Thinking for You

Sniffing around the Hydrant

2011-11-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

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

Okay Bubba

2011-10-03T11:49:00.000-07:00

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

Obama Against the World, or at Least a Significant Part

2011-08-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

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

Cowboys and Aliens, the Prequel

2011-08-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

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 an admirable 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 also not necessarily an 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.

Nude Women on Facebook

2011-07-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

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

Whose Wand was it Anyway?

2011-07-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

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

The New Like

2011-07-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

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

A Farewell to Ereck Plancher

2011-07-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

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

Test the Dangerous People

2011-06-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

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

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-hypodermic-needle-image17107497
http://reidreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Rick-Scott-batboy.jpg
http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/04/rick-scott-puts-crony-firms-on-the-state-payroll/

The Crock Heard Round the World

2011-06-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

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

Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean Revisited, Revisited, and Revisited, or: Whatever Floats Your Boat

2011-05-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy

Taking Out Snooki

2011-05-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

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

The Gods Must Be Crazy

2011-05-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Here's thinking for you,

Iffy

Who Cares if Osama had a Gun?

2011-05-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Cheating in the Eye of the Beholder

2011-05-04T11:09:00.000-07:00

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.

An Ode to Reticulated Armor

2011-02-28T09:38:00.000-08:00

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

McTronification

2011-01-02T19:43:00.000-08:00

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

Unrealized Aristocrat: Harry Potter and Evil Difference in The Deathly Hallows

2010-12-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

One attraction of the Harry Potter series is the unlikely hero/prince in disguise emerging from obscurity to battle the forces of evil, and (as the latest installment quite specifically asserts) if you just believe in yourself, have talent, and persevere, you will prevail, an attractive premise for awkward individuals in a challenging world, and an easy message to associate with Rowling from her single-mom, financially-challenged-to-mega-billionaire perspective. I haven’t seen her whole story, or how exactly she picked up an agent, and I suspect, like the character she created, she had more resources available in the manner of connections, in spite of her financial challenges, than are readily apparent.

As I never tire of remarking, The first Harry Potter novel amused me. I only got through half of the second one before the humor wore out and I concluded it was going nowhere. After that, there was nothing left but the movies, an endless procession of gaping snakes and sentimental conversations. The other part of it, that hundreds of millions of people don’t agree with me, is merely an unfortunate phenomenon of the emperor’s new clothes.

What the latest movie emphasizes, as for the Lion King, Avatar, and other commercially-crafted, sentimentalized fantasies, is not just an unrealistic opportunism that depends on aristocratic empowerment in the Western Tradition, but ultimately on a restatement of the determination that real evil resides in difference. Another attraction of Harry Potter as narrative has been the apparent variation of the relative forms in which good and evil are represented, such as diminutive elves or a tyrannical minister of magic in the character of a 50s soap-opera Mom, but these are misleading. Unfortunately, ultimate evil in the character of Voldemort still adopts the traditional darkness and deformation invested by reptilian knock-offs. Everything else becomes comic relief. The essential struggle depends on the traditional powers of darkness, represented by Voldemort and his corrupted ministry, against the rebellious keepers of the light, in contention for control of the source (the wand and wizardry), but the rebellion itself is an ironic one, because Harry Potter is the real heir of exclusion.

The powers of good, as the realm of Hogwarts perceives good, reside in the obligatory fair-skinned anglo adventurers of the North. I don’t know that Rowling ever specifically designates the racial and cultural origins of the characters aside from nationality and cultural connections, but the culture of the English boarding school is a little difficult to overlook or escape. The imperial colonial heritage that implies also creates a somewhat paradoxical and perplexing issue in terms of Potter’s popularity. Is Harry Potter a celebration of English Imperial High Culture (to which even oppressed colonial subjects apparently aspire, or at least the subaltern), or is it really an ironic indictment, or both, or something else? And does it matter? Perhaps it matters if Potter’s popularity represents an uninformed acceptance of cultural oppression, as for Edward Said. The giant snake, for instance, is not only a creature out of mythology, but a creature out of the mysterious colonial African and Oriental realms.

Colonial imperialism was not all bad. At the very least it provided an opportunity for the indigenous inhabitants of conquered cultures to study their oppressors from a privileged observation point, not necessarily a pleasant and inspirational view, but sometimes a pragmatically productive one. Europeans investigated the world and inadvertently displayed themselves for what they were in various contexts, opening themselves up to degrees of retaliatory appropriation. That however is fundamentally another argument. Whether to the effect of domination or to the opposite effect of opportunity for resistance, the Harry Potter character remains closely associated with the normative imperial conventions of the English boarding school culture.

I am not a great advocate for alternate lifestyles, but I would think that anyone in that position would be looking skeptically at Harry Potter, whether for the sake of disability, sexual orientation, or any number of various unique personal attributes. In the main characters, there are neither deformities, nor failures. These are the perfected champions of the aristocratic tradition, with the possible exception of impaired vision, although spectacles themselves indicate a kind of symbolically ironic intellectual affirmation, the need for spectacles suggesting keen vision of another kind. Doubt and adversity are permissible. Failure is never an option, quite consciously. That Harry, Hermione, and Ron may get tired of trying and make mistakes is expected. That they could fail isn’t even really contemplated. This is the conventional escape from reality in which skillful manipulation of a conventional quest engages a hopeful audience, yet distracts them from the more subtle stereotypes of power and domination. If the characters represented a rag-tag bunch of morally challenged individuals, there would be an element of aspiration to diversity, but what they represent in their conceptual form is an Anglo-European heritage of conventional hetero-sexual and political relationships, good-hearted, loyal devotion to each other and to an orderly society, however magically endowed the society may be, and disturbed, if at all, only by the acceptable dimensions of competition for sexual pairing. Even the introduction of jealousy and revenge, while conflicted, only emphasiszes the conventionality of the relationships. There is nothing fundamentally deviant or diverse in these characters. Only their opponents represent any inclination to resistance, and resistance only privileges evil. Hagrid, the one prominent, sympathetic character who sometimes seems to hover unarguably at the fringe of resistance, has been relegated to a kind of exile on the Hogwarts frontier, a somewhat tragic, yet cautionary condition.

True evil, whether greed, power, or only self-indulgence, results from failure to recognize that individual interests have detrimentally impacted social considerations, a denial of personal enlightenment and a threat to every stable relationship, personal or social. An authentic representation of such evil often reflects the mode of Rutger Hauer, evil disguised as beauty, or evil closely connected to beauty, but Harry Potter represents a simplified version, an older, more traditional narrative mode, the dark mode of primeval fear established in the Western tradition and the literature of colonial imperialism. Harry Potter validates that evil in the name of, not even sacrifice, but in the name of determined performance. Dobby the elf, for instance, sacrifices freedom and life for the sake of Harry Potter and his quest, but is only a subordinate, and therefore expendable. Harry accords the subordinate a noble ceremony, but the nobility is not the recognition of equals, for that cannot be. It is only a generous gesture to what is after all just an inferior creature that sacrificed itself in a noble gesture of its own, noble gesture for noble gesture. Why isn’t the undefineable Dobby himself (it/herself?) pursuing the dark, snake-like character of Voldemort? Because Dobby is just a free elf, not an aristocrat, and free or not, can never be an aristocrat in Harry Potter’s world. Narratively the primary characters with whom the reader identifies cannot be sacrificed, but in addition, Dobby is an inferior, only worthy to rubber stamp a cause incurred by the aristocratic knight-er(r)ants. The opposition to muggles and mud-bloods associated with Voldemort’s camp isn’t really an issue as much as it is a reflection of Harry’s own awkward unrealized aristocrat status and a distraction from the true nature of the relationship. Harry is the endowed aristocrat. The opposition’s preoccupation with mudbloods does not reflect an authentic fear of contamination. It reflects a fear of reflexive exclusion. Who is the real aristocrat?

It would not do for a true commoner to invest the cause of the quest. Perhaps the unrealized attraction of Harry Potter is appeal of the aristocrat in disguise (and that we all secretly want to be aristocrats, a kind of sceptre envy). Aspirations to social consciousness and benign self-enlightenment are only pretense. Unfortunately for the aristocratic urge and regardless of the appeal, aristocracy depends on the permanent subjugation of the majority and is therefore both inherently unstable and inherently tyrannical, which is like saying aristocracy begets evil. Everybody should have the opportunity to be aristocrats some of the time, also part of the Potter appeal (vicariously identifying with the aristocrat), but as a matter of enlightened self-interest and social justice, nobody should have a permanent endowment of aristocracy. That is where Harry Potter fundamentally fails as a contemporary moral allegory. It appeals to an aristocratic imperial nostalgia that is both lost and impossible, and through the stereotypes it invokes, likewise potentially destructive.

Voldemort’s reason for being is ultimate power/supremacy, a somewhat ironic representation of death (as for the vaguely ethnic Tale of the Three Brothers within the tale). The language of the name suggests something ambiguously Eastern European, perhaps including a casual leer at the Dutch, a traditional English opponent, with linguistic connections to desolate moors and the grotesque, shadowy growths associated with decay, distinct from the cheery Dickensian irony of Dumbledore, Umbrage, Weasley, and Potter, or even the quasi-mythical Western-European and agrarian-fertility connections of Hermione Granger. In spite of the nod to the quest for supreme power, the implication is that the capacity for evil is not a force inspired strictly by human involvement, but a force derived from the momentum of a mysterious and mythical antiquity. Evil exists in the world as an independent force, perhaps residing in corruption for the sake of bad choices, but otherwise independent of human intervention. Not just any old derelict champion will do. Only chosen human beings, invested by light, perfected by the mythical gift of wizardry, who meet the demanding standards of tradition, are called worthy to contend with the dark forces of difference, and those representatives of the aristocratic heritage are not complicated or hampered by the “imperfections” of diversity.

Here’s Thinking for You
Iffy

Edjukshun Is Hilee Over8ed LOL

2010-11-24T18:02:00.000-08:00

Ther is a big hipe on edjukshun. Oh, I no they got numbers that U will get a fansy job if U get colege, but truly U dont need no edjukshun 2 mak a lots of mony. I am entrepenur on thu net, & mak lots of mony. If U want lots of mony & get chances, pick U family good. U don’t need no edjukshun. I quit out of hiskul cuz thu net dont need no edjukshun.

Thu way I mak mony is on thu net & I subsckrib 4 X porno & slezy net skuls, all legul. If you want to mak mony on edjukshun, do verts & soshul netwerk 4 net skuls but I got sumbody to writ 4 me cuz sumbody sed that wuz not real cuz the writing wuz stoopid. They R stoopid. My frends all stick with me when I git thum stuff and do there stuff with thum that is fun 2. That taks no edjukshun.

My freind sed it wuz not thu sam. Thu kids that wuz on thu net all thu time new much as big shots. Now it not so E-Z cuz it got mor complik8d all laws & siense & such. Now all taks colege. Not tru. I writ on thu koments of thu net all thu tim. Read on the koments of the net sumtim. U wil see me ther. That dont need no edjukshun. My freind is stoopid.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

The Devil Take the Hindmost

2010-10-24T17:54:00.000-07:00

In a way I feel bad for Obama, not because his approval ratings are down, that goes with the territory, or even because McChrystal couldn’t remember what he was doing in Afghanistan, or even because the Russians don’t like chili dogs, but because, like Arnie in California, the job is impossible. Like I said before the election, the Rove/Cheney/Bush abyss may be too vast for any mortal human being to span in one lifetime. It is a no-win job that the republicans should have had responsibility for fixing as much as for breaking. But Arnie has only managed to confirm that the republicans can’t fix anything except their wallets. In spite of good intentions, Arnie gets hit from every direction. (http://politics.newsvine.com/_news/2010/06/26/4566213-gop-schwarzenegger-a-great-disappointment

Obama was the only hope, and I hate to see him go down in a thankless, impossible job, but he asked for it, so he gets the credit for not fixing it just as much as the Dubya Posse gets credit for breaking it. The opportunity to rise above the occasion for Dubya was exceeded only by the opportunity to screw it up, and so he did, leaving a legacy that even a sincere republican like Arnie can’t touch.

As for comparing Deepwater Horizon with Katrina, all Bush had to do to be a hero in New Orleans was to evacuate the sports dome and the hospital in two days. That’s all it would have taken. They would have forgiven everything else over time, but the pressure on law enforcement and resources in the city with no place for people to go turned into a spectacle that we’ll remember for a lifetime.

Military trucks, vessels, and aircraft a hundred miles away never moved, and the final irony was that the airport was still operational. That’s what really pissed people off, and likewise intensified resentment of every other perceived inadequacy of the response. After that, it was prove you can do better than New Orleans, instead of we are so glad to have some help.

As for fixing Deepwater Horizon, what in the hell was Obama supposed to do? This was not a regularly occurring natural disaster like a hurricane. The only domes involved are a mile under water, and there isn’t any known device in existence to manage the results. All he could do was stand on the beach and jump up and down. The Navy doesn’t have a huge stock of oil containment equipment. Yeah, somebody should have been ready to deal with this kind of problem. We know blowouts happen. We know BOPs can fail. We know working a mile under water is tricky, but republicans and other conservatives are always whining about big government and free enterprise. Nobody wanted to put responsibility for another expensive project on the government when they already had so much invested in cozy regulatory relationships. Does this remind you of anything, like the SEC? The industry could have cooperated on joint development of equipment and planning for contingency protection, but that would have been a quasi-government function. Chalk another one up for free enterprise, and let the devil take the hindmost. Only problem is, the hindmost is us.

Here's Thinking For You
Iffy

Insecticide: How a Failure of Diplomacy Wiped Out an Entire Community

2010-09-08T20:11:00.001-07:00

In the spring when I was cleaning the yard, I kicked up a low-lying wasp nest out behind the shed without realizing it at first. The wasps came in around my ankles, and I got stung pretty good (or pretty bad, or badly). Wasp stings can be so intense that the impact is first sort of incomprehensible, like suddenly running into an electrified barb-wire fence that was never there before. “This can’t be happening,” I say to myself, and then, ouch, yes it is happening, and I am doing the tribal dance of pain. I have some sensitivity to wasp stings as well. For several days my ankles swell into a painful imitation of exercise weights. I was seriously annoyed, but the truth was they were just doing what wasps do, and they weren’t really a problem otherwise. I wasn’t planning on going back there anytime soon, so I slathered on hydrocortisone and left them alone. After a couple of weeks, I could again walk like a human being instead of a two-legged pogo stick, and my outrage subsided into a comforting haze of live-and-let-live magnanimity.

This summer I had to work on the fence across the back, which wasn’t really in the range of the nest, but I had to walk within a couple feet of the wasps to get around them. I was a little apprehensive at first, but apparently I wasn’t a threat, and they left me alone. When I was almost done with the fence, however, I was picking up where I had been working, and suddenly the agonizing combination of sensations like sharpened lightning bolts hit me from behind. After days of ignoring me, apparently the capo wasp had suddenly decided to put out a hit on me, and without warning, the enforcers targeted the backs of my legs. This apparently unprovoked and unreasonable attack infuriated me. I had left them alone and given them their space, but they attacked me without mercy, the vicious little buzzards. I did what people do when they collide with the impersonal aggression of nature. I pulled out a can of insecticide and blasted the colony into oblivion.

