The Myers-Briggs Typology - of this blog!

From - http://www.typealyzer.com/

"INTP - The Thinkers"
The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

"Might come across as arrogant"? Excuse me? I work very, very hard to condescend, and I don't need some-jumped up computer with an online M.A. in social work and friends who think they're "just soooo perceptive!" evaluating my entire blog personality, dammit.

That Is All For Now.

How You Know What's Coming

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.