Chuckling

The Alternate Universe Fallacy

2012-01-01T19:36:00.000-05:00

Glen Grunwald spent nearly half an article about Ron Paul’s vs Obama’s foreign policy defending himself against partisans who he was sure would attack him for acting on his belief that a political discussion could conceivably occur outside of the “Red v. Blue Cage Match.” I’ve had some small experience with this phenomena over the years. I don’t read Grunwald regularly, but I can see that he’s getting hit with a shitstorm for his accurate reporting on the crimes, heinous crimes, and numerous misdemeanors of the Obama administration. Let me stress the word “accurate.” And of course “heinous.”

The argument against accurate reporting is always that the alternative would be much, much worse. Sure, they say, Obama is not the ideal president, but he’s a helluva lot better than X (McCain, Palin, Gingrich, Romney, any other GOP ogre of the day) would be. So even though Obama works hard to achieve massive tax cuts for the wealthy, fights to keep home stealing bankers free from prosecution, puts massive cuts to social security and medicare on the table, uses drones to commit mass murder abroad, and signs laws that allow the military greater authority to detain and interrogate U.S. citizens and deny them legal rights protected by the Constitution — among numerous other attacks on important principles we’ve always believed in — we cannot speak of these very real actions taking place in the very real world.

Why is it so wrong to speak of Obama’s actions? Because honestly depicting Obama’s actions may conceivably cause someone somewhere not to vote for him, thus putting our hands in the fate of some Republican psychopath. Sure, the logic goes, Obama is bad, but McCain would have been a helluva lot worse. And Romney, Gingrich, Paul, whichever, would be infinitely worse still.

Is that true? Perhaps, but one can’t actually say for sure about things that did not happen in the past or have yet to happen in the future — things that could only possibly have happened in some alternative universe. And you can play that game pretty much anyway you want. There are alternative universes out there to support any conceivable point of view. But in real life, things on the presidential scale never, ever, turn out exactly as one would have predicted. Take Nixon and Reagan (please) for example. Many feared dire consequences if they were elected and not that there weren’t dire consequences but they turned out to be nowhere near as bad as our worst fears. Significant opposition kept them from achieving their most heinous goals. Obama, unfortunately, has no significant opposition and he is achieving horrors as bad as our worst (short of nuclear war) fears about Nixon and Reagan.

Still, I understand how hard it is to get away from the alternate universe fallacy. Gore v. Bush will no doubt live long as the club of choice for whacking the reality-based folk. and it’s hard not to argue that those Nader voters in Florida screwed us over royally. Nevertheless, we don’t actually know what would have happened in that Gore-centric alternative universe. There may well have been a military coup rather than the supreme court ordered coup that happened in real life. There are so, so many alternative universes. They are as infinite as they are infinitely irrelevant. To argue based on one is to indulge in a logical fallacy plain and simple.

But hey, we’re not computers. Let’s indulge in one anyway. Consider, if you dare, an alternative universe in which voters vote their principles. And this is far-fetched, I know, but in this principle-centric alternative universe those same voters are not afraid to speak up in favor of their principles. Thus, in this far-fetched alternative universe, a politician is judged on how well he or she represents the voters’ principles. And more importantly, the voters speak up and tell the politicians in no uncertain terms that if they don’t represent those principles, they’re not going to get a lot of votes.

Just a fantasy, you say? No doubt, but must it be that way? Must the majority remain silent as politicians we voted for implement policies antithetical to our principles?

Must we support heartless, ultra-violent oligarchies bent on ruining the lives of multitudes simply because the goings on in an imaginary alternative universe might be worse? Well, yes, you say? Okay, fine, but must we just shut the fuck up about it as well?

Well, maybe that’s for the best. “What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on earth, given the experience of the past million years?” asks the Fourteenth Book of Bokonon. “Nothing,” is the reply.

Packed up and Moved

2011-05-22T12:45:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately, poor chuckling has entered the witness protection program, or something like that, and will forthwith be writing under an assumed name. Though still a fictional character writing for a fictional magazine...

An unearthly place (the words that maketh murder)

2011-02-10T20:32:00.001-05:00

New Polly Jean Harvey.

Capitalism at its best

2011-02-07T08:53:00.002-05:00

Can't help noticing that the Huffington Post, a mostly written publication which proudly does not pay its writers, has sold for $315 million. I don't know if there's a list of most ridiculous ways in which content producers have been swindled, but this has gotta be up there?

It's not all hopeless

2011-02-06T05:54:00.002-05:00

I just came across my kid's school newspaper. Here are the front page headlines:

Faculty Disagree on What makes a "Grade" (note: the school doesn't give grades but many faculty members always try to get around that policy. Administration notes that system has been around for a long time and works quite well)

Students Demand more Humanities Classes (Students upset that they are allowed to take two or three language, art, science or math classes but can only take one English or History Class at a time. Administration notes that system has been around for a long time and works quite well.)

Teachers Debate Use of Films in Class (Not much of a debate. Everyone agrees it's a sign of laziness and doesn't teach much. (Administration notes that policy of focusing on primary sources has been around a long time and works quite well).

Teacher Evaluations Considered (Everyone agrees it could be a good thing. Administration notes that current system has been around a long time and works quite well).

Some pretty good inside stories as well:

Nabokov, Salinger Consistently Stolen from Library

Science Students Seek Outside Forums for Sharing Research

WikiLeaks: Harmful or Helpful?

Room for Discussion: Debate on idea of an all-elective high school with no graduation requirements

Brooklyn Museum Hightlights Rockwell's Use of Photographs

Islamophobia on the Rise in the United States

City Reacts to Bloomberg's Controversial Education Appointment

Defining "Hipsters": A Window into Modern Society

I think all this provides a few pointers on excellent possibilities for education reform. Unfortunately, when given the choice between actually making education good or cutting everything but test prep and advanced test prep, most morons in charge choose all test prep all the time.

There by the assholery of god...

2011-01-19T11:23:00.002-05:00

Sadly, I can relate all too well to much, too much, of this article in the Guardian UK about writers who have attempted to quit drinking for the month of January. For example:

During the day it's not so bad – except that there's nothing to look forward to, of course. But the evenings I'm finding hard. They go on and on and on. Who knew that evenings were quite such enormous, terrifying voids that need to be filled somehow?

Yes, I know exactly how he feels having let an alcohol in the evening habit grow imperceptibly over the course of many years. Interesting though, how these Brits admit it, even wallow in it, whereas we Americans prefer denial and/or self-flagellation.

Move along, nothing to see here

2011-01-09T10:45:00.003-05:00

I've been watching the news coverage about the Tucson shooting for a couple hours now without hearing even one mention of the fact that Sarah Palin literally put her in the crosshairs. In fact, the news weenies are falling all over themselves emphasizing how outraged the Republicans and Tea Party idiots are about the shooting. By this afternoon "some people" will be speculating that it was all a plot by Obama and many others will openly pray for his death. More responsible Republicans will use the incident to gut any and all gun control legislation and call for tax cuts for the wealthy in order to curtail incidents like this in the future.

Say what?

2011-01-06T05:40:00.003-05:00

The New York Times tells us of a series of experiments that suggests ESP may be for real, and the accompanying outcry that such nonsense would be published by a respected academic journal. Well, I lack the ESP to know whether or not ESP exists, but I was struck by this common sense "proof" presented by one of the skeptics:

"...these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?"

Hmmm, so nobody is getting rich by reliably predicting the stock market? Not the best example, anti-esp folk.

picture says it all

2010-11-04T19:50:00.006-04:00

Has there ever been a politician more openly contemptuous of the people who worked so hard to elect him? Inviting the Republicans to dinner? Why doesn't he invite the people who supported him to dinner? Because he despises us, that's why. He just wants to be popular with the old farts in the country club. He'll shine their shoes, wash their balls, carry their bags, pay for their meals, lavish billions of dollars on them -- anything to be accepted. And the more he tries, the more it's him they despise.

Weak fucking loser ought to invite us to dinner. Not gonna happen, eh? And now with another election in two years, he'll soon come round begging us to pay for those dinners we're not invited to attend. Not me Bub. Ask your good buddy Joe Leiberman and your openly Republican friends.

hail to the king

2010-10-28T17:41:00.000-04:00

Most intelligent blog on the planet.

this modern world

2010-10-28T14:37:00.001-04:00

fucked up as hell

2010-07-10T16:55:00.003-04:00

This story in the NYT about synthetic marijuana demonstrates in two important ways just how ridiculous and fucked up this society is:

First, how fucking ridiculous, ridiculously evil, is it to let people use dangerous chemicals that exist only to mimic the effects of a harmless weed? Pretty ridiculous, and fucked up.

Second, the kid who killed himself "began “freaking out,” saying he was “going to hell.” Isn't it possible that his ridiculous religious beliefs had at least as much to do with his suicide and the fake weed? Fucked up as hell, I say.

Brooklyn sucks

2010-06-01T22:14:00.002-04:00

I've been spending a lot of time in the Bronx lately. The south Bronx at that. I've always heard it's like the worst fucking place on earth. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but certainly one of the worst places in New York City. Yet I've found it much more pleasant than Brooklyn. For example today I took a wrong turn and ended up on the wrong crowded freeway and then drove streets for about 30 long blocks at rush hour. About two thirds of the way out I was fiddling with my phone and realized that the light had changed four or five seconds ago. Shocked, I looked in the rearview to make sure there were cars behind me. Yes, of course, it was rush hour, there were cars behind me. Yet no one honked. What the fuck was that all about? In Brooklyn they time their honks to go off the split second before the light changes. If you actually hesitate a split second into the green light, it's very possible that two or three people behind you will burst a blood vessel due to their rage. They'll certainly lay on the horn. But the Bronx was different. At least today, and why would today be any different? It never is in Brooklyn.

Picture of the day

2009-10-03T18:49:00.002-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-09-26T17:30:00.002-04:00

Value priced values

2009-09-19T05:59:00.003-04:00

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed the blatant hypocrisy of the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. These paragons of morality boil with hatred for President Obama, who is by all accounts a wonderful family man. Meanwhile they cheer for Bill O'Reilly, a sleaze bag well-known for outrageous lying, bullying and sexually harassing young women one third his age. Watching that circus, reasonable people must conclude, the only values those pigs value are power and money. Unless you count hatred as a value. Then they value three. And murder? Maybe four?

On a related note, I can understand that so many values voters think President Obama is an arch-demon in the process of bringing about Armageddon and the return of an ultra-violent Christ to kill their enemies by the millions. These value voters live in a demon haunted world of primitive myth and superstition. That, plus they are plumb stupid. But what I don't get is how so many of them get away with claiming that Obama is destroying the Constitution. Although I read that people constantly make that claim, I've never seen any details of exactly how they believe he is doing it. Unless his willingness to sign laws passed by Congress is unconstitutional? Or respecting the Constitution is unconstitutional. Oh, who am I kidding. Of course I understand. Since Obama is a demon and the Constitution is whatever God's chosen people (the really chosen--right wing demagogues, not Jews) say it is, then anything the demon says or does is unconstitutional. Of course it's not entirely that simple. There's power and money in riling up the rubes. Any excuse will do. Value added, you know.

Picture of the day

2009-09-17T21:24:00.003-04:00

Apocolypse nowadays

2009-09-16T18:55:00.009-04:00

Talking Points Memo reports a poll that finds New Jersey Republicans to be mostly ignorant morons of biblical proportions.

To be precise, 18% of self-identified conservatives affirmatively say that Obama is the anti-Christ, with 17% not sure. Among the self-identified Republican label, it's 14% who say Obama has the number 666 hidden underneath his hair, plus 15% who aren't sure.

I mean, it's certifiably insane to believe in the existence of an anti-Christ. But how can anyone smart enough to breath even imagine that Obama is a super powerful demon who will throw the world into catastrophic religious war that will usher the return of Christ, who will kill millions?

Is there a more stupid text than Revelation, outside of the Aztecs, in any religion anywhere in the world? It's laughable primitive superstition of the worst sort. Think I'm exaggerating? I'll show you. I don't have to cherry pick. It's a fucking orchard. Just watch, nothing up my sleeve. I'll do the old "open it anywhere and point to a random paragraph" trick:

This is he who came with water and blood: Jesus Christ. He came, not by water alone, but by water and blood; and there is the Spirit to bear witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are in agreement.

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch, eh? I mean, there are four witnesses, the Spirt, the water, the blood, and the bleeding Watney's Red Barrel, natch.

Watch, I'll do it again:

Then another angel came out of the heavenly temple, and he also had a sharp sickle. Then from the alter came yet another, the angel who has authority over fire, and he shouted to the one wit the sharp sickle: 'Stretch out your sickle a, and gather in earth's grape-harvest, for its clusters are ripe.' So the angel put his sickle to the earth and gathered in its grapes, and threw them into the great wine press of God's wrath. The wine press was trodden outside the city, and for two hundred miles around blood flowed from the press to the height of the horses' bridles.

