Achilles & the Tortoise

Adios, Blogger

2009-08-23T14:15:00.001-05:00

I've finally gotten fed up enough with Blogger that I'm migrating to Wordpress. This will stay here, at least for a while, but all new content will be posted elsewhere.

Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn ... and Some People Are Just Idiots

2009-08-05T21:26:00.003-05:00

So this image of President-Obama-as-Heath-Ledger's-Joker with the word "socialism" as a caption has been turning up pasted to various surfaces in L.A., and is now making the rounds on the intertubes (and there are plenty of variations on the theme).

I've written elsewhere about the stupidity of using words like "socialist" as insults, because it robs them of their usefulness as neutral descriptors. This, though, is a new (or a least different), stupider kind of stupidity.

The Joker, especially Ledger's Joker, is nowhere near being a socialist. I'd call him an anarchist, and in some ways he is, but he's mostly a nihilist bent on destruction for the sake of destruction. That is, as should be obvious to anyone who can think himself out of a paper bag, a far cry from socialism (even if one is of the opinion that socialism ≈ the destruction of all that is good and holy).

Some are calling the image racist - because of the "whiteface," I suppose - but that, I think, is giving the creator of the image too much credit. Calling Obama a socialist just to insult him is a Republican/Libertarian/Fox-news-ian trope these days, so it shouldn't be at all surprising that a defaced image of him ends up with "socialist" or "socialism" on it (the original image, apparently, was captionless). Whoever took the image and added the caption probably never stopped to think about the doublethink required to attach the word "socialism" to an image referencing an anarcho-nihilist hell-bent on burning the world down. That's an impressive level of stupidity.

Now, the creator of the original image? Probably some random /b/tard.

Harry Potter and the Mechanics of Magic

2009-07-22T18:00:00.001-05:00

I recently re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (in anticipation of going to see the movie) and was reminded of something that bothered me the first time I read it: the Sectumsempra spell.

I don't read much fantasy - The Lord of the Rings being the major exception - so I'm not intimately familiar with the genre's tropes and conceits, but I've always been under the impression that magic was, for lack of a better term, a naturally-occurring phenomenon ("the bloodstream of the universe!"), and it would be best to not ask too many questions about how it actually works.

But in HP6, things are a little different. Rowling makes an off-hand mention of someone "inventing" spells in an early chapter, which isn't so problematic in itself - people invent new ways of using of using, say, radio waves, so inventing new ways of using magic is conceivable. But, well, I couldn't see the word "radio" in a book somewhere, throw some electronics into a cardboard box, call it a radio, and then have a functioning FM radio. Things don't work that way - unless, that is, they're magical things.

So Harry Potter ends up with an old, used, full-of-notes copy of a potions book, which formerly belonged to the titular Half-Blood Prince. Most of the notes are about, well, making potions, but Harry finds two spells written in the margins: Levicorpus and Sectumsempra. There are no explanatory notes (beyond "for enemies," which appears next to sectumsempra), and Harry apparently knows nothing about the pseudo-Latin which spell names are constructed from, because he has no idea what sectumsempra (always-cutting, ever-cutting) does (he'd seen levicorpus in action, sort of, in HP5). No idea, that is, until he decides to use it on fellow-student and insufferable git Draco Malfoy, who was totally pissed when Harry caught him crying in the bathroom, and suddenly there's blood everywhere.

This presents us with a problem (if, you know, you take YA fantasy lit seriously - to which I say, I take everything seriously): the textual evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that Snape (the Half-Blood Prince; sorry if I ruined that one for you) invented the spell; it didn't exist until teenaged Snape decided that a spell that cut people and produced fountains of blood would be, well, awesome, and did whatever it is you do to invent a spell - and then, magically, the made-up word sectumsempra (when said forcefully by someone brandishing a wand, anyway) would cause slicing and dicing and general carnage. But how do other people know it will do that?

Before Snape turned it into a spell, sectumsempra was just a collection of sounds that sounded mostly like Latin, a made-up word that was close enough to real words to have some sort of meaning. But after Snape turned it into a spell, it was a thing of power, and uttering it - even without any idea what it meant or was meant to do - unleashes that power. It went from being a word which had (no) power because of the (lack of) meaning assigned to it to being a word which was inherently powerful, a word whose meaning is derived from that inherent power. Words like that don't exist, except in fantasy stories, and Rowling has (inadvertently, I assume) drawn our attention to one of the genre's unspoken assumptions, one of the things for which we suspend disbelief, and pointed out the absurdity of it - and it's a little jarring.

But only, I guess, for people who take everything (too) seriously.

"What Should Girls Read?"

2009-07-22T11:17:00.003-05:00

From the opening of William Dean Howells's essay "What Should Girls Read?", originally published in Harper's Weekly, May 16, 1903:

Whether men like it or not, women begin by being their daughters and sisters, they go on to become their wives, and end as their mothers, though of course there are exceptions to the general rule. Women are here apparently to stay; their good and their evil are the good and the evil of men; there is not one law for women and another for men. They inherit their fathers as well as their mothers, whom sometimes they resemble solely in sex; they mirror their fathers' minds in quite surprising measure, and they are often, fatally enough, of their fathers' moral make.

Freud, Fire, and Pissing

2009-07-08T15:43:00.003-05:00

I'm reading Civilization and Its Discontents again; the first time was for a class as an undergrad (on Decadence in fin de siècle Europe and Japan), and this time for a graduate seminar on literary theory. I don't like Freud, and the things about his writing and thought that make me not take him seriously are all present in this, the best footnote I have ever encountered in any book, ever:

Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture – a fantastic-sounding one – about the origins of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came into contact with fire, of satisfying the infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upward. Putting out the fire by micturating – a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais' Gargantua, still hark back – was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire, and urethral eroticism.

(Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Ed., tr. James Strachey. Norton, 1989. pp. 42-43)

"What are we gonna do?!"

2009-05-29T12:17:00.005-05:00

I'm starting grad school in a few months: six years of reading, discussing, thinking, writing, and trying to keep my head from exploding, at the end of which (God willing) I'll have a PhD in English Literature. I have, consequently, been thinking a lot lately about what the hell I'm going to specialize in. When I was applying to graduate programs (both times), I listed my probable area of study as 18th-century literature, mostly because I'd written an honor's thesis on Robinson Crusoe, and partly because the prospect of grad school was distant and unsure enough (especially during the second round of applications) that it didn't really seem like an important question.

Now that working toward a PhD has become a real and rapidly approaching fact, however, it's become a very important question. It's a question that will determine not only most of what I do over the next six years, but also the shape of the early years of my post-doc career (assuming, of course, that I'm able to land a job in academia).

The 18th century - especially the "long" 18th century - still looks appealing, for a variety of reasons. The novel was still a new thing, and there was a fair amount of experimentation with the form going on at the time. It was an incredibly turbulent time politically, which culminated in the American and French Revolutions. Significant shifts in British imperial policy occurred toward the end of the 1700s, the initial signs of which can be seen as far back as Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and which continue to have an impact today. Lately, though, it hasn't seemed interesting enough; it's seemed too much like work, though that may only be because Tristram Shandy took so long to slog through.

Charles Williams, who is one of my favorite authors, has recently started to look really appealing as a subject for study, largely because I just read a critical reading of his work in (sort of) Kierkegaardian terms that I found fascinating, as much for the questions it raised and the lines of inquiry it suggested as anything else. Of course, specializing in someone as obscure as Williams might not be a wise move, and reading as much of his work in as short a time as I'd have to might melt my brain.

What looks most interesting, though, is a set of narratives - not only novels and travel narratives, but also graphic novels and films - that are connected (at least in my mind) but lacking, so far as I can tell, a designation. This group includes, for example: Robinson Crusoe; Gulliver's Travels; The Road; probably The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and certainly Dr. Bloodmoney; George Romero's zombie flicks, especially Dawn of the Dead (and Zach Synder's remake, despite it not being that good); Deep Impact (but not Armageddon); almost certainly Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Max Brooks' World War Z, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, none of which I've read, to my great shame. The group would also include 1984 and We, and probably Brave New World and V for Vendetta (another one I haven't read); Lord of the Flies; possibly Lost, depending on what the final season holds; Heart of Darkness, Friday, and "By the Waters of Babylon." The Happening. Maybe the Foundation Trilogy, and maybe Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, but I don't know. I could go on, but I won't.

