You said, "It's snowing, it's snowing - God I hate this weather!"

Today, my wife and I did something crazy in the grand scheme of things: we both went to work in the morning. Ordinarily, this isn't such a big deal, what with the whole need to make a living and have something to do with our time. Today, however, we had to drive through several inches of snow being tossed around by 30 mile-per-hour winds, and I really should note that Champaign and Urbana both do a terrible job of plowing city streets. Taking a quick look around local blogs, I'm not the first to complain. The problem seems to be either that the plows don't operate during the night during a snowstorm, which is kind of critical for getting roads clear by morning, or more likely that there just aren't enough plows. Apparently, the city makes it a priority to plow out the bus routes, which is very good, but they might want to consider adding major streets to the list as well. After my wife's workplace closed up shop at 10:00 am, two hours too late to make much of a difference, and mine announced classes were cancelled at 8:45am, an hour too late to make much of a difference for the faculty and more responsible students, I still could barely get home. Not to say the mall where she works is sad, but they didn't even bother to plow out their access road. They do have a plow, but he seemed content to move snow around the parking lot, even though no one was parked there.

Still, these are details. The big problem, and I think it is a big problem, is that we both felt the need to go to work in the first place. Driving in a blizzard on roads covered in a few inches of snow and occasional near-whiteouts is a really unsafe thing, and I'm sure in the long run that the productivity gained by the small fraction of people who actually make it to work before being sent home shortly thereafter is more than cancelled out by the lost productivity to all the people who get stuck halfway there, tying up emergency vehicles that would otherwise be busy taking care of the people who crashed their cars into other cars when the other cars swerved suddenly to avoid the cars stuck halfway there. We would all be better off if, as a society, if we could wrap our minds around the fact that sometimes it's a good idea to give everyone a day off because God himself (or whatever deity/deities/spiritual metaphors in which you dis/believe [note the cool ALA type "slash" construction!!!]) really doesn't want us to get there. My job is important, as is my wife's, but how much should we really risk our health and safety when we can work nearly as effectively from home? It's really not rational, but that rat race mentality does pervade American culture, and it's time for us all to chill out a bit. I'd say that this is obvious, but consider the limited number of vacation days that many jobs grant their employees, some of whom may have children whose own needs will call upon many of those vacation days, and you start to see a real problem with our corporatized culture. It's a job, in the end, not our main reason for living. Call me unpatriotic, but I think the Europeans have a healthier attitude toward the whole work/personal life balance, and they still manage to give everyone universal healthcare too. Perhaps we should start taking notes. Maybe we can start on a day where we don't go into work because the weather has made the roads impassable (according to the forecast, we have blizzard conditions again tomorrow, and the wife just got a call saying she can stay home)...

beliefs and science

Jfaber beat me to the topic, and I agree with him, but I want to add my small change.

Some would argue that Dr. Ross was fundamentally dishonest in working on research that he would later disavow, sort of:

And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, "I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates."

So, PZ Myers believes this means faculty should be more selective in admitting students with anti-science beliefs to graduate school. But it seems obvious that absent a total mind-scan, there is no way to determine whether a student is "working within the framework" that he/she fundamentally disagrees with and will later use the cachet of the credential to try and discredit.

I would also submit that Dr. Ross is an exception, in having managed to maintain cognitive dissonance between his young earth creationism and apparently sound paleontology. Most creationists, I reckon, either drop out of science Ph.D. programs or modify their worldview. On balance, admitting students who are eager to learn, but are burdened with contradictory beliefs, probably produces a lot more good than shutting them out. Which, as noted, is not practical anyway. Let a thousand flowers bloom, even if occasionally one turns out to be a prickly pear.

'Cause one kid had it worse than that, 'Cause then there was this boy whose parents made him come directly home right after school

Without comment, we'll start tonight with one of the best image captions of all time:

A grilled cheese sandwich, top, with an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. Jesus Christ is seen in an oyster shell, a frying pan and a pirogi.

Anyway, form the same fine newspaper, another story on the Academy, this time in relation to religious kooks Young Earth Creationists getting geosciences doctorates. From the article:

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”
...
And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

I don't find these questions particularly difficult to answer: no, yes, absolutely not.

Look, a degree is conferred upon a student for completing a specified body of work. Even under that standard, there is a tremendous amount of subjectivity involved, and the last thing we need to do is to add to that a level of psychological study of the candidate's motivations and future plans. If you happen to be a complete whackjob but produce a worthy dissertation, then you have earned a doctorate. Many a physicist was a kook while still in school, and a great many more became so later, but they are all PhD physicists just the same.

In the end, science progresses onward even though many people fail to understand it, even some of those considered within the scientific community. The structure that has been established, though, works remarkably well, and it is dangerous to go tampering with it, especially with regards to religion. For all the happy talk about coexistence between science and religion, they are occasionally orthogonal and frequently contradictory (see, e.g., the argument from Free Will for one example), and science really does do best to avoid any mention of religion in its internal workings. Sure, science has a role in interacting with and sometimes confronting religion, like with matters of homosexuality being genetically determined or making sure that evolution is taught in schools, but these are external interactions between science and society. In other words, religion doesn't have much place during a qualifying exam or dissertation defense: these are scientific rites of passage independent of religion.

A telling quote from the article:

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice.

Using a credential to miseducate the public is a completely reasonable thing to fear, but it results from those with an agenda taking advantage of people's ignorance, and is used by all sides in the debate. People somehow believe that if you've earned a doctorate in anything, it makes you an expert. I can talk about economics endlessly, but the closest I ever came to an Econ course was when I skimmed through one of my wife's textbooks. Still, if I, a PhD, start talking about free trade, there are people out there who will listen. I'll admit, academics often throw their credentialed weight around in support of liberal causes, and the world is often better for it. In a perfect world, however, audiences would learn to be more skeptical, and try to learn a little bit about an issue for themselves. With regard to global warming, there are numerous Climate Science PhDs who don't believe in its existence, and most of them have been interviewed as experts on FoxNews by now. Said group also makes up a ridiculously small percentage of the total community of climate scientists, the latter of whom clearly have a consensus view that global warming is a severe problem.

Lest I make it seem that Young Earth Creationists in the academy are just swell, I have to admit that I am stunned by the philosophical nonsense being spouted by Dr. Ross. These theories aren't interchangeable "paradigms" that can be switched in and out like CDs in a changer. They make assumptions about the very way in which the world works, with concrete and fundamentally contradictory implications for the planet and the universe. To be honest, most of the classic syntheses of religion and science are basically nonsense. A God who meddles in human affairs has a wacky sense of scale, given that we are just vastly insignificant in the grand scheme, and the level of suffering we go through is simply inexcusable if a higher being cared about us. A god who performed miracles in the past but not today, or miracles just for a select few perhaps, is one with a strange sense of favoritism. If God is mere clockmaker and tinkerer, then he really isn't a moral force, he's something of an engineer or computer programmer. As I mentioned before, it looks like he/she/they/God/Goddesses didn't even grant us free will at all, and we just fool ourselves into thinking we do. If Dr. Ross couldn't deal with these ideas, then he's not much of a scientific philosopher, but he is, and rightly so, a Doctor in the sciences.

