “They are excited about having these big earnings, and they are forgetting the cultural aspect.”

Kimbugwe, the Land O’Lakes representative, has a ready reply to such arguments. “Culture — fine, it’s good to have,” he said. “But first, the stomachs.” He views the Ankole as an atavistic indulgence for the country’s elite. Once, cattle were like currency, and the wealthy displayed their status by maintaining huge free-ranging herds. Competition for land is forcing cows onto smaller pastures. Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world, and despite its poverty and diseases like AIDS, the population has more than doubled since 1980. There’s a long history of tension between the Bahima and an agriculturalist ethnic group, the Bairu, which coexist in western Uganda, at times less than happily.

This is a common dynamic across Africa. In Rwanda, a similar ethnic conflict between cattle-keeping Tutsis and farming Hutus culminated in genocide in 1994. A number of experts say the “ethnic” war in Darfur is really a fight over grass. Uganda has not experienced that level of conflict, but the local newspapers are filled with stories of violent skirmishes between farmers and encroaching pastoralists. This is one reason that some say Holsteins represent the future. Rwanda, now ruled by longhorn-loving Tutsis but trying to address the causes of the genocide, is enthusiastically encouraging the breed’s introduction, with assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

One of the biggest dairy farmers in western Uganda, Kezekia Rwabuhenda, told me he was the first person in his area to adopt Holsteins, back in the 1970s. At the time, he said, many traditionalists maligned him, saying he was conspiring to “slaughter” the cattle they loved. “Afterwards, when they realized what the cross was producing, they started visiting me, asking for a bull,” he said through a translator. The elderly rancher still kept a hundred Ankoles, but they were for his wife, who was attached to them. He was sure that when he died, his children would dispatch them all to the butcher shop.

No one knows how many Ankole cattle exist. “We’ve been saying the Ankoles are 50 percent of the national herd, but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” said Dr. Denis Mpairwe, an animal scientist at Uganda’s Makerere University. “The crossbreeding the last five years has been so intense.” The International Livestock Research Institute predicts that if present trends continue, the Ankoles could go extinct within 50 years. But Mpairwe says he believes it could happen much sooner.

I went with Mpairwe to visit Uganda’s cattle country earlier this fall, along with Dr. Okeyo Mwai, a Kenyan biotechnology specialist who works for the livestock institute. I lived in Uganda between 2002 and 2004, and I couldn’t believe the change. Hillsides where graceful brown Ankoles once grazed by the hundreds were now dotted black and white. “Look at the calves,” Mwai said, as our pickup truck passed a herd. “Almost 100 percent are crosses.” He pointed up toward the hilltops, normally gently rounded and green, but now sandy in large patches from overgrazing. The two scientists are studying how high-producing cattle interact with the African ecosystem. If cows are like factories, you could say an Ankole is powered by a water wheel, while the Holstein requires a nuclear reactor.

The principle of the “tragedy of the commons,” perhaps the most famous metaphor in ecology, is a cattle parable. It was first described by a 19th-century British economist and popularized by the biologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 Science magazine essay about human overpopulation. Hardin was trying to refute the view that an unregulated free market invariably produces beneficial outcomes. “Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin wrote. The benefit of adding a single calf went to each individual farmer, while the cost of adding that calf (the grass it would consume) would be distributed to all pasture users. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited,” he wrote. The commons, he predicted, would inevitably be picked clean.

With the introduction of the Holsteins, something similar seems to be happening in Uganda. Farmers aren’t literally increasing the sizes of their herds, but they are creating herds that consume unsustainable amounts of dwindling resources. And something else is being obliterated: genes. Each time a farmer crossbreeds his Ankoles, a little of the country’s stockpile of adaptive traits disappears. It isn’t easy to measure genetic “dilution.” What is evident, however, is that the Ankoles possess much worth saving. For instance, their horns, often seen as ornaments, actually disperse excess body heat.

Holsteins don’t like heat. While a poorly adapted animal can survive for years in a harsh ecosystem, even a slight worsening of their conditions can have devastating effects. One rancher I met, John Kamiisi, told me that he’d lost his herd of Holsteins in a 1999 drought. He only avoided ruin because he kept some Ankoles, which could live on less water. Kamiisi told me he loved his sturdy Ankole bull “like my own life” but said he was starting to crossbreed again for financial reasons. Another elderly rancher said his whole Holstein herd died during Idi Amin’s dictatorship, when chaos and inflation made it difficult to buy the imported medicines the cattle needed. He started again with a few Ankoles his neighbors gave him out of pity.

“For countries on the equator, I think in almost all cases the Holstein is very poorly suited — maybe the least-suited breed,” says Dr. Les Hansen, a professor at the University of Minnesota and a leading expert in cattle genetics. Often farmers are making decisions that are informed not by science, he said, but by sales pitches devised by multinational breeding concerns. “As I travel the world,” Hansen adds, “my biggest challenge is countering all of the misleading marketing propaganda.”

The world market in cattle breeding is controlled by a handful of companies, several of them based in the United States. The companies maintain facilities where they extract semen from bulls, keep genetic databases, publish rankings and cultivate a sort of bovine star system. Two legendary Holsteins, Chief, born in California in 1962, and Elevation, born in Virginia in 1965, fathered tens of thousands of offspring in their lifetimes — and beyond, since their sperm was cryogenically frozen for future use.

Hansen’s research suggests that every Holstein is descended from Chief and Elevation, and that 30 percent of all the Holstein genes in the world are traceable to those two bulls. That has created a serious problem with inbreeding, which has adverse effects on fertility and mortality. But overseas markets like Africa are, so to speak, virgin territory. According to industry figures, American companies exported 10 million “doses” of cattle semen in 2006. In Uganda, a company called World-Wide Sires, the international marketing arm of two American breeding cooperatives, is working with aid agencies to increase dairy production.

“The proof is in the bucket,” said George Nuwagira, a dairy farmer who is also the World-Wide Sires sales representative for western Uganda. I met him one morning in the market town of Kabwohe. A stout, garrulous fellow, he was wearing a yellow baseball cap with a smiling cartoon cow on it. He ushered me into his insemination center, a narrow tumbledown storefront that also sold sodas. At one end stood a wooden counter that was decorated with a flier advertising a bull named Earl, “the Dairyman’s Dream,” which pictured Earl’s daughters posed in such a way as to accentuate their enormous milk-swollen udders. Behind the counter sat a metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen. Nuwagira unscrewed its cap, and a thick cloud of white vapor billowed out. He retrieved a cluster of brightly colored plastic straws filled with premium semen.

We were at the far end of the global semen supply chain. Nuwagira handed me an empty green straw. It was marked with the name “Theseus” and a long serial number, which indicated that the semen it had contained was collected at a facility near Plain City, Ohio, on Dec. 30, 2004. Three weeks before, he used Theseus’ semen to impregnate one of his own Holsteins.

Nuwagira took me to see the expectant mother. On the bumpy ride to his farmland in a breathtaking green valley, he told me that he was from the west’s agriculturalist ethnic group, not the Bahima. He didn’t care about the Ankole. “To me as a modern farmer, the horns don’t mean anything,” Nuwagira said. He didn’t name his cows like the Bahima but instead referred to them by numbers. He told me he owned just 35. “You know, it was used as a status symbol in the past, to have so many head of cattle,” he said. “Those who had hundreds wouldn’t sit with those who had less than 30. But these days, things have changed. When you talk of animals they don’t ask you the numbers. They ask you the production.”

Nuwagira’s biggest problem was getting his product to market. “You feed them, they will give you the volumes, but there are times when we find we are stuck having nowhere to sell it,” he explained. Milk is perishable, and Uganda is a country where roads are bad and refrigeration is rare. The dairy trade in rural areas is largely controlled by bicycle vendors who sell raw milk from aluminum jugs. There used to be a more sophisticated network of government-affiliated dairy cooperatives, but most of these were dismantled in the 1990s, during a World Bank push for market liberalization. The private sector was supposed to fill the gap but never did. Anyway, some Ugandan tribes don’t drink milk. They’re lactose-intolerant.

Crossbreeding follows the logic of the arms race. All the ranchers I met complained that Holsteins required expensive upkeep, and many didn’t want to abandon tradition. But they’ve had to change because their neighbors are changing. The volume of milk produced in Uganda doubled between 1993 and 2003, but in the absence of a surge in demand or improved delivery systems, the product has literally flooded the market. As the price per liter has fallen, dairy farmers have had to rearm with Holsteins just to maintain their usual profit margins. International organizations realize that increased productivity means little if it’s not accompanied by market growth. That’s why the U.S. Agency for International Development is spending millions across Africa to promote dairy cooperatives and pay for advertisements inspired by America’s famous “Got Milk?” campaign. But changing distribution and diets isn’t as easy as changing breeds. “A lot of consumers don’t understand how important milk is,” says Jim Yazman, a livestock specialist with the agency.

Economic forces can push a breed to extinction with frightening swiftness. In Vietnam, where pigs are the most important livestock species and the government has encouraged leaner foreign breeds, the percentage of indigenous sows has fallen to 28 percent from 72 percent since 1994, and 13 of the 15 local breeds are classified as either extinct or in danger. There were several million Red Maasai sheep in Kenya until the 1970s. Then, in just 15 years, indiscriminate crossbreeding with woollier imported sheep nearly drove them out of existence. But the wool sheep fared poorly in the Kenyan environment, in part because of intestinal parasites to which the Red Maasai were resistant. By the time that was discovered, though, purebred Red Maasai were almost impossible to find.

Many tropical breeds may possess unique adaptive traits. The problem is, we don’t know what is being lost. Earlier this year, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization released its first-ever global assessment of biodiversity in livestock. While data on many breeds are scant, the report found that over the last six years, an average of one breed a month has gone extinct. “The threat is imminent,” says Danielle Nierenberg, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental group. “Just getting milk and meat into people’s mouths is not the answer.”

As the world’s climate warms, and the environment becomes more inhospitable to the major breeds, humanity might need the genes that allow animals like the Ankoles to flourish in the African heat. The challenge is to safeguard the resource. There are two possible approaches: putting the animals in cold storage, or changing the economic equation. Proponents of the first option desire something like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a doomsday depository for plant species that an international consortium is building in the Arctic Circle. But storing sperm and embryos is far more expensive and technically difficult. Biodiversity advocates say that it would be preferable, anyway, for breeds like the Ankole to go on living in their pastures. The most obvious way to do that would be to create incentives to entice farmers to keep them. But even those who want to save endangered breeds recognize that subsidizing unproductive livestock in hungry countries is problematic. In November, at a conference sponsored by the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, Dr. Edward Rege, the organization’s biotechnology director, gave a speech listing several “inconvenient facts” about conventional wisdom in the field, adding that conservation approaches can effectively amount to “saying that farmers should remain poor.”

The best hope for the Ankoles may reside at a modest, terraced complex on a breezy hillside in Uganda overlooking Lake Victoria in the old colonial town of Entebbe. It was constructed by the British in 1960, at the height of the Green Revolution, as an artificial-insemination center and a staging ground for introducing new breeds — animals that mostly died off during the subsequent wars and dictatorships. Now called the National Animal Genetic Resources Center and Databank, the facility’s new mission is to save indigenous animals like the Ankoles by giving them better care and selectively breeding them to compete in production. The center keeps a dozen bulls of different breeds, including two immense Ankoles that once belonged to President Museveni. Twice a week, technicians collect semen, which is used to inseminate cows at government farms or else packaged and sold directly to farmers. If it’s successful, the program could offer a model to other developing nations. If, on the other hand, the Ankole cattle can’t be saved even with such government support, it’s difficult to imagine how any threatened breed will survive.

“They can produce milk and they put on meat,” said Dr. Dan Semambo, the center’s executive director. “People don’t know what they have.”

Ugandans rave about the fresh milk out west, and every rancher I visited there served me a cup. It has a delicious sweet thickness. No matter how well nourished they are, though, the Ankoles probably can’t produce as much milk as the Holsteins. Instead, the breed’s salvation could lie in the slaughterhouse. President Museveni says he believes that Ankoles make exceptional beef cattle and wants to export their meat. Some studies suggest that Ankole beef is unusually lean and low in cholesterol. Mpairwe and his colleagues at Makerere University are completing a study in which Ankoles and crossbreeds were kept on nutrient-rich diets. In early December, the cattle were slaughtered and an “expert panel” of faculty and students conducted a taste test, with encouraging results.

Shortly before I left Uganda, I convened an expert panel of my own. We met one evening at Le Petit Bistro, a European-owned restaurant that serves Kampala’s best steak. While we waited for our orders, I went back to the kitchen to meet the cook, Everest Neretse, who was wearing a white chef’s jacket and flip-flops. He told me he came from the west. “Ankole cattle, they are the best,” he said. “I can tell in the tenderness.” I had my filet with a little garlic butter. When I cut into it, rich reddish juices spilled out, and the texture was so soft that I hardly needed to chew. It was almost as if you could taste the contentment of an unbounded life on the open range. The panel agreed: it was extraordinary, it was beautiful and in no time every trace of the Ankole was gone.

To continue the theme of M&M's but bringing in Monkeys...

2007-11-06T20:08:00.000-06:00

Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: November 6, 2007

For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — while our friends and family are saying,

“Well... ”

This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”

If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.

The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm, carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor radio.

Then they were given a choice between two items they considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away), they were asked to rate all the items again.

Suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.

So, apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.

Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.

The monkey seemed to be coping the same way humans do. When you reject the toaster, you could spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, and that phenomenon, much less common, is called buyer’s remorse. (For more on that, go to www.tierneylab.com).

But in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.

Of course, when you see others engaging in this sort of rationalization, it can look silly or pathological, as if they have a desperate need to justify themselves or are cynically telling lies they couldn’t possibly believe themselves. But you don’t expect to see such high-level mental contortions in 4-year-olds or monkeys.

As the Yale researchers write, these results indicate either that monkeys and children have “richer motivational complexity” than we realize, or our ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance are “mechanistically simpler than previously thought.” Another psychologist, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests it’s the latter.

“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” he says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”

The new results jibe with those of a dissonance experiment that Dr. Lieberman and colleagues did with amnesiacs, people with impaired short-term memories, who were asked to rank an assortment of paintings. Then they chose among selected ones and ranked the whole group again. By the second time they ranked the paintings, they couldn’t consciously recall their earlier rankings or their choices, so they presumably didn’t have a psychic need to rewrite history.

Yet they showed as much new disdain for the paintings they’d rejected as did a control group with normal memories. Apparently, the rejections registered in some unconscious way, so that the amnesiacs rationalized their decisions even though they couldn’t remember them.

The compulsion to justify decisions may seem irrational, and maybe petty, too, like the fox in Aesop’s fable who stopped trying for the grapes and promptly told himself they were sour anyway. But perhaps Aesop didn’t appreciate the evolutionary utility of this behavior for humans as well as animals.

Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal.

And if you are the owner of a yellow gas-guzzler, you might as well convince yourself that the sensible blue car you passed up was an ugly bore. Aesop may call it sour grapes; you can call it moving on. Maybe your unconscious realizes you don’t have time for buyer’s remorse. You’ve got car payments to make.

2007-11-04T19:11:00.001-06:00

I can't claim this as my own.... but I still found it amusing.

M&M Evolution theory

M&M's: The Theory of Evolution

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species.

To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger,I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theatre of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to: M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc. Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

The cat's in the cradle...

2007-09-16T11:55:00.000-06:00

So, one week into fatherhood, and everyone seems to have survived the experience relatively unscathed. We've had our first visit from the grandparents, our first bath (and second one, for that matter),

our first walk around the neighborhood, and our first Jewish holiday. For even more photos and videos, you can always go to our flickr and youtube pages, respectively.

So, you ask, how is fatherhood? Honestly, it's great, and the only issue whatsoever has been the lack of sleep, which is slowly getting better itself. I realize that my wife is doing most of the hard work, just like she's been doing since the pregnancy began, but from my perspective, fatherhood is wonderful. The baby is adorable, she cries at times but not really that loudly yet, and she's just ridiculously adorable at times:

It's just a really rewarding experience, and I am more than happy to trade a few hours of sleep per night for it. That said, having family in to help out is probably a crucial element of my current sanity, since nothing really compares with years of accumulated experience. My mom couldn't stop laughing at how much I bought into the rules they drilled into us at the hospital, since I just didn't know which were critical and which were more along the lines of useful guidelines. I'm sure I'll get better at this, and I'm sure there will be more difficult times, but I have to say that while you can't inherently prepare for fatherhood, if you do try to prepare yourself, it's really great.

Most surprisingly useful item: Our battery-powered multi-event timer. My mom couldn't stop teasing me about measuring how long we took between feedings, diaper changes, and my wife's pain meds (tylenol, BTW!) , but honestly at this point I no longer trust my memory enough to remember what happened several hours ago at all times. This way, the baby doesn't go all day between diaper changes (she takes care of reminding us to feed her), and the wife doesn't have to go all afternoon without at least taking the edge off the discomfort. This is not to put down all the other things we got that we knew would be useful, just a note about the one whose importance we hadn't realized in advance. The runner up is the super-fuzzy Baby Elmo blanket (available at Kohl's), which Leila just adores.

Is fatherhood lonely? Maybe someday, but certainly not yet. It's busy certainly, especially given that I'm getting spectacularly inefficient at doing things, but the few moments I've had to myself the past week have been fine. In the end, there's now double the nuclear family members to spend time with, and that's fine with me.

We get it, you're tired...: Having just seen the movie The Lookout, I've noticed that fatigue over a few days seems to mimic the symptoms of a light-to-moderate traumatic brain injury. My attention span is significantly lower than normal, and sequencing out multi-step tasks has gotten to be a non-trivial issue. I see why they recommend that new parents try not to do too much. It's not just about exhaustion, it's also a matter of safety, in that undertaking complex tasks means that they might not be accomplished fully, and are best left untried. Thankfully, sleep seems to cure these problems, and I'm already feeling a bit more up to speed now tat Leila is coming much closer to sleeping through the night but for feeding breaks/diaper changes.

Is there an evolutionary reaction where babies are just so adorable that you have to protect and care for them? Yes.

What about when they cry? I suppose this will get much worse when her lungs develop, but for now, it's still too cute for words when Leila is upset, and since she generally stops before too long, usually because we alleviate the problem, it just doesn't upset us at all when she cries.

Parents vs. non-parents? We undertook this whole process well aware of what we were getting into, and I'd recommend that when possible. Babies are a ton of work, and she's only eight days old. If someone doesn't want to have kids, they have my full blessing. It's a completely valid choice, and I place no stock in the idea that we must always give in to our evolutionary drives. Still, since parenthood is built into our genes, I really don't have any respect for the position that the society has no responsibility for taking care of what parents voluntarily bring on themselves. Parenthood is tough, and society benefits by making things easier on people. The Family and Medical Leave act is only a bare minimum, in that it allows for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, forcing many people to go back to work while there children really still need fulltime care. Just like the young pay social security so that the elderly may lead happier lives, so should society ensure that children lead happier lives. It's not a responsibility to the parents, but to the children, who otherwise have no say in the matter. Frankly, it's a moral obligation, and I just can't think of a way to construct a counter-argument that wouldn't leave me speechless. Remember, be good to kids, because they are going to grow up and be in a position to decide our fate. Mutually assured destruction is no way to deal with generational issues. More soon, once I sleep some more...

PS- What about poop? Needless to say, she poops a lot. In the hospital, I got to watch her first poop live, commenting that it was the most bizarre combination of disgusting yet fascinating I had ever seen. Thankfully, baby poop doesn't smell if a baby's diet consists entirely of breast milk. Not even a bit. Because of this, diaper changes are really no worse than cleaning up any kind of liquid spill. Of all the issues that new parents have to deal with, diapers are far easier and more pleasant that I would have imagined. Honestly, the only thing is that diaper changes take a lot of time, as do feedings, baths, and everything else involving a baby. Nothing is fast, but most things aren't as bad as one might have otherwise thought, I suppose.

Some news

2007-09-08T03:00:00.001-06:00

Look here!

2007-09-06T12:30:00.000-06:00

I would argue that I'm a recovering Catholic, not a lapsed one.... but in truth I'm too apathetic to be recovering. I never really had a "bad" catholic experiences, never had a priest molest me, never had a nun try to break my knuckles, or anything of that nature. I pretty much just accepted the whole church thing as a bizarre accident of history, but then my Mom went to church primarily to watch babies.

In any case, I did have an interesting exchange recently that I felt was... thought provoking, for me at least. This all happened on myspace, and I won't name names....but it essentially went down like this:

One individual, an alum of VT, was complaining about how much attention the VT football season opener was focused on the tragic events of this past spring. Furthermore, they spent a great deal of time discussing the actions of one young man who put himself in harms way to barricade a door against the gunman. These actions apparently saved his life, and many others. That poster was upset because she felt the young man was simply trying to save his own ass:
here is the post:

So right now, I'm watching the VT vs. ECU game...and a few minutes ago, Erin Andrews (who's a stupid whore anyway) was interviewing a VT student who was wounded during the shootings back in April. She said to him, "You were one of the heroes who was wounded during your German class...and then you sacrificed yourself and barricaded the door. Thank you."

I'm sorry, but the people who were wounded and shot were not heroes. They were victims...of a tragic event...but that's it. And hearing this over and over and over again, while our soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan each day...does nothing more but make me resentful and hateful towards Virginia Tech and a lot of other people.

Heroes are the people who have CHOSEN to join our military...knowing full well that at any moment, they could be called to leave their families and loved ones for over a year...and spend that time in a combat zone...sleeping on the ground, avoiding IEDs, eating shit for dinner, etc. etc. etc.

They are the ones who have SACRIFICED their time and lives to save others -- even if they're not helping rid this country of terrorists and attacks, they ARE serving so that the rest of you don't have to. They're allowing YOU to go out to dinner...to sleep in a comfy bed...to go out to the bars for happy hour. Yet not once during this entire game has there been ANY mention of the sacrifices of our servicemen and women.

I love football, but I feel such hatred towards these people right now...because, win or lose, they get to go home to their loved ones and have a drink...while the rest of us are stuck here for months on end, waiting for those we love to come home to us. So don't fucking talk to me about the sacrifices other people are making...none of you has any clue about the true meaning of that word.

Umm.... okay. Now here was the response of my lovely wife to be:

I disagree with you here. This kid was just a college student (no basic training to prepare him to go into battle), yet he put himself on the line to barricade the door, allowing other kids to freak out and focus on saving their own hide... Not that others had a whole lot of options, but I do see a huge difference between those victims who sought to save their own lives by finding a better hiding spot or jumping out of windows or whatever and those heroes who put their own lives on the line to allow those others more time to save their own hides.

I think you're being pretty one sided here -- this kid did what you praise our soldiers for doing (put his life on the line to protect others), but without having had the chance to choose whether or not to sign up to go into a battle zone and without having special training to prepare him to react effectively in such a situation. How is that not a hero?

I agree that media coverage of the war has been pretty crappy. Most news outlets in the US are sickenly biased and hardly ever show any important news (unless you count Paris Hilton's latest zit as more important than the current death toll of US soldiers in Iraq). But I also think it's pretty asinine to suggest that someone has to join the military and leave their loved ones sitting at home for months or years to be worthy of being praised for doing something heroic.

Now to put things into context, the first poster is a cultural anthropologist, someone trained in cultural sensitivity.....in theory. The second is also a cultural anthropologist, one I'm quite fond of , disagreeing but trying to be respectful to her friend. Now the first poster has a boyfriend who is currently serving in Iraq. That individual posted this response:

That guy was obviously protecting his own ass. Heroes in the classroom..... we are all over here laughing at that situation. Ive never heard so much whining and bitching and "we are all hokies" bullshit in my life. People in africa have their entire village wiped out by rebels on a daily basis. There are constant terrorist attacks on those that live in Isreal, and we are supposed to call this guy a hero. Grow up people and get out of your bubble

Ok, now...this man is a soldier, in Iraq at the moment. I thought about it for a while and wrote the following response myself:

Well, what it comes down to is how one defines a hero. I would argue that someone who tries to keep his head together in a disaster and tries to help the people around him is a hero. The cops, firemen, and simple civilians running into the World Trade Center were heroes by any sane definition. People diving into the river and pulling an entire bus load of children out of the river in Minneapolis are heroes. Every last one of them. Soldiers defending their country are heroes. Its not a matter of being in a bubble, nor is it in any way a comment on any aspect of the trials and conditions of American Soldiers in Iraq, the people in Darfur just trying to survive, or anyone else.

