I'm just going to avoid the preamble - there is something bad coming down the road, and I know it because all there is on TV are shows about prison and I got solicited at the Home Depot, for the first time in my life, for a job by a middle aged white man who then out-and-out asked me for some money to get back to Texas. Day labor is by far the most recession-responsive industry there is; if a homebuilder cuts a single house, it's the equivalent in man-hours of laying off two men for a year. And he wasn't the only one there.
Now, it's normal to find guys looking for work outside a building supply store - but not two white guys, and not on a SUNDAY morning, when all there is are just the weekend putterers who want to do the stuff themselves (otherwise, they wouldn't be there.) Imagine if NASA engineers were looking for work outside the hobby shop, hitting up the people building model rockets; you'd probably say "Things must be bad at Cape Canaveral; and you'd be right.
Now, if you think that culture responds to society in unconscious ways, then the crime shows one sees on television are the dream state of that culture; when the economy was good, all that was on TruTV and MSNBC and Nancy Grace were cases of rich white girls being abducted - which is perhaps the most perfect analogue for the Freudian castration fantasy of the American bourgeois home. Coming home on JetBlue - remember, I don't own a TV, so I never get that "frog-boil" effect of getting used to the zeitgeist - there was a marathon of "what prison is like" stories; today on TruTV - the same thing. I suspect that this is because, knowing how the crime statistics are going to go, the deep troubled mind of the nation is wondering what exactly the conditions of prison are these days, much in the same way that Sigfried Krakauer discussed the formation of a infantilized man seeking masculinity in group action in the years before the rise of Nazism. Needless to say, I have the full expectation that everything Paulson does will make the economy work - why wouldn't it? he's a Bush selection, and therefore, by proxy, is an extension of the unsurpassed ability of the President to screw up - and it will literally be years before Obama's plan - if it works - has any tangible effects on jobs.
That Is All For Now.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Bush Will Be Very Alone Soon
Oh man, between John "Disappearing Act" McCain and this from the G20, the Republican administration is nothing but a bunch of children. Furthermore, consider the fact that Mitch McConnell wouldn't speak to Harry Reid for about two weeks after the election, because he was so pissed about the Democrats trying to take his seat. Needless to say, karma's a bitch, and there's no better newscaster for pointing out the awkwardness of Bush than Rick Sanchez, who's basically a SoFla broadcasting legend (if there's such a thing) on account of the fact that he says the most bizarre non-sequiturs in human history with this very earnest tone of voice. Here though, he's gold. And he hits it right on the money; if Dubya were a young kid, and I still worked in special education, I would totally have stopped the photo shoot right then and there for a group discussion. But he's a bloody idiotic warmonger who's brought the world's economy down, progressed nothing anywhere, and must probably suck in dinner table conversation at these summits; but then again, there's always this gem from The Onion: "Bush Regales Dinner Guests With Impromptu Oratory On Virgil's Minor Works".
That Is All For Now.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
"Exploration is not so much a covering of surface as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning." Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques.
The latest study to cause some (happy) turmoil in the literature garret of the Ivory Tower is this one: "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge". Basically, the paper argues that literature, with its focus on human relationships and individual experience over quantitative analysis, can reveal systemic problems that plague development. Which is what we in literary studies have been saying since we incorporated the novel into rhetorical studies, but I digress. I should also digress from saying that the authors quote Walter Benjamin quite early on, and do so in a very cavalier and to me annoying way - but I digress from that digression.
More importantly, however, is trying explain how this should work, that novels should be included in training and opening assessments of development strategies. As someone with academic experience on both sides of this particular divide, I proffer my two cents; imagination and cognition. There. Done. Explained!
In short, imagination in this sense consists of understanding how, in the opacity of markets, knowing human affections, tendencies, desires, and relationships brings about a way around the notorious reluctance of people being studied to explain everything about themselves to researchers. As a personal example, I have to admit to my own ignorance, corrected by a novelistic imagination in the case of Random Family. Random Family is one of those books that doesn't change your life - it merely changes your mind, a much less-lauded, and yet more valuable result. Specifically, in my case, the belief that poverty is aggravated by the lack of birth control, abortion services, and family planning in the inner city. What I hadn't thought about, and which the empathy, patience, understanding, and clarity that LeBlanc brought to Coco's family rebuked me for, was the dire necessity of an inner city single mother to try and maintain a man associated with the house. What I mean by this is, is that so often when we hear about the "welfare queen", we assume that she's having children more children to qualify for food stamps or what have you. This is half-right; what she's trying qualify for is the sustained affection and loyalty of a man through having his child. The government doesn't swing by at random with money and food and clothing - a man who cares for his child will, which benefits all the children of a single mother through "offsets", that is, if the father brings clothing for just his child, then it's as if he's given the mother a discount on clothing for all the rest of her children, etc. As such, abortion is, in the real life of the streets, often a self-defeating gesture, in which the man, who now knows that the woman doesn't really have any plans for attaching herself to him, continues to use the woman for sex, without ever bringing any benefits into her home life. Now while all of this sounds fairly obvious when explained this way - at least, it makes middle-term economic sense, if not emotional or long-term sense to those of us in the middle-class or above - it was one of those facts of life which escaped me, and colored my opinions of women - and through my experiences in working in education, I've met several - who had those multiple children without any obvious way of supporting them. I personally am the wiser for having read that book, and as a simple matter of fact, could not, if someone gave me the opportunity, produce a development plan that ignored the reality that trading sex for money isn't the one-night debasement that the "Indecent Proposal" crowd would have it, but rather part of the whole structural economy of the struggling class.