Perhaps the wasps had legitimate concerns, at least in wasp terms. Perhaps in another reality we could have been sitting down with a couple of beers under a big umbrella, amiably chatting up our unjustified mutual paranoia. Perhaps we could have reached an accommodating agreement regarding our space and our right of way. Perhaps we would have found that our basic motivation was not so different, and that we shared fundamental ambivalence about our competing relationships with the unfamiliar and the unique.

Unfortunately, wasps are short on diplomacy and long on attack skills. While their needs may be uncomplicated and fundamental, their triggers are irrevocable and somewhat mysterious. As far as I can tell, they have little patience or appreciation for negotiation, and so for all intents and purposes, they quite decisively and carelessly commit themselves to heroic annihilation, and the truth is that I have a hard time feeling thoroughly bad about it.

Here’s Thinking for You.
Iffy

Perfect Business

2010-08-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

Conservative republicans accused President Obama of opposition to business. What does opposition to business mean? Does it mean Bernie Madoff and AIG, no accountability, no enforcement, and no regulation? If so, then Obama opposes business. Does it mean uncontrolled pollution and collapsing bridges? If so, then Obama opposes business. Does it mean dangerous food, inadequate disaster response, and discrimination? If so, then Obama opposes business. Does it mean all the resources and all the income are controlled by a few people? If so, then Obama opposes business.

The conservatives accused another President of opposing business. His name was Theodore Roosevelt, and the business was Standard Oil. No doubt that ruined the country. By now we could have a government operated for profit by one corporation, like Idi Amin in Uganda. Wouldn’t that be perfect?

Here's Thinking For You.
Iffy

Full Ride

2010-08-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

Shanna McLaughlin got a lot of exposure in a UCF locker room and subsequently on the internet, as the images went from less than outlandish
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/432879-shanna-mclaughlin-pics-the-playboy-playmate-and-ucf-fan-causes-a-stir#page/7

to borderline pornography as reported by some kind of illiterate scribblealazzi.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/6487262-shanna-mclaughlin-shot-nude-in-university-of-central-florida

One entertaining thing about the internet is just how much the information can be lost in translation, or even just transfer. Apparently the mere attempt to repeat information is too much for some reporters. Female nudity in college football locker rooms makes interesting headlines, but in this case it’s also misunderstanding at best and sheer fantasy otherwise.

But Shanna McLaughlin in the locker room doesn’t bother me. The more blessings we can find to celebrate the better as far as I’m concerned. What does bother me is that anyone employed by the university would think it was okay to provide access to university facilities without consulting the legions of bureaucrats we employ to administer such things, alum or no alum. Do you have any idea what kind of hoops a business has to jump through to get approved for operating on campus? The university athletic department wouldn't even dignify a polite inquiry from Iffy with a reply, but a publication connected to adult entertainment can walk in and somebody hands them the key.

I’m not complaining. I just want to make sure we understand who really runs this parking-lot carnival.

Here’s Thinking for you.
Iffy

The Wages of Sin is Wages

2010-08-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

Mark Hurd bailed out of Hewlitt Packard after some kind of sexual harassment suit landed in their laps.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20100806/7ff465f1-26ff-485d-a021-cf6229cbd0e8

What exactly Hurd did to qualify for the shakedown is very unclear. Hurd himself and the company he is credited with revitalizing by cutting about a thousand jobs seem to be saying there was no sex and no harassment, only some kind of misinterpretation. For this minor carelessness they canned his ass, and he settled with his adversary for an undisclosed amount. Do you suppose she got forty dollars and a tee-shirt?

A pillow stuffed with about 30 million cushioned Hurd’s fall from grace. I don’t think you could call it a parachute. I don’t think there’s any way to make 30 million buoyant. Where do I sign up for harassment?

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

Gramatikly Speaking

2010-08-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I thought hassle was spelled hastle. Funny how the rules work when you're not paying attention, and I was critical of Michael Zerbe because the introduction to his book insisted that the contributions of his colleagues could not be "underestimated." Speaking of which (if this can be considered speaking) is refudiating really a word, or is Marilyn Standard-Pseudonym just goofing on me? (cryptic Facebook reference) But on the other hand, why not?

I also thought the level of grammatical consistency in national publications was declining because of electronic communciations, but when I went back and started looking at publications from the Seventies, Twenties, and before 1900, I came to the conclusion that there have always been a lot of typos in all kinds of publications, in spite of pedantic ranting about excellence and accuracy in writing.

Experts like Bennett are probably some of the worst offenders. Not only do they make mistakes, but they claim to set the standards. So is the question really whether the message gets across or not?

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

This Is Not What It Says. Read the Article.

2010-07-26T06:08:00.000-07:00

A Fox news headline accuses the Obama administration of approving the Libyan bomber release.

"U.S. Backed Freedom, Not Prison, for Bomber"

What the article really says is that the administration wanted the bomber kept in Scotland if he had to be released at all.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/25/obama-administration-reportedly-backed-lockerbie-release-transfer-libyan-prison/

The real title of the article:
"White House Reportedly Preferred Scotland to Libya for Released Lockerbie Bomber"

"The Obama administration told Scottish officials last August that, although it opposed any release of the Lockerbie bomber, it would rather see him released in Scotland than transferred to a Libyan prison..."

Did Fox News think for a minute that sending the bomber to prison in Libya was better than keeping him in Scotland?

No, Fox News wanted to run a headline critical of the Obama administration.

There's fair and balanced journalism at its best.

And reading comprehension.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

The Obligations of New Media

2010-07-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

Beyond basic questions of technical capacity and design, the interesting aspect of New Media is the dimensions of communication that have been drawn in or reconfigured. DuGay referred to “marketing to the imaginary self” in the design of technology. Identity, personal politics, and the imaginary self are all interested parties in the determination of style. Liu describes how knowledge workers express resistance to the demands of the knowledge economy, the industrial production of information.

To some extent, perhaps by virtue of merging work and leisure, everyone participating in electronic knowledge exchange is a knowledge worker, and everyone has an interest in style. Liu goes on to suggest that the color of a cellphone becomes, not just an expression of personal preference, but resistance to an economy of knowledge work that wants cellphones to be black or silver, for instance. This choice represents a complex dialectic or discourse of Horkheimer and Adorno’s equality replaced by conformity, where as Hebdige suggests, style, an expression of resistance, is adopted by the economy as a standard of conformity. In a sense then, new media offers the opportunity, or at least the appearance of opportunity, to choose between style and conformity.

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

Nehru's Dam

2010-06-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

I opened the UCF main page and there was a survey that wanted to know if I found what I wanted and how to make the site easier to use. WTF? I should have saved a screen capture. I told them to wait until after I used the site to ask about using the site. Don’t ask me if it works before I use it. That’s sort of typical IT mentality. Craft a superb online survey that works brilliantly and doesn’t measure anything. Awesome.

I shouldn’t be so cynical. It was probably set up by some poor aspiring graduate student for an intersnship project. On the other hand, maybe not. You would think with all the hulabaloo about technical savvy around here that the standards would be pretty high. That’s one of the hazards of the internet. In a post about global economic development, I once accused Nehru of building the Aswan dam. Same problem, wrong dam. The worst thing was that nodobdy ever nailed me on it. Maybe nobody ever looked at it. I like to think they don’t have that problem with the UCF main page.

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

Hey Sailor, Throw an Aussie on the Barbie

2010-06-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

Here’s a revoltin’ development. The father of California sailor girl, Abhy Sunderland, and the Australian government have caught some flack for the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent for rescue when her boat lost its mast in bad weather a long, long way from land. Some people wanted to know why a sixteen-year-old girl was out sailing around the world by herself in the first place when a lot of sixteen-year-old girls can’t even jog around the local park safely. Her father’s reply was something to the effect that kids today are over-protected.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20100617/00fe1425-8be1-4018-a694-338278951050

Okay. I’ll give you that sailing around the world is a more constructive activity for a teenager than prostitution or dealing drugs, but hey, wait a minute. I have to wonder a little bit about how many teenagers could get entertainment or job training or even food and cancer treatment for those hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for call-in isn’t a kind of over-protection, then I’ve got an oil spill I’d like you to finance. What planet does this guy live on?

There was a time when sailing was a little more essential for personal transportation, and that’s where the expectations of international assistance came from. If Abby got her start sailing as a cabin boy on the Cutty Sark, that might have been a little different culture, but I don’t think that happened. Even then, the only sixteen-year-olds out sailing around the world on their own were probably shipwrecked.

If Abby flipped burgers for the local fast food emporium until she was twenty-one to save up for her yacht, okay. I’d prefer that the Australians used their money for something more productive than intervening with predictably suicidal extremes, but we sort of make that allowance in the case of consenting adults, and I have no problem with sailing for fun and profit, but sailing is like horses and mountain climbing. As casual recreation and motivation for personal conditioning, they’re great, but the practical value is otherwise small in the real world, and heavy involvement with them is a kind of culture of the aristocracy. I’m okay with horses and sailing and climbing. I just have no use for aristocrats.

My personal opinion is that the youngest sailor or the youngest climber or the youngest rider to jump a Clydesdale over the Grand Canyon is just a couple of more jackasses in the world, their parents, and I’m talking extremes here, mind you. These are not accomplishments that inspire the human spirit to the height of achievement. These are accomplishments that point up the impossible gulf between the haves and the have-nots, a gulf that has not been bridged since the days of sailing ships, in spite of our great advances in engineering.

In fairness, of course, it wasn’t an issue until it went wrong. The young Australian who made the record also made a big splash in the press, most likely accounting for some of the Aussie inclination to sympathetic support, but, like Deepwater Horizon, that doesn’t mean the problem wasn’t there. The inevitable is also the nature of risk, but I’m inclined to say that if the California Dreamers want to sail around the world solo, let them wait until they hit twenty-one, or let them swim.

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

The Next to the Last Remake of Robin Hood

2010-06-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah. I know. Robin Hood already went down to "Sex and the City" and "Prince of Persia," but I did this and forgot to post it. Some responsible blogger I be. The Gulf will be cleaned up before I get around to ridiculing any more BP executives for their crude comments, har har. Free oil for all. Bring your bucket and scoop as much as you can carry. I see they sucked up a thousand barrels with their latest hat trick. Damn, you got to give those guys credit for trying.

Russell Crowe does a more convincing accent than Kevin Costner, but he still sounds to me, less English than the CEO for a herd of Leprechauns. If Robin Hood gets any older, they’re gonna have to haul him off to Sherwood Forest in a Senior tour bus. Maybe he can swing by Stonehenge on the way.

English history seems fairly well resigned to the idea that Richard Lion Heart was only one of a nominally dedicated and more or less despotically inclined tribe of tyrants strewn across northern France by the careless proclivities of Henry the Second, an inconvenient truth for the fairytale version that put Robin Hood in the forests of Nottingham to resist the depredations of evil King John and his spineless lackey, the Sheriff of Nottingham, anticipating the return of noble Richard from the crusades to put everything right.

The truth more likely seems to be that Richard was no more noble or concerned than any of his immediate friends or relations, if he ever returned to England at all. Beyond this somewhat isolated and perplexing concession to the historical validity of Richard’s probable rottenness, Ridley Scott’s narrative plays just as fast and loose with events as any fairytale, condensing decades following Richard’s crusade into a matter of weeks, and eliminating another inconvenient gap between his return and messy demise from gangrene several years later.

One flagrant irony of the fairytale version is that the occasion for imposition of oppressive taxes by heartless King John was the ransom of Richard from the Austrians, who were royally (so to speak) pissed off after Richard steamrollered a couple of their allies on his way to the crusade. The crusade was largely a PR effort to get past some youthful exuberance that eventually antagonized most of Europe, including his father, although, as the Austrians soon realized, his behavior in the course of the penitentiary expedition left something to be desired also, including the execution of two thousand Muslim prisoners who got to be inconvenient.

In the end, there didn’t seem to be much joy about the prospect of Richard’s return, and why the English bothered to pay the ransom at all is somewhat unclear except that unlike California, at the time it was sort of a national insult to have an Austrian calling the shots. I’m still not sure I want California enough to pay Arnie for it either. Maybe we have moved beyond that mentality, or maybe we should just let the Austrians have California, but nobody in England seemed much inclined to pay for the return of Richard, which explains why they resented John’s taxes, although Richard did repay their generosity later by taking over half of France.

After an opportunistic adolescent crossbowman skewered Richard from the ramparts of a recalcitrant French castle under siege while he was in the middle of an inspection tour, infection finally eliminated the Lion heart a couple of weeks later, and things got back to more normal feudal despotism. The king’s commander of mercenary guards hanged the garrison of the castle, flayed the marksman alive, and the oppressive taxes went back where they usually go, to support oppression.
Ridley Scott, however, dispensed with the whole ransom business and took out Richard in the course of a dramatic charge to the castle gate on his way back from the crusade. What he wanted the castle for wasn’t clear, and I sort of got confused at that point. Robin and his band of Merry Men were under arrest for an excess of merry, and the death of the king gave them an opportunity to split.

Meanwhile, back at Le Ranche, King Phillipe of France plots with Godfrey, another opportunistic royal connection of some sort, against the English Crown and loyal Chancellor Marshall, another throw-ahead to twenty years later, when Pillipe actually intervened in English civil wars until Willikin of the Weald whipped his ass, but those guys are pretty much a whole new operation. From there it gets kind of complicated.

In any case, Phillipe contracts with Godfrey to take down Richard on his way out of Dodge (France), not realizing Richard has already bought the farm. Richard’s outfit, packing the King’s crown as confirmation of the event, shows up on schedule, and Godfrey’s sword slingers ambush them at the passe. From the mortally wounded Robert Locksley, Godfrey learns the news about Richard, but at that point Robin Longstride and his Merry Men on the lambe turn up to wrecke the party. The English archers massacre the French hit-squad and recover the King’s crowne. Godfrey runs for his life, barely escaping back to England with a gash across his face from Robin’s parting shot.

Robin finds Robert Locksley, still dying, and reluctantly promises to carry Robert’s sword back to his father in Nottingham to reconcile their family feud. Robert finally gives up the ghost, and the Merry Men decide the only way to get Richard’s crown back to London without getting hanged for their trouble is for Robin to assume Robert’s identity. I didn’t totally follow that one. Something to do with the crown. Robin manages to ditch the crown with the queen mother, and the now unopposed King John replaces Loyal Chancellor Marshall with the scheming Godfrey to put down the restless barons in the north.

