| Friday, July 8, 2005 |
17:46 - Britishness
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Let the hand-wringers wring; to the rest, though, there's work to be done:
Now that's a bounceback. Go Brits.
(Now watch: people will start claiming that the attacks were perpetrated by day-traders looking to create a buying trough...)
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| Thursday, July 7, 2005 |
11:44 - Test of mettle
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So now that London has been attacked, it seems hard to escape the speculation that the terrorists—if indeed today's attack was by the same people—are moving from country to country, feeling each one out to see which way it will jump.
They know now how the US and Australia reacted, they know how Spain reacted. Now they'll find out how the British will react.
We won't know for another couple of days; today, people are still giving speeches in the heat of the moment, and many folks are saying very encouraging things, including even Ken Livingstone. But time will tell whether that kind of ire will last as it has here, or whether the Galloways of the world—with their connecting the dots between the claim of responsibility citing Iraq and Afghanistan as the reasons for this "retaliation", and the necessity for Britain to withdraw from the War on Terror—will win out.
Many are claiming that the British Isles are made of sterner stuff, but I fear that the world has become so cynical by now that the hope for a muscular response is slim.
In any case. The main thing today is for our thoughts to go out to the victims, and that's where mine are.
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| Wednesday, July 6, 2005 |
17:17 - "Devastating urge to do good"
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-363663,00.html
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Oh, man. I wonder what'll happen when the Koslings and DUers read this?
I mean, it goes against just about every accepted truth of global economics, charity, Western decadence, welfare-statism, independent achievement, and the transformative power of rock music that so many hold so dear. Hearing a Kenyan economist speak in such candid, eloquent terms, while the Der Spiegel interviewer sits there in shock and horror while his country's largesse is pushed away with pleading words—it's stunning.
...Wait, I know what they'll say. They'll turn to Bono's identification of Bush's commitment of world-leading aid to Africa, and use that as reason to blame America for ruining Africa with our filthy dollars. It makes perfect sense!
(Via VodkaPundit.)
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| Tuesday, July 5, 2005 |
20:54 - The Hatred Gap
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"Hate is a strong word," some caution. "Not strong enough!" others retort.
And all I can think, when I see something like this, is that some people's lives are just so consumed by hate—either feeling it directly, or fantasizing it in others—that I can't even fathom jumping the gulf that lies between myself and that kind of mentality.
From the linked discussion thread at Daily Kos, the genesis of which was a seemingly innocuous bit of satire, we get this:
These wingnuts have my goddamned adrenaline going, these days more than ever. After all the truth that has come out, they're still spweinhg filth about "liberal traitors."
Shit, I'm ready to snap back into old form and whale on a few of them. They're fucking asking for it.
What will it solve? Not sure. Maybe nothing.
But it'll sure shut their fucking mouths while I'm pummelling them, and that'll be enough for the time being.
Let them call me a traitor. Please, let some doughy piece-of-shit Rove wannabe call me a traitor.
It'll be the last word he says for a MONTH, because his fucking jaw will be wired shut.
by chumley
And
Here's to Truth, Orwell! (none / 0)
I know you got lots of flame for that comment, but I'm with you on it. These right wing assholes play games with the lives of many thousands of others, all for money and power in Washington, and IMO it is time they get their due. If these right wing personalities were to get the bar-b-cue treatment that those mercenaries in Fallujah got, it could very well turn public opinion in America, which in turn could save thousands of lives both American and Iraqi. The religious right is destroying America by putting us on a path to a sort of neofascist theocracy, and anything that derails their agenda has got to be good on at least some level.
As long as it's Independence Day, we should remember that our nation was born in a blood bath. Jefferson was never afraid of being called a "King George hater."
This is the problem with Democrats; we are too nice, we are too careful about hating only the policies and not the politician, we quiver in our boots when media personalities call us "Bush Haters". Fuck that! I AM a Bush hater, I hate that man and everything he stands for, just as I hate Saddam and Stalin, and yes, Jefferson Davis and all the slave traders and owners he represented. It is good to hate evil.
I guarantee you that most of those republican activists out there HATE all of us, and in particular they hated Kerry and especially Dean. And in a society enveloped in a noxious smog of fear, hate wins. Democrats will keep losing if we don't learn to hate and DESTROY our enemies.
Now let's be clear, I'm not saying I want those right wing hacks to die on their vacation in Iraq, I'm saying I don't give a fuck if they die or not. But if they do die - Shadenfreude.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." -James Madison
by Subterranean
What kind of terms does this guy's "guarantee" promise? We hate people like Kerry and Dean? Where does this even come from? This is politics, not some kind of backwoods family feud. I don't hate Howard Dean. Hell, I barely know him. I believe he's tone-deaf and counterproductive, but I bear him no ill will, either personally or even for his political prospects. John Kerry? The only thing that could make me hate someone in his position is if he were proved to have consciously and egregiously betrayed his country and caused a lot of soldiers to be killed, and I don't think anyone has conclusively shown that—or that he was anything less (or more) than a fairly mediocre minor officer, and the primary emotion I feel when anyone mentions his name is boredom.
Hate? Jeezum crow, people, get a grip.
Do I hate the people in comment threads like this, at Daily Kos and Democratic Underground? That would be a stretch. I might be said to despise them, but that's not the same thing—I abhor the things they say, and I find it repugnant that they tend to celebrate a lot of sentiments and ideals that I disagree with firmly. But primarily my reaction upon reading the stuff I see there, like what's quoted above, is sadness and futility. How can I even talk to people who say these things so blithely, so earnestly, like they're desperately working out some kind of deeply held passion? How much mileage lies between their opinions of, say, George W. Bush and a discussion that would involve statements like "Well, I disagree with his policy on such-and-such issue, for the following reasons"? I'm not even asking for consensus on issues like the war—just a common ground of rational discourse, something that doesn't involve conspiracies of power-drunk idiot madmen in thrall to Satanic oil companies (yet, for some reason, stumping for nuclear power). How do you weigh the pros and cons of an issue in a calm manner with someone who thinks he's being a brave representative of the "reality-based community" by saying I AM a Bush hater, I hate that man and everything he stands for, just as I hate Saddam and Stalin, and yes, Jefferson Davis and all the slave traders and owners he represented. It is good to hate evil? What kind of forum is it where—far from pointing out that even a politician from the far opposite side of the aisle from where you stand has human constituents and is trying to support them as best he can—merely expressing the idea that Iowahawk's original parody was funny gets you banned?
"Sure," some will now say, "This is extreme stuff. Yeah, we say we hate conservatives. But that's only because they did it first!"
And sure enough, one of the new Family Guy episodes that I caught last night while I was half-dozing in my chair features Brian the dog (who now, in the zombified Second Coming of the show, drives a Prius with a "Kucinich '04" bumper sticker and reads Michael Moore books) starts an alarming spate of loud and fierce baying at a black man that enters the room (waking me up in my chair with a start). Immediately, though, he catches himself and apologizes profusely to the man: "Sorry! I'm sorry! I can't believe I did that—that just completely isn't 'me'. I have no problem with black people; I vote Democrat!"
(It would have been great if the black man had said, "Yeah, well, I'm a Republican. What, you vote for the party of the slaveholders and the fire hoses?" —But that's not something we can expect out of Seth McFarlane, no sirree.)
It's become such an unquestioned article of faith on the Left—"conservatives hate"—that this kind of thing is par for the course, and whether it has any basis in reality or not, it's the grounding for the philosophy espoused by these people on Kos' forums.
It's as good as proved, for example, that Bush wants to kill gays. What good would it do, then, to point out the "Bush tapes", wherein he said behind closed doors that he didn't want Republicans to be "kicking gays"? Well, not much good, apparently—rather than take such words at face value, as off-the-cuff utterances captured on tape that reflect not just a policy statement but a directive from his own heart, the sentiments are interpreted as a "turnaround", and as a "weasel-like, cowardly approach to gay bashing".
Occam's Razor means nothing to these people. There's no such thing as assuming benign, humane, or even human principles in explaining the doings of someone on the other side. It's all just part of the greater tapestry of regimented hatred.
I honestly don't know what to do or think when confronted with these earnest pledges, by people who claim to be the vanguard of compassion and understanding and peace, to beat the life out of me for the opinions I hold.
I'm no Christian, but I know what it is to feel the sadness of watching someone willingly damn himself. It's born of love, and pity, and a wistful wish to be able to bridge the gap and bring the person back from the brink. Despite Kos' insistence that the Religious Right thrives on hatred and lives to damn those with which it disagrees, I have to say that after some four years now of dwelling primarily on the right-hand side of the aisle, I haven't even seen anything that comes close to the truly frightening level of murderous rage that emanates from what claims to be the country's rightful moral guide. I can't even remember the last time I saw someone on the pro-war/pro-Bush side even say or type the words "I hate..."
But I'm probably just not paying attention. Kos' people aren't just our moral guardians, they're our intellectual superiors, too.
UPDATE: I know I asked for it by using a blanket statement, but please refrain from pointing out Google results for "I hate" that appear in places like anti-abortion forums and white-power sites. Addendum here.
UPDATE: As if there were any doubt: reaction to the London bombings.
I'm not even shocked anymore. That's a very bad thing.
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| Monday, July 4, 2005 |
22:44 - Explosions will find a way
http://66.135.33.181/~btman/Fireworks/Fireworks.html
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Ahh, suburban California life.
These pictures were taken from a sidewalk a block from my house, pointing in all different directions as each pyrotechnic went off, each from any of at least ten different discrete locations within the residential sprawl. Backyard displays, in other words: pretty impressive ones at that. You can bet the people putting them on had smuggled the firecrackers in from Nevada or Arizona or Mexico, because they're sure not available around here. And judging by the people who kept walking by me alone or in pairs, with U.S. flag t-shirts and glasses of wine, and stopping to make small talk and enjoy the impromptu show that needed no organizers or traffic controls or announcers or (heaven forfend) fire control, one can hardly help but think that at least some people around here have that old-time spirit.
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| Sunday, July 3, 2005 |
10:53 - Hello from the 21st century, wish you were here
http://www.ucomics.com/doonesbury/2005/07/03/
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Wow.
Thanks a lot, Garry. I would have thought this was beneath you, but... I guess you've been digging for material so long, there's nothing left down there.
Y'know, I think maybe he's just jealous of people who can do journalism and hold down day jobs at the same time. Lord knows he doesn't meet many in the MSM.
Via Tom G.
UPDATE: Egad. I'm almost starting to pity these people for the untenability of their arguments.
Via Erich S.
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| Saturday, July 2, 2005 |
01:48 - Up the voltage
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=16480_How_Can_the_Future_Be_So_Primati
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I've just got one thing to say to this guy:
"Why don't you go eat a decroded piece of crap?"
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| Thursday, June 30, 2005 |
16:50 - Don't bother me with facts
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This may be part of the problem in today's intractable political divide: people simply decide in advance what they're going to believe about a given thing, and then even facts that directly contradict that belief don't make a dent in it—they just become transparent.
Case in point is today's SomethingAwful entry by Frolixo. I realize that SA is hardly what anyone considers a great profound think-tank, but if we're trying to get an accurate picture of how people interpret the world who aren't complete obsessive news-hounds and politics junkies, it's as good an example as any.
Did anybody watch that speech about the plans for Iraq that Bush outlined on Tuesday? I guess our plan of action to stem the tide of insurgent attacks and have democracy flourish in the region is to "defeat terror", "spread freedom", and "sacrifice". Wow, I'm sure all those buzz words that we've been hearing for the last 4 years will be just the solution to this clusterfuck we willingly walked into. I've never mentioned any politics in any of my updates because I tend to be fairly moderate in my views, and Zack Parsons does a good job of it anyway, but I just lost it after the speech on Tuesday. Anybody that knows their history or even has a shred of common sense knew that invading Iraq was a really bad idea unless you had a solid plan for the post-war.
This is looking more and more like a Vietnam situation, where hostilities are increasing and instead of pulling out we are digging deeper, sending more men and material over. The more we commit over there, the less of a chance we have of getting out. I just find it really tragic that thousands of young men who think they are fighting for a good reason will lose their lives over the next few years, just because this country is being led by a group of greedy, ignorant, and self serving men. The people who voted for Bush are finally wavering, but its far too late. We're fucked.
I didn't watch the speech, no, but I read it. And if there is any core unifying message in it, it's this:
The new Iraqi security forces are proving their courage every day. More than 2,000 members of the Iraqi security forces have given their lives in the line of duty. Thousands more have stepped forward and are now in training to serve their nation. With each engagement, Iraqi soldiers grow more battle-hardened and their officers grow more experienced. We have learned that Iraqis are courageous and that they need additional skills. That is why a major part of our mission is to train them so they can do the fighting and our troops can come home.
I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer.
Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don't you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.
Mmmyep. Sure sounds like Vietnam to me. Sending more soldiers every day. A draft is imminent. "Instead of pulling out we are digging deeper, sending more men and material over. The more we commit over there, the less of a chance we have of getting out." That's exactly what Bush was saying.
But, see, the people who believe this stuff have their justification when these contradictions are brought up, too, and it's simple: Bush was lying through his teeth.
If it's bad news, it's confirmation. If it's good news, he's lying. That's how this works, right? This is one of those "My brother is lying"/"My brother is telling the truth" things, huh?
But hey, it's good enough to sound funny, so it's good enough for modern America.
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| Tuesday, June 28, 2005 |
16:28 - Our unbiased media
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In just a five-minute trip to the bank and back, I've had confirmation that KCBS's bizarre slant these days is not an after-midnight-only thing, but something they do all the time.