Cognitively, I can do no better than recommend again the "Edge Master Class" series of discussions on behavioral economics. The liberal economic being as posited by econometricians and classical economists alike has of course been thrown out; but the implications of this rejection still remain in the fact that few economic choice studies take into account the "embodiment" of certain economic choices. For example, Dr. Mullainathan talks about "depletion", that is, the wearing down of the part of your brain that says "No, you can't do that, it's better if you wait, do this very carefully, etc." While we tend to think of willpower as something almost mystical, just like a muscle, it grows weary over time. And in this case, I'm always reminded of prison literature, specifically holocaust and gulag literature (ain't that a hell of a course title!) in which individuals make economic choices under extreme duress; and at every point, the writer intervenes to remind you that you cannot predict who will be the moral person in the camp, and whom the devil incarnate.
For example, Shalamov in Kolyma Tales writes of one person sent on an out-camp extended woodcutting job; basically, the prisoners are taken out into the woods, given an axe and a shovel, and told to chop wood until the guards return in a month or so (after all, where in the hell are you going to run to in Siberia?) What struck me about the story was the fact that, able to eat more in the woods than in the camps, the anonymous narrator tells us that the first things to return were anger, resentment, and rage, and then after that, the urge to think of escaping or something of the sort. Quite literally, the prisoners were too hungry even to think of flight or rebellion; only when they had some food in them, were they able to think of resistance. And this kind of behavior plays itself out in real life as well; the most major prison rebellion in the Soviet Union, the Vorkuta rebellion, was caused when new Ukrainian prisoners were brought into a camp full of long-term Russian prisoners. Hunger is a bitch, and knowing how people react to it, which is something that science, since the University of Minnesota experiment in World War 2, has not been able to test, requires careful examination of literature and observation to understand - if only because quantitative analysis is impossible for ethical reasons. It furthermore appears that poverty has the same sort of effects, if less dire, on political participation in democracies; poor people who feel that things are getting worse are less likely to vote than poor people who feel things are getting better, a counter-intuitive result entirely predictable if one reads The Grapes of Wrath carefully.
I want also to point out that I'm not limiting this to the written word entirely - The Wire, I feel, has as much insight into the failures of our judicial, educational, and media organizations as any given study, and certainly has vastly more appeal. And there are perhaps dozens of others I could name as well. But the notion that fiction and literature have little to tell us, all other considerations - ahem, I'm looking at you Stanley Fish - of beauty aside, is simply false.
That Is All For Now.
The latest study to cause some (happy) turmoil in the literature garret of the Ivory Tower is this one: "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge". Basically, the paper argues that literature, with its focus on human relationships and individual experience over quantitative analysis, can reveal systemic problems that plague development. Which is what we in literary studies have been saying since we incorporated the novel into rhetorical studies, but I digress. I should also digress from saying that the authors quote Walter Benjamin quite early on, and do so in a very cavalier and to me annoying way - but I digress from that digression.
More importantly, however, is trying explain how this should work, that novels should be included in training and opening assessments of development strategies. As someone with academic experience on both sides of this particular divide, I proffer my two cents; imagination and cognition. There. Done. Explained!
In short, imagination in this sense consists of understanding how, in the opacity of markets, knowing human affections, tendencies, desires, and relationships brings about a way around the notorious reluctance of people being studied to explain everything about themselves to researchers. As a personal example, I have to admit to my own ignorance, corrected by a novelistic imagination in the case of Random Family. Random Family is one of those books that doesn't change your life - it merely changes your mind, a much less-lauded, and yet more valuable result. Specifically, in my case, the belief that poverty is aggravated by the lack of birth control, abortion services, and family planning in the inner city. What I hadn't thought about, and which the empathy, patience, understanding, and clarity that LeBlanc brought to Coco's family rebuked me for, was the dire necessity of an inner city single mother to try and maintain a man associated with the house. What I mean by this is, is that so often when we hear about the "welfare queen", we assume that she's having children more children to qualify for food stamps or what have you. This is half-right; what she's trying qualify for is the sustained affection and loyalty of a man through having his child. The government doesn't swing by at random with money and food and clothing - a man who cares for his child will, which benefits all the children of a single mother through "offsets", that is, if the father brings clothing for just his child, then it's as if he's given the mother a discount on clothing for all the rest of her children, etc. As such, abortion is, in the real life of the streets, often a self-defeating gesture, in which the man, who now knows that the woman doesn't really have any plans for attaching herself to him, continues to use the woman for sex, without ever bringing any benefits into her home life. Now while all of this sounds fairly obvious when explained this way - at least, it makes middle-term economic sense, if not emotional or long-term sense to those of us in the middle-class or above - it was one of those facts of life which escaped me, and colored my opinions of women - and through my experiences in working in education, I've met several - who had those multiple children without any obvious way of supporting them. I personally am the wiser for having read that book, and as a simple matter of fact, could not, if someone gave me the opportunity, produce a development plan that ignored the reality that trading sex for money isn't the one-night debasement that the "Indecent Proposal" crowd would have it, but rather part of the whole structural economy of the struggling class.