Hero is a very subjective term. The fact that at least some of the people at VT put themselves in the line of fire to help save people does earn them the label of being a hero. Yes situations in Iraq an Afghanistan forces many people to be heroes, because they are nations in turmoil. No, the kid in question has not, as far as I know, joined the military. So what. Maybe on a scale of heroism he isn't the greatest hero mankind has ever seen. So what.

A hero might be a Palestinian woman trying to get food to her children through a Lebanese blockade, an Israeli soldier throwing themselves over a child to protect her from a car bomb. But at least in a small way, the ambulance drivers who drive into blinding snowstorms to help save lives are also heroes.

This in no way denigrates our soldiers, like you, who have volunteered to serve our country over seas in a time of conflict. If nothing else it raises the bar and shows the true selfless spirit of the American Soldiers, that they choose to put themselves into harms way.

The world is filled with heroes of all sorts. I for one am glad of that. This is not living in a bubble, it is seeing the range of good that the human spirit can attain, if for no other reason than to balance the evil.

That being said, the media has not done a good job informing Americans of the true range of information of the War. But I feel that is a completely different discussion.

Now there hasn't been any kind of reply to my post, I don't think there will be. Now I was trying very hard to be respectful, but the question remains, how do you approach a discussion like this? This exchange bothered me. It bothered me that someone would find the label of someone reacting, and probably saving many lives, not in the least his own, to be insulting. Why would this be? I have not seen any kind of social backlash to recent veterans simply commentary on the war. I realize I am not a soldier,but is this becoming one of those untouchable things? When did calling someone a hero cast doubt on soldiers in the field?

For all my problems with Bush, the administration, the excuses used to promote the war, the conduct of the war, and etc. none of this has anything to do with the men and women in our armed forces. Failure in Iraq will be due to the failure to create a stable government, not because our forces were unsuccessful. The problem I see is the inability to see context. Maybe as an anthropologist I've spent too much time in my own little world but how hard is it to see that perspective is an important thing, to see that one man's hero may not be another's. I question the presumption that there is only one path to take in order to be a hero.
--Alex

Have you ever been to American wedding? Where is the vodka, where's marinated herring?

2007-09-05T21:05:00.000-06:00

First of all, welcome to our new co-blogger. For those who know both, this is my friend Alex, not my wife's friend Alex. I have no idea what he'll write about, but I'm sure we'll find out. Though he's not a Russian Jew, I will note that he is a pretty much a lapsed Catholic, so he fits in with my lapsed Reform Judaism (which is almost exactly the same in many ways as observant Reform Judaism), and dkon's lapsed Marxism-Leninism.

Anyway, onto tonight's topic: weddings, and what they can teach us about my current predicament, er, um ... current familial situation. I'll start by attacking that favorite chestnut often repeated at weddings: "This is the happiest day of my life". No, sorry, it really isn't. The honeymoon might be, since you are finally done dealing with caterers, seating charts, complicated rituals, and a variety of prayers to intercede between family members on both sides who need to be separated...but the wedding is simply not the happiest moment in your life. This whole expression came about, as best I can tell, because it used to represent the first time one was allowed to have sex without being persecuted. Thankfully, such persecution is now on the way out, and as a result, weddings are really not the huge turning point in one's life that they used to be. Don't get me wrong, I actually had a great time at my wedding, as pictures will indicate, but I have to admit that the biggest change between before and after had much more to do with the flight to Cancun than the ring on my finger. I was pretty much committed to the relationship well before the marriage, and couldn't quite get used to the term "my wife" for a couple years afterward. For all the symbolism we would like to attach to it, in the end the wedding itself is a ceremonial rite of passage whose impact is primarily symbolic, rather than substantive. Society as a whole would be better if people would realize this, to say nothing of the benefit of forever eradicating the phrase "sanctity of marriage", especially when said by those who treated it as less than sacred, double super-especially, when that person had the New York City emergency management headquarters placed in a building known to be a terrorist target apparently so he could use it as a love nest for his mistress.

But I digress. I bring this up not to insult marriage, but rather to point out that many of the supposed turning points in our lives are much less climactic than we are led to believe. Just so no one out there is disappointed in such things when it happens to them, I should point out, with some trepidation, that finding out that your wife is pregnant may very well fit into this category. Don't get me wrong, it was exciting, but it meant that my life would be changing a full nine months into the future. In the short term, S. didn't look pregnant for a long time, she didn't have any real morning sickness (thank the deity of your choice or the lack thereof), and it basically meant that she and I both scaled back our drinking from nearly never to never and even more nearly never, respectively. For months, we knew a child was growing within her, but literally every book, website, and nurse we consulted compared it to the fruit, vegetable, or legume that it most closely matched in size. It's difficult to picture how a grape, kiwi, or nectarine will really be changing your life, and this is months into the process.

If I may be allowed a moment of misplaced Judaic chauvinism, I think I understand rather well now why Jewish law declares the quickening, or the first moment when you feel the baby move, to be the beginning of life. I think S. felt her moving a few weeks before I could, but once you finally feel your future child moving, then the tangibility of their incipient personhood hits you. By now, we can actually feel legs, feet, the butt, and all other parts sticking out (very much like this, I'm disturbed to say), and it really does seem like a small person inside there (yes, I realize that this is indeed the case). You simply can't abstract away something that kicks your hand, or something that causes rather stunningly large protuberances and indentations on your wife's stomach.

For better or worse, it seems that while many rites of passage in life are symbolic, childbirth is very demonstrably not one of them. I doubt I'll be going so far as to call it miraculous (nor "wonderfully Darwinian" while among strangers), but it is one of those things that actually sets down a marker in life, like before and after your team wins the World series or something like that. It seems as if there might be a few of those on the way for us over the next few weeks, but more on that later.

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Now playing: Gogol Bordello - American Wedding
via FoxyTunes

Umm....

2007-09-04T20:14:00.000-06:00

Hi.

This feeling of fakin' it. I still haven't shaken it.

2007-09-04T18:09:00.000-06:00

Incipient fatherhood awaits me. Admittedly, I've had basically the entire year up to this point to get used to the idea (we found out about the peanut's existence on the day before New Year's, after all). It's not that I'm particularly nervous, nor feel wholly unprepared, having been through birthing classes (cleansing breath, soothing touch, and why vomiting should be viewed as a positive thing), breastfeeding classes (tickle, tickle, pop the kid on), fatherhood classes (when bathing, use a different surface for each eye to prevent the spread of infection, and NEVER SHAKE A BABY!!!!). I've built cribs, shelving units, rockers, and had the car seat installed. I've even continued my long-running dabbling with insomnia, just to be maximally prepared.

No, what surprises me, even to this day, is the extent to which I'm beginning to realize how much parents fake it. I'm 30 now, by which point in my parents life I was 5 and 6. Good Lord, but it's hard to imagine having done this six years ago. Seriously, it makes you wonder what they were thinking...and yet, I'd like to think I turned out ok. Not to say we'll be the best parents in the world, but somehow the species has actually managed this trick for many thousands of years, and our ancestors for hundreds of millions prior. Even cats, among the laziest creatures in the world, manage to raise kittens when not consuming pounce and napping. And yet, I suspect most of them faked it too, at least at first.

Suffice it to say, this is not a knock on any of the parents I know, including my own and my co-blogger. They seem to have done/be doing a fantastic job, even though I can't imagine they had any more preparation than we managed to get, nor more sleep than we're prepared not to get. That they managed to keep their sanity in just about all cases, and in many cases their hair as well, we'll just chalk up to one of the mysteries of life.

In the end, I've tried to figure out the whole parenthood thing, and I still can't escape the conclusion that babies are a lot like cats, but you have to monitor their poop more closely and they aren't anywhere near as good at cleaning themselves. Lest this worry you, remember that my cat is certifiably neurotic and occasionally possessed by minor demons, and then consider the likely fate of our children...

To conclude, my honest and sincere thanks to my parents, and to all parents everywhere. Somehow y'all manage to do a job that seems more complicated than any task one should ask of a person, with vastly insufficient technical documentation and instructions, and much too little respect for what you do from many of the rest of us. If I've ever shown anything other than the proper respect and admiration, I'm certainly about to get my comeuppance. If I did show the proper respect and admiration and all that, well, I was probably doing it to buy your sympathy so we could get you to babysit someday. I may be faking it, after all, but I'm sneaky like that. I learned it from my cat.

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Now playing: Simon & Garfunkel - Fakin' It
via FoxyTunes

Back online

2007-09-04T17:57:00.001-06:00

Enough of the hiatus. Too many thoughts to not let them loose in the tubes of the world wide internetweb. In case I go on hiatus again, you can find much better content from Atrios and Talking Points Memo, but until then, you're stuck with me.

Please note, of course, that peanut-related content will continue at It's a Peanut, so you'll find links to parental-related stuff, like ridiculously catchy music videos, there.

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Now playing: Justin Roberts - Willy Was A Whale
via FoxyTunes

Simple answers to insipid questions

2007-06-13T07:52:00.000-06:00

From Howie Kurtz in the WaPo:

Krugman calls for focusing on the candidates' policy proposals instead. I'm all for that. But can we really make judgments about Obama and Edwards, for example, based on the differences in their health care plans?

Umm, yes. This has been the first edition to simple answers to insipid questions, inspired, of course, by Atrios.

Odds and ends

2007-06-10T18:46:00.000-06:00

I'm busy getting ready to watch The Sopranos' final episode, but wanted to pass along a link to an article about how lightening up roofing and highway materials is a vastly useful environmental technique, since much less heat is absorbed, especially in cities. All it takes is chalk dust. Apparently, the reason we don't do this is because it's too simple to sound impressive. From Mark Kleiman, via Matt Yglesias:

Of course, if we had political reporters who weren't pig-ignorant about science and technology, this wouldn't be as significant a problem as it is. And if politicians weren't in the habit of offering trivial pseudo-solutions to serious problems, journalists would be less cynical about things that seem too easy. But then if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a trolley car.

This is a case where simply repeating the idea until it no longer seems funny could make a difference. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the idea to five people until they stop laughing.

Stop laughing!

By the way, lest we ever forget this, people are morons. This is a fundamental truth of human existence. It applies to those in the tech world who would impose arcane limits on us, crazy warmongering politicians like Joe Lieberman, the same crazy guy agreeing with Barack Obama that the internet is dangerous, etc....though I'll note that, closing the circle, Obama does know how to deal with pig-ignorant journalists.

The wrong man was convicted

2007-06-09T08:19:00.000-06:00

Just a quickie this morning, about last week's Repbulican debate, with actual content outsourced to the always good Paul Krugman (link is behind the NYTimes firewall, but if you have an e-mail from an .edu domain, you can see it):

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit....

[I]f there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

No Justice, No Peace

2007-06-06T08:10:00.000-06:00

Before getting started on this morning's post, I should link to a great editorial in the WaPo from a counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the good guys), arguing that since filesharing is so incredibly easy, the RIAA and universities should just bundle in a music-sharing license in with preexisting fees currently paid by universities to musicians to cover various performances on campus. Anyway, I'll try to post some recent vacation photos tonight, but until then, onto the news of the day.

No Justice: For those not following it, or unable to figure out from the news coverage of the current scandals at the Department of Justice, here is a brief recap. Throughout the Bush administration, but more frequently during the period 2004-present, political posts throughout DoJ were filled with young lawyers lacking any proper experience who happened to be extremely loyal (and thus easily manipulable) conservative Republicans. This list could include Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and yesterday's Congressional hearing embarrassment, Bradley Schlozman (click on links for bios). Said employees seem to have made it their mission to try to politicize the entire justice department by preferentially hiring Republicans, even though this is completely illegal for career positions at DoJ. Why would they do this? Well, the primary offenses revealed so far were at the Civil Rights division, the Voting Rights division, and the US Attorneys themselves, who are responsible for prosecuting crimes involving those two departments. It doesn't take much to infer that the goal was to steer voting rights/voter fraud lawsuits against Democratic groups, and prevent such lawsuits against Republicans. About half of the US Attorneys fired had refused to indict Democrats who weren't guilty of anything, and the other half seem to have been involved in actually prosecuting guilty Republicans, which is an unforgivable offense to the administration. I should make clear of course, that "voter fraud" by minorities, which Republicans like to throw around, is largely a myth designed to suppress the minority vote, since it leans heavily Democratic.

One can further infer who is behind this affair. It can certainly be suggested that the reason so many youngsters were placed in positions of power is because their strings can be pulled by a puppet master, and so far all signs seem to point to Karl Rove. Recall before the 2006 elections, he claimed Republicans would succeed because he was entitled to "THE math" on the elections. Though he never stated such, one could suggest that carefully arranging the balance of who is actually allowed to vote might explain why one might be overconfident. Unfortunately for him, his dreams of a "permanent Republican majority" actually fell victim to the fact his party was perceived as vastly too corrupt to remain in power. Shucks.

No Peace: On the international front, it seems crazy to me that there are forces in the administration pushing for war with Iran, even though Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly going well. Who could be doing this, you may ask? Would it shock you that it is the Vice President, Dick Cheney? From Newsweek:

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney's national-security team has been actively challenging Rice's Iran strategy in recent months. "We hear a completely different story coming out of Cheney's office, even now, than what we hear from Rice on Iran," says a Western diplomat whose embassy has close dealings with the White House. Officials from the veep's office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official who asked for anonymity because of his position. Since Tehran has defied two U.N. resolutions calling for a suspension of its uranium-enrichment program, "there's a certain amount of schadenfreude among the hard-liners," says a European diplomat who's involved in the talks but would not comment for the record. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the veep's team seems eager to build a case that Iran is targeting Americans not just in Iraq but along the border of its other neighbor, Afghanistan.

Lest anyone think this is just rumor, It seems to have been confirmed by a bunch of people:

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

What happens, one can ask, when the administration is basically at war with itself, not to mention a bunch of other countries. well, for one thing, you end up with a badly understaffed foreign service. Also, you end up with a bunch of people lying about various matters to all sorts of people. Should the former by Chief of Staff to the Veep, and the latter by a US Attorney, this is not always a good idea, and can end up with said Chief of Staff residing at the Crossbar Hotel for 30 months (can we now call it the Paris Hilton Hilton?).

Imprisonment

2007-06-05T07:54:00.000-06:00

A quick summary of the news from this morning:

Imprisoned by the Universe: There is a great article by Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes this morning about dark energy, the stuff that makes the universe accelerate outward, and what this means for the ultimate fate of the galaxy (not planet, which will be long since gone, or humanity, whose future is a mystery trillions of years from now). I'd only add that measurements of dark energy are convincing, but theoretically difficult to explain, and we may yet overhaul our basic cosmological model in the future should a better theoretical grounding come along.

Imprisoned by the Government: Yesterday, a military court basically overturned the whole trial system set up to deal with detainees at Guantanamo, based on the case of a boy who was captured when he was 15. See either a good analysis piece from the NYTimes, or if you really want, a piece that basically just repeats the Bush administration spin from the WaPo.

Imprisoned by outdated moral notions: For all that FoxNews is indecent by design (see below for more on that), the government's treatment of their broadcast network, among others, has certainly been indecent. Thankfully, the courts have thrown out some ridiculously hefty fines imposed on the networks when celebrities used naughty words at live awards ceremonies. There is a boring wrap-up in the WaPo (they just can't win today), and a great one in the NYTimes:

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Imprisoned by the bonds of racism: If the charges against him are true, the Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) will be going to jail for a long time for corruption and being stupid enough to hide $100K in his freezer!?! If so, honestly, good riddance to him, for being a stain upon our government, and if he takes fellow Dem Allan Mollohan of West Virginia along with him supposing the latter is guilty, all the better. Corrupt Democrats are corrupt officials first, and we are better off without them. Still, only FoxNews could manage to make their own faults the story when describing a 16-count indictment. It seems that FoxNews can't tell black representatives apart, even when one is the current head of the House Judiciary committee and has a moustache, and the other one is not and does not. Idiots.

Imprisoned by our own shortsightedness: What do you do when NASA satellites keep finding evidence of global warming, which is inconvenient for an anti-science administration trying to deny the existence of said phenomenon? Apparently, you cut the funds for the program!

Imprisoned by preconceived notions: Newspapers apparently don't like Google News, because, um, well, I really don't understand. It actually drives their online traffic, and they want to look the gift horse in the mouth, then slaughter it and eat it. See a wise graduate student destroy the arguments of a journalism professor here, and puzzle over the vagaries of the tenure system.

Imprisoned by themselves?: It seems that the Justice Department interprets civil rights and voter rights to mean trying to make sure that minorities don't vote, by any means necessary. Congress is investigating. Perhaps they can sic the DoJ on themselves?

Catching up #3: Technology/Music/Free Concert Clips

2007-06-04T18:20:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned back when I was more responsible about daily blogging, I think the whole push by media companies for digital rights management (DRM) software is a load of crap. At best it makes it slightly more inconvenient to copy files illegally, and at worst it means that the CD* copy of Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome album won't play on either my DVD/CD player or my computer, and thus can't be imported onto my iPod (remember, CD* means like a CD, only crappier). In what almost counts as irony, I returned the disc to the store and got it on iTunes instead, and then burned a backup copy to disc, thus freeing it from the DRM software that Apple prefers. For anyone who likes the album, let me recommend that you do this, but rearrange the tracks in alphabetical order. For unknown reasons, this is a vastly better mix than what Springsteen et al. decided to go with. This is true whether you get the additional tracks from iTunes (Bring 'em Home, How Can a Poor Man Stand such times, etc.) or not.

Anyway, Apple recently announced that they are adding non-DRM tracks to their online store, albeit at an additional cost, starting with the non-Fab component of EMI's catalog. More power to them, I say, even if they do charge more for the privilege (which, frankly, is their right). Some people, though, are now up in arms about a hidden bit of the system: apparently, they "watermark" the files by encrypting your account info into the song file. Honestly, I understand that this can be a security threat if your iPod is stolen, but let's not kid ourselves. People are angry because it means that they will have to think carefully about illegally sharing those files. Allow me to play them a dirge on the world's smallest violin....ok, better. Just because DRM is dropped doesn't give people any more right to share the music files than they possessed before, which is absolutely no right whatsoever, unless said album was released under a Creative Commons license, like They're Everywhere, by Jim's Big Ego. For those convinced that they need to share files with their friends, but are afraid of the fuzz, one might suggest the following method is not really so hard.

1. Burn music to CD.
2. Read CD back into computer.

If you aren't willing to put forth that much effort before posting your music to a torrent site, I kinda hope the law does bust you, because you're an idiot.

Speaking of music, I've been listening to a bunch of it, and here are some recommendations:

Via my co-blogger, a Mexican Ska band that just totally will rock your world, Los de Abajo (The Underdogs). Clips from their album LDA vs. the lunatics ca be found here, including the single mix of the title track, which is just awesome. Honestly, given that that link will allow you to play their entire album for free, I don't understand why you are still reading this. You can always come back to my ramblings later, if you think about it.

Speaking of albums being streamed freely over the web, Wilco is doing it again with their latest album, Sky Blue Sky, which just came out recently. Go to this page, and click on "listen" in the lower left. After that, you can buy the album if you'd like, supporting musicians who remember that their fans deserve t be respected, not threatened with lawsuits. As for the album itself, dkon loved it at first listen, but it's taken some time to grow on me, and might need a bit more time still. It's very slow and quiet, much more given to softer pop rock than the atmospherics of their past albums. Jeff Tweedy's voice is in good shape, and the lyrics are a bit more grounded than the past few album's intricate nonsense (that's not an insult, BTW, just the best way I know to describe some of their songs). For what it's worth, I liked the album when I played it outside while chilling on the porch, and it'll do nicely for just about anyone in a "porch music" capacity, to use a term I usually associate with Greg Brown. I can't really rank it above either Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which is just a brilliant, quasi-visionary album, nor Being There, Wilco's second album, a double disc of roots-inflected Rock'n'Roll that just pounds out all that is good about good ol' down home Americana rock. Still, the album is currently playing in the background and my wife has been unable to stop drumming her fingers in time with Sky Blue Sky, so it must be pretty catchy.

Staying on the alt-country vein, I have to also recommend the newest album from Golden Smog, Blood on the Slacks. For those not familiar with them, Golden Smog started off as a side project for Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, a couple members of the Jayhawks, and a bunch of other alt-country artists. Tweedy was apparently too busy with Wilco for this particular release, but the Jayhawks members are more than capable of sustaining the gig. They have a couple of free tracks available on the MySpace page I linked to, but I also have to recommend their rocked out version of David Bowie's Starman.

Delving back slightly further into the history of country rock, I stumbled across a Gram Parsons tribute album while looking for Wilco songs, and it is incredible. Return of the Grievous Angel is a staggeringly good album, and I can't say enough about "$1000 Wedding", covered by Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield, "Sin City", by Beck and Emmylou Harris, or the title track, as covered by Lucinda Williams and fellow former Byrd David Crosby (Wilco's cover of "One Hundred Years From Now" is also very good, of course).

Finally, we've always known that They Might Be Giants were a bit ahead of the curve, but they are currently trying something that I have to say I can't remember being tried much before. Their new album, The Else, is available on iTunes exclusively, at least until July 10 when they finally ship the CDs. Here is a mashup of my favorite song on the album, Climbing the Walls with highlights from the Lost Season 3 finale (go to 0:47 for the music starting; spoiler warning?), and concert recordings of Take Out the Trash and Shadow Government.

Catching up #2: Movies

2007-06-03T15:37:00.001-06:00

Having watched way too many movies in addition to the recent finales of Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Veronica Mars, Lost, The Office, and Scrubs, and the upcoming ones of The Sopranos and Entourage, here are some reviews.

Far and away the best movie we've seen this year is Hot Fuzz, from the same people who brought you Shaun of the Dead. Lest you think this is some bizarre pick, I'll note that it's currently #109 on the IMBD Top 250, and the only release this year to top it so far is Grindhouse, which we haven't seen. Hot Fuzz is just about the perfect British humor takedown of American action movies that the world has ever seen. Based around a supercop from London sent to the perfectly idyllic countryside for making his colleagues look bad by comparison, the movie somehow manages to provide two different satires of the same genre. In the first half, we have the subtle brilliance of a film edited like an action film, with all the quick cuts, slow-mos, multiple angles, and other familiar tricks, even though nothing in particular is happening other than some brilliant jokes and physical gags. In the second half, when all hell breaks loose, we have shootouts, fistfights, explosions, and cruel but hilarious imitations of the two best cop movies ever (their judgment, not mine), Bad Boys 2 and Point Break (any film that allows its actors to mock Keanu Reeves scores bonus points in my book). Hot Fuzz is probably the first film in years to have multiple "fall out of your chair" moments, and is basically a must see if you possess any kind of sense of humor.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is a big, exciting mess, never really making much sense but delivering a decent number of laughs and gorgeously filmed action scenes. It's probably worth seeing on the big screen, since it just won't seem as impressive on a small screen. Shrek 3 is a smaller movie, funny but a bit less consistent than either of its predecessors, and can probably be safely waited upon until it comes out on video.

From the Netflix releases, I have to give some props to "Happiness of the Katakuris", a truly bizarre Japanese movies that plays like a cross between The Sound of Music and The Evil Dead. The claymation (?!?) parts make it even stranger. I'd try to describe it further, but it really doesn't make any sense. We were pretty disappointed by The Weather Man, which didn't really go anywhere at all, and Munich, which did, but took way too long to get there. The Squid and the Whale was understated but very good, personal as only well-told semi-autobiographical works can be, with a good performance from Jeff Bridges, among others. Confetti, starring Martin Freeman (Tim from the British version of The Office), was a good quirky British comedy, and we were surprised how much we liked Now You Know, directed by Jeff Anderson (Randall from Clerks), which basically slots into the subgenre of "quirky comedies about life in New Jersey that feel a deep ambivalence toward the Garden State".

Harry Potter #5 (the movie) comes out on July 11, 10 days before Book 7 appears in print. More on films then.