"In just under an hour," they intoned, "President Bush will make a speech in defense of the war in Iraq. The president will make the case that all the sacrifice of blood and treasure, all the images of horrific violence, are all worth it." With detailed foresight, they rattled off all the points that Bush's speech is expected to cover, complete with all the exaggerations, coverups, and outright lies that KCBS evidently expects to hear. The only thing they stopped short of saying was, DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!
Then they trotted out polls showing flagging support for the war, one-liners from people on the street (the pro-Bush guy as dull and moronic as possible and making incoherent noises about "that 9/11 thing", the anti-Bush guy sharp and snarky), notes about how everyone mistrusts Bush now because no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and some expert or other who issued a peevish critique of the administration for not having gone on record with a guarantee that we wouldn't be building long-term bases in Iraq.
Missing, naturally, is any opinion piece that would make a case in favor of the war, or that would point out that hey, maybe it would be a good thing to have bases in Iraq—better than in Saudi Arabia, yes? Missing is any invocation, however matter-of-fact, of the stated mission in Iraq and its stakes, or an articulation of why it was important to take out Saddam with or without WMDs in his hands, or of positive facts on the ground that might just support what the president has to say on the subject in half an hour. Missing, naturally, are any polls or interviews from soldiers in Iraq, or, heaven forfend, Iraqis. See, by doing any of those things, KCBS would be "touting the Administration line".
Which amounts to publishing enemy propaganda, don'tcha know. Because the Administration is The Enemy.
And just this morning, as I drove in, the anchor was expressing shock and hurt pride over the revelation that the American people don't trust the news media as far as they could throw it, or that it could possibly be construed as having a slant that's too critical of the Bush administration. Perish the thought.
If it sounds like I'm registering my disgust every time I hear a snippet of KCBS that doesn't involve the weather or traffic report, well, I pretty much am. It's because that's what the radio is tuned to in the car I'm borrowing, and this just gives me all the more incentive to get the Jetta fixed as soon as possible.
UPDATE: Oh yeah. Just after the item described above, they did a story like, "Facing a potentially embarrassing political situation, House Republicans backed off today on a bill regarding veterans' welfare benefits... House Democrat So-and-So had the following righteous speech on the subject..." —and I honestly can't remember the last time I've heard them do a story like that with the roles reversed. If I heard one, it would stick out like a sore thumb. It's not like such stories don't exist, you know.
And the day before, there was a story about California implementing bio-screening technology (at taxpayer expense) to test everybody for bodily toxins caused by pollution and so on. They played a bunch of sound bites from doctors and politicians saying how great it would be; and then, at the very end, said, "The bill is opposed by some chemical companies." Seriously! That's the extent to which they described the "con" position. And then they cut away to something else. Boo! Hiss! Bad chemical companies! Must be because they're evil. But that's all we hear of their side, so that's the impression we're left with.
It's as though they've started taking for granted that they're only playing to a certain audience now, so they simply no longer care about alienating people who don't agree with their slant.
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11:36 - The DMV: the New Ellis Island
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Evidently the same people in the California Assembly who have twice failed to pass legislation allowing driver's licenses for illegal immigrants are going to try a third time, thinking they have the Governator's support (though they don't, really, judging by his reactions reported on the radio this morning). This time, reportedly, they plan to distinguish illegals' licenses (a contradiction in terms, it seems to me) with a unique color and special security features, but the California Homeland Security department still isn't pleased. Which seems about right to me, but I can't help but think it's absurd that the question has even gotten this far.
Let's leave aside the philosophical question at the heart of whether it's right to give the legitimacy of documentation to people who are in this country illegally, who cheated the system to sneak in where others spent years in line waiting.
My question is a more basic one. It's about logistics. See, what people seem to be forgetting, perhaps because of the monotonic overuse of the term, is that these are illegal immigrants we're talking about. IL-LEG-GAL. As in, criminals. As in, they should not be here. As in, if the authorities find out they exist, they deport them. (Or should.) The life of an illegal immigrant is a life of hiding from all forms of authority, of lying low, of staying the hell away from any mode of detection by those with the power to discover that they have no right to be in the country. It's a life of skulking from under-the-counter job to under-the-counter job, seeking a living from sympathetic or (more frequently) exploitative employers willing to be party to the crime. It's all underground, and documentation is the very antithesis of the enterprise.
With that in mind, then: why on earth would an illegal immigrant go to the DMV to pick up a license, or even provide a mailing address to have one sent him?
Wouldn't this be like a Venus flytrap or something—just set up a special line at the DMV with a door in the back wall saying "Illegal Immigrant Licenses", and as each person steps through he falls onto a chute that carries him into a paddy-wagon idling in the sub-basement? If so, it'd be rather ingenious.
Or—as seems more likely—does this proposal merely amount to the decriminalization of undocumented immigration? If, as a self-demonstrated international criminal, you can walk with impunity into a government office and get official state documentation with your name and your address imprinted and reflected in a government database, instead of being arrested on the spot, then in what sense is illegal immigration "illegal" anymore?
It's like, say, if a notorious bank robber were to walk into a police station, and under a bulletin board with his name and portrait staring down at him from a WANTED poster, he told the cops about a neighbor whose music was turned up too loud. And the cops took down a police report and knocked down the neighbor's door. And the bank robber walked out happily into the sunshine.
It's hard for me to understand how the proponents of driver's licenses for illegals can have any other ultimate goal than the destruction of the concept of "citizenship".
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| Thursday, June 23, 2005 |
14:50 - Is that really a piece of fairy cake?
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=16344_Koran_Abused_in_Nashville_Seethi
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They're calling 911 now, when they discover a defaced Koran?
Methinks someone sees harvestable PR advantage in the relentless Gitmo drumbeat. Too bad we aren't buying it.
At what point does it become okay to suggest that these fellows need to be taught a sense of perspective, by whatever means necessary?
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13:18 - More office hijinks
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When a senior VP has a younger engineer in his office, talking about potential international support deals, and you hear the VP say, "Wanna go to Vietnam?" ... there's not much anyone within earshot can do but burst out laughing.
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13:04 - Incorrigible punster—do not incorrige
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So I was looking for friends and/or colleagues to go out to lunch with today. It turns out, though, that everybody I usually go with is either on vacation or had lunch plans of their own. I'm also on my bike today. So I did something I don't often have to do: rode my bike down to Chipotle, got a burrito, and rode back clutching the paper bag over my handlebar while I cut through parking lots so as to avoid being blooped at by cop cars noticing that I was on the wrong side of De Anza Boulevard (bike lanes are one-way-only and aligned with car traffic, and I wasn't about to go find a major intersection and cross over just to traverse the four blocks back to work). Kind of a pain, but worth it. I do so love Chipotle.
I got back to the doors of my building just at the same time as two of my friends did, who had skipped out for lunch on their own shortly before I went looking for them. "Oh, we went out for lunch a bit early," one of them said.
I replied, "And so I went out for lunch bitterly."
Then I jumped into the elevator so they couldn't chase me down.
(Great, now someone's going to T.P. my server.)
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| Tuesday, June 21, 2005 |
13:29 - GET'S!!
http://outpostnine.com/editorials/teacher.html
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"I am a Japanese School Teacher".
And thus it begins.
Not safe for work, but only because people will wonder why you're laughing so hard.
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| Monday, June 20, 2005 |
11:32 - All propaganda, all the time
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Now I know why, when Narsai David does his "Food News" segments on KCBS every hour, he no longer ends each one by saying the tagline "KCBS All News 74". And it's not just because they're saying "740" now, moving away from the old and not-very-explicable tendency for AM stations to call themselves by their frequency in tens of kilohertz, whatever sense that ever made.
It's because KCBS can't really claim to be a 100% "news" station anymore. Oh, sure, they pipe in the CBS News feed every hour. But if what I heard on Saturday night, driving up the Central Valley from the wedding in San Juan Capistrano long after midnight, is any indication, well... all I can say is that it's a shame. It used to be such a great news source.
For the three hours that I listened, as the dark fields swooshed past and distant fires burned, KCBS flogged the Downing Street Memos, saying over and over how they "proved" something evil and nefarious about Bush and the war, though they were oddly coy about explaining exactly what, or about quoting them verbatim. They repeatedly played a clip of a BBC anchorwoman who summarized the memos' scandalizing contents thus: "The memos show that the Bush Administration had been planning war with Iraq as early as the spring of 2002." Shock, horror. Guys, we knew by the end of that week in the middle of September 2001 that we would be invading Iraq. Remember that? Remember how we all thought we'd have taken out Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia too by now? Once we'd come to terms with the idea that the solution to Arab/Islamic terrorism was to reform the Arab/Islamic world, we knew—or at least some of us knew—that it was pretty much an all-or-nothing affair. Some countries would reform voluntarily; some would require military intervention. But fighting a War on Terror with Saddam still in power—whether he had any WMDs currently in his possession or not—was simply not an option. This was Saddam Hussein. He would have done all he could to thwart us, and he was long overdue for a tumble—besides, a free and US-friendly Iraq would be a huge positive first step toward the rest of the war we knew we'd have to fight, one that would make the remainder a ton easier. We all understood this. Why is it such a huge scandalous surprise now?
KCBS even interviewed Joe Wilson, who has a new book out all about this scandal (I guess his publisher gave him two weeks to write it—blast, my record has been blown open!); and it was almost farcical, listening to the CBS interviewer prod him again and again to give them a juicy bite o' sound they could play over and over once the sun came up:
CBS: What is your personal impression of George Bush?
Wilson: Well, I don't know the man, personally, so I can't say how I feel about his character...
(later)
CBS: If you could tell us what your personal impression is of George Bush—
Wilson: As I said, I don't know him personally, so I can't give you a good personal impression...
CBS: His administration, then.
Wilson: Well, then I can say that this is the most obstinate, secretive, and authoritarian Presidency that I've seen in all my thirty years in Washington.
Thank you. End interview. End story. And if you thought CBS would, you know, bring in someone from the other side of the aisle to, y'know, rebut Wilson's chest-puffing claims that he had made all these BUSH LIED!!!!111 claims a year ago, and now the memos "proved" him right, blah blah blah—to, perhaps, explain that anyone who is surprised to discover that the White House had plans to invade Iraq back in early 2002 had apparently been asleep throughout the entirety of the 1990s, when calls for toppling Saddam were a matter of daily discourse from college campuses to Comedy Central—well, get used to disappointment. Confuse the listener with multiple viewpoints? Bah! We'll tell listeners what to think. Surety makes them feel more comfortable than having to make up their own minds. Don't give people contextual information that might help them decide for themselves whether Guantanamo has any resemblance to the Cambodian killing fields or Auschwitz; don't point out that the worst the Gitmo guards are accused of doing is kicking a book, which some might regard as notably less objectionable an offense than, say, clipping off people's fingers with gardening shears or forcing them to drink motor oil. No, "Invasion of Personal Space by Female" has such a compelling symmetry with "Rape Room" that it's just too good not to use. Remember, we're living in a Nazi dictatorship, so we elites in the mass media have to get the subversive message out, somehow, so the people are informed but so the goons don't smash down our doors. Wait! Look at all this huge broadcasting equipment we have. Let's use that!
It's getting so I can't even trust Narsai David anymore not to be giving us recipes that rob us of our precious bodily fluids.
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| Thursday, June 16, 2005 |
21:12 - Out of my way! I'm a motorist!
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This is a continuation of the saga begun here and continued here. If I didn't know better, I'd think there might be a pattern starting to form.
The current cavalcade of whimsy began when I got my clutch replaced at Midas, last Thursday. In the process, they checked to see why the power outlet in the trunk wasn't working, and in so doing apparently yanked out the stereo from the dashboard, unplugged it, and crammed it back in, damaging it in the process so that the faceplate no longer fits on snugly and immovably. I guess they figured I'd never notice; who turns on their stereo system in this day and age, honestly?
So I then took it to the smog place to get the smog check done for the registration renewal. On the way home from work after that, I noticed that the Check Engine light was on. This, I discovered after having Bob Lewis (the dealership) look at it, was because of a faulty mass airflow sensor—something the smog check apparently didn't test for. (It gave me a perfect bill of health.) So Bob Lewis set about fixing it, for an estimated $450 all told, parts and labor. I can handle that. I can rationalize that. $450? Why, that's a mere three months of bandwidth, or a paltry four months of cable. I've still got lots of cash from the latest book. It's all good.
I should know better than to expect that the initial estimate will ever be the whole story, though. They called me up on Tuesday to tell me that in test-driving the Jetta around the auto mall after installing the new mass airflow sensor, they got more engine fault codes blipping up—which turned out to be misfires from the ignition coil unit. (Which, of course, reminds me of those aviation repair zingers: Problem—Number 3 engine missing. Solution—Engine found on right wing after brief search.) My new service advisor, "Matt", called me up and told me the unfortunate news: a new part that cost $500 would have to be ordered and shipped up from LA; I would have no use of my car until Thursday. Oh, and by the way, the stereo's fixed—Midas unplugged it and broke the faceplate, the morons. But the rear power outlet is fixed, at least—it was never plugged in by the factory, so it would seem.
I resigned myself to this new reality: not $450, but more like $950 plus a bunch of extra labor hours—call it $1200 and I'd be lucky to get out of there. I did some poking around, found an aftermarket VR6 ignition coil pack for $302, called Matt, told him about it, gave the okay to go with an aftermarket part if he could get a hold of it and it was cheaper. Taking whatever shortcuts I can glean, here.