Meanwhile, back at the Manse, Locksley’s wife Marion dodges tax collectors and unsympathetic catholic clergy while Robert gallivants around the world on Richard’s mission of mayhem. The ineffectual (as usual), Sheriff of Nottingham appears briefly. Things look up a bit when the laid-back Friar Tuck takes over the local church gig with a bee-keeping business and mead-brewing on the side, a happy combination. Eventually, Robin comes around with the sword, and Robert’s father wants to go ahead with the scam to help protect the estate. Marion isn’t too keen on shacking up with the impostor, but Robin sleeps on the floor with the dog, so it works out. Probably one of the best scenes in the movie, maybe because it’s so predictable, is Robin instructing the Merry Men to call him Sir Robert. It turns out that Walter Locksley was tight with Robin’s rebellious father back when cantankerous King Henry infringed on everybody’s rights, so Robin is really the heir of the struggle for truth and justice, for whatever that’s worth. I’d rather have the castle.

Are you still with me? Phillipe sends a French posse to help Godfrey stir things up by extracting John’s exorbitant taxes from the barons, hoping they can capitalize on the conflict to invade England. The French posse attacks the Locksley estate, trapping everybody in burning buildings and preparing the usual indignity for Marion. Godfrey executes the valiant Walter Locksley, but Marion proves more problematic, and with the help of the poachers holds off Godfrey and the French until Robin arrives at the last minute, leading the barons‘ cavalry.

King John realizes Godfrey is in cahoots with Phillipe and agrees to lay off the barons. The united English ride to meet the French invasion at the beachy margent of the sea. Marion slips into a comfortable suit of armor and gets in a couple of whacks at Godfrey before Phillipe decides things are going badly and calls off the invasion. John however, burns the agreement with the barons as soon as the threat is over, and Robin, as a rebel baron, is now an outlaw.

Guess where the Senior Center bus is headed? You guessed it, Sherwood Forest. Do you smell a sequel, or does Kevin Costner just take over here?

Phillipe tried to intervene a couple of times in English civil wars. Willikin of the Weald actually defeated the French invasion that turned back from England twenty years later. As a real guerilla leader in the forests of Southern England, Willikin may be a more intriguing character than Robin Hood. Nobody seems to know what degree of reality Robin Hood involves. Maybe that’s the attraction in an age of electronic identity. How authentic does it have to be?

After the casual adaptation of history for the film, I hardly care about the authenticity of a lot of details though. The characters had accents. What kind of accents they had, I could not tell you for sure. They could have been Canadian for all I know. Nobody pulled their arrows with their thumbs as far as I could see. I don’t know how hard it is to climb on a horse in a suit of chain mail, so that didn’t bother me.

The buildings had a kind of Elizabethan Faire quality about them, suitably rustic although somehow sanitized. There was some nice photography of interiors, like Dutch Romanesque (assuming there is such a thing) painting, although I wouldn’t characterize the filming as just gorgeous. I had some doubts about whether the landing craft for the amphibious invasion would have really gotten anywhere propelled by oars with that kind of draft, but on the other hand, what do I know about rowing a boat load of horses over the English Channel in the Middle Ages? I’ll suspend some disbelief in the interests of free enterprise. What the hell? It works for BP and Bank of America.

I wouldn’t call any of the performances brilliant either. Russell Crowe has an artful ability to understate lines, although that sometimes combines with conservative physical motion to create a sense of plodding momentum. In the scenes with Marion, for instance, she reinforces her reactions with indecisive movements. Crowe either transitions predictably from one required state to the next, or remains relatively static. Much of the action depends on inference from effects of the camera, as in the ambush scene with Godfrey's raiders, or later when the French invasion force reaches the shore.

King John is annoying, not because the character has annoying qualities, but because he is played with a kind of mysterious antagonism that never really goes anywhere. Yes, he is something of a self-interested manipulator, but so are we all. Why the apparent insinuation that there is something going on in his head we don’t understand? The French Princess is a promising character, but nominal. My favorite character as usual was the intractable villain, Godfrey, who is evil for no other apparent reason than ambition, which makes him rather one-dimensional, but it is at least a joyful one-dimensionality.

There are enough swords and sieges to give the film a respectable violence quotient, but this isn’t really an adolescent action fantasy. Another thing Crowe can do is look sad and weary. As a middle-aged romance, the characters of Marion and Robin are played for what they could have been, a pair of fatigued survivors with histories in a world of unpredictable loyalties and demands, what to an extent could be characterized in Clint Eastwood, baby-boomer terms as the Castles of Nottingham County. Is it worth a sequel? Ask Clint Eastwood, but maybe what the real target audience wants to see is one more complicated, redemptive romance.

Fisher Price Drill and Spill

2010-05-13T11:44:00.001-07:00

Where did they do this survey (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37116587/ns/politics-more_politics/) about offshore drilling that shows “overwhelming” support, and what exactly was the question? Why don’t we get that part of the story? I would believe that an overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned about economic benefit, but I find it hard to believe that spewing oil over half of the U.S. coast will ultimately prove economically beneficial. Perhaps BP can contribute to the economy by employing the homeless to scrub sea shells with toothbrushes, or maybe ocean currents will simply divert the disaster to France.

On NPR, BP’s Irish Guy compared Deepwater Horizon to Apollo Thirteen or fatal aircraft accidents. The argument, I gather, is that we don’t stop doing what we’re doing because things don’t go quite as planned, although even a BP executive with normal intelligence (for a BP executive), might think that the situations aren’t completely equivalent. What was the potential for environmental damage from Apollo Thirteen? Maybe we could speculate that debris from Apollo Thirteen might have eventually hit the sun, causing an uncontrolled solar flare resulting in a burst of energy that might conceivably have penetrated the earth’s atmosphere through a hole in the ozone layer and coincidentally singed off a BP oil executive's eyebrows.

Oh wait a minute. Apollo Thirteen made it back to earth without spilling anything more hazardous than a little oxygen in deep space. No doubt the Irish Guy got the assignment based on the well-documented Celtic ability to keep things in perspective and resist the temptation to immoderate hyperbolation. Regarding aircraft accidents, however, he’s got us there. The North American continent is littered with the remains of hazardous things falling carelessly from the sky, including Russian space stations and Buddy Holly. So far, we haven't stopped breathing to allow for acid rain, although perhaps we should consider it. I’m sure the environmental effect is an indisputable argument to continue deep water drilling unabated, well, pretty sure.

Here's Thinking for You.
Iffy

Hell Boy

2010-05-11T07:43:00.001-07:00

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Double Exposure

2010-04-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

So I been out to lunch, or at least out to conference in Pasadena. EdTech 2010, a compact and energetic academic enterprise. Probably I obsessed, and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) didn't entirely apply, but education should be a learning experience.

The quest for blogistic legitimacy goes on. I connected with the academic blog of Amit Rai at FSU,
http://www.english.fsu.edu/faculty/arai.htm
who seems to share some common interests (or at least the effects of imperial and colonial modernity interest me) and concern for information fluency, but my brilliant critical comments aren't showing up anymore. I don't know what that means, whether I am technically incapable of posting, or whether I'm just annoying, but it occurred to me that I can put them on my own blog. In cyberspace there's no escape from the critically inconsequential or inadequate. Like George Bush and Al Queda, the intellectual proletariat will hunt you down and find you.

We are neither post-colonial nor postmodern. Neither the colonial nor the modern are ready to concede power or accept responsibility. There are dangerous misconceptions in the implication that we have gotten past either one. Liscensing and the game world are extensions of Fordist factory mentality, incorporation of the individual into the enterprise. According to Donna Haraway, the problem with organic concepts of technology and relations to the body, of becoming, is that integration, or the lack of duality, requires acknowledgement of responsibility, of power-sharing. Duality is necessary to assign responsibility for technology somewhere else. In Benjamin’s case, to something resembling the “inauthentic” or “mechanically reproduced” artifact. In Nietszche’s case, to the rational man, the inherent subordinate to the natural or intuitive man. Perhaps a definitive example, like Don Quixote and the windmill, Heidigger wanted to distinguish technology from more personal industry, invoking an existence for technology independent of individual industry, for the simple reason that accepting the equivalence of technology and personal industry cripples the critical social distinction between the individual and the machine and robs the intellectual activist of the cause. We cannot resist the machine with conviction that transcends human banality if we are the machine. In that case we have to account for our own limitations in the machine. Essentially, technology derives from the personal in the same way Nietszche’s leaves derive from the particular, and like Haraway, we should desire reconciliation with technology, not mastery. We are cyborg, although that also does not mean there is no enemy. The enemy is capital, the mentality that converts a perceived lack of resistance into domination, the mentality that converts needs into subordination, the mentality that appropriates the body as a component of industrial production (Google, for example), and capital is not us. We participate to a nominal extent allowed for purposes of propaganda, but there is no real universal participation in capital. It is an exclusive community. Modernity lives.

Consider Train to Virar, first in the sense of underlying Western European enlightenment language that determines both the hierarchy and programming of the “top” of the page. What it represents to me, is merged views of a train track and a passenger car interior. Which is on “top” isn’t totally apparent, although there is some sense from the intensity of forms that the car interior is probably in the foreground. Eisenstein, Barthes, Burnett, and Manovich suggest that the power of combining images is such that it cannot be ignored, that we will attempt to make connections between images in proximity, so that making meaning without reference to sources is essentially impossible. To that extent, Stengers’ irrelevance of production is in itself irrelevant, and that's that.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Senatorial Surveytista

2010-04-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

http://lemieux.senate.gov/public/?p=NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=e71996f7-d15c-47bd-9399-f0fb9c3fe489

Not to put too fine a point upon it, Senator Lemieux’s recent survey regarding health care sucks. The results of the survey do not give any clue to the reasons for opposition to health care legislations, and are contradictory considering that the legislation addresses every concern included in the survey. Does 80% opposition make sense if the opponents understood that the legislation addresses the concerns? How does legislation that basically doesn’t go into effect for another four years qualify as a rush job? Does anybody seriously think we won’t be picking at it with tweezers and a magnifying glass for the next four years? How long are we supposed to wait to start doing something? Until everybody agrees on everything? That could be even longer than four years. Or is opposition simply a knee-jerk response to proposals that seem to change existing conditions for people who already feel they have advantages that they are entitled to? If Democrats are ramming this down Republican throats, that seems to suggest that Republicans aren’t willing to open their mouths, even a little bit.

Would somebody please explain to me what insurance it is that is not already regulated, and what insurance premiums are not already increasing? A government program extending availability of insurance coverage to a wider range of individuals will cost money, just as interstate highway systems or missile defense systems cost money to insure increased access and security. Why is that only a good idea if it means I don’t pay?

Like roads and defense, insurance is by nature a socialist project. Insurance pools resources to prevent any one individual from being completely destroyed by circumstances beyond their control. It’s hard to believe anyone who understands the fundamental nature of insurance or realizes that the cost will increase regardless would categorically oppose changes. I don’t particularly see Obama health care as a solution to the problems, but the survey simply invites opposition, it does not reflect the resolution of any issues. What would happen if the survey asked how health care costs should be contained, or how insurance coverage should be extended, for instance, and gave alternatives from Democratic and Republican proposals as the response? I’m not a Democrat, but I suspect Senator Lemieux would be afraid to find out the answers to those questions. The survey seems to say what people want is bi-partisan cooperation, and the Democrats won’t. Who opposes malpractice reform? The Democrats? Think again. Yeah, doctors want to limit recovery for malpractice. Guess who doesn’t? Right, the trial lawyer lobby.

Lemieux’s “predictive modeling” is a study in the ludicrous. Predictive modeling means don’t give credit to someone who probably can’t pay for it. So I have to agree with him there. If people who don’t have insurance don’t get health care, there will be less opportunity for fraud. We already have predictive modeling in the insurance industry. It’s called pre-existing condition exclusions. It means that people with a high risk of need have no resources, but that’s the breaks, right?

Likewise, Lemieux’s video comments make only a superficial kind of sense. He reminds me of Glenn Beck. He has the earnest face of a toddler, and he can speak in coherent sentences without stuttering to repeat the phrase, “money we can’t afford,” which should endear him to any conservative mentality, but his health-care debate “myth-busting” is largely based on restating the obvious as if it somehow means something else, such as increased costs in the Massachusetts health care system. Yes, costs increased, but not as much as other places. Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly approve of the state system, but they’re the wrong color, right? (On the electoral map, that is).

In the end, I can’t argue with Mr. Lemieux. The survey indicates conclusively that 80% of the people opposed to Obama health care legislation are opposed to it. The other 20% are undecided, or obviously misguided and irrelevant. Even I received a copy of the survey, which I did not complete, because I don’t like surveys in the first place, and this one seemed especially misleading. Now I wonder if the reason for sending me a survey was simply that I expressed concern about the timing of the legislation, and might therefore conceivably have been opposed to it, which would explain a lot of things.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Death of the Book?

2010-03-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

Dying and furniture have been the dominant themes in my life for the last couple of weeks, but furniture hasn't really spoken to me yet, so I'm going the other way.

Just like places, people need things. The alternative is a Matrix kind of identity connected to an electronic reality, but the accessibility and convenience of electronic documents that inspire optimistic predictions of inevitable replacement for paper and ink may underestimate the sensual value of physical things glued together in a discrete unit.

For one thing, books provide a sense of physical engagement in a way that interface with electronic files does not. Keyboards and touch-screens, even voice commands, are plaintive kinds of requests for cooperation that we can never be completely confident will produce the desired response. Although a book represents a universe of politics, economics, psychology, and industry, a book also has a distinct separation from the powers of its production. Just considering cookies, for instance, (the electronic kind), illustrates that in most cases, the connections involved with electronic files are transparent but mysteriously unknown levels of programming, machine language, and marketing interests. We like to think they are benign or at least innocuous, but we don’t even know that for sure.

For books, there is at least a sense that the hidden effects of culture and enterprise are contained within the covers. The multivariant connections of the electronic are limitless and unknown for practical purposes. Every connection to an electronic file is an act of faith in very real ways, yet the book seems to define self-contained limits to intrusion from the outside. Pick up a book, and you have a container of information that you can consider at your convenience and by the most suitable means. A book depends on you. Electronic communication has a life of its own, but a book needs you.

Literature, printing, and even binding speak with subtle marketing rhetorics of design and persuasion, but for books, there is at least a sense of meeting them on our own terms, sort of figuratively (or even literally) curling up in the fat chair and making them ours, our space, our things. A Kindle-kind of electronic unit can replace text, maybe even a place in a fat chair, but that doesn’t replace a fast riff through the crisp pages of a new book or even the soft and slightly slippery pages of an old one.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Progress Report

2010-02-23T07:26:00.000-08:00

I’m disappointed with Obama’s first year, but not necessarily with Obama. It’s not the same thing. The economy is such a complex and formidable problem, that the most capable leadership in history may not be sufficient to cope with it over an entire decade, never mind a year. As I complained before the election, and will not get over, my biggest fear then and now is that the legacy of the Bush administration will be insurmountable. Obama, however, took on that challenge willingly, and for better or worse, if he fails to deliver recovery, or at least the perception of it, then he gets the credit. Bush got out from under it with a few boos at the inauguration ceremony. Historic, but pretty cheap as far as I’m concerned, considering what he didn’t do for the nation.

