UCF has its own share of accountability issues with the Erik Plancher problem and now the NCAA sniffing around the mother hydrant of recruiting violations, but it’s hard to ignore the tribulations of JoePa at Penn State, venerable veteran of six decades in the noble service of athletic achievement for the Lions, unless you count getting distracted while your friends victimize disadvantaged children in some of the worst possible ways. All I can say is there are sick puppies out there in the Pennsylvania hills, and they don’t wear coveralls to work. It half reminds me of that old science fiction story about the kid they keep in the basement so their lives can be beautiful on the outside.
JoePa gets a million or so a year to choreograph this wonderful pageant that is athletics and send promising athletes on their way to equally lucrative careers in professional sports to the cheers of adoring throngs whose lives are made better by the joyful melee, while we sacrifice a few helpless misfit pre-adolescents for the personal amusement of his pedophile friends. Where’s the harm in that, JoePa? Isn’t that the question his morally bankrupt student posse asks when they tear up Happy Town in retaliation for facing reality? Where’s the harm in that? Is that what the employees of Enron said to Kenneth Lay? You didn’t really know what your people were doing, so it was okay? Look at all the good JoePa did for the school and those athletes and the psychic karma of the nation. Where’s the harm in that, and there’s nothing to do but state the obvious, what JoePa knows better than any of them, that you could not pack enough money on a team bus to fix what has been done and who did it. As more victims come forward, that is a condition with which the Pennsylvania school will be very familiar very soon. They need to be retaining the Catholic Church for consultation. Cheap shot.
In the end (so to speak), can I have sympathy for a sixty-year career going down in flames over what is a pretty nominal violation of basic human rights compared to Somalia and Sudan? Sure I can. Where does responsibility end? Does it end with JoePa? Does it end with an administration that failed or preferred not to investigate? Does it end with a board of governors that chose idiots for administrators, a state legislature that funds perverts, an electorate that empowered the legislature that mandated the institution that funded the program that JoePa built? Does it even end with a nation that pledges allegiance to a Constitution that authorizes state legislatures in the first place? Maybe we could argue the limits of knowledge and some kind of responsibility to know, but isn’t that really what Kenneth Lay and JoePa and you and me are all about?
Not so deep down, we are all JoePa. We all have kids in the basement, and we are all going to pay for it. Sure, I can sympathize, and that’s the part of the JoePa justice that really stinks. JoePa will never get out of it. It’s offensive on an intuitive moral level. It’s going to cost a fortune, and no matter how much we try to blame it on somebody, there’s no way out for any of us.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Monday, November 14, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Okay Bubba
Okay, Bubba Boehner (and Bubba Ryan and Bubba McConnell). For once the republicans are spot on, and why don’t we admit it? Yes, this is a class war. It’s a class war between the people who make wealth possible and the people who want the benefits without the responsibility. People with money want somebody to keep foreign threats away from them, protect them from fraud, secure their person and property for them at home, maintain their public rights of way, inspect their food, and recover their bodies when they crash their private planes. Like Warren Buffet says, their needs are out of proportion to the rest of us, but do they want to pay in proportion to their demands? No, and why should they want to pay? If they had to pay for everything they benefit from, they wouldn’t have any more money than anybody else, and then what would be the use of a class war?
I’m just asking.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=food+fight&hl=en&sa=G&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=-mGFdE2v7vrdQM:&imgrefurl=http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/menus/food-fighting-101.htm&docid=docWqKZTfze4SM&w=400&h=300&ei=QW53TuC7PM6htwez19iyDA&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=546&page=5&tbnh=113&tbnw=161&start=74&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:15,s:74&tx=97&ty=77&biw=1280&bih=784
http://if.ucf.edu/files/2011/07/JIF1Final.pdf
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Obama Against the World, or at Least a Significant Part
The only way he can win now is if things turn around, and I don’t think for a minute that the republicans are going to let things turn around. Why should they? They have plenty of money. It’s like the Great Depression. There’s lots of money, but it’s controlled by a small part of the population.
The rich are even spending money, but they’re spending it on artwork, exotic cars, and other luxury kinds of stuff. To be fair, that largesse probably trickles down to create half a dozen jobs for more of the beautiful people in the in crowd, some of which worked hard to get there, and working hard, you would think they would have some appreciation for people who work hard, but no, you’re only appreciated if you work hard and make a lot of money. If you don’t make a lot of money, they have another word for you, loser.
There are some elements in the Republican party, such as military veterans, with limited resources, who are comfortable with the appellation of loser because they learned (in the case of the military), that real men (or whatever) do not complain, do not question authority, and make do with what they are given. Anything else is a character defect.In this way, the haves are able to keep what they have by virtue of someone else’s willingness to sacrifice for the rights of the haves to have. Those who really made the sacrifices earned the right to drive around in secondhand delivery vans, collecting charitable contributions of stained mattresses, because they have inadequate compensation, inadequate health care, and less than inadequate recognition for what they sacrificed.
The military elite fit in with the Republican elite because they have the opportunity to accumulate money with a minimum of sacrifice by exploiting military contracts in some way, a well recognized principle of republican enterprise. Even some of those elite, such as John McCain, recognize the inconsistency, but as John discovered, if you complain too loudly about the injustice involved, you will find yourself without a voice.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
The rich are even spending money, but they’re spending it on artwork, exotic cars, and other luxury kinds of stuff. To be fair, that largesse probably trickles down to create half a dozen jobs for more of the beautiful people in the in crowd, some of which worked hard to get there, and working hard, you would think they would have some appreciation for people who work hard, but no, you’re only appreciated if you work hard and make a lot of money. If you don’t make a lot of money, they have another word for you, loser.
There are some elements in the Republican party, such as military veterans, with limited resources, who are comfortable with the appellation of loser because they learned (in the case of the military), that real men (or whatever) do not complain, do not question authority, and make do with what they are given. Anything else is a character defect.In this way, the haves are able to keep what they have by virtue of someone else’s willingness to sacrifice for the rights of the haves to have. Those who really made the sacrifices earned the right to drive around in secondhand delivery vans, collecting charitable contributions of stained mattresses, because they have inadequate compensation, inadequate health care, and less than inadequate recognition for what they sacrificed.
The military elite fit in with the Republican elite because they have the opportunity to accumulate money with a minimum of sacrifice by exploiting military contracts in some way, a well recognized principle of republican enterprise. Even some of those elite, such as John McCain, recognize the inconsistency, but as John discovered, if you complain too loudly about the injustice involved, you will find yourself without a voice.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
Cowboys and Aliens, the Prequel
Sorry folks. Cowboys and Aliens just didn’t do it for me. The reviews I read were promisng, and I wanted to believe, but there were too many things going on that didn’t make sense. One reviewer said we’re past the idea of aliens as strictly evil. Maybe that’s part of the problem. These aliens are grotesquely ugly in a conventional reptilian way and apparently motivated pretty much by greed, which is a one-dimensional moral lesson in the tradition of the Western for human observers, but maybe that’s one of those simplistic portrayals we’re past. An intriguing thing about District 9, for instance, is the hint that the aliens are more complex than humans give them credit for.
No danger of that here. There is a good alien, the mission-focused Ella, but only in the form of an attractive human female, another convention of the Western, portraying heroic characters as attractive Anglo-Europeans regardless of nominal ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily all that admirable of a convention of the Western. There is actually a disturbing lack of diversity in the characters. What ethnic diversity is involved is highly anglicized. Westerns weren’t renowned for acknowledging diversity, but they were also part of an anglo-supremacy that is another not-so-admirable convention.