The great wine press of God's wrath? Morons.

Unfortunately, however, the poll goes on to find that New Jersey Democrats are only marginally less stupid:

32% of Jersey Democrats who say that George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. In addition, another 19% of Jersey Dems are Truther-Curious, in the undecided column.

Could there be a bit of misunderstanding there. Are those 32 percent "Truthers" or did the mean that George W. Bush had advanced warning that Al Quaeda was planning to attack targets inside the United States, which is true.

Perhaps, but I'm willing to concede that 32 percent of Democrats will believe pretty much any kind of nonsense. We, as a society, are rapidly reverting to ignorance and superstition reminiscent of the dark ages. Just because someone supports Obama doesn't mean they are enlightened. They may just believe in a different type of voodoo. More and more, whoever best manipulates primitive fear and superstition will win.

Shape of things

2009-09-14T20:03:00.004-04:00

Regarding an alleged terror plot reported at Talking Points Memo:

...according to the Times, a law enforcement official said they had "only a hazy view of the group, its operations and goals, but decided to act fearing that undercover surveillance had failed to detect plans that might be developing."

If I read that correctly, they're saying that they arrested a bunch of people because they didn't know anything about them and couldn't prove that they were doing anything illegal. Yep. That makes sense. Perfect sense, unfortunately. In a Latin American right wing dictatorship circa 1980, pués. And ya'all wonder why I'm somewhat less than optimistic?

People who died

2009-09-13T20:06:00.004-04:00

I just heard that Jim Carroll died. That's sad. He is one of my literary gods.

The above was an interesting little project that integrated an interview with JC about Columbine and one of his masterworks, the poem "Borges Death Mask." It's incredibly rare to see this kind of thing on TV. Amateurish production, no doubt (it was a first effort on a primitive Mac), but JC comes through as so much better than the other peoples' shows he stars in.

Alternate link here: Borges Death Mask

Yada yada, pués

2009-09-13T13:56:00.004-04:00

As you probably know, Joe Wilson, lunatic racist bumpkin, South Carolina, screamed that Obama was a liar during the President's address to congress. Wilson, whose breach of protocol was so offensive that even fellow Republicans were embarrassed, was then forced to deliver an obviously insincere apology which Obama, of course accepted.

As I've said, I very much admire Obama and think he is a fantastic individual and the best that we can realistically hope for as president. I respect his belief in the importance of forgiving his enemies, but I'm not so sure I admire his accepting such a blatantly insincere apology for such an egregious insult. In fact, I think it was a mistake, not just strategically, but morally as well.

This was what the president likes to call a teachable moment. A racist yahoo hate nutzi who lies pretty much every time he opens his moth wrongly calls the president a liar? Obama should have made Wilson the poster boy for Republican hate, lunacy and deception. But no, he let it slide. That's not an example of superior morality. That's an example of pathetic weakness. Again, Obama demonstrates that there's nothing you can't do to him, no matter how wrong or outrageous, that will cause you any pain.

Photo essay of the day

2009-09-10T18:19:00.010-04:00

Slideshow here.

The essay is derived from two parades from Brooklyn's West Indian Days celebration. Each year people from the Caribbean publicly celebrate their culture through a series of events in and around their community. These events present outsiders with small windows into those cultures. Many more than can be presented in a 30 picture photo essay.

Doomed, doomed I tells ya

2009-09-10T16:39:00.008-04:00

I like Obama. I think he's a fine man. I'll go much farther than that and say I think he is the best we can possibly hope for. No other man or woman possessing his intelligence decency and wisdom could possibly become president. Thoroughly understanding the issues, being open minded, respecting people and their different views, forgiving one's enemies; these are the attributes of an exceptional person. Add to all that the fact that someone with those admirable characteristics was able to get elected and it's hard to see how a better hope than Obama could come along.

Unfortunately, the very attributes that make Obama such a fine human being make him a weak president. Once he established beyond any reasonable doubt that one could oppose him with impunity, the game was lost. The politician's greatest desire is to avoid pain and anything they do is going to hurt some way, some how. So their calculation is always what will hurt least. Supporting Obama will get a shitload of calls and emails from a bunch of ignorant fucking lunatics. They'll probably come scream at you at public events. Opposing Obama costs you nothing. You may even get rewarded. No strings attached. What's a poor apparatchik to do? No, to succeed as president, Obama needs make those who oppose him, particularly those in his own party, feel pain. He has to be a ruthless asshole that doesn't give a fuck about someone else's point of view beyond figuring out how to bend it to his own. Can he do that? Can he do it without becoming somebody else? One of them? I'm guessing no.

But ultimately, I don't think it really matters what Obama does. In the "tides of history" vs "great leader" debate, I'm 90 percent or so on the side of "tides of history" theory of predicting the future. Right now it looks like the tide is washing in an era of stupidity and violence. We are a thoroughly corrupt oligarchy drifting rapidly totalitarian. The media ranges from stupidly irresponsible to consciously ultra-partisan. More and more people are effectively brainwashed. Not only are they ignorant of the facts, they are angrily averse to knowing them. They'll believe what they're told by their leaders, no matter how outrageous and their leaders are telling them democracy and rule of law are not legitimate, Those, and other socialist ideas (such as education, to name just one) are, in fact, dire threats to national security, to Amercan's children, all things good and God Almighty.

Were Obama to consult poor chuckling, I'd advise him to give a big speech on the Mall detailing just exactly how and why our political system is irreparably broken, then resign and emigrate to France in order to devote all his energy to writing. He'd probably accomplish much more that way than by turning into a ruthless asshole. But you never know. I can see how one might argue that he give being a ruthless asshole a chance, then if that doesn't work out go with the expat option.

Hindsight

2009-09-08T16:52:00.003-04:00

In retrospect, it became obvious that Obama would fail miserably as president when he pushed the Senate democrats to let Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship. That act sent the message loud and clear that not only could people oppose him on this or that issue; they could kick him in the nuts, stab him in the back, bitch slap his wife--whatever-- and he wouldn't do a damn thing about it (except maybe try to suck up to them even more).

Pictures of the day

2009-09-08T06:19:00.004-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-09-06T15:45:00.002-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-09-05T23:16:00.002-04:00

A forest

2009-09-01T19:23:00.013-04:00

I need some text here to separate the photo above from the one below. So I'll just type something here. Anything. It doesn't matter. Just to take up space. It would simply ooze. Like toxic sludge through the neural pathways. No. No politics. Best not to write about it. Sure, it would take up some space, but it would also take up space in my head, and possibly yours. No. No, We don't want that. Best not to think about it, eh? Think about something else. Look at the pretty forest. Sure is pretty. I like pretty forests.

See, this post looks better already. That space sure helps. A second paragraph is nice as well. One line should be enough, though it probably would look better with two. No, now that I'm looking at it, I think three lines are definitely called for. You say I have four? Damn.

Picture of the day

2009-08-30T17:35:00.005-04:00

Before we get to the daily neighborhood report, we have an important personnel announcement. chuckling on-line magazine's photo editor has taken a leave of absence and will be replaced by a new guy that likes pictures of flowers. After the incredibly tranquil trip to Quebec, we feel it's best to look at pretty shapes and colors in an undisturbing kind of way. Enough of that black and white shit. Eh?

I finally downloaded the Offender Locator app. I'd been putting it off because I was so afraid of what I'd see. Living in a densely populated urban area which is, one must assume from what one sees, home to a ridiculously high number of malfunctioning individuals, I figured there's be at least a hundred sex offenders within a three block radius and that I'd recognize more than a few of them. Several guys I see regularly hang out on the sidewalk and make rude sexual suggestions to female passersbye. I just saw the worst of the two a few minutes ago when I went to the fruit market to get a red onion. He was sitting on a crate between the lemons and the limes, shirt off, sacked half pint going back and forth between his crotch and his lips. The guy always has a half pint. He makes his living, such as it is, sitting in front of businesses harassing females until the owner buys him a half pint to go sit in front of someone else's business. I expected to see that guy in the offender list at the very least. But it turned out to be not that bad and I didn't recognize anybody. No one near our block and only a few in a pretty wide area.

What a world, eh?

Picture of the day

2009-08-28T13:45:00.001-04:00

It's hard to keep up with all the changes to businesses on the commercial strip near my house. I think I mentioned that there's been a recent influx of cell phone stores. And we've always had a lot of 99 cent stores. One went out of business. Another has expanded, taking over an empty adjacent storefront. Now that I think about it, a business taking over an adjacent storefront has become a trend. T-Mobile did it, the dry cleaner and now the 99 cent store. The other trend is empty storefronts. I believe there are three now between my house and the subway. That's a first. In the past new businesses would move in as fast as possible as the old ones move out. I suspect we'll be seeing more and more empties going forward, though eventually each block may turn into a giant 99 cent or cell phone store, save each block's crappy Chinese restaurant.

Of course the big news is the prostitute bar that opened up on the corner. It used to be just another Mexican restaurant, then it morphed into an illegal nightclub, now it has become a prostitute bar like those you find in Mexican border towns. Customer's pay ten dollars to dance with scantily clad whores who will sit at their table and order buckets of beer. There's another Mexican prostitute bar down the street that has upstairs apartments where they take their clients. A van is available to shuttle them back and forth. Actual streetwalkers have started to appear between the two prostitute bars. Late night fights break out several times a week. There was apparently a concerted efforts by the whorehouse patrons to literally shit on the neighbors, or at least their sidewalks. One day last week several neighbors woke up to find fetid piles in front of their homes.

The neighbors have actively tried to close them down from the start. The neighborhood association, local politicians and the local police precinct have all been trying, though it's been mostly ineffective. Despite their efforts, and blatant law breaking on the part of the nightclub, the state liquor board gave them a license to operate until 4 am, so now they are legal, at least to serve liquor. The powers that be managed to close them down the other night on the flimsy charge of hiring unlicensed bouncers. I went to the hearing in which the city was trying to keep them shut down. The judge that was handling the case was on vacation so a temporary judge was assigned. The prosecutor was unprepared and did not know the law regarding liquor licensing. The judge said it was crazy to take away someone's property rights because of unlicensed security and liquor license violations that had since been remedied. He said he never would have closed it down in the first place. But fortunately, the Mexican whorehouse lawyer was even less competent than the prosecutor. The prosecutor asked to keep the place closed until the other judge could return and make a ruling. The judge looked at the whorehouse lawyer, clearly willing to open the place back up, but the whorehouse lawyer said nothing. The judge looked to the sky and kept the place closed until September 11.

What a world, what a world. Brooklyn.

Picture of the day

2009-08-27T19:43:00.006-04:00

Unfortunately, rehab wasn't very rehabilitating this year. Or if so, it hasn't kicked in yet. That could be because I still have a houseguest and the traveling has continued, albeit much more close to home. Rehab failed the past two years because I took it at Burning Man. Burning Man's great, but it's not exactly what you'd call relaxing. Not the way I've done it. Don't get me wrong. I'm as in favor of consuming mass quantities and watching things burn and go boom as much as the next guy, but I don't come back from it in a Buddha-like state. On the contrary, I shake for weeks.

But three years ago, I took the rehab in Quebec and that worked out quite well. Lola and I camped in a primitive campground on a fast moving river in a beautiful valley in a national park about 40 K north of Quebec city. We spent a couple days in the city, took a couple drives down the Chemin de Roy, which follows the Saint Lawrence from Quebec to Trois Riviere and I've no doubt is one of the more beautiful highways in the world. The rest of the time blissfully camping, hiking and canoeing. And the meals? Both in town and cooked over the open fire? Incroyable.

So I thought I'd replicate it this rehab. I'd recently been thinking of pursuing bliss and enlightenment and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Then maybe taking up squash. I don't know. Anyway, I though Quebec would be a good place to get started. And I had two weeks.