Well we got no class, and we got no principles

A story in The NYTimes just coudn't go by without some commentary:

Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits

The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

Let's be frank here, you can't see your academic quality "eroded" when it is rather unclear how well you stood within the academy to start with. They aren't ranked by the leading suspects like US News and World Report, and while many of their programs are accredited, several, including the MBA program, are not. In the article in question, the only quote defending the academic quality at UoP comes from their president:

In the interview, Dr. Pepicello shrugged off the bad news. Many top corporations still pay for employees to attend the university, he said, and the exodus of top officials has resulted from a healthy search for new directions. “We are reinventing ourselves,” Dr. Pepicello said.

That's not much of a stirring defense, but it's all you'll find.

Simply put, I doubt anyone has a decent sense of what the academic quality there was then or is now. No outside source was quoted in the article speaking up for the university at all with regard to either past or present. Several students were called upon to provide anecdotes, always a useful source of conclusive information, but all we really learn from them is that one professor hired by UoP seems to be "Doctoring" his CV by including a PhD that he never earned.

From the article, it is hard to conclude that the school has really changed all that much. It is an inexpensive option for working adults to get a college degree, which naturally has a low graduation rate because very few students will finish up within the required six-year timeframe if they finish at all. The quality is like what you'd expect from a distributed commuter/online University: highly inconsistent, with little way to really enforce standards. It is what it is, but I'm not sure if this story really did anyone justice.

You don't have to be a six-footer. You don't have to have a great brain. You don't have to have any clothes on.

Sometimes, a headline manages to combine both the extraordinarily obvious and completely wrong into one convenient passage: Here's an example from MSNBC:

Catholics slam bloggers hired by Edwards

Group claims campaign tarnished by ‘two anti-Catholic ... vulgar bigots’

Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

For the backstory, John Edwards hired two famous bloggers to work for his campaign, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan, who writes under the pseudonym Shakespeare's Sister at the blog of the same name. Both of them have been rather harsh on Catholicism in the past, not that the church didn't in most cases have it coming, what with defending and protecting any number of priests who like to molest and anally rape young boys and doing their best to fight reasonable birth control throughout the entire world.

Because of their writings, the Catholic League jumped all over the Edwards campaign, especially their president, Bill Donohue. Is he an important Catholic clergyman, you ask? Not at all, he's just the president of a large organization of right-wing Catholics, famous for the following quotes:

"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done."

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions."

He's a lovely fellow, isn't he?

What MSNBC totally missed is that the bloggers in question have offended any number of right-wing Catholics, right-wing Protestants, right-wing Jews, and right-wing atheists over time. Donohue speaks not for all Catholics, but for a particular right-wing organization. My wife's former boss is president of a left-wing Jewish organization, but it'd be ridiculous to claim that she speaks for "Jews"; rather she speaks for some Jews. If my wife and I get angry about the local grocery store in March/April, we don't get to claim "Jews slam Champaign supermarket over lack of Passover-related items" (this isn't a real complaint of ours, I'm just drawing an example). Donohue speaks ostensibly for his 350,000 person organization, who represent half of a percent of American catholics. He speaks in no official capacity for the Church itself, nor for the majority of American Catholics, who it turns out are a group that basically tend to behave like a broad cross-section of Americans, because they're a broad cross-section of Americans. Just as one can claim that the Catholic church is against abortion but a majority of American Catholics favor it's continued legalization, even more so may Bill Donohue have a problem with two bloggers while most American Catholics could give a flying one. It really isn't all that hard. The lesson, as always, is that way too many journalists are basically incompetent, and that bigots on the right-wing will always have a platform to launch ridiculous fake-outrage propaganda campaigns no matter how odious they happen to be. Thankfully, Edwards didn't cave, and now the left-wing blogs are launching attacks back on the Catholic league for their utter hypocrisy and misrepresentation of Catholic values. Serve it cold, people, serve it cold.

Friday music for haters

Y'know it's easy to dis contemporary pop music. Yes, there's a deluge of mediocrity, with vortices of crap and only isolated islands of originality. But if your default stance is turning your nose up, you're guaranteed to miss what's happening now.

Personally, I've been guilty. I didn't appreciate a lot of good music at the time it was happening. Maybe it was just arrested development, but I think there's a part of us college types that instinctively wants to be different from the unwashed masses. In the early nineties, say, I missed a lot of excellent music that was under my nose - e.g. Nirvana, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys - that it took me years later to appreciate. Outside of music there's the same psychology - I was sure Harry Potter was crap before I read, because why else would masses of people like it? Sure not because they're wondrously addictive fantasy stories?

Popular music and perhaps pop art in general has two basic qualities: it has to be accessible and it has to adapt quickly. The young drive it, each new generation or sub-generation wanting to distinguish itself from its ancestors. So it does take effort to keep up with the styles, to not miss the content because of an unfamiliar form. But being ephemeral and catchy is not antithetical to great art. Tell me that "I heard it through the grapevine" is not a powerful song? What about "Hey Ya"? (OK, maybe not as powerful but still great).

There are plenty of musical genres that are important, have amazing musicians, and will reward a listener with open ears. "Pop" music is just one (or many) of them. So here's an amazing band, maybe not quite pop because they've never made it very big, murdering it on this TV clip:

An Introduction to Irish Punk music (Friday Concert Blogging)

Sorry, I'm still in STL and don't have the option of taking a picture of my cat, and I'll put off Better know a blog blogging for one more week. Instead, we'll go a little wild with the free concert clips, and offer:

The Youtube Guide to Irish Punk Music

We start off with the forerunners of Irish Punk, doing their most famous song: Dirty Old Town, by The Pogues. You'll notice, if you haven't heard it in a while, that it's quieter than you might have thought. From a longer concert clip, you can catch their modernized version of Whiskey, You're the Devil at 8:45, and the utterly haunting "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" at 13:30 (I would throw in Uncle Tupelo's version of Moonshiner here to emphasize just how heartbreaking Irish music can be, but there's no free version online that I've found).