Cognitively, I can do no better than recommend again the "Edge Master Class" series of discussions on behavioral economics. The liberal economic being as posited by econometricians and classical economists alike has of course been thrown out; but the implications of this rejection still remain in the fact that few economic choice studies take into account the "embodiment" of certain economic choices. For example, Dr. Mullainathan talks about "depletion", that is, the wearing down of the part of your brain that says "No, you can't do that, it's better if you wait, do this very carefully, etc." While we tend to think of willpower as something almost mystical, just like a muscle, it grows weary over time. And in this case, I'm always reminded of prison literature, specifically holocaust and gulag literature (ain't that a hell of a course title!) in which individuals make economic choices under extreme duress; and at every point, the writer intervenes to remind you that you cannot predict who will be the moral person in the camp, and whom the devil incarnate.
For example, Shalamov in Kolyma Tales writes of one person sent on an out-camp extended woodcutting job; basically, the prisoners are taken out into the woods, given an axe and a shovel, and told to chop wood until the guards return in a month or so (after all, where in the hell are you going to run to in Siberia?) What struck me about the story was the fact that, able to eat more in the woods than in the camps, the anonymous narrator tells us that the first things to return were anger, resentment, and rage, and then after that, the urge to think of escaping or something of the sort. Quite literally, the prisoners were too hungry even to think of flight or rebellion; only when they had some food in them, were they able to think of resistance. And this kind of behavior plays itself out in real life as well; the most major prison rebellion in the Soviet Union, the Vorkuta rebellion, was caused when new Ukrainian prisoners were brought into a camp full of long-term Russian prisoners. Hunger is a bitch, and knowing how people react to it, which is something that science, since the University of Minnesota experiment in World War 2, has not been able to test, requires careful examination of literature and observation to understand - if only because quantitative analysis is impossible for ethical reasons. It furthermore appears that poverty has the same sort of effects, if less dire, on political participation in democracies; poor people who feel that things are getting worse are less likely to vote than poor people who feel things are getting better, a counter-intuitive result entirely predictable if one reads The Grapes of Wrath carefully.
I want also to point out that I'm not limiting this to the written word entirely - The Wire, I feel, has as much insight into the failures of our judicial, educational, and media organizations as any given study, and certainly has vastly more appeal. And there are perhaps dozens of others I could name as well. But the notion that fiction and literature have little to tell us, all other considerations - ahem, I'm looking at you Stanley Fish - of beauty aside, is simply false.
That Is All For Now.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Lame Duck For Dinner
The American political system produced a unique phenomenon; because our executive leader is independently selected from our representative leaders, we have "lame duck" presidents. A president is allowed to walk around for two months with all the trappings of power, and the emergency powers invested in the position, but means nothing in terms of what we consider real power - the ability to plot judicial courses, plan legislative agendas, and produce bureaucratic initiatives. George W. Bush, believe it or not, is now - and only now - truly a useless and pointless human being.
And we've done well with the weird "spandrel" that is the lame duck; for instance, consider Prop. 8's current status in the California courts. Essentially, the ACLU has sued CA because Prop 8. represents such a radical contradiction within the Constitution of the state, that the legislature technically has to vote first before it can go to the people. Here's hoping, but the main point is, is that the Supreme Court of CA even has dibs on deciding this because of Judicial Review, the principle in which the courts can hear all acts of the government and determine their constitutionality, and thence order the Executive to do whatever it is the court wants them to do; which comes from Marbury v. Madison, a case, of course, under a lame duck president, that ragingly liberal, socialist, and secularist slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson. So there's a point there.
Then there's James Buchanan's marvelous performance right before the Civil War. Generally, most sitting presidents try to do something when various sections of the nation secede - not James "Yes America, You Had At Least One Gay President" Buchanan, who spent most of his time after losing the election dreaming about returning to someplace called "Wheatland". If you think Obama had it bad, remember that Fort Sumter had already been fired on before Lincoln even slept in the Lincoln Bedroom. That's handing a hat full of shit to a dude and telling him "Yup, you're next in the hat parade."