Aside from diversity issues, however, the film suffers from some severe lapses of logic and tortured attempts to resolve contradictions that simply don’t fly. The aliens lasso humans, keep them in a kind of hypnotized storage to collect any belongings or parts that might involve gold, and eventually perform invasive procedures on them for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, they carry on subterranean mining for the same stuff. What they want it for, we don’t exactly know. Ella says it’s as rare for them as humans, but whether they use it for intergalactic jet fuel, cancer treatment, or money isn’t explained. Presumably we’re left to assume the aliens are just greedy top-gun types that underestimate the power of people to unite and prevail against overwhelming odds. I don’t know if that’s a convention of Westerns or not. I sort of have a recollection of the odds being bad but not insurmountable. The biggest obstacle is often personal inadequacy. There are attempts at that, but they are so superficial that they are almost humorous, as when the cattle baron and the Indian Chief have to reconcile their mutual suspicion of each other.
That however is not necessarily a critical failure. They got the two-fisted mysterious stranger right, but the past he’s running from is a conglomeration of law, injustice, and bad behavior. He stole money and double-crossed his friends for the sake of the girl who ends up fried by the aliens as a consequence, when Jake and his squeeze are abducted for the gold. By pluck and luck he escapes and picks up an alien wrist-gun in the process, but has no recollection of who he was or what happened prior to the abduction. Now he’s on everybody’s list and he doesn’t know why. It works up to the point where we start to find out what happened, but by the time the story is all out, it’s like okay, whatever. The entire last half of the movie is anti-climax with a sort of frenetic, Jar-Jar Binks, Star-Wars feel to it. They lost me when the posse formed up because I couldn’t understand what good these guys were going to be, but maybe that’s the point somehow.
Yeah, they got the conventions of Westerns, every one of them, ruthless bad guys, the cavalry galloping in, courageous coming of age, pacifist learns to stand up for self, etc. etc., but they missed the context. The real failure here is the failure to recognize that westerns had conventions, but every classic Western also had a unique take on the characters and a variation on the narrative that involved more than replacing the bad guys with strictly one-dimensional conventions from another genre. As hard as it is to believe, westerns like Stagecoach, High Noon, even True Grit were about individual characters in the bigger events of westward expansion. Indians, bandits, rustlers, or ruthless cattle barons are portrayed as conventional bad guys, but they function in a context of territorial conflicts that are the consequence of people struggling to mark their own space and define their own identity. Those are motivations we may not sympathize with, but we can appreciate in an intuitive way. We understand something of the psychology that produces the conflicts. Aliens whose only motivation is gold? Not so much. They’re just not really very interesting. They could give a five-year old nightmares, but so can I. They look like every evil alien since Alien, and they don’t even have reproduction at stake. They’re just mean.
Aliens trying to survive I can appreciate in an adversarial way because I can personalize somebody trying to survive, us or them. Aliens collecting gold I just don’t really care about very much because I find it hard to attribute such one-dimensional motivation to an entire race (another problem of diversity?). Greed is one thing. An entire race of greed-charged aliens that doesn’t even go through some kind of introspection is something else. The whole thing screams “VIDEO GAME” in the voice of a production marketer. Like it or not, the classic Westerns, even the bad ones, are more complex. That doesn’t mean the movie won’t be successful, just that it does not acknowledge the fundamental context of Westerns. If it hadn’t been for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and one of the best space craft destruction sequences since Challenger, it could have been a ridiculous mess. I can hardly wait for the sequel, Cowboys and Zombies. At least zombies don’t have to account for any expectations of personality. Oh wait, it’s already been done? That will be an instructive take.
No danger of that here. There is a good alien, the mission-focused Ella, but only in the form of an attractive human female, another convention of the Western, portraying heroic characters as attractive Anglo-Europeans regardless of nominal ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily all that admirable of a convention of the Western. There is actually a disturbing lack of diversity in the characters. What ethnic diversity is involved is highly anglicized. Westerns weren’t renowned for acknowledging diversity, but they were also part of an anglo-supremacy that is another not-so-admirable convention.
Aside from diversity issues, however, the film suffers from some severe lapses of logic and tortured attempts to resolve contradictions that simply don’t fly. The aliens lasso humans, keep them in a kind of hypnotized storage to collect any belongings or parts that might involve gold, and eventually perform invasive procedures on them for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, they carry on subterranean mining for the same stuff. What they want it for, we don’t exactly know. Ella says it’s as rare for them as humans, but whether they use it for intergalactic jet fuel, cancer treatment, or money isn’t explained. Presumably we’re left to assume the aliens are just greedy top-gun types that underestimate the power of people to unite and prevail against overwhelming odds. I don’t know if that’s a convention of Westerns or not. I sort of have a recollection of the odds being bad but not insurmountable. The biggest obstacle is often personal inadequacy. There are attempts at that, but they are so superficial that they are almost humorous, as when the cattle baron and the Indian Chief have to reconcile their mutual suspicion of each other.
That however is not necessarily a critical failure. They got the two-fisted mysterious stranger right, but the past he’s running from is a conglomeration of law, injustice, and bad behavior. He stole money and double-crossed his friends for the sake of the girl who ends up fried by the aliens as a consequence, when Jake and his squeeze are abducted for the gold. By pluck and luck he escapes and picks up an alien wrist-gun in the process, but has no recollection of who he was or what happened prior to the abduction. Now he’s on everybody’s list and he doesn’t know why. It works up to the point where we start to find out what happened, but by the time the story is all out, it’s like okay, whatever. The entire last half of the movie is anti-climax with a sort of frenetic, Jar-Jar Binks, Star-Wars feel to it. They lost me when the posse formed up because I couldn’t understand what good these guys were going to be, but maybe that’s the point somehow.
Yeah, they got the conventions of Westerns, every one of them, ruthless bad guys, the cavalry galloping in, courageous coming of age, pacifist learns to stand up for self, etc. etc., but they missed the context. The real failure here is the failure to recognize that westerns had conventions, but every classic Western also had a unique take on the characters and a variation on the narrative that involved more than replacing the bad guys with strictly one-dimensional conventions from another genre. As hard as it is to believe, westerns like Stagecoach, High Noon, even True Grit were about individual characters in the bigger events of westward expansion. Indians, bandits, rustlers, or ruthless cattle barons are portrayed as conventional bad guys, but they function in a context of territorial conflicts that are the consequence of people struggling to mark their own space and define their own identity. Those are motivations we may not sympathize with, but we can appreciate in an intuitive way. We understand something of the psychology that produces the conflicts. Aliens whose only motivation is gold? Not so much. They’re just not really very interesting. They could give a five-year old nightmares, but so can I. They look like every evil alien since Alien, and they don’t even have reproduction at stake. They’re just mean.
Aliens trying to survive I can appreciate in an adversarial way because I can personalize somebody trying to survive, us or them. Aliens collecting gold I just don’t really care about very much because I find it hard to attribute such one-dimensional motivation to an entire race (another problem of diversity?). Greed is one thing. An entire race of greed-charged aliens that doesn’t even go through some kind of introspection is something else. The whole thing screams “VIDEO GAME” in the voice of a production marketer. Like it or not, the classic Westerns, even the bad ones, are more complex. That doesn’t mean the movie won’t be successful, just that it does not acknowledge the fundamental context of Westerns. If it hadn’t been for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and one of the best space craft destruction sequences since Challenger, it could have been a ridiculous mess. I can hardly wait for the sequel, Cowboys and Zombies. At least zombies don’t have to account for any expectations of personality. Oh wait, it’s already been done? That will be an instructive take.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Nude Women on Facebook
If I was Casey Anthony, I’d probably be in big trouble again, because somebody would want to know why I was using my computer to search for Nude Women on Facebook, which is exactly the point. What I was searching for wasn’t actually Nude Women on Facebook. What I was searching for was an article about women who post nude pictures of themselves on their Facebook pages, which are then hacked, and the pictures end up for sale somewhere as amateur adult entertainment, which gets sort of embarrassing for Ms.Universe contestants, Dental Technicians, and Supreme Court Justice Nominees. What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had nude law school photos floating around on the Net. Would anybody take her seriously in that robe? And that goes double for Clarence Thomas.