A new book confirms another one of my favorite peeves, that the Republicans played into the terrorist trap by distracting us with the enormous expenditure of resources and effort invested in assassinating Bill Clinton’s presidency. How can any sane person think that was somehow a good idea? Where is the evidence? As the economy has demonstrated, the benefit quite clearly accrued to captains of defense, drug, and petroleum industries, and somebody had to pay the price. There is an argument for goating of the banks and automotive industry, but as usual, the costs will trickle down, and the true victims are us. If, like the NRA and Tea Party politics, you are happy to sacrifice for the sake of General Dynamics, Merck, and Exxon, maybe that will work for you, but don’t kid yourself that General Dynamics are us.

Also as usual, Obama’s big failure is probably as much perceptual as performance. The stalling of the health care initiative affects virtually nothing in a practical way. Those with health insurance still have provider networks. Those without health insurance still have the emergency room. That’s a system of sorts, and it helps keep costs high, but once again, the economic benefits accrue to a select management, insurance, and investment group. Maybe we should consider under-insurance to be the real force behind our emergency services system. With health insurance, routine medical treatment would be returned to relatively low-cost routine medical facilities. All those around-the-clock, publicly financed, flu and sprain centers could be scaled back to trauma and life-threatening conditions. Would that solve the crisis of health care costs? Probably not, but we need some token concessions to common sense.

No, the problem with the Obama health care initiative is just what a lot of people other than me are thinking, that the time is not right. Health care is a concern. It’s a huge concern, and we see what he was thinking. Going in with a lot of momentum from the election. Get health care through on the momentum, then build economic activity around the health care initiative. It makes sense, and only those same insane exceptions could consider universal health care a bad thing, except that we neither see health care as being closely related to the economy, or as the foremost issue. The economy is the scary thing. Health care was too complicated and too vague and too esoteric. What would the health care bill have done for me? To tell you the honest to gawd truth, aside from the simple principle of caring for each other, I have no idea.

What I do know, is that housing values are still precarious. Construction is still down. The red-hot jobs market isn’t. The stock market got a little juke and has been creeping up since then, but the emphasis seems to be on creep, and the banks are siphoning off the benefit of any general improvement. The market highs of the housing bubble are charred hulks after a forest fire, an awe-inspiring tribute to a fertile past, now only pathetic, remote, and mythical. The priority, therefore, in the disturbed minds of the voters who put Obama so firmly into office, was not health care. It was economics. Reagan and the Bush boys succeeded in totally derailing us from any social course of fiscal responsibility determined by the Great Depression and returned us to the Jurassic economy of the deregulated free market (redundant?). There seems to be little dispute of that, even from the most conservative, Bill-O’Reilly-variety of financial critics, because the train wreck is sort of hard to ignore. The only question is how to shift the blame to Obama, and if he helps them enough by investing too much time and effort in health care issues that are important but nobody understands, they may be able to pull it off.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy

What Educators Do Best

2010-02-17T07:28:00.000-08:00

One of the obvious joys of blogging is the opportunity to be an expert on everything, even if only in my own mind, and in my case, that's where my joy has been pretty much confined to. Playing with what I can only consider to be an educational blog (because it has no other apparent useful value), I started thinking that I might eventually want to actually connect with some kind of audience. Originally I took it that making connections would depend on assigning the right key words to insure attention from like-minded intellectuals searching for information. Eventually I determined that perhaps there were no such key words, or no such intellectuals, at least who would admit it, or that what I was producing didn’t qualify as intellectual, or maybe even as information.

Based on this positive attitude, by trial and error I eventually came up with the idea that perhaps I could more productively apply the effort to looking at some blogs and blogging strategy instead of thinking I knew how online searching worked. After skimming through a few educational blogs, however, I quickly realized something else. There are numerous suggestions for great ideas, resources, and connections, but probably 95% of posted material, like blogs for a lot of subjects, either repeats what has been posted other places or rediscovers things that have been produced by somebody else, adding captions to screen captures from Second Life as cartoon graphics, for instance.

Some of the responses make sarcastic comments about redundancy, some attribute social networking to political conspiracy or alien intervention, and some include links to Pamela Anderson's latest sex tape (...which is really about animal rights. How would I know? Research.) but the authors are not discouraged, and in the end, does it matter? Blogging communities are more insular than global information access seems to suggest, and we spend a lot of time chasing our own tails, but is that really any different than talking to somebody you know about something cool you found out about on the internet? Probably not, neither.

And does that mean blogging for education is a bad idea? No, it just means that the problem isn’t information. The problem is access. Educators spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but then, maybe that’s what they do best.

Here's Thinking for You

Iffy

Google Does Right

2010-02-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

If nothing else, the relationship of Google and China illustrates that neoliberal global capitalism has not conclusively marginalized the effects of national identity and national sovereignty. Despite global economic involvement by China, the Chinese have not been effectively reduced to the ideological status of an obedient citizen in an economically unified global nation. The Chinese have their own agenda, and it does not necessarily conform to capitalist economic expectations.

To an extent, the results are unsurprising. Google sold itself by making concessions to Chinese demands for accommodations in operating policy and restrictions. For some people Google’s concessions suggested an immediate conflict of interest, but that in itself is normal or at least not unusual in a market economy and is not necessarily evil. Consider it a variation of luring customers with a low-price introductory offer. Perhaps Google failed to appreciate the Chinese Government’s perception of the transaction, however.

The world has labeled China as the most promising and lucrative market on the planet. The Chinese have been encouraged to consider their economy as a desirable commodity in many respects. Having purchased Google with access to their markets, Google is, in the Chinese view, bought and paid for, a product they own. By what authority did Google restrict Chinese government access to information? Apparently Google agreed to restrict access for government opposition activists. Why would the Chinese government think using Google for additional surveillance would be a violation of their right to possession? Did they want anybody else to know what they were doing? Of course not. Does the CIA post notification of every attempt they make to infiltrate a terrorist group? I hope not.

I’m not suggesting that the Chinese government rightfully went into the control levels of Google’s systems and took protected information, but I am suggesting that Google dealt with China as if China was merely a typical business customer in a capitalist supply and demand economy, so why should Google be surprised that the Chinese government behaved as a typical capitalist customer and considered the purchased product to be used for whatever purposes suited them? One of the popular platitudes of technology is that people will find ways to use it that nobody anticipated. Google’s relationship with China seems at best naïve, and at worst blindly opportunistic, a technological attempt to colonize a foreign culture that backfired.

What Google should have sold the Chinese government was not a product tailored to meet the demands of their ideology by applying restrictions to content, but a product with functionality limited to the absolute minimum necessary to meet that content level. There are different ways to configure a trial version. Would the Chinese have refused to consider Google without access to personalization that includes confidential information? Maybe they would have refused, and maybe that would have told Google something either way. What would have happened if Chinese users themselves demanded that functionality? Would Google have been in a better position to negotiate the security of the information?

Let’s say Google took a chance thinking there wasn’t anything to lose if it didn’t work out. Maybe they are right, and they can simply start over from a better informed negotiating position. On the other hand, what they may have confirmed is the ability of the Chinese government to control both the technology and the application, to use it as it suits them. In a competitive market, the ideology of the technology then becomes a factor in successful adoption. Not only does Google have to compete on a functional level, but the competition becomes one of the nations and political systems from which the technology has been derived. The search capability of the Chinese state then becomes competitive, and the comparison extends to national origin. In the interests of global reconciliation, I hope Google is right, at least partly.

Here's Thinking for You.

Iffy

A Regulated Madness, Part One

2010-02-01T19:30:00.000-08:00

When my mother had a heart attack, I became intimately acquainted with the intensive care unit of the hospital and the perception of people as regulated combinations of information, so I did some thinking about what that means as a reflection of the contemporary information industry and knowledge work and the effects of modernity. If you are easily discouraged by academic commentary, you might be more interested in prior comments about Avatar.

Modernity is the time and the mentality of industry and rational science. Characteristics and consequences of Modernity include manufacturing, scientific study and development, colonial imperialism and exploitation, modern and surrealist art, and Disneyland.

The characteristics and consequences are reflexive. Modernity is itself a consequence of the Renaissance, the printing press, and rationality, an Aristotelian idea of knowable, predictable, and reliable cause and effect. Somewhat paradoxically, Aristotle has been both an obstacle to rational progress as a theologically approved intellectual standard conceptualization of the universe with the earth at the center, (the Galileo problem, and probably not what Aristotle himself originally envisioned), and as the inspiration for an intellectually curious and systematic investigation of nature (probably more along the lines of Aristotle's objectives).

Essentially, the effect of modernity is “valorization” of Western European ideas of knowledge accumulation and application established through adoption of Greek and Roman intellectual culture, partly as an effect of Christianity and partly as an effect of technology as an intellectual enterprise (distinguished from the more personal or mundane as art, craft, and individual functions, a mentality that inspires attitudes of cultural superiority inherited rhetorically from such notable predecessors as Homer, Alexander, Herodotus, and Julius Ceasar, as well as the intellectual heritage of Plato and Socrates). The exact intellectual or social process of technological development and advance is not completely understood. For Auguste Le Comte, John Stuart Mill, and others involved in the initiation of European science, it was an accumulation of knowledge necessary to answer the challenging questions posed by nature. For Thomas Kuhn, it is a series of revisions in paradigms, changes in fundamental ways of thinking about essential concepts brought about by recognition of irreconcilable exceptions, with intervening periods of methodically integrating information into existing concepts. For others, such as Donna Haraway, it is a competition between paradigms as well, or it depends on the contributions of exceptionally capable individuals, on the coincidence or condensation of essential information, or simply on the exclusive ability to ask the right questions. As Kuhn proposes, probably all of these are reflexive and none completely correct, including his.

John Misa describes instances of intellectual technology that are generally acknowledged to represent an acceleration or triumph of progress, production, and the way information has been applied and utilized, such as the advent of the printing press and the steam engine. The printing press contributed, not just to the proliferation of literature, but to religious conflicts, establishment of modern nations, capitalist economics, and the systematic investigation of nature, all depending on efficient and standardized exchange of information. The steam engine brought about both modification in the ways human labor applies to production and in the mobility of individuals through the availability of improved propulsion that ultimately affected a variety of transportation modes on the sea, on the land, and even in the air, when the project of self-contained engines that steam represented progressed to the point of internal combustion.

Electricity affected a wider variety of technical applications than any energy source in history since raw sunlight and fire, including everything from interpersonal communication to giant transportation vehicles. The transistor and the internet concentrated the application of electrical energy in an equally diffusive repurposing for comprehensive communication. In this way, intellectual technology has achieved the potential to involve every human being in direct ways, although the direct effects remain vastly under-developed and elusive.

Day of the Shoshone

2010-01-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

In Riverton, Wyoming, about 1962, I think, I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade. My father was a mining engineer at Lucky Mac in the Gas Hills. Riverton was sort of a low-budget ranch town in a sagging wash on the verge of the Wind River Indian reservation. Cold-War uranium mining put some post-agricultural life in the local economy, and eventually the money inspired erratic aspirations to culture and civilization, such as art guilds and French lessons, that eventually seem to overtake established communities in the West, Telluride, Denver, and Laramie, as examples, but Riverton was maybe a hundred years behind.

The kids of the ranchers were those hardy, independent cowboy types with good-hearted but incorrigible contempt for anything exotic and anybody they suspected of intellectual attitudes. I read an article in The Ranger that referred to homosexuals in the state prison. I didn't know what a homosexual was, so I asked my friend if he thought that was a problem. He never spoke to me again. That was Riverton in 1962.

The reservation was a separate economic class for reasons I later learned had to do with the peculiar legal status of the native peoples, oddly echoing the language of segregation, a separate but protected nation. Since they couldn't legally mortgage property, the Shoshone and Arapahoe had no way to borrow for improvements or to finance any kind of enterprise. If you want to understand the social effects of corruption in federal government combined with restricted credit, consider the history of the reservations. At the time, the Shoshone and Arapahoe lived pretty much on a subsistence level with an old car or pickup truck parked outside a tar-paper shack. That was my take on the economic image of the reservation. The Shoshone kids who lived off the reservation were respectful, quiet, and kept to themselves. They didn't mess with the cowboy kids much, or the miners.

I was in Piggly Wiggly one day with my mother, picking up the week's provisions I guess. That was the only way I would have been in the store for any length of time. Occasionally a few of us would walk over there to buy Sugar Babies, but we weren't allowed to hang around on our own. I would have been waiting up front to ring through a pretty good load of groceries. That was probably how I happened to notice an old Shoshone woman walking slowly past the dog food in the space across from the cash registers.

You could always tell the Shoshone because they dressed almost hyper-Western style with pearl button shirts, turquoise bolos, and black Stetsons with silver conchas on the bands. I never understood if that was an expression of a kind of desperate desire to belong, or a kind of irreverent parody of cowboy culture.

Maybe both, maybe neither, but I noticed the old woman because she wasn't wearing cowboy jeans and a corduroy shirt like the younger women with her. She had on a traditional head-dress and Navaho blankets with a big Mexican skirt that spread out four or five feet and hung to the ground, like you saw more in the Southwest, but hardly ever around Riverton. Her face was like the dark shiny old knots on the Pinion Pines, and completely fixed, without an expression, like she really was wood.

She moved slowly, as if she was very tired, a step at a time, but with a kind of dignity that even a junior high school kid could notice, until she got to an empty corner on the other side of the dog food where she could stop and turn around and lean back to brace herself against the wall. Then she pulled her blankets around her and closed her eyes. She moved around a little, a sleeper maybe dreaming under her blankets about life on a lost frontier, but otherwise she squatted there in the corner, completely motionless, while her companions shopped and rung out a few things.

There was some kind of problem with them ringing out, and it took the whole time that me and Mom rung through our own big buggies and got them loaded up again. That was before barcodes and scanners. A price-check or an ID could be terminal.

About the time Mom finished writing her check, the old woman finally opened her eyes, hitched up her colorful Mexican skirt, and waddled in her slow but dignified way out the door after the rest of her family. When we got to the door, my buggy hung up on the edge of the dog food rack, so I walked around the side of the buggy to push it loose, and I was facing the same corner where the old Shoshone woman had waited patiently, maybe dreaming about a proud and mythical past. Spread out there on the gray linoleum floor, in the space that the wide skirt had covered, was a huge shining puddle of bright yellow liquid.