And then there's the last few weeks - since October 6th, in fact; everything Bush has done since then is subject to review and denial until Jan. 19th, or something like that - the details are in the article. But more or less, ol' Tumbler there is done. Maybe he could take up a hobby or something - he seems like the kind of guy who could really get into restoring old planes. That'd be good for him now, in the middle of an empty large building surrounded by harmless gizmos - as long as he doesn't come out.
That Is All For Now.
And we've done well with the weird "spandrel" that is the lame duck; for instance, consider Prop. 8's current status in the California courts. Essentially, the ACLU has sued CA because Prop 8. represents such a radical contradiction within the Constitution of the state, that the legislature technically has to vote first before it can go to the people. Here's hoping, but the main point is, is that the Supreme Court of CA even has dibs on deciding this because of Judicial Review, the principle in which the courts can hear all acts of the government and determine their constitutionality, and thence order the Executive to do whatever it is the court wants them to do; which comes from Marbury v. Madison, a case, of course, under a lame duck president, that ragingly liberal, socialist, and secularist slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson. So there's a point there.
Then there's James Buchanan's marvelous performance right before the Civil War. Generally, most sitting presidents try to do something when various sections of the nation secede - not James "Yes America, You Had At Least One Gay President" Buchanan, who spent most of his time after losing the election dreaming about returning to someplace called "Wheatland". If you think Obama had it bad, remember that Fort Sumter had already been fired on before Lincoln even slept in the Lincoln Bedroom. That's handing a hat full of shit to a dude and telling him "Yup, you're next in the hat parade."
And then there's the last few weeks - since October 6th, in fact; everything Bush has done since then is subject to review and denial until Jan. 19th, or something like that - the details are in the article. But more or less, ol' Tumbler there is done. Maybe he could take up a hobby or something - he seems like the kind of guy who could really get into restoring old planes. That'd be good for him now, in the middle of an empty large building surrounded by harmless gizmos - as long as he doesn't come out.
That Is All For Now.
"These problems aside, Washington did get his army. He opened the federal repositories to arm the troops he led into the field against the Whiskey Rebels; his force was larger than any he had commanded in the Revolution. The rebellion simply evaporated before such a show of force; the only deaths came from a pistol going off accidentally and a drunken brawl that ended with a fatal bayonet wound. One can only speculate whether the Whiskey Rebels would have behaved differencely had they known just how ignorant of firearms were most of Washionton's troops. Hardly a disciplined force, the goernment militia looted, drank heavily, and beat civilians randomly. It was neither well trained nor well armed. General Samuel Smith, commander of the Maryland militia, reported to the House of Representatives that the majority of the Virginia and Maryland troops were ignorant of the use of arms. Many did not know how to load a musket, and others had never carried one in their lives."
From Michael Bellesiles, Arming America
So, I'm reading that book above; way excellent. All about the fact that no one owned a gun, more or less, from the Pilgrims up through the Civil War, because people really knew nothing and blamed spirits and aethers for bad gunpowder. Americans were lousy shots, with something like one broken gun per fifteen people, and one working gun for every hundred people. It even seems likely that the only reason why the Founding Fathers put that Second Amendment bit in isn't to protect American's gun rights, but to encourage Americans to own guns in case they had to join the militia, since practically no white American citizen even knew how to shoot back then. Hunting had nothing to do with it, since by far the most effective hunting is done with traps, and every government passed huge gun control laws from day one, usually against the poor, slaves, and Native Americans, but also against owning dueling pistols, carrying weapons in public places, and unregulated hunting.
Against that though, is the fact that environmentally speaking, we need hunting now more than we ever needed it in the past, for the simple fact that we've populated so many areas that there simply isn't the ecological robustness for, say, a deer population to go through a full malthusian cycle and recover appropriately. For example, in Vermont in the 1970's, prohibitions on hunting does meant that the deer population reached a point where thousands of deer were starving to death every winter. Therefore, we have reached a weird, ironic point where we base our rights to own guns off of people who neither had nor knew how to use guns and needed the government to prod them to even buy them in the first place, while today, when we actually have strong conservationist arguments to keep some basic hunting guns, we argue whether or not guns are even necessary to our modern society; in short, we didn't need guns then, but we do now - but we think we needed guns then, but don't now. (Note: I'm not talking about pistols and assault rifles and such - which more than likely contribute much more to crime than they do personal safety, and certainly do nothing to intimidate the government and preserve our liberties - but the principle of hunting as a basis for even a single type of personal gun ownership.) Weird thing, society.
That Is All For Now.