Several of them are apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, but not all of them; a few are dystopian; some are "unrealistic" (like Gulliver's Travels or anything with zombies), but more than a few depict events or situations that are actually possible. I'm toying with the idea of calling this thematic group "Kobayashi Maru fiction," as most of them contain no-win scenarios, or at least catastrophic upheavals requiring a new way of thinking and living. They explore human existence and human society in situations where what we consider "normal life" has totally ceased to exist. They attempt to discover the essence of 'humanity' by putting their characters in the hottest, most brutal furnace they can find, and burning off anything and everything they can.

This is where I want to work, in the crucible of the no-win scenario.

On "The Happening"

2009-05-19T15:33:00.001-05:00

I finally got around to watching M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening the other night - less than a year after it came out, which is pretty good for me. If you plan on watching it, be warned that this post contains spoilers.

I should begin by saying that I have a soft spot for disaster movies: not Towering Inferno-type disaster movies, but "oh-shit-the-world-will-never-be-the-same" disaster movies. I will readily acknowledge that such movies are rarely "good" in the way that most people mean when they talk about "good" movies – with a near-total disregard for that different genres have different standards of "goodness" and that "motion picture" is a medium and not a damned genre – but that's another issue. Suffice it to say that I was inclined to like this movie, or at least to really want to like it. And, well, I mostly really liked it.

It opens in Central Park, where - all of a sudden - people start losing their shit and killing themselves. A few blocks away, construction workers start throwing themselves off a building like bankers in 1929. It's a great way to start a movie like this: with something terrible and inexplicable. (Even later, when Shyamalan has provided an explanation (mostly), the scenes of people committing suicide are fairly disturbing; the best one, though, is the scene out in the field where Elliot's frantic piecing-together of what's happening is punctuated by off-screen gunshots as folks in the larger group behind them, over a ridge, start offing themselves.)

The movie then cuts to a high school classroom, where Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is discussing Colony Collapse Disorder, which gives us our first handle on what's happening, at least as far as you can explain one inexplicable event in terms of another, similar inexplicable event. The point we're supposed to get is that there are forces of nature beyond our understanding (let alone our control), and our attempts to explain them are little more than guesses.

Unfortunately, this kind of movie requires that the threat be at least identifiable, even if it remains inexplicable, and so we learn fairly early on that the mass suicides are the result of an airborne neurotoxin, and, later, that the neurotoxin is being produced by plants. Yes, plants. It's a goofy premise, I know - and the "ominous" scenes of trees and grasses swaying in the wind nearly ruined it for me. But if you can accept the plants as agents of destruction as necessary, because Nature as a concept is tough to visualize on-screen, then you can get at the idea behind the plants: the idea that Nature might, without warning, cease being our Mother and start weeding us out indiscriminately. That's kind of a terrifying idea, more terrifying than zombies or asteroids or even nuclear war, because it might actually happen.

Shyamalan described The Happening as a B-movie, but I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate description. Yes, the dialogue tends to be heavy-handed and expository, and the characters are underdeveloped, and some of the "emotional" moments feel off-key or manipulative (but, then again, some of them are really resonant) - but those things do not a B-movie make. It is, rather, a "movie of ideas" - as are all of Shyamalan's movies. The plot, the characters, the dialogue - everything is subordinate to the exploration of an idea. I have found most of the ideas driving Shyamalan's films intriguing and occasionally fascinating, which is why I forgive the awkward dialogue and (generally) flat characters.

The Happening did have one set of scenes that were genuinely terrifying, and a glimpse of what Shyamalan could do if he made a movie just to scare the shit out of people - the scenes beginning with Elliot, Alma, and Jess' arrival at Mrs. Jones' cabin, and ending with Mrs. Jones' suicide the next day. I thought, briefly, that everything that had happened up to that point was an excessively elaborate plot device whose sole purpose was to get them to that cabin, and that the movie was above to take off in a totally different, get-ready-to-shit-your-pants-with-terror direction. It didn't, and the film's actual ending - people losing their shit and killing themselves in Paris - is still appropriately ominous, but the "Mrs. Jones's Cabin" sequence is, I think, the strongest part of the movie, and that old lady almost upstaged the plants.

Alright, she totally upstaged the plants. Plants just aren't that scary.

Art Imitating Life, or Vice Versa

2009-04-18T21:24:00.003-05:00

Working in a library, I encounter strange books fairly often. A few days ago, SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music, and Electric Flesh, by one Arthur Kroker, crossed my desk. It was exceedingly weird, postmodern and "futuristic" but really dated by the fact that it was written in 1993. I posted a quote at random as my status on Facebook:

"Art is now a quantum fluctuation: a phase shift where all the old classical certainties dissolve, and where everything can finally be uncertain, probabilistic, and indeterminate. ...art can finally become a violent edge..."

...along with the comment that I didn't know what to think about the quote (or, for that matter, the book). A friend of mine responded:

The dissolution of Western Culture. Art following in the footsteps of Ethics. First definitive truth passes away, then definitive goodness, and finally definitive beauty.

To which I responded:

Maybe. Assuming that Western Culture exists as a singular entity. And I think I would say you've got it backwards: Art, then Behaviour, then Ethics.

Now that I've had a day or two to stew on it, I'd like to modify and expand my answer. Firstly, I think "Western Culture" (or "Western Civilization") can be a useful concept, so long as one keeps in mind the obscenely tangled mess contained within it. Whether western civilization is declining or dissolving at present, and, if so, whether that's a bad thing or a good thing, are questions I'm not going to address at present, mostly because I have no idea how I'd answer them. The question that interests me is whether Ethics changes first, followed by Behaviour, followed by Art, or the reverse, or whether Behaviour changes first and Art and Ethics change to match.

Of course, when you lay it out like that, it seems very Hegelian and deterministic, which ought to be a sign that we're headed in the wrong direction; so let's stop now and try a different approach. First, let's reduce our scale to something a bit more manageable: the individual. And let's leave out Art for the moment, on the grounds that most individuals don't create (or don't think they create) Art; but everyone does things and believes things, even if they have no idea why they do what they do or what they believe.

So: does my behaviour determine my beliefs, or do my beliefs determine my behaviour? Well, yes. If I believe that consuming alcohol to the point of drunkenness is bad, I will endeavour to only consume it in moderation. If I believe that drunkenness is bad, but drink myself stupid four or five (or six or seven) times a week anyway, I will either change my belief or ignore it (or, maybe, change my behaviour). And, of course, there are a variety of other internal and external factors which affect both belief and behaviour - and Art is one of them.

Art is a dangerous thing. It is dangerous precisely because we don't expect it to be; and if we've encountered enough Art to have learned that it is, in general, dangerous, we can very rarely defend ourselves against it, because it never attacks where we're looking for it. Art is dangerous because it affects (and sometimes totally alters) our beliefs and our behaviours without announcing that it's going to, and usually without our noticing it until it's too late.

Of course, we can't really enalrge our scale to the level of a whole culture again and hope this model will still be useful. Even so, a culture's Art is a fairly reliable guide to its Ethics and Behaviour, and if I had to back one for the instigator of cultural decline, elevation, dissolution, or apotheosis, I'd back Art.

Cleaning the Soundboard, Part Two

2009-03-25T15:48:00.002-05:00

After a not-really-adequate night's sleep, and a morning of yardwork, I returned to the church to resume my battle with the soundboard, armed with a better pair of needle-nose pliers from the house (lesson #1: any ad hoc toolkit should include a pair of needle-nose pliers).

And, what do you know, the pliers from home worked like a charm - they have a more even gripping surface, all the way down to the point, which is where the action was happening. And the bolts seemed to have learned a lesson; it only took about a quarter-turn with the pliers for each, and they were loose enough to unscrew with the allen wrench the rest of the way. I made short work of those 45 bolts.

Unfortunately, it did me absolutely no good. Those bolts, I thought, held the top plate down, and if I removed the bolts I could remove the plate, and get at the part of the board I wanted to clean: the place(s) where the knobs and sliders make metal-on-metal contact with the guts of the board. But, as it turns out, the bolts don't hold the plate down; they hold the guts up. The plate is attached to the rest of the metal box housing said guts. To get at the part of the soundboard's interior that I wanted to, I'd have to take the entire fucking thing apart, which I'm certainly not qualified to do, and not stupid enough to attempt (almost, but not quite).