From the publicity, you would think that women have some kind of Freudian compulsion, or maybe just a compulsion, to post nude pictures of themselves (or pictures of themselves nude) on the first available web page, as if the social expectation of attraction requires validation by visual display. Now don’t get me wrong, in principle, I approve, but as a matter of personal security, I reluctantly suggest this is not a good idea.
People underestimate how fast and how far things can go bad with personal information on the net.
http://www.wesh.com/video/28690471/detail.html
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=women&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADRA_enUS393&tbm=isch&tbnid=aTb23Rbd8vt6zM:&imgrefurl=http://video.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Abyssmia/tag/women/&docid=Ah6Qx5bJuLu9qM&w=1680&h=1050&ei=xH8xTqugKojL0QHbyYSjDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=126&vpy=161&dur=1716&hovh=177&hovw=284&tx=179&ty=96&page=5&tbnh=128&tbnw=171&start=97&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:18,s:97&biw=1117&bih=713
Monday, July 18, 2011
Whose Wand was it Anyway?
As my previous Harry Potter reviews have explained, I’m not a raging Harry Potter fan (actually not much of a movie fan at all, but my wife makes me, so I’m sort of a reluctant critic, the most objective kind). Maybe my response is best described by the scene in the movie where the loyal defenders of Hogwarts gather and unite in resistance to the evil horde, draw their weapons, and what they raise over their heads in defiance is a fringe of silly little sticks. I nearly fell over laughing.
You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.
As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.
Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.
Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.
As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.
Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.
Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The New Like
I was thrilled when I got an email from one of the discussions on Linkedin to notify me that I had a comment on my post. I eagerly connected with the discussion to find out what kind of response my brilliant education comments had inspired in the professional community. I discovered someone named Amy "liked" my post and left me a link to the thought-provoking publications of a hot lingerie retailer, and I don’t even mean hot like in stolen property hot, although maybe there is a little of that in there somewhere too. Loward knows I do what I can to consume my share of racy women’s underwear, but somehow I feel more exploited than the models. I signed up for Linkedin to find a job, not as a convenient marketing tool for some enterprising juvenile-delinquent, social-media manipulator.
The truth is that the fast and loose, free-spirited exchange of blogging, like the internet in general, is morphing into a giant multi-level marketing promotion, with the marketers using their family connections to promote commercial enterprise. The concepts of social network marketing hardly apply because networks are no longer any more social than any infomercial exploitation. Every business has a Facebook page and a Facebook link. Hell, we even have a Facebook page and a Facebook link at the Office of Information Fluency. Sometimes we even talk about doing something with it, but the truth is also that if you can’t somehow integrate that in your identity, it becomes additional baggage in already complicated lives.
Why complicate it more with commerce? An inevitable consequence, the complexity of life has caught up with the convenient illusion that electronic communication is somehow more sanitary than the people who produce it. Sorry folks, our ideas aren’t much better than we are, at least in application. Conceptually, maybe, but you have to consider who comes up with this stuff and what it is they really want. What they really want is to sell underwear, or whatever it is they really sell, probably Viagra or Botox treatments.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
The truth is that the fast and loose, free-spirited exchange of blogging, like the internet in general, is morphing into a giant multi-level marketing promotion, with the marketers using their family connections to promote commercial enterprise. The concepts of social network marketing hardly apply because networks are no longer any more social than any infomercial exploitation. Every business has a Facebook page and a Facebook link. Hell, we even have a Facebook page and a Facebook link at the Office of Information Fluency. Sometimes we even talk about doing something with it, but the truth is also that if you can’t somehow integrate that in your identity, it becomes additional baggage in already complicated lives.
Why complicate it more with commerce? An inevitable consequence, the complexity of life has caught up with the convenient illusion that electronic communication is somehow more sanitary than the people who produce it. Sorry folks, our ideas aren’t much better than we are, at least in application. Conceptually, maybe, but you have to consider who comes up with this stuff and what it is they really want. What they really want is to sell underwear, or whatever it is they really sell, probably Viagra or Botox treatments.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
A Farewell to Ereck Plancher
Okay, aside from the emotional and spiritual aspects of the Ereck Plancher situation that are beyond price, and the challenge of putting money value on the life of a human being, he was was worth ten million. I’ll give you that. Wide receivers are hard to come by in a recession. UCF knew or should have known he was at risk for serious health problems. But at that rate, let’s see. We squandered about 5,000 American lives in Iraq if you only count fatalities, and the truth is that we spent a lot more money getting them going than we spent preparing Ereck Plancher for higher education and athletic greatness, but ten million is a nice round number, lots of zeros. (If it bothers you to think of them as squandered, just explain to me what exactly we accomplished there, please. I wish someone would, someone with something like normal human sensibilities, meaning not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.) The U.S. knew or should have known invasion of Iraq was a risk of fatal injuries. At ten million a pop, that’s (10 X 5,000) million = 50,000 million, or fifty billion, right? My eyes sort of glaze over in the billions, so you have to check my numbers.
Then there are the 75,000 Iraqi collateral civilian deaths. Iraqis aren’t worth as much as Americans, of course, which explains why so many had to be eliminated, and 75,000 is vaguely in the realm of the requisite ten-to-one ratio that we approved for Viet-Nam with a comfortable margin, so for the sake of convenience, let’s do something crazy to humor my challenged arithmetic and assume (at least for financial purposes) that Iraqis are worth as much as aspiring American athletes. 75,000 Iraqi fatalities at ten million each is (10 X 75,000) million = 750,000 million, or 750 billion, right?
You know and I know there is no validity in making our military and those Iraqi civilians equal in value to college football players. The military chose to get involved, and the Iraqis had no choice, therefore, they have no legal recourse and no practical monetary value, but I’m just sort of wondering. You know what I mean? The odd thing is that the total comes out to about what has been spent on “operations” in Iraq so far.
Maybe that’s a good place to stop in more ways than one, so we don’t have to look at it too closely.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
Monday, June 13, 2011
Test the Dangerous People
I have an idea. Let’s have drug tests for state legislators. They get state money. In fact, you have to apply and meet income restrictions for public assistance, but your friends put you in the legislature regardless of how much money you have. Who is the most likely to steal the most public money? An unemployed construction worker looking for a job, or a greedy manipulator with control of state revenue? The answer to that is pretty clear, and the answer is not welfare mothers.
Here's thinking for you,
Iffy
Here's thinking for you,
Iffy
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-hypodermic-needle-image17107497
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Thursday, June 9, 2011
The Crock Heard Round the World
For once I’m about half sympathetic to Sarah Palin’s plight, which for me is going the extra light year or so in the name of fairness. On the other hand, I’m more inclined to laugh at the irony than leap to her defense. The problem, as usual, is Palin’s choice of words. Her sense of history may not be as distorted in this case as even Fox News wants to believe. The truth is that Paul Revere could have actually warned the British about the consequences of rashly intimidating the colonists by occupying their property and confiscating their weapons, but as everybody who went to the fourth grade in US public schools knows, Paul Revere warned the colonists about the British, not the other way around.