In America, the heart of the Irish Punk scene is unquestionably Boston, home to many a punk/ska band like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but also the whiskey-soaked Irish punk band the Dropkick Murphys. For movie buffs, their song "I'm Shipping Off to Boston" featured prominently in Martin Scorcese's The Departed. You may not have known the lyrics are by Woody Guthrie, and are the second song that the Murphys have put to music from his lyrics, after the title track of their album "Blackout" from a few years ago. The Murphys like to redo classic Irish songs, as evidenced by their version of "The Wild Rover", which is good, and "The Fields of Athenry", which is friggin' awesome.

From the West Coast we have the slightly more Irish, slightly less loud Flogging Molly, who just released a DVD, "Whiskey On a Sunday" whose trailer features fantastic potshots at music executives. For our clips, we'll go with the rowdy crowd favorites Drunken Lullabies and What's Left of the Flag For Me.

Finally, I'd be remiss in not mentioning Chicago's lead entry into the category, The Tossers, who certainly set the standard for being plowed during a live performance when they closed out a recent tour in Champaign. For your enjoyment, here is Good Morning, Da.

Slainte!

This is my generation, This is my generation, baby

History as we know it began in 1966. Maybe I should elaborate. in 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, setting up the National Register of Historic Places. In doing so, it ushered in a wave of history which had no equivalent as best I know: a wave of modern history. On that original list was Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, now a Chicago landmark. His Dana-Thomas house in Springfield became a museum in 1981. In upstate NY, Martin van Buren's house became a historic site in 1974. Nearby Olana, the home of Hudson River school painter Frederick Church, beat it to the punch by eight years; it was purchased by NY state in 1966 (my wife was an historical interpreter there at one time). Because of these things, pop music now often sucks. Ok, I should probably elaborate a bit more.

This shift in the late sixties and on until the present day marked a growing awareness of the historical nature of things in their own lifetimes. No longer are the houses and possessions of famous people routinely sold; now they are either preserved or collected. Literally every loose piece of music memorabilia created in the past few decades either has or will end up on the wall of a Hard Rock cafe. History has not always been as rapid, nor as reverent. The Elgin marbles are named after the British Earl who stole them from the Parthenon and brought them to England, or at least so we would suggest today. At the time, no one seemed to care very much. In the modern day, we have greatly increased the definition of what can be considered historical, in no small way because we can easily archive a great deal more of it than before, both actual artifacts and their visual representations (photos. home videos, audio recordings, etc.)

What happens to a generation brought up with such a fluid sense of history? The evidence seems to suggest that it starts to question its own place in the great canon. This is a theme of the postmodern literature which developed during this period and on to the modern day, and it is increasingly represented in popular society. Just as those growing up in the 1980's looked back to the 50's and 60's (my elementary or middle school definitely had a sock hop one year), so did the children of the 90's look back on the 70's and 80's. One obvious effect: recent history becomes capital-H History more rapidly than time itself passes. By the 1990's history was beginning to condense, and the process is now just about complete. VH1 aired "I love the 80's" in 2001, and "I love the 90's" in 2004. At this rate, "I love 2009" will first be shown in 2007 or 2008. As a devoted Sportscenter watcher, I can safely say that any list of "The top ten anything of all time" will inevitably be full of crap, since the list will include 5 items from the 2000's, 3 from the 90's, and no more than two from the entire past history of sports. Whereas Trivial Pursuit once reached back for decades in its questions, the new 25th anniversary edition sees no need to acknowledge that anything preceded the 70's.

The children of the 80's and 90's are more consciously self-aware than any previous generation. As a result, they (or perhaps I should say we) are highly self-absorbed. One obvious result has been widely noted: adults of my generation (and slightly older) have never been willing to give up their childhoods, because they see no need to give up fun just because previous generations were willing to make this compromise. My fellow Gen-X-ers watch the Cartoon Network (Adult Swim is specifically aimed at us, in fact), we still play video games, and even those of us who have taken on the roles of grown-ups still cling doggedly to our youthful sides in a way that was previously considered somewhat unseemly.

Well then, what happens when a generation of adults who still act kinda like children raises a new generation of children? Obviously, said children think of themselves more like adults (because they are more like adults in that adults are more like them). After all, pre-teens these days play on the same gaming systems as their parents, have the same iPods and cell phones, watch the same TV stations, etc. Of course, these preternaturally self-aware children (let's define them by birth dates after 1982, as some have done) think of themselves as adults with adult rights, honors and privileges, even though they only have the responsibilities of children (or more properly, the lack thereof). They also have a ridiculously heightened sense of their own importance in the grand scheme of things. What happens as a result? First of all, they become whiny punks, as the wife and I have learned from watching the Real World: Denver. Every goddamn thing is either the biggest crisis ever (I sprained my ankle! No one has ever felt so much pain in their lives!) or some great accomplishment (I climbed a hill to 10,000 feet that weekend outings of 14 and 15-year olds do on a regular basis as part of outward bound. This is the greatest accomplishment in my life [actual quote!]). Good Lord I hate Gen-Y sometimes (Kids these days!). Many of them think they are entitled to everything, but see no need to work for what they want. I realize these statements are properly limited to the middle class and upwards, but they are the ones with whom I'm familiar, and they are certainly the ones that the media typically focuses upon.

Finally, to get to my main point, what happens when these inexperienced whippersnappers, with no sense of history or empathy for others, but with a rather ridiculously high opinion of themselves, look to purchase music? I t turns out that they buy crap. They go for stupid American Idol-style verbal gymnastics because it's ostentatious, even though singing that way conveys almost no emotion whatsoever! Not every AI contestant is so cursed. From last season, Taylor Hicks can convey emotion (and actually won), whereas runner-up Katherine McPhee could easily be replaced by a machine given the lack of humanity in her voice. What's more, the subjects of too many songs suck. In the country genre, you have a streak of redneck triumphalism that is no end of annoying, especially given the total lack of down-troddenness of both the singers (who are millionaires) and the audience (middle class white people in America is not such a horrible demographic to find oneself in last time I checked). In the R&B world, you have a more personal sense of triumphalism in all the bling-bling stylings. What gets lost in the shuffle is any sense of true struggle, pain, or even emotion, things music can be very good at. That is why the National Historical Preservation Act of 1966, Cell Phones, Gen Y, and the Cartoon Network have destroyed pop music. Now, if you excuse me, I have to chase some kids off my lawn and watch a rerun of Murder She Wrote or 60 Minutes.

I've been a wild rover for many a year

My roving has taken me to St. Louis for a conference, but thanks to free internet access, even roving is no hindrance to blogging.