So, in the end, all I was able to do was clean off the dust that had accumulated under the multitudinous knobs (there was quite a bit) and clean the contact point of the sliders indirectly, by squeezing a few drops of alcohol down the slider with a Q-tip and running it back and forth a few times. I could have gotten all that done last night, without ever unscrewing a thing. Lesson #2, I guess.

The good news is that the soundcheck I did - after replacing and realigning all the knobs - sounded fine (it's also good news that the board turned back on at all, and that all the channels still work). The real test will be tonight's service, but I'm (mostly) confident that everything will sound fine.

And I bought a towel to keep the board covered with. Lesson #3.

Cleaning the Soundboard, Part One

2009-03-25T00:30:00.002-05:00

The soundboard at church - an old Mackie VLZ 24/4 mixer - needs a cleaning. The last time it was taken apart and cleaned was 5 years ago, and we haven't been very good at keeping it covered when it's not in use, and now, well, it's nice and dusty on the inside, and it sounds like it.

Because I am the way I am, I decided I didn't want to go to the trouble (and expense) of tracking down the person who cleaned it back in 2004 (when someone else was in charge of this stuff), and hauling it down to said person's house in the Metroplex, and either renting a board or cobbling something together with our two smaller boards for a week or two until the board was clean, and going to pick it up, and then putting everything back together. No, I decided I'd rather go to the trouble of taking it apart and cleaning it myself.

In my defense, I did some poking around online, and I'm not the first person to attempt this. And really, all we're talking about is cleaning off some dust. How hard can that be?

So at 9 o'clock this evening, having already acquired cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol, I went up to the church and set about disassembling the board. I first wrote down, for each of the 22 channels, the positions of all the various knobs (trim volume, aux sends, 4-band EQ, submix assignment), as well as the positions of a few other important knobs and sliders. Then, I took all the knobs (280) and sliders (a mere 27) off. Then, after making sure they were all labeled, I unplugged all the cords from the back of the board, and set about actually taking the thing apart.

The parts I wanted to clean are underneath a metal panel held on by a few dozen hex-head bolts. Tiny little things; they take a 1/16ths-inch allen wrench, and that was the first snag. Not a big one, mind you; the 1/16ths-inch allen wrench was absent from the set I'd brought with me, which required a quick ride home to retrieve it. Problem solved.

Well, sort of. The 1/16ths (or 4/64ths)-inch allen wrench wasn't quite big enough (and, of course, the 5/64ths-inch was altogether too big, which was why I'd had to go home in the first place). Not wanting to admit the obvious - that the bolts had been removed and replaced one too many times, and their hexagonal indentations were now a tad too circular - I did a little standard-to-metric conversion and figured a 1.6 mm allen wrench would do the trick. As it was now nearly 11 (I'd wasted a half-hour removing and replacing a bunch of screws that I should have just left alone), I set out for the only plae in town where I could hope to acquire a 1.6 mm allen wrench, if such a thing even existed: Wal-Mart.

(I hate going to Wal-Mart. I only do it when I have to. And, yes, I realize I could've called it a night and gone to Lowe's in the morning, but I wasn't ready to admit defeat.)

If a 1.6 mm allen wrench exists, Wal-Mart does not stock them. They do stock 1.5 mm allen wrenches, which, at least according to Stanley, is equivalent to a 1/16ths-inch allen wrench, and therefore useless to me. As a last resort, then, I bought a pair of two-dollar needle-nose pliers, planning to unscrew the damn stripped bolts that way, and rode back to the church.

And, amazingly, my plan worked. In fact, it worked better than I expected: the first bolt I tried started moving right away, and once I'd loosened it with the pliers, I was able to unscrew it the rest of the way with my trusty 1/16ths-inch allen wrench. (Good thing I went home for it, after all.) Bolt number two came out easier than bolt number one. "Shit, yes!" I thought, "I might actually get this done tonight!"

But no. With bolt number three, my luck ran out. I couldn't get the pliers to grip it long enough to loosen it. I left number three to reconsider and tried number four. Nothing. Number five? A recalcitrant little punk. I tried a few more, at random. Bitches, all of them.

I was defeated. I came home, had a glass of wine, washed a few dishes, and now I'm going to bed. I'm going back tomorrow, and trying something new. What, I don't know yet. At the very least, I have to put the damn thing back together for the service tomorrow night, whether I get it clean or not.

You won this round, mack, but this shit ain't over yet.

Enough a Cynic to Believe

2009-01-20T16:06:00.002-06:00

The amount of physical and emotional pain - devastating, life-altering pain - that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another, and do inflict on one another, on a daily basis, is staggering. (If you want examples, read a newspaper; I'm not up to starting a list, because there wouldn't be a good place to stop.)

I think this is probably the reason most people who don't believe in God don't believe in Him - the "How can anyone believe in a God that would let X happen?" argument. The answer - that He gave us free will, etc. - doesn't pack the same emotional heft as the argument, and so usually fails to convince anyone, sometimes even the person using it.

But if there is no God, if humanity and everything else is the product of chance, how can anyone respond to life with anything but despairing, impotent rage? Some argue that we can create meaning despite the fundamental meaninglessness of the universe, but that's bullshit. Or rather, the meaning we create for ourselves is as paltry and meaningless as we ourselves are.

If there is no God, the horrors of this life remain unanswered. If there is a God, we can hope and trust that someday all things will be made new, and the horrors of this life will be answered. Until then, we can only ask (again and again), "How long?"

Another Episode in the Ongoing Farce of Government

2009-01-06T11:07:00.004-06:00

I don't pay much attention to the news, but the furor around Gov. Rod Blagojevich's alleged attempts to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat made it on to my radar. I'm of the opinion that most politicians are at least a little corrupt, placing their own needs and those of their (wealthy) supporters over the good of those they serve, but Blagojevich is accused of being unabashedly, flagrantly corrupt, and I think it's funny, in a horrible sort of way.

So when I saw that Roland Burris, the man he'd appointed to fill the vacant Senate seat, had been turned away by the Senate this morning - because his paperwork isn't in order - I was very happy. Not because I care whether or not Burris ends up in the Senate (I hardly care that Obama won the election instead of McCain - why the hell would I care about a Senator?), but because of the hypocrisy the Senate is displaying. They wish to avoid the appearance of corruption, but they aren't fooling anyone. Blagojevich and Burris are their brothers, their kin, their tribesmen. Blagojevich is being scapegoated not because because of his corruption, but because he went just a little too far.

UPDATE, 1/8/09:
Looks like Burris will get to be a Senator, after all. That didn't take long.

Unintended Irony

2008-12-16T13:06:00.002-06:00

One of my duties here at the library is dealing with the mail. Today I received a fundraising letter from Paul Kurtz of the Center for Inquiry, which publishes Skeptical Inquirer, which we subscribe to, and Free Inquiry, which we do not. In the letter, Mr. Kurtz says the Center's "ambitious agenda" is to "defend reason, science, and freedom of inquiry even as we create new secular institutions as alternatives to the ancient religions."

(In passing, I'd like to point out that the construction of that sentence implies that defending reason, science, and freedom of inquiry is unrelated to creating new secular institutions, and that new religions (Mormonism? Scientology? Dawkins-Hitchensism?) seem to be exempt.)

The deliciously ironic thing about this letter is that it has as an epigraph the phrase "...all things are possible." As in, "With God, all things are possible." In the body of the letter, Mr. Kurtz attributes the quotation to President-Elect Obama, apparently not realizing where Obama picked the phrase up, or hoping nobody who got the letter would recognize it.

I am all for reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and freedom from imposition of belief; I just don't trust secularism to do a better job of defending them than religion, and expect it to do a much worse job, in the end. And I will mock mercilessly anyone who makes so careless a blunder, in print, for all the world to see.

A Holiday Rant

2008-12-07T19:30:00.002-06:00

Every year when the holidays roll around, Christians all over the place start complaining about the "War on Christmas." There are country songs about Jesus being "the reason for the season;" there are Facebook groups dedicated to "keeping Christ in Christmas." There are buttons and bumper stickers, email petitions and concerned women, right-wing radio hosts and Bible-thumping preachers - and all of it makes me furious.