Sometimes I wonder if it was a cultural thing.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Revisiting Avatar

2010-01-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

The range of reactions to Avatar has been instructive, including racism, feminism, disabilities, religion, economics, technology, and a variety of environmental issues.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100020706/avatar-james-cameron-deserves-the-worst-lefty-award-2009/

I'll comment on a few of the more prevalent that I kind of have answers for.
Regardless of white savior syndrome, the planet and the native culture are part of their own technologically superior bio-computer that ultimately appropriates the white imperialists for its own protection. An attractive take from an environmental perspective, although why bio-technological superiority would tolerate interference in the first place is a little perplexing. Maybe Wounded Knee and ultimate supremacy, through casino construction, were all part of the Indian (Native American) spiritual bio-computer plan.

If you don't like the racial and imperialist tones, don't watch it. Well, maybe you have to watch it once to have some idea of whether the arguments apply, besides which, it's worth watching anyway as a visual experience. The problem there is the nature of art as Trojan virus, a seductive vampire that sucks out your brain, or as stealth delivery vehicle for bad ideas. If you aren't aware of the argument, you may be affected indirectly, so you should at least consider the less obvious messages. Otherwise, a science fiction fantasy that “barely” qualifies for an R rating (based I suppose on the hint of unconcealed alien female breasts and a couple of carefully staged expletives), suggests little concern for offensive content in the way that X-rated material or something from a source that regularly provokes controversy might. To make the don't-watch-it argument valid, you need some kind of reliable cause for both anticipating offensive content and accepting the classification, like complaining that The Simpson's makes fun of religion, duh (or d'oh).

Likewise, the argument that "It's just a movie. Get over it," depends on the same kind of myopia. Just a movie that may pull in an audience of half the country. Accepting destructive messages because they come in artful packages serves the purpose of propaganda, regardless of intent. Spending 300 million dollars could conceivably produce something spectacular whether or not political messages were meant to be included. Essentially we need to at least discuss that. (Consider Caligula.)

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Pocahantas Simba Binks Meets Avatar

2009-12-27T10:38:00.000-08:00

Warning: Plot Spoiler. This review gives away parts of the plot (such as it is). My personal opinion is that a movie worth seeing won't be diminished by previous knowledge of the narrative, but some people can't live with it, so there you are.

The short version: Very long (2.5 hours), watchable, highly Disnified fairytale. No literary classic, but respectable visual and audio effects.

The longer version (but not as long as 2.5 hours):

In a galaxy far, far away, a mining company searches a primitive jungle planet for a mysterious precious mineral with the unlikely designation of something like “Unobtanium.” What this stuff is good for, we never know exactly, since all of the transportation modes involved in the fantasy world appear to operate in old-fashioned combustible ways, but for whatever reasons the stuff is highly desirable. Okay, we'll give them that.

The native inhabitants are a unique and vaguely jurassic group of spiritually interconnected plants, animals, and elongated blue humanoids with little use for the low-consciousness of the invading miners and their environmental carelessness. Coincidentally, deposits of the valuable mineral tend to be associated with the most important places in the native culture. Opposition from the natives and the hazards of the environment require the mining company to employ an army of ex-marines to insure security. If the native population doesn't cooperate, the Marines will also either forcefully relocate them, or eliminate as many as necessary to insure success of the mining operations.

Racing against the military profit schedule set by the corporate business manager, a team of dedicated scientists led by the crusty but culturally-conscious Sigorny Weaver as Grace, the science manager, struggles to find a workable diplomatic compromise by gaining knowledge of the native culture through the interaction of avatars, biological android replicants controlled by transfer of consciousness from a human operator. Just in case that wasn't sufficient provocation to produce avatars, human beings can only live in the atmosphere for about twenty seconds without gas masks. (Sorry folks, those are the rules, I didn't make them up.)

Into this predictable conflict of methodology and objectives, stumbles, so to speak, Jake Sully, a disabled Marine veteran who has lost the use of his legs under circumstances that are not clear, and is now, for reasons that are also not clear, the only suitable replacement to do the job of “sullying” the native culture as an avatar operator that was supposed to be his twin brother who has inconveniently died under circumstances that are even less clear. In a likewise somewhat incomprehensible deal, the militant and determined Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac commander of the security force offers to insure replacement of Sully's legs in return for his cooperation as an avatar operator to find something about the natives the mining company can use to force their cooperation. Apparently, as a fellow Marine, the Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac feels Jake's loyalty can be trusted. Unfortunately for the Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac, the native chief's attractive, independent daughter (think blue Pocahantas) conveniently rescues Jake in the character of his avatar (with a stylized minority face remarkably similar to Simba the lion cub) from the consequences of his own impetuous ignorance in the jungle. The inevitable follows.

Jake learns to appreciate the native culture as well as his shrewd and attractive native guide. His loyalties shift. The infuriated security chief convinces the business manager the time has come for violent action. The company sends in a team to destroy the native home-base (think Disney Tree of Life). The attack aircraft launch explosive incendiary rockets at the base of the colossal tree. The tree falls, and in the chaotic aftermath, the father of Pocahantas, I mean Blue Native Princess, gets speared by a fatal spike of the splintered tree.

Disowned by the natives for his human connections, poor Jake has to find a way to regain their confidence. This he accomplishes with a minimum of fuss by jumping onto a giant flying dinosaur and piloting the awesome beast in for a landing at the powow, becoming only the sixth or so successful major dino pilot in the long history of the natives. This is good enough for them. They take it as a sign.

The natives worship another weird tree (think fiber optic weeping willow) that serves as a kind of connection to the spiritual network of the planet. Unfortunately the tree grows on a promising location for Unobtanium. The company sends out an expedition of giant mining equipment, but Jake and the blue warriors head them off at the pass, so the business manager decides to go ahead with plans to drop a huge bomb on the site, and Jake leads the defense. Some kind of natural forces on the planet interefere with navigational instruments, so it's mano-a-mano, dino-riders against exo-suits.

In spite of their valiant effort and some help from their friends, including the scientists and a rogue copter pilot, the dinos and the natives are getting whacked by the massive firepower of the secuirty machines. Blue Jake jumps onto a flying humvee for a showdown with the Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac, and tosses a missle into the rotor, but Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac escapes in an exo-suit and Blue Jake makes a successful crash-landing through the sympathetic jungle vegetation.

On the ground, Marine Drill Sergeant Maniac in exo-suit takes on Blue Jake, Blue Pocahantas, and some of their dino back-ups. I won't spoil the duel by describing the outcome. I'll only suggest that it won't surprise you much.

As a teacher once put it to me, the simplest way to explain literature is that it messes with your head. Literature sells ideas like billboards sell cruises. How the ideas come across depends on a lot of things, including language, logic, comparisons, organization, all those things literature teachers are always ranting about as elements of literature whether they understand it themselves or not. This is also critical thinking, understanding how ideas are presented and their effect.

As literature, Avatar doesn't especially convey ideas successfully. The fundamental conflict between economics and nature represented by the mining company and the blue natives, a thinly veiled comparison to European colonial expansion, is something Disney has routinely exploited, exploited more effectively, and exploited with more blatant and complete hypocrisy (and I'm not even arguing that would necessarily be a bad thing for a business project).

What impact the narrative has depends, not on discovering any important or novel aspect of the relationship between nature and economics, but on contrived sentimentality of the sort criticized by Horkheimer and Adorno as products of the culture industry, predictable devices: destruction of the loyal companion, destruction of the devoted father, destruction of the loyal pet, destruction of the noble warrior, joining of the romantic characters, not things that have impact because of fundamental, inescapable personal connections, but things that have impact because of conditioned behavior, things that make you want to cry because they are supposed to make you want to cry.

To an extent, all emotional reactions are learned, conditioned, social behavior, but if that's all it is, then there is nothing authentic in the reaction. In that way, Avatar adds little or nothing to the conversation in the way that films like Blade Runner or Brazil added to the conversation, and the construction of the narrative is inconsistent. What supposedly happens to these avatars when the operator disconnects? Apparently they just go to sleep wherever they happen to be, which seems rather careless. Shouldn't they at least be parked somewhere secure?

Like a demanding mother, Grace insists on poking macaroni and cheese into Human Jake while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. What kind of planning is that? Are clothes generated for avatars the same way as the avatars themselves? Why does one of the scientists' avatars always wear identical clothes? Doesn't that guy ever change clothes, in or out of the tank?

The only real critical success of Avatar is not in narrative or in social issues. The success is almost strictly in the detailed aesthetic world of imagination that conjures up the frightening proximity of unfamiliar creatures, provokes stomach-turning vertigo on the verge of numerous heights, or involves the viewer in the ceremonies and environments of a mystical race. Dinosaur-like predators attack with jarring presence. Fragile, glowing reptiles with wings and luminous jelly-fish insects float through the air. The characters scamper recklessly along mossy branches far above the apparent surface. The meager story advances through myriad views of unfamiliar life forms, but the thing painfully apparent is confinement to the passive visual and audio experience.

This is not an alien world. It is 3-D, the dimensionalizing of fantasy art into movement and sound. The floating mountains, the dinosaur-like dragon creatures, the weapons of the primitive tribe are all standards, not of profound insight, but of an esoteric, mock-medieval style of legend. It is a magnificent set without a script of any significance, and even the technical effect is questionable. It lacks the novelty of a Star Wars and merely utilizes the hyper-real production techniques of a Final Fantasy or even a Toy Story. In some ways more like the arbitrary identity shifts of a video game than narrative, Avatar ends up as an only somewhat successful and very long (2.5 hours) look through a constrained window of special effects, although for that length of time, even the accomplishment of not being totally boring is a degree of success.

I was rather struck that so many people in the audience would accept the corporation and the caricatures of the US military as enemies, that they would literally applaud the destruction of the strike force. But perhaps the joke is on me, because ultimately the representation of military loss is only pretend, and the message that remains attached to the visual spectacle seems to be that the fate of nature and culture depends not on right, or justice, or even on inner strength, but on the disputes and intervention of Anglo, male, U.S. Marines. Whether you are a predatory corporate enterprise, or a valiant blue native, you can't win without an Anglo male Marine on your side. Everything else is incidental, and resistance is futile. As true as somebody might like that to be, 2.5 hours is a long time to take for the message.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Emily Dickinson Writes "The Gingerbread Man"

2009-12-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

This is sort of a Christmas post, Martha Marinara’s fault. Suppose Emily Dickinson made gingerbread like she wrote poetry, or even worse, suppose she wrote poetry like she made gingerbread....

A pudgy fellow cooked by gas
Occasionally hides--
You may have met him--
Did you not
His notice sudden is--
The nose reacts as to a fork--
A flattened shape is seen--
And then it dashes past your feet
And sassy further on--
He likes an open doorway
A floor apart from meals--
But when a child and hungry
Returning after school
I passed I thought a morsel
Escaping on the run
When stooping to secure it
It danced away for fun--
Some of the kitchen’s people,
I know and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of familiarity
I never met this fellow
Accompanied or alone
Without a warmer feeling
And spicy taste of home.

Here's Thinking for You, Best Wishes for the Holidays

Iffy

Phantom Post

2009-12-10T07:56:00.001-08:00

Information for Living

2009-12-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

Probably most human activities involve critical thinking. Information frequently finds you unprepared, unavoidable, attacking in the most merciless and inconvenient ways. Walking across the street requires knowing and accumulating volumes of information about imagery, lighting, traffic, sounds, physics, customs, laws, history, religion, and philosophy, not to mention personal capabilities and characteristics of response. How to apply the information to the task requires analytical and associative thinking, projections of future outcomes and identification of patterns. Should I cross here? Is it safe? Should I hurry? Can a car get here before I can get across, or in the case of imminent danger and spiritual insecurity, perhaps before I can get a cross? Where’s the nearest traffic light? Should I obey the law? Is it convenient? Why should I cross in a pedestrian crossing? Do I care what other people think? Is that Brad Pitt over there?

Therefore, it goes without stating, which means, of course, that it will be stated, critical thinking concerns the most intricate and personal aspects of our lives, so why would critical thinking be an issue of concern somehow separate from any particular problem? Maybe one answer has to do with the necessity of noticing patterns. Accumulation of information for such diverse projects as genetic research and identity theft or hacking requires the identification of patterns connected to the production of information.

What are the situational patterns, the parameters, that provide clues to the operation of natural processes and to the behavior that controls access to property or other valuable information, and how do people think who gather and use that information? The analytical processes are closely related, the patterns that generate databases fundamental. One scholarly critic describes it as “Unit Operations,” the idea of producing information processing programs that are both reusable and modifiable in ways that allow adaptation to a variety of purposes. In general, for instance, word processing serves the purposes of both divinity and drug dealers.

What the recognition of fundamental or underlying patterns means for information fluency is that understanding how information works, finding information, using information; research, rhetoric, and critical thinking, suggests clues, not just to the subject of a specific inquiry, but to the complete range of information-critical problems. Understanding how to prepare and use research makes the products of the thinking and development behind hacking, identity theft, and online scams not entirely avoidable maybe, but certainly easier to recognize and deal with, which is another way of saying information fluency represents information for living.

Here's Thinking for You

Iffy

Playing Electronic Gotcha

2009-12-01T11:10:00.000-08:00

Considering what mainstream remote computer surveillance software programs can do, the idea of either interfering with electronic communications or stealing information from electronic communication isn’t much of a stretch. Numerous programs available for under a hundred dollars can record information from a computer in as much detail as individual keystrokes or streamed display recording. (http://www.awarenesstech.com/TestDrive/overview/frame5.html)

If keystrokes and images from a computer screen can be recorded remotely, and not only remotely, but now over wireless connections, even from cell phones, gathering information surreptitiously (stealing?) only becomes a matter of getting the control program onto the target device. We don’t even want to think about how easy that may be, really, but apparently at least it isn’t completely automatic, because this is where scams and viruses come in as a convenient way of convincing people to cooperatively turn over their protected information.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/Employers/Career-Network-Aka-A/career-network-apple-staffing-2bn92.htm

http://www.gradtogreat.com/tips_advice/article-jobboard_scams.php

Stealing personal information, such as passwords or Social Security numbers can be as simple and direct as looking over somebody’s shoulder at an ATM or as technical as hacking into a network database from a remote, wireless location. Sometimes the most sophisticated technical security remains open to the most simple-minded access, such as the British net surfer (more or less) almost accidentally hacking U.S. military intelligence. None of that encourages great confidence in the ultimate security of electronic information, but it also suggests that the obvious mode of operation for stealing information is the path of least resistance. If the U.S. military will give up information conveniently, why go to the trouble of elaborate technical programming, except maybe as an ego trip to prove superior technical capability? Another answer may be in the potential payoff of individual records in the millions, but by and large, attempts to collect protected information concentrate on more direct approaches. Why go to a lot of trouble dealing with complex technology if all you have to do is ask through email?

The variations are many and diverse, stealing for both fun and profit, but most follow the basic patterns of either convincing us to supply a click that a computer program interprets as authorization to perform a restricted operation, like downloading a document with a virus, or convincing us to provide confidential information, and away we go on the familiar carnival ride of unauthorized use and malfunctioning devices. Everybody knows what these cheerful requests for mindless cooperation look like. Please confirm your account information. Follow this link for photos of Lindsay Lohan. Click here to renew your subscription. We’d like you to join our company. In order to protect your personal security, and so forth.