As promised a week ago, here is the answer from madpoet, my dad, on why a half-Sephardic, half-Ashkenazi Jew of Portuguese and Baltic/Russian ancestry was raised on a continuous playlist of Irish folk music:

To be honest with you, I am not certain why I started you down the road of Irish music. I'd like to think that there was something about the music that somehow resonated genetically with both of us, but I suspect that is wishful thinking. More likely, before you were born I was a dyed in the wool folkie, due to the politics of the time, my need to be rebellious, and heaven knows what else. The problem with folk music then was that most of the singers wrote somewhat repetitious songs, and most of the women sounded largely the same, in the vein of Joan Baez or Judy Collins. Most of the men sounded like clones of Pete Seeger, and the truly talented ones couldn't sing a lick: consider Leonard Cohen or, dare I say it, Bob Dylan. On the other hand, bands like the Clancy Brothers combined not only highly political songs but a liveliness and singing ability that was somehow lacking in American folk music. And Irish bands were not above stealing great Irish songs from such traditional Irishman as Shell Silverstein (your introduction to unicorns). It was also about the time that the traditional music of Ireland was becoming popular with groups like the Bothy Band and Planxty. That was what I listened to, so that's what I sang to you as a child, and to your brother, though heaven knows where he went wrong. You also have to consider the fact that when I drank, which wasn't often, my drink of choice, because I wanted to be Irish, was either Guinness or Old Bushmills whiskey.

The bottom line is, I really have no idea why I so immersed you in Irish music, but I must say I'm glad I did. The Irish, Scottish, and to a lesser extent English folk bands had it all over their American counterparts, and even in the area of the folk rock, once you got past the Byrds, there was little back then that would approach Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, or the Oyster Band. And, since you didn't turn out so bad, I have to think that it was the correct music for its time and remain so.

Thanks, dad!

I have to agree that it's the liveliness of Irish music that has always appealed to me, as well as the friends I've been able to introduce to it (I think I can claim credit for dkon's exposure to Black 47 and the Wolfe Tones, for instance). Music has gotten louder over the past few decades, however, as evidenced by people calling early Beatles albums "four young men screaming". Thus, while my dad and I still have a great deal of overlap in our tastes (Chieftains, Irish Rovers), he's more a fan of the better voices (especially Irish female singers), whereas my tastes lean somewhat obsessively toward Irish punk (Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly). In the end, though, much of the appeal is the same: Irish music is fundamentally about making the best of a bad situation. It's a running joke that essentially every Irish song involves at least two elements from a list of: getting drunk, fighting the British, starving in a famine, and being sent away to either Australia as a criminal or America as an immigrant. Some songs attempt all four. This form of music (happy songs about sad stuff) is perhaps the most powerful musical form ever created, underlying styles as varied as classic country (think Johnny Cash's prison songs) to geek rock (virtually every They Might Be Giants Song fits). It works for the same reason that Greek drama works: art is cathartic, and eases your troubles by empathizing with them and then finding some form of silver lining. It can easily be made a bit angrier and worked into punk music (see also the Gypsy punk of Gogol Bordello), and is devastating when counterpointed with something truly sad (more on this friday?). Tomorrow, I'll try to get into my problem with several of the genres of pop music today, in that this element of sadness is essentially missing, and try to tie it in with my take on the difference between my generation and the one immediately younger (kids these days!). Here's a hint: I blame cell phones. No, really, I do. More tomorrow.

I'd like to dream my troubles all away, on a bed of California stars

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge fan of many aspects of NASA's manned spaceflight program, especially the part about going to the moon and then to Mars. More than anything else, it's a matter of wasting limited resources on a program that returns only minor scientific gains, but today's news reminded me of a few more reasons to have doubts. First, to quote Harlan Ellison Philip K. Dick [ed. note: oops, my bad, thx madpoet for the correction], androids may indeed Dream of Electric Sheep (it's a book; the movie was called Blade Runner), but they don't sleep with other robots and then try to off their lovers. The same can no longer be said of astronauts, according to the NY Times:

The police in Orlando, Fla., filed attempted murder charges today against Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, a NASA astronaut who the authorities say attacked a rival for another astronaut’s affection at Orlando International Airport on Monday after driving more than 900 miles from Houston to meet her flight.

Captain Nowak, a Navy captain who flew on a shuttle mission last summer, was originally arrested on attempted kidnapping and other charges, and a judge initially set a $15,500 bond at a court session this morning.

But this afternoon, the police filed the new charges against her, saying they had evidence that Captain Nowak intended ”to do serious bodily injury or death” to Colleen Shipman, a captain in the Air Force, because she considered Captain Shipman to be a rival in her romance with a fellow NASA astronaut, Cmdr. Bill Oefelein.

When the police arrested Captain Nowak, they found in her possession a steel mallet, a buck knife with a four-inch blade, a BB gun and a map to Captain Shipman’s house, they said.

My immediate response: these people have to be pretty damn bright to become astronauts and get through training, so how exactly does she plan to get away with any scheme that involves a mallet (?), knife, BB gun (?!?) and some form of kidnapping? If it's too implausible for CSI or Law and Order, it just won't work in real life. You could strongly suggest she doesn't have....the Right Stuff (oh-oh oh-oh-oh, oh-oh oh-oh).

More seriously for all space travel/satellites, but particularly those with live people on board, is the sheer amount of crap flying around out in space. Most of it is small, but it pack quite a wallop when it hits you at 21,000 miles per hour. Thanks to the Chinese shooting down a satellite to test out their abilities, there are now 1 thousand new piece of large debris to go along with the 7,000 old ones (<- cool NYTimes interactive graphic!). According to a colloquium I heard last year, there is virtually nothing that can be done to get rid of them, and thanks to all the new debris, we're going to eventually get to a point where we get a chain reaction as pieces of debris hit other pieces, creating even more debris. Beyond all the problems with keeping people alive in space in a sustainable way, we simply have no way to deal with simple tasks like taking out the trash. It's a serious problem, and it's getting worse. Perhaps we should spend a bit less time trying to get to Mars, and a bit more making our current home planet a bit more livable, by making sure it doesn't get so warm that we flood all our coastal cities and kill off a big chunk of the biosphere. Just saying.

Transgressing the Boundaries

For tonight's post, we'll cover the death of a company, the death of an economist, and the death of certainty, news of the last of which may be greatly exaggerated.

The company in question is GM, who I've bashed before for their crimes against the planet, and will now bash for crimes against human decency. Their commercial from the Super Bowl, which can be viewed here (scroll down), featured a robot that dropped a small part on the assembly line, got fired, progressed through a series of ever worse jobs, and in the end prepared to commit suicide before waking from a dream. As pointed out by ABC News, among others, GM announced last year that they are cutting 30,000 positions across the country by 2008:

"[The ad] is absolutely disgusting," said Art Reyes, president of United Auto Workers Local 651 in Flint, Mich., and a third-generation UAW member. Reyes said Local 651's membership has been cut in half in the past 18 months because of job cuts throughout the U.S. auto industry.