From Michael Bellesiles, Arming America
So, I'm reading that book above; way excellent. All about the fact that no one owned a gun, more or less, from the Pilgrims up through the Civil War, because people really knew nothing and blamed spirits and aethers for bad gunpowder. Americans were lousy shots, with something like one broken gun per fifteen people, and one working gun for every hundred people. It even seems likely that the only reason why the Founding Fathers put that Second Amendment bit in isn't to protect American's gun rights, but to encourage Americans to own guns in case they had to join the militia, since practically no white American citizen even knew how to shoot back then. Hunting had nothing to do with it, since by far the most effective hunting is done with traps, and every government passed huge gun control laws from day one, usually against the poor, slaves, and Native Americans, but also against owning dueling pistols, carrying weapons in public places, and unregulated hunting.
Against that though, is the fact that environmentally speaking, we need hunting now more than we ever needed it in the past, for the simple fact that we've populated so many areas that there simply isn't the ecological robustness for, say, a deer population to go through a full malthusian cycle and recover appropriately. For example, in Vermont in the 1970's, prohibitions on hunting does meant that the deer population reached a point where thousands of deer were starving to death every winter. Therefore, we have reached a weird, ironic point where we base our rights to own guns off of people who neither had nor knew how to use guns and needed the government to prod them to even buy them in the first place, while today, when we actually have strong conservationist arguments to keep some basic hunting guns, we argue whether or not guns are even necessary to our modern society; in short, we didn't need guns then, but we do now - but we think we needed guns then, but don't now. (Note: I'm not talking about pistols and assault rifles and such - which more than likely contribute much more to crime than they do personal safety, and certainly do nothing to intimidate the government and preserve our liberties - but the principle of hunting as a basis for even a single type of personal gun ownership.) Weird thing, society.
That Is All For Now.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Georgia's Private Language
"A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.... 'We can't be lulled into complacency,' Broun said. 'You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential.'"
From the AP wire, a loverly quote from a Georgia lunatic. Who happens to be a Representative from Georgia - Athens, surprisingly. What I love is that noting that there's a "potential" isn't the same as "comparing"; which is true, because I've always thought that Georgia representatives had the "potential" to be baby-feasting, widow-impaling, terrorists who use that sick nitrous mask thing Dennis Hopper had going on "Blue Velvet" - but I would never make that comparison at all. Nope. Not me. I also like how Obama could be either Fascist or Marxist, because there TOTALLY isn't a difference between them. Apparently all it takes to be a representative in Georgia is the ability to string together boogeyman phrases, like "Terror rapiss abortionists with hitler's big brother in Mexico and the aclu and Osama and Homos in New York City are abducting hostage planes to assault your drinking water." and you win the sweet electoral cake of Georgia politics. Seriously, there are days when these people sound like a Francis E. Dec recording....
That Is All For Now.
From the AP wire, a loverly quote from a Georgia lunatic. Who happens to be a Representative from Georgia - Athens, surprisingly. What I love is that noting that there's a "potential" isn't the same as "comparing"; which is true, because I've always thought that Georgia representatives had the "potential" to be baby-feasting, widow-impaling, terrorists who use that sick nitrous mask thing Dennis Hopper had going on "Blue Velvet" - but I would never make that comparison at all. Nope. Not me. I also like how Obama could be either Fascist or Marxist, because there TOTALLY isn't a difference between them. Apparently all it takes to be a representative in Georgia is the ability to string together boogeyman phrases, like "Terror rapiss abortionists with hitler's big brother in Mexico and the aclu and Osama and Homos in New York City are abducting hostage planes to assault your drinking water." and you win the sweet electoral cake of Georgia politics. Seriously, there are days when these people sound like a Francis E. Dec recording....
That Is All For Now.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
She Didn't Know Africa Was A Continent
If arrogance is superciliousity combined with ignorance, then Sarah Palin is a megalomaniac according to this formula I just pulled out of my ass:
(Actual Capability + Ambition)/(Assholishness)
I'm including a +/- factor here, where someone who's good but a large asshole will get a small positive score, whereas someone who's evil but has a large assholishness will get a small negative score, so that we could theoretically plot this. Which would be, like, science.
For example, let's compare Martin Luther King to Malcom X; in this case, without having to actually assign values, we know that MLK is much less of an asshole than Malcom X, and got a whole hell of a lot more done, though Malcolm X does have a much higher ambition index. As such, MLK > MX, according to this scale.
In this comparison in the negative you'd have like Castro <> (Note: I went back and edited that inequality in the Castro < Argentinian Junta; when I woke up the morning after, I realized that the math would be all wrong; the better you are in the negative quadrant, the larger the number. Sorry for any confusion there.)
And here's what's interesting about Sarah Palin - she is so incompetent, her own incompetence actually makes her a small force for good in the world. Seriously - because of her Robert Mugabe-like incompetence, she crosses the axis into a world where she is needed and wanted because what she wants cannot be had by people who do not know the countries that make up North America and then declines to brush up on the fact because the people who make these decisions will not let someone that insanely dumb make decisions on those things. I would not be surprised if some Republicans sabotaged machines against McCain this year on her behalf - and I'd respect them more if they did. But I'll miss her, as she rides off on a scrofulous moose, now at the close of her fifteen minutes as the Paris Hilton of politics. She was everything wrong about the last eight years in an impossible way, like a Lewis Carroll parody of Milton Friedman and Jerry Falwell's gay-adopted daughter. And soon, she'll be gone. Sigh.