Paul Revere was a fairly prominent activist in Massachusetts. That’s partly how he happened to be tasked with surveillance and communications for colonial opposition to unilateral British administration. Whether Paul actually ever spoke directly to responsible British authorities, I don’t know, but it’s perfectly plausible. Suggesting that Revere warned the British, not in the sense of imminent action by the colonists, but warned them in the sense that their aggressive actions were going to provoke a reaction from the colonists if they didn’t cool their jets, would be within the realm of possibility.
In any case they didn’t listen to good advice, and the words “Paul Revere warned” have been forever since indelibly connected in the American psyche with raising the alarm to resist invading red coats, not with a cautionary message to the invaders themselves. Ask any properly programmed American who Paul Revere warned, and they aren’t going to reply that it was the British. To suggest any other application is as un-American as Mohammed, pedophiles, and tofu turkey. No wonder even Fox News has her on their hit list. Facts aren’t an issue for Fox news, but regardless of Paul Revere, you still have to wonder if you want someone for President with Palin’s instinct for word choice. The next thing you know she’ll be cheering on the Seventh Cavalry in memory of Wounded Knee. Well, why not? They got more Medals of Honor than any other US military engagement in history, and they should have. The Indians were poorly equipped, freezing, malnourished, and way outnumbered. That’s the real secret for carrying out any kind of successful preemptive military action. What do you mean that’s not how it’s supposed to work? Didn’t Paul Revere warn them the cavalry was coming?
That’s the best I can do for you, Sarah, and unfortunately, it ain’t much.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Paul Revere was a fairly prominent activist in Massachusetts. That’s partly how he happened to be tasked with surveillance and communications for colonial opposition to unilateral British administration. Whether Paul actually ever spoke directly to responsible British authorities, I don’t know, but it’s perfectly plausible. Suggesting that Revere warned the British, not in the sense of imminent action by the colonists, but warned them in the sense that their aggressive actions were going to provoke a reaction from the colonists if they didn’t cool their jets, would be within the realm of possibility.
In any case they didn’t listen to good advice, and the words “Paul Revere warned” have been forever since indelibly connected in the American psyche with raising the alarm to resist invading red coats, not with a cautionary message to the invaders themselves. Ask any properly programmed American who Paul Revere warned, and they aren’t going to reply that it was the British. To suggest any other application is as un-American as Mohammed, pedophiles, and tofu turkey. No wonder even Fox News has her on their hit list. Facts aren’t an issue for Fox news, but regardless of Paul Revere, you still have to wonder if you want someone for President with Palin’s instinct for word choice. The next thing you know she’ll be cheering on the Seventh Cavalry in memory of Wounded Knee. Well, why not? They got more Medals of Honor than any other US military engagement in history, and they should have. The Indians were poorly equipped, freezing, malnourished, and way outnumbered. That’s the real secret for carrying out any kind of successful preemptive military action. What do you mean that’s not how it’s supposed to work? Didn’t Paul Revere warn them the cavalry was coming?
That’s the best I can do for you, Sarah, and unfortunately, it ain’t much.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean Revisited, Revisited, and Revisited, or: Whatever Floats Your Boat
I’m a Johnny Depp fan, but not hugely a Johnny Depp fan, and that’s probably a pretty good barometer for the effect of the latest installment of the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow. This was a flick, like Penelope Cruz, pregnant with possibilities, but we’ll hope Penelope has a more successful delivery. After two hours I was pretty much squirming in my seat, hoping for a stray musket ball to end my impatience.
As a general assessment, this production suffers from a classic case of sequel effects, the dependence in a rather desperate and incoherent way on misguided ideas about what has worked for you before. The result is an array of boring, stereotypical characters, ambiguous discrimination, mediocre action sequences, and unsuccessful drama, with the exception of the striking visual effects (to which 3-D added little noticeable impact, by the way). A summary of the development is unnecessary if you have witnessed any of the previous installments. Think the original less most of the interesting quirks.
Consider some failed possibilities. The King of England is an intriguing character with a comically superficial manner but hints of underlying intelligence and perception that are never realized. What if the King had turned out to have some more profound personal agenda than simply competing with Spain? Likewise, Blackbeard is a bad guy with no redeeming qualities. He starts out in a promising way, with cynical disdain for the minor inconvenience of general mutiny on his ship, but it turns out he isn’t even gloriously or heroically bad. He’s just bad in mean and petty ways. He tortures helpless mermaids to no purpose, not even his own amusement, and rejects the loyalty of his daughter. The mermaids are just what you would expect, monsters disguised as attractive, predatory Caucasian women who must be controlled. In fact, the whole ideology achieves a largely Anglo-European male supremacist effect. The Conquistadores arrive in the end to wreck the Fountain of Youth in the name of religious faith (only God can give youth), but whether that is theology or spirituality represented by the enigmatic character of the evangelist, or a critical comment about imperialism and disregard for the environmental context of culture, depends strictly on perception. It is not a compelling argument either way. It’s more like a how the hell did all these Conquistadores get here anyway question.
Otherwise the content is about equally divided between missed opportunities and pathetic stock gags such as teeter-tottering in competition to get the chalices on Ponce De Leon’s ship, inexplicably balanced on the face of a cliff in the vicinity of the fountain. What if the motif of hanging from provocative pub signs had been extended, more had been made of confusion about Jack’s identity, or the characters had even paused to respond contemptuously when Jack mentions his spectacular destruction of the lighthouse that attracted the dangerous crowd of carnivorous mermaids? What if the crew had included some memorably colorful characters? What if the Jack Sparrow impersonator had turned out to be the Voo Doo woman on a mission instead of the convenient, anglo-fied fantasy Latina with incomprehensible conflicting loyalties? (And I don’t mean her tattooed boobs.)
In that respect, the narrative had a strong sense of superficial rush job without much thought to the connections. In the end, Jack Sparrow, apparently unable to resolve his sexual identity problems and take responsibility for a serious relationship, abandons his pregnant girlfriend on a deserted island again and escapes in a leaky rowboat while Barbossa sails off in command of a new ship, neither of which indicates narrative finality, so don’t feel bad if this episode didn’t seem to measure up. There will be more to come. My sense is that Disney has not nearly abandoned hope of squeezing the last doubloon out of the fat Caribbean galleon, and as my wife says, take consolation from knowing that with a little effort, even a prominent group of creative artists with a proven concept and virtually unlimited funds can build a boat that won’t float. I’m just sorry they had to take me with them. Otherwise, if Johnny Depp and fine cinematic effects glad you enough, you can probably endure the proceedings comfortably, regardless.
As a general assessment, this production suffers from a classic case of sequel effects, the dependence in a rather desperate and incoherent way on misguided ideas about what has worked for you before. The result is an array of boring, stereotypical characters, ambiguous discrimination, mediocre action sequences, and unsuccessful drama, with the exception of the striking visual effects (to which 3-D added little noticeable impact, by the way). A summary of the development is unnecessary if you have witnessed any of the previous installments. Think the original less most of the interesting quirks.
Consider some failed possibilities. The King of England is an intriguing character with a comically superficial manner but hints of underlying intelligence and perception that are never realized. What if the King had turned out to have some more profound personal agenda than simply competing with Spain? Likewise, Blackbeard is a bad guy with no redeeming qualities. He starts out in a promising way, with cynical disdain for the minor inconvenience of general mutiny on his ship, but it turns out he isn’t even gloriously or heroically bad. He’s just bad in mean and petty ways. He tortures helpless mermaids to no purpose, not even his own amusement, and rejects the loyalty of his daughter. The mermaids are just what you would expect, monsters disguised as attractive, predatory Caucasian women who must be controlled. In fact, the whole ideology achieves a largely Anglo-European male supremacist effect. The Conquistadores arrive in the end to wreck the Fountain of Youth in the name of religious faith (only God can give youth), but whether that is theology or spirituality represented by the enigmatic character of the evangelist, or a critical comment about imperialism and disregard for the environmental context of culture, depends strictly on perception. It is not a compelling argument either way. It’s more like a how the hell did all these Conquistadores get here anyway question.