Long story short: Had a great time but am probably less enlightened before I left and definitely short of more than a few brain cells. But Quebec? It's fantastic. First we camped at Parc National de la Maricie. The highlight of those days was canoeing an hour and a half to get to a three kilometer trail that brought us to a beautiful waterfall where we swam for hours. Then we went about two hundred kilometers north to Parc National de Point Taillon, which sits on a giant lake. Perhaps the highlight of the trip was when we passed through an enchanted forest on the way. I'm not one of those boorish people that goes on and on about his dreams; suffice it to say that I was having a great one when I ran off the road and woke up. And it took up right where it left off when my friend Ken was driving. Unfortunately, I woke up when he ran off the road. Much as I hated to do it, we stopped for some coffee to shake off the effect of the enchanted forest. I didn't want to kill poor little John Bob. Point Taillon is almost totally flat. Everybody bikes there, so we rented bikes and tooled around for a couple days, often stopping for rest in fields of wild blueberry (the original title of this article was "my wild blueberry paradise." I would have eaten enough, if that were possible) and eating wild raspberries from the many patches that lined the side of the road. We were about 20 meters from the beach and went to sleep each night to the sound of crashing waves. We swam in the pleasantly cool water morning, noons and night. From there we camped at Parc National de la Baie-Sainte-Marguerite on the Saguenay fiord, best known for the Beluga whales that often hang out there. A three K hike took us to the observation area, a beautiful beach where the river empties into the fiord. The hills were as high as a thousand meters and the Fiord below was equally deep. Every day clouds enveloped the hills and drifted down the fiord. On the third day the whales arrived. I watch probably fifty or sixty Beluga swim leisurely up the fiord toward an oncoming storm. The water was blue, the clouds black, the lightning almost as bright a white as the whales. The thunder rolled. The next day we took a whale watching boat out of Taddousac and saw a lot of mink whales, a few fin whales and another pod of Beluga. After that we headed down to Quebec to finish off the trip with a couple days in the city. John Bob and I managed a kayak trip that included a couple sets of type II rapids. We had a couple fantastic French meals in the old city. Then cruised the Chemin de Roy to Trois Riviere and made a dash back to NYC.

Back in the city I saw Ponyo. Ponyo is the latest movie from Studio Ghibli. Studio Ghibli movies are great. Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and My Friend Totorro are high art. One could make an argument for Princess Mononoke. I had reservations about Ponyo because I'd read it was a G-rated movie about a little fish girl who wants to be human. But I knew it probably didn't matter what a Studio Ghibli move was about and I was right. It is a great movie. Not without its flaws, but there are two or three scenes that are possibly the two or three most incredibly beautiful animation sequences in the history of the medium. If the sequence where Ponyo chases the car on waves is not the result of artistic genius then artistic genius does not exist. There's just nothing else out there like Studio Ghibli. Hayao Miyazaki writes the story and paints the storyboards. He has total control. No one else does anything remotely similar. Perhaps other have the talent but not the means. Nevertheless.

Finally, my friend Ken is still here so I haven't quite gotten back to normal, hence the paucity and poor quality of my publishing. I've spent far more time than I like going to bars and shows in Manhattan. Our return from Quebec coincided with the departure of the French kids. I had dreaded their time here, but it worked out quite well. They were perfect house guests and I liked them very much. Between them and Quebec, this turned into a summer of French. I can actually carry on a decent conversation again for the first time in years. Of course that won't last.

Anyway, things should be getting back to normal soon. I need to finish up this year's Coney Island project, but there's still a lot of work to make that happen.

Hope this finds you well, reader. Personally, I need a fucking vacation. I wanna go to rehab, yea, yea, yea.

Back from rehab

2009-08-23T12:23:00.003-04:00

Yep, back from rehab. It's been nice to be away from the news. Got in at 2 am last night and did a quick scan of the usual sites. Looks like Obama's blowing it big time, huh? Apparently his strategy of saying "fuck you" to his base isn't working. Who could have predicted?

OOO

2009-08-09T23:11:00.002-04:00

FYI, I'll be away for the next couple weeks. No posting or reading email.

A teachable moment

2009-08-06T16:57:00.007-04:00

I'm surprised there hasn't been more comment on the lefty blogs about George Sodini, the wingnut who shot up a Pittsburgh gym full of young women, killing three. Pandagon covered it from the "nice guy" angle, but the overall effort seemed half-hearted. I understand. We know all about these people. Wingnut on a murder spree? It's like commenting on the weather. Sure is hot. Yep. The New York Times didn't even mention it.

But he fact that Sodini is an archetypical wingnut should be played for all it's worth. Sexually frustrated, bullied, Christian fruitcake, gun nut, Obama hater:

Sodini's first entry on Nov. 5, 2008, was a racist rant about President Obama and black men. The seeds of slaughter were sown in subsequent entries, where he complained about not having had a girlfriend "since 1984."

Sodini dismissed his dad as a "useless sperm donor." He raged against his "useless bully" brother. He called his mother "The Central Boss." He blasted his former pastor.

"This guy teaches (and convinced me) you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven," Sodini wrote.

Couldn't get laid for 20 years? Hell, I'm no great catch these days and women still occasionally flirt with me. That guy was in decent shape and had a job and couldn't get a date. Dude must have put off a seriously fucked up vibe. And Jesus gave him permission to kill. Now he's in heaven.

The wider audience, the regular people who don't read deep into the news, need to be introduced to these people. Mass murder is what some refer to as a "teachable moment." Oh well, it looks like there will be way too many of these teachable moments. Maybe next time a wingnut goes on a murder spree it will get the coverage it merits. Maybe tomorrow. It won't be long.

Photo of the day

2009-08-04T21:18:00.000-04:00

Photo of the day

2009-08-02T10:54:00.003-04:00

Photo of the day

2009-07-31T01:09:00.001-04:00

Somewhere

2009-07-28T21:08:00.013-04:00

Someone asked if I was sorry I didn't shoot color the other day when I saw the rainbow at the beach. Actually, I was carrying the color camera and took a few shots. But this isn't all. I have a lot of color rainbow pics. Hundreds. I take them all the time. Rainbows are part of a project I'm working on called "Puppies, Kittens, and Rainbows." The purpose of the project is to show the naysayers that puppies, kittens, and rainbows are too just so damn cute.

On an unrelated note, people have been searching for the end of the rainbow since time immemorial. As you can see, I found it in Coney Island. The end of the rainbow is in Brooklyn public housing. Who could have guessed?

Chuckling predicts a bipartisan solution for health reform

2009-07-27T19:23:00.009-04:00

This is easy. Congress will eventually pass a health reform bill. It will be designed to transfer massive amounts of taxpayer money to health insurance companies. Given our experience with the financial sector, my guess is that the insurance companies will be given significant financial incentives to insure everybody, or at least most people, but there will be no actual requirement for them to do so. The guidelines will be voluntary. Executive compensation will be huge. Tens of millions will remain uninsured.

Then just as there are no racists in the age of Obama, and therefore no need for anti-discrimination laws; there will no longer be any need for Medicaid, or for the uninsured to visit emergency rooms, because everybody should have insurance. We'll see what form it takes, but some kind of compromise that denies millions of poor people the health care options they now have will be the makings of a bipartisan solution. The combination of windfall profits and punishing poor people will definitely appeal to the conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans who are so necessary to getting some kind, fuck all any kind, of health care legislation passed.

Photo of the day

2009-07-26T21:59:00.000-04:00

Change you probably didn't sign up for

2009-07-26T10:07:00.002-04:00

Seems that nowadays if a cop wrongly harasses and arrests an innocent black guy he wins a beer with the president.

Is it still too early to declare the Obama presidency a failure? To recognize Obama as the point guard for the Washington Generals? I guess, but so far the game is going according to script. The Washington Generals jump out to a big lead only to start making boneheaded turnovers, missing lay ups and turning a blind eye to the other team's egregious cheating. The Globetrotters, in this case the Republicans, close the gap and win in the end. The Generals, in this case the Democrats, cash their checks and laugh all the way to the next fundraiser.

21st century welfare spokesmodel

2009-07-22T21:07:00.003-04:00

Gimme, gimme, gimme.

Picture of the day

2009-07-20T19:44:00.002-04:00

Class divide

2009-07-19T09:17:00.005-04:00

From an article in the Guardian UK: "Revealed: the hidden benefits of a private-school education."

...fee-paying pupils benefit from an emphasis on "soft skills" such as teamwork and communication, which are imparted through sport, music and drama. With more pupils now getting the academic grades needed for university, private pupils get ahead because of their more rounded CVs and confident presentation.

That's been my observation as well. Shows how stupid it is for public schools to cut sports, music, drama, and other arts in favor of class after class of reading and math focusing almost exclusively on test prep. Yet another area in which conservatives get it totally wrong.

Brooklyn summer

2009-07-19T08:58:00.003-04:00

As regular readers know, I hate New York like any animal hates its cage. The noise, blah blah, the grime, blah blah, the godawful noise, blah blah, blah blah.

But it's not all bad. Last night I agreed to take John Bob to see the new Harry Potter movie. The weather was perfect. Warm, not too humid with a nice breeze. We walked through Prospect Park to get to the theater. We had an hour and a half to kill after buying the tickets so we walked across the street, back into the park to the bandshell, bought a glass of wine and caught the end of the (free) King Sunny Adé concert. By pure happenstance, we sat down on the lawn by some friends, so we sat around and had a nice chat after the concert.

The Potter movie wasn't as bad as I feared. I've read all the books because of the kids. I enjoy them. Not great literature, but page turners with a small amount of emotional impact here and there. I don't like any of the movies though. And I didn't like this one that much either, but it was significantly different than the rest. It was mostly about the awkwardness of teen sexuality and actually did a fairly good job of portraying it. There was some beautiful nature shots as well. All the wizarding mumbo jumbo seemed incidental.

Anyway, the movie got out about 11:30. We popped in a little restaurant for some sushi and I had a large Sapporo, then we hopped on the Subway for a couple stops to get back home. All in all, a nice urban experience.

Scoop

2009-07-12T14:15:00.005-04:00

Like everyone else, we here at chuckling on-line magazine have been following the Sarah Palin phenomena. We've managed to infiltrate her organization in the midwest and have learned many disturbing new facts. Most disturbing of all, we can now report, is that her followers are organizing themselves, or perhaps being organized, into secret societies modeled after Christian organizations from the dark ages. They've even got a stupid vow, which initiates must recite when entering the order:

I swear that I am not now nor have ever been a liberal, that I do not accept the overthrow of the rightful American government by the pagan usurper, Barack Obama. That I do not accept gay marriage or the separation of church and state or the metric system. That I will not answer the census questions. That I will never again steal or drink or use illegal drugs or fornicate out of vice. And that I will give my life for my religion and Sarah Palin.

More tk. Lots more, I fear.

Domestic updates

2009-07-12T10:19:00.004-04:00

Several times in the past few years we've sent our children to stay with relatives in France during summer vacation. Payback arrived last week in the form of three Parisian teenagers who will be living with us for the next six weeks. As if New York teenagers weren't shallow enough.

Just kidding. Though quite fashionable, they are good kids. The only problem so far is that one of them seems to have made all his fashion decisions based on gangster rap videos. The second day here he came out with his pants down below his butt showing off his boxer shorts while wearing a wife beater shirt, a thick gold chain around his neck and a NY Yankees cap tipped sideways. He had the look nailed, the only problem being it was a bit too precise. Of course we told him he had to pull up his pants while he's in our house. And we asked him to please not go around like that in our neighborhood. In Manhattan he can wear his pants around his ankles for all we care.

Are we old fogies? Maybe some, but for the most part I don't think so. My main concern is for his safety. People Brooklyn in generally don't want to see kids adverting themselves as thugs walking around their neighborhoods and it's not unusual for local toughs to do something about it. Brooklyn ain't Manhattan. Then there are the cops who are likely to hassle the gangster types. And I also fear that real ghetto kids might not take kindly to some French kid posing as a thug. Cause tough guy he ain't. After putting away his gangbanger costumes he busted out with a series of athletic wear ensembles. Better a pimp than a punk, I guess. Those French and their fashions. Just gotta laugh.

The girl, who is 15, bears a strong family resemblance to my wife. I've found that a bit uncomfortable, but I'm coping. I'm not one of those disgusting old guys that ogles young women. My daughter's friends, for example, are mostly attractive young girls and I don't need any self control not to ogle them. One time I walked in when they weren't expecting me and caught them dancing topless. I got a laugh off their embarrassment, but that was it. But none of them look remotely like my wife, unlike her little French niece. It's taking some effort not to look at her. Lola was pretty cute way back when.

Anyway, I was afraid having three teen visitors in our tiny New York apartment would be difficult, but it's gone all right so far. John Bob's had a lot of sleepovers and now he's away at camp for 10 days. Jane Bob is spending a month in France, so it's not that much more crowded than normal. This time she's not staying with relatives. She got in one of those education abroad programs where they study something and live with a family. Of course she's not writing much and hasn't called, but the few notes we've gotten indicate she's having the time of her life. A bunch of 17 year-olds running free in Paris? Yea, that would be fun. Now she's with the family in Arles and seems to be having a fantastic time there as well. About the time Jane Bob gets back I'm going to Quebec for a couple weeks, so I'll be free. But it's too bad for her French cousins that she's away. They're kind of lost and are spending most of their time playing the Wii.