The psychology of this operation is diabolically simple. We want things, and we worry a lot (about identity theft, among other things), so verifying account information to prevent unauthorized access is, like, a high priority, and clicking on an external link or an attachment is so easy (Like the one with a graphic link as a big red disk labeled “Do Not Press This Button”). Worst of all, sometimes we want to believe those lurid claims are true. So how do we avoid entrapment by these inventive hucksters? Most of it, especially on a personal level, depends on those simple concerns. Maybe the first line of defense is simply being alert to our own priorities. The agents, bots, and cookies that collect information for more or less legitimate marketing also provide potential guidance to scammers.

Familiarity with the routine transactions of banking and/or using a variety of credit cards online makes financial information an attractive target and our response potentially careless. Think twice about any unanticipated electronic communication concerning money and financial transactions, especially if it involves submitting passwords, numbers, or other personal information. What could be easier for identity theft than simply asking for the information? Think twice about any unanticipated electronic communication concerning any subject, especially if it involves clicking on anything. Consider the composition of the URL. Paste it in as a browser location address if you really have to check it out, although that can have a downside also. A very undesirable web location may now be permanently recorded in your address list, that can only be removed by either deleting your entire browsing history or by locating and modifying the registry file that keeps the list. Modifying registry files is not necessarily a convenient operation, so avoiding the problem makes sense.

There are other general precautions worth considering. There is no perfect way to insure security in cyberspace, but Leaving a computer on with accounts open or any kind of useful information displayed is potentially problematic as the remote variations of wardriving become more sophisticated and effective. The size and complexity of both video and animation files and the programs to display them are better suited to concealing virus and information control activity, so avoid videos if your security software has deficiencies. Transferring malicious material or controls in text files is very difficult through direct connections on the internet and pretty much impossible without opening the files on an individual unit, even without additional security programs. If files aren’t downloaded and attachments aren’t opened, viruses and information control can’t get connected.

While advisable, security software is notorious for slowing down operating systems, and security programs aren’t necessary for every kind of problem. An example is the disconcerting experience of receiving hundreds of undeliverable messages as a consequence of having email hijacked by a bot to distribute spam. While free security programs like Spybot and AdAware can remove uninvited intruders (although don’t confuse AdAware with the opposite and deliberately similar Adware, which installs rather than removing snoopy gate-crashers), sometimes the situation can be managed simply by changing the email password. Another danger of allowing bots to operate in email accounts is that the email account will eventually be virtually shut down by anti-spam control from recipients of the commercial or malicious messages, which can be excrutiatingly inconvenient for personal email accounts. Even if we have security software on our computers, sometimes we already have the best security installed in our heads. All we have to do is use it.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Sarah Writes

2009-11-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

Judging by the reactions to Sarah’s book, what she seems to have accomplished is mostly to prove she can’t remember phone conversations any better than email, or that she even knows the difference (what might be a legitimate point for someone who thinks a photograph for a running magazine wouldn’t turn up anywhere else). Apparently, to her it’s all just words. I can’t argue with that.

But moving on to important stuff, it’s not the shorts in the photo. It’s the classic “I am sex object on display” pose that’s sort of offensive. I’ve seen some dramatic photos of Palin running along a rocky beach somewhere in front of a glacier that seem to say more about an effective personality than standing with your hands and one leg hitched up in a beauty-contest, fashion-mag celebrity pose, although even with the glacier, she is alone. She may be a highly intelligent and savvy politician, but she’s channeling it into a fool’s image. How are we supposed to respect that? She has to get beyond Wasilla-league popularity to be a serious political factor.

"I'm going to have my official portrait painted on the nose of an F-22."

And by the way, isn’t it a desecration of The Flag to throw it over a chair and plant your elbow on it like a placemat? I thought there was a specific way to fold and store an American Flag when it isn’t on proper display? What do the swift boat veterans for patriotic BS have to say about that?

No doubt Newsweek chose the photo because it seems to reflect badly on Palin’s ideology and would generate controversy, but that isn’t even the issue. Yeah, unless you’re Bill O’Reilly or Hannity, and sexual harassment is your cup of tea, so to speak, this is a demeaning photo, whether it’s Newsweek, Runners World, Hustler, or the Catholic Review. What makes her think she can get away with it? I’ve seen photos of presidents running and playing golf or tennis, but unless they were just being goofy I’ve never seen presidents dressed for exercise and standing around in a Mr. Universe flex pose with American Flags wadded up under their arms.

If you have some, trot them out.

Here’s Thinking for You.
Iffy

Government Transparency

2009-11-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

The only thing Republicans hate worse than opaque government is transparent government. The Bush Administration had a firm grip on understanding that ignorance can only complain about lack of information. Knowledge opens up all kinds of potential issues. Look at the Whithouse guest lists. Under Bush, the only complaint was that nobody knew who had access to the President. Under Obama, knowing that George Clooney has access to the President makes Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney feel inadequate again. Poor Rush. Poor Dick.

And speaking of Rush and Dick, we’re on to another week of the inexperienced and immature Obama thing. Uh, did I miss something, or was not extension of the “war” in Afghanistan a Bush administration policy? Afghanistan was never going to be easy, and how we are going to get out was never clear, but none of that makes the previous administration less responsible for anything except having any idea of how to get out before going in. Once the military solution was achieved (except for failing to neutralize Bin Laden, which correct me if I’m wrong was why we went in. No? Oh, my bad.) , how do you democratically maintain a government that you put in place but the inhabitants seem less than enthusiastic about, without leaving it to be lynched if you leave, like the Russians?

Oh, I know. We can move Karzai over here and give him Canada. The Canadians are moving to Florida anyway. In fact, we can just cut out the dealer and give Karzai Florida up front. Florida gave the election to Dubya, it’s only fair that we should have Karzai for King. We’re done with Crist anyway. He’s going to have to switch parties after the Obama hug thing. Don’t forget, Charlie, Sara Palin’s out there somewhere, very far out there.

Maybe my wife is right. The Republicans don’t want to take stimulus money, because the more people without work, the more people default on their mortgages, and the more cheap houses go to those bright enterprising Christian conservatives to share with their less fortunate brethren, at a fair rent that defaults to 27.99%, of course. The work ethic rules.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy

Snarling and Mauling

2009-10-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Oh Mr. Dik, you rascal you. Are we dithering in Afghanistan again? Well, we shouldn’t be surprised. You only had eight years to mess it up. A couple of more years and maybe you could have done a thorough enough job that nobody could do anything about it ever. That must be a big disappointment. No wonder you make so much noise.

Yeah, we’re letting those naughty little Talibanistas walk all over us, like they had any business running a country in the first place. And what’s with this taking opinions from other countries into account? The US of A don’t take no sqwak off nobody. We are the pit bulls of politicals. We know only snarling and mauling. With us or agin us.

Now why isn’t it that we invaded Saudi Arabia? Oh yeah, we only invade undemocratic despotisms where distribution of wealth is way inequitable.

So why don’t we just invade us?

Here’s Thinking for You.
Iffy

NObamable

2009-10-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

You might think from the title that this would be a complaint about the award to President Obama, but actually, no. That's just a little wordplay to get the opposition all excited.

Remember Croatia and Serbia? Does anybody remember Croatia and Serbia? There was, like, this war with guns and violence and killing and atrocities, and it was getting genocidal and threatening to be regional, and Silly Bill sent over the U.S. Airforce, and they bombed the hoorah out of Serb military installations and production facilities, until the Serbs ran out of stuff to blow stuff up, and they made a separate country for Croatia, and now they don’t necessarily like each other or even get along, but at least they don’t kill each other so much? Remember that?

The problem was, obviously, that we were just too clinical about the whole thing. We sent in aircraft to cut off the means of waging war, and it worked. The number of Americans who died as a direct consequence of combat was what? Under a hundred? What kind of intervention is that? You can’t have a war without killing people. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s contrary to the whole concept of war.

And so, what kind of political capital do you accumulate by ending wars without adding bloodshed? Answer: not much. The Army wasn’t happy about it. Veterans weren’t happy about it. Patriotic political organizations weren’t happy about it. Conservative politicians weren’t happy about it. They didn’t want it to work, and the absolute worst thing about it was that it worked. Well, so they didn’t waste any time whacking Clinton down to size. They had trouble making the Bosnian strategic success into a bad thing, but Silly Bill cut his own throat, so to speak, for them by the mistake of participating in a questionable personal relationship, and even worse, thinking it might not be that big of a deal. Politically, you may be able to survive not killing people, but you sure aren’t going to get away with any personal indiscretions. That, my friends, would be grounds for impeachment.

Thus the foundation was built for the advent of George Bush, who in the aftermath of 9/11 quickly demonstrated that he could have only one hope of ever achieving anything like presidential stature, and that was to take responsibility for the decision to sacrifice American lives in the execution of a Great Cause. What the Great Cause would be remains somewhat unclear, but we escalated the killing straightaway, and the place of George Bush in history was thereby assured.

Why we betrayed the rebels and accepted Hussein’s repression of the Shiia after the Gulf War in the first place remains another mystery. Apparently the simple expedient of neutralizing his helicopters and tanks would have been sufficient to achieve regime change, but maybe the question of internal instability somehow initially justified the need to intervene only in a direct and comprehensive way. For reasons that remain mostly incomprehensible, however, Hussein was allowed to continue his repressive policies, which somehow eventually became part of the justification for the Heroic invasion by George Bush. Five thousand American casualties later, the coalition of token participation has achieved little assured result other than unresolvable conflict and international skepticism accompanied by an economic collapse aggravated by the continual diversion of attention elsewhere, and Bush slipped away into history to write his memoirs, his war predictably unconcluded, a presidential stature of mythic proportions undoubtedly under construction. That is, if anybody remembers he was ever president, or wants to. It was Bush that was President, right? Not Karl Rove?

This is the preposterous situation, going back at least to the first Gulf War, into which Barack Obama enters as successor to George Bush. My concern for Obama has always been taking over a no-win situation that the conservatives were only too happy to relinquish, so they could blame it on someone else. Just as obviously, they wasted no time jumping on that bandwagon. Witness Hannity and Beck. If anything, their real consternation, once again, is the all too apparent danger that Obama might at least move toward some kind of international consensus. Even the mere prospect of achieving progress in the global resolution of conflict is just too much for his opponents.

And you are still clueless enough to wonder why the man deserves a Nobel Peace Prize? You should work for Fox News.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy

In John We Trust

2009-09-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

I now have the disappointing distinction of supporting two prominent liars in the course of my life, George Bush and John Edwards. By comparison, Bill Clinton’s response to the investigation of his relationship with Monica Lewinski doesn’t even rate with Reagan’s bad memory. When Bush claimed that Iraq represented a threat to the progress of international peace by WMD development and imminent deployment, I believed that the President of the United States had more at stake than some kind of schoolyard attitude. I was wrong. Perhaps my outrage at the failure of my judgment in that case led me to an excessive desire for retaliation that made me blind to the apparent character (or lack thereof) on the part of John Edwards. Or maybe at that point I just really didn’t care that much. When controversy usually seems to mean increasing the divide between rich and poor, and the military cheerfully obeys illegal orders just to keep the funds flowing, you tend to develop a kind of cynical attitude toward the prospects for performance of government and politicians, despite the necessity for both.

The excessively sordid saga of John Edwards' infidelity, however, has an additional ironic, poignant resonance in the UCF composition program, where one of the textbooks on argument included an essay by Edwards discussing the essential nature of trust and credibility. HOO Rah. There’s a laugh, you would think. The only redemption for Edwards in that discourse may be Hank Lewis’ distinction between morality and ethics, the idea that perhaps you can be professionally ethical without being entirely moral on a personal level. A philandering doctor or real estate agent or convenience store clerk can still perform the functions of the job, maybe even exceptionally well. Why should their behavior off the clock impact professional expectations?

What we expect of professionals is to do the best job they can, regardless of their personal prejudices. Morality is a kind of personal responsibility, a personal prejudice in a sense. However, excusing bad behavior as irrelevant to professional performance assumes a distinction between personal and professional that may not exist. Showing up late and falling asleep, or stealing to finance multiple relationships are common ways that the complexity of the personal can directly affect the professional. At that point, at least, we generally agree and acknowledge by policy and law that the limits of the personal and professional have been exceeded, but what if the relationship is less obvious? Lawyers, for instance, are supposed to be committed to excluding individual morality from performance anyway. Lawyers are supposed to choose the best argument regardless. Why should infidelity and public deception be anything other than what you would expect? A good lawyer being a good lawyer?

The reason is the same reason we don’t allow doctors and fighter pilots to kill runaway children on the weekends as part of the compensation for their value to society. A doctor for whom destruction is personal entertainment would neutralize the value of professional performance to society. Likewise, anyone for whom destruction is personal entertainment neutralizes their value to society, and so we discourage destructive personal behavior regardless. Murder for entertainment on weekends wouldn’t prevent a doctor from treating the flu, but the value of treating the flu pales by comparison, so to speak. We don’t even tolerate a doctor who goes out on weekends and knocks over convenience stores for fun, in spite of how valuable the medical skill may be. There are degrees of destruction, both personal and public, but when the destruction has been sufficient to be acknowledged by everyone involved, then the value of the profession has been neutralized. Call that morality of a sort.

If I didn’t know about Edwards’ infidelity, maybe it wouldn’t matter, but on the other hand, if I don’t know about a crime, does that mean it didn’t happen or it isn’t important? Everybody takes up some space on the planet. That’s the space we agree to allow each other by virtue of the planned or unplanned fact of existence. Connections of family and the routine affairs of subsistence are personal. Services rendered on an impersonal basis are professional, but where personal affairs, personal space, becomes destructive in a comprehensive and acknowledged way, the social value of the professional has been neutralized. John Edwards’ infidelity may not be entirely illegal, but it was destructive on both personal and public levels. As far as I’m concerned, Edwards’ value as an attorney and as a politician has been neutralized, or should have been.

Here’s thinking for you.
Iffy

The Shrill Sillies of Righteousness

2009-09-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Jesus was a socialist. In his outrage at the exploitation of class distinctions, however paternally condescending such outrage may be, there was a fundamental insistence on mutual consideration. Jesus may not want you for a doormat, but he certainly doesn’t want you for a military elitist reactionary. As much as you might like to think Christianity is parochial, colonial, and safe from universal concerns, Jesus had other ideas. The unfortunate down side of Christianity for supremacist interpretations is the Christian part, and there is, by the way, one sin that will not be forgiven regardless of all the love in the heart of Jesus, righteousness. Judgement is God's turf, and God don't take kindly to squatters. So much for theology.