I drove Lance's car to work on Wednesday. Then, this morning, I called Bob Lewis to verify that the car was done—it was—and had him drop me off at the dealership, where I finalized paperwork and paid the final bill: $968. Hey, less than four figures—a pleasant surprise! "Now, we did over eight hours of work on your car," Matt told me with a conspiratorial smile, "but we're only charging you for four. Well, three, actually, when you consider that we didn't charge you anything to investigate this window problem you reported or to fix the rattling thing in the armrest." I agreed, that certainly sounded like he was giving me few causes for complaint. I had them drive the car out so I could look at the stereo faceplate before I handed over my money; they amiably agreed, and I found that it was seated quite firmly—you could move it up and down a little, but just pressing buttons you'd never shift it. It was pretty clear to me at this point that Midas was wholly at fault for breaking the stereo, and I couldn't fault Bob Lewis for anything. At last! Out of all these service places, at least I can be sure that one has treated me right the whole time... or at least has only given me cause for suspicion and circumstantial evidence for failures that could just as easily have been one of the other place's fault, which I could never prove.
You see where I'm going with this, perhaps.
I got in the car and started it up. Sounded great. Shifted into gear nicely (I'm still basking in the joy of a new clutch). I pulled out onto the expressway, U-turned, got onto Guadalupe and then onto 85, and headed to work. I got off 85 at Stevens Creek and pulled up at the first stop light.
That's when I noticed that the idle speed was wrong.
It's supposed to be 700. On the Jetta, especially the silky VR6, 700 rpm is just about silent—I can barely tell the car is running and hasn't stalled out. It's a beauty at idle. But not today... because the car was idling at 1000 rpm. Which, coincidentally enough, happens to be the harmonic frequency of the VR6 engine block. So now it's noisy and wobbly and I feel the vibrations traveling up the gearshift lever into my forearms, and the needle is buffeted around the vicinity of the 1000 rpm mark as the vibrations kick up stronger and back off, batting the engine back and forth across the spine of the complementary waveforms.
I pulled in to the parking garage and went to my cubicle. I called up Matt and got his voicemail; I left a message noting that the idle speed seemed to be set too high. Was this because they'd reset the engine computer while installing the ignition coil pack, and it was now tuned for Jet-A fuel? Was it because they'd put on the wrong part, the one for the R32 or something? I didn't know, but it sure didn't seem right for the idle to be right on the harmonic frequency—there's no way they'd do that on purpose. Right?
No calls had arrived by lunchtime, and all the other guys decided to go to the Chinese place, so I was left behind to forage for myself. I got in the car and started it up. There was a slight hiccup as it started, but nothing to worry about, surely. I noticed, before leaving the garage, that the idle speed was back down to 700—oh good! So that's all taken care of, then. Jolly.
How charmingly naïve we can be sometimes, eh?
I drove down Bandley and up toward Stelling. After about three minutes I noticed with some consternation that the engine was idling at 1000 rpm again; apparently the gremlin of the ECU had not departed after all, and only required a certain amount of engine heat to prod him to liveliness. Ah well, so it's idling at 1000. Whatever.
But then I pulled into the drive-thru at Taco Bell. Sitting motionless in the line, waiting to give my order, shifter in neutral and clutch out, suddenly I notice that my instrument cluster was full of weird red shapes. Warning lights.
"Welcome to KFC/Taco Bell. May I take your order?"
"Uh, just a second. You seeing this?"
The seat belt light was on. The ABS light was on. The hell? I checked my belt; it was securely fastened. I checked the brakes; nothing happened to the light. My seatback was in the fully locked and upright position. All cigarettes were extinguished. And yet these mysterious lights were glaring at me. And, as I watched in numb silence, the ABS light began to blink on and off.
Then the seatbelt light went off. Then the ABS light went on solid again for a second, then started to blink faster than before, once or twice, then went off.
My car is haunted!
I bought the most occult-repellent items on the "Mexican-inspired" menu and picked them up at the window, staring at the instruments. No lights showed their faces; only the engine continued to judder and putt along at 1000 rpm. I drove back to work and parked.
Back in my cubicle, I talked to automotive necromancer CapLion, who told me to go back out to the garage and pop the hood and check a variety of possibly loose electrical connections. Unfortunately, the VR6, being crammed into the engine bay through the magic of Teutonic cylinder placement that lets you fit six cylinders into a hole made for four, exists under a carapace of plastic that pretty much obscures the entirety of the engine bay, eliminating any chance of even seeing such things as the wires leading from the radiator to the engine or from the battery to the alternator or the vacuum hoses leading to the throttle body, much less checking them for loose connections. All I could do, really, was poke at things with an index finger and note that they were hot. "Hmmm," I said to myself, rubbing my chin sagely.
I made a couple more calls to Bob Lewis, trying to get a hold of Matt and tell him of the new developments that had occurred, which would surely be of interest to him, especially considering that I am sort of planning on driving this car to San Diego on Friday afternoon, if he doesn't mind. But he hadn't called back in response to my initial message, and he was still away from his desk. I asked the service department receptionist to take down a message to have a service advisor—any service advisor—call me back pronto to tell me whether I should worry about the car abruptly dying on me somewhere in the middle of the Central Valley, most likely at Coalinga where the stench of cattleyards overpowers anyone not hermetically sealed into an air-conditioned car cabin.
Finally, just before 6:00, Matt called me back. I told him the whole story that had transpired at Taco Bell. He made clueless sorts of noises that belied his earlier seeming conversance with all things potentially odd in JettaWorld. "You say the seatbelt light was on. Was your seatbelt buckled up?" Uh, yes. "Sometimes when the engine needs to kick on certain systems, like the air conditioner, the revs can drop for a second or two, then come back up to speed." Well, true, but that's not what's happening—the engine is at a normal 700 rpm idle for the first three minutes of the drive, then shifts up to a 1000 rpm idle. "Ah. Hmm."
He advised me, in his expert opinion, to bring it in in the morning if I was really worried about it, but that it was probably okay to drive to San Diego. Well, phew. Now I can rest easy. And lo, it's 7:00 now. Time to go home.
I go out to the car and sit down in the driver's seat. I put in the key. I turn it. It goes COUGH... and stops. Nothing.
The battery is totally dead.
Now I am seriously unamused. I call up Bob Lewis—by this time of night there's only a single on-call person to take questions and appointments—and ask if it's okay to bring in my car and leave it there overnight, because if I get a jumpstart I'm not about to drive it home and go through this all again tomorrow morning, because there's clearly a short somewhere, or at least a gremlin that feeds on electrical energy and might escape from the car into my computer at home or something. She says that's totally fine. I get Kris to give me a jump, and I drive to Bob Lewis, high-revving the engine on every shift to make sure I don't kill the engine and strand myself on the side of the freeway with a dead battery. (Kris left the parking garage right after I did and tailed me all the way to the Guadalupe exit, for which I have no doubt he'll be rewarded with karma points or other valuable spiritual prizes.) I fill out a statement of My Royal Displeasure, write a big fat 0 in the "Amount approved for repair" space, seal my keys inside, and get ready to leave with Lance, who's met me there.
But who should still be there, burning the midnight oil, but Becky?
I couldn't resist. I went over to her desk, where she was chatting with the on-call person, whom I asked where I should turn in the night-owl envelope with my key in it. She pointed to the slot outside. And Becky took the bait: "I didn't expect to see you back here so soon!"
And I regaled her with a condensed version of the story. This time I could afford to be dismissive and a little magnanimous, because it was painfully clear that this time—instead of the first, where the brake fluid flush may in fact have been done as claimed, or the second, where maybe Bob Lewis broke the stereo faceplace or maybe Midas did—it was pretty damn cut-and-dried that whereas I had given Bob Lewis a working car with a working electrical system, what they'd given me back was a big sparking pile of crap. Becky's face was gray and wooden. There were no sneers of condescension this time. There was no attempt at passing of blame. It was all she could do to turn a wan smile in my direction and tiredly promise that if they found anything wrong—and I knew they would—I'd know by noon.
It's anybody's guess whether the car will be in any shape to drive to San Diego tomorrow. I'll call in the morning and see if there have been any developments. But in the meantime, I can't help but notice that this makes three consecutive car repair places that have, in the process of trying to fix or verify one thing, succeeded in breaking something else. I'm beginning to wonder what chance I'd even have if I knew what made all these mysterious car parts work together—they seem hell-bent on thwarting me at every turn, no matter how hard I work to head them off physically and psychologically. This game is just too intricate for the likes of me.
I'll stick to installing Windows 2000. It's less aggravation.
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| Wednesday, June 15, 2005 |
01:32 - They don't make Hitlers like they used to
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1118894835.shtml
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Dean, who has had a dog in the Terry Schiavo fight since before most of the rest of us had heard her name, has a good reaction piece to the autopsy results today that ostensibly prove that the position he took was "wrong". The point being that it's just a bit fatuous to be drawing "right" and "wrong" lines in a case like this, and the consequences of erring on the one side versus the other are anything but balanced, particularly depending on your individual moral/ethical compass.
But that's just background. What I wanted to note was this:
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the autopsy did nothing to change President Bush's position that Schiavo's feeding tube should not have been disconnected. He had signed a bill, rushed through by Congress in March, in a last-ditch effort to restore her feeding tube.
...And yet, somehow, the judicial arm of the government overrode him and brought his decree to naught.
Exactly what kind of Fuhrer is this? The kind that can be brought low by people working normally within the system? The kind who can't even intervene meaningfully in a life-or-death decison regarding a single citizen whose newsworthiness isn't even political?
Oh, but he's a Christian and a Republican, and you know what that means.
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| Tuesday, June 14, 2005 |
22:21 - Down in front
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050613-104823-1601r.htm
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I saw part of this Dick Cheney's press conference yesterday morning when I was dropping off my car at Bob Lewis; it was being shown on the big TV in the waiting room, which was tuned to CNN. (Apparently it was only one brief period of the day when the coverage was not devoted exclusively to Michael Jackson, whom I would thank to please recuse himself from the public spotlight for a while so we can move on to the next celebrity scandal or tabloidy human-interest murder case to demand weeks on end of attention.)
Cheney explained, defensively, that the people being held in Gitmo are in fact terrorists—the real deal, the "20th hijacker" kinds of people—and that even so there was a definite process in place to determine whether each one posed specific threats to the United States or should be released. He then began to cite examples; he started by telling the story of one who had been picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan, who had after seven months in Gitmo been determined not to be a threat to America's security, and was released to Afghanistan with a new Koran and several extra pounds around the waistline. Five months later, US forces killed him in a skirmish with Taliban forces in the mountains near Kandahar—because this released prisoner had immediately joined right back up with them and become the Taliban's regional commander.
Cheney began to recite the story of a second prisoner whose humane treatment and early release would seem to be unwarranted; but CNN chose that moment to cut away, and the anchor started talking over it, saying "Vice President Dick Cheney has been defending the conduct of guards at Guantanamo Bay, where interrogation practices have been criticized recently as "torture"; politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for Gitmo to be shut down." And then they cut away to more Michael Jackson crap.
Don't let the man talk, or anything. Don't let him make his case to the American people. Just shut off his microphone and remind us all that what he's defending is TORTURE CRITICIZED GITMO SHUT DOWN KORAN FLUSH URINE AAHHH! And then jump off in another direction before anyone has time to process what they've just seen. In the name of all that's secular, don't let the last impression in people's minds be what Cheney said.
I would wager that Cheney is more hated among the general public here and abroad than even Bush; nobody knows anything about Cheney except that he's a big grimacing evil bald corporate vulture, whereas at least Bush has a dumb innocent vacant look on his face. Why, just put up their pictures next to each other—you know who's running the show! —And yet if anybody actually listened to what either man says, in speech after speech, particularly off the cuff, so many of these preconceptions would just dissolve.
Not that CNN is about to let us make up our own minds or anything.
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21:05 - Beep... beep... beep
http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/usziae.html
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Just got word of a very large earthquake off the coast of Northern California, with a tsunami heading toward Eureka and Crescent City (the latter of which was severely damaged by the Alaska quake/tsunami in 1964). The quake seems to have been 7.0.
Just heard the Emergency Broadcast System beeping on the TV upstairs...
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| Monday, June 13, 2005 |
22:08 - Huh boy
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/archives/2005_06.html#001139
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Well, this is an unpleasant little blast from the past. Remember Loonatics?
Well, it's been redesigned, presumably in response to thunderous audience feedback. As I'm sure everyone remembers, the big problem was that everyone had sharp pointy red laser eyes and huge sharp teeth in a gnashing snarling expression. Also they weren't recognizable as whatever species they all were.
So ... their adjustments were to ditch the giant pointy sunglasses and give everyone bland "Have a Nice Day" smiley faces and anime eyes.
Perfect. That's just what it needed.
Urg.
(Via Steven Den Beste.)
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13:22 - Service sucks
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There have been some intermittent downtimes of this server over the past few days. The machine is randomly crashing. The crashes appear to be hardware-related, since I haven't installed any new software on the machine lately, and they happen at seemingly random times of the day or night.
Managed.com doesn't have phone support; rather, they have this bizarre e-mail-to-web-forum system whereby you e-mail the support address, and a trouble ticket is opened automatically, and a message thread in the online ticket viewing system is begun. This would work great if it weren't for a few small problems: a) Follow-up e-mails sent in response to the messages that are e-mailed to you from the system don't seem to get added into the web system, so if they respond to your request for help via e-mail (which also goes onto the web thread), and you make the mistake of answering in e-mail, it just disappears into the ether never to be seen or responded to again; and b) During most of the day and night, if you try to use the web support forum to post followups, when you click "Submit" it takes more than ten minutes on average to process your response—so the browser invariably times out, and you have no way of knowing whether the message was posted or not.
