Keifus Writes!

Review: Jack of Kinrowan, by Charles De Lint

2012-01-30T16:56:00.001-05:00

Jack of Kinrowan is an omnibus edition containing Jack the Giant-Killer and Drink Down the Moon. They’re urban fantasies set amid the greener corners of Ottawa, following the adventures of Jacky Rowan, who, along with a few other twentysomething types, weaves in and out of the parallel faerie dimension to face an assortment of its more unpleasant denizens, and nudge the fair folk from their habitual fecklessness in the pursuit of a quest or two. The plot of Jack the Giant-Killer is nearly revealed by the title: it has Jacky and her more pragmatic friend Kate barge rather recklessly into a serious political situation among the magical people, but they manage, with timely help, quick judgments, and an amazing dose of luck, to confront and prevail over the darker hordes. In Drink Down the Moon, Jacky and Kate, now promoted to official guardianship roles, come in late to assist against a new threat to the unaligned faeries of the Ottawan Elsewhere, which has already dragged in human musician Johnny Faw, and has robbed the wild sidhe of a leader for their life-sustaining full-moon wander.

So. As a personal bit of background, I recall Giant-Killer, getting some informal praise on the science fiction circles I lurked back in the early 90s, to the extent that I thought it might be worth reading at some point or other. The first of the two was published in 1987, at a time when urban fantasy was gelling into something of a sub-genre, but a good decade and a half before it took off deeply into teen fiction. Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, for example, came out in the same year, and I read that one based on similar acclaim from that group; John Crowley’s Little Big, which is one of the most brilliantly endearing books ever, came out just a couple years before (and if it didn’t define the genre, then it should have retired it). Authors were still busy updating the world of fairytales to modern times, and reclaiming them for adult readers. Meanwhile, one of my real-life friends enjoys Charles de Lint, and for this reason alone, I am inclined to find out what’s good about these particular stories.

The de Lint stories are both quick and economical reads, and I take them as quality little escapes. They’re not especially heavy on inner psychological drama, but they offer just enough depth of character to make the people interesting, just enough personal challenge to get us on their side, just enough threat from the mages and goblins to worry about them making it out of it. Jacky’s had some bad luck with relationships, and we catch her feeling sorry for herself at the end of one, but her strength is credible enough, something that people with better judgment can readily see. It’s fun to put an independent woman in a fantasy quest role too, without ever once turning her into an action hero or giving her a savior complex. Johnny we find facing the recent loss of his grandfather and musical mentor, and uncovering the inherently tragic relationships the old man had in his life. The human characters are all young and single, and if their world-wide-open mindset, and the mild romantic subtext that doesn’t neglect to pair off the attractive people appropriately at the end, tends to be a little much for my old jaded self right now, then I’m at least assured that all the characters are pushing 50 here in 2012.

Although there is some necessary dissection of “the rules,” and a background of how the (even) fair(er) folk immigrated to North America, it doesn’t strive to the ponderous level of Big Idea. The magical characters remain true to their natures, but de Lint doesn’t make them inaccessibly mercurial and fey, or which are convenient for them. They think and reason like anyone else, and have made the concessions to modernity that they have to. Refreshingly, the humans react fairly understandably to discovering them. They doubt it’s real, but de Lint doesn’t take the conceit that the characters have somehow never read the same stuff that everyone has. They know their fairy stories as well as I do. I think de Lint’s aim, and his greatest success, is to capture the enthusiastic spirit of the old characters of the plucky beanstalk climber or the clever tailor and find who they’d be in a modern context. The characters act and react, make their decisions by thinking fast. It makes for a few enjoyable afternoons.

Review: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

2012-01-18T14:05:00.002-05:00

Anathem is a great illustration of how, even when every idea has already been played out, a great author can make it all look utterly new. It’s another story playing out the idea of traveling to an alternate reality, a what-if tale, a close companion of the nerdier genres, but it’s still been around long enough to become a well-embedded trope, one which you’d think (and this is the last time I’ll ever cite it, I swear) should have been killed dead in 1971, with a brilliant little short that illustrated how when all story outcomes are accessible, then none of them mean anything. Well, au contraire, mon frère. There are still great new ways to do it, and like everything else, it all comes down to execution, connections, and character. This is one of the nerdiest novels I’ve ever read, in fact, and it’s unreservedly entertaining as hell. Here, Stephenson applies some real thinking to speculations on the allowed trajectories of how one might traverse one what-if universe to the next, or how you a character might sample alternate versions of reality in advance of the dang wavefunction collapsing on him. He ties the ideas into some fairly legitimate interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness, physical cosmology, metafictional analysis, and, of all things, some kind of neo-Platonism in which our many worlds may additionally include ones of pure(r) ideas, because, hey man, number theory and plane geometry will still hold even when your fundamental constants get a slightly different roll of the polycosmic dice. Putting all those things together makes the many worlds interesting all over again.