Catching up #1: Books, Part 1

2007-06-03T14:06:00.001-06:00

aka Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog, #13-16:

The Sherlock Holmes novel(la)s: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and The Italian Secretary, by Caleb Carr

I don't really know what motivated Michael Chabon to write a Sherlock Holmes-based novella, given that he's not particularly associated with the mystery genre (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a coming-of-age novel, not a detective tale). As such, he managed to write a very different sort of Holmes story than what one is used to: in the wrong era (World War II), Holmes as an anonymous protagonist without a Watson to be found, solving what would seem to be a rather insignificant crime (a boy;s lost parrot). Chabon deserves credit for his technique, in that we essentially know more about the end of the tale as readers than his characters do throughout, a rather difficult feat to pull off. Still, this reads more as an exercise in constrained literature, using pre-existing characters placed in unfamiliar settings, than as a true detective story. Chabon's characters come off as very human, especially the more commonly cold and mechanical Holmes, but the detective story feels like an afterthought. I'm still a bit unsure of the global setting of the piece (a WWII story entitled "The Final Solution" should make the subtext clear), which serves more as a disturbing reality check contrasting the relatively calm and rational image of Holmes' Victorian era with the horrors of the 20th century. Still, not a bad quick read, as is Carr's take as well.

Caleb Carr is an obvious choice for writing a Holmes-based story, as his most familiar works, The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, involve turn of the century detectives, albeit ones that prefer the science of the day to pure deductive logic. Carr clearly has a feel for the characters and the proper flow of a detective story. He may be slightly more technically inclined than Arthur Conan Doyle, and more given to filling in some crucial details for a turn of the 21st century reader that would be more familiar to his forbears, but the conversations and plot developments feel more naturally appropriate to a detective story. Still, for all that the setup is appropriately mysterious, involving a perceived threat to the British crown in the late days of Victoria's reign, the conclusion feels more than a bit muddled. In some ways, Carr's talents lie in stretching out the conclusion of a rather straightforward mystery, the literary equivalent if you'd like of a Law and Order episode, whereas here he has to draw out the conclusion of the mystery for too long, tripping over his loose ends and red herrings a bit. More than anything else, it seems like he just should have had one more go at the draft to clean up the ending, but failed to do so. Again, not a bad book, but rather a quick read of middling quality.

The Author I Love To Hate: Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I hate to go up against both the Booker Prize committee and some members of my book club, but for Ishiguro, how can I not? In essence, these are the same boring book, in which a feckless narrator drives slowly through the English countryside, reminiscing slowly on how useless and feckless they actually are, slowly letting us in on the details. Frankly, it's a terrible style designed to fool the reader into the appearance of deep literature, but it lacks the cleverness that a well-plotted story should have. Essentially, you take a linear plotline, divide the terrible secret into bite-sized chunks, and then place one in each chapter surrounded by long and boring discussions between flat, emotionless characters. There's never any real twist, nor any real action, just a feeling that something more interesting has to lie eventually around the corner (hint: it doesn't). It's "artistic" pacing by dilly-dallying endlessly, and "literary" in its descriptions because the characters are so robotic that it feels like it should be insightful (I have the same complaint about French New Wave directors and their bizarrely robotic characters). In RotD, the main character is Stevens, the butler played memorably in the movie by Anthony Hopkins, who has to face up to the fact that his employer collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and Stevens never really did a damn thing in his life other than to make exuses. This might have been slightly more interesting had the reader not realized all of this within the first few pages.

SPOILER WARNING AHEAD, skip to the next paragraph unless you want the plot possibly spolied: In NLMG, the narrator is Kathy H, who fecklessly reminisces about her classmates at an isolated boarding school. The big secret, never really well concealed, is that she and her friends are being raised to be organ donors, a la The Island. Suffice it to say, the science in the book is terrible, Ishiguro made no attempt to understand modern bioethics, and he seems to fundamentally misunderstand the notion of marginalized people in society (hint: we prefer to keep them hidden in the shadows, not in front of us everyday, e.g. migrant laborers, wounded Iraqis, third world child laborers, etc.). The book is so unrealistic that it could only work as an allegory, but he never bothers to actually set one up. One particularly caustic review suggested the characters would be more sympathetic if they were revealed to be cows. I would argue that as they go around their feckless, passionless lives in England, that not only does Ishiguro write about england as if he had no experience with the country, where he has lived since age 5, but he writes like he has no actual experience with actual people either. Seriously, I never thought I'd say this, but just watch The Island instead: at least it realizes that with a premise so ridiculous, the best thing to do is turn it into a dumb action flick rather than an insipid, boring novel.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 12: Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

2007-05-06T20:10:00.000-06:00

Due to a strange bit of scheduling, I read almost this entire book while sitting in the O'Hare Marriott, waiting to meet up with our ride back to Champaign. Let it be said, they have some really comfortable chairs, and are kind enough to not hassle people who spend hour after hour sitting there without any obvious purpose.

If World's Fair was about a family in which nothing too much happened, this could be considered the exact opposite situation. Burroughs' memoir, assuming it is even half truthful, deals with an upbringing about as unconventional and bizarre as just about any ever put into print. As to truthfulness, we'll leave that to the lawyers, and just evaluate the book as if it were a novel. I don't mean this as an insult in any way, because it's basically the way I read Bill Bryson, Erik Larson, and any number of other non-fiction authors whose style is more narrative than informational.

The obvious comparison for Burroughs is David Sedaris, as several hundred reviewers have noted. The comparison isn't exact, of course. Both are funny, and both are gay, but Sedaris' stories are more about minutiae blown up into shaggy dog stories, whereas Burroughs' childhood is so exaggerated that even if slightly falsified, it includes numerous felonies (with him as victim, not perpetrator) and events that should have required intervention by a host of public agencies. The comparison is inexact enough that Salon's reviewer slammed Burroughs in a three-page review for all his narrative flaws, but I find myself feeling vastly more kindly toward him. His writing style is indeed on the simple side (education was hardly his first priority growing up), but the material is so outlandish that it doesn't require verbal fireworks to jump off the page.

Burroughs is a very bemused, surprisingly detached narrator, whose adolescence was so traumatic that it is hard to treat his memoir as anything but a coping mechanism. It's a bit ironic that the family he lived with sued him, given that his tone is so nonjudgmental throughout that one could make a strong suggestion that there is a Stockholm Syndrome effect at play, especially in the case of the daughter who was apparently sold at age 13 to an adult mental patient of her psychiatrist father to be his girlfriend in order to pay the family's bills. This one seems to be on strong footing factwise, as the father lost his license as a result according to public records. In some ways, Burroughs blandness as a narrator could probably be attributed to his lack of finesse as a writer. You just don't always get the feeling he has much more to say about anyone around him. As a result, the appeal of the book is really at its heart the freak-show aspect, lightened up by its good-natured breeziness. I know I should look down on it for that, but it works. Even though his childhood was a trainwreck, the book is anything but, and makes for a disturbingly good read. I'm still surprised that I liked it so much, but I did.

The movie, it should be said, is faithful to the book, with some, but not all, of the more graphic bits removed or edited around. It falls into the category, in fact, of movies that hew so closely to their source material that they add almost nothing to the book whatsoever. Alec Baldwin's performance is good, but nothing else about the film is particularly memorable.

Sunday Concert/Picnic Blogging

2007-05-06T15:40:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the extended absence, but I'm back, and will try to resume posting on a mroe regular basis again, as well as clear through a growing backlog of unreviewed books (yes, I know that this is my own personal obsession, but so be it).

Friday night's regularly scheduled post was interrupted by an actual event here in Champaign, a concert at one of the local bars featuring a band from out of town. It marked the second time that we've seen The Tossers, an Irish/Punk band from Chicago. I've linked to one of their videos previously, and would basically describe their music as somewhat punk-influenced Irish. If the Dropkick Murphys are about 60/40 or so Punk/Irish, and Flogging Molly about 35/65, then The Tossers are about 25/75. More than anything else, they sound a great deal like the Pogues, and like the Pogues, tend to perform frequently, and likely best, a few sheets to the wind.

Onstage drunkenness, or at least drinkingness, can have a few interesting effects. Last time we saw them, it was a Sunday night (as quiet in Champaign as just about anywhere), and they were on the last night of a reasonably long tour through the Midwest. The band, who were pretty good and hammered, proceded to play just about every Irish song I know and more (Camptown Races even), and not a single one of their own creations. Not a one, in an hour and a half of continuous music. Last night, we were treated to a mix of the new (their album Agony just came out a few weeks ago), the old (The Valley of the Shadow of Death--cheerful album titles all around), and the older (Several of the Rover songs, and a number of Pogues covers). What can I say, the show rocked. For some examples of what we heard, check out this video or perhaps this one. Drunken Irish music is best played loud (there is a reason I lean toward Irish Punk, and away from the "Celtic Ladies" movement that certain of our readership prefers), and inside a bar, it is extremely loud. Even better, Champaign has a smoking ban, so the air inside was pretty clear (only the band gets to smoke), while all the smokers had to stay outside.

Making the show even better, the opening act was actually pretty good too. I am not sure if JigGsaw is a local college band, but they do pretty good pop/progressive punk for a local band. Thanks to the wonder of the internets, you don't have to take my word for it, and can check out their music on their Myspace page. Perhaps I am kidding myself, but I thought their rhythm section actually did a surprisingly good job of mixing things up, dropping into all sorts of ska-based beats and other things to keep things interesting.

Saturday was a bit calmer, as we went for a picnic at Lake of the Woods park in Mahomet, IL. BTW, let me highly recommend a good picnic basket for anyone who lives anwhere near the outdoors, which I assume is most of you. Very little in life is as relaxing as a nice picnic.

The park is home to the Early American Museum, which is just shockingly well done for a small museum. Rarely have I seen a small museum that manages to combine as thorough a collection of artifacts (in this case 19th century housewares, photographs, and other antique items) with a reasonably good overview of the time period for the area. I particularly liked the exhibit on baseball in Illinois over the past century, something that has sadly disappeared from the area over the past couple decades.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 11: World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow

2007-04-30T21:16:00.000-06:00

Last week I said I liked two out of the three final books I had read during the trip to Aruba. Oddly enough, this was the one I didn't think much of at all. I have nothing against Doctorow, and rather liked Ragtime, but there must be something up with him that rubs people the wrong way. Suffice it to say, among major literary authors, he has more copies of his works sitting in the $2 rack at used bookstores than anyone else I can think of. Janet Evanovich, Clive Cussler, sure, and about every mystery author who has ever lived, but also a constant stream of Doctorow. I haven't been able to find a single Vintage press copy of anything by Nabokov for less than 3/4 the retail price for years, but I could have owned 10 copies of Water Works or Billy Bathgate had I wanted to. In some ways, it takes some of the fun out of finding them in bookstores, since there's no excitement in the find. A nice copy of Vonnegut is impossible, Calvino a rare treat, and we've found John Irving from just about every printing through years of work, but Doctorow is just too easy.

Anyway, on to the actual review. World's Fair is a fictionalization of what I have to assume is Doctorow's own childhood growing up in New York. Unfortunately, Doctorow seems to have had a childhood much like most of ours, full of events that are only passingly memorable and the rare moment that rises to the level of minor excitement. Unfortunately, that is about the extent of it. In theory, I am supposed to suggest that New York City in the 1930's is itself a character, but the narrator is much too young to really have experienced much of it at all. As a result, the novel is more than a bit flat. The emotion ranges from kind of happy to kind of sad, and even though our narrator's parents certainly have a troubled marriage, nothing ever really comes of it to spark some real dramatic tension. The dramatic ending, in which he sees both the magic but also the tawdriness of the New York World's Fair, similarly fails to inspire, breaking no new ground whatsoever. If you want to really read about the magic and horror of a World's Fair, try Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 10: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

2007-04-25T21:26:00.000-06:00

Having discussed what some of the more backwards amongst us consider to be cultural Armageddon in our first post of the evening, we move onward in our second to a literary take on Armageddon that is vastly more enjoyable than the Left Behind series. Any time the end of the world is foisted upon you by Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman graphic novels and the brilliant novel American Gods, among others, as well as Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, well, you know it has to be good. Just to get the obvious references, both men have the same British wit that is typically associated with Monty Python, Douglas Adams, or maybe Shaun of the Dead. It is unclear why the British are just funnier than Americans, most likely having to do with a certain fatalism inspired by the nasty weather, horrible food, and typically undrinkable coffee. Then again, maybe when you grow up watching your politicians hurl witty insults at each other rather than vapid sound bites, it can be a bit inspirational.

In any case, this little novel, written before either of them became famous, ranges from the drop-dead hilarious to the sidesplittingly funny, even when some of the subjects of the humor are a bit obscure. Still, you have to give them credit that they made me laugh about the M25 Motorway (the loop road around London: think the Beltway, I-95, and the tri-state tollway if you are familiar with DC, Boston, or Chicago; for NY readers, think I-287 with the traffic typical of the BQE or Van Wyck) and the planned town of Milton Keynes. A sample of the book's take on life:

Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.

The plot, such as it is, concerns plans by the hosts of heaven and hell to spark Armageddon, each hoping for the ultimate victory, while a pair of friendly demons, realizing that low-level employees for competing firms often have more in common with each other than either has with their corporate management, do everything in their power to stop this from happening. Of great benefit to them is the fact that the Antichrist was misplaced at birth, and many of the supernatural beings about to wage battle are caught in traffic. Honestly, if this plot doesn't grip you yet, you probably need professional help. Fleshing out the novel are a multitude of jokes and witticisms, and it is a fun challenge to try to figure out which author wrote what. Having read a good bit of Gaiman and one book by Pratchett, I was pretty stumped, but I would imagine that an aficionado could do much better. Gaiman is the more Vonnegutian of the two, preferring jokes that rely on timing and misdirection, whereas Pratchett likes the more carefully constructed comic scenarios, but the book flows pretty seamlessly from one to the other without any obvious hitches. Even though it contains something of a moral conclusion, in that humans often act both better and worse than either God or the Devil could even imagine but that life is still better with us having free will than if we didn't, the book avoids adding too much saccharine to the mix.

If I had to choose between Gaiman and Pratchett, I could pretty comfortably choose Gaiman, but life is generous and we are lucky to be able to enjoy both. This one is definitely worth it, start to finish.

It's something no sensible person would do... I wish I was married to you

2007-04-25T20:20:00.000-06:00

It was kind of lost in the shuffle this week, what with the continuing scandals that the administration likes to create instead of actually governing, but Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York announced he will be submitting legislation to legalize gay marriage in the state. This is a very good thing, even though it stands almost no chance of passing the Republican-led New York State Senate. It's been debated how much "political capital" he should use to try to impose his will, but short of a State Senate majority, it will have to stand for the moment as a powerful but temporarily symbolic gesture. If New York can manage to pass civil unions instead, which seems likelier at the moment, and Rhode Island also joins New Hampshire in allowing them, you will basically have legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts (all efforts to overturn it have basically gone nowhere), civil unions throughout the rest of the Northeast and West Coast, and additional pressure on the more liberal states in the Midwest that have Democratic governors and state houses to possibly follow suit (that means Illinois, by the way). It would come as no shock whatsoever if a very significant percentage of the country soon has civil unions, and the continuing refusal of Massachusetts to actually break out in Armageddon will only make it more likely that states go further, not retreat. Honestly, once you've got NY and CA, you;ve basically got the cultural centers of America (Chicago would be a bonus, and call me an unreasonable optimist but I truly believe in the power of the media elite to both reflect the culture in which they find themselves and to normalize it for the rest of the country. We've all basically known that someday gay marriage will be viewed like interracial marriages are today, as inherent rights for people opposed by bigots and those who refuse to deal with the modern world, but I think it happens sooner than we think. I give it about twenty years, give or take, especially if the Supreme Court ever goes liberal by a 6-3 majority with younger justices being able to assert themselves.

One can ask, in the midst of this hopeful flight of fancy, if there is a political price to be paid. Honestly, the answer is yes, but not for Spitzer or the NY state Democrats. No, he is way too popular at the moment to be touched, and he's actually going on the offensive against State Senate Republicans for blocking campaign finance reforms. This latter move has the potential to reshape NY State politics for the first time in my lifetime, but some explanations are in order. For basically forever, the State Assembly has had a Democratic majority , and the State Senate a Republican majority. As a result, the leaders of both houses, along with the governor, sit in a room each year and basically run the state. It's a classic top-down, party boss system and in no way allows the interests of the public to be represented at all. The stability of the arrangement has been maintained by an informal, off-the-record truce, in which neither side nor the governor really interferes in the other's affairs. Thankfully, Democrats seem to have realized that with the entire Northeast trending heavily blue, this arrangement basically screws them over for no reason. Earlier this year, they actually picked off a Republican-held State Senate seat, and indications are that they might actually try to win more in 2008 for a change.

It's important to remember that dissatisfaction with the Republicans, which led to the Democratic wave in 2006, shows no signs of retreating. We've got all sorts of indictments either underway or in the works, and public opinion continues to turn against the war in a big way. Just today, it was reported that 55% of Americans agree with Harry Reid that the war is lost, so one could easily argue that no matter how much the Republicans hyperventilate about treason and such, it really does help the Democratic cause, since the war is so bloody unpopular. Call it a hunch, but I think issues like this may carry a bit more weight that Spitzer's take on gay marriage in 2008.

Tuesday Feet blogging

2007-04-24T20:28:00.000-06:00

Results of the first big sonogram below. All systems check out perfectly, everything looked good. We got to see the heart (all four chambers), the brain, various appendages, and all sorts of other stuff that was hard to identify. As to the big question, we're still in the dark. It seems the wee lass or laddie curently has the umbilical cord running between his/her legs, which made it impossible to see what does or does not lie beneath.

Left Foot, with approximately 5 toes (along with the giant brain [left]):

Right Foot with approximately 5 toes (looking down the leg):

Side view. Crown of the head is to the left. Face, looking upward, is the brighter area running horizontally on the left. He/she is chewing on one hand, which is balled into a fist. The humerus runs off horizontally to the right about 60% of the way up on the image.

Keeping busy

2007-04-23T19:45:00.000-06:00

Just in case anyone took a break from Rooted Cosmopolitans, there are four posts up from today and yesterday. We've got book reviews of Los Gusanos, by author and film director John Sayles, and Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia, who for some reason I've been completely misidentifying as a relation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even though she's Cuban-American and he's rather famously Colombian. UPDATE:Forgot to mention, I'll have reviews out soon of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow, and Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs. I like two out of the three. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to which two?

On the political side, we've got my surprising support for the media in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy, though I'll note that NBC's branding of Cho's materials was more than a bit tasteless.

Finally, I seem to have started a trend by complaining about the Great Wall of Baghdad. Just yesterday, it seems, the Iraqi government let us know that they don't want it either. Needless to say, this is a colossal FUBAR on the part of everyone involved. It's getting harder and harder to say with a straight face that they are in charge when we keep disagreeing with their government about whose troops should be doing what, and we're already sounding out overthrowing the government now in power. Even if Harry Reid actually hedged his statements, I see no need. The War is lost.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 9: Los Gusanos, by John Sayles

2007-04-23T19:09:00.000-06:00

For the second half of our Cuban-American double feature, we have Los Gusanos (The Worms), by John Sayles. I should say off the bat that Sayles is one of those guys who has slipped under my radar. Best known as a director (Lone Star, Return of the Seacacus 7, Brother from Another Planet), the only movie of his that I've actually seen is Eight Men Out, and that only because it's about baseball. I can't claim any credit for picking this book up somewhere; as I remember, we got it during a Christmas book exchange, but sometimes you really do get lucky. Like the book I read immediately prior to it, the focus is on the Cuban-American and Cuban communities, though with a primary focus on Miami. Even though the basic setups are roughly the same, spanning decades in the lives of its protagonists, the books could hardly be more different. Sayles has a definite story to tell, and even though we often get looks insides his characters heads, they are very much rooted to their own location and situation. This is not a novel of dreams, but one of concrete histories, showing how we reach our current state through a series of events and experiences. Put another way, whereas the motivating forces in Dreaming in Cuban are primarily internal, here they are almost exclusively external. Characters are much more deeply tied to each other, in the tangled web of politics and culture that is Miami.

In many ways, the governments exist in Los Gusanos immediately off-screen, acting via the CIA and other sources to keep the community constantly in flux. Then again, I think it is fair to say that the Cuban community in Miami does a pretty good job of that all on their own. One of the greatest mysteries to me has been how the US government seems willing to maintain a policy towards Cuba that has never shown any sign of working, all while the expat community supports the vociferously no matter how many times the CIA undercuts their aspirations of retaking the island. From the Bay of Pigs to later failed insurgencies, it seems that some forces in our government are willing to trade something, be it reliable Republican votes, some control over organized crime in Southern Florida, or god only knows what, just so long as they make sure to say really mean things about Fidel. As for the Cuban-American community, you might think that having failed to overthrow Fidel for 40 years now, they might be willing to consider some amount of compromise in order to see long-separated family members...but apparently you'd be wrong.

In the novel, this plays out as a generation torn between the appeal of organized crime, ragtag invasion militias, or quieter, more humdrum lives in the beautiful weather of South Florida. Living so fast, many fail to see just how much they are pawns in the hands of the powerful (or to quote Fidel himself, Gusanos). Through vignettes, we get to see fragments of the life stories of the many protagonists, reminiscent of something one might expect from Robert Altman. It's hard to identify any particular story that is truly more compelling than the rest, but it's interesting to read a big, sprawling novel that can manage to balance any number of competing threads to paint a picture of a city across the years much more successfully than groups of blind men are typically assumed to describe elephants. If the characters themselves are a bit flat, the settings themselves certainly jump out. It's not the language per se, which features a somewhat intimidating amount of Spanish intermixed with decent prose, but rather the clear idea that he has for each chapter, infusing each with a strong sense of narrative flow that carries throughout the novel. I have to say, for a random acquisition, I really liked the book, enough to add several of his films to our Netflix queue.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 8: Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

2007-04-22T20:26:00.000-06:00

There is something of a recurring theme in the female characters that appear in magical realism novels, in that at least one woman per family needs to live at least partially on the spiritual plane. This is very clear in Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits", forms perhaps the main theme of "Like Water For Chocolate (haven't read it, but I've seen the movie a couple times), and makes up the heart of this novel as well. The story of three generations of a family split between Cuba and New York, the book takes a very ethereal approach to issues of dislocation and separation, much more concerned with people's dreams than their politics. Garcia isn't much of a narrative storyteller, more a spinner of tales that illuminate facets of her characters and their relationships. Perhaps befitting the image of the Cuban community as a wee bit out there (let's face it, every fictional work ever set in Miami basically assumes this as truth, from Scarface to Miami Vice to CSI, or the novels of Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, among others), most of the characters are a wee bit insane, at least at times.

If there is a running theme in the book, it is the ways in which isolation can force us to extremes, regardless of whether the isolation is caused by family or by the politics of an embargo. From generation to generation, we have love and other emotions expressed as both alliance and antagonism, as only families can inspire. Most of the action here, such as it is, lies within it's protagonists' minds.They retreat into memory, seek out connections, and basically try to find a place in the world for themselves, all while the potential sources of stability generally conspire against them. Still, it is not so much the events in their lives that define them, but rather their reactions to them, and the people who surround them. Inasmuch as the book is a meditation about mindsets, it is ultimately successful, more a painting than a story to remember. Garcia, it should be noted, writes in English like the world's finest writers write in Spanish, heavy on the adjectives but in a way that explores the bounds of expression. Think Marquez, but with multiple sentences per page. It's rare to find such confident prose stylings, and really stands out among the various Spanish/Latin American authors out there.

The little ones sit by their tv screen, no thoughts to think, no tears to cry, all sucked dry, down to the very last breath

2007-04-22T12:09:00.000-06:00

I actually surprised my wife with this one: the Virginia Tech gunman mailed a series of photos and videotapes to NBS news, so should they, and other news agencies, have shown excerpts on their nightly newscasts/websites, etc.? It's easy to suggest no. The killer was already dead by his own hand, and this gives him a posthumous gift of the recognition he wanted, and could in theory motivate others to similar action. Oddly enough, I find this argument wholly unconvincing. Don't get me wrong, after a traumatic experience it can be brutal seeing repeated images of the killer...but that really is a phenomenon over which has some control. Turn off the TV, avoid the newspaper for a couple days, and stop watching Cable news entirely (actually, that last bit of advice applies for everyone, frankly, regardless of the situation). What worries me, among others, is the media declaring a blackout on things that are on their face newsworthy, to prevent us from having our sensibilities challenged. See the arguments by Atrios:

I'm a bit puzzled by all the conversation about whether NBC and other news outlets should've broadcast Cho's videos. While there can always be debates about what should be front and center, the idea that this kind of thing should be withheld by a Media That Knows Best is rather disturbing. Emphasis and placement is always an issue, which is why if nothing else this stuff can be put on the internets where people can make the effort to take a peek if they wish.