"Their way of life was affected. Their way of life was destroyed. This just completely glosses over their hardships," said Reyes. "What General Motors has been doing by tapping people on the shoulder to get rid of them, whole plants at a time, it wasn't because of a dropped bolt … we have a qualified work force here."

Way to go, shitheads on GM's advertising team! Remember, you don't have to pay benefits to your laid-off workers if they throw themselves off bridges!!!

Next up is the death of an economist, the legendary Anatol Rapoport. Who, you ask? He's the guy who invented the classic strategy for success at the Prisoner's Dilemma known as "Tit-for-tat", in which you basically act nice to people who are nice to you, and punish those who betray you. For vastly more on the topic, check out Brad DeLong's economics blog, which has a thorough recap of some more recent work. I personally prefer the following quote from Daniel Dennett, quoted here:

The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Someday, I might have the patience to try this with ridiculous rightwing wingnut drivel, but don't hold your breath.

Lastly, the death of science, and how exquisite the corpse still looks. About a decade ago, Alan Sokal published an article in a postmodern cultural criticism magazine called Social Text titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which was quite intentionally composed of several pages of gibberish sprinkled with authoritative-sounding post-modern literature citations. Sokal, a physicist, was poking holes in the outlandish claims made by post-modern, far-left members of the academy who argued that since science was a social activity, it's results were inherently a product of culture and thus "subjective", rather than the objective truth they are often claimed to be. Scientists got very rightfully offended by many of the more extreme claims, in that we would argue that since experiments can be repeated independently in the physical sciences, there is an objective truth to the results, even if the interpretations and broader implications involve a human component. In other words, gravity works if you are male or female, black or white, young or old, and we're willing to drop any science studies professor who claims otherwise off a building to confirm who is right (we'll provide a landing pad so no one gets badly hurt). I would note that while the worst of the anti-science crowd were definitely on the left, they really were on the far left and never had much by way of mainstream representation outside of a few post-modernly inclined humanities departments at academic institutions.

Anyway, Sokal has now teamed up with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at The Intersection over to the right in our blogroll, to write an editorial on how these days the vastly dominant anti-Science trend is coming from the right. From the LA Times:

Such introspection on the academic left has been a heartening sign, and the pronouncements of extreme relativism have subsided significantly in recent years. This frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).

The potency of this combination has become apparent during the six years of the Bush administration, as many if not most scientific agencies of our government have become embroiled in scandals involving the misrepresentation or suppression of scientific information, gag orders on scientist employees, or other interferences with the processes by which science feeds into decision-making. Tracing these intrusions back to their source, we almost always uncover the same pattern: It concerns an issue in which one of the two principal constituencies of the current administration — religious conservatives or big corporations — has a vested interest.

As if to prove their point, a poll of Republican Congressmen finds that only 13% believe in global warming, down 10% from last year!?! In the end, science will win over anti-science, because we have the universe on our side...assuming that some fraction of us manage to survive. Here's hoping.

I only wanted 2 see u laughing in the purple rain

Another Super Bowl come and gone, wrapping up the season but for next week's Pro Bowl (all-star game), which is typically well attended because it takes place in Hawaii, but nearly completely unwatchable. As for the Super Bowl, Indianapolis basically won going away, like most people predicted, after spotting Chicago a 7-point lead when the opening kickoff was returned for a touchdown. From that point on, it was basically all Indy, even though the Chicago defense did yeoman's work while being on the field pretty much the entire first half. Chicago's problem was pretty simple: their quarterback, Rex Grossman, sucks. He sucks a lot. He is almost certainly the worst quarterback to "lead" his team to the Super Bowl, where by "lead" I mean let the defense, special teams, and the running backs score enough points to cover over his numerous mistakes. Knowing this, and having seen their defense and running back set up their second touchdown, making the score 14-6 Bears, Chicago proceeded to throw the ball a lot. Grossman threw a few to his own team for not enough yardage to make much of a difference, a couple to the Colts defenders, and a few to the turf just to keep things interesting. Next time, against a defense that proved all year that they can't stop the run, and in a pouring rain that must make getting a grip on the ball extremely difficult, try....RUNNING the GODDAMN BALL!!!.

In the end, the game itself was slightly better than mediocre, making about average for a Super Bowl all things considered. The highlight probably was, as pointed out at Americablog, Prince using a projection screen to turn his guitar into a genitalia image during an extremely lackluster halftime show (U2 and the Rolling Stones were better the past couple years). Thankfully, the game will do some good for the world: in the next week or two, many, many children in Africa will acquire all sorts of brand new clothing celebrating the Bears' victory over the Colts that didn't actually happen.

As for me, have no fear of regular sports posts disappearing over the coming months (I know many, many of you were worried). Pitchers and catchers report a week from Thursday, and the NCAA basketball tournament, undoubtedly the most exciting tournament in US sports (let's face it, nothing compares to the World Cup), begins as always in March. Until then, you'll have to content yourself with literally hundreds of Mainstream Media stories in which Tony Dungy praises Jesus, and it is explained that Peyton Manning is not a choker, as they've been reporting every week for the past nine years. I can't wait.

Laser Vision/Vance Gilbert (Saturday Cat/Concert blogging)

Friday Saturday Catblogging

Karina, too lazy to actually jump, attempts to use laser vision to catch a wand toy.

Free Concert Clip

Tonight, we're going to catch Vance Gilbert at the Blue Moon Coffeehouse on the campus of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, IL. A longtime staple of the Northeastern folk scene, he's famous for his humor and his stagecraft (and the fact he's just about the only Black folksinger on the scene today, outside of Richie Havens). The latter is in evidence in this Youtube clip, taken at a singer/songwriter's workshop. At the Falconridge Folk Festival, this is Vance's yearly opportunity to make aspiring musicians into good performers. I've seen performers go up as rookies and leave with the ability to own their local coffeehouse, all because of the advice he can give in the course of a few minutes. It may not be entirely clear from the clip, but he's got an incredibly powerful voice. I've seen him go off-mike and just sing a capella by himself to an audience of ten thousand people, and be able to carry his voice to the back of the crowd.

Better Know a Blog

Better know a Blog blogging will return next week when I have some more time.

compulsive liberty

Hola amigos! It's been a while since I rapped at ya...

The UK is about to outlaw all discrimination based on sexual orientation:

The Equality Act, due to come into effect in England, Wales and Scotland in April, outlaws discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexual orientation.

Among other things, it would mean that Catholic adoption agencies can no longer refuse to place children with gay couples.

Serves them right, you say?

But some business that provide services to gay clients also oppose this ban:

Mr Hurst, who runs Guyz hotel in Blackpool with his partner Steve, said: "Rather than improve gay rights, it will make things much worse. We run a gay hotel exclusively for men. We feel if we were forced to a situation where we had to accept heterosexual people into our hotel, our gay clientele will not behave as naturally as they would now."