Periodically, I've told you about the ever-ongoing changes to the businesses in my neighborhood. It's been a little slow lately. A dry cleaner took over a clothing store and dentist office that closed. His old shop is now for rent. A Russian bakery went out of business. I walked by there late the other night and five Chinese guys were playing poker. I don't know if they were workers remodeling or if it's now going to be an illegal poker parlor. I wouldn't be a bit surprised either way.

The big news here is that a local Mexican restaurant went rogue and turned into an illegal nightclub. Hundreds of people are in and out of there till four in the morning. There's dancing, bright lights and thumpa thumpa all night long. There's been at least one knife fight, a few women have been slapped around on the street, and the noise is pretty much constant from 2 am to 4:30. The worst of it is that taxis continuously pull up and honk. We can drown out most of it, but the honks pierce any white noise we throw up against them.

You might think that it would be easy to close down an illegal nightclub but that's not proving to be the case. The neighbors are up in arms. The neighborhood association has had numerous meetings and repeatedly contacted the police and elected officials. The authorities have been responsive. They learned that the restaurant's liquor license only goes till 10 pm and claim to be working to get that rescinded. The police say they have given the owner numerous summons's and at one point they jailed him for four days. But the day he got out it was open again and has been open ever since.

I'm not without sympathy. Guy's trying to make a buck in tough economic times. Apparently there's a great need for nightclubs among the Mexican population. Those people work hard doing the shittiest jobs around. Why shouldn't they be able to party? The answer is that if the guy wants to run a nightclub, he should open one in a non-residential neighborhood where it's legal.

Nobody round here quite understands why it's so difficult to shut the place down. How can someone just defy the authorities like that? If I sat up a table and start selling beer on the sidewalk it wouldn't be an hour before the police closed me down. And since he doesn't have a liquor license for a nightclub now, I'm skeptical that taking away his daytime license is going to have any effect. Why won't he just continue telling the cops and politicians and the neighbors to fuck off? Apparently he's making a lot more money than being illegal is costing him. But I don't really care about his reasoning. What's with the cops? Are they really such big helpless pussies when confronted with a Mexican who doesn't want to obey the law?

Picture of the day

2009-07-11T22:24:00.007-04:00

How little I knew

2009-07-09T17:29:00.007-04:00

The feature article* in this month's Harper's argues that Barack Obama is the next Herbert Hoover. Of course I've heard that he's the next Bin Laden, the next Hitler, the next Stalin and the anti-Christ if not Satan himself, so it's hardly surprising someone would throw Herbert Hoover into the mix. Hoover was, as we all know, the cold hearted architect of the Great Depression, a very bad person with no redeeming qualities and a typical big business Republican. Like you, I am sick of all that shit and passed over reading the article.

But this was Harper's and after reading everything else, I came back to it. And little did I know. Herbert Hoover was not at all like I thought he was. He's actually a lot like Obama, except far more interesting.

Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.”

Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. “The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.”

He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely that any other individual in human history saved so many people from death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation between labor and management.

“We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved,” the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”

The article goes on to describe the similarities between Obama and Hoover's governing philosophies. It repeatedly makes the point that both of them understood what was happening better than everyone around them. It details how Obama is taking the same approach as Hoover did across a wide range of issues. It details how and why Hoover failed and argues that Obama is making the exact same mistakes. It's a depressing read. Makes way too much sense. Uncomfortable. I fear all too prescient. Worth reading, nevertheless. At least it was for me. Turned out I knew next to nothing about Herbert Hoover.

* Subscription required. Go ahead, subscribe. Harper's is easily the best magazine still publishing.

SOL birthday

2009-07-04T07:29:00.003-04:00

And it's one, two, three...

2009-07-03T09:39:00.012-04:00

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Does anyone even ask? Does anyone even give a damn?

The U.S. has reportedly launched an invasion of Afghanistan's Helmand Province. Helmand Province is roughly the size of West Virginia and home to 740,000 people, almost all of whom hate us. Why are we doing that?

The first major operation launched with the additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama is devised to clear Taliban havens across a strategic southern province — and then, in a marked departure from past practice, to leave clusters of Marines in small bases close to the villagers they were sent to guard and aid, according to senior military officers.

Why? Why do we want a presence in every little village in a dusty province half a world away? Isn't there some better way we could spend our money and energy?

“Essentially what they are trying to do is create and sustain a productive presence in Helmand Province, including both combat power and civil-engagement capabilities,” a senior military officer said.

Again, why? Even if 4000 troops can conquer and hold this province, why is it worth such a massive expenditure in lives and fortune?

The silence is deafening. Let's try Google. It has an answer for everything.

OMG. The all-knowing internet doesn't even know why we are fighting in Afghanistan. It's a mystery of our times.

Yea, I know, it supposedly has something to do with 9/11, but whatever the poor villagers of Helmand Province might have had to do with hijacking those airplanes has been lost to the mists of time. At this late date, we seem to be engaging in military operations just for the sake of engaging in military operations. Once a military operation starts, it has to continue until total victory has been achieved. Otherwise we've lost. What have we lost? That's not exactly clear.

Oh well, in these troubled times maybe it's best to have the military occupied in some hellhole half a world away. By all reports, the military is a very conservative institution and right wing Christianist extremists have been successfully infiltrating it. Maybe it's best they expend their energy trying to conquer and convert Afghanistan to right wing Christianity. With too much time on their hands they might try to conquer and convert us.

Picture of the day

2009-07-02T20:42:00.000-04:00

Juneteenth 09

2009-06-29T20:02:00.004-04:00

Picture of yesterday

2009-06-28T12:35:00.006-04:00

Another self portrait (and apple stills sucks)

2009-06-28T09:36:00.005-04:00

I finally got around to replacing my piece of shit computer. As mentioned previously, Apple is an evil monopoly and I once again call on President Obama to sic the trustbusters on them. Apple refuses to offer a simple inexpensive box that you can pop open and add hard drives and RAM. You either have to buy the highest of the high end Macs which adds up to $3000 minimum, or go with an underpowered little thing that requires the skills of a brain surgeon and a lot of research to upgrade.

Anyway, I eventually settled for cheapest Mac Mini with additional RAM and a firewire 800 hard drive to run the OS. It's OK, a bit zippier than the piece of shit G5 tower that died, but as you can see, it requires a lot of external crap and wiring. And being no brain surgeon, of course I fucked up the audio when installing the RAM, which voids the warranty. Fortunately, I've got a lot of computer crap laying around and that included an MBox that I can use for audio.

So it all ends well, for the time being, but my hatred of Apple is reaching pathological proportions. It's just not right that only one company manufactures personal computers. I'm not exactly what you'd call a rabid free marketer, but this is one area where government should get involved to ensure healthy competition.

A is for authoritarian

2009-06-24T22:32:00.006-04:00

"God's laws are designed to protect people from themselves."

So says Mark Sanford (R) South Carolina, big red (A) in public. Yea, yea, another conservative hypocrite. Family values southern guy ditches his wife and kid for an affair with an exotic foreigner. Not such a hillbilly after all, eh? Yea, yea, I know, the term "hypocrite" in "conservative hypocrite" is redundant. We all know that.

I find the above quote from the governor much more interesting than his all-too-human fuckfest with a dusky temptress from a foreign land. Let he who hasn't either done that or fantasized about it cast the first stone. What separates conservatives and normal people on the scarlet letter question is the idea of control. I think we can all agree it's not a great thing to fuck around on your wife and mother of four kids and get busted all over the news cycle. The difference is that normal people think a person should exercise self-control in these matters while conservatives think government should intervene to smack down sexuality. Why? Because God commands that we do whatever it takes to keep people from enjoying sex. Sanford's little speech lays it out plain.

My knee-jerk reaction is to think that these hypocritical authoritarian fucks don't believe a word of their purported religion. Anyone who believes in an afterlife; anyone who believes that quality of a guy's eternal afterlife is decided by his ability to keep his dick in his pants would manage to keep his dick in his pants. Personally, I'd cut the damned thing off if it would guarantee me eternal bliss. Any sane person would.

Yea, yea, I know that the conservative pathology is more complicated than that, but they definitely believe in earthly authority, no ifs ands or buts. In the societies conservatives rule, societies such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, North Korea, et. al., the government beats the bitches in the street for any hint of sexuality. That's the ideal conservative society. That's what conservatives, people like Mark Sanford, need to control their hard on. They need for government to keep the bitches from tempting them. They need for the government to punish the ones who do. And God agrees, you can read it in a holy book, so it makes a lot of sense to people who believe that crap. That's why the conservatives of this world, Mark Sanford being today's poster boy, so diligently pursue state power. They can't control themselves so they want somebody else to do it for them. And when they're caught, they'll ask for and receive forgiveness, but you can bet they never gave any and probably never will.

Rainy day and mermaids

2009-06-23T19:06:00.013-04:00

Notes on photography

2009-06-21T21:07:00.006-04:00

Kafka on the shore

2009-06-19T22:36:00.010-04:00

You may recall that I've been revisiting Haruki Murakami’s novels. I recently re-read ""The Wind-up Bird Chronicle." I just finished "Kafka on The Shore."

Read a serious review of Kafka here.

The first time through I thought Kafka was the much better novel. It was funny and all the supernatural stuff made sense. But now I think Wind-up Bird was better precisely because the supernatural stuff didn't all fit together neatly. The level of explication necessary to tie it all together in Kafka resulted in many stretches of ridiculous dialog. Still, it's a great page turner and worth reading.

I was more disappointed in the review I linked to above. It's an example of pretty much everything I hate about modern book reviews. After reading it, I was surprised to find that it was written by John Updike who is very well-regarded in this area. I guess that means one of us is shallow and scoreboard suggests it's not John Updike. Still...

In science news

2009-06-16T19:49:00.002-04:00

Flaws in the ointment

2009-06-13T08:10:00.025-04:00

Like I said, it's because all of the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert... But listening to the D Major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of--that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

-- Haruki Murakami from Kafka on the Beach

Amanda Marcotte's review of the movie Up at Pandagon includes a slap at Pixar's Cars. I had only recently become aware that Cars was poorly reviewed as far-and-away Pixar's worst film and that a lot of people think it sucks. I was surprised by this because Cars is my favorite Pixar movie and the only one I ever had any desire to see more than once.

So in comments I asked what people thought was wrong with it? The typical answer, supplied by someone called junk science, is:

...the plot, character types, and pacing seem like so much paint-by-numbers feel-good Disney blandness compared to a wittier Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. Cars isn’t a bad movie, but it could have come from a lesser studio than Pixar, which is what I think bothers people.

OK. That makes sense and pretty much answered my question. But a couple other responses were worth reading for their other-than-mainstream perspectives. Mnemosyne writes:

I wasn’t too fond of Cars but my husband and most men I know really, really liked it. It seemed to speak to them on some subconscious level about breaking through to a better, less traditional view of what being an adult man should/could be. It’s one of the few movies out there where the male protagonist matures through his relationships with other people and not because of the adventures he encounters. The traditional markers of male success aren’t just rejected, they’re actively subverted at the end of the film. (Trying to avoid spoilers here, but I think you know what I mean.)

If that’s what men and boys are getting out of it, then I don’t really care that it didn’t speak to me. Not every movie is about me.

I thought that comment was very insightful. Do I like Cars because of a guy thing? I'm not particular into cars, often don't even own one, and would just about rather go to the dentist than watch a NASCAR race, which as far as I can see is nothing more than a lot of colorful boxes making an endless left turn in slow motion. I did like the fact that the protagonist matured through his relationship with others. That was the heart of the movie and in conjunction with the manner in which he matured (understanding that friends are better than fame and fortune) explains a good part of why I liked it so much.

RobW had a different take:

One of the central themes of Cars was the idea that individuals are born to their purpose and cannot escape being what they are, and what they all are is a collection of stereotypes. The race car is the jock, the towtruck is the dumb redneck, the lowrider is the cholo, the only “black” characters are a Cadillac and SUVs with huge chrome rims (who, being from the city are naturally criminals- in the end we see the small town sheriff has them in custody doing hard labor and we’re supposed to laugh at them), etc.
The smart and pretty Porsche totally falls for the race car despite the lack of any explanation why anyone would even tolerate the arrogant prick. Because she’s a girl and he’s famous. Then there’s the fangirls: Mazda Miatas, of course.

It is also a paean to nostalgia. Modern is bad, the Old Ways are good, combined with the vicious racial stereotyping and reactionary message that you can only be what you are meant to be makes the film despicable, really. Hell, the towtruck, ‘Mater, has a star turn at one point demonstrating, quite literally, the joys of going through life in reverse. It seems you don’t need to know where you’re going, all you have to do is know where you’ve been- but this can only work if you never, ever, leave the familiar.

Oh yeah, and the happy ending: it seems the best thing that can happen to anyone is to gain the approval and support of a large corporation, the oh-so-benevolent-and-kindly OIL COMPANY of all things. Run by a stereotypical Texan, naturally...