And if this still doesn’t sound dorky enough for you, then consider that the setting is one such alternate reality in which academic types are customarily, by some three or four millennia of tradition (accounting for the violent vagaries of human nature at that), shut out from society in walled clockwork monastery/colleges (maths, as Stephenson calls them), forbidden from (much) high technology, and left to delve into purely intellectual human pursuits, chasing their tails around philosophies and famous thinkers which, as even this epistemologically limited reviewer will recognize, have rather direct traditional Earthican analogues (in context, Stephenson throws out a multiversal reason for that). And we’re put right in there. Within the walls, formal reasoning and edifying dialogue are the chief modes of expression. With that kind of background, and that kind of purpose, the story just doesn’t sound like it should be this fun, but it is.

Stephenson wisely chooses a younger set of acolytes to flesh it all out, which ends up being handy in lots of ways. It keeps the prose and dialogue from getting too abstract, for one thing, where Erasmas and the gang aren’t quite so far from the outside world to have forgotten it, and the setting is explored effectively as they compare and contrast the reality with their memories. In any case, Neal Stephenson is about the last guy to keep the language on some dry scholarly level, although he’s definitely someone I would expect to play around with what’s, here, basically grad-student style wit. The narration seems to get more colloquial as the novel passes, and I don’t know if it’s because I got used to all the proper names and clever alt-universe word fusions, because the characters interacted more outside the “concent,” or just because he fell back into a familiar American-style writing groove. The characters are good revealers of concepts too: it’s natural for young eggheads to be excited to expound goofily on their newly-attained knowledge, which gives all that philosophical info-dumping the fun vibe of the world’s most Socratic weed-baked dorm room. [It also no doubt lets Neal Stephenson cover his ass as a mere interested layperson. But then again, it seems that science fiction has to be really silly to get scientist readers to object, and the author here appears to be up on his metaphysics just fine.] And of course, they have the analytic tools to decode the conspiracy from scant evidence. One great scene has the acolytes using geometry and a pinhole camera. Centering the story on young learners also offers a few natural arcs to hang the story on: discovery of the external world (and then some), and we get a charming little coming of age aspect too, young goofballs falling in love. Mostly, we follow them along as they try to figure out what the hell is going on.

The novel also draws (and it’s no spoiler to reveal this) on the tradition of a science fiction first contact tale. There’s a ship floating in orbit, and it’s hard to spot from inside the tower, but the entirety of civilization is liable to go apeshit when the information gets out. It’s the meat of it all, it’s the device that drives the plot, but the ship and the aliens are almost anticlimactic when we finally get there. Okay, they come from a different cosmos and all—their matter is fundamentally different--but the (alien) people in there look like us. A character observes that they suffer such disappointingly banal shit as committee meetings, that more cultural variation is observed on their own planet, almost as if the author is taking a potshot at some of the more common genre flaws. It sounds like ideas transposed by some primeval geezers of science fiction into a mediocre short story, or maybe an episode of Star Trek. It’s more philosophically oriented than you’d normally get from this sort of thing, but it almost could be. Instead, it’s a wonderful book. It’s all in how you tell it.

Whither Keifus?

2011-12-31T15:20:00.006-05:00

[Wither, Keifus?]

I am not a big one for year-end rememberances--a little of that sort of thing goes a long way--and yet 2011 seems to have been an odd one. Much as I hate to admit it, they do get their little marks. For sheer gusto and quality, 2007 was something of an apex, with better writing and better participation in that world. Most of what I proudly remember having said happened in that year. Belt-wise, 2004 was fat, and 2006 was thin for me (2010 was fattest of all, and 2011, thin again--I blame fad yo-yo dieting for everything), and the early 2000s were the most formative kid years, remembered for the sink into the quicksand of bright-eyed dependency, watching my body make the decision to start aging as a couple of new little humans sucked out my essence. 2005 was a terrible year of work, and 2011 witnessed an even deeper career low, with employment held by a thread, and saved by an eleventh-hour appeal. I got a new job, starting on the first Monday of next year, pulling it off about three seconds before the old one stopped paying me once and for all. 2011, in general, counts for a year of massive re-evaluation.