That Is All For Now.
For example, let's compare Martin Luther King to Malcom X; in this case, without having to actually assign values, we know that MLK is much less of an asshole than Malcom X, and got a whole hell of a lot more done, though Malcolm X does have a much higher ambition index. As such, MLK > MX, according to this scale.
In this comparison in the negative you'd have like Castro <> (Note: I went back and edited that inequality in the Castro < Argentinian Junta; when I woke up the morning after, I realized that the math would be all wrong; the better you are in the negative quadrant, the larger the number. Sorry for any confusion there.)
And here's what's interesting about Sarah Palin - she is so incompetent, her own incompetence actually makes her a small force for good in the world. Seriously - because of her Robert Mugabe-like incompetence, she crosses the axis into a world where she is needed and wanted because what she wants cannot be had by people who do not know the countries that make up North America and then declines to brush up on the fact because the people who make these decisions will not let someone that insanely dumb make decisions on those things. I would not be surprised if some Republicans sabotaged machines against McCain this year on her behalf - and I'd respect them more if they did. But I'll miss her, as she rides off on a scrofulous moose, now at the close of her fifteen minutes as the Paris Hilton of politics. She was everything wrong about the last eight years in an impossible way, like a Lewis Carroll parody of Milton Friedman and Jerry Falwell's gay-adopted daughter. And soon, she'll be gone. Sigh.
That Is All For Now.
All The Little Stories Get Their Printing
From Newsweek's "How He Did It" Campaign Follow-up:
"The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'.""
This is going to be a must read for the interim; at some point, someone will write the book on this campaign, and I will read it the way that wolverines consume meat, but until then, this will have to do. But I love that snark of Obama's up there. And now that he's President, I hope we get to see more of it. But read the article for all the other bits of insight into the campaign - like how Sarah Palin basically ripped the McCain campaign off on that shopping spree, which apparently was way more than the 150k we first heard about. Oh, Sarah!
That Is All For Now.
"The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'.""
This is going to be a must read for the interim; at some point, someone will write the book on this campaign, and I will read it the way that wolverines consume meat, but until then, this will have to do. But I love that snark of Obama's up there. And now that he's President, I hope we get to see more of it. But read the article for all the other bits of insight into the campaign - like how Sarah Palin basically ripped the McCain campaign off on that shopping spree, which apparently was way more than the 150k we first heard about. Oh, Sarah!
That Is All For Now.
The Most Sickening Picture of The Day
From the L.A. Times, a picture from a celebration for the passing of Prop. 8, banning gay marriage. How someone can celebrate something like that makes me nauseous. Maybe those Christofascistic homophobes are onto something about the link between gay sex and bestiality - because all I see in that room full of pro-Prop. 8 supporters are a bunch of swine. To force someone else to get divorced because you're not comfortable with their relationship, well, as the old Jews say, may you hurt where you breathe. And it certainly shouldn't be something you celebrate, any more than you should celebrate harsher penalties for every crime on the book, failing and closing public schools, and hospitals instituting "no insurance, no treatment" policies - because when you celebrate the failure of government and the institution of punitive measures against people who bear no relation to you, you fundamentally reject the notion of "the social", replacing it with "the natural", in which we are animals fighting for our little scratch of dust, alone, and without hope of progress or unity. That picture - that's the face of hatred of America, not ACORN, Bill Ayres, or Ralph Nader. That's the picture that wants to hurt, ban, and ultimately eradicate anyone who actually uses their freedom to bridge the gap between lonliness and love, rather than buy belt-buckles and sub-prime mortgages. One can only hope that this represents the crest of the wave of sexual hatred in this country, and that over the next few years, we begin to see the repeal of these amendments.
Oh, BTW - "Campaign contributions came from every state in the nation in opposition to the measure and every state but Vermont to its supporters." Fuck yeah, VT. Way to once again lead the country in being goddamn awesome. To recap: first in the nation called for Obama, only law school to lose government money for its opposition to allow army recruiters on campus because of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", Howard "Fifty-State Strategy" Dean, and now only state not to have a single person who gave a dime to California Hatin'.
That Is All For Now.
Post Election Notes
So, a few things. Americans decided a couple of things last night - a black man could be president; gays still aren't really human beings; marijuana should be more legal than it is; abortion is more-or-less acceptable as is; and in Washington, you can finally get help from your doctor in offing yourself.