...So, it’s an entertaining movie for people unoffended by racial, cultural, gender stereotypes, who don’t think about its reactionary message, or who just don’t think. Great conservative film, in other words.

RobW, I think, is a bit harsh. The idea that individuals are born to their purpose and cannot escape being what they are is not one of the central themes of Cars. It's one of the central aspects of cars. That's cars, not Cars.

Cars really are born to their purpose and don't have a lot of opportunity to be something else. A tow truck is a tow truck. A fire engine is a fire engine. They will never become race cars or minivans. I see nothing in the movie that argues the same is true for people.

As for the ethnic stereotyping, Rob makes a good point. Without thinking about it, I had liked the diverse cast of characters and the way they all got along so well. Social integration is a good thing, man. And it fit with the fictional universe of the movie. The army surplus guy is a jeep. The VW Kombi is a hippie. The low rider is a Mexican-American from East L.A. How else would you cast the low rider? They are not ashamed of their taste in cars in East L.A. But yea, how do you cast the African American woman? As a Cadillac? Uh oh, there is some negative history with that kind of stereotype. But anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of African Americans like Cadillacs (as do geriatric white people) and don't seem particularly ashamed of it. I hesitate to call that vicious racial stereotyping. They didn't show her parked out in front of a shack.

And women fall for arrogant pricks all the time, both in real life and in film, so that's hardly unrealistic. Of course the part where the arrogant prick realizes the error of his ways and changes happens only in the movies, but Cars is a movie. What do you expect?

Perhaps Cars is a paean to nostalgia. I guess I just don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. The scene where the old neon lights of Route 66 come back to life is, I think, one of the better paeans to nostalgia in cinematographic history. It's a beautiful scene.

But enough defense against the fringe. The mainstream argument is that the story is paint-by-numbers feel-good Disney blandness.

First, I say leave Disney out of it. Cars is Pixar storytelling all the way and it tells pretty much the exact same story as Up. A socially isolated individual learns the benefits of friendship and community. All Pixar stories are painted-by-number. They are all textbook. They are all flawless from a technical storytelling perspective. Cars is just like all the rest.

That's my problem with Pixar. The flawlessness of their storytelling is their greatest flaw. You need only watch a few Studio Ghibli movies to see what I mean. Watch Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, or even Totoro, and you'll see that they leave Pixar in the dust artistically. Kids like Pixar movies but they're not that crazy about them. I'm the one who always suggests going to see them. But after seeing Spirited Away, my kids begged me to watch Studio Ghibli movies. You'll love it, dad, it's great, over and over again for about a year until I finally gave in.

The big difference, I think, is that Studio Ghibli movies are the artistic vision of one man, Hayao Miyazaki. Sure his stories have flaws, but his idiosyncratic visions of flying machines, old ladies, Japanese mythology and other individualistic bric-a-brac raise them so far above Pixar's textbook stortelling that it's not even close. Pixar's stories seem the work of a committee. A very competent committee, granted, but a committee nevertheless.

Naw, that's a bit harsh as well. Pixar does excellent work. I'll end this with a couple quotes that, I think, better illustrate what I'm trying to say.

John Lasseter of Pixar:

(about making the movie Cars) I learned that the journey in life is a reward, It's about living every day to its fullest, and I knew that's what I wanted the film to be about.

Let me tell you a funny story. I took the family to see this film one weekend, I'll go to see almost any film that's good for the whole family. And so we're sitting there watching this film, which I won't name, and there are long stretches that are just not very entertaining. My little son - he was probably 6 at the time was sitting next to me, and right in the middle of this dull section, he turns to me and says, "Dad? How many letters are in my name?" I must have laughed for five minutes. I thought, Oh, man, this movie has lost this little boy.

We make the kind of movies we want to see, we love to laugh, but I also believe what Walt Disney said 'for every laugh there should be a tear'. I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards how did they do that?

Interesting, but again, I'll give Miyazaki the last word:

"Personally I am very pessimistic," Miyazaki says. "But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making."

Perhaps this is why he tells children's stories. "Well, yes. I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy."

I ask if he feels he's managed that already and he chuckles and shakes his head. Nor does he feel that film can be employed as a force for good. "Film doesn't have that kind of power," he says, gloomily. "It only exerts its influence when it stirs patriots up against other nations, or taps into aggressive, violent urges."

This is a black diagnosis indeed. But then, inexplicably, Miyazaki's mood lightens. Perhaps it's the sunshine, or the cigarette, or the fact that the interview is almost over. "Of course," he relents, "if, as artists, we try to tap into that soul level - if we say that life is worth living and the world is worth living in - then something good might come of it." He shrugs. "Maybe that's what these films are doing. They are my way of blessing the child"

Another self portrait

2009-06-11T19:03:00.002-04:00

Today's top story

2009-06-10T20:03:00.002-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-06-07T13:38:00.007-04:00

I don't know who you are or why you come by here so I have no idea whether or not you are interested in the photography. I've always figured it would be in my best interest to expound on the photos. To explain my motivation for taking them. To explain what I see when I look at them. People enjoy that, I know. It makes you more likely to buy. Yet I find myself unable to do it. It's your business to interpret the photo yourself, or not. My advice is to click on it to enlarge, then spend a couple hours or more staring at it. Some kind of psychotropic substance and an appropriate soundtrack might be helpful in achieving the proper understanding. But that's your business. It's not my business what you think and I don't want it to be my business to tell you how to see.

But sometimes I wonder. What do you see when you look at this photo? I'm not going to explain it to you, but I'll tell you that getting it was not a trivial endeavor. Technically, it required an obscure combination of equipment and skill to achieve this look. Artistically, how many people are even trying to achieve it? Probably not many. I've spent many years figuring out how to take this particular photo. How to communicate this particular experience. But I can see how boring it might be at a glance. There could well be a reason why no one else is bothering to figure this out. Do people on the internets even give something like this a second look? I'm guessing no.

Deformative action pt. II

2009-06-07T08:12:00.007-04:00

In comments below, ChrisV82 provides this chart which purportedly represents the admissions disadvantages and advantages for different groups in terms of SAT points. It's saying, for example, that being a recruited athlete adds 200 points to one's SAT score. Being an Asian lops off 50 points.

Jewish people are the group most conspicuously absent. Historically, Jews were pointedly excluded from elite universities. Today they make up a disproportionate percentage of the student body at elite schools, particularly in the northeast. I'd guess that if Jews were on the chart, they'd rate something like -150.

I do not know what the best system for college admissions would be. I guess in some ideal world (somewhere similar to France), all students would have the same curriculum in school, take the same tests based on that curriculum, then be admitted, or not, to universities based on the results. But we don't have anything close to an ideal system. We have thousands of schools teaching who knows how many different curricula and the test results track with parents income far more than anything else.

What is best for society? Should test taking ability be the most important criteria? If test taking doesn't produce diversity, should diversity trump test taking, at least for a small proportion of the student body?

Poor chuckling simply does not know. The obvious answer is to have enough good schools for everybody, but that particular solution doesn't appear to be on anybody's agenda.

So for now we'll have to leave it to the professionals. College admissions people feel that it's vitally important to have a diverse student body. Beyond easily identifiable ethnic groups, they also try for socio-economic diversity, for example giving advantage to children who are the first in their family to attend college, and international diversity. What are their reasons for this belief in diversity? Are there data that suggest that's the best way to go? Is it political? At this point, I just don't know, but now that I'm thinking about it will start asking the question.

But as long as the most privileged children in this country are getting a leg up, I don't see how anyone can seriously complain about historically disadvantaged groups, or poor kids, getting a leg up as well.

self portrait

2009-06-05T20:06:00.006-04:00

Deformative action

2009-06-04T18:28:00.003-04:00

The University of Illinois cops to what everyone knows. When it comes to college admissions, the wealthy and powerful benefit from a deformative action program that guarantees them spots in selective universities for which they would not qualify on merit.

This fact somehow gets lost in the debate about affirmative action. You know, the type of action in which people who merit an opportunity get an opportunity they otherwise would not due to their socioeconomic status.

Deformative bad. Affirmative good. Simple concept. Obvious truth. neh.

Today's top story

2009-06-04T18:26:00.002-04:00

Brooklyn story

2009-06-03T16:51:00.007-04:00

This is sad. Chanequa Campbell, a gifted African American student from a poor, violent neighborhood in Brooklyn was told she would not be allowed to graduate this spring from Harvard and was forced to move off campus.

She was raised by a single mother in a blue three-story house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and was set on a path to Harvard in fifth grade, when she was nominated to participate in Prep for Prep, a program that prepares minority students for elite schools. In seventh grade, she was admitted to Packer Collegiate Institute, where she excelled and was a star athlete. She won a New York Times Scholarship in 2005, applied to 14 colleges and was accepted to all of them.

Three weeks before she was scheduled to graduate, prosecutors reportedly linked her to a murder at her dorm. One of her friend's boyfriends killed a pot dealer in a botched robbery.

“Conversations that occurred between at least those four people led Jordan Copney to believe he could rip off Justin Cosby,” said the Middlesex County district attorney, Gerard T. Leone Jr. He also said that the Harvard students had provided the three men access to the campus.

Ms. Campbell was not charged with a crime and denies she was involved in the planning of the robbery or the murder. In an article in the Boston Globe, she denied knowing the pot dealer and letting anyone use her dorm access card. Harvard is not providing any details as to why she will not be allowed to graduate.

As you can no doubt imagine, the comments on the Globe story are mostly sick. It's getting to the point where the words "conservative" or "Republican" are synonymous with "racist moron." Those commenters, aside from the openly racist shit, whine on and on about "the race card." Now that Obama is president, no one is allowed to complain about racism any more, dontcha know.

But the old-fashioned don't question authority kind of conservatism comes out strong in that thread as well. Many simply cannot believe that Harvard would not take that kind of drastic action if they didn't know something they weren't telling. I admit to being somewhat susceptible to that argument, but I know better. Shit, as they say, flows downhill.How many times does a powerful organization find itself in an embarrassing position, look around for someone to blame and pick on the most powerless person available. So who's that gonna be? Chanequa from the hood or Brittany?

Of course I don't know. There's not enough information available to come to any kind of responsible conclusion on the justness, or not, of Harvard's actions. But no matter the outcome, this is a sad story in all too many ways.

I am familiar with Ms. Campell's educational background. Prep for Prep is an organization that picks the brightest minority students out of NYC's public schools and guarantees them placement in an elite private school. The prep part is two summers and the year in between in which sixth graders complete a grueling curriculum to catch them up with the kids in the private schools they will be entering. It is affirmative action, but not the kind that advances kids that can't hack it intellectually. Prep kids do very well in the top schools and belong at whatever university they choose to attend. Colleges want the top Prep kids because they are sure bets to succeed. After Prep, she excelled at a very good Brooklyn school, became a national merit scholar, and got into Harvard. Her parents and twenty relatives were planning on attending her graduation. I have some sense of what that would have meant to them and, try as I might, cannot imagine the devastation they must feel over what has happened. When a kid comes out of Bed-Stuy and aces Harvard, it's a very special thing.

And even worse, some poor kid died in a marijuana-related crime. This is yet another example ways in which prohibition destroys so many lives. The kid who died, his family, and possibly a very gifted young woman as well.

Katerskills falls

2009-06-01T17:51:00.008-04:00

A few weeks ago I declared that I would go camping in the Catskills every weekend until October. You may think I'm crazy, but I have somewhat of a history with pronouncements like that. One summer I proclaimed that I would go camping on the beach in Mexico for the foreseeable future. Every weekend I got off work, picked up Jane Bob from the day care and hauled ass to the beach. 100 mph most of the way. We usually took a boat out to a sea lion rookery in the Sea of Cortez. If the sea was calm, I'd drink a lot of beer. If not, I'd lay on the deck and concentrate on not throwing up. Jane Bob spent most of the time hanging her head over the front of the boat and watching for dolphins. Once we got there we'd do some snorkeling and hang out with the sea lions. Yep. Those were pleasant days.

My soul-consuming hatred of New York City had abated significantly after visiting the midwest in the spring. I mean, sure, New York is a putrid hellhole, but it's a lot better than most the rest of the country. My all-too-understandable rabid hatred of the midwest trumps my sad-petty hatred of New York just about any day. My only real problem with New York is that I'm trapped in it. Who's fault is that. Not New York's. Obviously. But nevertheless, I hate it again.

What was I saying? Right. So every weekend I throw John Bob in the car and head up to the Catskills. But that's not gonna work. Not every weekend. I have photo commitments for a couple of Saturdays in June. Fourth of July I'm sure as hell not going anywhere. People and traffic are bad enough on a regular day. Holidays? No.