The good ole Fray, which accounts for nearly all of my readers and the majority of my real friends, gave up its last breath in this year and took down valued memories with it. Although it's something long since left behind, watching it go is a sort of writing milestone, a reminder that it's been hard to write to the world, to play music, to read this year, and I know the blog has suffered. Love in 2011 seemed more improbable, less deserved, and more deeply squandered than ever before. And it's funny too, because the bottom of 2010 was so abysmal that I worked my ass off to turn things around. Success, right? I took on all sorts of new directions... and I just don't know if any of them went anywhere. I am still a wreck, but I feel I'm a much different wreck. And I sort of miss those bright eyes of mine. In 2012, I'll be fucking forty.

Anyway, I sort of thought something should get penned for December. In the heady months of 2007, I was beating one post a week, but lately, I've just been so distracted. I have a couple book reviews pending, and I've been seriously considering embarrassing myself at poetry one more time, held back only by how bad the old ones were. I'll be around, but who knows in what capacity. Bigger and smaller seem equally possible.

Happy new year n shit.

Why I Have Trouble Following the Narrative of Current Events

2011-11-21T11:10:00.006-05:00

"[T]he contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless[...] It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2=3. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only up to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time—after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. [...] [I]f [these writings] were found to be the right kind of awful, [they were] made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison inflitrate your brain to its very roots."

--from Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. [I am so loving this book so far.]

Oh, ain't I so smart and above it all. But then again, consider that I'm the guy who finds that following the bullshit narrative, even if it's just to complain about it, can still be more stimulating than the soul-crushing branch of science work where I landed myself. I mean, for god's sake, don't ask me anything about group theory.

Can Anyone Create Jobs? I'll Have To Go With "Yes."

2011-11-17T13:57:00.003-05:00

Adam Davidson asks, Can Anyone Really Create Jobs? Now, normally I'd prefer to leave that sort of empty-headed both-sidesism right the hell alone, or at least to the better political writers out there, especially when it's, like, so two weeks ago, but sometimes when you actually make yourself pay attention to a minor irritation like that, next thing you know you've scratched your arm raw, and everywhere else feels itchy too. I note that (1) Adam Davidson is a known economics reporter, one of those ubiquitous NPR presences—presumably they pay him for this sort of thing, which is another fine reason not to send them your donations—and now here's a regular Times Magazine opinion gig wherein he professionally throws up his hands and fails to opine (when the thesis is "nope, can't do it" then remind me why I might consider reading subsequent entries); and (2) some otherwise smart Facebook friends recently congratulated themselves for "liking" this one, and venting out my polemical impulses where no one will actually read it is pretty much exactly why I have a blog. [All right, there's (3) this business of cleaning out my browser tabs while I find myself again able to focus on this sort of thing for awhile. Most of the other tabs are job postings awaiting replies, and this is a break from that. Maybe for fun, I'll try and guess how much government creation was involved in any of them.]

Read the article if you must, but this gist is Davidson observing that—or rather appealing to authority to discover that—neither the Chicago-school approach described as "do nothing" nor the Keynesian approach described as "spending a lot of money" (and only tax breaks or subsidies are feasible, he tells us) to "goad consumers into spending again" does anything. It takes him to the end of his first page to reach the point that the austerity moves of firing government employees in Britain did not improve private job growth, but did directly cause a bunch of losses when those people were suddenly let go. "Wait," you ask, "since the British government had, in fact, created all those government jobs, doesn't that mean that they can be created?" Yeah, well, don't ask me. I don't have a keen economic mind, either. You may further wonder about the simultaneous contentions that Americans can't do things people will pay them a living wage for but still need to indenture the hell out of themselves for more education to get such non-jobs.