I think a very cogent argument can be made that it's not the government's job to correct our beliefs, however bigoted. It's hard to draw the line between preventing harm and becoming a perpetual nanny spanking the naughty kids for misdeeds. (And it's usually the issues that involve kids that make us become very interested in others' morals, see evils of music lyrics, videogames, and porn.) I think it's reasonable to require certain level of equality for agencies receiving public funding, but again, how much public financing should demand what compliance? I haven't bothered to read the language of this bill, but if it does apply to private hotel owners, it smacks of overreach.

Totally off topic, except for fabulous Brits, here's my Friday live music clip. This song has haunted me for a few years, ever since I really listened to the Smiths, and the band does a nice job:

Truth twenty-four times a second, #2

Even though Pan's Labyrinth was playing last week at out local multiplex along with a bunch of other Oscar-nominated films, we decided to see The Departed there, and waited until it opened at our local Art theatre in town. I can safely say, it was worth the wait and then some. Volver was good, as was The Departed (even though I still prefer Infernal Affairs, the original Hong Kong version). This movie was fantastic, easily the best movie from last year that I've seen (I missed too many to have any right to talk about "the best movie of the year" in general). First though, just to get this out of the way, the advertising for the movie is a bit deceptive; even though the lead actress was 11 during the filming, the level of violence and mature themes (not sex, in this case, just themes one needs to have some maturity in order to process) basically rules this movie out for pre-teens and younger. That said, on to the actual review.

Pan's Labyrinth, as best noted by Stephanie Zacharek of Salon, is a fairy tale in the classic sense: not a happy children's story, but a much darker morality tale that serves as an introduction to life's horrors and moral quandaries. Set in 1944 Spain, as Franco and the fascists were cementing their hold over the country, the movie tells the parallel tale of a young girl dealing with a dark fantasy world (which one could argue is her figurative take on her actual surroundings), while those around her deal with the more mundane horrors of warfare without the benefit of a runaway imagination to soften the edges. Guillermo del Toro, the director, does a masterful job of blending the real with the fantastic, both visually and in the storytelling itself. If some characters are more starkly evil, it is because they serve as the negative counterexample that every fairy tale requires. Good in this approach is more layered, full of failings but made noble by its decency and humanity.

Refreshingly, this is anything but a Hollywood movie, able to surprise you by its twists and turns. It's primary lesson, that you cannot blindly follow orders and must instead act as you think is right, is not treated as a simple concept to be learned but rather one that is nearly impossible to achieve. Throughout, no one is allowed innocence; neither a child being forced to deal much too early with an adult world nor the adults who must constantly balance betraying their principles in the short run in order to maintain them in the grander scheme, often at terrible cost. If anything, the movie's harshest condemnation is not just for the embodiments of evil, but also for a society that blindly watches as third parties are caught up in the crossfire (several hundred thousand Iraqis might be able to comment on this topic if they hadn't been killed over the past few years).

Of course, to focus merely on the lesson is to give short shrift to the telling: this is a movie of gorgeous images, masterful pacing, and a not inconsiderable dose of magic. Much like City of God, it is much too engrossing to be considered depressing, capable of transporting you like great storytelling can. I can't recommend it highly enough.

A certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge'

In the past two days, two different liberal blogs I read have featured amusing links to manifestos written by conservatives. First, Lawyers, Guns, and Money linked to a "reactionary catechism" posted on Redstate. For those unfamiliar with it, Redstate is the conservative equivalent to Daily Kos, with DKos's small population of wacky bleeding-heart liberal moonbats replaced by a small group of wacky arch-reactionary conservative wingnuts, and the larger group of committed progressives replaced by an equally large group of wacky arch-reactionary conservative wingnuts. These gentlemen apparently wish we hadn't gotten rid of that whole segregation thing:

Tradition and custom need not constantly explain or justify themselves as practice or policy. The presumption is in their favor. To drag them before the bar of a rigid rationalism is profound impiety.

Men, and societies of men, are ultimately more apt to maintain loyalties among those who are like them. This is natural and not to be either deplored or extirpated, but rather disciplined by civic virtue.

Indiscriminate blending of cultures is thus undesirable, and more often than not an at least implicit act of aggression against the existing majority culture.

Next Matt Yglesias picked up on a manifesto by someone who apparently wants us going to war even more frequently:

When foreign leaders issue threats against us, we take them at their word and act accordingly.

Great, now we can bomb everybody else every time they make a hollow threat.

As a response, let me propose the following manifesto to counter all these manifestos:

1. The Talmud tells that a gentile came to Shammai saying that he would convert to Judaism if Shammai could teach him the whole Torah in the time that he could stand on one foot. Shammai drove him away with a builder's measuring stick! Hillel, on the other hand, converted the gentile by telling him, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it." Hillel set his standards too low: one should do what is pleasing for others, not just avoid doing harm. Libertarianism is for people whose moral scheme got fixed in the third grade.

2. No manifesto should have more than one item. It makes you look like a raving lunatic, and gets away from whatever you wanted your central argument to be. No manifestos more than one item!

3. Writing a manifesto puts you in some questionable company. Marx wrote one, along with a buddy. The Unabomber wrote a rambling one. More recently, a group of British "leftists" wrote one, and were joined by a group of American "leftists" who look a whole lot like neocons and Iraq war supporters. This is not the company you want to join.

4. If something is immediately obvious, you are wasting you time putting it in a manifesto, since everyone already knows it. If the point is not immediately obvious and you want to convinve anyone other than yourself, you'll need to explain you argument through logical reasoning, and are wasting your time by putting it in a manifesto. This point is of the former category.

5. Those that have just broken the water pitcher.

6. Those that from a long way off look like flies. Seriously, click on the link, it'll make you a better person...and encourage you to stop making stupid lists. This post is over, so click on the link damnit!

Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I'm so forlorn

Some days, the news is just too ridiculous to not comment about it. First up are some cool cats who might be a bit too cool for their own good:

More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. The devices depict a character giving the finger...

Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.

Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball.

From the category of rats, we've got the kind screwing up the war we've been fighting in Iraq:

Tens of millions of U.S. dollars have been wasted in Iraq reconstruction aid, some of it on an Olympic-size swimming pool ordered up by Iraqi officials for a police academy that has yet to be used, investigators say. [ed. note: try hundreds of millions, not tens]...

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.

U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Responding, the State Department said in the report that it was working to improve controls

Needless to say, next time perhaps they can try tracking how they spend BILLIONS of dollars before they just hand it out. Just suggesting...

Anyway, our other rats are those trying to get us into our next war:

Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

You'll note that there is not a single shred of evidence that the Iranians were involved, except for the fact that the attackers were "sophisticated". So help me, if the attack had been "intricate", we might be at war already. WTF is wrong with people to believe this crap?