The first adversary in the "War on Christmas" is generally some school somewhere that decides to have a "winter program" instead of a Christmas pageant. This is, frankly, a stupid thing to be upset about. So what if some public school - a government-owned factory for producing unthinking, unquestioning automatons - decides not to celebrate Christmas? We ought to be angry when schools do have Christmas programs, not when they don't. We ought to be furious that the public school system has co-opted one of our holiest days, but instead we go along with it so the kids get a week off school at a time that's convenient to us.

The second offender is the retailer who decides to use the word "holiday" instead of "Christmas." Such retailers are usually threatened with a boycott if they persist in being inanely PC. Again, why aren't we angry when giant corporations hijack Christmas to make tons of money? We ought to boycott when a business uses the birth of our Saviour as a marketing tool; instead we boycott when they don't. That's not merely stupid, it's idolatrous. We're whoring ourselves to Mammon in the name of Jesus.

That's the reason we fight this imaginary "War on Christmas" every year - to hide the fact that we've turned the Incarnation into an orgy of conspicuous consumption. We're only fooling ourselves.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I'm not against giving gifts at Christmas - giving ought to be a year-round part of the Christian life, but it's especially appropriate as a way to celebrate God's giving himself to us. But most of the gifts that are given at Christmas are worthless and unnecessary. Video games? Expensive electronics? Fruit cakes? What about gift cards - they're like free passes to a whorehouse in our consumption-addicted culture.

Do you want people to know that Jesus is the reason for the season? Then act like it. Feed the hungry; clothe the naked; tend to the sick. Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Skip the sales, and visit a shut-in, or write to someone in prison. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Give the people you love gifts, but don't give them some mass-produced piece of trash; give them something that shows that you love them, something worth giving. And give gifts to people you'll never meet; give for the joy of giving. And while you're at it, throw away the stupid buttons, peel the bumper sticker off your car, leave the Facebook group, and delete every forwarded email that lands in your inbox. Celebrate Christmas like St. Nicholas - hoping that nobody would notice he was doing it.

This is me...

2008-11-19T10:25:00.001-06:00

Tea and Biscuits

2008-10-28T10:30:00.002-05:00

I've started drinking tea at work, because the coffee is terrible (and the tea is actually stronger). Today, as I was making it, it occurred to me again how odd it is that tea - not only the beverage, but the accouterments and rituals - is so associated with Britain. Globalization is not a new thing.

What got me thinking, though, was the tagline on the box the tea was in - something about it being "in the best English tradition" (which is a pretty common descriptor, I think). But the English tradition of tea-drinking is only 350 or 400 years old; Shakespeare wouldn't have had tea and sugar with biscuits and cucumber sandwiches every day at four. I can't recall an instance of anyone drinking tea in Joseph Andrews. What they do drink is beer, and lots of it, at all times of the day.

That's a much older tradition, and, at least in my opinion, a better one. I'd rather be sitting here at my desk with a pint of bitter than a mug of tea. But biscuits are fine.

Why I'm Voting Third Party

2008-10-02T10:04:00.007-05:00

Whenever the subject of the upcoming presidential election comes up, as it often does, and I mention that I'm voting for a third-party candidate, the response I get from Republicans and Democrats alike is, "Well, you can throw your vote away if you want to." My response is usually that it's not going to matter much whether McCain or Obama wins, because they're really not all that different. Here are a few reasons why I think that:

I. Both McCain and Obama voted in favor of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. This is the same bill that Bush so strongly supports, the one where hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are going to be used to rescue businesses that ought to be allowed to fail (and they ought to be allowed to fail because that's how capitalism works).

II. Obama voted for the 2008 FISA amendments, which, among other things, retroactively legalized the warrantless wiretapping activities of the NSA (carried out under Bush's orders), and granted immunity to the telecom companies who went along with it. I'm sure McCain would've voted for it also, but he was too busy campaigning to attend to his day job.
While I'm on the subject, Obama voted against the Protect America Act, the earlier, provisional version of the 2008 FISA amendments. (McCain was absent for that one as well.)

III. Neither one will balance the budget. The words "balanced budget" don't even appear on the Fiscal platform portion of Obama's website. The most he promises is to "enforce pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rules which require new spending commitments or tax changes to be paid for by cuts to other programs or new revenue," which is a fancy way of saying the budget won't get less balanced, but it's not going to get any better, either.
McCain's website says he'll work for a balanced budget (balanced by 2013!), but it also says: "No taxpayer money should bail out real estate speculators or financial market participants who failed to perform due diligence in assessing credit risks. ...Any policy of financial assistance should be accompanied by reforms that promote greater transparency and accountability to ensure we never face this problem again." And yet, he voted for the EESA, which is a bailout of irresponsible financial institutions, with lots and lots of taxpayer money. So his promise to balance the budget isn't worth much, I'd wager.

IV. Neither one is going to extricate us from the Israeli-Palestinian mess. Granted, we're partially responsible for the mess, as part of the League of Nations, which arbitrarily carved up the Ottoman Empire after WWI, and as part of the United Nations, which decided to take away half of Palestine and make a new country for the Jews. (As an aside, can you imagine the UN attempting to give, say, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to the Native Americans, making it an entirely separate country? That's exactly what we did to Palestine.)
However, our relationships with other countries in the region, particularly Iran, are going to be strained so long as we favor Israel. The Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, and nothing is going to get better so long as we ignore it, as both Obama and McCain will, like Bush, continue to do.

V. Both voted for building 700 miles of fence along our 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Guess who else thought that was a good idea? Bush.

A Matter of Perspective

2008-10-01T08:35:00.003-05:00

I just read an interesting article about "preemptive suicide" in a species of Brazilian ant. The ants cover the entrances to their colony at dusk, and several (as many as a dozen, it looks like) remain outside the colony to ensure that the entrance is completely hidden. The ants that remain outside usually die; this is, apparently, "the first known example of a suicidal defense that is preemptive rather than a response to immediate danger."

That's just background. What I'm on about this morning is the quote that ends the article, from a community ecologist at OU (who wasn't involved in the study) named Michael Kaspari, who said: "Uncovering the pressures that drive this self-sacrifice could shed light on the evolution of altruism."

The assumption is that altruistic behavior in humans is, at root, motivated by a sort of collectivist-selfishness; a few individuals suffer and die, but the community (or state, or species, etc) benefits. The idea that an individual could sacrifice himself for reasons based on ethics or morality or love is rendered nonsense by this assumption: the individual might think he had different reasons for his sacrifice, but really it was motivated purely by a hard-wired compulsion to act for the good of the community.

Now, I realize that the end result is the same. However, the reasons we do something are at least as important, and I think far more important, than the act itself; and so reducing altruism to an evolved response greatly cheapens it. Not only that, but it has a ring of tyranny about it: of sacrifice demanded from above, for the good of the State, rather than sacrifice freely offered, for the good of one's fellow man.

Every Little Bit Helps

2008-05-01T14:47:00.002-05:00

I recently ran across an excellent article (thanks, Byron) on the NY Times' website (which you should read). It asks why we should bother trying to live greener, especially in the face of rampant, wasteful consumption at home and abroad, all the while drawing stares and snickers from Hummer-driving suburbanites. After all, there are plenty of times when it has felt like the changes I've made - using cloth diapers, biking instead of driving, starting a compost heap - make my life harder without making a bit of difference. Sure, I rode my bike two miles to work today, but then I spent eight hours making overpriced designer coffees for soccer moms and tie-clad desk jockeys in SUVs and sports cars, and rednecks in giant diesel pickups.

But I digress. The reason we do it is, basically, because we don't have a choice, and because change so radical has to happen at the level of the individual. He quotes Wendell Berry: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

So. I'm going to keep riding my bicycle, I'm going to get rid of my trash cans, and I'm going to plant a damn garden.

Indebtedness & the Industrial Revolution

2008-02-13T15:35:00.002-06:00

Despite the fact that anyone with any sense knows that deficit spending and continual indebtedness are excellent tools with which to destroy one's own finances, they are indispensable parts of a government's economic toolkit. Why, I don't know. Maybe because groups of people are stupider than individuals, and most individuals aren't that smart - so a really big group is bound to be really dumb.