And, no, I didn't have much desire to see any of it, I just reject the idea that our Elite Filters really know what's best for us.

and Kevin Drum:

There's no question that these images and videos are intense; they undoubtedly cause pain to the loved ones of the victims; and they might even help promote copycat behavior — though I suspect this is more urban legend than reality. But like it or not, they're also a key part of helping us understand one of the biggest news stories of the year.

I think this is exactly right. When the media acts like gatekeepers, we are shielded from violent images at the true cost of not understanding their context at all. I would argue that the lack of bloodshed from Iraq shown on tv has led us to ignore the deaths of several hundred thousand innocent civilians, since we never see the true picture of all the suicide bombings and executions that plague that country. We don't even see the true effect on our military, since the media is banned from showing soldiers' coffins and they have dropped the ball utterly on the effects of serious injuries on the troops. Until the recent expose of Walter Reed by the Washington Post, the media was basically happy to pretend that these things just didn't deserve widespread attention, even though Salon pointed out many of these issues years ago.

That said, some discretion is called for. Rather than pimping the Cho videos endlessly, it was probably appropriate to show brief snippets and post the remainder to websites, but in the end, it is up to us to decide what we wish to watch and what we would prefer to avoid, not up to them to censor the news for the sake of the most sensitive individuals.

By the way, what of the argument that we are just provoking copycats? More from Kevin Drum at Political Animal:

Still, does publicizing specific mass murders inspire copycats? I'm not so sure about that. In fact, it might be just the opposite: the massive publicity these events generate makes everybody far more vigilant about the possibility of "disturbed loners" in their midst and might actually reduce the likelihood of copycat sprees. What's more, when all is said and done, most of these killers come across in media accounts as delusional, hopeless losers, not as heroes to emulate.

What we all need to remember is that no matter how brutal this killing was, random killing sprees, including those at schools, are extremely rare. There is not some "wave of killings" taking place at schools, just like there is no wave of kidnapped children, or any of the million other problems blown up to ridiculous proportions by the various news outlets. What there is, rather is much more hyperventilating news sources to which we have access, who are willing to make random isolated events into trends so that we may be scared into watching their programs. VT was a true American tragedy, but also a rare and reasonably random occurrence. Some perspective goes a long way into fitting it into a reasonable narrative, and that requires both access to details about the case, as only the news can provide, but also a reasonable approach, which we can rest assured they most definitely won't provide.

PS: It seems that Rosa Brooks of the LA Times feels similar to me about assuming the tragedies and trauma of others, in that it is overdone in modern society:

Convincing ourselves that we've been vicariously traumatized by the pain of strangers has become a cherished national pastime. Thus, the Washington Post this week accompanied online stories about the shooting with a clickable sidebar, "Where to Find Support" — apparently on the assumption that the mere experience of glancing at articles about the tragedy would be so emotionally devastating that readers would require trained therapists...

Our self-indulgent conviction that we have all been traumatized also operates, ironically, to shut down empathy for other, less media-genic victims. On the day of the Virginia Tech shooting, for instance, Army Sgt. Mario K. De Leon of San Francisco (like the Virginia Tech victims) died of "wounds sustained from enemy small-arms fire"). On Wednesday, car bombs killed at least 172 people in Baghdad. But no one has set up a special MySpace page to commemorate those dead.

Some stagger and fall, after all, it's not easy...banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall

2007-04-22T11:46:00.000-06:00

So the big news on the international front is that just like Pink Floyd, the US Army is busy building a wall. No, this time it's not a metaphor about shielding oneself off from the public eye, but rather walling off a Sunni neighborhood to "protect" them from Shiites by basically turning their neighborhood into a ghetto in the classical sense. Needless to say, the residents are vastly unhappy, since they now live in a walled-off enclave surrounded by enemies and cut off from friends. Funny that.

Not to say that the news we get from Iraq may be unduly optimistic, but that's basically what I'm suggesting. First, we have very quietly abandoned the latest rationale for our troops doing what they do: that as "they stand up, we'll stand down". Seems like they aren't standing up at all:

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.

In a reflection of the need for more U.S. troops, the Pentagon decided earlier this month to increase the length of U.S. Army tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months. The extension came amid speculation that the U.S. commander there, Army Gen. David Petraeus, will ask that the troop increase be maintained well into 2008.

About that increase in the length of military rotations. Bush tried to blame it on Congress not sending a bill...but a few reporters even picked up on the fact that the increase was announced BEFORE funding "ran out', by which I mean won't really run out at all:

This speculation was fueled by Wednesday’s White House press conference, where Dana Perino explained the strange timing by claiming that President Bush had been in the dark about this major policy shift until the morning it was announced:

Q So why did he tell the American Legion that people would be staying in Iraq longer because of the Democrats, when his own Pentagon, 24 hours later, was going to keep people there longer?

MS. PERINO: Well, one, I don’t know if the President knew about the — the meeting — remember, yesterday morning is when Secretary Gates came and talked to the President. […]

Q And so the President didn’t know about his own policy until Wednesday?

MS. PERINO: I’m not aware that the President knew that there was going to be — that Secretary Gates had come to any decisions.

We might be hearing more about our problems in Iraq, of course, but for the fact that the military is telling officers to keep their mouth shut and won't let them talk to Congress:

national Journal's Congress Daily:

Pentagon lawyers abruptly blocked mid-level active-duty military officers from speaking Thursday during a closed-door House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee briefing about their personal experiences working with Iraqi security forces.

The Pentagon's last-minute refusal to allow the officers' presentations surprised panel members and congressional aides, who are in the middle of an investigation into the effort to train and organize Iraqi forces.

Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Martin Meehan, D-Mass., called the Pentagon's move "outrageous" and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas.

One correspondent suggests: "My guess: the training is not going well, there are some big gaps, and a bunch of horror stories that the Pentagon doesn't want aired. ... That said, this will backfire."

Right now, the"grown-ups" are debating on the Sunday morning news shows whether Harry Reid was wrong to suggest "The war has been lost" if we continue on our current course. He is right of course, and let me suggest that it only shows the vapidity of today's media that they are discussing this in relation to its effects on politics, rather than asking if he is indeed correct. After all, what are a few thousand deaths in relation to the opportunity to strategize and fundraise for the various political committee's right?

In the water, he was beautiful

2007-04-19T21:39:00.000-06:00

It's tempting to talk about politics tonight. For several hours, the Attorney General was schooled by the Congress, including passages where he was reminded that if he was going to suggest that US Attorneys were fired for being poor managers, he should lose his job as well, as well as Chuck Schumer reminding him that the burden of proof lies with Gonzales to explain his actions to Congress, and not the other way around, since Congress isn't actually putting him on trial. It's a bit pathetic, really, that the Attorney General doesn't seem to be so well versed in the whole law thing, but rank incompetence no longer comes as such a surprise.

I'm even going to hold off on the news that the FBI raided Rep. Rick Renzi's (R-AZ) and he had to step down from the Intelligence committee. The investigation likely cost Arizona's US Attorney his job during the abovementioned Attorney firing scandal, just as San Diego's Carol Lam was forced out after successfully prosecuting the now former-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA). Renzi's raid occurs just days after the FBI raided Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) house, forcing him to step down from the House Appropriations Committee, a committee whose ranking Republican member is Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), who you may be shocked to find out is also under investigation, in an inquiry started by former US Attorney Carol Lam, who as we mentioned was fired during the US Attorney scandal.

No rather than not mentioning politicians, I thought it would be a good opportunity to not review a book. During our trip, I read "The Sweep of the Second Hand", by Dean Monti, since it cost $2 and the cover review said it begged comparisons to Woody Allen and Nick Hornby. It doesn't. It begs comparison, rather, to Joseph Heller's "Something Happened". This is very, very much not a compliment. I could go on about the book I read, and take some potshots, but what's the point? It's not like anyone who reads this is likely to even see it in print during their lifetimes. Instead, I will take some potshots at Joseph Heller, by comparing him to the guy we killed by going on vacation, Kurt Vonnegut.

It is tempting to link Heller and Vonnegut in a way, as they wrote two of the most famous American novels about war during the previous century, books about WWII that seemed to describe Vietnam just as well. It should be noted that Catch-22 came out in 1961, long before Vietnam had entered into the American consciousness, whereas Slaughterhouse-Five was written in 1969. I have to say, between the two, I'd probably have to take Catch-22 if I was forced to choose. It's satire is as sharp as just about any serious novel ever written, and it is difficult to imagine a time where one can't describe the classic contradiction posed in the novel in any other terms. Without risk of hyperbole, it certainly deserves consideration as possibly the greatest American novel of the century (along with To Kill a Mockingbird, Gatsby, and what? Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck?). It is, sadly, really the only great novel Heller wrote.

This is not much of a criticism, mind you, very few of us have even a readable novel in us, much less a good one. Heller wrote one of the best of all time. Still, why could he never reach that height again? The sequel, Closing Time, felt like a pale imitation of the original (think U2's most recent stuff compared to their mid-80's peak). Good as Gold is like a lesser novel by Bellow, God Knows is funny but hardly memorable, and for the life of me I don't remember a thing about Picture This. Something Happened, on the other hand, is wretchedly awful, a long slog of several hundred depressing pages filled with quasi-ironic "insights" about how much life sucks that we are supposed to find deeply meaningful, as if Heller's discovery of angst is really something new. The contrived ending only makes the rest seem like an even greater waste of time. The question becomes: why did Heller have one great book, and so many more that pale so much in comparison?

I think the answer lies in the way he writes. He is always funny, but it is a cold humor. The insanity he channels throughout Catch-22 is madcap but somewhat passionless at times, and that lack of empathy shows through much more in his later works in which the cold glare falls on our very real lives. Where Catch-22 can be enjoyed for finding humor in what would otherwise be tragedy, the rest of his books basically seem like descriptions of just how tragic life in general tends to be, and the jokes have a gallows quality that kind of ruins the enjoyment. Sure Heller is a satirist, but he just doesn't always seem to care about anything or anyone, and that grates after a while.

Vonnegut, on the other hand, may have been a satirist and a notable pessimist about human behavior, but in the end he remains one of the most deeply humanist authors ever to achieve greatness. I'm not talking about the Secular Humanist sense (which he was), but rather in the sense that he had a deep and powerful love for humans and humanity. It's been said that his books are "bitter-coated sugar pills", with a thin veneer of irony covering an almost cloying desire for people to be better. I can't say that this is description is wrong, but in many ways it is what makes him such a joy to read. No matter how bad things are, and in a Vonnegut book, we're usually talking about Armageddon-level bad, there remains the hope that if people are better, things could improve. It's not that he thinks we'll actually be better, just that we have the potential. He even could see it in himself, in a way. Tonight's post title is taken from his description of himself in the foreword to "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse".

Our book club will be reading Cat's Cradle for next month, perhaps his greatest novel (unless you prefer Breakfast of Champions or Slaughter House-Five), but even a middling Vonnegut novel can stick with you for years. In Slapstick, which Vonnegut himself only graded as a "D" (really!), he manages to introduce a concept for artificial communities that I really think might radically change American society for the better if we ever tried it, by assigning random names and numbers to all people that would serve as communities to which everyone gets to belong. If you think about it, given that we bond with people because of common interests in sports teams, favorite authors, and any number of other random things. Why not give people a few more, in such a way that everyone gets to have some. There is literally no downside, beyond getting used to middle names like Daffodil-11 or Raspberry-19.

It's strange, both men are dead, and I will be forever glad that Heller ha one amazing novel within him, but I feel like I miss Vonnegut and will for a long time.

So it goes.

Your beaches so much admired with palm trees all adorned, your coat of arms and flag is the proudness of us all!

2007-04-18T20:56:00.000-06:00

After a couple days worth of venting, and plenty more to discuss, I thought it might be a good idea to change the topic anyway. If our society thinks it wise to track literally everyone in the country on antidepressants, but doesn't bother to keep records on gun owners because that would be an invasion of privacy...well, need any more be said?

Instead, it's about time to finally discuss our trip to Aruba, before finally doing a weeklong series of book reviews (guess what I spent my time doing in Aruba). The most obvious thing that apparently everyone says about Aruba is that it's very much like being in America. After all, everyone speaks English, as well as Dutch and a local creole language known as Papimiento. Yes, I mean virtually everyone born there is at least trilingual, and a decent number of people seem to speak Spanish as well. While there is a local currency, we couldn't find a single place that didn't take US dollars (their currency is pegged to ours, so there's little risk for merchants to do so). At tourist locations, you might not even know that they use anything but dollars, and the menus certainly don't give that fact away. If you are wondering if this is just a reflection of the wealthy tourist regions, you may be a bit surprised. Aruba has a standard of living the places it below Northern Europe and America, but above Southern European countries like Italy and Spain. The houses in the countryside may not be huge, but they look solidly middle-class. As one who suffers from the occasional pang of liberal American guilt, Aruba gave me just about nothing to feel guilty about. They do so much tourist business that the living standard is relatively high and labor needs to be imported from neighboring countries. Honestly, many Arubans do seem happy, what with living in a tropical paradise, and they seem to be using at least part of the tourist income to promote the local culture and language. I just didn't manage to find anything to feel particularly guilty about.

Just to cement the linkage with America, while the beaches are lined with the palm trees so proudly mentioned in the national anthem by which I titled this post, the rest of the island, basically all 20 miles long and 7 wide, is the sort of vegetated desert that looks exactly like the Arizona countryside:

It may seem strange to have a desert in the tropics, but Aruba, apparently like neighboring Bonaire and Curacao, has no rivers and very little rainfall, averaging something like a foot per year. On the good side for them, the lack of rain is due in part to the fact that it lies well south of the Hurricane belt in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Essentially, the weather forecast is temperatures in the mid to low 80's with a 10-15 mph breeze from the northeast, every single day of the entire year.

Along the leeward coasts, you basically have the endless line of hotels and resorts to the west, and a string of towns to the south, including Oranjestad, the capital. Oranjestad is a pretty town, with a harborside street devoted to all the cruise ship visitors and several others for people, including some gorgeous wood-panel architecture in the pastel colors you come to expect in the Caribbean:

Just a quick aside. In case anyone was curious, we have some news that we may not have shared with all of the friends who read this blog. The photo above may make it pretty obvious, and if you go over to the flickr photoset of our vacation, rest assured that the drink shown here was a non-alcoholic strawberry concoction. I only managed one beer myself during the trip, though I can now say that Balashi, the local pilsner, is rather good.

As for the recommended tourist attractions, I would recommend the Jeep safari around the island, making sure to note that when they say you are going off-road, they are really, REALLY not kidding. Also, make sure to visit the butterfly farm, which was a true highlight of the trip. We particularly enjoyed the "butterflies gone wild" segment, in which we saw the first flight of a female butterfly after hatching that morning, followed by the first and only mating event in her life not five minutes later.

Lest anyone think Aruba is some form of paradise on Earth, it should be known that it hides a terrible, awful secret, and it's not the fact that the Cable News will blow any incident on Aruba out of proportion so that their correspondents can "work" there for months, roaming the beaches and nightclubs in search of "news". No, while Arubans are happy to say that 75% percent of the visitors to the Island come from America, they do everything possible to hide the fact that the overwhelming majority of these visitors come from New Jersey. Not that there's anything wrong with the Garden state...but let's face it, it's New Jersey. Everywhere we turned, Jerseyites. (Jerseyans?) I haven't seen so many Yankees hats and visors during visits to NYC. Also, who wears visors?!? Seriously, when you head south from the City, you don't actually hit Trenton and Philadelphia, you just somehow fly over the ocean and end up in Aruba. Given how many of them were sitting on the beach around us, talking about Cawfee and visiting the Shawre, I can only imagine that commuting along the Parkway and the Turnpike must have been a breeze for the week. i don't really have anything more to say, I'm just enjoying bashing a state where some of my inlaws live, hoping against hope that none of them ever read this.

Anyway, we had a fantastic time, and had I remembered to put sunscreen on my back before going snorkeling, it would have been the perfect trip. Instead...well, let's just say that I'm not red in the face, but rather some other places which now itch like crazy.

One more untitled thought

2007-04-17T16:22:00.000-06:00

Just to follow up on my esteemed colleague's post, I thought I might also take the time to let loose on the media, though I'll note that the more reputable sources (NYTimes, WashPost, NPR) have done a pretty good job. I refuse utterly to watch the cable news coverage, so I can't comment on them in particular.

Still, I can only imagine how many times, as dkon mentioned, some poor student still clearly in shock has been asked, "How do you feel". Let's just all concede for the moment that within 24 hours of such an event, if not much longer afterwards, the answer is some strange combination of too many things to describe and nothing at all. The human brain is not meant to deal rationally with these kinds of things. They put us into shock, which is a real condition, not just some kind of metaphor. I seem to remember that when many Simon's Rockers were asked inane questions by the media, they realized that by inserting a few choice four letter words in the midst of otherwise cogent thoughts, they could piss the hell out of annoying TV reporters. I personally didn't act so mean to them, but in my defense, I was stoned on Percocet at the time.

Someday, I'd like to ask reporters why they ask people how they feel after virtually all events, both positive and negative, when such a question is fundamentally unanswerable. I've got a theory, of course. Whatever gets answered, it feeds into our sense of vicarious experience, which many in the media will mistakenly label "empathy". We wish to know how victims feel so that we may imagine ourselves in their place, as noble victims, just like we can imagine ourselves as Super Bowl winners, hurricane victims, children waiting for loved ones to come home from war, etc. It's pure, simple, utterly vapid vicariousness. We never actually feel what the interviewee actually feels, nor could we. Feelings are fundamentally intangible, no matter how carefully we describe them. For all the inanity, I understand why people want to empathize with people celebrating...it's kind of obvious. Vicarious victimhood scares me, though. People love to assume the role of victim. The Christian right talks about being persecuted in America, ignoring the fact that they basically run the show at the moment. Lou Dobbs, a very wealthy man, bashes immigrants every night on behalf of the poor American worker. Let's not get started on how many of society's ills are blamed on the gays (or minorities, or immigrants, or looking further back, Jews, women, Irish, Italians, Catholics, etc.). Playing the victim is a sickness in American society; having not really suffered squat (being average in America puts a human being at the pinnacle of the species' frickin existence on the planet so far), we need to assume others' tragedies in order to assuage our survivor's guilt, or in this case, our guilt with regard to luck of our birth. I am always struck by the obsession America has for the holocaust, not within the Jewish community but outside it as well. Honestly, it's not done to keep the memory alive, it often just means that we need a godawful big tragedy on which to project ourselves, and that one is the clearest. Frankly, anyone who bemoans the situation of the German Jews and then bashes any minority or ethnic group...well, hypocrisy just doesn't describe it.

Today's media obscenities were produced by a couple of Right wing bloggers who do humanitiy's reputation a great deal of harm. John Derbyshire of National Review (h/t Ana Marie Cox):

As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

Yes, yes, I know it's easy to say these things: but didn't the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything? As the cliche goes—and like most cliches. It's true—none of us knows what he'd do in a dire situation like that. I hope, however, that if I thought I was going to die anyway, I'd at least take a run at the guy.

and Nathanael Blake of Human Events Online (h/t ThinkProgress):

College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut. Meanwhile, an old man hurled his body at the shooter to save others.

Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that. …

Like Derb, I don’t know if I would live up to this myself, but I know that I should be heartily ashamed of myself if I didn’t. Am I noble, courageous and self-sacrificing? I don’t know; but I should hope to be so when necessary.

It never ceases to amaze how the pro-war right, having gotten us into a war for which they have literally made no sacrifice whatsoever, instantly project themselves into the role of the heroes they idolize but have already proven they could never emulate. Honestly, in a shooting, people go on pure instinct, there's not a rational thought in sight. Perhaps if either of these wastes of phosphorus had some actual law enforcement or military training, they might be able to react like they so fervently believe they would in their Dirty Harry-esque wet dreams...but they fight evil using their keyboards, bashing those of us who often suggest that just because our soldiers are courageous doesn't mean they need to be sacrificed to our quixotic national nightmare. Here, rather than take on the role of victim, they actually project themselves into heroism, and woe unto the rest of us mortals who fall short of their delusional estimates of their own self-worth. Honestly, when you haven't done jack shit, the least you can do is shut the hell up when talking about a group of students who just faced the most horrible event of their lives. It's just utterly reprehensible.

In closing, here's a tip for both our media and our chickenhawk critics: try asking "Is there anything you'd like to say?", or even better yet, "What would you like people to do in response to this?" You see, rather than being badgered or accused of cowardice in the face of a threat only a chickenhawk blogger could hope to overcome, you could always allow the traumatized students to express themselves in their own words or describe how we can help them. In the end, this is actually better than allowing them to help us by allowing us to suffer without pain or consequences...I just don't see it ever happening.

words fail

2007-04-16T23:15:00.000-06:00

There's not much to add to Dr. Faber's post below about the massacre at Virginia Tech. In these situations the words mostly distort and cheapen and inflate and trivialize. That's why I remember such a visceral distaste for the media circus after the comparatively minor massacre at Simon's Rock. And that's why it seems grating to me today, like in the only "news" clip I saw on the internets today. Why is the first question to a wounded student, "how do you feel?" How do you think he feels, idiot?

I'm all for reporting the news and finding facts, but do you need any extra emotion for this story? Why are we so fascinated by other people's misery? Do we not get enough on our own, or does it make us feel better by comparison? And yet, after sucking down the last morsel of impertinent information, and learning about the perp's best friend's favorite bands, we promptly forget and do absolutely nothing until the next massacre.

We all suck.

No title tonight

2007-04-16T21:39:00.000-06:00

Well, we're back from Aruba, and the real world seems to be butting in on what was supposed to be a lighthearted vacation recap. I already had a tribute piece to Kurt Vonnegut planned, but that will happen later in the week. First, a few words on an actual real news story, unlike Imus, which was an utterly vapid piece of navel-gazing by the American news media in which any interesting aspects of the story were pushed aside for empty theatrics.

The shootings at Virginia Tech are utterly horrific, needless to say, ranking not only as one of the worst such incidents in US School shooting history, but the worst spree killing in US history, period, and possibly the third-largest in recorded history. Over the next couple days, the ratio of information to misinformation will gradually rise from the current 1:10 ratio to something approaching 1:1 or so, and as details become clear, they will almost certainly be horrible. As I was discussing tonight with alexm, when these things get so large in scope it necessarily implies that a lot if things went wrong; when the police and campus security respond correctly, the casualties by definition will be significantly fewer. What happened here is likely to be the same story as with the Simon's Rock shooting 15 years ago: the authorities failed to act in time, because they were put in a nearly impossible position and reacted badly, as people do. Put a group of people under immense and unexpected pressure, and they will frequently not do such a fantastic job. We're human, and we're imperfect, and extreme acts can bring out the worst in us just as they can bring out the best.

It's hard not to bring up the gun control issue at a time like this. Needless to say, I am a strong gun control supporter. We happen to live in a society that is a bit too comfortable with random acts of violence (see our media, romance for war, even the casual cruelty with which hunting is accepted), and our romance of the firearm is part and parcel of this. Many conservatives out there (see Lawyers, Guns, and Money for some links to reprehensible examples) seem to think that had students been allowed to pack heat, this could have been stopped. First of all, who carries to German class? Second, imagine encouraging acts of vigilantism in tense situations by students completely untrained in crisis situations: they are as likely to shoot the hostages as they are the gunman/gunmen, to say nothing of the fact that the police will have a fun time figuring out who is who. Third, and most importantly, COLLEGE STUDENTS DRINK TOO MUCH AND MANY ARE CLINICALLY DEPRESSED!!! This is not a good mix with widespread firearms. Think of how many fights occur at college bars, and now add heavy weaponry. Think of how many students are distraught over bad breakups, wondering if they should confront the person who replaced them, and add the capacity to commit homicide. Let's face it, college students are not a particularly trustworthy lot, and it's best to pacify the crazier part of the population, not arm it.