The heart of socialism, shared with humanism before Darwin got hold of it and ripped it out, is the idea that people are fundamentally equal and valuable. Seem familiar? Individual expression is also valuable, but distribution of resources depends on the determination to find places for everybody that fit their individual capacities, not on the mighty power of randomly individual supremacy and survival of the most contentious. Hysterical objections to socialism are based, not on the reality of an economy and society that has already demonstrated the essential nature of interdependence, but on perceptions of a failed communist experiment that established a new aristocracy of party affiliations unequal to confrontation with the established aristocracy of capitalism. In spite of technical expertise formidable enough to at least put a good scare in the capitalist technocracy, the Soviet Union failed to compete toe-to-toe as an industrial capitalist initiative, much as any under-funded and badly organized business venture fails to compete with other established competitors in the market. Soviet communism was only socialist in the sense that it confined the majority of the population to subordinate positions, creating a façade of equality that, like capitalist class distinctions, does not even allow participation in public discussion, much less socialist ideology, Marxist base and superstructure. Therefore, unable to continue support of a non-productive aristocracy and competitively outclassed, Soviet Communism collapsed under its own weight, an outcome previously predicted by a few shrewd analysts, and since Soviet Communism was neither socialist nor competitive, we need to get over fear of Soviet Communism as justification to oppose the suggestions of the President.

The underlying premise of socialism produces such cooperative consequences as public roads, health standards, educational opportunities, legal recourse, and free speech. The ancient and excessive fear of an aggressive and totalitarian aristocracy disguised as communism now justifies opposition to initiatives that are both socially and religiously imperative, and the inference of irrational volume and intensity suggested by characterizations of shrill and silly resistance are about right. If the objection to health care reform depends on resistance to government and the threat of socialism, then my response would be to get your sorry hypocritical parasite butt off the public streets produced by socialist consensus, and find a privately constituted route home, and good luck with that.

Here's thinking for you.
Iffy

Advice from the Other Side

2009-04-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

Poetry is the language of profound observations, and I wouldn't want it to be said that I did not aspire to literary achievement, so here is a cautionary tale as an account of personal experience in traditional lyrical style.

An armadillo in repose
With outstretched arms and pensive nose
Extended 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 stood up to command attention,
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 obtuse reflection,
Inviting horrible dissection.
Recollect the armadillo
Snuggling asphalt for a pillow.

Here's thinking for you.
Iffy

Intercultural Communication

2009-04-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

I had some trouble with my presentation at the conference of the National Council of Teachers of English in San Francisco due to the simple logistical problem of a wireless mouse that was too small for my nervous fingers. I plead Aspasia, either that or early onset dysfunctionality. I was okay once I gave it up and switched back to the keyboard, but when I made one of my cryptic remarks about mice in Orlando with more political influence than Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the middle of the presentation, somebody in the audience said “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I suppose they considered it to be criticaI of the governor of California, although the point was simply that in Orlando Walt Disney World is the political power. California and Anaheim have Disneyland, but it’s not quite the same where an entire region sort of owes its existence to a theme park.

I like Arnie. For a Republican, at least he seems to have some common sense. Everybody wants big cheerful guys to be their friends. I’m all about that, and I considered stopping and explaining the remark, but to me it seemed like it would be even more embarrassing to have somebody explain in the middle of a presentation that mice in Orlando was a reference to Walt Disney World. Would that be a credit to your information fluency? And I wouldn’t want to make the issue any more complex and contentious, because, after all, that one individual represented 20% of my audience.

Here’s thinking for you.

Iffy.

Horton Hears a Heffalump

2009-03-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

My previous reference to Oliphant and the chimpanzee rampage cartoon was somewhat ironic since one of Oliphant's new cartoons outraged the Semitic community. I’m not totally enthusiastic about the cartoon myeself because it isn’t really funny, and it’s too obvious to be clever. It has sort of a Dr. Seuss sense about it, with the little wheel under the monster star. Dr. Seuss produced patriotic propaganda during WWII, before he used the characters for children’s books. That's another lesson in recycling swords and plowshares. Maybe the Semites should give some thought to how Gaza has been coming across, however. Complaining about Oliphant isn’t exactly going to fix the problem, no matter how mindless the cartoon may be.

Oliphant 2009

Dr. Seuss 1942

***************

MSNBC published a somewhat uncharacteristic article about Bill Clinton signing off on the derivatives regulation exclusion in 2000. Some things the article neglects to mention are that besides burying the clause in a morass of complex financial legislation, in 2000 the Republicans (and I use the capitalized form lightly) had Bill on the verge of an executive layoff. It wasn’t like he could afford any showdowns over individual components of budget legislation. His veto would have been overridden faster than you can say “Monica Lewinski.”

We can blame nitwit Bill for doing something petty, arrogant, and self-indulgent in the first place, but somehow I can’t help thinking that in 2000 the Republicans should have been concentrating more on the economy and national security and less on presidential indiscretion. We would have all been better off in the long run. In a crisis, if you had to choose between whether the president gets oral sex or a long vacation in Texas, which one would you go for?
Here’s thinking for you.
Iffy

Another Pot of, Well, Gold

2009-03-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

Spring Break is over. Another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. President Obama got in touch with his Irish roots. That must have been invigorating.

AIG bonuses are in the news again. The idea of a retention bonus seems to presuppose some kind of value to be gained from retention, although the value in the case of AIG employees is a little hard to conceptualize. How much value to a company can employees be who engineered a two hundred billion dollar loss, unless their expertise actually depends on sucking up government bailout funding? If that’s bad for company moral, Gee Whiz, excuse me all over the place. I’m sure there are many decent human beings working for AIG who don’t deserve to be identified with unfortunate company initiatives. On the other hand, I also suspect there are plenty of homeless people who made better choices than working for a conglomerate without moral principles.

Somehow the argument of contractual obligations leaves me unimpressed. Let’s see. I work for a company that loses vast amounts of money with operations that are barely even legal. Now I want a bonus to continue working for the company? Why didn’t I think of that in previous jobs? I could be a CEO myself by now.

Just say no. If they don’t like it, let them sue. Breach is always an option. I like Cuomo’s question about where would the bonus money come from if there was no bailout. There would be no bonus money.

Let’s look at it this way. If we don’t pay out million-dollar bonuses to keep these brilliant economic yahoos employed, they could wind up panhandling for change on street corners, and considering AIG, I’m afraid it would require a whole new infrastructure program to build additional street corners, but on second thought, maybe that would help revive the economy. It could be a win-win.

Here's thinking for you.
Iffy

Elmo Love Bernie

2009-02-20T06:29:00.000-08:00

A fifty-four year old woman required treatment by teams of surgeons over a period of seven hours for injuries inflicted by a confused chimpanzee living on lobster and ice cream in Connecticut. If the victim survives, she will require years of treatment to repair the disfiguring injuries suffered after offering the chimpanzee an Elmo doll as a present. There is a temptation to speculate that the chimpanzee was not a fan of the Muppets, but unfortunately the consequences and implications of this event transcend humor, to the detriment of a New York Post cartoonist.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/nat?guid=20090219/499cf560_3ca6_15526200902191164606112

Selma Hayek inspired international outrage by breast-feeding a starving baby. The baby has no doctors. The baby has no medical care. The baby has nothing to eat. Selma Hayek did the only thing a decent human being could do.

The chimpanzee died of gunshot wounds from police faced with the task of controlling an unpredictable animal the size of a large man with twice the strength. A controversial political cartoon subsequently appeared in the New York Post portraying police shooting a chimpanzee and commenting that the chimpanzee could have produced stimulus/bailout legislation more competently than Congressional legislators, suggesting a connection to the sad event of the Chimpanzee Rampage.

In a rather ironic political twist, civil rights activists compared the chimpanzee to President Obama, and complained about discrimination by the cartoonist. The cartoon tastelessly exploits an unfortunate tragedy in an unoriginal way that has been treated more effectively and humorously, by Oliphant during the Reagan administration, for instance, but the racial discrimination is in the eye of the beholder. The baby, on the other hand, will be lucky to live as long as the chimpanzee.

There is a moral in these events, confused as morals usually are, something about expending resources to establish and maintain impossible relationships doomed from the start, while the most basic needs of others go unanswered. Can I excuse myself any more than the nation or humanity? No I cannot. I have adopted defensive habits of moderation that regard punishment as the only reward for good deeds. Witness Selma Hayek. I have retreated into the noncommittal middleground of Martin Luther King’s frustration, yet I cannot help reacting, like touching something unpleasant in the dark, to the unregulated opportunism and unfocused excess of economic and administrative cowboy culture that has encouraged disregard for just responsibility and produced an environment characterized by the vast and historic scope of self-indulgence represented by the superficially benign but ominously paradoxical images of the Dick Cheneys and Bernie Madoffs and their spiritual kin.

As far as I can tell, nobody offered the baby an Elmo doll.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy

Down with Tall Letters

2009-02-19T17:58:00.000-08:00

The American Psychological Association distinguished the construction of citation forms in professional publications by removing capital letters from titles. I would like to suggest extending this efficiency to modification of all titles, such as “the wizard of oz,” for example.

In fact, the construction of all text could be vastly simplified by dispensing with capital letters entirely, thereby eliminating controversies over such thorny issues as hyphenated constructions (Web-Based or Web-based?), and other derivative terms. capital letters are really only a form of linguistic imperialism anyway, an extension of patriarchal dominance that privileges assertive thought. elimination of capital letters would therefore establish more gender-neutral and diversity-friendly language forms.

likewise, the complexity of language imposed by capital letters is at least equaled by complications imposed through punctuation. elimination of punctuation in addition to capital letters would also simplify the use of text no more controversies over dependent clause inversions set off by commas elements of lists or sentences connected improperly the meaning now depends as it should entirely on the context

having dispensed with the cultural tyranny of capital letters and punctuation consider the relative usefulness of various letters of the alphabet most vowels occur with a frequency that makes them intuitive the use of vowels is therefore redundant and merely contributes to spelling errors wtht vwls th lngg bcms vstly mr ffcnt nd n fct mny rptd ltts r qully nprdctv wtht vwls or dbl ltrs mny ns pr nfrquntly w rly nly nd th cmn ns gt rd f x y z k q v nd m d wth th rst ndgtrdspcs

And so I conclude my argument. APA has the right idea. Psychology rocks.

Here's thinking for you.

fy

Save the Lemmings

2009-02-11T07:45:00.000-08:00

Would somebody explain to me the logic of raising credit card default rates to 30%? How exactly is this supposed to encourage economic activity or even protect lenders?

Consider the scenarios. Take employed borrowers interested in making credit purchases. Except in desperation, are they going to look at using or applying for credit cards with 30% default rates and variable rates up to prime plus 22%, or even more? Oh yes, they’re going to say “I can’t get enough of that. Give me more.”

Likewise, for someone laid off or on reduced income with dwindling assets, how exactly do astronomical default rates encourage continued payments? Even psychologists grasp the simple concept that organisms faced with insurmountable obstacles either give up completely or turn their attention elsewhere. How does compounding loss encourage recovery?

With billions in bailout money propping up credit providers, at the very least, a moral obligation has been imposed to moderate obligations, not to mention the simple business wisdom that raising prices, in this case the price of credit, does not increase sales. Increasing the price of consumer credit is a Reagan era bait-and-switch strategy that has been sustained by economic trends of increasing income and asset values, but in a depressed economy you might as well go out and beat yourself in the head with a brick.

Forcing consumers into bankruptcy with astronomical default rates will not increase recovery for lenders, only for lawyers. What it really does for lenders is to temporarily inflate balance sheets by adding theoretical debt to assets, an effect that got us into this mess in the first place, and a practice that is only just this side of outright criminal, and only theoretically this side.

In a free market economy, price increases are an argument of supply and demand, but it is abundantly apparent that neither the economy nor the free market are what they were cracked up to be. You must have either a genuine contempt for humanity or complete disconnection from reality to believe otherwise. Raising prices in a context of dwindling resources is either the depredation of a predatory monopoly (think oil), or the last resort of the truly desperate.

Price increase is the historic mentality behind failing businesses, and you would think after the lessons of the last presidential administration, that lenders would be smart enough to figure out business as usual won’t cut it. Evidently, hope isn’t the only thing that springs eternal. Bankers, like the lemmings of legend, want to lead us on over the cliff, but the truth is, even lemmings are smarter than that.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy

Living Within Somebody's Means

2009-02-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

The New York Times published an article arguing that the half million dollar salary cap requested by Obama for bank executives under the bailout plan isn’t realistic for NYC. The article wasn’t totally in earnest, but let’s make sure that NYC delight with its own costliness doesn’t excessively distort reality.

It may be true that bank executives have become accustomed to million a year life-styles, but they are going to have to realign their perspectives. In the first place, the limit is partly symbolic. They will probably find ways around it. Limits on compensation don’t necessarily preclude creative variations. There will probably be loopholes that allow some flexibility, if not too much. The only hope is that a definitive statement of limits will convey the message that some restraint has to be applied.

A hundred thousand a year mortgage in NYC may not be so unusual, but there is no valid principle on which bankers should continue to maintain wealth at the expense of people who have no jobs. Plenty of people are available to replace bank executives, and experience has shown that it might not be that bad of an idea. I’ve known grapefruit with more aptitude and moral principle. We have no obligation to be grateful for the opportunity to keep banks in business by rewarding the administrative class that both failed to forsee and to manage financial failures effectively, and as far as I’m concerned, that responsibility trickles pretty far down the food chain in the management of those organizations.

The name of the game is redistribution of wealth, unless we want to play O’Reilly-Limbaugh free market depression disparity again, and I fail to see the justification in that. Civilized accumulation and retention of wealth requires the cooperation of a complete society, not just individual performance. If you don’t believe that, I have some Congolese rebels and Russian Mafia I’d like to introduce you to.

Let them refinance their mortgages or give up their houses and move into five-thousand dollar a month apartments instead of ten thousand a month houses for awhile. If they don’t like it, let them go find jobs in Iceland, where people will appreciate their talents for what they are worth. Better yet, let them subdivide their million-dollar bungalows and rent out the back bedroom so they can get in touch with reality. Their children might even have to attend, shudder, public schools, where they would be crammed elbow to elbow with financially challenged low-lifes like me.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy

All My Dreams Daschled Again

2009-02-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

You have to allow some slack for the possibility that everything will not work perfectly in government. It’s inevitable that the Obama administration would eventually run into some kind of ironically appropriate and embarrassing obstacles, like unreavealed tax issues for a cabinet nomination, but you have to be impressed by the sheer scope of the impact with respect to Tom Daschle.

I like Tom Daschle, and the truth is that I think he would be okay as secretary of something, but $140,000 in back taxes? Let’s see, when was the last time I even made $140,000 in a whole year, never mind incur a $140,000 tax obligation? To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I made $140,000 in a year. I must have been on drugs or something. Maybe that was the summer of love. But when I consider $140,00 in back taxes against a $150,000 wardrobe, to tell you truth, the wardrobe kind of palin’s by comparison. I consider tax evasion to be even more contemptible than expensive shoes.