But any time a "developing" country decides to undertake a program of industrialization and "being like America," they begin by borrowing incredible amounts of money that they are then incapable of paying back, because the programs never quite succeed. And here in America, we have such a massive amount of national debt that every person - not every taxpayer, or every adult, but everyone - owes $30,000 of it. (Current figures available here.) And, of course, most people have their own debts as well - because our economy runs on consumption, and perpetual consumption requires that lots of people buy lots of things they neither need nor really want, and which they have to borrow money to buy.

I don't know where or when this all started, but I have a feeling that the world's current debt-binge is a result of the Industrial Revolution and the creation of a large class of people with disposable income. And I also think that, certainly in the West, we've been running things on the same line of credit since the beginning, not having learned the lesson of the Great Depression; that is, part of the history of the last two hundred or so years is one long bender of borrowing and consuming and borrowing some more.

And it's not just economic: we've been using up natural resources and filling our environments (or other people's environments) with the waste like the world was about to end. Even recent advances in "green" technologies and products are still based on a cradle-to-grave model. A CFL is far more efficient than an incandescent, but it still gets thrown away when it burns out. Ditto for rechargeable batteries and hybrid cars. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use them; we should. But they're only temporary solutions - our industries and economies need to be rebuilt on a cradle-to-cradle model.

But getting out of debt requires not only serious discipline and lots of hard work, it requires that you stop borrowing. Because i tend towards cynical pessimism, I think we'll continue to borrow against the future (both financially and ecologically) with our eyes tightly shut, until our credit runs out and payment in full is demanded. That doesn't mean that I've given in to despair; on the contrary, I'm going to do my damnedest to turn things around. If all I can do is carve out a chunk of land where my children and grandchildren can live self-sufficiently, then, well, at least they'll be able to weather the Fall of the West and the next Dark Age.

On Capitalism

2007-10-05T13:06:00.000-05:00

I used to think that my dislike for sales-people made me a bad capitalist - not that I mind being a bad capitalist, because I think it's a system with some serious flaws. And not that I dislike all sales-people, just that breed of them whose goal in life is to sell people things they don't even want - telemarketers and door-to-door-ers and drug reps, to name a few.

I've recently had an epiphany, however. The pushier a salesman is, the worse his product is, or at least the less he believes in it. A Rolls-Royce essentially sells itself; a Yugo or an Edsel doesn't. Or rather, didn't. A good product doesn't have to be "sold" the way a shoddy one does. Of course, our economy is built on shoddy products - built-in obsolescence and mediocre workmanship guarantees that people will have to buy the same products every few years.

I had this epiphany at work yesterday. The coffeeshop I work at supplies a number of local drug reps with coffee, pastries, whatever - which are, if I understand the drug rep's modus operandi, essentially bribes. (A co-worker's brother works in a small doctor's office, and was fortunate enough to receive an iPod as a bribe from a drug rep.) The reps get paid to convince doctors to prescribe their company's brand name drug instead of a competitor's (or generic) that does exactly the same thing. Bribery (though of course we don't call it that in a situation like this) is the easy recourse. I'd like to think that most doctors aren't swayed to prescribe a given company's drugs because their rep brings better coffee, but that's the way the system works.

The same kind of thing happens, though with fewer intermediaries, in the selling of automobiles and credit cards. And, oddly enough, all three have a significant thing in common - they are far less necessary to our survival than we have been led to believe. I'm not saying that some medicines aren't necessary or even life-saving, but there's a growing tendency to solve any and all problems, mental or physical, with a pill, rather than with a good diet, exercise, and working less than 80 hours a week. Likewise, a car is a necessity for most families and individuals, especially those in places without good public transportation. But a family of three (or even four) doesn't need a luxury SUV or a Ford Excursion (i.e., a small bus); it doesn't take a Ford F550 to run to the grocery store for eggs and milk. And credit cards are only good for getting into debt with, and debt is awesome.

I think the fundamental issue is the conflict between conspicuous consumption and sustainability. The standard American attitude (or instinct - there's not much thought involved) is that buying things and then throwing them away is what makes you a good American. That's maybe an attitude left over from the fifties, when it was "necessary" to prove one wasn't a Communist. And while there's a growing trend of buying "green" and "organic" and "eco-friendly," the basic attitude hasn't changed - we're still buying (though hopefully buying better stuff) and getting rid of it, though there's more recycling and donating to charities. The paradigm shift from consuming to sustaining hasn't happened yet, and I'm not at all sure it will, at least until our current lifestyle crumbles under its own weight.

Maybe I'm a bad capitalist after all.

Don't let the car fool you...

2007-09-22T01:21:00.000-05:00

Last week I was driving home from work when I saw a Lexus RX 350 (MSRP: $38,800 and up) with a bumper sticker that read: "Don't let the car fool you, my real treasure is in Heaven."

The amount of doublethink required to put that kind of bumper sticker on that kind of car is unfathomable to me, but it seems to be pretty common, as a simple googling of the phrase "don't let the car fool you" will demonstrate (and it should be noted that the above photo is from a random flickr account). The verses being referenced are Matthew 6:19-21, which read as follows: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (NKJV)

Now, if a forty thousand dollar car doesn't fall under the category of 'treasure', I don't really know what would. And referencing this statement of Jesus' - of all the things he said - on an earthly treasure requires either total ignorance (not to say stupidity) or self-righteous arrogance. To make things worse, it's only a few verses later that Jesus says that thing about serving two masters - God and money - and how it can't be done.

I had mostly forgotten about the whole thing - it's so typical of mainstream American Christianity as to be unremarkable - when I saw the same bumper sticker today on an old, beat up Isuzu pickup, with a mower in the bed and the number of the driver's landscaping business on the rear window. I thought, on first seeing it, that it was an appropriate vehicle for such a sticker - not a treasure, but a tool. It's still a weird thing to put on a car, though. Why broadcast the fact that you're storing up treasure in heaven at all? One last verse, Matthew 6:2: "When you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward."

Controversy at Your Local Starbucks

2007-03-23T15:16:00.000-05:00

The newest crop of cups at Starbucks features, among others, the following two quotes:

#220: "Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is a scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America’s public schools? Yes, let’s do it – not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu idea that the Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle."

-- David Quammen; author. His books include The Song of the Dodo and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.

#224: "Darwinism’s impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism’s connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record. And the record is not pretty."

-- Dr. Jonathan Wells; biologist and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

I'm not sure what it means for the debate about a controversial subject like this to spill over into the realm of coffee-cup sound-bites (print-bites?), but I seriously doubt it will lead to much substantive dialogue, especially given these two quotes - which preach to the choir rather than address the issues at hand. They are ridiculous, unhelpful, blatantly ad hominem attacks. A waste of ink.

Problems & Solutions

2007-02-01T14:10:00.000-06:00

A quote from the side of a Starbucks cup:
"Complex problems defy simple solutions. One cannot end poverty be giving money to every poor person, nor is the world cleaned up if everyone rode their bikes to work instead of driving. We need to commit to a total solution for our perceived problems. We need to also remember that most solutions hurt people too. What or who we hurt and who or what we fix is always the tough part of the equation." -John Adamski, Starbucks customer from Oregon.

At first read, it seems to make sense; complex problems require complex solutions, "total solutions," "commitment." Giving money to every bum on the street won't create employment for them, and riding a bicycle does nothing to clean up, say, nuclear waste or an oil spill at sea.
However, giving money to poor people under the right circumstances can go a long way toward solving poverty: microcredit, the loaning of small sums to poor people with the goal of jump-starting an entrepreneurial enterprise, is a big example (see my previous post on Muhammad Yunus. And riding a bicycle instead of driving addresses at least two complex problems: America's addiction to fossil fuels and our deteriorating national health, caused at least in part by a thoroughly sedentary lifestyle. So a simple solution (or several simple solutions: carpooling and public transportation come to mind) in the case of oil dependence is a necessary first step in addressing the larger problems: finding sustainable alternative energy and fuel sources, retooling industries, etc. We might go so far as to say that a complex solution (a "total" solution) is nothing more than a lot of simple solutions working in concert.