If they only had a phone number you could call, there would be none of this "E-mail a message asking for help with the repeatedly crashing server; get a response asking for your password; reply, only to have the reply disappear and not get posted to the web forum, which is the only thing they read, and where they close a ticket every time they respond to it, and only if you reply does it get reopened; wait twelve hours before realizing that they never got your response; find the link to the web forum thread; repost your response into the web form; wait half an hour while the browser times out and you try in desperation to get back into the system while it spins and chokes; e-mail a new trouble ticket; repeat" nonsense. But nooooo.
So I'm stuck with sending reboot requests to the reboot request queue, which is apparently staffed by onsite "techs" who are trained in the art of pushing the little button on the front of the box, but not in the art of anything else (like, say, looking on the console to see if any telltale kernel panic messages have been echoed to it, or telling me accurately whether the server was down because it crashed or because it was "disconnected", no matter how many times I ask for this information); and they refer me back to the support forums, where the techs alternate between irritably telling me to send reboot requests if the server goes down, petulantly telling me that "Well, I can ping it, so your server seems to be fine" right after it gets rebooted after a crash, and passing my case from one tech to another, each of which must be briefed on the entire case history from day one and shows no knowledge of my previously submitted diagnostic profiles, even though they're posted right at the top of the support forum thread. (I strongly suspect that there's only one support guy in the entire company, and he just keeps changing his name and feigning amnesia whenever I send a new support request; this way they won't have to fix anything, and I'll take my troublesome demanding "I would like for my server not to crash all the time" business to some other company. Fix bad RAM or CPU/motherboard? Bah! Who do these customers think they are, anyway?)
So there's that. And also there's my car. See, here's the timeline:
Last Thursday I took my Jetta in to Midas to install my new clutch. (This part, at least, went dreamily; it now drives like a whole new car.) At the same time, I asked them to take a look at the power outlet in the trunk, where I would like to plug in a GPS unit for the Alaska trip; I tested it a couple of weeks ago and it seemed not to be working. So when I got the car back, Midas told me they agreed it was broken, but couldn't find any loose fuses or anything; I'd have to take it to the dealership. Fine, I can deal with that.
On the way back to work, though, I noticed that my stereo system wouldn't turn on. Not "came up in Safe mode," or "all my radio stations had been reset" or anything—wouldn't turn on. At all. Completely dead. Also my clock had been reset, and the power windows seemed not to be working properly (they have a one-touch feature where if you push the button and release it, the window goes up or down all the way; but that only occurs if the engine is running or if the engine has been shut off but the doors haven't been opened yet. Now, however, they seemed not to be one-touch-capable even in the engine-off-doors-still-closed case.) I talked to the service person at Bob Lewis, and she told me confidently that the readiness codes simply needed to be reset, and these—stereo, clock, windows—were all common symptoms of a tripped readiness code. Okay, fine. Sounds nice and cheap. I made an appointment for Monday (today).
The following day (Friday), I took the car to a local smog place on De Anza—little mom-and-pop place that has been in the same location since 1969, well respected and a community fixture. They gave me the smog check I needed to renew my car registration. I got the certificate; all readings looked fine.
Yet when I started up the car to drive home at the end of the day, the "Check Engine" light came on. You know, otherwise known as the "Please insert $125" light. Because that's how much it costs to get the dealership to take a look and find out what the hell it's doing on. Mind you, I have just come from the smog check place, one of the functions of which is to identify any conditions that might cause the engine light to come on in the near future; and they found nothing. Later that same day, the engine light comes on. What the shoes did they do to my car?!
Oh yeah, and over the weekend the engine hesitated on startup a couple of times. Which is real reassuring when I picture it happening at a remote campground somewhere between Whitehorse and Haines Junction. I figure it's another symptom of the electrical system being screwed, possibly coupled with having the smog check done; after all, my radio still won't come on, and the windows are still being a little unpredictable.
The car is now back in at Bob Lewis, where they're going to charge me a big wad of cash to fix something that apparently broke while I was getting the smog check done, possibly complicated by something that apparently broke while I was getting my clutch fixed and the fuses looked at. Seems like every time I get someone to fix my car, they break something else.
While it's in there, I'm also asking that they fix the little piece of plastic buried inside the latch mechanism of my armrest, which is dangling over a piece of wire and making a rattling and buzzing sound at highway speeds; also, if I'm lucky, they'll fix that rear power outlet that was the cause of all this in the first place. I'm sure it'll cost me the entire profits I've made from the latest book, and considering that I'm about to send in the Estimated Tax Payments on it to the state and fed, I'm going to end up owing money on balance. If they can't fix the armrest cheaply, I'm just going to drip some Elmer's glue in there.
What else? Oh yes: Cartoon Network has its audio all screwed up. None of the other channels. If I switch to Cartoon Network in the middle of the night, the right audio channel is cranked WAY UP LOUD to the point where it's clipping. I can turn the balance knob back and forth on my stereo and verify this: the left channel is barely audible at all, and the right channel is blaring and grating. I have verified that it happens on no other channels, and it happens on other TVs in the same house.
So I sent Comcast an e-mail through their handy little "Ask Comcast" e-mail gateway. (I'd tried their "24/7 Web Assistant" thing, which I discovered to my dismay was merely an AI bot designed to scan your questions for keywords and give out canned answers.) My hopes weren't high, but the notes on the e-mail gateway said that a technician would respond "usually within 24 hours", which said to me that an actual person would reply to my carefully explained problem, which outlined precisely the methods I'd used to isolate the behavior of the audio channel and verify that it was not in any way the fault of my equipment or configuration.
And—surprise, surprise—I got a canned response back explaining to me how to properly seat the coaxial F-connector for better reception and how to set up porn-blocking for my kids. And a little footnote at the bottom that said, "If you exhaust all of these options and are still experiencing poor reception, a tiling picture, a "One Moment please" message, or a communication error, please call Customer Care at 1-800-xxx-xxxx. A technician may need to visit your home to rectify the issue."
Boy, I sure hope someone got paid handsomely for setting up all these barricades between clueless customers like me and any hope of getting competent assistance.
Oh, and I'm not even going to get into how many bugs I've filed against Tiger Mail and its infuriating behaviors such as downloading and caching every single message in my Junk and Deleted folders when I come in on Monday, which after a typical weekend usually comes to some 10,000 messages or more, meaning that my computer is useless for about two hours while it keeps trying to grab thousands of messages at a time and cache them locally, while I stand there with my mouse posed over the Activity palette like a Whac-a-Mole game killing the sync processes every time they start.
And how my machine here at work seems to have got it into its head that I want my Keychain to lock itself automatically every time I step away from my desk, so I come back to find that all my apps have popped up cascades of "So-and-so wants access to your Keychain!" authentication dialog boxes which jumble up against each other and drag the system to a standstill.
I must be at some kind of karmic confluence of misfortune at the hands of all those who provide service to me on which I depend. Sounds like a perfect time to be driving merrily off into the Northern wilderness!
UPDATE: Kenny B. writes:
I imagine that at this point you might be considering a wagon, oxen, compass, map, and log book for this trip.
If you do, don't forget to bring a barrel of axle grease and a couple of extra wagon wheels. :)
I'll just stop off at Hiram's shop. If he can't sell me what I need, at least I'll be able to find solace of another kind.
UPDATE: Seems it was the mass airflow sensor that went out. A paltry $350, plus the cost of investigation labor and installation.
As for the stereo not turning on, Bob Lewis discovered that the reason was that the unit had been unplugged, in the back—it had been yanked out and unplugged when Midas checked for reasons why my trunk-mounted power outlet wasn't working. (BL also said that the stereo faceplate is now fitting loosely, like there was some damage to the unit. Funny, it was fine this morning.)
And the reason why the trunk-mounted power outlet wasn't working? It had been ... unplugged. Sometime between 1999 and now.
Moral of the story: don't ask Midas to check anything electrical, as they will apparently manhandle your stereo out of its socket, leave it unplugged, damage it, and then cram it back in and hope you don't notice that it's not working anymore.
And this also means that I somehow managed to pass the smog check with a bad airflow sensor, which I can only assume means that the smog check place is crappy.
There are fewer and fewer places around here that I feel I can trust with my car.
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| Friday, June 10, 2005 |
23:39 - Meaningless Trivia for a Better Tomorrow
http://www.striderweb.com/blog/128
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Steve Rider has one of those meme things they've been going on about in the newsreels, and I'm supposed to submit my scintillating contribution to the general discourse surrounding iTunes and music in general. Never having done one of these before, I don't know how likely it'll be to be entertaining, but hey, I don't recall guaranteeing anything to begin with, so here goes:
Total size of music files on my computer:
14.02 GB. Not even enough to make my 20GB iPod really stretch its legs. Pity. Note that this amount includes 2.1 GB of FreePlay Music, which would be great to use in iMovie projects if I ever did any of those anymore.
The last CD I bought was:
I honestly don't know if I can remember which of my recently acquired physical CDs I bought myself, rather than were given to me as gifts. I've certainly had a lot more of the latter than the former in recent years; my purchases have been almost 100% digital since the iTMS opened. (Though I'm going to have to break down and slink into a Tower Records or something if I ever want to get some Beatles music, or even the odd guilty Zeppelin tune, as those groups appear to have no plans to join the digital age in our lifetimes.) So I think, for myself, I'll have to point back at late 2002 when I bought The Essential Leonard Cohen and the Spirited Away soundtrack while I and some friends were mooching around a mall after attending the Bay Street Apple Store opening. Oh, and I think I also got Rufus Wainwright's eponymous debut album at that same time. And a copy of William Orbit's Strange Cargo, not realizing that it would sound nothing like his later stuff that I enjoyed a whole lot more.
Song playing right now in iTunes:
Right now? I don't actually listen to music while I'm typing; I find it too distracting. The only times I ever fire up the tunes is when I'm puttering about the room doing some mindless thing that requires no cognitive interaction, like drawing or folding laundry or peeling a pomegranate.
If I were to arbitrarily hit Play right now, though, Party Shuffle would serve up "The Big Chair" by Da Vinci's Notebook, followed by Trevor Jones' main title theme from Last of the Mohicans.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Just five? Oh, very well:
- "Don't Touch Me" by Andy Merrill as Brak. Perhaps the most quintessential auditory morsel from the Cartoon Planet glory days. It's got everything: Brak incoherently yelling, Space Ghost beatboxing... uh... Brak incoherently yelling... yeah, like I said, everything.
- "This Land", the essential instrumental theme by Hans Zimmer on the Lion King soundtrack. Probably no other piece of music has anything like the same ability to transport me to a specific date, time, and place: when I first listened to this soundtrack on the Fourth of July 1994, lights off, watching the fireworks in Ukiah—ten miles away over the southern horizon—out my bedroom window. I'd graduated from high school about a week before, the same weekend when I saw the movie for the first time; and I tend to mark the days of my adult life more or less from that moment.
Yeah, shut up. Like you don't have a maudlin fetishized indulgence like that.
- "One Man Guy" by Rufus Wainwright. When his father sang it, it was about morose firelit self-reliance; but given Rufus' all-pervasive homoeroticism in lyrics and delivery, it takes on several weird extra meanings, and it becomes—in Cartman's words—all about gay cowboys eating pudding.
- "Prince Ali" from the Aladdin soundtrack. Howard Ashman's last hurrah (one of the last lyrics he wrote before he died), and one of the most finely textured, elegantly structured Broadway-style songs Disney has ever produced, with a logical progression in theme from verse to verse that's downright exhilarating, and counterpointed patter with intricate harmony that you're still finding new nuances in the fiftieth time you hear it. Robin Williams is at his finest, Alan Menken's music is crashing and rollicking like it simply enjoys being alive, and the whole thing comes cascading down in a frenetic finale that's somehow all the more satisfying without even the visuals to go with it. Stephen Schwartz gave us a couple of game attempts in later films, but this song really was the peak of the craft.
- "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" by XTC. Yeah, sure, politically speaking it's matchlessly vapid and shallow:
Peter Pumpkinhead put to shame
Governments who would slur his name
Plots and sex scandals failed outright
Peter merely said, "Any kind of love is all right"
Hearing this stuff in high school, though, was like shoving a candy cane right into the cerebral cortex: Fed the starving and housed the poor; showed the Vatican what gold's for! Hallelujah! Preach it! And as insipid as I find it today, as full of misdirected recrimination and useless platitudes and bored persecution fantasies, I still gotta admit that the tune is damn catchy and the texture is sublime, especially the soft final verse with the distant bells. And it still makes the heart catch in the throat, just a little.
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Oh, great. You know this is by far the hardest part, don't you?
CapLion, which I guess goes without saying.
Paul Denton, because that simply oughtta be a fun read.
Mike Silverman, if he's still blogging. (Wait, he is!)
Mike Hendrix. I'm sure he has some tricks up his sleeve for us.
Damien Del Russo, likewise.
And I'd say Lileks too, but I don't know if his format would allow for it or his interest would encompass it; besides, he gives us plenty of this same kind of insight on a daily basis anyway. Be cool to see, though.
Well, that was fun...
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13:25 - Stop wigglin' around, you jackass
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I just have one thing to add to this, in response to this:
Brock Freaking Samson.
"Be a maaa-a-a-an..."
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| Wednesday, June 8, 2005 |
11:56 - You sound surprised
http://vodkapundit.com/archives/007868.php
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You know, just curious, but what did you think all those guys meant by calling the WTC replacement proposals the "World Cultural Center"?
The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom"--but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.
I wish I could say I'm surprised or disappointed by this, but I'm not. I saw it coming the moment they floated the first "Freedom Tower" models with sixty melty-ice-cube stories and another fifty diaphanous stories of wickerwork and papier-maché on top.