The Catskills are about 130 miles away. Two hours, right? But that's two hours plus whatever time it takes to get through New York City. Four hours is not unusual. Nightmare scenarios exist and regularly come to pass. In August, I've got to take Jane Bob on college visits. But I'm a gonna try. I'm a gonna try to get to the Catskills every weekend, to spend my days under cold waterfalls along Katerskills creek. I'm a gonna see some sunsets. Lot's of them. Follow the movements of the stars.

When's the last time I knew where Orion was going to be at any particular time. When's the last time I could predict where Venus would rise? Not since moving to New York. I can tell you that.

For a few d more

2009-05-29T19:28:00.003-04:00

I saw "Up," you know, the new Pixar film, with John Bob today. It's a very well-made movie. Pretty much flawless. Except perhaps that it's too flawless. Maybe it could use a flaw or two. Regardless, those Pixar dudes sure know how to tell a story. Gotta love em for that. And enjoy it while it lasts. Cause you know that after the first flop Disney will be taking control and fucking everything up.

I also saw it in 3D. Not by choice. There was no choice at the local somewhat affordable theater. Pixar handled it well. The 3D was never annoying, at least not after the opening credits, and there were a few scenes where it worked very well. Those were subtle, not pointy things flying at the camera. The technology does give the director significantly more and better framing options.

The previews, however, featured upcoming 3D movies that were obviously horrible. Although Pixar did it well, my advice is to be very, very afraid for the future. Cause far and away the biggest thing that 3D enhanced was the price of the ticket. Added about $5, it did. Well, movies haven't been for the poor for awhile now. Pretty soon they won't even be for the middle class.

Education news

2009-05-28T17:28:00.003-04:00

I hope you don't see me as one of those people who bore everyone with all the details of the lives of their kids. I only share Jane Bob's experience because it illustrates educational issues that are widely reported and discussed. And never fail to keep in mind that chuckling on-line magazine is a fictional publication. Any personal details may or may not be fanciful. Best to just assume they are.

Anyway, Jane Bob's SAT scores are in and she did okay. She took the PSAT before she started test prep. The PSAT predicts what a kid will get on the SAT. She scored 100 points higher than predicted. So in our case, the test prep was probably worth 100 points. That sounds about right. People who argue that test prep doesn't significantly favor those who take it claim it adds 10 to 30 points. Those who sell test prep claim it adds about 200.

In our case, that 100 points was the difference in being in the middle and being near the cut-off point for what it takes to get into the selective schools. That's a significant difference. A lot of people get left on the bottom side of that divide for lack of 100 points. If you care about getting your kid accepted into the selective schools, you really should consider some serious test prep. Not just a weekend. Several months, at least.

You probably aren't properly imagining how stupid I recognize this high stakes testing to be. Jane Bob spent five months going to a three hour class once a week and taking a practice test every weekend. If there were not big money involved, I wouldn't be able to think of a much worse way to spend that time. I really felt bad for her.

A lot of people don't realize this, I certainly had no idea as recently as a few years ago, but the most selective schools have far and away the best financial aid. Almost all of them are need blind. That means they accept kids based on their records with no consideration for ability to pay. If accepted, enough financial aid to get by is guaranteed. If you're not wealthy, Harvard is probably cheaper than Big State U. So for us, getting into one of those schools is not about prestige or ambition. I'm just hoping Jane Bob can come out of college without having sold her immediate future for student loans.

Memorial day

2009-05-27T19:01:00.003-04:00

Room 208

2009-05-24T16:22:00.006-04:00

A couple years ago my daughter Jane Bob was looking for something to read and asked me to recommend a book. This came as quite a shock because she'd always been hostile to any reading advice I might give. Now she was asking for it?

I looked across the book shelf and picked out "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami. She looked at me with undisguised disgust. It's like a gazillion pages. Don't worry, I said. You'll like it. It's like totally inappropriate for a kid your age. Really? Yea, really. Only a totally irresponsible parent would recommend that book.

So she took it and I forgot about it. A couple weeks later she gave it back. Did you like it? Yea, it was good. Thanks.

I liked it when I first read it, and then I read "Kafka on the Beach" and liked that as well. But over the years I got to wondering if Wind-up Bird was really that good. It was a page turner, sure, but was it great literature?

As someone who probably took a few too many English classes in college, I tend to consider whether or not someone is a great writer and if his or her work is great literature. What is great literature? Impossible to say, precisely, but it usually involves some combination of great writing and great insight into the human condition. Is Murakami a great writer? Is Wind-up Bird a great novel? I finally got around to reading it again.

Several years had passed and I found I didn't remember many of the story details. That happens a lot, I think, with page turners. You get so engrossed in finding out what's going to happen that you kind of skim important parts leading up to the resolution. But this time I was more interested in what it was "about" than in what was going to happen.

So, you read Wind-up Bird, I said to Jane Bob. What was it about? It's about a guy whose wife leaves him and he spends the rest of the book trying to get her back.

Wow, I said dumbfounded. I never thought about it that way. So what did you think it was about? she asked. You're supposed to be some kind of Mr. Literature aren't you? I don't know, I said. That's why I asked. I guess if it were a question on a test, I'd say something like it's an examination of Japan trying to move into the modern age while still mired in its supernatural heritage and lingering angst about the war.

What did she think about all the supernatural stuff? Really made it interesting. What did she think about all the WWII historical stuff? First she'd heard of it (her U.S. History class didn't even get to WWI), but it was interesting. Was it great literature? I don't know Dad, I'm leaving now.

After reading "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" again, I don't think it will prove to be great literature. Cause when you cut through all the supernatural and historical elements, it's simply about a guy whose wife left him and he's trying to get her back. The idea that heaven and earth play super complicated games that involve the lives of millions over some guy's missing wife is a bit too much.

But as always, I may be wrong. Murakami could well be like Miyazaki. Perhaps his references to the supernatural aspects of Japanese culture go over the heads of ignorant westerners and there is much more depth to the story than we can comprehend.

The New York Times had this to say. I don't know about any of that, but Wind-up Bird an enjoyable read and a good page turner. I guess time and more intelligent readers than I will ultimately determine its literary merit. Jane Bob, btw, has never asked me for another reading recommendation. My advice on that score: If your teen-aged daughter asks for reading advice, recommend something with significantly fewer than a gazillion pages. Maybe "Even Cowgirls get the Blues?"

Science news

2009-05-21T19:48:00.009-04:00

That pic's from the Creationism Museum in Kentucky. Note how both the girl and the dinosaur have shit eating grins. Lot's daughters got nothing on that girl.

Today's top story

2009-05-20T18:28:00.003-04:00

Another study in contrasts

2009-05-18T18:49:00.006-04:00

Back to our regular scheduled programming

2009-05-16T16:25:00.005-04:00

I've mentioned that my daughter Jane Bob is preparing for college. She's currently mired in the insane test taking phase, but I'm trying to look ahead. We've been to a couple dog-and-pony shows. Representatives from five colleges give short speeches and then take questions. They are quite erudite, but you learn next to nothing about what it's like to attend any of those places.

Fortuitously, I found a very helpful book out on the sidewalk in front of a used bookstore on Court street. The author got to wondering how life at a residential college had changed since he went to school in the 60's. He spent time in residence halls at 12 colleges (including my alma mater) in (somewhat) diverse geographic regions. The book it titled “Binge.” It has two subtitles, or I guess one subtitle and one uber title. What do you call a blurb like a subtitle that actually goes over the title? Anyway, they add up to “Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess: What your College Student Won't Tell You.”

Sounds pretty scary, eh? Bingeing. Disconnection. Excess. Gotta sell books I guess. I'm surprised they didn't mention sex since sex is an important part of the book.
But although it's portrayed that way on the cover, the book is actually not alarmist at all, and only minimally judgmental. The author makes a good effort to accurately describe what it's really like to be in college these days, or at least what it was like in 2005, which is not so long ago.

The book is not, as the title suggests, primarily about excess drinking, but bingeing does get mentioned a lot and merits its own chapter. An interesting part explains how efforts to control alcohol consumption on campus have led to dramatically increased alcohol consumption. Since students can no longer be seen in public with alcohol, they now have to drink easily-concealable hard liquor rather than beer. And after they've smuggled the hooch into the dorm, they have to do their drinking before they go out. So they huddle quietly in little circles guzzling hard liquor as fast as they can. Plenty of stories detail the deaths of young people who had 20+ shots in a compressed time period. Prohibition always fails. Spectacularly.

And of course the book touches on the state of racial segregation, which is reportedly severe. I've read again and again, including in “Binge,” that every college has its “Black” table in the dining hall and that people of recent African ancestry are likely to catch some flack for not sitting at the black table. And not just a black table, but a variety of other separated tables. Apparently there is a good deal of segregation in roommate assignments as well.

I was talking about this with other parents and an African woman made some interesting observations. She had come to the United States and gotten an undergrad education at a rural college. She had dealt with the issue of dining hall segregation. She explained that she had lived in the foreign student dorm and sat at the foreign student table during meals. From that experience she understood the social forces resulting in the segregated table phenomenon. Every now and again, one of the foreign student regulars would try to assimilate with some white American table. The foreign student regulars would make “who does she think she is” type comments. There was a general feeling of condemnation. Not from the African woman, mind you, but she understood where they were coming from.

The African woman drew “why aren't you sitting with us” attention from the black table and felt like maybe she should sit there, at least on occasion. But it turned out she wasn't entirely welcome. She says there was an impossible-to-define tension she felt coming from the American blacks. She said that there was another level of segregation at the black table, based on the relative darkness of one's skin. She was pretty much always the blackest person in the room, so double cursed. She returned to her people at the foreign students table and soon moved off campus.

Dealing with that kind of shit is going to be challenging for Jane Bob. Here in Brooklyn, we live in a fantasy-like world of near color blindness. Jane Bob and her friends have a wide variety of skin tones, but they're all very similar socially. No one pays all that much attention to your skin tone round here. The African woman told a little story that brought that point home. She'd recently spent a few weeks out in the heartland. She said she was shopping in a mall and noticed someone looking at her, an African American woman about the same age. She realized that she and the other were the only black people in sight. The black woman smiled and nodded. The African woman returned the gesture. The African woman told us that she had lived in New York for so long that she had forgotten what it was like being a highly visible minority and she was surprised when she felt it again. Out in the sticks black people tended to acknowledge one another as kindred souls in a sea of other. Just like at the colleges. There was usually a black table at work. It wasn't the best way to organize a society, but it was apparently natural. At least in an otherwise unnatural environment.

As you can probably imagine, I'm starting to cop an attitude about all this college crap. Jane Bob's going to have to read the book and formulate a list of questions based on it. Then she can ask those questions at her college interviews and make her own decisions.

Today's top story

2009-05-14T17:59:00.005-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-05-12T19:55:00.008-04:00

I don't know if I've ever told you that I'm a big Star Trek fan, but it's true. I'm one of those people who go to conventions and then dress up and wait in line for days before the movie opens. I've seen every episode of the original series like a gazillion times. I have an outfit like the robot Porrofatto, an obscure character with a caustic wit from one of the earlier episodes. Not many R. Porro's out there, I tell you what. Anyway, I stood in line all weekend, but unfortunately I was in the wrong line and didn't get into the opening. So I didn't see the movie until today after work. I took John Bob along because he hates Star Trek and I am an evil parent.

If you, too, are a serious trekkie and haven't seen it yet (hardly possible, I know)quit reading now. I'm about to give it all away. The new Star Trek movie tells the story of how the crew came together -- Jim, Bones, Spock, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura as very young people. Tears came to my eyes every time they hit a familiar note from the old show. I bawled on several occasions, like when Spock said "live long and prosper" or when Scotty said something along the lines of "She can't take it any more, she'll be breakin up." If Bones would have said "he's dead, Jim" I probably would have had to be institutionalized. It was bad enough as it was. My constant crying made others in the theatre uncomfortable.

But I did have several problems with the movie. For one, Kirk got beaten up constantly. He lost every fight he was in. It was like watching a twisted version of "The Passion of the Christ," only with a fictional character I cared about. William Shatner never would have lost all of those fights. And Uhuru chose Spock over Kirk. That would never happen. Not in 1968. Not ever. I tell you what. And the guy playing Spock from the future, Leonard Cohen I think, is way old. The plot? It turns out that all of the history of Star Trek as we know it was wiped out. A Romulan changed the timeline. Every episode we've ever seen never happened. Episodes? What episodes? It's all becoming cloudy. Star Trek Voyager? What the hell was that? William Shatner is a lawyer. Denny Crane, Denny Crane. It was all a bad dream. And now I'm awake. And in this timeline I am cool. Very cool. I don't dress up like anybody. Well, maybe like Joey Ramone, but not in a stupid green smock like before. Hallelujah. Great fucking movie. Changed my life.

And John Bob liked it. He wants to be Mr. Spock next Halloween. Not such a great idea. I tell you what.