The second part of the quote - Mr. Adamski's assertion that "most solutions hurt people too" - is equally problematic. If we in western industrialized nations decided to commit to solving the problems we've created - environmental degradation, poverty and disease and unrest in the third world - it will, indeed, require sacrifice. But it will require a sacrifice of our luxury, not our necessity: Hummers and Cadillacs and McMansions for us, or food and water and medicine for them?

I hate to indulge in cliche, but: the answer is to do what you can where you are with what you have: and that may turn out to be far more than you think. Change doesn't come from above, from governments and corporations; it comes from individuals choosing to act differently. Enough people moving in a new direction can turn the tide.

"Corporate Growth"

2007-01-27T00:43:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting post on the similarities between unrestricted capitalism and cancer. The idea is, essentially, that corporate growth without regard to anything but profit parallels cancer, which is the unrestricted growth of cells without reference to the rest of the body. After I'd had this new metaphor rolling around in my head for a week or two, it reminded me of a book I'd run across by accident a few years ago, called Cradle to Cradle.
The authors, an American architect and a German chemist, argue that industrial growth isn't fundamentally bad, as many environmentalists argue, but that it isn't being done correctly. The example they point to is nature: the waste that the cycles of plant and animal life produce isn't 'waste' in the way that a plastic bag is; it's not even recycled the way cardboard is; natural 'waste' is in fact an integral part of the cycle. So, for example, the leaves dropped by trees in a forest decompose and replenish the soil; plants 'breathe' carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and animals breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Everything alive is something else's food.
I realize the two ideas aren't directly related; that is, even if modern industry was revolutionized following the cradle-to-cradle model, it would still have the potential to be 'cancerous'. But both ideas suggest ways in which an imperfect system (which is still preferable to most of the alternatives) can be improved upon.

The photo is from the website Postsecret. It's only very tenuously related to the post, but I think it's funny.

On the TTC: 6

2007-01-13T22:53:00.000-06:00

The third claim on TSRT's TTC-propaganda billboard is that the project will create "more jobs." The promise of more jobs gets used to sell just about everything; and sometimes, it's even true. It's true in this case, for example: building 8,000 miles of infrastructure will indeed create more jobs, because, naturally, someone has to do the work of building it.
The first problem with this claim is the implication that not building the TTC means less jobs: which, of course, it does not, but a big part of the pro-TTC party's platform is the claim that enemies of the TTC are enemies of progress. And if Peter Gorman is correct (see the previous post), then at least some of the jobs created by the TTC are replacements for jobs that will be lost when improvements to existing highways stop.
Secondly, the claim tries to blind us to the fact that any massive government project will create jobs. If Gov. Perry decided he wanted to dramatically improve the quality of low-income public housing across the state, and contracted with private companies to get it done, well, that would result in more jobs. So would building an environmentally responsible ("green") freight and passenger rail network across the state - instead of the TTC. So would reclaiming abandoned urban properties - empty warehouses and dead malls - and turning them into community centers, homeless shelters, or parks. Of course, those projects lack an essential feature that attracts governments & private investors - profitability. C'est la vie.

A last point I'd like to make is that the "more jobs" appeal, much like the "faster evacuations" appeal, is calculated to hit people at an emotional level, circumventing the rational, critical-thinking, parts of their brains. I'm not trying to belittle emotion, but it's a sorry way to make decisions of this sort; we ought not pave a million acres of Texas just because it feels right.

That's all I have to say on the subject for now; bookmark the TTC News Archive to stay informed.

On the TTC: 5

2007-01-12T15:27:00.000-06:00

Here are a few highlights from a recent article by Peter Gorman in the Fort Worth Weekly, available online here.

"The plan, made public only after 175 Freedom of Information Act requests were filed by citizen groups and news media, describes a 1,200-foot-wide corridor to be leased to private companies who will design, build, and maintain their specific sections, setting and collecting all tolls for contract periods ranging from 50 to 75 years. Sections of existing roads that coincide with the corridor — all of I-35 from San Antonio to Laredo, for example — will become part of the toll road. Additionally, motels, gas stations, and stores built within the corridor will be part of the private company’s holdings — and part of their profit package.
But the deal is even sweeter than that. The initial contract signed by the Spanish firm Cintra; their partner on the project, Zachry Construction Corp.; and TxDOT for a 316-mile section of road to be built from San Antonio to Dallas, includes what’s known as a no-compete clause. In this case, it means TxDOT has agreed not to improve any roadways that run parallel to the TTC for the duration of the Cintra lease, unless those improvements had already been approved prior to the signing of the contract.
Perry has still refused to disclose some parts of the contract, on grounds that they contain proprietary information for the Cintra-Zachry partnership. But the sections that have been made public show that Cintra will not be obligated to build more than four car and truck lanes “until and unless it is demonstrated that there is a demand for high-speed rail, commuter rail, freight, and utilities.”
And who gets to decide what tolls to charge on these new roads? Cintra. In the contract, TxDOT agreed that toll prices will be set “at what the market will bear.” A TxDOT news release suggested they would be in the 12- to 24-cent range per mile for autos. Opponents think they’ll more likely be twice that. In other words, the San Antonio-to-Dallas trip could cost a motorist anywhere from $32 to $118 in tolls, plus gas."

On the TTC: 4

2007-01-09T13:21:00.000-06:00

Here's a photo of the offending billboard - swiped from the TTC News Archive. Let's take the claims one at a time.

1. "Less Traffic:" We can only assume this means less congestion, and not less cars on the road. Here are some numbers from TSRT's website: during the past 25 years, road use in Texas increased 95%, and road capacity 8%; during the next 25 years, road use is expected to increase 214%, and road capacity 6%. Seems really dire, right? But these numbers are essentially meaningless on their own; they look scary, and most people don't understand statistics, so numbers get tossed around (by lots of folk, not just pro-TTC lobbyists) and people are swayed by "lies, damned lies, and statistics."
How is 'road use' defined? Is it the total number of hours spent by Texans on the road? If so, just drivers, or passengers also? Is the number of cars on the road a factor? Is it merely the number of cars on the road, without respect to how much time those cars spent on the road? What roads are getting used? Only highways? What about Farm-to-Market or Ranch roads? City streets?
How is 'road capacity' defined? The total number of cars one road could carry at one time? With or without congestion? How is road capacity measured, and by whom? Are our roads at full capacity now? Obviously this depends on the road: I-35 probably is, and maybe I-45, but there are hundreds of miles of smaller highways and farm roads where I could drive for hours without meeting five cars. If all the roads in Texas have been lumped together to come up wit these numbers, they're basically useless (because the roads they compare are too dissimilar to be compared profitably; think of the street outside your front door and, say, the huge conflux of interstates (30, 35, 45) in downtown Dallas: are they the same?).
Lastly: How much will the TTC increase our road capacity? Let's be stupidly generous and say it will double our road capacity - an increase of 100%. If our roads are at full capacity now, a 100% increase in capacity still falls woefully short of meeting the 214% increase in road use. There wight be less traffic, but there will still be traffic, which I'm sure TSRT and TxDot know. So the claim of "less traffic," which to the average motorist means (or is intended to mean) "no traffic," is one of those wonderfully misleading half-truths.

2. Faster Emergency Evacuations: There are a number of ways to address this claim. The simplest is to point out that, especially in the wake of hurricanes Rita and Katrina, this is a blatant emotional appeal. It may be true - giant roads might make evacuations faster - but it is calculated to bypass the rational mind and cause the viewer to support the TTC on an emotional (and therefore irrational) level. If the pro-TTC camp can get average people to support it in this way, without thinking, they've gone a long way towards selling it. Rational thought is the enemy of all bad ideas.
I could take the Al Gore approach and point out that the TTC is going to produce, both during construction and once in use, obscene amounts of pollution, which will contribute to global warming, which will in turn lead to more hurricanes - in which case we will need to evacuate the coast more often. I could also say that, if disaster relief and prevention are such major goals, there are better ways to spend the time and money: restoring (or constructing) barrier islands off the coast, "hurricane-proofing" coastal cities and towns, improving the speed and quality of disaster response agencies, etc. I could, I suppose, ask how many people died as a result of not being able to evacuate, and if improving evacuation times is really the best way to save lives - but that might seem callous, so perhaps I'll leave that question unasked.

I'll leave the third claim - "More Jobs!" - for later.