The people with the real power in this country and the Western world, the ones whose momentum is in the ascendancy, have as their ultimate goal our own humbling on the world stage, not to say our own destruction in favor of giving someone else a turn being king of the hill. (That's "fairness", see.) We may as well just get used to it—because in light of what's coming in the next few years as 9/11 matures into our social consciousness, this will just be par for the course.
Terrorism will be in all our backyards, and we'll welcome it with open arms.
UPDATE: Bill Whittle has these guys' number. Too bad there are a lot more of them, and they run the nightly news.
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| Monday, June 6, 2005 |
13:31 - I'm running out of link paste
http://www.lileks.com/screedblog/index.html
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Gotta save at least enough for this one. Heh—apparently enough people dislike the Screedy Bleats as to drive them onto their own page. Well, that makes 'em all the easier to find and archive, then.
Stories like these must be told, of course, if only to show what the media finds important, and remind us how good things are going. I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:
What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?
"Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."
Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –
"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."
Oh. So we lost, then.
Not yet, but I'm sure we've got it in us.
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| Thursday, June 2, 2005 |
00:34 - A little too much honesty, perhaps?
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BayAreaJobFinder.com has been airing these weird, weird ads late at night by a "Dr. David Batstone" who sits behind a desk like a personal injury attorney and issues proclamations such as:
Most employees, on the day of their termination, express surprise. Yet upon reflection, they realize there were certain signs that should have warned them that the end was coming, if they'd just connected the dots. Just remember: just because your last employer may have been happy to get rid of you, doesn't mean that somebody else won't be happy to employ your brains, skills, and work ethic.
And
Have you ever been forced to choose between your sense of business ethics and your job? Many employees in the technology sector have found themselves asked to do things by their employers that they themselves found objectionable. Just remember, even though you may have been fired for refusing to compromise your principles, another employer might be happy to hire you for those very principles.
Just a tad direct, don'tcha think? I mean, I suppose I can't argue with either one of those sentiments, but I don't think I've ever seen such raw honesty in that kind of ad before...
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| Tuesday, May 31, 2005 |
11:33 - This should not be difficult
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Okay—so I'm trying to figure something out here. Anyone with any expertise in the GPS world, your input would be greatly appreciated.
I'm trying to find a cheap, small, portable GPS unit that will do one thing and one thing only: keep a long and detailed track log. The purpose being that I can record my route for the three weeks I'll be in BC, Yukon, and Alaska this August, come home, download the track log into my computer, and then link up the GPS data with all the photos that I intend to take.
I don't want any funky mapping stuff, or two-way radios, or route waypoints, or a heart monitor, or directions to local hotels and In-N-Out Burgers, or even a compass. I just want a long and detailed breadcrumb trail.
Looking at the Garmin product page, and poking through the specs for each individual unit, it seems that the company is being unnecessarily coy in conveying exactly how big a track log each unit will support. From what I gather, a 10,000-point track log is considered "large" these days, but what does that mean? How long will that many points last me? This page seems to indicate that the situation is nice and confusing:
In addition to these choice you will need to decide whether to place the tracklog in "automatic" recording mode or "time" recording mode. In automatic mode the unit itself decides when to drop a bread crumb (trackpoint). (The G-III family also supports a "distance" recording mode.) Generally, in automatic mode, it will enter a trackpoint when you have turned more than 25 meters (82 feet) from a straight line projection from you last point or you have significantly changed the speed from the last entry. Using these two criteria allows the Garmin to accurately map your journey, however it becomes difficult to judge exactly how much data can be collected before the tracklog becomes full. Some units will also make a log entry when the unit draws a new screen. With a typical 1000 point log you could overflow the log in 40 miles or in 400 miles depending on the terrain and your driving/hiking/riding habits. On the G-III family you can change the setting for the turn distance. The Street Pilot uses 50 meters by default and this turns out to be a good setting for driving down the road. This, of course, will increase the length of data that can be collected at the expense of accuracy on turns. The etrex vista, legend, and venture have both time and distance. Automatic mode has a setting where you can adjust the sensitivity to distance from the projected straight line from less to more often.
And every single unit seems to handle it differently—and Garmin doesn't seem to care too much about telling potential buyers about whether the interval is configurable, whether you can select "distance" or "time" mode, whether you can select whether new data will wrap around and overwrite the oldest data points or whether the whole log just shifts to keep the newest points (discarding the old ones as it adds the new) or whether it simply stops recording when the log fills up. I'm playing with a GPSMAP 295 that my neighbor lent me, and it doesn't seem to be configurable at all—you can just turn the track log "off" or "on", and in driving the 15 miles to work I used up 9% of the available track log space. Clearly this feature doesn't appear to have been a very high priority in the design criteria of this thing. And certainly nothing online sees fit to tell me how many track points the GPSMAP 295 has, so I could compare it to the capacity of a unit made in the last five years.
I don't mind downloading the log to my computer every night—I'll have a laptop along with me. I just don't want to have to pull over and suck down all the data every three hours lest I miss any numbers. That's ridiculous. How hard can it be to keep a day's worth of track points in a unit the size of my armrest?
Garmin's offerings seem to downplay the track log feature in favor of blaring headlines about how so-and-so unit is reliable and extra-precise as WAAS can make it or uses animated graphics that will help you identify your marked waypoints. The closest it ever gets to talking about track point capacity—even in the specification pages—is that it boasts Garmin's exclusive TracBack® feature that will reverse your track log and help you navigate your way back home. Wheeee! How helpful! Now give me some fleepin' NUMBERS, you morons. Even a price would be useful to add to some of these product pages.
(And Magellan seems to only support 2000 track points on any of their units, which—in light of the 10K that some of Garmin's units seem to have—seems a bit light.)
So: Anybody have any great insights? I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars here. I don't want to know where reefs and buoys are; I don't want to plot waypoints to VORs and airport towers; I don't want cute colorful icons of fish on hooks; I don't need it to be waterproof or camouflage-colored or even have a screen. I just want something that will log my trip (preferably on car power) and let me download the log.
Does anybody make such a thing? Can someone advise them as to how to advertise their products or maybe get them into Google?
UPDATE: Looks like the eTrex Legend is the way to go. Thanks to all who mailed!
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| Sunday, May 29, 2005 |
23:53 - First they came for the knives
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4581871.stm
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You know, it used to be that you could make a pretty good case against the arbitrary regulation of privately owned firearms by explaining that if the purpose of gun control is to prevent violent crime, criminals denied guns (legally acquired ones, anyway) could just commit their murders with knives instead. (Make knives illegal, and they'll hit you with cars or pour Drano on you instead. And so it goes.)
It was almost a joke, in fact; rattle off the logic, and even a defender of gun control would usually have to concede the point (as it were) and take up a different tactic. Who, after all, would make knives illegal? Guns may have limited applicability to everyday life, but people need knives. How else are you supposed to cut up your turkeys and roasts?
Well, it seems the British may have to come up with an answer to that absurd rhetorical question:
A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.
A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.
They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.
The research is published in the British Medical Journal.
The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.
They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.
None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.
And a short blade is just as useful for killing someone, if you're determined to do it. So's a hammer. So's bleach. What'll be next on the hit parade?
By all means, don't be finding ways to stop people wanting to kill each other; instead, just pointlessly reduce obvious methods for them to kill each other. Don't punish the bully on the playground, just cancel recess.
And by all means: consult chefs to determine whether people have a need to be allowed to own such things as kitchen knives. Come on, now: what else should the infant wards of the state that you call "citizens" be protected from being allowed to own?
Will everyday people in England actually put up with this ruling being made upon their lives, or will they take a stand? Can this finally be the place where people stop thinking of "freedom" only in the context of "allowing people to be gay and do drugs", and start thinking of it in terms of liberty from an oppressive police state dictating the terms by which citizens can live?
I'm told by a friend who grew up in Florida (and in the company of people who told these stories from first-hand experience) that in Castro's Cuba, every kitchen has a long carving knife—chained to the counter. It's regularly inspected by the secret police to make sure you haven't tampered with this deadly weapon in "your" house. If you work in the cane fields, you're issued your machete when you arrive to work, and must turn it back in at the end of the day. In this way murders are kept at bay, for the small price of having stormtroopers burst in every few weeks to frisk you for illicit implements of destruction. (But of course you have free health care and 100% literacy.)
Is that where you want England to go, West Middlesex University Hospital?
Via CapLion, who's planning a lucrative career as a mugger in Britain, where his victims will be defenseless and he'll be protected by law from being assaulted by them in the course of his work.
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| Thursday, May 26, 2005 |
22:40 - Every emotion you have ever had, to the Dark Side leads
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mistful/68456.html
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Via John. Best Star Wars: Episode III review evar.
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12:24 - Guy must have flunked Civics
http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000103.htm
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I wonder what "Congrefs shall make no law refpecting an establishment of Religion" means to Rep. Conyers.
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| Wednesday, May 25, 2005 |
00:38 - Wait, he can't do that
http://www.acf.org/white_house.htm
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Having been dolefully lectured on the subject by everyone from park rangers to Bill Bryson, it's hard not to be excited to see this:
The tree planted Friday came from a research farm in Virginia, where blight resistance was bred into the native chestnut with the help of the Chinese chestnut.
The American chestnut, prized for its timber and its crop of glossy dark nuts, once dominated Eastern forests from Maine to Georgia. The graceful trees were virtually wiped out by blight starting at the turn of the 20th century.
That loss, Case said, "was the greatest environmental disaster in the Western Hemisphere since the Ice Age."
Now, after years of breeding, cloning and crossbreeding, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ready to reintroduce disease-resistant chestnuts to Eastern forests next year.
Case says the chestnut is also poised for a comeback that could reclaim the scarred face of closed coal mines. It can also absorb carbons released into the air by fuel-fired plants in the Midwest, he said.
"This is a major accomplishment," Case said. "(The president) is to be given a round of applause — that this is a help to the environment. There's no question about it."
Be sure to check out the rest of the site for further background information. I hadn't realized these efforts even existed—I'd been led to believe that the tree was extinct, and with it bucolic daguerrotypes of mustachioed men and spring-bustled women spreading a picnic under gigantic arching chestnut branches in parks, pennyfarthing bicycles leaned against the massive trunks. But who knew—there's hope after all.
Maybe the Greens will take to the streets to protest this obvious abuse of the power of genetic engineering or something, or perhaps they'll just cut down the White House sapling. Anything would be better than for this to succeed.
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23:13 - Babykillers On Parade
http://unoriginal.co.uk/footage39_1.html
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George Galloway ought to be ashamed that if he'd had his way, this video would not exist.
Via JMH.
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22:38 - Reductio ad Kansas
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb052505.shtml
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I've noticed that the bar for arguing against intelligent-design-in-schools types is pretty low. People (especially those snide enough to call their magazine Reason) don't seem to feel there's really much argument to be made. People reading their articles, naturally, don't demand much rigor in reinforcing what they already believe, so why should the authors bother? Understandable.
Yet still, this (via InstaPundit) bugs me:
The anti-evolutionists affect not to know who or what the "intelligent designer" of their theory might be. He, she, it, or they could be little green men or purple space squid or a race of intelligent supercomputers—or maybe, just maybe, an omnipotent God. Who knows? We're all just innocently asking "scientific" questions here.
But away from the glare of media attention, this pose of scientific objectivity cracks. "ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic," admitted board member Martin. The intelligent design proponents in Kansas ask: Why not let children in public schools hear arguments for intelligent design in biology classes? Schools could "teach the controversy."
Biologists retort by asking, "So it's OK then for high schools to teach astrology, phrenology, mesmerism, tarot card reading, crystal healing, astral projection and water witching, too?"
It bugs me because there's a pretty obvious counter-retort to be made. It goes: Yes, sure, but only to the extent that they're relevant to a basic science course in elementary school—which is to say, not at all. No more than you'd teach oncology, metallurgy, human sexuality, DNA analysis, or juggling to sixth-grade science students.
In other words, there's a different test to be applied here. You only teach the stuff that's relevant to basic science—and basic science includes, fundamentally, discussion of the origins of life on Earth. Ancillary disciplines—whether quackery or established practice—just aren't on the radar of kids at grade-school age, nor should they be.
And then, when the time comes to study whether phrenology or crystal healing have any scientific merit, you can establish in an afternoon's work that they don't. And the students might be better educated by the exercise, mightn't they?
When I was a high school freshman, my World Cultures & History (once known as "Geography") teacher, an altogether phenomenal figure with whom I later visited Russia as part of a student tour group, dispensed to his class the wisdom that there are not two, not three, but five human sexes. Male, female, homosexual, transgendered, and neuter. (I think—it's been a while.) He required us all to transcribe this "theory" into our notes and recite the details on demand in the week's topical quizzes. This caused something of a stir, and parents wrote a few confused—not to say alarmed—letters to the local paper about it, wondering what else their kids were being taught by this guy or the rest of the faculty at this fine upstanding school. It's peachy, you see, for the public high school to teach evolutionary theory without a breath expended to explain the limitations on said theory or even the fact that it merely is a theory (albeit one that seems to mostly work); but one might think that if a teacher is going to fill his students' ears with pet hypotheses about human sexuality, it might help if he went with one that anybody else on the planet agreed with. But, y'know, hey, that's just a suggestion.
But there's an argument to be had, isn't there? Teachers get to say whatever they like, as long as it doesn't involve "theism" or the dreaded "God". If they can get fired for that sort of thing, why not for explaining that the Earth's gravity is caused by centrifugal force (as this guy also laughably maintained)? And if the goal is to get kids to think in new ways about things they might already think they understand, well, why be so threatened by the idea that whatever religious dogma it obliquely validates, scientific reasoning cannot disprove or even fully describe a system in which logic is not a fundamental design constraint?