Otherwise the content is about equally divided between missed opportunities and pathetic stock gags such as teeter-tottering in competition to get the chalices on Ponce De Leon’s ship, inexplicably balanced on the face of a cliff in the vicinity of the fountain. What if the motif of hanging from provocative pub signs had been extended, more had been made of confusion about Jack’s identity, or the characters had even paused to respond contemptuously when Jack mentions his spectacular destruction of the lighthouse that attracted the dangerous crowd of carnivorous mermaids? What if the crew had included some memorably colorful characters? What if the Jack Sparrow impersonator had turned out to be the Voo Doo woman on a mission instead of the convenient, anglo-fied fantasy Latina with incomprehensible conflicting loyalties? (And I don’t mean her tattooed boobs.)
In that respect, the narrative had a strong sense of superficial rush job without much thought to the connections. In the end, Jack Sparrow, apparently unable to resolve his sexual identity problems and take responsibility for a serious relationship, abandons his pregnant girlfriend on a deserted island again and escapes in a leaky rowboat while Barbossa sails off in command of a new ship, neither of which indicates narrative finality, so don’t feel bad if this episode didn’t seem to measure up. There will be more to come. My sense is that Disney has not nearly abandoned hope of squeezing the last doubloon out of the fat Caribbean galleon, and as my wife says, take consolation from knowing that with a little effort, even a prominent group of creative artists with a proven concept and virtually unlimited funds can build a boat that won’t float. I’m just sorry they had to take me with them. Otherwise, if Johnny Depp and fine cinematic effects glad you enough, you can probably endure the proceedings comfortably, regardless.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Taking Out Snooki
I agree with Michael Moore that Osama Bin Laden’s exit strategy was an execution as much as anything. What else can you say about shooting an unarmed man in his pajamas? It didn’t appear that he had any idea who was hammering on his door in the middle of the night, never mind that they were dangerous, which inspires a lot of the skeptical diplomatic questions about Pakistan and management of their internal controls, if nothing else. That they have a lot of challenges is no mystery, but at the very least you have to wonder about their ability to insure any kind of secure and consistent administrative strategy and performance.
In spite of the legal implications and ideological hypocrisy, however, I’m not sure taking Bin Laden alive would have been either just or helpful. Pakistan’s shaky grip on political loyalty makes it abundantly clear that there was no way of knowing what exactly the hit squad was going to find. They could conceivably have ended up in a shootout with the entire Pakistani army. The mere need for the kind of excluisve secrecy maintained indicates a precarious lack of confidence in the circumstances. I take it Bin Laden’s arrangements for escape or protection were pretty much unknown. Explosives? Tunnels? A squad of battle-hardened immortals? Or even if he was there at all? Bin Laden alive could have meant missing our one chance to hold him accountable. Do the interests of justice ever exceed the interests of due process, even once in a millenium? How willing was Bin Laden to engage the international legal system? Maybe that’s the real test. How much did international law mean to Osama Bin Laden? I haven’t noticed Al-Quaida appealing to the international court for representation lately.
I also haven’t seen Bin Laden’s birth certificate, but unlike President Obama and Hawaii, I don’t think connections to a de facto U.S. territory like Saudi Arabia makes Bin Laden a U.S. citizen, so no problem there. He would not be entitled to either post bail or run for president. Taking him out may be a technical violation of international law, which is the sticky point, but what if in the course of human events the authority demonstrates unwillingness and inability to enforce the law? This would be comparable to a situation in which Mayor Snooki of Chicago sends out agents from Parks and Recreation to ram a trailer truck into an office building in Texas, killing thousands of school children at a Christian temperance rally. The mayor admits privately to planning the operation and ordering the landscapers to crash the truck, but she escapes into the South Dakota badlands and disappears. The Texas Rangers complain to the federal government. The government responds that they’re working on it.
Hot on Mayor Snooki’s trail, the Texas Rangers turn over critical information to the Feds, only to discover Mayor Snooki has been tipped off and escaped from the Corn Palace in Mitchell where she was known to have been holed up under the protection of local sheep ranchers. Ten years later, the Feds are still working on it when the Rangers find a Facebook page for Mayor Snooki and she turns up in Sioux Falls, working as a contestant on a reality survival show and living at the local Hilton hotel in a witness protection program after ratting on the New Jersey mob.
The Texas Rangers send special forces disguised as a Zydeco band into Sioux falls to take down Snooki in the hotel. During the raid, Snooki’s business manager dies in anguish from a fatally irregular bass beat and the lead guitarist steps on her chihuahua. In the dark hotel room, the Rangers discover a stash of hunting equipment from Snooki’s escape into the wilderness and erroneously conclude they have blundered into a trophy hunt for an endangered species by Mama Bear Palin, where they will be gunned down at the first opportunity, so as a precaution, they execute her on the spot with a portable electric chair.
I realize this is trivializing the entire terrorist issue, which is not funny for a lot of people, and with good reason, but it could happen, and you see the point. Who would complain about the Texas Rangers?
Here's thinking for you,
Iffy
Monday, May 16, 2011
The Gods Must Be Crazy
A colony of carpenter ants turned up in the mulch lining the bottom of the clay pot under the scraggly skeleton of the little tree with yellow flowers that died in the winter. Carpenter ants are the big busy kind, black and transluscent brown, big enough to be scary, but they mind their business pretty much, intense and focused, even in a crisis.
I guess mulch must be sort of perfect for carpenter ants, splintered wood with plenty of spaces, carpenter ant prefab. Apparently the moisture wasn’t a problem for them, maybe even an enhancement, and the whole thing was enclosed by the solid sides of the clay pot, like rock. I wonder if the ant philosophers and ant media bloggers ever remarked about the secure location, design, and planning. To an ant, it must have been structurally secure, solid and dense, with all the necessary conveniences of an ant community comfortably enclosed inside. From all appearances, the community thrived. Hundreds, maybe thousands of big gregarious ants swarming busily thorough passages connecting all kinds of compartments, nurseries, storage, dining, who knows? A retail mall? A convention center? A situation room?
In the end, they needed more than a situation room. The winter was cold. In the spring, the little tree didn’t recover. There was also a big old stump in the yard I wanted to cut up when I got everything squared away in the Spring, but one of the first things was clearing away the dead plants. I turned the pot over and dumped it all out and there was the ant colony in the mulch in what had been the bottom of the pot and the ants swarming in confusion and dismay through what had been the comfortable, routine passages of their lives.
Damn, man. What the hell? This thing was rated good to 90 degree rotation. Who could have predicted a total overturn? It’s a once in a lifetime event. Where the hell’s the queen when you need her?
Ants, however, are remarkably resilient. Ants are not given to extended introspection or organizational paralysis in a crisis. Almost as fast as the pot went over, scouts were looking for a refuge. They returned quickly, apparently with news of the nearby stump. Swarms of workers dragged the precious egg cases from the wreckage of the colony, somewhat hampered by disputes over who exactly would take charge of each project and what route exactly would be followed. Dragging an awkward load as big and heavy as your own body through the tangled roots and stems of thick grass must be an unimaginably challenging task. I watched one stout worker hauling a load resolutely through the tangle, sometimes bracing and virtually flinging the heavy bulb over obstacles, then climbing over and resuming the slow journey. After several minutes of this sporadic progress, a small brown lizard scampered down from the stump and took up a position on a fallen branch with a panoramic view of the proceedings.