In the end, many people will ask why these things happen. Here is a list of the reasons as best I've been able to figure out from being on the barrel side of the gun, rather than the trigger side:

1. There is no reason. These things happen. A small percentage of the population can be driven to homicidal behavior, and accessing deadly weaponry is not particularly difficult.
2. God moves in mysterious ways. Honestly, I find this explanation to be a complete crock, but if it works for you, so be it.
3. College students are a bit emotionally unstable by nature, because adolescent brains do not possess the full suite of behavior control techniques. Moreover, there is a significant percentage of people who are either clinically depressed or on strong psychotropic drugs that can cause violent behavior. More moreover, college is a disruptive time in life where you are displaced from family, and it is not so hard to become isolated. These all combine to make it inevitable that students will flip out every so often, though we really never know where, when, or how many will suffer as a result.

So, I hear you saying, what can we do? Honestly, not much in the short term. In the long-term, try not to be such violent bastards, basically.

If anyone is interested, I've posted a scanned version of my one published poem, which was written about the Simon's Rock shooting, on my website as two image files. You can find the first half here and second half here. Warning: contains strong language and graphic imagery, as one might expect.

On a happier note, I've posted our pictures from Aruba to my flickr account. More on that tomorrow. Also, Alexis, check the comments to dkon's piece for the song about which you asked.

More tomorrow, kids.

art and agricultural pests

2007-04-15T20:41:00.000-06:00

Recently I've revived my love of Talking Heads, thanks in part to seeing my neighbors' TH tribute band, Houses in Motion. They do all the songs quite faithfully, and their frontman is amazingly David Byrne-esque.

Speaking of the dude, he has a nifty journal where he pontificates quite lucidly on various topics. For a music geek, even more fascinating is his web radio. He puts together a 3-hour playlist every month, which then loops continuously.

This dude keeps on top of music and is always listening to new artists, so his playlists are pretty educational. He has his old favorites, like the Brazilian strange-ass old dude Tom Ze, who keeps making great music, like last year's Estudando O Pagode, an operetta(!) about women and feminism, in the vein of the samba/hip-hop amalgam called Pagode. It's pretty stunning.

But back to David Byrne Radio: one of the songs I heard there was Boll Weevil by Greg Hale Jones. I had no idea until I read up about it, but it was a vocal taken from an old field recording of folk tunes (maybe Alan Lomax?) that sits in the Library of Congress. This modern poducer then added instruments to a digitized and processed voice from 60 years ago to create a words-fail-me beautiful tune about devastation from boll weevil invasion ("I see boll weevil, he's sittin' on the square, next time I see him, he got his family there"). Even an agrarian blog added some commentary about the veracity of the old folk tune's description of the biological reality. If you can't wait until the song comes up on the playlist, there's an mp3 still available here, but it cuts off the end of the song.

This made me think again about context in art. Somebody, likely a sharecropper with no education, performed this tremendous tune, and then it's dressed up with modern studio trickery, but has the essence really changed? Or was it just put in prettier frame?

Finally, for old time's sake, here's Talking Heads in all their geeky and funky glory from 1983:

Great Art and the American Commute

2007-04-09T10:05:00.000-06:00

The former is no match for the latter:

This story rouses a roller-coaster of conflicting emotions: first, of infinite sadness for humanity, second of hope, because at least the kids consistently wanted to stop and listen to a great musician, and then of more sadness, because you know the curiosity and emotional receptiveness will be be wrung out of them with time.

(hat tip: David Kurtz at TPM)

Off to Aruba

2007-04-07T15:16:00.000-06:00

I'll be back on the 14th, and I promise to return to daily posts when I get back. Look for an essay-length piece on the meaning of the term un-American (hint: I don't really side with Joe McCarthy), a buttload of book reviews, and of course, many photos of Aruba. Until then, dkon has the floor, and if you have some time on your hands, read Atrios, Talking Points Memo, and Digby's blog for national news, check out our friends' blogs, and consider donating to the llama of the month or the previous charities. Thanks, y'all. Hasta semana.

One little goat, one little goat, that Father bought for two zuzim.

2007-04-02T20:43:00.000-06:00

It's the first night of passover tonight (we just had a lovely Seder with some of the wife's coworkers, and in the spirit of the holidays, the time has come to choose this months Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month. This month, we'll be guided by the notion of Tzedakah, the religious concept in Judaism that translates roughly into charity, but with a notion of social justice as well. According to Maimonides, perhaps the greatest philosopher among the medieval rabbis, the highest form of Tzedakah is:

Giving a poor person work (or loaning him money to start a business) so he will not have to depend on charity. This is because the person is now free from having to rely on charity. The giver has not just helped the recipient for the short while, but instead for the rest of their life.

In honor of a rather familiar passover song, we're going to try to give a family a goat, which means that the Charity of the Month is The Heifer Project. Operating worldwide, they give animals to needy families, but also teach them about sustainable agriculture and then ask them to pass along this knowledge, along with the female offspring of the animal, to their neighbors, strengthening communities worldwide.

Heifer International works to ensure that the gift of each animal will eventually help an entire community to become self-sustaining. Animals such as goats, water buffalo and camels are seven M animals- they provide meat, milk, muscle, manure, money, materials and motivation. Once its immediate needs have been met, a family is free to sell any excess at market. Heifer International provides a breeding animal along with the gift animal so that it can produce offspring. Participating families are required to "pass on the gift", that is: they must give at least one of the female offspring to a neighbor who has undergone Heifer's training. In time, that neighbor will pass along one of the offspring of its animal, and so on.

To make things more convenient, I've set up a gift registry on their website, which can be found here. In honor of passover, we have the option of giving a goat, or for the Simon's Rockers out there, you may also choose a llama. No need to buy an entire animal all at once, you can buy fractions of an animal as well (apparently, they wait until the fractions add up to a whole, rather than shipping them a leg or piece of a torso at a time). I chipped in for a share of both a goat and a llama, and I'm counting on our dear readers to finish off one of the two. C'mon people! Everyone needs a llama or goat! We can make this happen. Do it for the kids (that's a pun, y'all)!

Help us buy a llama!

All images and graphics in this post are copyright of Heifer International, of course.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 7: Persepolis 1 and 2, by Marjane Satrapi

2007-04-01T20:47:00.000-06:00

Continuing the Iranian theme we had in the last book review, tonight we've got a pair of graphic novels from an Iranian expat who now lives in France. For those unfamiliar with the term, which seems unlikely given the known preferences of most of our readership, graphic novels are long-form comic books.

Compared to most of the other prominent graphic novelists out there, Satrapi is quite the crude illustrator, preferring a rather simplistic drawing style with a black and white palette. She has a few pretty poetic touches, but nothing to compare to the more artistic panels in Maus or something done by a professional illustrator, like V for Vendetta or The Watchmen. Then again, that's not really the point. She has a story to tell, and comics are her medium of choice. The graphic elements certainly are there to add to the story, but it is the narrative that makes or breaks it. How is that narrative you ask? It is interesting certainly, a very personal take on growing up, first in Iran during the Revolution, later in Europe as a teenager, and finally in Iran as a twentysomething.

Satrapi lacks much of the intellectual grounding that Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, but she may be better at describing her own situation (Nafisi is certainly more gifted at describing that of others). This is both a blessing as a curse in her case: she is able to describe her own reactions to situations throughout her childhood and teenage years in great detail, but the result is something less than sympathetic at times, even though she is the one telling the story about herself. Maybe it's me speaking as someone who kind of missed out on their rebellious phase, but while I understand that life's troubles can be hard to deal with, I can't help but have mixed feelings about some of the situations the author put herself into. Then again, this may be part of her point: life can put us in impossible situations, frequently in the case of Revolutionary Iran, but we can also put ourselves into similarly difficult spots through our own handiwork.

Just like in the reading Lolita, we see again that the standard perceptions of Iranians is a poor reflection of the society as a whole (one could make the same claim about Iraq, or just about anywhere else, of course). The upper class in Iraq was, and remains, extremely Western in outlook, and the middle class seems to be more concerned with what people in the middle class are typically concerned about than about most of the religious nonsense put forth by the government. Iran, like many nations, is propped up by the blood of the masses (who were slaughtered during the Iraq-Iran war), and that seems to be where the current religious officials still draw most of their support. Somehow, reactionaries always seem to know that they can prey upon the religiously guided ignorance of large segments of the population in many nations, even those that one would think too modern to fall under their spell (cough, Karl Rove, cough).

In the broader sense, these books should serve as a reminder that wars are really, really bad. Yeah, I know, some insight there, but go with me on this one. The US was busy supplying arms to Iraq in the 80's, in order to contain the Iranians, to whom we were also supplying arms, but less publicly. This containment managed to strengthen the mullahs in Iran, strengthen Hussein to become the figure we became familiar with during our wars against him, and generally made a mess of the region. Scarily enough, these weren't our biggest strategic mistakes at the time. That would be our support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. I think it is fair to suggest that when we encourage our bastards over there to fight against the other bastards over there, the result is generally a lot of dead people, a lot more poorer people who will be more likely to get behind unsavory leaders, and a bunch of formerly weak unsavory leaders who are now much stronger unsavory leaders. This is not idle speculation, given that we are rather actively supporting the government of Ethiopia during their current efforts to boot out Islamic militias in Somalia. Needless to say, I predict that this will likely lead to the standard awful results in the coming years, which is really saying something when you are talking about Ethiopia and Somalia getting worse (think famine and Black Hawk Down for our current images of both nations).

Anyway, back to Persepolis. I'm not entirely sold on Satrapi as a particularly good storyteller, but she lived through incredibly interesting times, and that counts for an awful lot in a memoir. I learned more than a bit from the books, and would recommend them to anyone in a heartbeat. They are two long comic books in the end, not War and Peace, and more than justify the minimal time it takes to read them. Go do so!

BTW, we announce the next Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month tomorrow, so donate to Doctors Without Borders today of you haven't done so already. Also, the Mets won the first game of the season, so let's see if they can go wire-to-wire in first place. Expect much more baseball here coming soon!

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 6: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi

2007-03-28T21:53:00.000-06:00

With Iran in the news, I decided to clear out the growing Persian presence on my shelf of books to read. Most of the news coming out of Iran at the moment is pretty bad, though there are some funny exceptions to that rule. Anyway, the first book up is Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, which has certainly made the rounds of the book club circuit over the past year.

It's not hard to see why this book is so popular. Iranian society remains a mystery to most people in America, and this book goes a long way toward undercutting some of the more outlandish notions we may possess about them. In particular, it becomes immediately evident that while the public face of Iran is one of religions hardliners and fundamentalist rule, the society there was, and still is, vastly more modern than we ever give them credit for. American ignorance can hardly be considered shocking by now, and it says something that of the few Americans who can recognize Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President of Iran that very few realize that though he may be an anti-Semitic provocateur, he has very little power over any foriegn policy issue whatsoever (that would be the milieu of Ayatollah Khamenei and the clerical establishment). Neither of these political forces represents the actual population all that well (not that I would dare to suggest a similar principle applies with regard to American society...) Iranians love their illegal satellite dishes, their forbidden music (click on the second link above), and just about all the other things that we would love in the same circumstances.

Nafisi's book does present a thorough treatment of one facet of life that Americans do have trouble imagining: life under the rule of a truly oppressive government, especially during wartime on one's own soil. While we were sending weapons openly to Iraq and under the table to Iran, the people there were suffering under the double threat of foreign missiles and self-imposed political terror. The choices faced by liberals and intellectuals were truly terrible, much worse than anything their counterparts over here have had to go through. Even in the most extreme cases where the US government spied on peace groups, they didn't just haul people off and summarily execute them. As for those who wholeheartedly get behind an ideological movement, Nafisi has even less respect for such people than I do. There have always been many people out there, especially among the young and impressionable, willing to slaughter their fellow men for the sake of Revolution, or God, or Country, or any other capital-letter ideal, but the ends are almost never happy ones. Among the most striking passages of the book is the trial of The Great Gatsby by one of her classes, where the book is accused of all manner of evils and recommended for banning by the hardline students, as if the ideas themselves are dangerous. One could suggest of course, that this is the ultimate failure of debate: if an idea you dislike is so very appealing, then you have failed in your duty to build a better counterargument.

I should say that discussing the book only in terms of its grand themes does it a disservice: it is not a mere political statement, but a memoir, and a damn good one at that. Centered around the private sessions the author held in secret with seven students who were devoted to literature, the book doesn't scream it's positions on imagination and individual expression, it paints them in rather fetching language. If anything, Nafisi is at her weakest when dealing with her own reactions to newsworthy events: in describing her own reactions she seems to get so involved that she loses some of the strength of her narrative voice. Instead, she is at her best describing the others around her: how they react, how they interact, and how they maintain their own concepts of identity in the midst of a regime trying to undercut it through physical and mental intimidation. Nafisi is clearly from the school of teaching via contrast and comparison, and it is the reflections and refractions between she and her students, her students with each other, and all the other pairings upon which this book has earned its reputation. Definitely worth a read, if for no other reason to remind us that the people that many people in our government are looking to bomb to smithereens in the near future are very much like us once you look past the headscarves.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

2007-03-26T20:38:00.000-06:00

Having been swamped by work, I never had time to comment on the biggest news about the 2008 Presidential candidates from the past week: Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John, has cancer, and from the sound of things it's not good. She was treated for Breast cancer in 2004, and it has now returned and has spread to her bones, which is currently incurable. Treatable in some cases, perhaps, but incurable. This has led to numerous stories in the media wondering if it is right for John Edwards to continue his campaign, as if somehow this is a decision to be made by us, rather than the Edwards'. Needless to say, I am not particularly sympathetic to this point of view. I think better than anyone, Ana Marie Cox (formerly known as Wonkette) sums up the media and personal dynamics pretty well:

Over time, voters may react negatively to image of a man pursuing the presidency as his wife struggles with an incurable disease. But whether or not that is the image they see is another question, and that creation of that image largely depends on how we in the media frame the Edwards' decision. Specifically, such an image will emerge if we depict that choice as Jay did: as a man -- John Edwards -- torn between "his duties as husband and father to three children, including a 6 and 8 year old" and "his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House."

First of all, this framework presents what might be -- in the eyes of both John and Elizabeth -- a false choice. From all they've told us, the Edwards family sees those duties (as husband, as father, as candidate), as overlapping. Surely, one reason John Edwards is running for president because he wants to be a part of creating a better world for his family. Which brings us to the second problem: The decision to keep the campaign going was not John Edwards' alone to make. (And I find the presumption that it could be startlingly archaic.) John may find himself pulled to simply concentrate on his family, but I think Elizabeth would push back. I think she already has.

Does it seem selfish that he continues to run? Think about it this way: Your doctor gives you a year to live. Of course you decide to pursue the things in life you either put off or gave up on. You follow your dreams, as they say. You sail around the world. You read the Bible in Aramaic. You reconcile with a family member. For Elizabeth Edwards, the answer to the "what would you do if you only had a year to live" question is simple: Get my husband elected President.

Is that decision selfish, given that the couple has two small children? I can't say -- and I'm not sure if anyone who doesn't know the family can -- but I don't think it's a question with a standard answer.

Having some experience with traumatic events, I can safely say that how one deals with trauma, or loss, or death, or any other deeply serious issue has a tremendous amount to do with how one personally chooses to, or just instinctively does, react. In the aftermath of the Simon's Rock shooting, I was cracking jokes in the hospital starting from the time I was on the operating table (true story). It helped me rationalize things. Sure, there were times in the following months and years when I mourned, and times to have long philosophical conversations about it, and times to act a bit defiantly to prove I was alive...and all of those were appropriate at the time. For those who have trouble imagining me angry, they should have seen the fire I was spitting when an unnamed family member who does not read this blog, as far as I know, challenged me on my ways of dealing with my memories, thinking that he knew better than I (this may be something of a giveaway as to whom I am referring).

When my aunt developed breast cancer, and especially toward the end where the news got progressively worse, she tried to pack as much life out of her remaining time as possible. I'm sure she also spent time mourning, as did any number of family members before and after. If the Edwards choose to take the fighting path, more power to them (if they had chosen to drop out of the campaign, more power to them in that, too). Family is important, but let's try to remember that he is campaigning for the presidency of the United States.

Simply put, John Edwards has a legitimate shot to become the most powerful and influential person in the entire world, able to set an agenda that could conceivably help out millions of people (i think so, and I certainly think that he thinks so). If he and his wife agree that this is the higher goal, and that they are both capable of it, how in the name of anything good and holy can you try to argue he should drop out. This isn't just a job, or some kind of passing fad, it is the presidency of the United States, and that title used to mean something before the current administration decided to crap all over it. I can't say I envy the Edwards' the pain and grief they will likely have to face in the much too quickly approaching future, but they are entirely justified in their priorities. There is a legacy at stake here, for the candidate with the strongest social vision of any of the current candidates (Obama has him on general tone and eloquence, but Edwards wins on pure vision of how to make us a better country). They, as a couple, are in a position shared by only a handful of people the world round, and seem well aware of that potential. If they choose to prioritize the greater good with the time they have, and people want to complain about that, forgive me if I have to think it speaks vastly more poorly about the latter's morals than the former's.

Send lawyers, guns and money...The shit has hit the fan

2007-03-23T22:10:00.000-06:00

Tonight's title comes from the late Warren Zevon (better known perhaps for "Werewolves of London"), and happens to be the inspiration for one of my favorite blogs, found over to the right side in the blogroll. Also, take a look over there at our two new additions, Mad Poet at the Gate, featuring the poetic stylings of the lawyer most closely related to me, and Elaine's blog, featuring the poetic stylings of of someone who is a very kind and generous soul in spite of the fact she married a lawyer.

There are two important political developments to talk about in the news the past few weeks, which, much to my continued amazement, show Democrats showing good sense and fierce organization (?!?) and Republicans neither whatsoever. The Democrats did a good thing with the passage of today's Iraq War funding bill. Everyone in the world admits it's not perfect, but it does put the President in the awkward position of needing to veto a bill finding the troops in order to avoid having to meet some actual benchmarks for a change. To quote Atrios:

Shorter GWB: The troops need funding which is why I'll veto the bill which would give it to them.

I think the most persuasive statement about the morality of this bill came from Chris Bowers at MyDD, who wrote the following to liberal critics of the bill:

My point is this: don't tell me that I am less principled, moral or ethical than you because I am supporting this measure even though I don't think it goes far enough. I am certainly not going to do the same thing to you, because I don't really see how either of our positions will result in a more ethically acceptable outcome. I arrived at my position because, in my final analysis, I believed the politics of the situation demanded it. You could respond that I should appreciate the ethical values of actions in and of themselves, rather than in the context of their consequences, but if that is your position than ultimately it represents an ideological difference between the two of us that will not be settled either in the discussion of this post, or before the House vote tomorrow. I do not see an ethical high ground in the progressive debate on this vote, and thus political considerations take precedence. Now, I don't think we handled the politics of this vote as well as we could have, but a progressive engineered defeat of this bill would make the political situation even worse. Republicans have to be the ones who hold this bill up, and / or fail to implement it, not Democrats and not progs. If the war will continue either way, then it must be clear that it was their decision to continue it, not ours.

If we must have this war, and given the lack of veto override numbers in Congress, we will certainly have this war, it is time to make sure Republicans own it, so the nation as a whole can let them know the depth of our profound displeasure in 2008. The choice must be as stark as possible, and the House has gone a long way towards accomplishing that task. From a pragmatic point of view, and let's face it, that's all we have for the moment with our bellicose and incompetent leadership running the show, tonight's NYTimes headline says it all: Democrats Show Surprising Unity.

On to Republicans who seem completely disorganized. This isn't just a passing phase, by the way, their incompetence has driven the number of people identifying as Democrats to the highest numbers recorded for decades, and R's to the lowest. Still, the bungling of the Justice department with respect to the US Attorney's firings is staggering, even before the news that Alberto Gonzales apparently blatantly lied to Congress about meetings he attended but claimed he did not. Note in the story how many different stories DoJ officials are still telling: in general, when you have so many diverging and contradictory stories, it is because everyone (perhaps minus one) is lying. At it's heart, the story is exactly what Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking points Memo has been saying for months (he's the blogger/journalist who the media is belatedly recognizing as kicking their asses on this story): Karl Rove and GWB tried to turn the Justice Department into a partisan enforcement arm of the Republican party:

Now we know with crystal clear proof what we really already knew a week ago: that Alberto Gonzales was lying about his role in the US Attorney Purge. So add that to the list of all the other things he's lied about.

But don't get distracted by the lying or even the cover-up.

Right-wing shills want to chalk the blundering administration response to US Attorney Purge scandal to incompetence. But just as we can infer the force of gravity from the descent of the falling apple, the panicked succession of lies and dodges out of the administration implies not incompetence but guilty knowledge of underlying bad acts.

This isn't about the AG's lies. It's not about the attempted cover-up. It's not about executive privilege and investigative process mumbojumbo.

This is about using US Attorneys to damage Democrats and protect Republicans, using the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel in the war for national political dominance. All the secrecy and lies, the blundering and covering-up stems from this one central fact.

Even though many of the "finest" legal minds on the right, and a number of befuddled centrists fail to see how this is so troubling, let's lay it out, very simply and cleanly.

1. Karl Rove, acting as the President's political advisor, has long wanted to use the DoJ as a partisan operation for permanent Republican dominance, seemingly forgetting that his entire party is vastly incompetent at governing. This is, for instance, how over 80% of local investigations by US Attorneys turn out to be targeting Democrats. Still, some US Attorneys seem to be reputable, so the White House decides to remove them from office.

2. The White House has the power to do this legally, since they got Senator Arlen Specter to allow a provision into law to replace US Attorneys without Senate confirmation. They then pushed out 8 US Attorneys, including many in key swing states who had the gall to investigate criminality by Republicans, or alternately fail to prosecute innocent Democrats on trumped up voter fraud charges. This is not to say the entire process is legal. Senator Pete Domenici, Representative Heather Wilson (both of New Mexico), and Republican party officials in Washington State may have very well obstructed justice by attempting to interfere with ongoing investigations by leaning on prosecutors.

3. Even though the White House actions may have been technically legal, if the details got out they were so blatantly anti-democratic that even our tepid media would have erupted in outrage. Thus, they did what administrations like this always do: they lied to everyone who asked about these issues, claiming no political interference. Lying to the media is one thing, however, lying to Congress another. The latter is criminal, and apparently encompasses a number of the higher-ups at the DoJ, including the AG himself. Remember, lying to Congress is a crime.

4. Some in the media continue to focus on the details of the firings, which, as we just went over, were technically legal. This ignores both the reason behind the firings, which was to turn the DoJ into a partisan enforcement service, something that should worry any rational human being. It also ignores the coverup, which is blatantly illegal. There is an important reason why you cannot legally lie to Congress: they provide the only oversight over the executive branch until November 2008!

Of course, this is the bush administration, so we can be pretty sure that Gonzales also lied about not giving DoJ investigators the right to investigate the warrantless wiretapping program, even though it was his conduct that was going to be investigated. WE can save that for next week, however.

Truth twenty-four times a second #4: The Lives of Others

2007-03-22T21:38:00.000-06:00

First of all, some bloggity news to pass along. A certain paternal relation of mine has finally decided to set up his own blog, Mad Poet at the Gate, featuring a number of poems ranging from Koans to reminiscences about science fiction writers. It seems to be a household thing, as his wife has a blog, too. Seriously, if you appreciate language, check them out. Even if you don't, check them out, and maybe you will. If nothing else, you can try to figure out how one writes in Kanji on an English-language blog...

Last night, I got to see this year's best foreign film Oscar winner, The Lives of Others, in the theatre. I have to admit, it was good, and even though the academy pretty clearly made a mistake by selecting it over Pan's Labyrinth, it's not a horrible choice. Choosing Crash last year for Best Picture, for instance, was a much poorer judgment.

The Lives of Others is set in mid 1980's East Germany, when the Stasi, or Secret Police, still ruled the country through fear and a vast web of informers, and the early signs of Glasnost and the fall of the Wall were still completely invisible to just about everyone. Like a lot of the books and movies I've seen recently, and most of our daily political news, it concerns the use and misuse of power. At it's heart is the Stasi agent assigned to monitor a seemingly loyal playwright, who gradually realizes that his assignment has much more to do with the personal agendas of the powerful than with any real state interest. It is here that the film manages to make it's most profound moral statement, in that Wiesler, the Stasi agent, can hardly be considered to be pure of heart for realizing the evil of his orders. After all, he has been instrumental in ruining countless lives, many of whom were likely innocent, all in the name of duty. His affront at being used against a personal rival, rather than an enemy of the state, is as much from a personal sense of pride as from any innate goodness. Still, without giving away the ending, we have a clear case where Wiesler manages to fundamentally do good in the world, where most would have not, and that must count for something.