On to elephants. First the kind in the New York State Senate who truly have their priorities straight with regard to who needs to be looked out for in next year's state budget:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer will propose a budget of more than $120 billion Wednesday that would increase overall spending by more than 6.3 percent, a larger increase than his predecessor, George E. Pataki, proposed last year but significantly lower than the budget enacted by the Legislature, people briefed on the plan said.

After talking for months about the need to rein in spending, the governor had to reconcile his campaign promises to substantially increase funds for education and lower property taxes, while also moving to make health insurance available to all of the state’s children and increase aid to distressed municipalities.

The governor’s plan for property tax cuts is aimed at the middle class, adding $6 billion over three years to the existing School Tax Relief program, known by the acronym STAR. Benefits under the plan decrease for upstate households with incomes exceeding $60,000 and households in New York City and its suburbs with incomes exceeding $80,000.

Some Senate Republicans criticized his proposal for not doing enough to help constituents with higher incomes.

It's always a shame when politicians fail to look out for the interests of those with higher incomes. We may see riots all the way down Wall Street, if they weren't so busy taking advantage of all their federal tax cuts that Republicans in Washington have been handing out for the past few years.

Finally, the best news story of the day, about elephants...as in pachyderms. The military has blacklisted them, but with an important caveat. From Too Hot for TNR:

According to a recently-issued Special Forces manual, while certain pack animals are acceptable to use for spec-ops purposes (donkeys, mules), elephants "should not be used by U.S. military personnel." In the assessment of the manual's authors, "Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either."

There you have it. The military has concluded that elephants aren't actually evil. Giraffes, on the other hand, are either with us or against us, and we must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

Jacked up and our wheels in slush and orange crush

We just got back from the Illinois-Michigan State basketball game, a somewhat ugly 57-50 victory for the home team over the visiting Spartans. If nothing else, sports are a window into society, admittedly a cloudy window that frequently has cracks in the glass. Still, some random observations and photos.

First of all, I should note that attending the game in no way makes me a hypocrite in spite of my disdain for the team's racist mascot. Our tickets were given away at my wife's workplace, so we didn't even contribute to the team directly except to cover up a couple of empty seats. Our Illini t-shirts say "Illinois", not "Chief", the latter of which has to be perhaps the stupidest thing I've seen in a while to put on a shirt to support the team. Who puts the name of the mascot on a t-shirt?

In our seats in the upper level, we were surrounded by a bunch of white people, most of whom were in their 50's and 60's. I have no idea, frankly, who these people are. They aren't university professors, seem a bit too old to be students, and I didn't think a huge number of alumni really stay in town. My guess is that they are primarily the non-university population of Champaign (we have 100,000 people here, of whom no more then 10-20,000 work for the university, if that). They are scarily devoted to the team, picking apart the team's offensive failures, primarily the poor practice habits of our starting point guard, who did lead the team in points tonight on 6 of 8 shooting from the field for 17 points. They were extremely unhappy with the refs, who did seem to let every 50/50 call go the way of the visitors. More than anything else, though, the fans seemed to be there to kvetch about the team. The Illini led the entire game, by as many as 15 points early in the second half, yet we heard much more bitching than excitement. Admittedly, the game was ugly (more on this in a second), but c'mon gang, have some fun! This is entertainment, not a job.

My wife was getting driven nuts by a habit that Midwesterners seem to share: they refer to athletes by their first names exclusively (even though two different Illini are named "Brian"). She points out that our country-club-esque, extremely white neighbors in our row would almost certainly never talk to a random young 6'8" black man if they met him on the street, and certainly wouldn't address him on a first name basis, but do so exclusively from their vantage point 100 feet from the floor. It is a bit weird, really, being on a first name basis with a bunch of people that virtually anyone around us has ever met.

In the top of this shot, you see part of the Orange Crush, the Illini student fan section, who can also be viewed above my wife's left shoulder in the previous shot. These kids do really make it a crazy fun atmosphere in Assembly Hall, making noise constantly throughout a game, most of which time they spend jumping up and down while either needling the other team or cheering for the home team. To the left on the floor, we have the cheerleading team. I need not say anything about the cheerdudes, other than to point out that the current president was a cheerdude at Yale. The female cheerleaders are the kind of peppy obnoxious types who do that bouncy foot-switching thing when they walk down the street, and are always chipper. I hate those people. Thankfully, there is enough going on at a basketball game that they can generally be ignored. On the right hand side, in blue and white, is the Illini dance team, an entirely different set of cheerleaders. They do the more choreographed routines but skip the aerial maneuvers. Essentially, their routines would be extremely suggestive if performed at about 1/4 the speed, with lots of hip rocking and chest thrusting, but at their hyperkinetic speed they come off instead like someone tweaking out while trying to get rid of a wedgie.

You'll notice in this shot that exactly one player from each team is moving. This was kind of a theme for the night. Neither team has what you would want to call a dynamic offense. Michigan spent the first half turning the ball over on their way to 17 points in 20 minutes (16 turnovers vs. 21 shots, if I heard it correctly), missing a variety of midrange jumpshots because they could neither find an open 3 nor get the ball to the rim. The Illini played pretty average, but just by generating a shot on most possessions were able to run out to an 11 point lead. Staggeringly, Michigan State had the Illini in early foul trouble, so they would be shooting free throws after every Illini foul from the 7-minute mark on in the first half, yet never got the ball inside to induce fouls. Both teams basically spent most of their time wandering around the perimeter taking low percentage shots that they missed about 2/3 of the time.

In the second half, the Illini offense really started to sputter, except for their point guard, who would hold the ball forever, start to drive the lane like Allen Iverson, realize he wasn't The Answer, and pull up and drain a jumper from 15 feet. Let's just suggest he's not a huge fan of passing the ball, ever. Michigan State figured out that passing to the 6'10" guy standing three feet from the basket was a good idea long enough to close within 4 points, but then he fouled out and they resumed taking ridiculously long jumpers. If there were more than one or two fast break opportunities in the entire game, I must have blinked and missed them. Heck, there were no more than a handful of layups, something like 15 total assists by the two teams combined for the entire game, and not single recognizable screen-and-roll. Basically, this is the kind of victory that makes you worry about the likely success of your team in the conference tournament, much less the Big Dance in March. Still, it was fun, and you realize things at a game that you just don't get on TV, like the fact that a bucket-and-a-foul, because of the timing of the thing, is vastly more exciting in person than on TV, whereas a dunk just doesn't seem as exciting when viewed too far from above. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, though I have to say I prefer the downhome charm of the Illini club Ice hockey team. More on that soon, once I catch another game.