When the ant with the egg case finally reached a convenient proximity, the lizard reached down with an attitude for all the world as if to say “Pardon, mate, I’ll just have that,” And removed the cargo from the grasp of its bearer. At first the ant completely paused, as if in consternation and disbelief, but finding no explanation or resolution, made a couple of vague, searching lunges, shrugged in resignation, and scurried back toward the ruined colony. Ants are not given to excessive agony or regrets either. The egg was gone. The work must go on.
By the next morning, the entire population had disappeared into the comforting security of the stump. I reflected on the heroic determination of individuals in the face of disaster, the resourcefulness, the selflessness, the sheer resolute sense of purpose despite the fragile vulnerability of society and the foolishness of confidence. In this simple drama, I recognized the unpredictable effects of fate and profound irony as I somewhat uncomfortably readied my chain saw to cut the stump in pieces.
I guess mulch must be sort of perfect for carpenter ants, splintered wood with plenty of spaces, carpenter ant prefab. Apparently the moisture wasn’t a problem for them, maybe even an enhancement, and the whole thing was enclosed by the solid sides of the clay pot, like rock. I wonder if the ant philosophers and ant media bloggers ever remarked about the secure location, design, and planning. To an ant, it must have been structurally secure, solid and dense, with all the necessary conveniences of an ant community comfortably enclosed inside. From all appearances, the community thrived. Hundreds, maybe thousands of big gregarious ants swarming busily thorough passages connecting all kinds of compartments, nurseries, storage, dining, who knows? A retail mall? A convention center? A situation room?
In the end, they needed more than a situation room. The winter was cold. In the spring, the little tree didn’t recover. There was also a big old stump in the yard I wanted to cut up when I got everything squared away in the Spring, but one of the first things was clearing away the dead plants. I turned the pot over and dumped it all out and there was the ant colony in the mulch in what had been the bottom of the pot and the ants swarming in confusion and dismay through what had been the comfortable, routine passages of their lives.
Damn, man. What the hell? This thing was rated good to 90 degree rotation. Who could have predicted a total overturn? It’s a once in a lifetime event. Where the hell’s the queen when you need her?
Ants, however, are remarkably resilient. Ants are not given to extended introspection or organizational paralysis in a crisis. Almost as fast as the pot went over, scouts were looking for a refuge. They returned quickly, apparently with news of the nearby stump. Swarms of workers dragged the precious egg cases from the wreckage of the colony, somewhat hampered by disputes over who exactly would take charge of each project and what route exactly would be followed. Dragging an awkward load as big and heavy as your own body through the tangled roots and stems of thick grass must be an unimaginably challenging task. I watched one stout worker hauling a load resolutely through the tangle, sometimes bracing and virtually flinging the heavy bulb over obstacles, then climbing over and resuming the slow journey. After several minutes of this sporadic progress, a small brown lizard scampered down from the stump and took up a position on a fallen branch with a panoramic view of the proceedings.
When the ant with the egg case finally reached a convenient proximity, the lizard reached down with an attitude for all the world as if to say “Pardon, mate, I’ll just have that,” And removed the cargo from the grasp of its bearer. At first the ant completely paused, as if in consternation and disbelief, but finding no explanation or resolution, made a couple of vague, searching lunges, shrugged in resignation, and scurried back toward the ruined colony. Ants are not given to excessive agony or regrets either. The egg was gone. The work must go on.
By the next morning, the entire population had disappeared into the comforting security of the stump. I reflected on the heroic determination of individuals in the face of disaster, the resourcefulness, the selflessness, the sheer resolute sense of purpose despite the fragile vulnerability of society and the foolishness of confidence. In this simple drama, I recognized the unpredictable effects of fate and profound irony as I somewhat uncomfortably readied my chain saw to cut the stump in pieces.
Here's thinking for you,
Iffy
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Who Cares if Osama had a Gun?
I will miss Osama Bin Laden. Probably I should not put it quite that way, but he gave us a comforting sense of united hostility that was taken from us by the end of the cold war. He rescued us from a vague and purposeless moral ambiguity relieved only by the pursuit of wealth. Regardless of what we owe to Osama for the unity of resolute righteousness, however, dancing on the corpse of the enemy is a time-honored tradition and probably one of the more restrained forms of celebrating victory at the expense of the loser. Rejoice, the evil Other has been defeated. Make the most of it.
And, indeed, Osama Bin Laden was evil in his way. He was a violent extremist. Apparently he engineered the most devastating sneak attack on American “interests” in the history of sneak attacks on American interests, ending thousands of inoffensive lives in an ideological bid to wound a powerful opponent, not to mention bringing it home to the national core and seriously impacting cherished illusions about the irresistible effects of our dazzling culture. Before 9/11, nobody who spent significant time in the continental U.S. could conceivably fail to recognize the superior aspects of our way of life. After 9/11, we have to consider the realistic possibility of more cynical resistance.
But what was fair about 9/11? Unrestrained movement has been one of the signal features of freedom as we know it. Turning commercial aircraft into weapons exploited, not just the illusions of our invincible influence, but the generous accessibility of our transportation system. Regardless of age, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, or marital status, anybody can (could) get on a jet in America and fly wherever the hell they so desired without obtrusive interference and authoritative scrutiny. There was nothing special about getting on airliners in America, and hardly anything special about taking them over, but the 9/11 hijackers failed to play by the rules. The rules said you don’t gratuitously destroy the aircraft in a bid to cause as much destruction as possible. The rules said you gave authorities a fair chance to intervene, and that was the last straw with Osama Bin Laden. He didn’t play by the rules.
The religious aspects of the conflict are, as religious aspects always are, unfortunate and unnecessary, but predictable as the organizational trajectory of resistance. Where religion appeals to the disenfranchised as an ideological substitute in the mode of Marx, Althusser, and Nietszche, it attracts resistance looking for a coherent community. The failure of the state to adequately manipulate religion as potential resistance has to do with the approach/avoidance conflict of minimizing discomfort over inequitable distribution of resources by allowing the illusion of religious tolerance or even solidarity. The poor in Saudi Arabia, denied more than nominal participation in the great wealth of the aristocratic rulers, were encouraged to accept religion as a substitute for wealth and even nominal identification with the ruling class. We are all one in Mohammed. Despite the disparities in wealth, rich and poor were united in Islam.
Whether Bin Laden, despite his own wealthy origins, really appreciated the inherent hypocrisies of this unequal distribution, or really only leveraged social justice as resistance to foreign intervention in his own aristocratic projects is also a fair question, but Bin Laden also recognized that both the practical and symbolic sources of unequal distribution are rooted in the effects of economic capitalism. America is not the exclusive representative of economic disparities by any means, but it is the most blatant. In our prodigious propaganda of opportunism, we inevitably emphasize, not the potential for reconciliation, but the potential for differentiation. America is the land of opportunity. By hard work and lack of principles, anyone can be separated from their humble origins to achieve financial well-being. With the right friends between us and the dirty work of accumulating money, sometimes even a fair representation of principles survives, so that we at least have an idea of what it looks like to be honest, generous, and fair, or what it might look like in the right circumstances.
Bin Laden, however, was impatient with the rhetorical and practical demands of pretense and looked for a way to get directly at the core. So, quite appropriately he got on a jet and smashed it into the literal, structural home of the free, brave, and economically opportunistic, a gesture lost on nobody, killing three thousand people who were doing nothing more aggressive and predatory than what the rest of us do every day. And it is, therefore, just as righteously appropriate and necessary that he should die a violent death in the hands of his opponents, just as righteously appropriate as any tragedy of Shakespeare or the Greeks.