On the TTC: 3

2007-01-06T22:30:00.000-06:00

What got me on the subject of the TTC was a pair of billboards advertising the TTC on the stretch of US Hwy 82 between Sherman and Gainesville. It was a fairly obvious piece of propaganda, paid for by Texans for Safe Reliable Transportation (TSRT), whose website is BetterTexasRoads.org. So I'll start there, and later address a few of the claims made by the billboard.

The first thing we should note is the ".org" at the end of the web address. That, opposed to a .com or a .net or a .tv or a .whatever implies something: that the organization who operates the site is a non-profit, dedicated to making the world a better place - in this instance, making the world better by making our roads safer. (For comparison, here are a few other .orgs: CARE, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Heifer International.)

And, of course, TSRT claims to be a non-profit:
"Q: What is Texans for Safe Reliable Transportation?
A: Texans for Safe Reliable Transportation (TSRT) is a coalition of individuals, employers, trade associations, and public safety organizations dedicated to improving transportation in Texas.
...
Q: Is TSRT a front-group for a special-interest agenda?
A: No. We are public interest group interested in promoting an improved transportation system in Texas."

But a list of the "individuals, employers, trade associations, [or] public safety organizations" who are members of TSRT isn't easy to find, which seems a bit odd. Ashamed to publicly support safer roads, are they?
There is a list of the board members to be found on the site, though it's tucked away, in one of TRST's earlier press releases. The three board members are:
Joe Krier, San Antonio Chamber, President and CEO.
Lawrence Olsen, Texas Good Roads Association in Austin.
Donna Williams, vice president of Parsons Infrastructure & Technology in Dallas (and wife of Texas Railroad Commission member Michael Williams).
(In later press releases, however, Joe Krier is simply TSRT's chairman, and Donna Williams is "a Dallas-based aviation engineer.")

So it would appear that TSRT is indeed a front for a special interest agenda; the board members all stand to profit (indirectly, of course) from the construction of a massive system of toll roads in Texas. And so we ought to assume that anything they tell us is, if not an outright lie, certainly a misrepresentation of the truth, or a statement based on faulty (or false) and unstated assumptions. With that in mind, we'll turn to the billboard and a corresponding press release shortly.

DWR Champagne Chair Contest

2007-01-06T01:26:00.000-06:00

Design Within Reach has a yearly champagne-chair contest: entrants construct a miniature chair out of the cork, wire, and foil from two bottles of champagne. My mom & I entered one this year (the idea was my brother's):

Named it Sparky.

On the TTC: 2

2007-01-06T00:38:00.000-06:00

According to the map below, which I found on CorridorWatch, the plan is for a network of corridors, which look like they'll replace most (if not all) of the major highways currently in use: I-35, I-45, I-10, etc. Corridors in orange are "priority" corridors, and those in green secondary - obviously, the priority corridors get built first. (There's a bigger map here, which was apparently produced by TxDot in June of 2002.)

I feel pretty certain the thing will get built, despite the opposition. This is Texas, and we like roads in Texas, and we like things big in Texas. Also, the Houston-to-Texarkana corridor is part of a multi-state & Congressionally approved plan to connect the various parts of I-69 and thus have a corridor running from Canada to Mexico. Read more about that at Wikipedia and Google.
Of course, even if it does get built, it'll be twenty years before the thing is done. And we can always choose not to drive on it.

On the Trans-Texas Corridor: 1

2007-01-05T16:33:00.000-06:00

For those of you who aren't from Texas and/or haven't heard of the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), it's a proposed (and, of course, controversial) new highway, running roughly parallel to I-35 from Mexico to Oklahoma. It will have, according to TxDot's TTC website: separate lanes for passenger vehicles and large trucks; freight railways; high-speed commuter railways; infrastructure for utilities including water lines, oil and gas pipelines, and transmission lines for electricity, broadband and other telecommunications services. According to CorridorWatch, it will also be extremely limited-access, only connecting via interchange to interstates and major highways: there are no planned on- or off-ramps, no frontage roads, etc. Also according to CW, gas stations, restaurants, and hotels will be built inside the corridor by the private companies who are, even according to TxDot, providing most of the money: so local economies will suffer as a result.
Oh, and the thing is a quarter of a mile wide, and will be (at least mostly) a toll road.

Some of this makes sense: freight & passenger railways, for one thing. Looking 50 years ahead, as TxDot says it's doing with the TTC, for another. But 8,000 miles of road, taking up 146 acres per mile (according to CW), doesn't seem like a particularly good idea, or a good use of resources. It also doesn't seem particularly far-sighted to build this thing based on the assumption that gas will be as cheap or as plentiful in fifty years as it is today.

More on this later.

Aparisim Ghosh on leaving Iraq

2006-12-17T19:24:00.000-06:00

I just read through the Dec. 11th issue of Time Magazine (I get them second-hand, so I'm usually further behind than that), and correspondent Aparisim Ghosh's Viewpoint - "What We Would Leave Behind" - says (better) what I said a few posts ago; namely, that a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq won't stop the violence, and would probably make it worse. "If the Iraqi government can't stop sectarian killing today when it is able to call on the world's most powerful military, it can hardly be expected to do so once the Americans have left." Further on, he writes: "...some Sunni groups dedicated to fighting U.S. troops have already begun to recalibrate their gunsights. One of the largest Sunni insurgent groups, Islamic Army, dramatically changed course last week and called on its followers to wage a 'battle of destiny' against Shi'ites for control of Baghdad."
He ends by saying "The Americans created this mess; it's their responsibility to fix it." That's true of recent history, but something of an oversimplification. In 1920, the League of Nations 'partitioned' the Ottoman Empire, and the borders it somewhat arbitrarily decided on are basically the ones still in place today. Western involvement in the region goes back much further than that, but the 1920 partitioning illustrates well the rock and hard place we (westerners) are stuck between regarding Iraq & the rest of the formerly colonized world. It is, if not entirely, then certainly mostly our fault that the 'third world' is in the state it's in. Part of the reason places that used to be colonies are poor today is that a colony's economy is set up to benefit the mother country, and that state of affairs persisted beyond decolonization; and poverty is a gateway to a host of other problems. (Anyone remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs?)
So colonialism created the problem; but our attempts to fix it - to spread democracy and western economic structures - are seen as neo-colonialism. And if we throw in the towel, we have the blood of innocents on our hands. What's the right way forward?

Awesometown

2006-12-10T00:38:00.000-06:00

If you think this is funny, go here and here. Watch the theme song.

Victory in Iraq

2006-12-09T13:19:00.000-06:00

With the release of the Iraq Study Group's report & recommendations, there has been renewed talk about the prospects for victory in Iraq. I was curious what, exactly, "victory in Iraq" looked like, so I Googled "Iraq Victory."
The White House has available at its website a document titled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - download the pdf here.

From the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq":

“Our mission in Iraq is clear. We’re hunting down the terrorists. We’re helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We’re advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and grandchildren.”
-President George W. Bush, June 28, 2003

"VICTORY IN IRAQ DEFINED
As the central front in the global war on terror, success in Iraq is an essential element in the long war against the ideology that breeds international terrorism. Unlike past wars, however, victory in Iraq will not come in the form of an enemy’s surrender, or be signaled by a single particular event – there will be no Battleship Missouri, no Appomattox. The ultimate victory will be achieved in stages, and we expect: ...
In the longer term:
• An Iraq that has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency.
• An Iraq that is peaceful, united, stable, democratic, and secure, where Iraqis have the institutions and resources they need to govern themselves justly and provide security for their country.
• An Iraq that is a partner in the global war on terror and the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, integrated into the international community, an engine for regional economic growth, and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."

So. Victory in Iraq will finally (and only) be achieved when Iraq has become a 'modern' country with a developed, industrialized economy. If that's the goal, our country's involvement in Iraq (and Afghanistan, where the goals are or ought to be largely the same) is going to last a long time. Would we say that Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Colombia - countries which the US has sought (and continues to seek) to make "peaceful, united, stable, democratic, and secure" - actually are? Cuba is still Communist, despite a half-century of efforts to democratize it. Colombia is still run as much by drug cartels and Marxist guerillas as by its government: decades of a war on drugs haven't done much good, and have perhaps (probably) made matters worse.
Unless the above criteria are radically altered, victory is a long way off. And to leave now, to exit gracefully or otherwise, would be to leave the country in worse shape than we found it, ripe for takeover by a dictator worse than the one we ousted. Whether our involvement in Iraq should continue in the same manner, I don't know; but it must continue in some form, because the mess we've created isn't cleaned up yet. It may never be, I suppose, but we set ourselves the task, and must labour at it until it's complete.