More than anything else, films like this (and Pan's Labyrinth in its own way) show just how dangerous it is to place loyalty to an ideology as one's primary goal. As we've seen in Iran (I'll be reviewing Reading Lolita in Tehran in a few days), in North Korea, in the US invasion of Iraq, and countless other places, ideologues typically believe in pretty sounding words that fail miserably in practice. One could strongly suggest that it took Marxists about a century to pretty much prove this point completely, as East Germany demonstrated just a few years later. When ideologues gain power, the results range from bad to tragic, with almost no room for any good outcome. For the pawns in their games, it doesn't matter if you are a loyal soldier (cough...Scooter Libby...cough) or a well-meaning crusader whose strings are being pulled from above (paging the US Attorneys): you are still a pawn, and in the end their moral failing will compromise you one way or the other.I have a great deal of sympathy for the fired US Attorneys, but it is important to remember that they were willing to be quiet about what seems to be a vast plan to obstruct justice until the Department of Justice decided to rub it in their faces. Up until that point, justice was just as perverted, but they felt none of the current compunction to speak out. Then again, as we argued before, even if injured pride moves you to do the right thing, you've still done the right thing...

As a film, The Lives of Others, features any number of strong acting performances in a story told very tightly until the surprisingly loose, John Irving-like ending. If the academy was fooled, it was because they went with a good Actor's movie over better Director's movie. It's almost excusable, but disappointing to see one of the truly visionary films of the past few years lose to a well-told but significantly less ambitious film. Still, though, this one is very much worth seeing. Remember, as the second best foreign film of the year, it is probably the second best film of the year as well (The Departed might make the top 10, if I'm feeling charitable, but last year was not a proud one for American film). More than any I saw last year, it is a deeply humanistic film, one that really does a tremendous job in finding the humanity amidst our boldest and bravest choices and most craven moral compromises.

high times

2007-03-20T20:55:00.000-06:00

First, tip o' the hat to the co-blogger and his missus for putting up with me and the mini-me. This was our first meeting since starting this venture, and of course we mostly swapped music and played with the kidlet rather than developing a serious business plan.

Second, a wag o' the finger to people you'd rather forget who appear out of the past. Remember Ken Starr? The ol' rascal's back and representin' at the Supreme Court. Specifically, he's arguing that a high school principal can suspend a student for holding up a "Bong hits 4 Jesus" sign outside the school grounds. Really.

I recommend the whole article - IMHO Dahlia Lithwick is the funniest and also most clear-headed writer on judicial issues, especially SCOTUS arguments (maybe madpoet has his favorites.) Just check out this graph:

Starr insists that "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" promotes drugs. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asks whether a sign that said "Bong Stinks for Jesus" would be more permissible. Souter asks whether a simple sign reading "Change the Marijuana Laws" would also be "disruptive." Starr says that interpreting the meaning of the sign must be left to the "frontline message interpreter," in this case, the principal. Then Starr says schools are charged with inculcating "habits and manners of civility" and "values of citizenship." Yes, sir. In the first six minutes of oral argument Starr has posited, without irony, a world in which students may not peaceably advocate for changes in the law, because they must be inculcated with the values of good citizenship.

I know, it gets so old and cliched, because we have to ask this all the time, but why do right-wingers instinctively hate America's freedoms? There is a set of ingrained cultural signifiers, e.g. the sweet leaf which has yet to harm anyone, that for some reason really get their goats. In this case, this was just a sign that mentioned pot (outside the school) which is somehow undermining the entire education system. It takes a special kind of mind to try to justify this level of meta-absurdity - not unlike the one that took tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to produce long and boring graphic descriptions of sexual acts and published them for the world to see, all in the name of defending family values?

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 5: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

2007-03-16T19:38:00.000-06:00

Somehow, I managed to re-read TS for our book club here at UIUC, and then ended up too busy to go to the book club meeting. Why did I read it the first time, you ask? Well, it's the second important novel ever written in English (after Clarissa), and the second great postmodern novel, after Don Quixote. For my original take on TS, you can take a peek at my old book review page. For those unfamiliar with the book, the title may be dignified, but the novel is anything but. it's a long series of tangents on philosophy, political and religious jokes, amusing anecdotes, further digressions, and just about anything other than either the life or the opinions of its narrator. For the first four books, we are treated to the story of his conception (it doesn't go well) and birth (even more poorly). Eventually, we get to his accidental circumcision as a youth while pissing out a window, a book devoted to insulting France, and the almost but not-quite romance between his uncle and a local widow...but this is beside the point. Tristram Shandy is not centered around its plot, but around its fun with language and storytelling. Sterne is a constant practical joker (much like Cervantes), with a true talent for blue humor, rather impressive for an 18th century clergyman.

In many ways, the novel shows off just how much society has changed with time, especially with regard to moral values. Needless to say, people today are vastly more prudish than they were back then. Yes, I said more prudish now, not the reverse. There is nothing more amusing than the editor of this edition stumbling in his attempts to explain some of Sterne's bawdier references, even though Sterne himself was never so shy (to be fair, Sterne himself edits out the really dirty parts, but in such a way that there is no mystery whatsoever as to what he is implying). I have a real beef with the editing team, it should be said. The endnotes fail to translate any number of the parts written in foreign languages, fail to explain some crucial allusions unfamiliar to a modern reader, constantly refer to works that no one outside a graduate English program could be expected to track down, and have a bizarre obsession with TS's citations in the OED. The introduction is a horrid piece of 50's literary criticism, of virtually no interest to anyone but a diehard Shandean, which in no way even attempts to explain how the novel has remained influential to this day.

Quoth wikipedia:

Today, the novel is commonly seen as a forerunner of later stream of consciousness, self-reflexive and postmodern writing. However, current critical opinion is divided on this question. There is a significant body of critical opinion that argues that Tristram Shandy is better understood as an example of an obsolescent literary tradition of "Learned Wit", partly following the contribution of D.W. Jefferson.

I believe our editor was from the latter school, which is deeply, deeply misguided at best. I would have to argue that when a book clearly influences any number of modernist and post-modern writers (Joyce and Rushdie are mentioned by wikipedia), many of whom seem to have taken notes on the style of writing via digression, it needs to be classified as such even if there is a gap in the historical chain between then and now. Needless to say, no book so influential today can be properly considered only in terms of an obsolescent tradition. If anything, I think it shows off more just how misguided critics of PM fiction tended to be, given that virtually every aspect of popular culture is moving steadily in the direction of self-reflexivity (remember, on the first day we founded this blog, Time Magazine named us people of the year!).

Anyway, back to my main point. It is almost shocking to see just how modern the sensibilities of the 18th century were, at least with regard to the vastly more buttoned-up taste of the 19th. We often forget, in these days or rapidly lapsing Victorianism, that it wasn't always like this. Maybe 19th century Brits had some serious sexual hangups that required about 150 years and the introduction of pay cable and the internet in order to break down, but the 18th sure seem free of these problems. In the end, we can deny human nature for decades, but in the end people are much more the products of our animal ancestors (Sterne would likely say "animal spirits") than your average Conservative would care to admit. The second novel ever written in the English language begins at the moment of its narrator's conception, and I mean the exact moment, and ends with a celebration of its own place as a Cock and Bull story, where I would note that the allusion there means exactly the same thing now as it did them. Speaking of the closing line, it was used as the title of Michael Winterbottom's rather shockingly good movie version of the novel, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a free mental cheat sheet in place before they read the book.

Speed of lightning, roar of thunder, Fighting all who rob or plunder: Underdog, Underdog.

2007-03-15T21:14:00.000-06:00

Hi y'all, sorry about the hiatus, but work has been keeping me busy for the past week (no need for sarcastic comments about working hard, hardly working, etc.). Anyway, I had to weight in on something eventually, and certainly one thing is at the forefront of my mind: the NCAA basketball tournament, and why I'm a Democrat. Yes, those two are related. We'll get to the latter in a second or two.

First, the Big Dance, which as a 64-team single-elimination team sports tournament shares what has to be the most exciting format in all of Sports This is not American triumphalism or some such, I just mean the format itself, which is shared, for example, by the national cup tournaments in European soccer, the FA cup being perhaps the most famous, especially to readers of Nick Hornby. The key to the format is that there are never 64 really evenly matched teams in any sport, so you end up with numerous underdog vs. favorite matchups, especially in the early going, which then morph into Cinderella stories in the middle round. Typically, midnight strikes eventually, leaving us with a bunch of good but often surprising teams presenting us with the cognitively dissonant fact that all you have to do in order to win the whole thing is to win six straight games, yet only one team manages the feat. Needless to say, it's also the best format for gambling pools nationwide, since you need virtually no inside basketball knowledge whatsoever to fill out a bracket. I usually pick some possible upset picks from the #2 and #3 seeds, since everyone picks #1 seeds and it lowers the marginal value in betting with them, and then hope that they'll go far. I should mention this virtually never actually works. Still, it makes it more fun to root for underdogs throughout the entire tournament. That way, I've successfully hedged my bets. When favorites win, my bracket looks better. When underdogs win, I'm happy on a personal level. As a side note, since I'm really not alone in these rooting interests, it explains why debates over who should be in the tournament (aka "Who's on the bubble") are essentially meaningless. The Illini were one of the last teams in, making fans in Champaign and several counties in Central Illinois happy. The rest of the nation, not so much. Had Drexel, or Missouri State, or Bradley, or a smaller program made it, everyone not from Virginia Tech would have been rooting for the upset. Instead, no one cares.

Rooting for the underdog goes to the heart of my liberal political beliefs, of course. Up until 2006, being a Democrat we very much like rooting for a mid-major program. They show some promise, but you just know that they're going to lose in the end. Thankfully, sometimes Cinderella makes the final four, like George Mason last year, and sometimes those in power fall, like Duke this year in the first round (to Virginia Commonwealth). Anyway, back to actually making a point. The democratic party, in its ideals, certainly appeals to those who root for underdogs (in practice, politicians are politicians first and people second or third, and appeal primarily to deep-pocketed donors). Unions over corporations, the poor over the rich, the right of people to vote over the right to suppress it, etc. Seriously, for those who speak badly of unions, WTF? I'm not suggesting that they are perfect, but you have to be seriously deranged to believe that corporations needing protection from their workers is a more pressing issue than the reverse. On the death penalty, what does it say about your very soul if you are more comfortable seeing an innocent man murdered by the state rather than a guilty man go free? Karl Rove, the man seemingly behind the US Attorneys scandal (there's a shock!) wanted certain people fired for failing to investigate "voter fraud", which in practice means anecdotal evidence of some trace amount of illegal voting by non-citizens. The favorite republican tool to stop this: odious voting registration requirements that suppress minority turnout. Seriously, if you don't like the rules of the game, just change the rules in order to keep the other side down (see Bush vs. Gore for more of this kind of policy).

At heart, I really dislike people who root for the big guy over the little one (no height-related comments from the peanut gallery please). It basically means that you are picking your sides based on who you think will win, rather than who should win. It's like being a Yankees fan, only toward life, rather than just baseball. We're not kids anymore, crying because we lost a little league game, or a talent competition, or something like that. Especially in cases where the big guy is a combination of corporate interests that value profits over people, along with their theocratic allies who value profits over prophets, and a scattering of macho bullshit idiots who think that war is a game not much different than basketball, but for the traumatic injuries, deaths of soldiers and civilians, millions of refugees, etc....well, let's just say to root for the little guy.

More tomorrow night when I'm in the mood to be a bit coherent. Until then, here's hoping for Upset City, baby!

algo divertido

2007-03-12T22:31:00.000-06:00

Since my illustrious co-blogger is busy (for a change?) I figure we can have a little fun. Here's an awesome video from the dearly departed Mr. George Harrison, and watch out for a little help from certain friends...

If you want to discuss the obvious or obscure symbolism of the video in the comments, be our guest. Possible topics: are pajamas philosophical garments, or just closer to "institutional" attire? What's up with fake boobs hanging out? And why is moustache on John Cleese inherently and unmistakably evil?

Barack and crabbiness

2007-03-09T10:03:00.001-06:00

I don't envy what Barack Obama has to go through. Here's an excerpt from a passionate letter about the attitudes of black intellectuals gathered on Tavis Smiley:

But then it happened . . . my enthusiasm came to a screeching halt! Here we go again . . . that same gratuitous question mainstream media outlets across America seem to be commissioning ambitious black folk to answer and justify: Is our brother, Barack Obama, down enough with the cause to deserve our support?

I just knew this panel of amazing minds and deep souls would once and for all stop the madness and give a resounding, "we're not falling for another Rove-ian mindtrick to sidetrack us from the substantive issues at hand to debate your historical lies and give credibility to your ignorance." I just knew this conscientious crew would cite to Obama's academic excellence and obvious intelligence, his outstanding achievements, his proven commitment to our community through his life's work, his impressive legislative record, his coalition-building skills and political experience. But instead, Malcolm's proverbial crabs started grabbing, pulling, pinching and reaching for dear brother Barack's neck. I was mortified.

Two observations:
1. From my uninformed perspective, I'd guess that lack of monolithic support from the "black community" (whatever that means) will probably play in Obama's favor in the broader population.

2. The tendency to "eat their young" is certainly not limited to African-American intelligentsia. A lot of groups, political, ethnic, cultural, scrutinize those closest to them more harshly than others, perhaps reflecting deep-seated insecurities, or the human tendency to magnify differences with those near and dear to you.

Whatever the outcome, I think Obama's is by far the most exciting campaign happening now, both because of who he is, what he says, and how he connects with people.

It's not a crime! It's legal, perfectly natural...

2007-03-07T22:15:00.000-06:00

I'll be going off tonight on fake scandals and the reporters who love them, but make sure to scroll down and play dkon's youtube clip first, since it'll put you in a better mood either before or afterwards (or both).

My current favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, found himself enmeshed in a scandal today...only, it turns out that it's not really much of a scandal at all. He turned over proceeds from his book into a blind trust, realized later that he was receiving more info about the investments he let a broker make than he should, and decided the best course of action was to take all his money and place it into mutual funds instead, to avoid a conflict of interest. Thankfully, Obama understands the fast-paced media cycle and responded in the same day:

Senator Barack Obama said today he did not believe it was a conflict to seek investment advice and use the brokerage services recommended by a friend and political contributor. He said he was not aware he had invested money into two of the same companies supported by some of his top donors.

“At no point did I know what stocks were held,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “And at no point did I direct how those stocks were invested.”

I'm not even sure that this is a scandal even if he knew, since he and supporters were investing in the same companies, not in each other's projects, and as mentioned before he didn't even know about where his money was going so one can't really say he meant to do anything. Still, it's good to know that the story got smacked down, because otherwise it is safe to assume that FoxNews would have had a field day, like they did with the fake madrassa story, and the fake controversy over his church's creed, and the fake controversy about his middle name, and ....

Obama's not the only one whose been bitten by crappy gotcha journalism. John Edwards was gotcha'd for selling his house through a realtor below market price to a political opponent. Again, I have no idea how this is supposed to be a conflict of interest, and neither did the Washington Post ombudsman, who smacked down the reporter who filed the bogus story, John Solomon. Solomon, formerly of the AP, is famous for misleading hit pieces, most recently on Harry Reid for another non-scandal, and was once described thus: "The consensus: he's lazy, and takes hit jobs handed him on a platter by opps research teams (and anyone will do.) And doesn't do much to clean it up.".

Seemingly every presidential candidate is vulnerable to this crap. Hillary got pilloried by the Drudge Report, and then CNN et al., for a quote taken massively out of context. Even St. John McCain, the patron saint of moderation and maverickosity was on the receiving end of another Solomon smear that was considered so blatantly unfair that lefty bloggers were up in arms.

Remember, many politicians are out-and-out criminals, like Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and likely Tom DeLay. Sen Pet Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, both Republicans from NM, seem to have interfered with an active investigation, thus obstructing justice, in the recent US Attorneys scandal. Still, not every scandal is real, and many of these stories are steaming piles of donkey poo, poorly sourced and poorly fact-checked, designed to attack a candidate without giving them a fair chance to respond. For goodness sakes, it's not like investigative journalists can't find enough real scandals out there, but some are just too lazy to do it.

What brothers are for...

2007-03-07T21:06:00.000-06:00

Here is something to amuse the fine blog-reading public. My brother Tim hipped me to this:

Liar, liar, pants are on fire, your tongue is as long as a telephone wire

2007-03-06T22:38:00.000-06:00

Today was a bad day for the administration. In the morning, we had suicide bombers killing over 100 Iraqis as reports filtered out of 9 more US troop deaths. Around noon, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, was found guilty on four counts of obstruction of justice and perjury. All day long, Congress heard testimony from US Attorneys forced out of their jobs, supposedly for performance reasons, but apparently for either prosecuting Republicans or not prosecuting democrats enough. One thing is clear from the last two items: nothing coming from senior levels of the administration can be trusted anymore. Here is a basic summary of their malfeasance:

1. They let subordinates lie for them, and then fall on their own swords to protect the boss. This is clearly the case for Libby, who lied to protect Cheney when everyone else in the administration actually told the truth to the FBI. Note that this indicates that Cheney is the paranoid power behind the throne; Karl Rove told Patrick Fitzgerald the truth about leaking a CIA agent's name, knowing that the media would follow up ineffectively. By the way, regardless of the ongoing trial, Bush promised to fire anyone connected to the leak, and Cheney and Rove both admitted doing so under oath. I somehow doubt they will be tendering resignations any time soon. Perhaps the media should harp on this a bit.

As to the prosecutors, they were honorable in their duties, even in the face of government interference that they considered tantamount to obstruction of justice. The higher-ups in the Justice Department smeared them anyway,m because that is what they do, and are now being bitten in the ass for it.

2. There is no accountability in our government, because the media gets too distracted. Anna Nicole's death, in the days that it happened, was still a smaller story than the continuing suffering in New Orleans, or Darfur, or Iraq, or any number of places. The Bush administration never fixes any of these, they just wait for the focus to pass. This is good for them personally, bad for their party, and horrible for the nation. As I mentioned yesterday, though, they don't really seem to care, so long as the bucks keep flowing their way. Look at Walter Reed, whose problems were outsourced to a former Halliburton executive, or Iraq, many of whose problems were outsourced to Halliburton, or ...you get the point.

In scanning tonight's news, there were stories in the NYTimes and WaPo about the administration's failure of credibility, but we all know tomorrow that they will still report the government's side in the interests of "fairness" failing to properly note the administration's global lack of any credibility on just about any issue. This needs to change.

3. Democrats are still being very, very cautious, which is dumb. It is time to say, repeatedly and publicly, that the administration specifically and Republican party in general is no longer a credible governing force. Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans, Walter Reed, Congressional pages, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Macaca, Ann Coulter, the list is endless, on every issue one could name. Time after time, it is time to treat them with the scorn that they've earned for years now. Rather than embrace a phony bipartisanship to sound nice, Democrats need to claim an alliance with the American people, fighting for the issues we support against a government that has functioned for the past six years as a kleptocracy. Taking the other side seriously as anything but an impediment for passing an agenda worthy of the American people is a waste of time at this point. They've fucked us over for long enough, and it is time for the grownups to take over. End of story.

Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today.

2007-03-05T21:58:00.000-06:00

In the continuing furor over care at Walter Reed, it seems even more bizarre that the VA system is considered to be the best healthcare system in America according to any number of recent surveys...until you realize that the two statements I just made have no relation to each other at all. Walter Reed, like many of the problematic medical facilities out there, is a military hospital run by the Department of Defense, in this case by the Army. Bethesda Naval hospital, as the name implies, is run by that service branch. The VA system, on the contrary, is run by the Department of Veterans' Affairs, a completely different branch of the government. The latter has been hurt lately by an influx of new wounded veterans without a corresponding increase in its budget and the fact that it's current head, Jim Nicholson, is a Republican toady:

He has been accused by some veterans and the organizations that represent them of being primarily a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and of being slow to respond to increasing strains on his agency as returning soldiers move from facilities like Walter Reed, which is run by the Defense Department, into the veterans affairs system.

Critics say he has under-emphasized his agency’s budget needs to Congress, has not responded to calls for more mental health workers and brain trauma specialists and has failed to overhaul disability claims procedures. Some leaders of veterans groups say Mr. Nicholson is less communicative than his predecessors.

Still, VA care is among the best in the country, as this Washington Monthly story demonstrates:

And so it goes today. If the debate is over health-care reform, it won't be long before some free-market conservative will jump up and say that the sorry shape of the nation's veterans hospitals just proves what happens when government gets into the health-care business. And if he's a true believer, he'll then probably go on to suggest, quoting William Safire and other free marketers, that the government should just shut down the whole miserable system and provide veterans with health-care vouchers.

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

Here's another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

Not convinced? Consider what vets themselves think. Sure, it's not hard to find vets who complain about difficulties in establishing eligibility. Many are outraged that the Bush administration has decided to deny previously promised health-care benefits to veterans who don't have service-related illnesses or who can't meet a strict means test. Yet these grievances are about access to the system, not about the quality of care received by those who get in. Veterans groups tenaciously defend the VHA and applaud its turnaround. "The quality of care is outstanding," says Peter Gayton, deputy director for veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. In the latest independent survey, 81 percent of VHA hospital patients express satisfaction with the care they receive, compared to 77 percent of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

No, the current problem lies with Walter Reed and the military's hospital management. In many ways, they are suffering from the same problem as a number of government agencies do: complete hubris and incompetence in the face of a Congress and media that basically spent six years ignoring their roles as guardians of the public interest. Just like the Justice Department decided that it could can a bunch of US Attorneys and no one would notice, just like the administration decided to put cronies in charge of FEMA and no one would notice, just like they decided to make up the reasons to fight a war, and are trying to do it again, hoping no one will notice...it's just the way that they operate.

If I told you that Halliburton is ultimately at fault, would you be shocked? At this point, you shouldn't, because Halliburton's fingerprints are all over the scandal:

In a letter from the committee to Weightman, the members said the Garibaldi memo “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel.’ ... According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”

The committee’s letter also noted that Walter Reed awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

The committee also noted that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private workers.

“The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful,” the committee statement said.

“Part of our mission on the oversight committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers.”

The committee letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty — a process that began in 2000.

“But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002,” the committee letter states.

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states.

“The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission has grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”

Seriously, it's not a new scandal each time, it's the same scandal being created by the same folks, whose effect always seems to be to poison this country. It's not that all of them are evil, though some may be, it's just that they don't really give a shit, and that's a bad thing for the people running the country to think.

And that is how I know...when I try to get through on the telephone to you...There'll be nobody home

2007-03-04T20:19:00.000-06:00

There was a brief period when I was first introduced to Slashdot, the web's leading technology news source, when I used to leave comments. I soon realized it was pretty useless, given the general chaos in their comments, which span the full range between insightful points and babbling idiocy, with very few people aware of the difference in spite of their extremely complicated comment moderation system. Still, it should be pointed out that there are precious few stories about anything technical that escape their attention, and three from tonight really made that clear. I'll skip straight to the linked articles, since that is where the real interest lies.

First, a quickie about a mission to go sample the Earth's mantle with a deep sea mission. MSNBC reports that the exposed mantle is located near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where matter is upwelling, slowly pushing America and Europe apart, though nowhere near as fast as our President has been doing so. No one is quite sure exactly why the crust seems to have ripped open in this one spot, according to the article, though they seem to think the crust above fractured and was more tightly bound to itself than to the mantle below, leading to fissures. Given the huge uncertainties we have with respect to the physics of what happens underfoot, especially compared to the ease with which we study the stuff above, I'm sure that anything they find will be more than interesting. Heck, just last week they announced that a big chunk of the mantle beneath China contains as much water as the Arctic Ocean, though no one has much of an idea how to access it anytime soon.

Switching over to matters above, if you will, the NYTimes has an article about our evolutionary conditioning to believe in God. Just to set up the basic parameters:

About 6 in 10 Americans, according to a 2005 Harris Poll, believe in the devil and hell, and about 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and of life after death. A 2006 survey at Baylor University found that 92 percent of respondents believe in a personal God — that is, a God with a distinct set of character traits ranging from “distant” to “benevolent.”

The article mentions several interesting psychological studies, demonstrating that as young children we first believe that everyone thinks exactly the same (i.e., exactly like us), and later that we still seem to believe in omniscience, especially with regard to our parents until about age 5 or 6, and essentially suggests that God may be the residual of this belief.