Here's the thing. The U.S. currently already does invest a metric fuckton into job creation. It's not just the legions of deputy assistants and other bureaucrats that make up the government workforce. To point out the obvious, our military and defense contractors (including me, for a couple more weeks) are primo recipients of this, and it creates a need for high-dollar industries like lobbying, and low-dollar ones for things like food service and building maintenance pretty much by virtue of its existence. We have a huge program to hire research staff in various laboratories and through extensive grants. Given that the government is powerful enough that it can appropriate—or invent—money and just hire people to do stuff, there's no reason it has to be doing anything special. Commenters on Davidson's article (and on Facebook) note that the Roosevelt-era rural development programs are a bit outdated in modern times, but for fuck's sake, fix the rotten infrastructure, administer medical insurance, get some science on, or do all that teaching that Davidson is convinced we need. If we're doomed to a system big enough to waste so much enterprise on evilly blowing up our contrived enemies, is it too much to ask that it do something useful as well?

The other obvious rebuttal is that the market is a construct, and the government ostensibly has some power over its operating parameters. If the problem is that our delicate corporate persons can't possibly hire Americans at the rates they (the hirees) need to survive in this predatory economy, then the government has the putative power to make foreign (or immigrant) labor more expensive too. Raise some tarriffs, let the dollar fall, things like that.

The government isn't really interested in creating jobs though. The real problem—and let's just call it—is that the people who command the economy don't want to pay people to work, and furthermore don't want to pay the government to pay people to work.

All that's your standard liberal boilerplate, which has merit so far as it goes. As I face increasingly crappy job prospects of my own, I feel a growing urge to take it all a bit further. The above argument grants various assumptions that I don't at all feel like ceding at the moment. It takes as givens, for example, that money and debt are more or less real, as if they're system variables rather than some network of agreements and contracts that will tend to work out better for the people who have the better lawyers. If we turn once more to a black box way of thinking about the economy, then, again, the sum of all the things and services produced (and imported/exported) will get definitionally distributed among the people in it. To take an IOZan turn here, why the fuck does it have to be distributed according to "jobs" in the first place? I mean, sure, there's some ad hoc philosophical justification for this, amounting to a plausible intuition that we should get rewarded relative to our contribution, but hey, the Golden Rule's pretty intuitive too, and that individualist model becomes a little bit, you know, problematic, the second any one of us gets too old, sick, or dumb to contribute, or as technology-assisted productivity (as opposed to the more work/less pay kind) advances far enough down the Player Piano timeline to obviate so much ant labor.

Why the hell not just pass out what we make? There's no law of nature involved in this (and it's a bit horrifying to think that we're basing our economy on 18th and 19th century natural philosophy, which defies even anthropological evidence). It's our society, we can arrange it how the hell we want, right? Why does the idea of getting a benefit for not working blow our minds so much? Ed's got this right in that, well, it depends on what class of people we're talking about. If you already have cornered enough money, then getting more of it gets to be something of an entitlement. The truth is, distributing the economy according to jobs isn't just a somewhat arbitrary theoretical model, when it comes down to practice, it's already something of a polite fiction. Only some segments of the population are expected to work very hard for their money, which is a convenient story for the segments that don't. I mean, in a society where monster effort was what got things done, the guys who spend their days elbow-deep in toilet drains would be the ones raking in the gains.

Anyway, I also can't let myself neglect the point that both the Keynesians and the Chicagoland bullshitters suffer from alarming cornucopianism built right into their sets of axioms. I don't want to give him credit for this, but I suppose I agree with Davidson in that in the face of economic shrinkage forced by external pressures (you know, actual physics), the current economic will be that much more imperiled. Oh well, at least we invested for the future during the flush times.

Review: On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers

2011-11-16T15:55:00.008-05:00

[Yet again, apologies for such infrequent posting. Strange days.]

More astute cultural observers than myself will note that On Stranger Tides shares its title with a recently-released theme-park-ride-based crapfest of a seafarin' movie, which (to paraphrase an internet commenter who I'd happily credit if I could ever find again) pretty much rolled tape while Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush talked like pirates for two and a half hours, and still managed to suck. I don't know how I failed to pick up on the connection with the novel, because I did see the movie (who could resist the marketing pitch: "it's not nearly as embarrassingly awful as the last one!"), and have since convinced myself that I remember experiencing a shimmer of hope or sadness when "inspired by the novel by Tim Powers" rolled across the opening credits. In hindsight, it probably explains what a reprint of a 1987-vintage, not-his-best publication was doing featured in the bookstore aisle.