You can't get what you want, you can't want what you get. Desire's a fire with big red eyes and it'll leave you hungry

One of the great mysteries in American life was answered today. In the case of Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President Bush, was he an actual idiot in real life or did he just play one on TV? Apparently, it's the former. From Slate's coverage of the Libby trial:

Turns out Fleischer saw a story in the Washington Post suggesting that anyone who revealed Valerie Plame's identity might be subject to the death penalty. And he freaked.

Unfortunately, Swopa at the Needlenose blog thinks this might not be quite right, but it's still hilarious, in a "these bastards risked our national security to get revenge on one of the few honest people we had in government and his wife, who was helping to fight arms proliferation until said bastards outed her to the world, and ain't comeuppance quite the raging bitch" kind of way.

Fleischer's plight reminds me of another of life's great mysteries, or at least mysteries to me. Why would anyone want a job where they are basically an extremely prominent peon, a familiar face to millions at a job utterly devoid of actual power to do anything at all? When your superiors ask you to bend rules, the result is almost inevitably a felony, and those same superiors will make sure that when certain excremental products hit the fan, you are the one covered head to toe while they come out smelling like a rose (at least if someone other than Patrick Fitzgerald investigates the case). Why would anyone want a job like this? Sure, ambition can drive people up the job ladder, and the Peter Principle guarantees that everyone rises to the level of their own incompetence, as this administration has proven hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Still, who grows up wishing that they might someday become a felonious peon standing near the centers of actual power without ever being delegated any for themselves? It's not a problem unique to government, of course, as any number of corporate executives have proven over the years.

I blame the morality of large enterprises. Neither the government nor large businesses act in a way that individuals would consider "moral". It's not their job to do so, but we seem to pretend frequently that they will anyway. People are loyal to their employer, even though their employer will fire them the second that they no longer contribute sufficiently to make the shareholders and CFO happy. People are loyal to an administration, even though it's policies will generally fall vastly short of their lofty rhetoric and they will be expected as part of their daily duties to cover this fact up. Frankly, blind loyalty to inanimate entities makes idiots of us all, and what's worse, turns people who would otherwise be relatively harmless putzes into virulent schmucks. And in the end, for what? I know people can justify it, but I simply don't get it. What exactly is it that people need, anyway? Once you've got a significant other, family, and friends with whom to spend your time, a good personal library, a kickass TV with a 5+1 surround sound audio system, high speed internet, and enough cash to afford frequent seafood, periodic entertainment events (sports, theatre, movies, dancing, etc...), and the occasional trip somewhere exotic, what more could a person seriously ask for? I'm not even joking here. If you can get all those things by working no more than 10-11 hours a day, then what exactly is the point of all the extra time (for those who can pull it off in 8/day, my hat is off to you, unless you happened to inherit it...)? I just don't understand ambition.

They've both passed on, God rest 'em, but left me caught between, That awful color problem of the Orange and the Green.

Anyone who's spent any time around me at all generally becomes aware that I seem to be well-versed in Irish music for someone who's quite literally completely Jewish as far back as my roots can be traced. An Ahkenazi-Sephardic mix, true, but beyond occasional disputes over what is supposed to be avoided for Passover, it's Members of the Tribe all the way back. No, the story which I'll get the relevant party to explain properly some day is that I was raised on Irish music, particularly the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, from birth until it was too late to make a difference. As a result, I'll forever make the wholly misleading claim that I am indeed "one quarter almost-Irish", which is true, in a very strained way. Note that I didn't say "almost one quarter Irish", which is false. I'm almost Irish, not almost 1/4 anything.

Anyway, there is hopeful news out of Northern Ireland today. Remember, Ireland as a country is a generally peaceful place, the "Celtic Tiger" in Europe's economy, with a government more than willing to work things out with the UK. In Northern Ireland, where the IRA and loyalists waged a self-described "war" for most of the past century, things are looking much better. From the WaPo:

Northern Ireland's largest pro-Catholic political party voted overwhelmingly Sunday to cooperate with the predominantly Protestant police force, a remarkable reversal that was widely seen as a critical step toward cementing peace in a British province recovering from three decades of sectarian war....

The vote by Sinn Fein, the political affiliate of the Irish Republican Army, which waged a bloody struggle to free Northern Ireland from British rule, was a required step toward restoring a Catholic-Protestant power-sharing government in the province. The British government has given the bickering parties in Northern Ireland until March 26 to form a local government or see the province's affairs fully controlled by the central government in London.

I think this goes to the heart of one of the crucial issues in ending bloody conflicts: the best way to get people to stop killing each other is to have them stop killing each other. For at least a couple of years now, the IRA has basically gotten out of the business of killing Protestants (though certain members have been accused of killing Catholics in what are essentially gang-related killings). While some Protestant paramilitaries are still in the business of Sectarian murder, the death count is essentially down to under ten cases per year, vastly smaller than it used to be. Don't get me wrong, both sides still have plenty of hatred for the other, but once one side stops creating new martyrs for the other it's amazing how it can become a chain reaction. Even though the political process has been extremely rough for the past few years, it hasn't proven to be anywhere near the trigger point for further warfare. Even the deepest wounds heal over time, but not if you keep poking at them constantly.

The obvious parallel here is Israel and the Palestinians. I honestly can't say I have a true side in the conflict. I've never been to Israel, don't know more than a smattering of Israelis, and am something of a lapsed Reform Jew, if such a thing is possible. Israel has committed grave breaches of international law against the Palestinians, who have committed grave breaches of the same laws right back at them. Both sides have overseen the murders of thousands of innocents, and it is hard to name anyone in any position of leadership for either side without blood on their hands. Still, the Palestinian leadership is completely hopeless, and every break in the fighting with Israel turns within days to Fatah vs. Hamas civil war. It's pointless asking them to do anything as a nation-state, since they have no internal control over the population. The same cannot be said of Israel, which is an authentic country with working civic institutions. Even if it's not fair, and further Israelis will die at the hands of suicide bombers, the only real solution is for Israel to ratchet down the reprisals against Palestinians. It's not an issue of fairness at all, of course, just practicality. Even if eye-for-an-eye revenge seems more fair, it just guarantees more needless deaths for both sides. No, the biblical precept that would make a difference is the one about "turning the other cheek". It may not satisfy the animalistic need to spill the blood of those who have spilled blood, but it's the only path to peace out there. Many Jews out there would portray this as endorsing weakness, but the perception of strength has never been a valid long-term goal. Peace and prosperity are the long term goals, and it's about time that responsible adults (read: people out there not leading the American and Israeli governments) realize this. God willing, maybe someday the people fighting religious wars will actually bother to read their source material. I'd suggest the classic Proverbs 3:13-18

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that obtaineth understanding.
For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.
She is more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.
Length of days is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honour.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, and happy is every one that holdest her fast.