Now, I might be genetically predisposed to be a non-believer, since neither of my parents are believers, but I am wary of the "nature instead of nurture" tone of the article. There is a strong social component to religion, especially given the role played by parents in teaching religion to their children (you have no idea how hard it was not to use the word "brainwash" there). Also, there is a bizarre tendency in humanity to believe completely random crap about just about anything, no matter how contradictory those beliefs may be, rather than admit to not knowing. Ask people if there is gravity on the moon, and more people will tell you "no" than "I don't know" (the answer is yes, of course, since mass is a source of gravitation and the moon has quite a bit of it). For reasons beyond me, people would rather believe their lives have an inherent point, even if we can't really define it, rather than admit we have no idea if we do or not. Most of it comes down to a sense of perspective: people ignore the fact of just how small and insignificant we are on the global scale, much less an astronomical ones. Maybe this is the byproduct of evolution: we specialize in explaining things, with very little regard to whether or not the explanations are correct, and uncertainty just flusters our well-evolved brains. Then again, I really don't know.

Finally, having looked up and down, let's just look all around at the invisible things all around us, in this case Wi-Fi networks. John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine, who is a very good writer, suggests that cellphone companies will try to kill off citywide WiFi projects, which would compete with their overpriced, tortoise-paced cell-based internet networks. He's certainly right about the telephone companies, who like just about all media/communication companies are fundamentally shortsighted about literally every technological issue with which they have to deal. I just wonder whether he fully understands kids these days. To anyone used to Hi-speed internet (let's say 10 Mbps or so), dial-up speed is physically painful. So long as there are restaurants and coffeeshops with free Wi-Fi, I'll blissfully ignore the existence of slower connections. If trapped at an airport without Hi-speed, I'll watch a DVD or read a book. I doubt I'm alone in this, it's just that a slow connection seems like a waste of time in the end. Outside of an airport, where exactly can one not find a coffeeshop these days? I would certainly look at paying for city-wide WiFi , but anything else is just a bit too close to the telegraph and the Pony Express. Thankfully, the cellphone companies don't have time on their side: free municipal WiFi may be hard to get implemented, but once in place it's hard to see what could make it go away. Besides, once Apple takes over the market with the iPhone, and then switches over to a WiFi/VoiP basis rather than cell when possible, how much longer will the cell phone industry be around, anyway?

Well maybe I am the f@ggot America, I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

2007-03-03T22:14:00.000-06:00

First a followup from yesterday, and then the newer stuff, including a movie review for a very good film that I really should have heard about long before now.

The media blackout on Coulter basically continued today, but for a halfhearted effort from the NYTimes, which first compared her to Hillary Clinton (yes, they are both polarizing, Hillary for proposing a halfway decent healthcare plan and Coulter for being a bigot), and then attempted to apologize for all the speakers who preceded her at the CPAC meeting, failing to note that last year at this very venue she contented herself with just making raghead jokes. This was premeditated, no matter how dumb the media chooses to play it, when they play it at all.

I brought up Atrios yesterday, and today featured one of the best descriptions of his blog and methods from the also-excellent Ezra Klein. Discussing Atrios' world-famous "wanker of the day" award, Klein explains exactly what it does and does not represent:

Among other things, the lefty blogosphere was founded on a critique of the mainstream media that argued, contrary to popular belief, that the media was not actually liberal. The individuals who comprised it may have been tolerant on cultural issues, but years of sustained attacks from the right had cowed reporters into a hollow set of "objective" protocols that served to obscure truth rather than enhance it. Simultaneously, decades of sustained attacks on liberals had spurred "serious pundits" to underscore their independence by routinely attacking the left. The result was a media which may have voted Democratic, but was fairly hostile to progressivism.

"Wanker of the Day" is not an argumentative feature, it is a reinforcing one. It exists to repeatedly provide evidence for a critique of the media that is only now leaving the margins. Atrios's epiphany was that you had to actually prove it day after day, not merely argue it. Since this was a somewhat counterintuitive take on reportage, it had to be buttressed -- and not just once, but repeatedly. Now, you can argue about the language ("wanker") or even deny the feature's legitimacy, but it does have a point -- it's not simply rhetorical extremism or red meat.

And let us all say, amen.

BTW, in case anyone wondered about the US Attorneys reference I made yesterday, the same exact wanker media/good blogosphere dynamic is summed up perfectly here at Talking Points memo, which also has pictures of Mitt Romney with Coulter, and this little chestnut on the whole affair, sent in by a reader:

From TPM Reader RB:

As I read the reaction/fallout from Ann Coulter’s remarks at CPAC this week I’m annoyed by the entire progressive reaction to it and most of the many other outrages committed on a daily basis by the Republican Party.

Why doesn’t a progressive with an audience say something to the effect “This is who and what the once proud and honorable Republican Party has turned itself into. It is a party of hate, intolerance, incompetence, greed, treason, fanatical, hostile to science and reality, and totally corrupt. They have no honor and no shame. They’re fascists and a cancer on our great nation, plain and simple and this is just another example of that.”

You'll note the clever meta trick of publishing said reader comment on a progressive blog with an audience...and again, let us all say amen, brother.

So, on to the movie reviews. On the recommendation of one of my colleagues, I finally saw Idiocracy, by Mike Judge, the guy who created both Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, and wrote and directed Office Space. It stars Luke Wilson as a completely average American who is accidentally placed in hibernation for 500 years, during which time the stupid people in the world so completely outbreed their smarter brethren that the entire country is plunged into idiocy. This should not be taken as racist (maybe classist), more a comment on today's race to the bottom popular culture. Given Judge's past, it should come as no surprise that TV, along with global corporate greed, proves to be a popular target for Judge to parody. The satire is a bit loose, but the movie is sustained throughout by a clever and funny visual feel (everyone wears shiny clothing more littered with ads than your average NASCAR driver), and a selection of targets that few would want to defend (mostly corporate conglomerates and their incessantly stupid advertising, along with dreadful reality TV). It's certainly worth renting, and given its complete lack of notoriety should be easy to find in a video store.

One of the funnier points that the movie makes is that there is an unfortunate association made in popular culture between intelligence and feminization. Judge does this by having his idiots of the future call lots of things "gay", satirizing the same macho bullshit redneck culture attacked by Green Day in the lyrics giving us tonight's post title (from "American Idiot", just like last night) and personified by Coulter's remarks and her intended audience, who can think of few things funnier than a faggot joke.

One of the reasons I am proud to consider myself a liberal is that this shit does not fly with us. We don't make it a point of principle to constantly attack the "other", whoever they may be at the moment, and are willing to defend them, as Elizabeth Edwards, John's wife, did today:

Although her words did not hurt us, they may have hurt some in the gay community. We are all sick and tired of anyone supporting or applauding or introducing hate words into the national dialogue, tired of people thinking that words that cause others pain are fair game. And we are sick and tired of people like Miss Coulter thinking that her use of loaded words about the homosexual community in this country is remotely humorous or appropriate.

The same dynamic is always in play whenever homosexuality is brought up: idiots go on the attack against what they perceive to be an easy target, and those of us who aren't assholes are left to argue against them. In response to a former NBA player coming out of the closet, we had this lovely quote from former player Tim Hardaway:

"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known," Hardaway said. "I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

Somehow, he perceived this as the proper Christian response, as would Ann Coulter as well, which is even scarier. The intelligent comeback came from former players Charles Barkley and Reggie Miller, respectively, and credit to them for saying it:

“I played with gay guys, I’ve got gay friends. I don’t care if a person is gay or not, only God can judge a person. But any jock who thinks he’s never played with a gay guy is sadly mistaken. Any team you’ve been on, at some point, you’ve played with a gay guy.”

“It’s a lack of education. For everything we’ve overcome as African-American athletes with a lot of the racial discrimination, I believe he needs some type of counseling or help to overcome his phobia. This is another black eye that David Stern has to deal with.”

I'll note that even though times may be changing slowly, they are changing. It may not men much to hear these words from someone randomly on the street, but these are prominent (hall of fame caliber) athletes, albeit in one of the two more liberal major sports (the NBA, because of the large African-American player percentage, along with Hockey, because of the European/Canadian influence). Even one of the most conservative institutions in America, the military, is seeing a change in perceptions. According to a 2006 Zogby poll:

Nearly one in four U.S. troops (23%) say they know for sure that someone in their unit is gay or lesbian, and of those 59% said they learned about the person's sexual orientation directly from the individual, a Zogby International poll of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan shows.

More than half (55%) of the troops who know a gay peer said the presence of gays or lesbians in their unit is well known by others. According to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, service members are not allowed to say that they are gay.
...
According to the new Zogby data, however, nearly three in four troops (73%) say they are personally comfortable in the presence of gays and lesbians.

Thankfully, with Democrats now in charge of Congress, Rep. Marty Meehan's bill ending the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy will likely come to the floor, even though the assholes at the Pentagon aren't pleased and say that it will be divisive. in a sense, they may be right. it will end up dividing the assholes and bigots from the rest of America, and about time. There is simply no place left in reasonable discourse for out and out bigots, and it's about time we started pushing this as strongly as possible.

Don't wanna be an American idiot, Don't want a nation under the media

2007-03-02T22:36:00.000-06:00

To quote Atrios: Owwww! The Stupid! It BURNS!!!! Parental advisory: Today's stupidity will force me to curse repeatedly.

From today's Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmichdiscussing the new TV show "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?":

But as for what star is closest to the Earth? Get real. The average person does not need to know that.

Yes they do. It's the fucking sun! It's what powers the entire planet, and allows us to live. How big an idiot are you, first to not know, and then to mock people for not being more ignorant than your average kindergartner?

From today's Conservative Political Action Committee meeting, at which nearly every Republican presidential candidate spoke, we have Ann Coulter, who I'll note was introduced by Mitt Romney himself:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered.

That's actually not the idiocy, since Ann Coulter is always like this. No, I'm talking about the complete media blackout. You may not have heard of this, since while it was mentioned on several liberal blogs and Editor and Publisher magazine, it literally wasn't mentioned by a single newspaper or news agency in the country, even though the NYTimes, Washington Post, and AP all filed stories on the day's meeting. From E&P, who seem to actually still believe in journalism:

The New York Times failed to mention the crack about Edwards in observing tonight: "The conference drew thousands of attendees, many of whom waited in a long line out the door for a late-afternoon appearance by Ann Coulter, the conservative author and commentator."

The Washington Post covered the conference but did not mention Coulter at all. Neither did the Associated Press, which also attended.

Seriously, what the fuck? John Edwards got a week of bad press for hiring two bloggers who have in the past taken on the Catholic Church for its support of pedophiles and backwardness with respect to birth control, and all of those news sources were more than happy to run with the story. A speaker at the biggest collection of Republican candidates to date makes a faggot joke in front of the assembled media, and they decide it's not newsworthy? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this country?

I could actually go on about several other idiocies tonight, given the continuing whitewash of the Walter Reed fiasco by the military (the guy they appointed to take over the facility, General Kevin Kiley, did nothing after being told that patients were sleeping in their own urine).
There is a story in the WaPo about the firing of 8 US Attorneys that completely misses the fact that many of them were fired because they were investigating higher-ups in the administration. Did you know that Carol Lam, the former US Attorney for San Diego who busted Rep. Duke Cunningham, is currently investigating the former #3 official in the CIA for corruption? You won't find that little tidbit anywhere in the newspaper tonight, needless to say, because John Solomon, their new "investigative" "reporter", turns out to be neither.

Seriously, I wish there was a God so it meant more when I say "god help us all"..

There's not been a day, one hasn't gone by, when I don't think about the day he didn't die

2007-03-01T20:05:00.000-06:00

Thankfully, while the current administration seems intent on making sure that all our news is bad news (how exactly did nuclear allegations about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea all turn out wrong anyway?...), they are as incompetent with regard to this task as they are to all the efforts they undertake. Today actually brought us two lightly related bits of good news, to offset the cratering of the stock market, the politically motivated firings of several US Attorneys, the first signs of the military taking some responsibility for the Walter Reed debacle about four years too late, etc.

It appears that there is some very encouraging news in the fight against malaria, one of the world's true preventable health crises.

A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.

The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.

A treatment will cost less than $1 for adults and less than 50 cents for children. Adults with malaria will take only two pills a day for three days, and the pill will come in three smaller once-a-day sizes for infants, toddlers and youngsters.
...
Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, based in Paris, will sell the pill at cost to international health agencies like the W.H.O., Unicef and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

As to the medical charity, they should be pretty familiar to you, since they are the February/March Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Médecins sans Frontières, a.k.a. Doctors without Borders. They even got the company to agree not to patent the drug, so generic versions will be legal worldwide. Let me suggest that this is an even better time to support their efforts. Your $25 may save up to 50 children's lives, by my count. Seriously, how can you not give at that rate of return on your money?

Further good news on the malaria front comes by way of a study performed in Uganda:

San Francisco and African AIDS researchers reported Tuesday that they had virtually eliminated malaria in a group of highly vulnerable, HIV-infected children simply by providing them with a daily dose of antibiotic and having them sleep under an insecticide-treated mosquito net.

The study conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in collaboration with researchers from San Francisco General Hospital found the bed net and antibiotic combination reduced the risk of malaria an astonishing 97 percent among the HIV-infected kids compared with a similar group of healthy children who did not receive the antibiotic and most of whom did not sleep under a bed net.
...
The antibiotic used in the study is cotrimoxazole -- sold in the United States under brand names such as Bactrim and Septra. The oral antibiotic is produced by generic drugmakers, and can be provided to children for pennies a day. But cost is always an issue in Africa and even the $5 cost of an insecticide-treated bed net is prohibitive for poor families.

Let's do a quick calculation, shall we? The Iraq war currently costs about $200 billion per year, once all costs are factored in. Figuring on two nets per person ($10), we could basically keep about 20 billion people from getting malaria in Africa each year...except for the fact that there are only about 6 billion people on the planet at the moment. Quite literally, in choosing to eliminate malaria or fight a war, we chose the war, and it's not even working out so well...when people try to make moral cases for war, make sure to remind them of these numbers, and then point out the millions displaced and the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians.

A quick update to a point I made about a month ago. Apparently, pressure is growing in Europe to require publicly funded scientific research to be made freely available to the public. According to the BBC:

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication.
...
Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world.
...
For years, the research model has remained relatively static.

In many countries, government funding agencies in the sciences, social sciences, and health sciences dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support research at national universities.

This statement is correct in many fields, but the BBC forgot to note that the revolution has already occurred in several, starting with high energy physics, and now encompassing a significant chunk of the physics world, including the entirety of astrophysics. The vehicle of change was the arXiv preprint server, to which essentially every astrophysics, high-energy physics, condensed matter, and many other disciples' papers are posted either prior to or immediately following acceptance by print journals. As an example, here is the sum of my published scientific output, short of talks that I've given but have yet to post to my personal webpage. There is not a single paper of mine for which you would have to pay for access that could not be gotten for free. Anyone in the world can read them all, not that anyone out there should really want to. Trust me, you don't want to. I don't even want to, frankly. You'll note if you check over there, or you could just take my word for it, that many of these papers appeared in reputable journals, whose editors and referees play a major role in validating the quality of papers. I'm certainly thankful that the published ones had to get an independent reader's approval. Even when the process is a pain, it generally improves the final quality (I'd note to avoid confusion that these revisions can be updated to the "preprint" after the fact, though it is not required).

Honestly, just about any academic field would be better served by this model. The opposition forces, which seem to consist of Nature and possible Elsevier press, are blowing smoke because they have a nice racket going and don't want to even risk it. What's most frustrating about this argument, though, is that many people discuss it as if it were some big theoretical idea, whereas the actual case is that several million scientific articles currently reside on public servers (arXiv has 400,000, and is the third largest that I found with a quick search). Thus you still see arguments like this:

Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.

even though it runs completely counter to the experience of hundreds of thousands of scientists who would be forced to spend literally minutes per paper uploading it to a public archive if they weren't industrious enough to pawn off the task on a grad student. Shockingly enough, and contra Nature if you'll pardon the pun, it is actually useful for scientists to make their work as broadly accessible as possible. In my case, UIUC subscribes to every journal under the sun, but I have no access at home or on the road to anything but the free server, an extremely common problem. This is just not that difficult an issue, frankly. Science belongs to the world, not to publishing houses.

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings, too

2007-02-28T21:24:00.000-06:00

It's often been said that "Sports is human life in microcosm", but sometimes it's a pretty tawdry microcosm. Other times, it's just frickin' bizarre. We'll get to tawdry in a second, but first, the quotable sports story of the day:

The chicken toss has been declared off limits at Kansas State. For years, Kansas State students have smuggled live chickens into basketball games against Kansas, then thrown them onto the court and behind the opposing bench before tip-off mocking their rival's Jayhawk mascot.

Umm, how exactly does one get not one, but several live chickens into a basketball game? These days, many stadiums still check purses, on the chance that Al Qaeda might hate not only our freedom, but also varsity college sports. In what exactly can one keep a chicken hidden and quiet, out of view of security until it is chucked onto the court? This has to rank as one of the mysteries of the universe, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, to the tawdry. The chairman of the N.F.L.’s research committee on concussions, Dr. Elliott Pellman, has resigned. Ok, that's not the tawdry part. It turns out that not only was he caught a few years back seriously padding his resume, and not only is he not a freakin' neurologist, but his "research" for the league seems to contradict virtually all the established medical research on concussions. ESPN published a story on him and the NFL's treatment of concussions a year ago which was truly disturbing:

Since it first published research results in 2003, Pellman's committee has drawn a number of important conclusions about head trauma and how to treat it that contradict the research and experiences of many other doctors who treat sports concussions, not to mention the players who have suffered them. For example, Pellman and his colleagues wrote in January 2005 that returning to play after a concussion "does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season." But a 2003 NCAA study of 2,905 college football players found just the opposite: Those who have suffered concussions are more susceptible to further head trauma for seven to 10 days after the injury.

Pellman and his group have also stated repeatedly that their work shows "no evidence of worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players." But a 2003 report by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina found a link between multiple concussions and depression among former pro players with histories of concussions. A 2005 follow-up study at the Center showed a connection between concussions and both brain impairment and Alzheimer's disease among retired NFL players.

Just to make it clear, post-concussive syndrome can be incredibly serious. Merrill Hoge, a former player and current sportscaster, described his symptoms:

Five weeks later, he was hammered on a tackle in a game against Buffalo and collapsed on the next down. His vital signs vanished for a few seconds. He spent two days in an intensive-care unit, and was told by neurologists that his eight-year career was over.

For a year, Hoge said, he could not stand bright lights and had dizzy spells. He struggled with arithmetic, and reading was difficult. He also had no sense of direction.

"It's one of the most helpless feelings I ever dealt with," he said. "I would get lost in my own neighborhood."

It can get worse. Andre Waters, a player for the Philadelphia Eagles, committed suicide in November, and the brain damage he incurred during his career is being blamed:

Brain damage caused on the football field ultimately led to the suicide of former NFL defensive back Andre Waters, according to a forensic pathologist who studied Waters' brain tissue.

Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh told The New York Times that Waters' brain tissue resembled that of an 85-year-old man and that there were characteristics of early stage Alzheimer's. Omalu told the newspaper he believed the damage was related to multiple concussions Waters sustained during his 12-year NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals.

Anyway, back to the NFL's concussion committee. Were one to be uncharitable, one could suggest that the committee is blatantly violating their Hippocratic oaths and endangering players for either hidden payoffs or possibly even worse, the continued opportunity to be the medical equivalents of starfuckers. Shockingly enough, their systematic trend is to suggest that athletes being paid millions of dollars maximize the value that teams get out of a contract, even if it endangers their lives and livelihoods once they are no longer team property. I'm not trying to suggest that the people on the committee range from physicians little better than tools because they are working outside their field of expertise to compromised hacks who should actually know better...but I'm not really in the mood to suggest any other alternative, if you get my drift. As for the league, it's important to remember that while fans talk of tradition and good times, owners think of dollars. We see championships, they see dollars. We have heroes, they have profits. There may be an occasional exception (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks comes to mind), but in general, it's all about the money, and we are their all-too-willing ATM machines, as they pull their clever reverse Robin Hood trick on us.

There would be a larger outcry about this kind of thing, except for the fact that in discussing sports, most men take out their brains, place them gently on a padded surface, and replace their cognitive capacities with a mix of testosterone and bullcrap. We value things like "shaking off a hit" even if that hit has left an athlete with a permanent brain injury. Again from the ESPN piece:

A knee to the back of the head knocked Chrebet stone-cold unconscious a quarter earlier, and now the Jets' team doctor is putting the wideout through a series of mental tests...Then he asks, "Are you okay?" When Chrebet replies, "I'm fine," Pellman sends him back in.

For some sick reason, this kind of behavior is seen as exhibiting "toughness" and "resolve", and is admired and complimented. Forget the fact that Chrebet has a family and decades more to live, of course, since he's a wide receiver and this is a close game! For all that I love watching sports, sports culture often disgusts me, as my anti-Chief diatribes should probably have indicated. I'm still trying to convince myself that athletics can be separated from the culture surrounding them, but I haven't come up with an argument that sounds vaguely plausible as of yet. Thankfully, baseball lacks the violence associated with football, and merely has to deal with the fact that some people estimate that over 80% of all players take either steroids or some form of amphetamines. Joy!

I was just a bookworm on a respirator, who's to say that's wrong?

2007-02-27T22:06:00.000-06:00

Tonight, I had a little time to spend in a bookstore, which has always been a favorite activity of mine, as most people out there should either know or be able to guess. As a kid, I used to volunteer for the local library, since I spent so much time there and figured I might as well make myself useful. I'm one of the few people out there who considers books to be a central component of interior decorating. I'm not even kidding that when we looked at our current apartment, I looked at the nook in the hallway, figured it would hold two bookshelves, and mentally signed off on the place (my wife liked the dishwasher). Here's the evidence:

I'll note that the photograph on the wall by the kitchen, which shows a lightning bolt against the night sky, was taken while standing about five or six feet away from my co-blogger, as we both aimed our cameras randomly at the sky clicking the shutter when we thought we sensed lightning on the way. By the way, while I'm at it, here's a picture of the cat, since I haven't posted one in weeks:

Anyway, several thoughts ran through my head at the bookstore. First, bookstores are humbling. I read a lot of books, enough to fill several bookshelves over the past decade, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the good literature out there, to say nothing of the rest of the stuff they have, from good to dreck. For someone who likes to read everything by an author, it's frustrating, since every time I finish off one, several new guys appear to take their place.

More disconcerting, it struck me even more than it usually does that we really do live in a time where someone in the middle class and above in the developed world literally has the entire sum of human knowledge available to them, and is forced to choose the degree and direction of their ignorance. Every foreign language we don't learn, or basic piece of learning we skip past is by choice. Of course, some people out there are more ignorant than others, but most people are too polite to just come out and say that way too many people are content being ignorant and stupid. I am not such a person, and noting my own incapability with respect to cars and virtually everything related to style, I'll happily endorse the point of view that way too many people are stupid and ignorant. For those that care to challenge this statement, I'll post polling data in the comments about how many Americans recognize people about whom they really should know in order to qualify as a moderately informed citizen.

On a more practical level, I wonder what the future of the book will be. Book technology hasn't really evolved all that much over the past couple of centuries, but that may change soon. Recent developments in electronic ink and electronic paper would seem to have numbered the days of the bound-paper book, but I don't know anyone who really wants to switch over just yet. It's not a matter of storage. iPods now hold 80GB of storage, and The complete works of Shakespeare only take up a little more than 5 MB as text, so you can fit about 15,000 copies inside your e-book if you want to make sure that they are safely backed up. No, it's a matter of the feel of a book, and the convenience, but I can't see that lasting for very long. Imagine, for instance, being able to search for given text in every book you own, something that is rather difficult to do with several bookshelves worth of hardcovers and paperbacks. If we don't transfer over to an electronic book system within a generation, I'll be shocked. Perhaps book publishers will be able to teach their music industry colleagues a lesson: the existence of libraries will make it almost impossible for booksellers to make e-books uncopyable, since people are used to sharing books. Whatever model they devise to remain a viable industry will almost have to be adopted by both the music and film industries, unless the latter beat the publishers to the punch (hint: they won't, because they're really dumb when it comes to this stuff). Hopefully, for fogies like me and the rest of my generation, to say nothing of our parents and theirs, these fancy e-books will still be booklike, since books are nice, tangible symbols of the joy that can be found within literature.