"Post-9/11 America"

2006-12-09T00:14:00.000-06:00

I was putting my daughter to bed recently, letting my mind wander as I waited for her to fall asleep, when the phrase "post-9/11 America" drifted through my head. I have always, since the day of the attacks, been uncomfortable with the government's and media's appropriation of the attacks as a means of manipulating the public, and it finally occurred to me why.
Most other nations have experienced war on their own soil: even if we only go back to, say, 1776, we would be hard pressed to find a nation that has not suffered war or imperial oppression & violence within their borders. For examples: in Europe, there were the revolutions of the mid-1800s, and of course the World Wars; in Asia, WWII and Vietnam; Africa was carved up by Europe, and then abandoned to civil wars and ethnically/religiously-fueled violence; Central and South America have been subjected to numerous military "interventions" by the United States in the last, say, 70 years, not to mention the skirmish over the Falklands (which the British needed for "strategic sheep purposes").
America, by contrast, has suffered relatively little. The Revolutionary War was confined to what is now a relatively small part of the country, as was the Civil War. Pearl Harbor happened in the middle of the Pacific; 9/11 was an isolated attack. They were tragedies, to be sure; but the wars happen elsewhere.
That, to me, is the arrogance of America's constant focus on 9/11. We as a nation have never experienced the horror of war in our own cities. We have not been bombarded by Nazis, or firebombed by the Allies, or nuked, or occupied by a hostile army. There was rationing during WWII, but our cities weren't reduced to rubble. Millions of American men and women have died serving in the Armed Forces, but civilians do not daily fear for their lives during wartime. We are now, of course, worried about the possibility of another terrorist attack; but this is a different worry than that of a mother in Israel or Palestine that her husband or child will be killed by a suicide bomber, or the worry of an Englishman or a German during WWII that they'll be killed in a bombing. It seems recreational in comparison, like our worry about the possibility of another al-Qaeda attack is on par with our worry that Starbucks will sell out of blueberry muffins before we can get there.
Were we, in 1950, a "post-Pearl-Harbor" America? We were, of course, because it was an event that had happened in the past, and we as a nation would never be the same. But the "post-9/11" mentality we've had for the last five years strikes me as false, as though we're trying to cast ourselves as victims. Some of us were; some people died, and more lost fathers, husbands, mothers, wives, sisters, brothers, friends. But the war has happened somewhere else; it is somewhere else that the violence makes normal life precarious, or impossible; somewhere else that fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers - civilians, mind you, not soldiers - still die every day.

Sins of the Father

2006-11-18T23:57:00.000-06:00

I'm reading - almost through - a fascinating book by Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom! - which is too complicated to really summarize, but:
It's about a man, Thomas Sutpen, born poor white trash c. 1810 in the mountains of Virginia, who, because of something that happened to him on a plantation when he was 14 and the family had rolled out of the hills to lowland Virginia, spends his whole life in pursuit of his "design" of acquiring a plantation and establishing a dynasty. So he leaves home, ends up (years later) married to the daughter of a plantation owner, heir to the land, with a son: and leaves it all, repudiates the wife, and takes away only 20 slaves, because he discovers that his wife is an octoroon, 1/8th black. So he starts over in another state, marries again, has another son & a daughter, and things are going well - until the Civil War breaks out, and his first, abandoned son turns up to marry his half-sister. At the war's end, the second son kills his older brother, disappears, the sister who was never a bride is widowed, and everything falls irreparably apart.
Also: the first son had a son himself, by a woman who was also an octoroon. The (twice) abandoned grandson marries the blackest woman he can find, in rejection of the 15 16ths of his blood that's white: and they have a son, who lives in a shack on Sutpen's abandoned plantation. Sutpen's last scion turns out to be a poor mulatto, feeble-minded and slack-jawed.
Two dynasties: both of which die of after a few generations, cursed by the father's racism. A brilliant use of David's and Absalom's story to try to come to grips with the (still enduring) legacy of American slavery and racism, and a brilliantly written (and difficult) novel.

It seems to me that a great deal of what's wrong in the world - certainly not all, but a lot - is wrong because of Western European arrogance: the arrogance that claims another people's lands, exploits them, enslaves some of them, wrecks the environment, etc, all for economic gain and material comfort. An oversimplification, probably, but not untrue.

There's more to say, but I'm losing the ability to put words together in a way that makes sense: time a pipe, a stout, and sleep.

Rick Perry, John Hagee, and the End Times

2006-11-07T18:37:00.000-06:00

So: Rick Perry attended a service at John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in San Antonio; he agreed with Hagee's statement that "If you live your life and don't confess your sins to God Almighty ..., you're going straight to hell with a nonstop ticket"; he did some backpedaling a little later. (Go here for the DMN story..)
He's entitled to believe what he wants, as we all are. He should, indeed, (and contrary to what Chris Bell said) make those beliefs public, at least in his actions; any belief one won't act on isn't worth continuing to believe in.
The problem is that he agreed/agrees with John Hagee; that he didn't hear anything in an hour-long sermon that he'd object to. Why is that a problem? Aside from the fact that Hagee believes most people are going to hell, he teaches the Rapture: that Jesus is coming back to rescue his people from the world, and turn everything else over to Satan. He has big charts and detailed timetables about something Jesus said even he didn't know the timing of.
There's a lot wrong with that way of thinking, and more educated people than myself have discussed it. The one consequence I'd like to point out is that people who expect to be raptured expect it to happen in their lifetime, and so don't make long-term plans or think about the long-term consequences of their decisions; global warming, deforestation, the destruction of the environment - these things don't matter if Jesus is coming back in a few years. So I didn't vote for him; I'd rather have a governor who'll think about how my great-great-grandchildren are going to be affected by what he does.

Cake or Death?

2006-11-01T23:14:00.000-06:00

MSRP of a 2006 Hummer H2: $54,225

Better ways to spend $54,225:
At Heifer International: Provide 108 families with a heifer, 361 families with a llama, or 452 families with a sheep.
At Blood:Water Mission: Provide 54,225 Africans with clean water for a year.
At Compassion International: Provide 15 years of sponsorship for 9 children (and have enough left to sponsor a tenth child for six years).
At International Medical Corps: Vaccinate 13556 children against measles, yellow fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis and polio.
At Living Water International: Pay for two Large Capacity Wells or 21 Small Capacity Wells.
At Action Against Hunger: Provide 1,084 malnourished children in feeding centers a month's worth of high-energy milk & porridge.

Or: At Apple: Buy 155 80GB video iPods.

(But this is America; of course we'll take the Hummer. And a venti nonfat latte.)

Muhammad Yunus & the end of poverty

2006-10-29T22:23:00.000-06:00

I ran across a blurb in a recent Newsweek about Muhammad Yunus, winner (with the bank he founded) of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Guy has an interesting idea (though not original to him): give tiny loans to really poor people in order to jumpstart them out of poverty and into entrepreneurial enterprise. It makes sense; what to us in developed western nations is an insignificant amount of money can make a life-changing difference to someone who lives literally hand-to-mouth, and there are millions who live that way.
What caught my eye was his prediction - perhaps offhand - that by 2050 poverty will be eliminated, preserved only in museums. That is, of course, ridiculous. It's a worthy goal, and he (and countless others fighting poverty on other fronts) is (are) doing worthwhile work and have my respect. But to think poverty can be eliminated in 44 years, or 440 years, is to ignore history and human nature. Not everyone who is poor is poor because of circumstance - some are poor because of bad choices, and some of those will continue to make bad choices even when given opportunity and means to make better choices. That's just how people are.
But one can't tell in advance how someone will use the help they're given, and so it must be given, and given again; we must do all that we can so that by all means we may help some.

Correction, 11/26/06:
The blurb was actually in the Notebook section of Time Magazine, October 23rd, 2006. The quote: "58% of the people who borrowed from Grameen are now out of poverty. There are over 100 million people now involved with microcredit schemes. At the rate we're heading, we'll halve total poverty by 2015. We'll create a poverty museum in 2030."