Once again, however, Bin Laden, has not totally played by the rules. What exactly went down on the third floor of the now famous urban fortress in Pakistan, like all defining occasions in history, shows no indication of a dramatic conciliation or even consesus. Bin Laden resisted. Bin Laden did not resist. Bin Laden participated in the firefight. Bin Laden had no weapon. Bin Laden used a woman as a shield. A woman threw herself between Bin Laden and the attackers.
That he was shot twice, in the face and the chest seems to be fairly well established. Why he was shot if he was unarmed and cornered is a little more problematic. Would capture have made more sense? The Navy SEALS assigned to the difficult task couldn’t know exactly what to expect. No doubt they had orders to shoot first, and SEALS do what SEALS do. That part of it, however, will be the eternal subject of critical scrutiny and analysis like what you are reading now. The spectacle of Bin Laden's demise could only have been exceeded by the spectacle of his capture, which would have been an even greater risk for the focus of controversy and divisive resistance, but Bin Laden in his final moment knew how to cheat effectively. Nothing could have been finer for the U.S. than to take him down mano a mano with his gun in his hand and a troop of hardened fighters around him. Instead, he was executed, shot down without resistance by a merciless invader. The reality is irrelevant. That’s the scenario bequeathed to us by a savvy opponent. No matter how hard we try, our simple and somewhat impatient desire to be forthright in a situation that can be nothing other than complicated has undone us. We have produced a martyr.
And finally, aside from Bin Laden’s violent fundamentalist extremism and arguable self-interest, there are the inescapable conditions of critical social issues in the Middle East and throughout the world combined with U.S. knee-jerk reactions in Iraq and continual floundering in Afghanistan. Bin Laden killed three thousand people at the World Trade Center. The U.S. killed 75,000 civilians in Iraq. The only way to justify the disparity is to argue like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Iraquis are somehow less valuable than day traders, a demeaning reminder that we are at best no better than those we seek to defeat. The elimination of Bin Laden, even the elimination of Al-Quaida as a relevant threat, does not eliminate or even moderate the conditions that produced them in the first place. If we cannot accept the responsibilities of economic equity and self-determination for anyone but ourselves, then some form of Osama Bin Laden will be resurrected, and in the name of American interests, in the name of truth, justice, and the American way, we will fight wars of attrition until in the end, everybody loses.
And, indeed, Osama Bin Laden was evil in his way. He was a violent extremist. Apparently he engineered the most devastating sneak attack on American “interests” in the history of sneak attacks on American interests, ending thousands of inoffensive lives in an ideological bid to wound a powerful opponent, not to mention bringing it home to the national core and seriously impacting cherished illusions about the irresistible effects of our dazzling culture. Before 9/11, nobody who spent significant time in the continental U.S. could conceivably fail to recognize the superior aspects of our way of life. After 9/11, we have to consider the realistic possibility of more cynical resistance.
But what was fair about 9/11? Unrestrained movement has been one of the signal features of freedom as we know it. Turning commercial aircraft into weapons exploited, not just the illusions of our invincible influence, but the generous accessibility of our transportation system. Regardless of age, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, or marital status, anybody can (could) get on a jet in America and fly wherever the hell they so desired without obtrusive interference and authoritative scrutiny. There was nothing special about getting on airliners in America, and hardly anything special about taking them over, but the 9/11 hijackers failed to play by the rules. The rules said you don’t gratuitously destroy the aircraft in a bid to cause as much destruction as possible. The rules said you gave authorities a fair chance to intervene, and that was the last straw with Osama Bin Laden. He didn’t play by the rules.
The religious aspects of the conflict are, as religious aspects always are, unfortunate and unnecessary, but predictable as the organizational trajectory of resistance. Where religion appeals to the disenfranchised as an ideological substitute in the mode of Marx, Althusser, and Nietszche, it attracts resistance looking for a coherent community. The failure of the state to adequately manipulate religion as potential resistance has to do with the approach/avoidance conflict of minimizing discomfort over inequitable distribution of resources by allowing the illusion of religious tolerance or even solidarity. The poor in Saudi Arabia, denied more than nominal participation in the great wealth of the aristocratic rulers, were encouraged to accept religion as a substitute for wealth and even nominal identification with the ruling class. We are all one in Mohammed. Despite the disparities in wealth, rich and poor were united in Islam.
Whether Bin Laden, despite his own wealthy origins, really appreciated the inherent hypocrisies of this unequal distribution, or really only leveraged social justice as resistance to foreign intervention in his own aristocratic projects is also a fair question, but Bin Laden also recognized that both the practical and symbolic sources of unequal distribution are rooted in the effects of economic capitalism. America is not the exclusive representative of economic disparities by any means, but it is the most blatant. In our prodigious propaganda of opportunism, we inevitably emphasize, not the potential for reconciliation, but the potential for differentiation. America is the land of opportunity. By hard work and lack of principles, anyone can be separated from their humble origins to achieve financial well-being. With the right friends between us and the dirty work of accumulating money, sometimes even a fair representation of principles survives, so that we at least have an idea of what it looks like to be honest, generous, and fair, or what it might look like in the right circumstances.
Bin Laden, however, was impatient with the rhetorical and practical demands of pretense and looked for a way to get directly at the core. So, quite appropriately he got on a jet and smashed it into the literal, structural home of the free, brave, and economically opportunistic, a gesture lost on nobody, killing three thousand people who were doing nothing more aggressive and predatory than what the rest of us do every day. And it is, therefore, just as righteously appropriate and necessary that he should die a violent death in the hands of his opponents, just as righteously appropriate as any tragedy of Shakespeare or the Greeks.
Once again, however, Bin Laden, has not totally played by the rules. What exactly went down on the third floor of the now famous urban fortress in Pakistan, like all defining occasions in history, shows no indication of a dramatic conciliation or even consesus. Bin Laden resisted. Bin Laden did not resist. Bin Laden participated in the firefight. Bin Laden had no weapon. Bin Laden used a woman as a shield. A woman threw herself between Bin Laden and the attackers.
That he was shot twice, in the face and the chest seems to be fairly well established. Why he was shot if he was unarmed and cornered is a little more problematic. Would capture have made more sense? The Navy SEALS assigned to the difficult task couldn’t know exactly what to expect. No doubt they had orders to shoot first, and SEALS do what SEALS do. That part of it, however, will be the eternal subject of critical scrutiny and analysis like what you are reading now. The spectacle of Bin Laden's demise could only have been exceeded by the spectacle of his capture, which would have been an even greater risk for the focus of controversy and divisive resistance, but Bin Laden in his final moment knew how to cheat effectively. Nothing could have been finer for the U.S. than to take him down mano a mano with his gun in his hand and a troop of hardened fighters around him. Instead, he was executed, shot down without resistance by a merciless invader. The reality is irrelevant. That’s the scenario bequeathed to us by a savvy opponent. No matter how hard we try, our simple and somewhat impatient desire to be forthright in a situation that can be nothing other than complicated has undone us. We have produced a martyr.