The California vote is interesting; the gay marriage ban is 52-48, while the abortion limits is 48-52. Which means that about 4% of California's electorate thinks abortion is ok, but gay marriage is not. Weird, weird, weird. I'm trying to put myself in that headspace, and it's not working out alright. I would have to believe absurd things like popcorn is weasels to make that make sense. Ain't nothin' so queer as folk, as they say. On the other hand, 43% of Arkansans voted to let gays adopt; give it another ten years, I think, and then we'll be able to repeal all these inane amendments. Still, CA, I'm disappointed in you. Los Angeles County even voted yes, though the full results aren't in yet.
And then there's that new CNN hologram technology, which is weird and dumb as well. I have no interest in seeing will.i.am Obi-wan-Kenobie'd, and it brings nothing to my understanding. And then there's that "Second Life" thing where they created an entire digital rotunda just to have some guy manipulate a 3d map. I'm sure these technologies have some great uses - these just weren't it. It's kind of like someone invented a technology just to suck. "Try my steel-wire toothbrush! The pain is intense and scouring!" "Ok! Let's get will.i.am to sell it!"
And finally, a fascinating article about psychopathy from The New Yorker. If you don't know much about psychopathy - and you should, since they make up one percent of the population, and yet are almost never diagnosed until they snap and push another person through a meat grinder just for kicks - read up on it. Having met one person who was definitely a psychopath, and a few others who I suspect are, they're absolutely the answer to the question, "What kind of person does that?" I mean, don't get me wrong - schizophrenics and borderline-personality disorder folk are way "interesting"; but it's the psychopaths that scare me. Fisheyes, man. They've got that stare like dead fish, and nothing seems really to change it. Talk about the psychoanalytic gaze....
Or, as they say in the article: "Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”"
That Is All For Now.
The California vote is interesting; the gay marriage ban is 52-48, while the abortion limits is 48-52. Which means that about 4% of California's electorate thinks abortion is ok, but gay marriage is not. Weird, weird, weird. I'm trying to put myself in that headspace, and it's not working out alright. I would have to believe absurd things like popcorn is weasels to make that make sense. Ain't nothin' so queer as folk, as they say. On the other hand, 43% of Arkansans voted to let gays adopt; give it another ten years, I think, and then we'll be able to repeal all these inane amendments. Still, CA, I'm disappointed in you. Los Angeles County even voted yes, though the full results aren't in yet.
And then there's that new CNN hologram technology, which is weird and dumb as well. I have no interest in seeing will.i.am Obi-wan-Kenobie'd, and it brings nothing to my understanding. And then there's that "Second Life" thing where they created an entire digital rotunda just to have some guy manipulate a 3d map. I'm sure these technologies have some great uses - these just weren't it. It's kind of like someone invented a technology just to suck. "Try my steel-wire toothbrush! The pain is intense and scouring!" "Ok! Let's get will.i.am to sell it!"
And finally, a fascinating article about psychopathy from The New Yorker. If you don't know much about psychopathy - and you should, since they make up one percent of the population, and yet are almost never diagnosed until they snap and push another person through a meat grinder just for kicks - read up on it. Having met one person who was definitely a psychopath, and a few others who I suspect are, they're absolutely the answer to the question, "What kind of person does that?" I mean, don't get me wrong - schizophrenics and borderline-personality disorder folk are way "interesting"; but it's the psychopaths that scare me. Fisheyes, man. They've got that stare like dead fish, and nothing seems really to change it. Talk about the psychoanalytic gaze....
Or, as they say in the article: "Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”"
That Is All For Now.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
In The Beginning, There Is Nothing But Foolishness And Hope
This picture is from 2006, when pollsters first began to query how people would view various match-ups. Needless to say, any reasonable person looking at this would recommend that Obama get comfy in his Senate seat. And yet, here's today's likeliest map:
It looks like someone spilled blue paint everywhere, doesn't it? And yet, here we are. Democrats have a way of doing that; I'm sure Clinton's map in 1990 looked pretty comparable, stacked up against H.W. Bush. Huzzah!
That Is all For Now.
What Next?
So, it seems Obama's going to win; personally, I wouldn't be surprised, given the early voting numbers, if Obama has essentially won already. For example, in Georgia, early voting was already up to 80% of the TOTAL 2004 voting; African-American turnout was 35% of the electorate, when historically it was 25%. Unless there's a massive surge in white McCain voters today that pushes that 35% down to 30%, Georgia could be a miracle win for Obama, despite the overall polling that has it at a McCain victory. Not that I think Obama is going to win Georgia, but I do think that that kind of impetus will bode well for closer states like North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.
But now there's the next parlor game; who will Obama appoint to his cabinet? I put together my dream team below.
State: Bill Richardson
Treasury: Paul Krugman (though it'll probably be some tool like Jamie Dimon - more likely, one of Dimon's underlings.)
Defense: Wesley Clark (I know, I know - I just can't remember any of the other senior Defense appointments/representatives from the Clinton years.)