The author gets this bit right:
What they don't understand, however, is that religious belief and evolution are compatible.
In 1996 no less a religious authority than Pope John Paul II declared, "New knowledge has led to the recognition in the theory of evolution of more than a hypothesis."
He could have gone on to point out some of the little-known details of the Galileo story, which are much in the same vein. (Not that you'd ever hear a teacher with any self-preservation instinct say so.) But he doesn't.
He also doesn't seem too concerned with explaining how it's hypocritical or indicative of imminent theocratic takeover for someone to say in public that intelligent-design theory is totally agnostic as to the specific nature of said design, but to admit in private that "ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic". WooOOOoo. Spooky. At least for Reason readers it is, apparently. This guy seems a bit too pleased with himself for discovering that intelligent-design advocates in America tend to be Christians. Shocka! Gee, I thought they were all pure-hearted solipsistic atheists who wanted kids to start from I think therefore I am and deduce the existence of rice pudding and income tax by twelfth-grade graduation.
What he's so horrified by is simple acceptance of reality. When you've got someone fighting for the right to teach that science by its very nature cannot disprove that which it cannot observe, and therefore science cannot disprove the existence of supernatural elements in the Universe, the fact of the matter is that in Kansas, the way that will manifest is with "theistic" vocabulary—even, horror of horrors, Christian vocabulary. If it were in a different state, such as Buddhasota or Jedifornia, perhaps that would be different.
Federalists ought to enjoy seeing this happening, it seems to me. But however each state handles it, its upshot would be that kids wouldn't have to go to school and be told by their teachers that their parents are fools, and then go home and be told by their parents that their teachers are lying to them. And that seems like a rather positive thing for the minds of kids looking for trustable authority figures—more so that ensuring that any hair-splitting whisper of the "theistic" is blockaded from a reluctantly adopted acknowledgement of the place an intelligent-design hypothesis might play in an understanding of how the Universe works.
Who knows? Kids might even learn the proper scientific definition of the word "theory", and be properly equipped to identify one when they see it later in life—instead of the current popular definition, which is "Scripture that you learn in school instead of church".
UPDATE: Standard disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a creationist. Just so's we're clear.
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| Monday, May 23, 2005 |
15:01 - Whisper numbers
http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/003157.html#more
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There's an old, old Dilbert strip—from the days before the Pointy-Haired Boss, even—where Scott Adams illustrates how numbers in business can be manufactured from thin air. It goes like this:
RANDOM STOCKBOY: I have no idea; it could be anything from one to a million.
MIDDLE MANAGER: They say it could be a million.
EXECUTIVE: Experts say one million.
That's what it's felt like in recent months watching the number of Iraqi dead climb and climb in the media—first latching onto the "100,000" Lancet figure and gnawing on it to this day in prime time, over and over, long after it was debunked; then upping it higher and higher to 250,000 or even 300,000, with seemingly no criteria for verification beyond "It's bigger than the last number, so it must be right."
So here's Shannon Love (via JMH) on the idea of the "number gut", something the people repeating these numbers don't appear to possess:
Why couldn't 250,000 be dead from violence? Well, the first clue is that the total population of Iraq is around 25 million, so 250,000 dead represents 1% of the entire population. That means if LIMS is accurate then 1 in every 100 Iraqis were killed in the war up to Sept 2004. So what? After all, it's a war and lots of people die in wars right? Well, not as many as most people think.
For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?
Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that's only dead, not dead-and-wounded).
So, with the Falluja cluster included, LIMS asks us to believe that Iraq has suffered a worse proportional aerial bombardment than did Japan during WWII. Common sense compels us to ask: does Iraq look like it suffered such a fate? Where are the mass graves? Where are the leveled cities? Where are the hundreds of thousands of walking wounded? Where are the millions of refugees that such intense fighting must have inevitably produced?
I get the feeling that there's nothing more to these numbers people are tossing around than to the "whisper numbers" that ruled the stock markets during the dot-com boom; we lived in terror that someone named ShadowKnight718 would post a message on some discussion forum somewhere that said "17 cents per share profit" or "2 cents per share loss"—from an anonymous IP and with no supporting research or anything—and traders would immediately set expectations accordingly. Suppose a company was about to announce a 15-cent-per-share profit, a number that in a vacuum would indicate fabulous breakout results? Well, someone on some chat board said 17 cents, so get ready to tank. Tough beans.
All you have to do is make up some number that one-ups the last one they said on the news, whether it's true or not, and it instantly attains the mantle of truth. It's almost as though they have an agenda to promote.
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11:50 - Thanks but no thanks
http://mediamatters.org/items/200505180008
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You know, this is just something we don't need:
From the May 17 broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, "Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore," and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, "Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death." And you know, well, I'm not sure.
I don't listen to talk radio, so I have no idea how civil or uncivil it routinely is... but this kind of thing is just ridiculous. It plays into every negative stereotype people have about "right-wing talk radio" and it exonerates Michael Moore in people's minds, turning him back into a legitimate victim instead of a swamp-draining, mansion-building Sad Clown in a hobo costume who did more damage to the Democratic Party's credibility than he ever did to Bush.
You're not helping, Glenn Beck.
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09:26 - Be still my heart
http://www.actionforum.com/forum/index.html?forum_id=266
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MoveOn.org has a new discussion forum, with a rating system so people can vote on ideas that are intended to shape the group's agenda.
Best of all, if you're a "citizen of the world", as some of the particiapants at home and abroad label themselves, you can post happy ideas about aiding the Iraqi insurgency that get vehement agreement.
Now that's "democracy in action".
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| Thursday, May 19, 2005 |
22:14 - Okay, I talked me into it
http://www.deadmonkeycomics.com/gallery/album10/email_final
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I wasn't going to link to this, but I really would be remiss if I didn't. So: The Email Cartoon, which is probably Not Safe For Work, but it's worth it just like this was.
Shun.
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| Wednesday, May 18, 2005 |
18:19 - IT'S A TRAP
http://darthside.blogspot.com/
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Darth Vader has posted for the last time, it seems. Is that well-timed or what?
I tell ya, if it weren't for the Darth Side, I'd have no angle whatsoever to find the characters in the prequels interesting enough to care about. This does the job nicely, and it ends marvelously. Dude knows what he's doing.
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13:26 - From the ashes a fire shall be woken
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Lileks got me Googling, and I found this site which seems to be a snarky and satiric—though full of excellent real information—blog on architecture in New York.
And it's covering today's Donald Trump unveiling of his new WTC proposal, which Curbed had described (sight unseen) as "tall, leggy, and voluptuous".
If I'm not terribly mistaken, isn't that the Gardner/Belton design? You know, the one that not only proposes a practical use of the site, features a gorgeous set of supporting buildings and some amazingly appropriate memorials, restores the original skyline in a confident and unapologetic manner, and actually looks good?
If so, hot diggity damn. If it's got Trump behind it now, it stands a real chance.
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11:04 - Behold the crushing of dissent
http://vodkapundit.com/archives/007835.php
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Stephen Green quoting Scott McClellan being grilled by the press over the Newsweek scandal. (That's right, the press has the sente in this game. Still.)
Q With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not telling them. I'm saying that we would encourage them to help --
Q You're pressuring them.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm saying that we would encourage them --
Q It's not pressure?
MR. McCLELLAN: Look, this report caused serious damage to the image of the United States abroad. And Newsweek has said that they got it wrong. I think Newsweek recognizes the responsibility they have. We appreciate the step that they took by retracting the story. Now we would encourage them to move forward and do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done by this report. And that's all I'm saying. But, no, you're absolutely right, it's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report....
Q Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you're saying here?
Noooooooo, I'm just asking them not to LIE about how BAD it is.
Why can't we have a press secretary as snide and sharp-tongued and arrogant and downright rude as the people he has to deal with every day?
For crying out loud, even when the scandal is against the administration's opponents, the administration ends up being the one against the wall.
And people call this a Nazi state.
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| Sunday, May 15, 2005 |
23:49 - Blood on the pages
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1116217489.shtml
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Dean is right: Newsweek is squarely to blame for all the deaths and injuries and intimidations that have resulted and have yet to result from their eager repeating of an anonymous report of Guantanamo Bay guards flushing the Koran down the toilet.
The only thing Dan Rather hurt in his fake-news scandal was George Bush's reputation, which is about like saying he's responsible for harming the popularity of 8-track players. But Newsweek has gotten people killed.
Something they would have known if they'd spent more time reading LGF instead of thinking up new ways to belittle religious people or misinterpret technology news is that a whole lot of the Islamic world already believes that Americans are responsible for nonstop crimes against Muslims that are just getting hushed up by the Zionist media; this is simply a long-awaited and long-expected "documented" case of it. For Newsweek to tell the real story now—that the Koran-flushing incident in question was a prank by an inmate trying to clog up the toilet with the only flushable thing in his cell—would be an exercise in futility and more fuel on the fire, whereas if they'd told it that way originally it would only have gone unnoticed. (And they'd have sold less copies, probably, so there you go.) And just as the Egyptian experts examining that EgyptAir crash a few years back where the black box showed the pilot muttering prayers just before sending the plane into a deliberate dive into the ocean insisted that the pilot would never commit suicide because Muslims just don't do that, there will be nothing Newsweek can say or do to make the people who believe their original story was accurate change their minds. They know the truth; any attempt to deny it now would just be a cover-up, and further proof of the Americans' nefarious complicity. Especially if they had the audacity to try to say that Muslims—Muslims—were the ones desecrating the Koran. It'd just make them madder.
If Newsweek had any sense of the stakes involved in the global PR campaign that is the War on Terror, they'd be steering clear of these matters where they're clearly not qualified to treat sensitive news with the delicacy it deserves and requires, and spending their writers' precious time instead on more lavish cover stories about how Y chromosomes and bottled water cause cancer.
I sure am glad I let my subscription lapse a few months ago.
UPDATE: Well, yes, perhaps the bigger problem—globally speaking—is that we have to be this careful about stuff like this.
It's the 21st century, and we did away with anti-flag-burning laws. Your turn.
UPDATE: So according to Glenn and one of Austin Bay's on-the-scene correspondents, Newsweek has managed to turn what has been by all accounts a spectacular political success in Afghanistan over the past three years into "a total disaster"?
I'm starting to want to see some hangings for treason here. I wonder if we can get Newsweek to foot the bill for the Afghanistan campaign to date, since they don't seem to have cared about pissing it all away in the name of scoring some cheap points in yet another flagrant abuse of the freedom we give the press in time of war these days.
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| Friday, May 13, 2005 |
15:49 - Daily profundity
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You know, I don't think there are many better-conceived words in the English language than "waive".
Regardless of its unrelated etymology, one just can't help picturing a guy waving his hand dismissively at some piece of paper full of fine print and going "Ehhh".
...Okay, you make more sense. I'm tired.
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| Thursday, May 12, 2005 |
01:17 - Homer sleep now
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Just finished uploading the last chapter of the new book. The one I got the green light for about three weeks ago.
And a whole weekend ahead of schedule, too.
I think I'll go to bed early tonight. (According to UPS, there might be a lens waiting for me when I wake up...)
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| Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
18:25 - "We should look for all manner of diversity"
http://www.nytco.com/pdf/siegal-report050205.pdf
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What's this? The New York Times is out-and-out admitting that there really is a liberal media, and they're it?
Have Jon Stewart and Ian Maxtone-Graham seen this?
Via Cold Fury.
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| Tuesday, May 10, 2005 |
14:07 - It's officially mainstream when it encompasses the esoteric
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPlayListsPage?fcId=62768434&pa
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Jeezum crow! Look at this latest exclusive at iTunes: all the Final Fantasy soundtracks. All the way back to the 8-bit ones.
Nice presentation, too.
(Ooo! New Gorillaz album too. Oh, and videos that require iTunes 4.8. Wonder what that has?)
UPDATE: Aha: they finally rolled Contacts and Calendars syncing directly into iTunes, instead of making you configure it through iSync. Tiger-only feature; now that they've decoupled .Mac syncing from iSync, they can also move the iPod out and into iTunes. No more having two different things launch whenever you plug in the iPod.
Funny how I just finished writing the chapter on syncing contacts and calendars LAST NIGHT and submitted it this morning...
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| Monday, May 9, 2005 |
11:32 - Good thing all scientists are apolitical
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Well now, hold on here—perhaps this new documentary (via LGF), in which thousands of scientists from all over the world denounce the scientific basis of the global warming theory, actually is "not of broadcast quality", as the Canadian broadcasters' screening board determined. Maybe it's really disingenuous and full of obvious untruths, or maybe it's just shoddily done.
...Hmm. Okay, well, looks fine to me.
Maybe they can get it shown here, in between publicly sponsored showings of The Day After Tomorrow and Fahrenheit 9/11.
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| Friday, May 6, 2005 |
14:32 - This guy might need an intervention
http://mfdh.ca/writing/scoop_diary_archive/04-1111.html
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Via BrianD comes this story/adaptation that's just a little bit too well executed for its own good.
Nadim Zero leaned back in the booth and boasted that he had made the Red Sea Run "in less than twelve miles." Reading Salim's blank look he continued: "I've outrun British customs boats. She's fast enough for you, old man. What's the cargo?"
"Only passengers," replied Salim smoothly. "Myself, the boy, two clerks, and no questions."
Nadim Zero chuckled. "What is it? Some kind of local trouble?"
"Let's just say we'd like to avoid any...American entanglements."
It wasn't until I reached the end that I realized that this was done by Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming, the guy behind the Darth Vader blog. I should have seen it earlier—the Canadian diction should have been a giveaway. After all, no one country is big enough for two people this terminally geeky...