And finally, aside from Bin Laden’s violent fundamentalist extremism and arguable self-interest, there are the inescapable conditions of critical social issues in the Middle East and throughout the world combined with U.S. knee-jerk reactions in Iraq and continual floundering in Afghanistan. Bin Laden killed three thousand people at the World Trade Center. The U.S. killed 75,000 civilians in Iraq. The only way to justify the disparity is to argue like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Iraquis are somehow less valuable than day traders, a demeaning reminder that we are at best no better than those we seek to defeat. The elimination of Bin Laden, even the elimination of Al-Quaida as a relevant threat, does not eliminate or even moderate the conditions that produced them in the first place. If we cannot accept the responsibilities of economic equity and self-determination for anyone but ourselves, then some form of Osama Bin Laden will be resurrected, and in the name of American interests, in the name of truth, justice, and the American way, we will fight wars of attrition until in the end, everybody loses.
Cheating in the Eye of the Beholder
One thing became clear in the course of the cheating problem in the business department. This was not a case of writing answers on the back of your hand. The basic issues of fairness were called into question, but in a society where rights of disproportionate possession and accumulation are defined and enforced by law and military intervention, there will always be tension between the desire to join or participate in the community of the elite, and the exclusive expectations of the ruling class. By definition there is nothing mysterious or fundamentally unethical about action taken to pass a class to acquire a degree to get a job of disproportionate economic value.
Adapting the fundamental supply and demand principle of economics, given the opportunity, those with less will take some. Denied suitable opportunities, they may look for those too. The impulse can be defined away as a disturbance to society and a violation of law, but even considering the benefit of an orderly society, it cannot be denied. If education depends on enforcement of “calibration,” as one test security expert so aptly described it, then the result will be a very fine line indeed, so fine that it will be invisible. To designate the use of available information as cheating is simply to emphasize the determination to prevent those who do not have from leveling the field. You outsmarted yourself, so you call the response cheating. And that’s an institutional responsibility, not an individual instructor’s responsibility. It’s a legislative mandate in the interests of economic inequality.
This is not suggesting that there is no such thing as cheating. Cheating is taking more than you need, but that’s another argument altogether. If the students in this case cheated, we made them what they are. If they did not, they are pretty much what the rest of us are, aspirants to economic aristocracy. Maybe we all deserve each other.
Adapting the fundamental supply and demand principle of economics, given the opportunity, those with less will take some. Denied suitable opportunities, they may look for those too. The impulse can be defined away as a disturbance to society and a violation of law, but even considering the benefit of an orderly society, it cannot be denied. If education depends on enforcement of “calibration,” as one test security expert so aptly described it, then the result will be a very fine line indeed, so fine that it will be invisible. To designate the use of available information as cheating is simply to emphasize the determination to prevent those who do not have from leveling the field. You outsmarted yourself, so you call the response cheating. And that’s an institutional responsibility, not an individual instructor’s responsibility. It’s a legislative mandate in the interests of economic inequality.
This is not suggesting that there is no such thing as cheating. Cheating is taking more than you need, but that’s another argument altogether. If the students in this case cheated, we made them what they are. If they did not, they are pretty much what the rest of us are, aspirants to economic aristocracy. Maybe we all deserve each other.
Monday, February 28, 2011
An Ode to Reticulated Armor
An Armadillo in repose
With outstretched arms and pensive nose
Appealing to the sky.
Only the Armadillo knows the reason why
It’s lying in the road.
Perhaps it paused to think great thoughts
And having thought of lots and lots,
It postured, waving grave intentions
Preparing for the exposition,
Of insights too profound to mention,
When in due course it was fatally struck
By a careless, careening pickup truck.
Take counsel all you small and great
When legs are short and hazards wait.
Don’t dawdle in abstract reflection,
Inviting horrible dissection.
Appreciate the armadillo,
Snuggling asphalt for a pillow.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
With outstretched arms and pensive nose
Appealing to the sky.
Only the Armadillo knows the reason why
It’s lying in the road.
Perhaps it paused to think great thoughts
And having thought of lots and lots,
It postured, waving grave intentions
Preparing for the exposition,
Of insights too profound to mention,
When in due course it was fatally struck
By a careless, careening pickup truck.
Take counsel all you small and great
When legs are short and hazards wait.
Don’t dawdle in abstract reflection,
Inviting horrible dissection.
Appreciate the armadillo,
Snuggling asphalt for a pillow.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Sunday, January 2, 2011
McTronification
Tron, ten minutes of entertainment spread out over three hours. Go figure. Get a CLU. So much for critical thinking.
Had the additional honor of encountering the remodeled lobby at Downtown Disney. Taking lessons from the Starbuck’s reader. How to charge ten dollars for a cup of coffee. Put something alcoholic in it, of course. If I think about it, the idea seems absolutely preposterous. Ten dollars for coffee? What planet are you from?
But It’s incremental, like the drop of water argument in tort damages. Two-fifty for coffee. A lot, but okay, if you have to pay six or seven greenbacks (or Technicolor holobacks or whatever passes for dollars now), for a quart of popcorn that costs maybe a dime in its wholesale state, why not two-fifty for coffee? And if plain coffee can be two-fifty, why not six or so for something as exotic as a latte? Surely the qualitative value of a latte equals or exceeds a quart of popcorn. And if you charge three more dollars to add, not a shot, but a dollop of Irish whiskey, with tax you’re almost there, and everybody’s happy.
The whole arrangement of the lobby is an exercise in strategic marketing and profit maximization. What was previously a large open space has been subdivided like lots in a retirement development for efficient processing. Where you had a widely curving food service counter spread along a fair share of the periphery, the space has now been broken up into irregular specialty stations for a bar, other typical beverages including coffee, popcorn and nacho center, and the traditional theater food counter that now takes up about a tenth of its former territory. What used to impart a brief and deceptive yet rewarding sense of spacious elegance, has now been reduced to a typical rat maze of promotional entrapment, with the possible added bonus of at least increasing the take without increasing the staff, if not outright reduction of staff. Not that I would be surprised considering the source, but I somehow feel like one more little delusion of significance and independence for the masses has now been withdrawn and quite consciously commodified. They didn’t even bother to try and evoke any kind of ethnic or cultural charm in the design. Efficiency has met standardized taste in an ultimate McDisnification.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
Had the additional honor of encountering the remodeled lobby at Downtown Disney. Taking lessons from the Starbuck’s reader. How to charge ten dollars for a cup of coffee. Put something alcoholic in it, of course. If I think about it, the idea seems absolutely preposterous. Ten dollars for coffee? What planet are you from?
But It’s incremental, like the drop of water argument in tort damages. Two-fifty for coffee. A lot, but okay, if you have to pay six or seven greenbacks (or Technicolor holobacks or whatever passes for dollars now), for a quart of popcorn that costs maybe a dime in its wholesale state, why not two-fifty for coffee? And if plain coffee can be two-fifty, why not six or so for something as exotic as a latte? Surely the qualitative value of a latte equals or exceeds a quart of popcorn. And if you charge three more dollars to add, not a shot, but a dollop of Irish whiskey, with tax you’re almost there, and everybody’s happy.
The whole arrangement of the lobby is an exercise in strategic marketing and profit maximization. What was previously a large open space has been subdivided like lots in a retirement development for efficient processing. Where you had a widely curving food service counter spread along a fair share of the periphery, the space has now been broken up into irregular specialty stations for a bar, other typical beverages including coffee, popcorn and nacho center, and the traditional theater food counter that now takes up about a tenth of its former territory. What used to impart a brief and deceptive yet rewarding sense of spacious elegance, has now been reduced to a typical rat maze of promotional entrapment, with the possible added bonus of at least increasing the take without increasing the staff, if not outright reduction of staff. Not that I would be surprised considering the source, but I somehow feel like one more little delusion of significance and independence for the masses has now been withdrawn and quite consciously commodified. They didn’t even bother to try and evoke any kind of ethnic or cultural charm in the design. Efficiency has met standardized taste in an ultimate McDisnification.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
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