Picture of the day

2009-05-10T23:12:00.003-04:00

Wild Brooklyn.

Studies in contrast

2009-05-09T09:33:00.003-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-05-07T18:37:00.002-04:00

Picture of the day

2009-05-06T17:46:00.008-04:00

I was flipping channels a few minutes ago and came across Chris Matthews arguing with Tom Tancredo, and losing badly, about creationism vs. science. Tancredo, an extreme right wing xenophobe, if not much worse, wiped the floor with Matthews. If I were more of an idiot, I might think that creationist argument makes a lot of sense.

I know, I know, Matthews is a clown but so are altogether too many other people on any particular issue, myself included. Still, a big time tv interviewer should be prepared to destroy a creationist. They're paid a lot of fucking money to prepare for these interviews. A high schooler should be able to tear the creationist a new asshole. Easily. Fuck man, in this day and age, the demonstrated ability to destroy creationist arguments should be a requirement for graduation. It's a low bar, granted, and I'm not saying it should be the only requirement for high school graduation, only one of many. But anyone who can't jump that minuscule hurdle should not be given a diploma. On a bad day I'd almost argue they shouldn't even have the right to vote. People who can't effectively argue with lame-ass creationist bullshit are too poorly educated to function responsibly in a democratic society. I know, I know, democracy is inherently non-exclusive. Wouldn't work any other way.

But what about the people who make those lame-ass bullshit arguments for creationism? Are they really that stupid? Or do they have other agendas? Are they just reeling in the rubes as a means to some other end? Or both?

Both, I'm sure, but I've noticed that the creationists talk about the horrors of the modern world almost as much, if not more than they talk about the inerrancy of the bible and their 6000-year-old earth theories. They really hate the modern world. Dinosaurs on Noah's ark get the kids through the doors, but the explicit message once they're in the door is that the modern world sucks. Wanna fix it? Visit the gift shop, you'll find all kinds of useful information. There are dinosaur toys for the kids. Dinosaur clothes for the little ones. Dinosaurs are so cute. Kids love them.

Creationists have clever-sounding arguments, exquisite logical fallacies, that appeal to the poorly educated. Simple answers to simple questions. They have training programs to help those so inclined make those simple argument. They go to training seminars. They buy training DVDs on-line. They learn how to make those simple arguments. Wanna fuck with them? They know what you're going to say and they have a well-practiced answer for that. And they count on you to publicly show respect for their religious beliefs. You have your opinion, they have theirs. If you are going to argue with them, you'd better be prepared with facts. Cause they are prepared for you.

You won't see them explain themselves so nakedly on national television, but in the deep recesses of their culture they phrase it this way: Beliefs are beliefs and we all have them. So when it comes down to it, who are you going to believe? The sad deluded souls rotting in this hell of a modern world or God? Who you gonna believe, huh? Lost souls? Evil people? Or God?

Picture of the day

2009-05-05T17:44:00.012-04:00

We're living in a significant time. Great changes are possible and the consequences of missing these opportunities to change will most likely prove devastating. If history demonstrates anything it demonstrates that turning our fortunes over to greedy sociopaths is not a good move. Boom and bust cycles are predictable. Sustainable? No. My nephew works for an advanced business degree at Wharton. I know another guy who went to the same elite business-oriented school in Paris, also went to Wharton and became a successful derivatives trader. Both of them think highly of American freedom and capitalism, not that they make any differentiation between the two, and are happy to sing our praises to anyone who will listen. France? Nice place to grow up and get a fine education. The wine wine is fine fine and the dining as well. Socialist hellhole though. Can't make your billions there. Really sucks. Not like the U.S. where freedom is free and if you're smart they'll pay you for it. The graduates from Wharton and a few other top business schools dominate the financial markets. They've pocketed uncountable billions of dollars. Set for life, they are. Not just their own lives. Generations of their progeny. They'll fuck up anything, anything on earth or outer space, for that money. Those assets. The prestige. More than anything, the prestige. They need help.

Now is one of those rare moments of history when the sociopath greedheads have exposed themselves as the sociopath greeheads they are. They have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that they care fuckall for anything not related to their net worth and that unconstrained, will destroy anything that crosses their paths. Unchecked, they'll destroy anything, even the world. An overwhelming majority of leading scientists are quite clear on this. Unchecked capitalism will destroy the world. For humans anyway. Never mind the billions of individuals that die from other species. The story ends the same way in too many fields of science.

Someone (responsible, you know, I don't mean me) needs to explain all this to humanity at large and the American people in particular so that we can enact checks and balances to stop these sociopaths from fucking everything up so badly. We need to use our tax and other financial laws to herd these types into less destructive avenues of attaining personal satisfaction. They could be carnies or something. Guess your weight. Three card monte. Not exactly respectable, but relatively harmless. Now is the time to make that argument. That greed is not good. Now, when just about everyone knows it's true.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen. We're going to give "greed is good" at least another chance or two to prove itself a utilitarian philosophy. To prove, against all evidence, that a rising tide lifts everything in the water.

Picture of the day

2009-05-03T10:01:00.008-04:00

I'm starting to dread Fridays. Last Friday everyone in my company got a significant pay cut. This Friday the landlord raised the rent. Just a slice of life in the New Depression, eh? What will next Friday bring? I don't even want to know.

My daughter Jane Bob is finishing up her junior year in high school, which means tests and lots of them. I don't mean tests in whatever subjects she's studying at school, those are pretty low stress. No, I mean college related tests. She took the SAT with writing yesterday. By the end of the month she will also have taken three SAT II's, the ACT and three AP's. What a bunch of shite, eh?

We've pretty much done everything the right way, but a lot of parents out there are plumb crazy. Did you know that typical over achieveing parents arrange diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder for their kids so that they can do better on the SAT? I shit you not. The ADD diagnosis benefits the test taker two ways: he or she gets twice the time to finish the test and a dose of Adderall on top of that. Adderall is an amphetamine that helps a child focus and increases stamina. It's good for at least 50 points on the test. Reportedly.

Imagine that. Giving your kids amphetamines for 50 points on a test. What kind of monster would do something like that? But you gotta give them this. The test is important. Jane Bob went to an exhaustive test prep class for almost six months. She had taken at least 10 practice tests before taking the real one yesterday. The practice tests were composed of medium and difficult questions, no easy ones. But the practice paid off, as it always does. She felt she did very well on the real thing and given all her experience, I'd be surprised if she didn't get the score she needs. Hopefully, she'll only have to take the test once and can move on. Most of the really motivated parents make their kids take the test several times. The colleges only see the best scores on each section. Crazy stuff, huh?

So yea, I'll be glad to see the stupid tests over with. Then we can move on to college selection and applications. She'll also have to take challenging subjects and do well in class for the fall of her Senior year, which won't be a problem. Poor kid is taking Physics and Calculus. Nuts, innit? The payoff for the kids that do what it takes is that they don't have to do anything the second half of senior year. Europe on spring break. Turn eighteen. Party. Of course if she fucked up yesterday, we might have to look into the ADD thing after all. Maybe twice the dose would add 100 points?

Just kidding. Although we've gone through the motions of doing everything that has to be done to get in an elite school, we've never been obsessed with it or gotten stressed out. We were very fortunate to get Jane Bob into a high school that doesn't do grades, so we don't have to worry about GPA, which is a stress factor up there with the SAT for kids in a normal school. The other day we were at a large get-together for high achievers and the woman running the show asked how many of the kids were horribly miserable in school this year because all of the college related stress, especially the need to make good grades, a high GPA. All of the hands went up except those from our school. Jane Bob and most of her friends have no concept of what it's like to be miserable in school. That is something I could never have imagined back in my day. I couldn't imagine not being miserable in school. So I consider getting kids through high school without being miserable the greatest possible parental accomplishment. By far. We're almost there.

The disappearing middle

2009-04-28T17:00:00.009-04:00

Senator Arlen Specter's celebrated switch to the Democratic party is a bad bad thing A bad bad thing and a harbinger of bad bad things to come. The immediate result is the loss of a senate seat. Had a real Democrat won two years from now in Pennsylvania, the Democrats would have another seat. But if Specter is permitted to keep the seat as a nominal Democrat, it effectively stays Republican. As he says, changing parties won't change the way he votes. He's just betting it will change the way people vote for him. He's betting Pennsylvania Democrats are a bunch of chumps.

And given the numbers in play and the sudden change from the Constitution's simple majority to the need to have sixty votes to pass any meaningful legislation, Specter's tactical move will make it significantly more difficult for Obama to get anything progressive done--even if he is so inclined--which is not altogether certain. Specter is still a right winger. He's on record as saying he's not going to vote differently. The only change is that now he will join right wing Democrats in obstructing progress within the party. He couldn't achieve that any longer as a nominal Republican. The right wing, or in official parlance "moderate", Democrats are actually right wing Republicans. The nominal Republicans have gone so far off the deep end to have rendered themselves meaningless with their hatred and hysteria. They are no longer Republicans in any historical sense of the term. They're just a flaming bunch fucking nutzis. The right wing of the Democratic party's where the money will be made.

Let's hope netroots or somebody kicks Specter's ass in the primary and then beats him again in the general election. The general election? You know he'll pull a Lieberman if it comes to that. And if it does come to that, he'll have the support of both the Democratic and Republican organizations -- and probably the White House as well. Progressive talk is all well and good for fund raising and winning elections, but you wouldn't want to actually have the votes to implement any of it.

Substitutes

2009-04-26T07:24:00.013-04:00

Because God is perfectly holy, He must punish sin-- either the sinner himself, or a substitute to bear His wrath.

-- From The Seven C's of History, a publication ofthe Creation Museum

Above all, God loves Himself and upholds His glory, and to uphold His glory as infinitely valuable requires that punishment be executed on those who profane, or disgrace, God's glory.

-- Random wacko on the internets

Everybody writes about this, so I'll limit myself to just a few points that I don't see others making.

The primary function of torture is to punish dissent. Nazi's, Communists, Latin American strongmen, Bush's band of bad men (and Condi)... Doesn't matter. At heart, they cannot stand the idea that someone somewhere disagrees with them and when freed from all legal restraint they ache to make the dissenters pay in the worst possible ways.

It has been noted in the big media, albeit rarely, that torture is more about extracting confessions than gaining useful information. But again, those confessions, false or otherwise, are used to justify the state theology that dissent is wrong and dangerous. And I don't doubt that there is an element of sadism at the highest levels, butI think that kind of sick pathology is more abundant among those who actually carry out the torture. Still, it's not hard to imagine sick fucks like Bush and Cheney relishing in the pain of those weak, powerless peons who disagree with them. You can't deny the element of power.

The second point that is never made is that the U.S. has been a torturing nation for a long time. We have trained and otherwise enabled torturers throughout Latin America and the rest of the third world at least since the beginnings of the cold war. A lot of that is well-documented and supports my point above. There was never any ticking time bomb. 100's of thousands of people suffered horribly and many died to placate the sick egos and insecurities of the powerful. The only difference these days is that we have cut out the middle men.

Oh, we're not Argentina, they say. We're not torturing out own citizens because of their political views. Well, not yet, but now that it's all out in public and nothing will be done to the perpetrators, it's clear we're sliding down that slope. And you must know know it will be worse the next time violent Republican know-nothings come to power. If not next time, the time after. They always believe that anyone who opposes them is unpatriotic. It's a small step from unpatriotic "threat to national security." And they'll get the confessions to prove it. By torture? What of it? These are traitors we're talking about. They deserve whatever they get. You're not one of them, are you? No? That's what they all say, eh? What about your neighbor?

But what I really don't get, and maybe you can explain this to me? is why no one brings up the question of whether it's okay for foreign governments to torture Americans. Would the Republican asshats sing the same tune if Iran wore torturing confessions out of Americans. Probably not. Someone has done some good reporting to let us know that the U.S. has a history of prosecuting foreigners, even executing them, who have tortured American prisoners. Why can't Chris Matthews or any of the other prominent asshats ask that fucking question? How hard can it be?

Springtime is here!

2009-04-23T19:40:00.013-04:00

You know I spend a good deal of time reading the lefty blogs and I don't think I've read a word about the arrival of spring. I suspect that illustrates a good part of the problem with political people, all too many seem to be entirely disconnected from the natural world. Not just political people. Just about everybody. The problems that logically ensue. the damage that is done... incalculable.

Nevertheless, it's here. Spring is here and the earth is singing. Get out there and listen. That's my humble advice. Soon it will be oppressive summer with its mosquitoes, spiderwebs, humidity and such. Get out now while you can.

You see? I'm enthused. So fucking enthused I'll leave you with a poem, a Rimbaud poem no less. Can't have springtime without a sappy poem, no? I think this one is an apt metaphor for springtime in NYC:

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

You'll thank me for that. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for at least a few minutes. Happy spring!