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| Thursday, May 5, 2005 |
17:14 - Do they give a Nobel Prize for "attempted chemistry"?
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Just a thought, here.
On 9/11/01, two of the four hijacked planes successfully hit the two towers of the World Trade Center. The other two planes and their targets, however, have sort of become a footnote to history, understandably—if only by sheer dint of numbers of casualties and lasting damage to the national psyche.
However: we know that Flight 93, the one that went down in Pennsylvania when the passengers rebelled, had been targeted at the Capitol building; and Flight 77, the one that hit the Pentagon, had a flight path with deviations that suggest that it was originally steering for the White House, but couldn't find it and went instead for its secondary target.
In the years since 9/11, the predictable response has been twofold: from one side of the nation has been the implacable call not just for justice against the actual perpetrators of the act, but for a thorough worldwide cleansing of the ideology that would give rise to people inclined to follow in their footsteps... and from the other, a sense of reservation and reluctance, born of the fact that the buildings that toppled were the World Trade Center buildings, symbols of commerce and American financial dominance and—to some—hives of "little Eichmanns", the people really pulling the levers that directed American actions that they found abhorrent (globalization, investment banking, free trade, capitalism, et cetera). The strike on the Pentagon just sealed the deal (repeat after me: military-industrial complex). In other words, the way 9/11 went down, it's become irresistibly branded as a big blow against America's economic might and hubris—not its political clout or identity as a nation.
The success of the terrorists' mission has to be scored at about 65%—they hit half their primary targets and missed two, but hit a secondary target. The targets they hit differ significantly in symbolic impact from the targets they missed (or hit as second choices). However, this result could have gone any number of different ways, largely dependent on nothing more than accidents of timing, luck, and serendipity.
What, then, if things had happened a little differently?
What if the timing had worked out another way, so that different targets had been hit first, and passengers on different planes had started hearing the news on their cellphones and begun making plans to rebel and overthrow the hijackers? What if the weather or pilot error had forced other planes to make new decisions as to where to aim, rather than the ones that did?
What if it had been the Capitol and the White House that had been hit, and the World Trade Center had been missed entirely?
How would that have affected America's response to 9/11? How would we have reacted if, instead of it being a symbol of our financial global dominance and a privately owned office building full of thousands of civilian employees of regular companies and tourists that had been destroyed, it were the symbols of America's political power that bore the attack's full brunt? What if, in the months following 9/11, nobody thought—for there would have been no outward reason to suspect it—that the "little Eichmanns", whose buildings were still standing intact there in Lower Manhattan, had anything to do with the terrorists' motives? What if, instead, on the evening news each night we found ourselves staring at two shattered national monuments in Washington D.C., the graves of hundreds of Senators and Representatives and possibly the President?
Would we have reacted differently? Would we be asking ourselves "Why do they hate us?" Would our youths be protesting in the street against military response? Assuming he survived, would they be calling Bush Hitler? Would they be talking about appeasement and understanding and compromise?
And if not... why the hell not?
Better yet: since we live in a world where these things didn't happen... why the hell do they?
People discussing issues like hate-crime laws make lots of airy claims that "intent shouldn't be a factor" when determining how to punish someone—an act of murder is an act of murder, regardless of the motivation, right? Only the commission of an act should be punishable—not the attempted or intended commission of that act. If someone's convicted of attempted murder, it's pretty typically a lesser sentence than for successful murder. Seems to make sense, but... not if you think about it too hard.
Because if we treat 9/11 only on the basis of what the terrorists successfully accomplished, we run the risk of missing the whole point of the act, and reacting in a manner that attempts to solve all the wrong problems.
We have to measure our response according to the symbolic and concrete impact that 9/11 would have had if the terrorists had succeeded in hitting all their primary targets. Because that's what they would have done if only they'd been able to. They didn't choose to hit only the buildings full of "little Eichmanns" and our military headquarters, and leave our representative government and its symbols intact. If Allah had been on their side, they'd have taken out both towers of the WTC, the Capitol Building, and the White House. And we'd be reacting today based on the aftermath of that kind of horrific spectacle that would have been all the more dreadful than 9/11 already was in the real world.
Some people are able to cloud their moral judgment by justifying 9/11, to some degree, as a righteous attack upon America's economic hubris, rather than upon us as a people. Yet I don't think they'd be able to do that if it were our national symbols and monuments, the historic and irreplaceable buildings that Americans of all political stripes revere as the home of politicians among whom just about anyone can find representation in past or present history, that had been turned into rubble-filled craters. There'd be no denying who it was that was the attack's targets. And there would be no confusion or equivocation as to the appropriateness of the response.
  
Imagine that none of the buildings pictured here, or the people inhabiting them, existed anymore. Not just half of them, or well-armored substitutions for some of them that are easily rebuilt—none of them. Imagine all of them going up in the same plumes of smoke that covered Manhattan for that week in September.
Go on: imagine it.
That's the world in which those people live who back the War on Terror. Not the world where nature and humanity conspired to turn the attack into something subtly different in symbolic character, and considerably less horrific, than what it was intended to be.
Hell, if all the planes had missed, even if miraculously nobody had died, even if the plot had been foiled at the ticket counters—we should still be reacting the same way, with the same far-reaching plan to reshape the Arab world and snuff out Islamic fundamentalist terrorism by spreading secular democracy. Yet imagine how intense the domestic and international resistance would have been then.
Just a thought, but—why should there be any difference?
UPDATE: Yeah, I know the "hate crimes" thing is a bit glib. Go too far into the "punish intent rather than deed" direction and you're in Big Brother territory; yet too far in the other direction and you end up adjudicating things solely on the basis of body-count, and the judicial system becomes some sort of non-sentient organism responding to stimuli in a coldly linear manner, which just isn't a sensible way to deal with humans and all their irrationality. Then there's the "intent should matter when deciding punishment, not when deciding guilt" argument put forth by South Park, which seems to make sense, but takes some mental gear-grinding. The point is, we don't have to do any psychological tricks in this case to find out what the terrorists' dream outcome was, and we'd be deluding ourselves to proceed on any other basis.
UPDATE: I also realize Bush was in Florida on 9/11; but that, too, was dumb luck. It's not like the terrorists could really have planned around that.
UPDATE: Greetings, Rantburg patrons—and thanks for the kind words!
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| Friday, April 29, 2005 |
14:17 - Mood: melancholy
http://darthside.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_darthside_archive.html
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Via Damien: Darth Vader's blog.
...You try to be an effective manager, you weed out the bad apples like the late Admiral Ozzel -- only to find that an insidious culture of incompetence has somehow transformed your deadly pan-galactic armada into a fleet of spaceballs.
It's alternately very silly and very good. Certainly a lot more entertaining than the last couple of movies have been, but maybe that's just because it actually pays attention to extant plot and makes some attempt to tie it all meaningfully together. There's even some perverse wisdom in it.
This'll be one to watch.
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| Wednesday, April 27, 2005 |
16:29 - They do stuff™
http://www.huhcorp.com/index.htm
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I'm totally buying stock in these guys. As soon as they IPO.
Via Cold Fury.
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| Tuesday, April 26, 2005 |
11:57 - NEW POPE IS NAZI LOL WTF!!1!1
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2822
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It's always refreshing when one of the lone voices of sanity on the Internet comes from Something Awful.
I’m going to build a time machine. What I’m going to do is take old Bill here back in time to 1941 Germany. We’re going to sit there and wait for the Nazis to find him and say, “Join us or die.” Bill Berkowitz (Uhm, we’ll have to change that last name for this to work) is going say, “Sorry folks, but I humbly oppose the Nazi regime and I don’t wish to join your organization.” and we’ll see what happens.
George Washington owned slaves during his lifetime. He didn’t want to and in his heart he knew it was wrong but he did anyway. It was the cool thing to do at the time. Slavery was just another fad like pogs or Pokemon. But in 1976 he was posthumously appointed the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, the highest ranking military position the U.S. has to offer. The fact that he owned slaves didn’t seem to bother anyone. The fact that Joseph Ratzinger involuntarily joined the Hitler Youth shouldn’t bother anyone either.
But it will, as long as some people can use it to fuel the storybook image they have of the world in which WWII was that far-off time when good and evil existed, people who committed atrocities were otherworldly beings in man-suits (certainly, anything but human), and the human race was absolved of having to base their decisions in this gray modern world on any sort of moral clarity as long as you say enough things like "How many Nazi salutes did he give? How many times did "Sieg Heil" come out of his mouth?" when you think the right people are listening.
UPDATE: Brummbar has more.
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| Monday, April 25, 2005 |
15:44 - But that's not fair
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CapLion has a few things to say on the subject of socialized medicine. Money quote:
To address this properly, I really need to start off with a fairly macroscopic view of the issue. It's one that many, many Americans understand, and just about all Canadians, Europeans, and Liberals in general do not: It is not okay to be poor.
Perhaps harsh, but as Cap says, read the rest of it before you start smashing things. And I've gotta say, it comes at a pretty opportune time for me to read it. See, here I am pulling in no fewer than four incomes from two full-time jobs and change (as well as a lot of completely self-driven work over the past several years that's now trickling dividends my way), in which number I count this current breakneck writing project on which I'm working harder and faster than I ever have before in my life (including college), with visions of hazard pay and an impeccable Guy Who Gets Things Done aura shining around me when they think of who'll be able to take on future emergency projects. Sleep? Who needs it? Alaska beckons. Or, failing that, the mortgage payment, which plus expenses adds up to within hundreds of my after-taxes take-home pay.
...And then, as I did a few weekends ago, I go to visit some acquaintances on a bright Saturday in San Francisco. Four of them, living in an absolute pit of an apartment in the middle of the city. Oh, it's a beautiful apartment complex—perched on a high hill, full of gorgeous landscaping—but their unit itself was packed from floor to ceiling with books, used food, knickknacks, and piles of cat crap. Of the four renters, not one had a job. One apparently did some kind of contract work once in a great while, but that hadn't happened in a long time; and so one of them, who told me this with great pride, was the "main breadwinner" by virtue of his skulking down to the bus station to pick up garbage every few days, which he smugly said qualified as enough "community service" to make him eligible for General Assistance, which he was able to convince his worried mother was a "job". Meaning one of my incomes—I don't know, pick one—was being diverted to pay his and his friends' rent.
Boy, what a sucker I am, huh? You work harder than the average, you make more money—but you get taxed harder, like the evil rich person you obviously are. Don't wanna work, and don't mind living in a litterbox? We'll find some bozo with an extra income or so he doesn't need and make him sponsor you.
Oh yeah, and then the guy asked me to "lend" him money, or else they'd get kicked out of the apartment. Like I'd done once before, never to see the money again, needless to say. I tell you, it was all I could do to get to my car before I started yelling and hitting things.
And get a load of this little gem from my Correspondent that I read this morning:
There are also circular problems. Let's say I'm having trouble getting work because of my weight (companies don't want to co-pay my high insurance costs). Losing weight is best with the right foods, which cost too much, which I can't afford, because I don't have the job. Or I need the medical assistance to lose this much weight, and I don't have the health insurance because I don't have the job (and the Republicans have made this one of only two industrial countries which has no national health plan). Or, because I don't have a job, I try to survive on government assistance, but I don't qualify because my car is worth too much money, unless I try to sell it in which case I get only a fraction of its value, and then the government doesn't pay enough to live on, and I can't get work because I don't have a car to get there (and I live in a big city whose public transportation system is both too expensive and unreliable), so I get stuck on government assistance, not being able to eat, so I find a local part-time job that I can walk to, and then they cut back the government assistance, and the combination is even less than what I was making before, so...
Where to begin? Perhaps with the thing about how losing weight requires expensive food. Huh? Funny, everyone I've always talked to seemed to be convinced that losing weight involved buying less food. Or jogging around the block once in a while, which is free. Jared became a matinee idol on six-inch Subways, right? "Results not typical", I know, but give me a break. If only there were magical weight-loss pills slipped into every mailbox by the USPS, like in Canada or Cuba, eh? But of course it's the Republicans' fault that this guy is too fat to work. Do I have that right? God, I'm stupid.
I know, I know—part of being one of those people who takes on way too many projects at once and always seems to come through in a way that makes people applaud and throw money my way is also being the kind of person to never complain or even make any public spectacle of how much work it all involves. You can't be an uncomplaining martyr if you complain. I know I don't have any real problems, and being successful insulates me from even being able to empathize properly with people who do. But you know, sometimes you just read or experience too many things in a day that make you so mad you want to wrench your own head off.
And sometimes you're tempted, because you live in a country where the evil capitalist hospitals would probably be able to sew the damn thing back on for you.
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10:57 - A cup of Gatorade
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Four chapters in five days. Whoo.
At this pace, though, I'll come in well under the deadline. I just hope they don't want me to do this again anytime soon.
Anyway, last night as I was taking out the garbage, I heard the whine of what sounded like struggling jet engines directly above; very loud, enough to make normal speech difficult, and changing in pitch suggesting that the pilot was making some pretty significant power adjustments. The next-door neighbor came running out to see what it was, just as the plane passed overhead; there was a choppy cloud cover at about 1000 feet, and the plane was barely above it, or so it seemed. Judging by the way the lights were arranged it looked to have long swept-back wings-- a C-5 or something, aimed in the direction of Moffett.
But there's no way it should have been that low. The neighbor and I stood there watching and listening for a long time[md]we could hear those engines whining after it had been gone over the horizon five minutes. We never did hear a big "boom", but it wouldn't have surprised us at all. Pretty unnerving.
Anyway, that's enough of the outside world.