How do you pay $250,000 for “car services?” There’s no love lost between me and Sarah Palin, which I’m sure is a great relief to Todd, and so far, I’m in Obama’s corner, but even speaking as a slightly liberal-leaning, independent conservative, if we’re not going to allow some kind of double standard here, Daschle did the right thing to hit the road. After all, he’s got a $250,000 car service to take him there. Maybe he should be secretary of transportation instead, or the treasury.

Here’s thinking for you.

Iffy

Undecided: An Election Retrospective

2009-02-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

I was undecided well into the presidential election campaign. I don’t think I’m particularly partial to old white guys, but to an extent, I felt like McCain deserved to be president. McCain paid his dues, military service in combat, POW in Viet Nam, struggled with physical injuries and other personal obstacles, both in and out of politics, yet never lost the determination to succeed in government. We had a military situation that needed sound military judgment. My gawd, how could you fault the man for experience and focus? Who was Barack Obama? A junior Senator on a fast track end-run into the big time? Looked like a light-weight.

There was the economy, which I held Bush responsible for ruining by a combination of stupidity and Reagan policies, not that the difference is clear. I voted twice against Bush in futile opposition to a small man in a big job who literally turned the presidency into a joke, but I also thought McCain was not a small man. Obama I wasn’t sure about, and to tell you the truth, I’m still not a hundred per cent sure, but I’m hopeful.

Palin was a stroke of genius. I guess like a lot of people, I was dazzled by the canny political audacity of matching the experienced, old-guy Republican politician with a bright, capable, effective Republican woman more in touch with a different generation and a different constituency. It took me a couple of days to figure out that only some of the vision was true, however. She was in touch with a different constituency. Catch is, that constituency amounts to a small proportion of voters, those for whom a ditzy personality is the only criteria for choosing somebody to tell them what they should do. For them, Palin was perfect, but those weren’t the voters that needed an alternative, and Palin wasn’t just a poorly qualified prop, her selection was an insult to the many truly capable women involved in Republican politics. With somewhat mystified regret, I had to conclude that McCain was taking bad advice or bad drugs, or both, and after taking leave of his senses, his campaign seemed to dissolve into a floundering parody of purpose, served up by John Stewart on The Daily Show as comedy straight off the news service reports, no embellishment required, equaled only by the inevitable bumbling of “President Goofus.” Unfortunately for McCain, a lot of people seemed to recognize the last-ditch return to Bush/Rove/Cheney staple fear-tactics delivered by Palin for what it was, pathetic. Like everybody else, I wanted some inspiration, and I didn’t necessarily want to vote for Obama by default, but you could look at it that way.

I came from Alaska, but I don’t know what happened to the people up there. The only thing I can figure is that, like everybody else, oil made them stupid, and they had more oil, so they got more stupid. How else can you explain election of a governor without any qualifications? It’s great to be a down-home, turkey-ripping, sled- waxing, soccer mom, but if your best organizational assets are experience as Wasilla Solid Waste Management Home-coming Queen, and a sneaky, vindictive kind of administrative style, then you should maybe be in organized crime instead of state government, or who knows, maybe it’s the same thing. I can tell you from experience though, even in the old days, not everybody living back there in the woods was an environmental idealist. I just never realized how seriously they took their work. I see that Palin has been organizing an exploratory committee for the next election, but I hope she will be no more dangerous than Punxsatawney Phil and only stick her head out once every four years before she returns to her burrow.

Here's thinking for you.
Iffy

Iceland

2009-01-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

The incomprehensible audacity of using bailout money for bonus payments to employees of failing companies only exceeds the incomprehensible audacity of bonus payments to employees of failing companies in the first place. The rationale for retaining valuable employees in this crisis environment is equally absurd. Where are they going to defect to? Lehman Brothers? AIG? Fannie Mae?

How long can the government hope to keep this parking lot bailout carnival going? In the 1930s, public works programs made a difference in the economy. World War II has sometimes been claimed as the real solution to the Great Depression, which may or may not be true, but either way, George Bush already made our war, which only distracted us from what should have been the real issues and contributed to the economic crisis instead of alleviating it, so war as an economic solution doesn’t look hopeful this time around, leaving us with the more benevolent domestic approach.

The argument that we still aren’t socialist is nuts. Banks that aren’t “troubled,” are of course whining that they are being discriminated against for their prudent management, which is true in principle, but as they know well enough, and the reason they aren’t whining louder, is that failure of the lunatic fringe would create an economic vacuum eventually threatening to suffocate even the most conservative financial operations. Perhaps the result would only be the equivalent of the 1930’s, in which a small portion of the population continued to possess great wealth while a much larger portion struggled desperately, but why the general population tolerated that condition at the time is sort of a mystery in itself except that the thirties may have been more hopeful, because there is a crucial difference. In the thirties, the government was not yet saddled with trillions of dollars of debt from decades of cold war competition and general bad management.

The savings and loan failures of Reagan era deregulation precipitated a financial crisis at the time, but it was headed off by another crucial difference, the advent of the information technology revolution, equivalent to or exceeding the economic effects of steam power, railroads, chemistry, electricity, and wireless communication. The IT industrial revolution produced a huge new global economic enterprise that didn’t begin to deflate until the dotcom collapse at the advent of the new millenium, while the economic momentum continued to sustain the Iraq war and residential construction until the saturated market at home and the lack of encouragement for opportunities in developing economic markets left the financial community without any realistic alternatives except reality, and Reagan’s other shoe finally dropped on us.

The U.S. has not used up its capital resources, either financial or psychological, and to a larger extent the entire world still has a vested interest in US economic viability, but we’re running out of options, and without some kind of general economic production on the scale of IT development, there will be no revival. Where’s that going to come from? Space exploration? Environmetnal restoration? Maybe, but where are you going to get that kind of consensus?

In the meantime, here’s what we need to do. The laws and services that make Accumulation of wealth possible depend on cooperation and participation of the entire society, not just on individual enterprise. We’re all in this together. The government should create a general fund. Any individual net worth of more than a billion dollars should be collected and contributed to the fund. To paraphrase Muhammed Ali, if you can’t live on a billion dollars, you can’t live on nothin’. We’ll allow a half a billion per individual for wiggle room. Income tax will be increased, not decreased. Everybody with jobs and/or money is going to contribute something. If this is not to your liking, then just go live somewhere with an economy and laws that suit you better. Go to Iceland.

In the long run, Iraq and the Middle East may achieve stability, although it’s hard to see how the alternative of not invading Iraq could have been much worse. As a matter of both capability and vision, George Bush has been a disaster. The government can intervene effectively as long as the global investment community on which we depend continues to consider the U.S. a good and necessary risk, but without the reassurance of either intense national commitment or revived economic activity, or both, how long can we keep that perception going? How long can you hold your breath?

Arguing at the Level of the Conservative Bogey Woman (annotated)

2009-01-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

I can’t get enough of Anne Coulter (Actually, it didn’t take much). Her writing is like the low-cut dresses she wears in publicity photos. There doesn’t appear to be much worth either concealing or revealing. (This is a misleading argument strategy sometimes called False Comparison, although if you’re really into fashions, there may be more truth in it than dr. Coulter would like to think about.) But dr. Coulter knows how to make an argument, and that means I don’t have to worry about thinking for myself (implying that anyone who agrees with Coulter is happy letting somebody else do their thinking for them). There is no doubt about who the bad guys are. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28524234/ (dr. with a small d implies that Coulter lacks both credentials and intellectual stature without any effort on my part to substantiate either one.)

In argument there are other misleading rhetorical strategies, like Ad Hominem, which kind of means suggesting somebody is wrong because they look scary in a low dress instead of making a substantive reply to the argument. Another one is called Poisoning the Well. Poisoning the Well more or less means assuming the truth of conditions without any information, such as the assumption that liberals are bad guys. The first sentence in the excerpt from Coulter’s book explains that liberals make up pretend victims like Cesar Borja (the retired NYC cop chosen by Hillary Clinton as the poster child for 9/11 emergency services) to crank up sympathy for their cause, very similar to John McCain and Joe the Plumber, but palin’ by comparison (a pun alluding to McCain’s vice-presidential candidate).

There is another misleading rhetorical strategy called Oversimplification. Oversimplification would be like dr. Coulter making selective remarks about the two politicians with connections to discrimination. One of the politicians might never have expressed any regret about discrimination and might have only refrained from openly practicing discrimination because it could mean jail time. The other might have publicly expressed regret for any association with discrimination and left a discriminatory organization because he thought the people in the organization were crazy, but oversimplification only takes into account that both politicians had connections to discrimination, and are therefore equal. That’s what I like about dr. Coulter. She can use a misleading rhetorical strategy per paragraph, and like her heroes, George Bush and Karl Rove, she is proud of it (implying that she deliberately uses misleading strategies).

If you want to talk about deceptive seminal imagery, let’s talk about Weapons of Mass Destruction instead of NYC Emergency Services, but seriously, folks, let’s be frank, ‘n forget all the propaganda extremes on both sides (another pun, this one alluding to the senatorial candidate who previously wrote a book commenting on, among other things, Anne Coulter’s misleading rhetoric). Suppose for the sake of argument, that Cesar Borja is a fraud and Hillary Clinton knew it. The idea was, what? Federal funding for New York City emergency workers? Oh my gawd, there’s a cause we wouldn’t want to accidentally contribute to. We need far too much of that money to blow up things in Iraq. (That’s a misleading rhetorical strategy called Ad Populum, which means connecting the argument to a well-known issue that inspires either common support or common opposition, but this isn’t sensible, or even intellectual. This is satire, or at least sarcasm, so I can get away with it.)(Also implying that intellect doesn’t necessarily make sense.)

And finally, I reluctantly (nothing reluctant about it at all) point out that regardless of any moral issues and misleading arguments involved, regardless of how pathetically pandering and perverse liberal ideology may be, it’s palin’ (ibid., a Latinate abbreviation meaning see the previous related reference) by comparison to the fraud and larceny perpetrated by corporate banking and other pillars of conservative finance that did not benefit anyone except corporate executives. Bernie Madoff, former NASDAQ chairman, CEO of an investment firm renowned for successfully cautious management practices, parlayed Reagan financial deregulation (implying that Reagan is responsible for current economic problems, which he is, which is in itself an oversimplification) into the most fantastic Ponzi scheme since the French monarchy (suggesting that conservative economics reflect aristocratic arrogance), and “made off” with enough money from investors to supplement New York City Emergency Services for a hundred years. (What’s in a name?)

The only trouble is, he didn’t give it to New York City Emergency Services. Nobody knows what he did with it exactly. While dr. Anne Coulter was busy complaining about misleading liberal political strategies, conservatives were out there making a real difference in the real world (implying that yeah, they made a difference, but a negative difference). None of your petty, hypocritical, grand-standing for conservatives. By gawd, when conservatives rip somebody off, they do it right. (A misleading rhetorical strategy implying that all members of a group behave the same.) They’ve got the liberals beat again, and so I congratulate dr. Coulter for making a point in the best conservative tradition, clearly, cleverly and completely bogus. (And I congratulate myself for applying the same strategy. I may not be better, but at least I’m as bad, even if I'm not syndicated.)

And just as an aside on Coulter’s NBC interview, I’m equally appreciative of the brilliant performance by George Bush in the White House (if you’re that fond of dancing), but an economy spiraling into collapse is a funny idea of keeping the country safe. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28537291/ On the other hand, the economy isn't an issue for Coulter, so maybe she's referring to how George and Laura have been champions of free speech.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy

Blasted by the Light

2009-01-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

About half a mile from my house, I come to the light where the exit from my ghetto subdivision intersects a major cross-street. If the light is green, I go. If the light is red, I stop. If the light is yellow, I probably speed up like mad, hoping to squeak through, but that doesn’t happen often. With a perverse will of its own, it deliberately chooses to turn red according to what causes the most aggravation. Basically, it turns red when it sees me coming.

The response produces a pattern of behavior that amuses it, and so it continues to perform adversely. The light is green. The light waits. I approach the intersection. The light turns yellow. There is still hope. I accelerate. At the last possible point for any rational potential to legally enter the intersection, the light turns red. It then pauses in derision, all traffic from all directions momentarily suspended to contemplate the indignity of my defeat while it savours the grandeur of victory and the affirmation of power. All the civilized world pauses and ha-has my reluctance to collide with cross traffic and incur the willingness of law enforcement to commit acts of imposition on my personal freedom.

The tyranny of this traffic light has a statistical kind of validity. I have had numerous opportunities to sit and observe the complete cycle. 90 seconds for the traffic on the main street. 20 seconds for the left turn out of the through street from the other direction, and 10 seconds for exit from my subdivision. Out of the 120-second cycle, 10 seconds barely represents 8%. From a strictly empirical quantitative view on the subdivision side of the light, the light remains red 92% of the time, perhaps even a little more, depending on how the intervening yellow plays out, but does that mean I should miss the green cycle by less than a second 100% of the time? I don’t think so. There is an adverse power of the universe at work here.

Despite the evil nature of this particular traffic light, however, like Republicans, it serves a social function for which I must grudgingly acknowledge some gratitude. Without the traffic light, I might never leave my subdivision at all. During the last hurricane, for instance, a somewhat bemused law enforcement officer described stopping a driver going seventy miles an hour along the main road through intersections at which the lights were out.

Technically such intersections should be considered four-way stops, yet even in emergencies, the momentum of the major thoroughfare seems to overwhelm the public interest in caution. The force of the flow sweeps aside the interesests of the intersecting side streets, and the need for more obvious enforcement of the conventions becomes apparent. Unchecked, the path most traveled becomes the path of intimidation, and the bullies prevail.

But in a Democracy, even bullies proceed along paths prepared for them by the operation of social contract, a complete system of agreement and controls. There would be no seventy-mile-an-hour violations through native sand-pine wilderness and swamp. Only the existence of multiple lanes of pavement enables such carefree excess. In fact, anyone who stops at a stoplight, anyone who uses a public road, anyone who goes where they want and does what they want benefits from an agreement to join together in public interest, a social contract. Anyone who uses a public road is a socialist. Anyone who uses a public road takes a handout.

You can make whatever arguments you want about free enterprise and individual responsibility. Those are good things to the extent that they encourage self-actualization and constructive activity, but as recent economic failures have finally made painfully apparent, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and J.K. Rowling can only accumulate vast wealth because the economic storms are controlled by complex systems of communication and transportation in which their products can flourish. In a Democratic society, without universal participation, they are nothing, and the readiness of rough men to commit violent acts on their behalf that serves as law enforcement in the global economy, while necessary, is overrated.

For whatever reasons, there are people in the world, and Sadam Hussein was one of them, who understand only violence, but do we want traffic lights with attitudes? The readiness and willingness to commit acts of violence is vastly different from the commission of violent acts willy-nilly. Like the light at my intersection, the operation of violence takes on a perverse attitude of its own, like a traffic light that operates entirely at random, or not at all. Indiscriminate violence, or even worse, poorly considered violence, therefore defeats its own purpose.