Time travels, pt. 1

2009-04-19T10:47:00.008-04:00

Editors note: Since I'm not going to finish the entire essay about our visit to the Creationism Museum, and other parts west, anytime soon and I don't want to leave chuckling on-line magazine with no new content, we've decided to publish it as a serial. Below is part 1, which most likely will be some other part in the final essay.
___________________________________________________

For a while, things were perfect in the Garden of Eden. As Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful garden (planted especially for them by God). They could eat of any tree in Eden, except one. This first couple had a perfect relationship with their Creator, a perfect marriage and a perfect place to live. The animals, which Adam ruled over, got along perfectly. But something obviously corrupted this “very good” world, turning it int the world we see today, which is full of sickness and death.

Because of Adam's disobedience (sin), all of his descendants (you and I) are born with sin in our nature. Because of Adam;s sin, our bodies will die. Because of Adam's sin, God cursed His precious creation. The world we see today, while reflecting God's original creation, has been corrupted by sin.

My good friend K. died a couple weeks ago. Or was it a month? Either way, I was unable to attend the funeral and it was too late to send flowers by the time I learned about her death. I knew I'd be visiting the old home town in a few weeks anyway, so I put off making a condolence call to her husband until I could do it in person.

So the first thing on my agenda was to see F. and tell him how sorry I was. Everyone told me he was devastated. I brought a joint along, as is the local custom. F. always liked to get high and that hasn't changed. He had his own dope and wouldn't think of smoking the crap I had managed to bum. I knew it would play like that going in, but I like to follow social conventions and he appreciated my efforts. It's pretty much all we've got. K was 51 when she died. Looked like 85.

K's death was horrible. She. suffered mightily for many years. Oh, I know, the end was sudden. She keeled over from a sudden heart attack and was gone before her head hit the steering wheel. That's what the paramedics said and it made everyone feel a little better. No suffering. Here one minute, gone the next. Poof.

But in reality she had been dying for a long time. Her son was killed a few years ago when the road curved and his car went straight into a ditch and flipped end over end across a wheat field. N was thrown through through the window. He broke his spine and cracked his head, killed when he hit the ground. N hadn't been drinking and only pussies wore seat belts back then, so it wasn't his fault. He had a little weed in his system but that wasn't the cause of the accident. People blamed it on lack of sleep from the messy divorce he was going through. That and working two jobs to support the baby. Sounds bad, I know, but that's pretty much everybody's story back there. K suffered every moment from when she got the call that he was dead to when her heart gave out for real in the plastic factory parking lot.

K had been a beautiful woman, but when I saw her a year after N's death she looked like a meth addict. She was beautiful one year. A craggy faced hag the next. I'm glad I didn't see her at the end, when she had actually been smoking meth for awhile. Must have been the ugliest woman alive.

According to F, she had complained of chest pains and numbness for several days before she died. He told me that during that time she had also drank a big box of wine, took over a hundred Xanax, smoked a little meth and smoked weed and cigarettes pretty much constantly. I was very surprised to hear that. The drug use was nothing new of course, but it was the first I'd ever heard of her drinking. That struck me as odd. Very odd.

But it got odder fast. F told me she had been hanging out at the bar, giving blow jobs in the parking lot and fucking old bikers in their oil stained garages. Said he caught her with some guy, told him, that's my wife, buddy. Here's five dollars, go buy her a beer. Don't ask me what the fuck that meant. I didn't ask him.

As an aside, those guys she was reportedly fooling around with must have been some serious losers. A normal man wouldn't let an old meth hag like that get anywhere near his dick. F didn't see it that way though. He was still in love. She was still beautiful. It wasn't her doing those things. It was the alcohol. As soon as she quit drinking, he would forgive her and they could go back to the way they were.

Although K deteriorated rapidly after N's untimely death, she had been unhappy for the fifteen years she had been married to F. Previously, she had been married to a friend of mine, which is how I had gotten to know her so well. Back then M was a crazy adventurous guy. They were always doing exiting things, having a good time. They seemed like such an ideal family, especially after N was born. But as is only natural, M got caught fucking the babysitter and a divorce quickly ensued. F was right there to catch her on the rebound. I think she complained bitterly about her quick remarriage to F every time I saw her after that. She would have been better off staying with M. So what if he couldn't keep his dick in his pants. At least he was alive. It was better than being with boring old F. Or she could have married me and gone off traveling to interesting places (and it's true, she could have). But no. She was stuck and she hated it.

Everyone that knew them sided with F. He was nothing but a nice guy who took good care of her and gave her with everything she asked for except excitement. She should be happy, or if that wasn't possible, get a divorce and move on. But soon he got her pregnant and she stuck it out. She regularly attended a right wing evangelical church and had strong feelings about raising children in a two parent family. She also believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and would have enjoyed the Creation Museum. As the years went by she came to believe the most outrageous right wing conspiracies and regularly expressed her hatred of all "niggers" (except those who were her friends). It was due to that kind of degeneration, especially the racist jeremiads,that I hadn't seen her for for about five years before she died. She managed to cope with her marital unhappiness until her son died by going to church on Sunday, smoking prodigious amounts of weed and taking a lots of pills. There was the occasional sniff or two of crank as well. Then later, when crank became meth, she started smoking it.

I wonder now if there wasn't something more wrong with F than anyone believed. All K ever said against him was that he was boring, but who knows what else might have been going on. I know realize that his was probably a “nice guy” in the Pandagonian sense of the term. He was the friend who was always there, then he swooped in when she was depressed about the breakup of her marriage. He was the anti-M. Now I wonder about the deeper details. Sex must have been horrible for her. That's a given.

I don't know of course but he's sure a mess now. That condolences visit was one of the most uncomfortable situations I've ever been in. It was bad enough listening to him go into way too much detail about her fucking and sucking, then alternately going on about how he loved her so much, how it wasn't her doing those things, and that he would have forgiven her if she quit drinking, but I hadn't smoked any dope for a long time and his was pretty good. I wanted to back off and analyze it all intellectually, but with the dope and all I was just horrified and uncomfortable and all I could think about was getting out of there as fast as possible. I know what you're thinking and it's true. I'm not the good friend you want around in your time of need.

Anyway, as I said above, I wasn't surprised that K deteriorated and died young. That has happened, and is happening, to a lot, if not most of my friends and acquaintances from the old home town. Any sane person either gets out or gets fucked up.

Time travels

2009-04-17T20:48:00.005-04:00

Sorry for the light posting. I'm working on some stuff related to my recent trip to the real America. I did make it to the Creation Museum and plan to tell you all about it, just not now. And I have some interesting photos, many of which I will show you, but again, not now. Soon though. Soon. For now, this picture, which I'd say is worth about 2000 words (conservative estimate), sums up a large chunk of it.

No left turn on red

2009-04-11T08:57:00.002-04:00

I noticed a headline at the New York Times saying that more Americans view "socialism" favorably. The subhed questions if they even know what it means. Two observations: 1. Of course they don't know what it means. I'm sure it's just a reaction to the Republican idiots repeatedly calling Obama a socialist. Even ordinary people who don't closely follow politics realize that conservative retards have been wrong about everything. If they don't like socialism, then hey, must be a good thing. 2. Notice how the media question whether regular people know what socialism means but they never question the meaning of the word when Obama is accused of being a socialist.

More news from nowhere

2009-04-09T08:47:00.006-04:00

As you probably know, I'm on a trip that's taking me through large swathes of bumfuck. It's refreshing to be away from the big city media, to see what the small town papers have to say. Things are pretty bad out here, folks, and getting badder every day.

Each morning's news brings stories of child abusers, child molesters and meth labs. The big state news revolves around a serious budget shortfall due to significantly decreased tax revenue. The state's plan is to spend the stimulus money almost entirely on funding the state budget. There will be a little spending for new projects, but the Republican governor and the Republican congresspeople are still hashing out the details. They all agree on building more prisons. They differ in that the governor wants to slash education spending a whole helluva lot and the legislature wants to increase it just a little. Hmmmmm, slash education, build prisons. They've been doing that for years. How's that working out? See multiple stories about meth labs on pages A-3 through A-6. Meanwhile, they're sitting on a giant pile of cash they saved from when times were good. Yep, if this is any indication, not a lot is gonna get built with all that stimulus money.

Back to national news, I inadvertantly read a Mallard Fillmore editorial cartoon. Apparently, conservatives are attacking Obama as a gaffe-prone, lousy communicator. Yea, as Obama moves effortlessly on from one incredible communication triumph after another and people see him speaking well on tv every day, that hardly seems like a smart strategy. But what really strikes normal people as funny is the apparent fact that these idiots appear to have no memory whatsoever. Normal people easily recall a certain gaffe-prone president that couldn't communicate for shucks. What was that guy's name? Wait, it'll come to me. I know, I know. George W. Bush. Ha ha. Obama doesn't really need him to look good, but sheee-it, Bush ain't totally forgotten. Not yet.

Speaking of saps

2009-04-06T15:09:00.004-04:00

I was in a liquor store in the midwest today. Beer distributor is talking to the cashier, they're bitching about the economy, complaining about their sales. Beer guy asks the cashier if there's a lot Mexicans in the area. Yea, she says in a nasty tone of voice, they're fucking everywhere. You can always tell, says the beer guy as he sadly shakes his head. God damn Corona's flying off the shelves. Motherfuckers are like cockroaches, or some similar sentiment, hangs in the air, unsaid.

There are important lessons in that exchange, somewhere.

Same old story (to be)

2009-04-06T14:59:00.003-04:00

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Pittsburgh police say a man wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call, killing three of them.

Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday's shooting isn't clear. Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

So where did the gunman get the idea that Obama was going to take his guns and why isn't anyone organizing protests and boycotts against those who spread or sponsor that kind of hateful nonsense? Cause all indications are that it's gonna get a lot worse. How many more massacres by heavily armed, recently laid-off Republicans who have been propagandized into insanity by the Limbaughs, Palins, Becks, and assorted other hucksters making their millions off the poor saps before someone calls them on their crap?

Out of office

2009-04-03T18:36:00.003-04:00

I'll be away for the next 10 days or so. My goal is to not use the internet, so I probably won't be posting anything, although it's always possible in this horrible age of mobile computing and wireless networking. I'll be working on a major photo project and also going to the Creationism Museum in Kentucky. Just about everyone I know has asked me to get them a post card from the gift shop. I'm really looking forward to it.

Social democracy rules, oligarchy drools

2009-04-02T17:47:00.006-04:00

Robert Kagan, one of the most egregious intellectual failures of the 21st centuries, explains why the European social democracies are so superior to the United States oligarchy:

The Germans and French prefer welfare payments to government stimulus spending, for they are part of the passive system of social safety nets on which their citizens have grown so comfortably dependent. The creative destruction of the business-oriented political economies of the Anglo-Americans is too violent and unstable, too brutal and unpredictable. Better to regulate more tightly the international capitalists who can cause havoc through their inventiveness. Better to be less rich than less secure.

Of course he sees comfort and security as bad things. Better to have a large pool of poor uneducated suckers on the edge of economic disaster to manipulate into wars of conquest and global domination. Duh.

But the glaringly obvious problem with Kagan's analysis is the last sentence in the quoted graph. Better to be less rich than less secure? Thing is, the great majority of people in European social democracies are more rich, not less rich, than average Americans and being a whole helluva lot more secure is largely responsible for that fact. In European social democracies, it's only the super rich that are less rich than their American counterparts. That's a good thing.

Picture of the day

2009-03-28T21:58:00.003-04:00

Another from the East New York project.

Dem leader to moderates: piss off you commie wackos

2009-03-28T09:32:00.006-04:00

According to Politico, "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that liberal groups targeting moderate Democrats with ads should back off..."

Two things wrong with that.

The big honking one, obviously, is the Senate Grand Poobah telling the little people to keep their opinions to themselves, to not worry their little heads about government business and just leave it all to the strong, wise men who will handle the situation and do what's best. Yea, well, fuck him and then slash the tires on the limo he road in on. Goddammed plutocrats and oligarchs. More people need to stand up to them, not fewer.

The second, less obvious, problem with Politico's lede is referring to the anti-Obama Democrats as "moderate." They are not moderate. They are right wing. If they were moderate, their number would be more like 30. The word "moderate" comes from the mathematical concept of mode. The mode in a list of numbers refers to the list of numbers that occur most frequently. Since the majority of people support Obama, and the great majority of Democrats, then Obama supporters are by definition "moderate." The Democrats who oppose him, from right or left, are by that same definition "not moderate."

Of course I'm aware that in our right wing propaganda culture the term "moderate" is defined as "Republican." Time to push back on that crap as well.

Picture of the day

2009-03-25T18:31:00.001-04:00