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| Wednesday, April 20, 2005 |
16:26 - Quoth the editor
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Just now:
How quickly do you think you can write this book?
We have an opportunity to have this on promo this summer at B&N but the book
needs to be ready to ship to the customer on July 7th. To do that we will
need to maintain a very aggressive schedule and would need to have 100% from
you by May 16th.
Uhhhh.... huh. So if there's any doubt as to why blogging shall be light for the coming three weeks...
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| Monday, April 18, 2005 |
15:07 - Sentience is a deadly weapon that must be registered
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J Greely has a good take on the rapidly-becoming-infamous Rattlesnake Anti-Defamation League signs that are just so very symbolic of urban Californian mentality as a whole.
I'd think it all has something to do with a vague little voice in the back of everyone's minds that says, "We're the privileged ones, therefore evil; so whatever happens to us, good. We deserve it."
I should mention, however, that the signs in my San Jose neighborhood warning of mountain lions and coyotes are nothing like this kind of theme-park daffiness. Maybe something about having our cul-de-sacs infiltrated and our cats devoured by such creatures gives us less of a sense of humor about such things.
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| Tuesday, April 12, 2005 |
18:11 - There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...
http://www.zompist.com/predic.htm
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Elections cause people to do a lot of thinking and writing. They certainly seemed to have had an effect on Mark Rosenfelder back in 2000, who penned this long and crunchy essay (via James A.) on the American political landscape while Gore and Bush and McCain were still duking it out on the campaign trail.
It's worth a read. Not because it's totally right—there's a lot of it that's willfully blinkered, I think, or that betrays the author's personal proclivities in a way that would put the lie to any claim he might make to being "unbiased". The whole thing, in fact, is a treatise in defense and promotion of "liberalism" as he defines it. He spends a satisfying amount of time explaining the very rational roots of the philosophy and distancing himself from the "progressives" (whom he holds in as much disdain as he does unreconstructed communists). But it's been five years and a huge tectonic shift in world politics since when this thing was posted, and the most fascinating thing I've seen all week is how well this piece works as a time-capsule as contrasted with today's political landscape—and that's only after five years. Things move fast these days.
Rosenfelder tries gamely to explain the existence of the conservatives in American politics, but he can't resist oversimplifying them or referring to them with dismissive nicknames ("consies" and "fundies"); to read this piece, one gets the impression that anyone to the author's right harbors at least the latent desire to roll back abortion rights and abolish the IRS. As he puts it late in the piece:
[A given political party long in power] also stops explaining itself with any eloquence or passion. Many noisy consies, such as Salon's David Horowitz, were once liberals; their descriptions of what liberalism is are usually unrecognizable, and their reasons for leaving it are adolescent. (E.g. one recent apostate decided that conservativism was more 'sensible'; his example was that the homeless weren't disadvantaged people, but street lunatics. So, it was just 'sensible' to keep blacks from voting or holding good jobs? And the 'sensible' way to treat lunatics is to keep them as filthy, drunken vagrants?)
Riiiight. That's what Middle America wants post-9/11 (or, I suspect, wanted beforehand). Latent racism and authoritarianism.
Most of the big unaddressed political class that Rosenfelder seems to ignore (because I really doubt they were statistically insignificant in 2000) is what we now know as the South Park Republicans. Not a racist bone in their bodies, determinedly secular, anti-authority, libertarian, middle-class, anti-tycoon, entrepreneurial, fiercely defensive of privacy, sexually liberated, and all for equality of all rights that it is sensible for the law to affirm—yet tempered by a knowledge that there are some restrictions on social behaviors we've inherited from our benighted ancestors that actually have some place in building strong communities. These are people who take a moment now and then to wonder whether there might in fact have been some downsides to the empowerment of women or the mainstreaming of homosexuality—not with the intention of rolling them back, notably, but of confronting such faults without the fear imposed on us by an establishment that won't tolerate the questioning of such ideals as multiculturalism or the absolute parity in all objective measures of all races and sexes and religions and lifestyles. This isn't about "discrimination"—it's about understanding how humans work, and finding out whether we're being willfully blind about certain things that might be costing our society in efficiency and elegance.
These days, the people attracted to various segments of the political landscape don't much reflect the way they sifted themselves out in Rosenfelder's long-bygone era, it would seem. This bit stuck out at me as particularly laughable:
A more typical libertarian, I suspect, is one of my recent correspondents, who earnestly explained that prosperity was not based on "brute labor", but on "clever thinking". That's pure Randism; but the guy makes $14,000 a year. What's the story here? Randism seems to be built for billionaires. It's a transparent reponse to socialism: When people are calling for your blood as exploiters, it's mighty comforting to be told that your place at the top of the heap is heroic and even moral.
I suspect Randian rhetoric appeals most to folks like my $14K/year correspondent-- basically, smart whites who have a grudge against the system. They're not doing as well as they'd like, but they're not in enough difficulty that liberals pay them any heed. Rand crystalizes for them their suspicion of socialism and the welfare state, and assures them that their ambition and hard work are the marks of future Nietzschean overlords. There's also a particular pleasure in being contrarian, in not merely opposing but scornfully rejecting the liberal idea that one should resist misery and injustice. It's a miserable and unjust world, baby! We are winners, and damn the losers! Only they're not exactly winning yet. Something must be holding them back. Ah, the government!
"Smart whites who have a grudge against the system"? "$14K/year"? Yeah, that describes a whole lot of libertarians I know. No, this is 2005, and the people who fit this mold today are the hard-core Progressive radicals: the ones who hold such a grudge against the established systems of humanity that they're willing to march in the streets to overthrow them so the world can be more like it is in cyberspace, where everyone has as much sex and alternate reality and hallucinatory escapism as they want and nobody hates anyone ever (except Republicans). The college-age floundering urbanite in this day and age, as I've known him, isn't a Randian; he's a hazy idealist, insulated from the need to work like an assembly-line drone of yesteryear by myriad opportunities and luxuries unthinkable to the poor of earlier ages, and adhering reflexively to any convenient group with a built-in grudge and sad tale of repression to tell. Society at large is at fault for not providing enough welfare to deserving folks like them; much better to define themselves as part of a romantically downtrodden community or subgroup than as a part of the white-bread nation that shuns them. Rosenfelder himself says: "The country is too rich for progressive causes to be understood, much less championed." He's right-on there. Less so when he describes the ACLU as being a champion of the individual and the conservatives as secretly yearning for aristocracy—if there is any group with delusions of elite superiority these days, it's the cranky youths in every suburb who think that knowing how to configure sendmail or run a port scanner makes them Middle America's natural born leaders.
The author of the piece makes several mentions of his above-average familiarity with the role of religion in these proceedings; and while he is quick and thorough in his dismissal of the "fundies", he does say this:
Similarly, many people abandon the Christianity of their childhood without ever achieving an adult understanding of their religion. They think they've left the religion for rational reasons, when all they've defeated is the Sunday-school simplification of it.
Bravo. If there's one thing of which I've grown intensely weary in recent years, it's those people who smugly sniff about having risen above the ridiculous superstitions of religion and embraced a philosophy based on "rationality" and "logic" and "reason". Bull.
A friend recently brought over a DVD of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! series that aired on Showtime; among all its episodes, which debunk and expose the silliness of all manner of conceits of modern society (such as magnet therapy, penile enlargement, alternative medicine, animal liberation, Feng Shui, and so on), the crowning jewel was its hour-long segment on creationism. And while Penn and Teller were quite happy to videotape people lobbying in Atlanta to have creation taught as a theory (alongside evolution) in Georgia public schools, they did an amazing job of failing to acknowledge the very salient points with regard to legal precedent, scientific inquiry, the nature of a theory, legitimate criticisms of evolution, and fear of competing ideas that these people made, instead preferring to point and laugh at the stupid hicks with their stupid hick accents. They (well, Penn) even egregiously misrepresented the First Amendment, as everyone does, when explaining about the "separation of church and state". I had to move upstairs and shut my door about halfway into it, it was so maddeningly intellectually dishonest and unjustifiably condescending.
Any high-school kid can pick up a science textbook and read the explanations of why evolution is the answer to everything; but it takes someone willing to take a leap into unsupported realms of thought—indeed, a leap of faith—to understand that logic cannot sufficiently describe a system in which logic is not a constraint. In fact, logic itself would dictate that one couldn't use logic alone in such a circumstance. Specifically, we are limited enough in our faculties as humans that we cannot distinguish between the world as we know our scientific laws would predict it to appear, and the world as fashioned by some omnipotent force to appear the way our laws would predict it would appear. This might seem too counterintuitive or far-fetched for a mere high-school intellectual (as I once was) to grasp; but the years intervening since I was shocked to discover that there actually existed people on modern planet Earth who believed in God have been chastening, to say the least.
I went to Caltech, perhaps the most hard-science-oriented university on the planet. I specifically went there so that I, as a sure-footed atheist of the kind that nobody with even a shred of spirituality would ever invite to lunch, could be sure of never having to deal with such irrationality ever again. But what should I discover, upon completing the Blacker Hovse roompick in the fall of 1994, but that I had landed in a double... and the occupant of the other side of the room was a guy I'd come to call, behind his back, the Apostle Matt. Deeply, deeply religious. And, I would later find, one of the most agile minds I'd ever met.
We clashed numerous times over the course of that frosh year, with our creationism-vs-evolution diatribes occupying long sheets of paper that we taped up all over the inside of our room's walls, so that we could read each other's rebuttals and write them in silence, never once giving actual voice in conversation to them. Seriously: as furious as we grew on paper, we never once broached the subject in actual speech, and our conversations were never anything but pleasant and happy. But these sheets of densely-written paper covered the walls from floor to ceiling, turned the corner, and spilled out and down the hallway for passersby to read and observe our philosophical fisticuffs. And the most galling thing of all was that at the outset, I assumed—assumed—that just because he was some fundie whose presence on campus was inexplicable (dang, he must have had a lot of extracurricular activities), I'd be able to run rings around him logically. I figured I could even quote the Bible at him and beat him at his own game. Sure, I'd never read it myself, but hey—it's a big book. Surely he can't know it that well. How should he know whether some outrageous verse I made up is actually in there or not?
Suffice it to say that he wiped the floor with me. Not necessarily in the specific wall-covering discussion, but in the long run. See, it turns out that creationist or not, he became a planetary science major, did numerous research projects and theses on the nature of the universe—all while at the same time leading the Campus Christian Fellowship and excelling in everything else he did, which was a lot—and graduated with flying colors, going on to grad school where I believe he's already in charge of some prestigious theoretical research group. Whereas I floundered my way through a mechanical engineering curriculum and graduated only by the skin of my teeth, which is why my teeth bear ugly stretch marks to this day. Had I backed a slow horse? Had I managed to shut myself off to a whole mode of thinking that would have allowed me to excel? I may have had the edge in knowledge of parody materials and smirky pop culture, but intellectually—I know now—he was so far beyond me that I wasn't really a worthy opponent.
After the rigor of academia was behind me, and (shortly afterwards) once 9/11 occurred, I was able to look back on the experience with something of a renewed perspective. It turns out, shockingly, that some huge percentage of Caltech's undergraduate population—larger, even, than the national average among universities, if I remember correctly—were highly religious. If I'd known this as a high-school senior, it'd have turned my world upside down. But I've seen it in action. Religion is no detriment to intelligence or reason. Quite the contrary: it's an enhancement, an augmentation to a mind that might find it all too tempting to limit itself to feeding on logic alone. I've seen too many breathtaking churches and cathedrals and synagogues and mosques, witnessed too many small-town Ladies' Auxiliaries presiding over community funerals, heard too much astonishingly good music created by people my own age, all inspired by that stupid, retrograde thing, religion, to ever again be seduced into the grim austerity of life so limited. I'm still an atheist in practice, mostly just out of habit, but I have to apologize to myself and others for it rather than holding it up as some kind of banner proving my elite superiority over the seething masses as I once did.
(Incidentally, a wise sophomore during that frosh year in Blacker opined that by definition, the only thing a scientist can be is agnostic. This idea is less and more attractive to me depending on the cycle of the moon.)
Religion is one of the only areas in which I think South Park misses the mark in its social commentary. That aside, it as a collected work stands as a pretty good rebuttal (or corollary) to Rosenfelder's treatise. It's possible, in a nutshell, to be friendly to most of what he describes as core "liberal" values (civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, campaign finance reform, freedom of expression, gay rights), and yet not to be so fixated upon them that we mutate into establishment-destroying radicals once the bulk of those issues have been addressed. There's a wide gulf between "You don't have to like gays and lesbians, but that's no reason to jail them, fire them, beat them up, or deny their civil rights" and "Let's all legalize gay marriage". In that gulf rests a huge demographic that Rosenfelder seems to have overlooked, or that has only found its voice in the intervening five years.
The funniest part is the ending, where Rosenfelder issues some predictions for the future:
• The Republicans will find that they like governing; as a result their anti-government rhetoric will fade away, to be revived only on ceremonial occasions (in much the same way that you only hear "these United States" at political conventions).
• Religion is here to stay; but the fundies, frustrated with their inability to impose theocracy, will lose interest for a generation. The next time they pop up, they'll be as likely to ally with the left as with the right (especially because abortion will, I suspect, be largely eliminated by improved methods of contraception).
• Liberalism will disappear-- at least in its incarnations as described above; the new movements and causes that replace it may keep the name. The political fights of 2100 will center largely around ideas that are considered impossibly idealistic or perverse today.
• Conservativism will remain, of course; though it will end up implicitly accepting everything that 20C liberalism stood for.
That was supposed to be a prediction for the next hundred years. Sounds like it's only taken a twentieth of the time.
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Brian Tiemann