Speaking of books, I would note for anyone out there interested in a little self-betterment, like we discussed above, that virtually every great book that predates the 1920's can be found freely online, either through the Google books program or through Project Gutenberg, which makes the text of a huge number of classic works available to the entire world. Among the many works they have is one that was brought up in comments by my dad, The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Think of it as a cynic's response to the Conservapedia, which just happens to predate it by a full century. Highlights can be found at wikipedia:

Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

education: That which discloses from the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.

learning: The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

mayonnaise: One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.

and possibly the most famous, as mentioned by my dad:

religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Those, my friends, are some zingers, if I may say so.

zinger of the day

2007-02-27T11:34:00.000-06:00

I'm not a huge fan of Bruce Reed (centrist DLC-type) but he can be funny:

After all, the central animating principle behind conservatism has always been that there is no Plan B. That's President Bush's position on Iraq, and it's quite literally the conservative position on abortion.

Zing!

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, then you might find, you get what you need

2007-02-26T23:31:00.000-06:00

Sorry, just a quick post tonight. For anyone who has ever used iTunes, there is an interesting article that was linked to on Slashdot that explains how Apple's Fairplay digital rights management (DRM) software works. Suffice it to say, it is extremely complicated:

During authorization, iTunes creates a globally unique ID number for the computer it is running on, then sends it to Apple's servers, where it is assigned to the user's iTunes account. Five different machines can be authorized.

When a user buys a song from the iTunes Store, a user key is created for the purchased file. The AAC song itself is scrambled using a separate master key, which is then included into the protected AAC song file. The master key is locked using the user key, which is both held by iTunes and also sent to Apple’s servers.

Protected, purchased content is locked within iTunes; songs are not scrambled on Apple's server. This speeds and simplifies the transaction by delegating that work to iTunes on the local computer.

The result is an authorization system that does not require iTunes to verify each song with Apple as it plays. Instead, iTunes maintains a collection of user keys for all the purchased tracks in its library.

To play a protected AAC song, iTunes uses the matching user key to unlock the master key stored within the song file, when is then used to unscramble the song data.

Every time a new track is purchased, a new user key may be created; those keys are all encrypted and stored on the authorized iTunes computer, as well as being copied to Apple's servers.

etc. etc. etc. Some people think it is awful to encumber music with this crap, since it greatly restricts what you can do with it. Thankfully, Apple doesn't really want to protect music so much as make it inconvenient to copy. To get full rights to your music you have to burn it to a CD and then read it back into your computer, and presto, no DRM crap!

Right now, even Steve Jobs is saying that Apple doesn't really like DRM, and the music industry makes them do it. As I've suggested here before, the music labels are certainly idiotic enough to make this statement true, but that doesn't make it so. Either way, the simple fact of the matter is that media companies can try to protect things all they want, but they are no smarter than the hackers out there trying to defeat them, and the hackers have them outnumbered thousands to one, even in the case of Microsoft and the biggies. Actually, I should say especially in the case of Microsoft, since the bigger the target, the more attention it gets.

The real proof of this principle can be found in the multiple layers of encryption used for the high-def DVD formats just coming on the market: Blu-ray and HD-DVD. They use similar content protection systems, known as AACS. Since their release in June of last year, hackers have managed to undo three independent layers of encryption, noting that the means used in each case were similar, to the point that they will likely soon crack the entire system, which is already sufficiently compromised to allow an enterprising user to get around any limits that Media companies tried to place on him or her. Thanks to Wikipedia, knowledge of the cracks is publicly available, and already a source of embarrassment for the media giants, who decided to use the time and date of a disc's creation as the "secret key" that unlocks a disc. Great thinking, guys. All this for a system that some predicted would be unbreakable. in the end, the media companies really just hope that you'll be lazy, and not take the time to learn how to get around their protection. We've obviously passed that point for the majority of computer user's with CDs, and DVDs will follow in the not too distant future. In the end, they'd be wise to find some sort of workable subscription model, basically cutting middlemen like Netflix or CD stores out of the process, and just charging a monthly fee for convenient service. We'll see who is smart enough to do so over the coming years.

Truth twenty-four times a second: 2007 Academy Awards

2007-02-25T22:53:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure what the situation is most years, but this year there is precious little suspense for most of the major awards. Helen Mirren won literally every film critics society award for Best Actress, as did Forrest Whitaker for Best Actor, almost (they both won tonight). According to the Hollywood Stock Exchange, Martin Scorcese was a lock for Director going in and going out, as was Jennifer Hudson for Supporting Actress (she won). Alan Arkin for Supporting Actor was a darkhorse winner, though this is the "Jack Palance" category. Apparently, Norbit may have actually killed Eddie Murphy's chances, as many critics guessed. Best film was predicted to be a two-horse race between The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine, with Departed, the favorite, winning.

Overall, I'm a bit disappointed in the best picture nominees. I liked both of the favorites, but neither struck me as best film of the year. I can only hope that Children of Men, Last King of Scotland, The Prestige, or maybe The Queen are better (sure Babel and United 93 may be better as well, but both have been described as being so godawfully depressing that I can't say that I'm in a rush to see either).

Further thoughts: African Americans have previously won 2 Supporting Actress awards (Hattie McDaniel in 1939 for Gone with the Wind, and Whoopi Goldberg in 1990 for Ghost), one for Best Actress (Halle Berry in 2001 for Monster's Ball), four for Supporting Actor (Louis Gossett, Jr. for Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, Denzel Washington for Glory in 1989, Cuba Gooding Jr. for Jerry Maguire in 1996, Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar baby in 2004), and three for Best Actor before tonight (Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field in 1963, Denzel for Training Day in 2001, and Jamie Foxx for Ray in 2004). Tonight's two awards add to that total by 20%, and make the third time in six years that Black actors and actresses received multiple awards in a given year, but the first time it happened when the host wasn't black (Whoopi for 2001, Chris Rock for 2004).

Overall, the quality of films this year was good, but concentrated amongst Foreign films and to a lesser extent independent films. This is something of a pattern. Of the IMDB top 100 rated films, 18 have been made since 2000. Three are Lord of The Rings, 5 are foreign (City of God, which was simply amazing, highest among them, and the only non-LotR film since 2000 in the top 20). That leaves ten from America in the past 7 years: Memento (deserves it), Eternal Sunshine (?!?!?), The Pianist (haven't seen it, but seems legit), Requiem for a dream (good, but should be lower), Hotel Rwanda (haven't seen it, seems right), Sin City (?!?), The Departed (good, but should be lower), Million Dollar Baby (haven't seen it), Batman Begins (?!?!?!), and Kill Bill 1 (?!?). Brokeback Mountain should have made that list, but overall, I can't say it reflects all that well on the Hollywood system, nor to a lesser extent on IMDB (Eternal Sunshine as #39, Sin City as the 68th best movie ever, and Batman Begins at #90. Seriously, WTF?). Given the budgets out there, I'd expect more from the studios. I'll note that there is a systematic bias at play: IMDB penalizes the overall ratings of movies with less than 25,000 votes, so independent films don't rank as highly as they would otherwise. Little Miss Sunshine loses 100 spots under this system from #110 to #202, for instance. Still the pattern seems to be cyclical, as the Top 20 heavily favors the 1950's (Seven Samurai, Rear Window, Twelve Angry men), the 1970's (Godfathers 1 and 2, Cucckoo's Nest, Star Wars), and 90's (Shawshank, Schindler, Pulp fiction, Usual Suspects, Goodfellas). Hopefully, around 2010, Hollywood will rebound, or maybe modern technology will finally make the studio system obsolete.

daydreamin'

2007-02-25T13:23:00.000-06:00

OK, so I've been bad about posting, not that Jfaber has left us with nothing to read.

First, let me introduce the Rooted Cosmopolitans charity of the month: Medicins Sans Frontières. You've probably heard of them, but to summarize: if there is a group of saints on this here earth, they are it. These doctors are about the only people providing medical care in war zones, like Darfur, Chechnya, and Afghanistan, sometimes getting kidnapped or killed for their troubles. They also do work in disaster areas and other areas of need. It's hard to fathom the dedication of these folks to others, so the least we can do is contribute a small portion of our bourgeois spoils to their efforts.

Second, I want to share a song by a great young rapper Lupe Fiasco, who had an acclaimed album last year, which I of course missed. But here he is with the incomparable Jill Scott, and I can't get this song out of my head:

and now there's just no denying that you're an a$$hole...

2007-02-24T22:37:00.000-06:00

So, we have a new national treasure on our hands. Conservatives, fed up with the "Neutral Point of View" policy of Wikipedia, decided to set up "Conservapedia", because let's face it, in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".

Why Conservapedia, you ask? I'll let them tell you:

On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America.

Yes, a set of facts that explicitly favors one religion and one country...not that that should introduce some serious cognitive dissonance. From their more detailed list of complaints:

9. Edits to include facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored. [ed. note: That's because there are no "facts' that contradict evolution, and you, Conservapedia's founders, are flippin' wingnut idiots!]

13. Often key facts are missing from Wikipedia entries in favor of meaningless detail. Wikipedia's entry about Indentured Servitude is massive, but it omits any reference to Bacon's Rebellion, which was the turning point for the use of indentured servants in the New World! [ed. note: Then add it, dumbass! By design, anyone can do so! ]

18. Wikipedia's article on Feudalism is limited to feudalism in Europe and does not mention the feudal systems that developed independently in Japan and India. [ed. note. And your point is....what, exactly?!?!]

Of course, there is an obvious problem with this approach: anyone can edit pages. If you restrict only to members, you don't get enough content generated. Thus, liberals have been having a field day, and some Conservatives make things easier by being nuts themselves. Here are some amusing entries:

1984: "1984 was a book by George Orwell. 1984 describes an alternate history in which Oceania (Australia) is at war with Eurasia. It is a utopian book because it talks about a place where everyone is watched over by Big Brother, who makes sure people are doing what they are supposed to.

The protagonist is Winston Smith. There is something about rats at the end, but it is confusing. The end is probably supposed to be ambiguous. " (since changed, but that was fantastic!)

Islam: "Because Islam is an uncomplicated religion to live by, it is sure to continue in its popularity around the world." I like how this is now a verifiable fact.

Crusades: "It seems that the Christian armies lost sight of our goals to bring and spread love and Christianity along the way, got drunk with power and glory and decided to pillage towns and murder people (note that this is breaking many commandments “thou shalt not murder.” “thou shalt not steal”)

The Crusades went against our Christian teachings and the words of Christ, “love thy neighbor as thyself” “turn the other cheek” etc. " Umm, "our goals" and "our teachings". Again, I'll remind you, this is an encyclopedia.

Seriously, thank the Lord for wingnuts. As evidenced by Fox's attempt to emulate the Daily Show, they may not be funny when they try, but they certainly are most other times....

Friday Concert Clip/Theatre Discussion

2007-02-23T23:01:00.000-06:00

For those who noticed that the song "Jet Airliner" appeared as Tuesday's post title, but that I listed "Paul Pena" in the tags rather than the Steve Miller Band, well...I actually doubt anyone noticed, and that is a shame. Paul Pena was, until his recent death, one of the most unique musicians in the world, and I say that without any sense of exaggeration. Blind since birth, he became famous for writing "Jet Airliner" and any number of other songs (apparently, some people have covered "Gonna Move" on American Idol). Blind blues musicians, however, are something of a famous subcategory, so that could hardly be called unique. No, the unique part is that after hearing Tuvan throatsinging on a shortwave radio, he taught himself to sing that way without any formal training. The result can be seen in this clip. Wait for the 1:23 and 1:53 marks for the reason his nickname is "Earthquake". The story of his journey to Central Asia was captured in the documentary film Genghis Blues, and the film's soundtrack is mindblowing. The most impressive song on the album, and perhaps the most original blues song I've ever heard, is the song that won an award at the throatsinging competition featured int he movie, "Kargyraa Moan", and it can be found at this blog. Stop what you are doing and go listen to it. I can wait, and you'll be a better person for it. Seriously, click the link now.

Tonight, my wife and I went to the local community college for an evening of locally written one-act plays. In many places, this would be painful, but we happen to be in a college town with several active theatre departments and theatre companies, so the quality was surprisingly good. While not perfect, it's still a neat experience to catch local theatre, especially since you never know quite what you'll get, unlike just about every Hollywood movie out there. She was surprised to find that we both liked the two dramas more than the one comedy, but we figured out that this makes a lot of sense. Writing plays must be an immensely difficult task. For one thing, the length works against you; a good short story is often harder to achieve than a good novel, since you have less room with which to work. In some inadequate amount of time, you have to introduce characters, invest the audience's sympathies or distaste into them, and then make up enough plot to keep people interested but still allow for some kind of catharsis or conclusion. That's a big task for a 15-page short story (or even an 80-page novella), and is even harder to put on stage, where the dialogue has to carry the action rather than the descriptive passages. In these settings, comedy is especially tough. Comedy generally works if it's very smart or very dumb, but can fall very flat anywhere in between. The dumb stuff works well on film, but requires a great deal of physical effort from a cast, usually more than a local theatre can be expected to pull off given limited resources. Smart comedy, on the other hand, can be just as tough. Some of the jokes in tonight's one-act were pretty sharp, others a bit less edgy, so the final product was good but not great. It had potential, sure, but there are very few new jokes under the sun, and it didn't really find many. Dramas allow for a bit more leeway, since they can be funny, melodramatic, or philosophical in parts, and it just adds to their breadth. The risk always seems to be that after a good opening, it is hard to keep the level up throughout the middle, and then end strong. The first play we saw managed the former but came up short on the latter, whereas the second got a little overcooked in the middle but saved itself with a good ending.

All in all, though, it was a lot of fun. Local productions may lack the funds needed to design elaborate sets and lighting setups, but the play's the thing, not the background. So long as the people speaking the lines are competent, and many, many people in this town greatly exceed that threshold, you don't really lose out seeing something nearby instead of off-broadway, and you can save some serious dough. Of the plays we've seen, several have been very good (Copenhagen, a three-person all-dialogue drama about physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr at the beginning of WWII, was excellent), and the ones that fell flat typically did so more from failings of the playwright than of the cast. Musicals are a bit more hit and miss, since strong singers seem to be rarer than good actors. If there were more great singers, after all, American Idol would never be able to weed down all their applicants. I do have to recommend Urinetown, which we caught at the community college last fall, to anyone who gets the chance to see it. It had to be difficult getting the backing to produce a musical about urination and the economic theories of Malthus, but they managed it, and it's becoming something of a community musical theatre favorite apparently. The best thing about local theatre may be the fact that of all the forms of popular entertainment out there, it supports the best group of people. I pretty much figure the money i spend on movies and CDs goes directly to Big Media, and even new books come out of large publishing houses. Professional sports teams are some of the most odious forces in the world when they blackmail local governments, getting tax breaks left and right that would be better spent anywhere on public services rather than modern day bread and circuses. Local theatre supports...educational institutions, the local arts and culture scene, and even the actors themselves. There is literally no down side. As for tonight, all the people who put on tonight's show can take a bow, they did some very nice work indeed.

Tyranny-oh it comes in many shapes and sizes...Tyranny-but when it comes, it comes with no surprises

2007-02-22T22:13:00.000-06:00

There are people, maybe even you
Who think opinion polls equals democracy
'Round here the grownups talk of should or should we not
Meanwhile the kids, they know we're going to war...

Dan Bern, "Tyranny" from My Country II

Tonight brings news from Congress on Iraq, both good and bad, though I still suspect that a scary number of the Democrats have their head stuck up where the sun don't shine. Republicans, frankly, aren't worth discussing at the moment, having abandoned reality a while back. The best idea I had heard from in a while for dealing with the Iraq disaster came from Jack Murtha, who decided that it might be best to actually require that our troops be ready before they go back to Iraq for future rotations. In case you missed it, it went something like this:

He's [Murtha was] proposing a law that bars the President from sending troops in Iraq back to the war zone until they have spent one year being retrained at their home base. It forbids troops from being kept in Iraq longer than the one year tour they were promised and prohibits any troops from going to the war zone until they are fully trained and have the proper equipment.

Sounds like a pretty good idea for a bill, especially in the House, where we have a majority and majorities can force through whatever they like. The plan was fiendishly clever in a way. When it got to the Senate, the Republicans would certainly try to filibuster, but the military needs a supplementary appropriations bill because Bush has spent the past few years cooking the books by not including the costs of the war. Thus, Republicans are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Block the bill, and they block the funding for the troops because they refuse to mandate that the troops are adequately prepared. Vote for the resolution and they get wedged away from their base. It was beautiful, but sadly too beautiful for this world. Even though something like 60% of Americans or so have turned against the war, Democratic moderates seem not to have quite come around (again, no need to mention Republicans, who still haven't realized the inevitable result of drinking the kool-aid). From Friday's Washington Post:

House Democrats have pulled back from efforts to link additional funding for the war to strict troop-readiness standards after the proposal came under withering fire from Republicans and from their party's own moderates. That strategy was championed by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
...
But that approach may be all but dead, according to several Democratic lawmakers. Murtha doomed his own plan in part by unveiling it on a left-wing Web site, inflaming party moderates.

"Congress has no business micromanaging a war, cutting off funding or even conditioning those funds," said Rep. Jim Cooper (Tenn.), a leading Democratic moderate, who called Murtha's whole effort "clumsy."

Seriously, it's hard to resist the urge to tell the Congressman that he should consider performing an unspeakable act upon himself. Who gives a flying monkey crap where Murtha unveiled the plan? If it's a good idea, then fight for it, and keep fighting for it. There is a time for process, and a time for action, and way too many people in Washington have absolutely no idea how to distinguish the two. A hint: when people are dying, try action, not process. When naming a building or declaring National Brotherhood Week, process is swell. Congress has every business in determining how funds are used, because they're frickin' Congress, capital-C, one of our three co-equal branches of government. It's just not that hard, especially given that the war is deeply unpopular and getting more so.

Shockingly enough, according to the WaPo it's the Senate that may take the lead on this one:

Senate Democratic leaders intend to unveil a plan next week to repeal the 2002 resolution authorizing the war in Iraq in favor of narrower authority that restricts the military's role and begins withdrawals of combat troops.
...
"We gave the president that power to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, if necessary, to depose Saddam Hussein," Biden said of the 2002 resolution in a speech last week before the Brookings Institution. "The WMD was not there. Saddam Hussein is no longer there. The 2002 authorization is no longer relevant to the situation in Iraq."
...
The new framework would set a goal for withdrawing combat brigades by March 31, 2008, the same timetable established by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Once the combat phase ends, troops would be restricted to assisting Iraqis with training, border security and counterterrorism.

Seriously, Hell Yes! This war was a Republican creation from the beginning, and it's time to hang it around their necks for good. If they choose to block it, so be it, but it will crush their election hopes in 2008, having to explain why we've been for war for 5 years in Iraq and SEVEN in Afghanistan, without signs of things improving, all of our former allies having basically deserted us. This past week, Britain announced that they were pulling troops from Iraq, and no one, and I mean no one, believed it when the administration tried to claim it was a "affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well", to quote the Veep. By now all of realize exactly what happened: the British have no control whatsoever over Basra, and saw no need to continue getting their ass handed to them, deciding that since their troops are desperately needed in Afghanistan, where they can still do some good, they needed to redeploy them.

I have to admit, the people running the show have actually done a pretty good job so far, but this is the time to start hammering away, for the good of the nation and the good of the Democratic party. Courage!

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth

2007-02-21T22:43:00.000-06:00

A quick funny story, and then some follow-ups.

The SETI Program is simultaneously one of the great undertakings of mankind, and likely a waste of time. It is a project that virtually every astronomer is glad to see in existence, but happy not too work on. SETI, the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, is the program that worked in the book and movie versions of Carl Sagan's Contact, but has yet to produce any real results in reality...until now!

It's not quite what you'd expect. You see, the most visionary component of the current SETI initiative is Seti@Home, whereby they take their data at large radio telescopes, but ship it off to millions of people's desktop PC's to crunch their numbers and report back. It was the first of these programs which are now also used for Protein Folding, cryptography, and any number of other projects. According to an AP story that got posted to Slashdot:

One volunteer, James Melin, a software programmer for a county government agency in Minnesota, runs SETI(at)home on his seven home computers, which periodically check in with University of California servers. Whenever that happens, the servers record the remote computer's Internet Protocol address and file it in a database that people running the SETI software can view.

One of the computers on which Melin installed SETI(at)home is his wife's laptop, which was stolen from the couple's Minneapolis home Jan. 1.

Annoyed and alarmed that someone could delete the screenplays and novels that his wife, Melinda Kimberly, was writing Melin monitored the SETI(at)home database to see if the stolen laptop would "talk" to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.
...
Kimberly's writings were safe, and the thieves didn't appear to have broken into her e-mail or other personal folders. But the returned computer contained 20 tracks of rap music with unintelligible lyrics, possibly from the person who stole the computer or bought it on the underground.

"It's really, really horrid rap," Melin said. "It makes Ludacris look like Pavarotti."

Kimberly was more enamored with Melin's detective work.

"I always knew that a geek would make a great husband," she said.

I wholeheartedly agree with that final sentiment. Remember: Seti@Home -- It's like Lojack for your computer.

To update some previous posts, the problems at Walter Reed are now being addressed, since a public s#!tstorm is the one thing that can actually bring about action in Washington. According to the daily update in The Washington Post:

Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, used terminology similar to that of a military campaign to describe his plan to overhaul the broken building, including giving it a more "appropriate" name, and the sluggish bureaucracy for outpatient care.

"We own that building, and we're going to take charge of it," Cody said at the Pentagon. "The senior Army leadership takes full responsibility for the lack of quality of life at Building 18, and we're going to fix it."

Cody blamed "a breakdown in leadership" for the troubling conditions but said no one has been fired or relieved of command. He did point to lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned officers lacking "the right experience and the authority to be able to execute some of the missions."

As i remember, based on the past few decades, or maybe even past few centuries, the proper adjective for those who claim to take responsibility for something, refuse to hold anyone accountable, and then pass the buck by blaming nameless inferiors in the organization is "presidential". I should note that the US Army had some warning about potential problems, as Salon published a story about mistreatment of vets with brain injuries TWO YEARS AGO, and again last year!

Speaking about being ahead of the times, or in this case ahead of the NY Times, the video of the Amy Winehouse song "Rehab" that dkon posted on December 28 of last year just hit one of the new blogs at the Grey Lady, as a prescient commentary on the sad tale of Britney Spears from across the pond (though I would note that the misadventures of Pete Doherty and Kate Moss might be more apropos).

Finally, our local basketball team. As I suggested after considering the immensely obvious details, the player who was released from the team after crashing his car into a tree and nearly killing a teammate has been charged with DUI and leaving the scene of an accident. He was at the game we played tonight, laughing it up with teammates, which frankly disgusts me. I'm not suggesting that he is the worst human being on the planet, but he nearly killed a teammate, and then left him in the car while he went off to do God only knows what (it's been suggested that he tried to mask the fact that he was driving drunk). WTF is he doing joking it up with teammates? Innocent until proven guilty, but keep him the hell away from the team and the limelight. While we're at it, not to be racist, but the car he crashed was his grandparents' Lexus...yes, a Lexus. Either his family is more wealthy than I would have suspected, or the University might want to pay its players a bit less conspicuously, lest we get hit with NCAA sanctions.

Racism at UIUC was symbolized by Chief Illiniwek, but as promised, tonight was the last time that a white dude wearing traditional Sioux garb did a dance inspired third-hand by Plains Indian tribal dances to honor the tribes of Illinois who were driven out of the state in the face of the Western Expansion of other tribes being forced out of their traditional lands by colonial genocide. On ESPN, they just showed some girl with "Chief" painted on her forehead bawling uncontrollably at the site of our team mascot's final performance. Seriously, WTF? 100 Americans are killed in Iraq every month, to say nothing of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis. People all over the world are suffering. People all over the USA are suffering...and you are moved to copious tears because our racist mascot no longer gets to perform at halftime. If nothing else can explain why I hold many people in horribly low regard, this is it. Crying, bitching, moaning, and whining over the loss of a mascot is utterly pathetic, just pathetic. Grow the hell up, and stop embarrassing yourself, the university, and all of the people out there who can recognize plain old-fashioned idiocy when they see it. Jesus H. Christ, people annoy the crap out of me sometimes.