Attorney General: Patrick Fitzgerald
Interior: Lincoln Chafee
Agriculture: Tom Vilsack
Commerce: Robert Reich
Labor: Austan Goolsbee
Health and Human Services: Barry Bloom
Housing and Urban Development: Stanley Allen
Transportation: Tyler D. Duvall
Energy: William Jeffrey
Education: Gregory Mankiw
Veterans Affairs: No Damn Clue
Homeland Security: Tossup between a governor and a career FBI/D.O.J. person
Director of National Intelligence: REDACTED
Yeah, DHS and DNI are two that I really don't know; they're so new, there's no sort of track record of what kinds of institutional policy are going to influence the selection. As for the rest, they're from the higher reaches of Dem. politics and liberal-leaning intellegensia, with some career bureaucrats thrown into the mix. That's also not including Obama's "I.T. Czar" position that he has claimed he wants to create, and who will probably be someone like Paul Allen or Larry Ellison or Carly Fiorina. I daren't hope he'd put someone like Larry Lessig or Nicholas Negroponte or even Steve Wozniak (or maybe Richard Stallman? - no, I must be on crack) in charge.
Anyway, join in with whomever you'd like to see; rotisserie cabinetry for everyone!
That Is All For Now.
But now there's the next parlor game; who will Obama appoint to his cabinet? I put together my dream team below.
State: Bill Richardson
Treasury: Paul Krugman (though it'll probably be some tool like Jamie Dimon - more likely, one of Dimon's underlings.)
Defense: Wesley Clark (I know, I know - I just can't remember any of the other senior Defense appointments/representatives from the Clinton years.)
Attorney General: Patrick Fitzgerald
Interior: Lincoln Chafee
Agriculture: Tom Vilsack
Commerce: Robert Reich
Labor: Austan Goolsbee
Health and Human Services: Barry Bloom
Housing and Urban Development: Stanley Allen
Transportation: Tyler D. Duvall
Energy: William Jeffrey
Education: Gregory Mankiw
Veterans Affairs: No Damn Clue
Homeland Security: Tossup between a governor and a career FBI/D.O.J. person
Director of National Intelligence: REDACTED
Yeah, DHS and DNI are two that I really don't know; they're so new, there's no sort of track record of what kinds of institutional policy are going to influence the selection. As for the rest, they're from the higher reaches of Dem. politics and liberal-leaning intellegensia, with some career bureaucrats thrown into the mix. That's also not including Obama's "I.T. Czar" position that he has claimed he wants to create, and who will probably be someone like Paul Allen or Larry Ellison or Carly Fiorina. I daren't hope he'd put someone like Larry Lessig or Nicholas Negroponte or even Steve Wozniak (or maybe Richard Stallman? - no, I must be on crack) in charge.
Anyway, join in with whomever you'd like to see; rotisserie cabinetry for everyone!
That Is All For Now.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Oh, I'm Gonna Miss Our Little Damaged Sarah When She Goes
Seriously, I've started to grow fond of Sarah Palin - she's so, so, so adorably dumb, and if it weren't for the fact that her ignorance lets her imagine for an instant she's bright enough to run anything that goes on in the lower 48, then I'd pat her on the head each time she tries and give her cookies often, because, well, she's apparently a gin-u-wine buffoon, like the kind we used to have in the South when some local banker made his addle-pated little brother mayor just so he didn't have to look at the idiot drooling on the deposit slips and molesting the tellers during lunch.
Here, she gets pranked by two Quebec shock-jocks, pretending to be President Nicholas Sarkozy. I will say this for her - she's a "real gal" enough to know that when you're pranked, you ask what radio station did it. If that had happened to Dubya, he would have just slammed down the phone - and if it had happened to Clinton or H.W., both of them would have instantly known something was wrong when their French came back with "wey" instead of "oui". I'm surprised she didn't request a song while she was at it. And as far as I can tell, this is the real deal. Awesome. Especially since it shows that Sarah Palin is so narcissistic, she thinks the President of France actually has time to personally call the substitute of a losing American senator. "Oh, well, he probably just wants to check in and show his support!" thinks Sarah, blissfully unaware of anything called "state protocol." "I hope he votes for me!"
That Is All For Now.
Here, she gets pranked by two Quebec shock-jocks, pretending to be President Nicholas Sarkozy. I will say this for her - she's a "real gal" enough to know that when you're pranked, you ask what radio station did it. If that had happened to Dubya, he would have just slammed down the phone - and if it had happened to Clinton or H.W., both of them would have instantly known something was wrong when their French came back with "wey" instead of "oui". I'm surprised she didn't request a song while she was at it. And as far as I can tell, this is the real deal. Awesome. Especially since it shows that Sarah Palin is so narcissistic, she thinks the President of France actually has time to personally call the substitute of a losing American senator. "Oh, well, he probably just wants to check in and show his support!" thinks Sarah, blissfully unaware of anything called "state protocol." "I hope he votes for me!"
That Is All For Now.
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