Good thing the book and movie had nothing whatsoever in common. It didn't even rise to the level of "based on." Well, it borrowed almost nothing. I guess Disney managed to appropriate themselves a catchy title with those rights, and to co-opt any competitors who might have otherwise been tempted to generate a screenplay about pirates, on the Caribbean, from something that was actually worth reading. And the book does have both Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth in it, but that's thankfully the extent of things.

That alone is a funny thing. If you were to pile variously unrelated local legends (Blackbeard, voodoo, and that elusive fountain) into a summertime concession draw, or into a television show, or into anything, you know, popular, then I'd consider it as axiomatically terrible as the latest uninspired vampire mashup to land in the "paranormal romance" section. [That's both unfair and sort of true. The whole fantasy genre has been simmering various familiar stews for generations now, and that doesn't mean it can't get pretty damn entertaining now and again. Like everything else, it's all a matter of how you manage to work it all in.] Tim Powers is generally good at mixing up the fantastic elements with contemporary life or historical events, and when you're doing these things, it really only comes down to how much finesse you can use to stitch up your secret histories, keeping consistency with recorded facts as well as with the story itself. Powers pulls it all together with an indiginous and slave-borne magic that manages to survive in a part of the world that's not yet gentrified it out of existence. (It's only a matter of time, of course.) He's done his research (and, as I thoroughly bored y'all with a few years ago, I can't not like Voodoo, it's just so unapolagetically freaky and ad hoc), and maybe even too much of it, unable to resist a thoroughly anachronistic quasi-scientific explanation here and there,* but it all weaves its way together quite attractively.

Much as it's appreciated, this story almost doesn't need that deeper consistency. Powers is mostly giving us an adventure yarn, complete with its share of duels, magic, cannonades, walking dead, romance, sardonic wit, betrayal, and nautical terms. As far as the story goes, it keeps the pages tearing right along, and he tops himself with dramatic entertainment and imaginative weirdness with each chapter. John Chandangac, a puppeteer off to Haiti to deal with some legal issues, finds himself conscripted (as Jack Shandy) into piracy, and, increasingly, into strange worlds of magic and obligatory derring-do. It comes complete with treacherous villains and a packaged love interest, with rescues and satisfying comeuppances clearly in store. Good stuff, and I'll happily recommend it for all that. Combining good writing and that thought-through depth, it's miles ahead of the sort of thing you'd expect from a pirate book that got the eye of Disney.

It's a good thing all that detail-level momentum keeps things rolling. Were I to pause very long, I might have wondered about what Jack Shandy's character was even supposed to be. Though he's got a score to settle, a father to avenge, and later gets a girl to fight for, he still seems more than a bit unmotivated and (realistically enough) ready to quit whenever the going gets very tough. He's not really a hapless sucker pushed around by events exactly (Powers sometimes writes characters are like this), but he also isn't quite convicted enough to make it as a plausible action hero. He starts off as completely bored by Beth Hurwood, the distressed damsel, and it's a little unclear to me how she manages to turn herself into a legitimate love interest by story's end. Shandy takes opportunities to slack off or betray people to save his ass, then, randomly, take some exception on noble principles. (Well, maybe that's all fitting a pirate.) He's such a blank slate that I was waiting for Powers to reveal that he'd been pushed along more than a little bit by some lurking Loas or bocors, given that mind control was well within that magical universe, but the closest thing we got placed Shandy as, merely, some kind of prophesied doom of Blackbeard, which isn't quite the same thing, and wasn't put out there very well either. Similarly, his training with puppets emerges for a couple plot events, but it's unclear how that made him more generally suited for piracy (how it produced the required physical constitution, for example), or contributed to his hardly-existent character. I'd argue that the plot shapes up unevenly too, and some characters are dealt with oddly (for example, Blackbeard had been built up as an intimidating and nearly supernatural bastard, and giving him a sympathetic point of view for three pages mid-story was a huge-ass mistake), or not enough, or dispatched before their time, only to let the long-telegraphed events finally emerge as a pretty significant anti-climax. It ends up a good book that with a few nips and trims could have been awesome. Ah well, it rips and roars enough that you'll hardly notice.

*Sorry to be so discursive, but this really interests me. The first one of these instances that I remember had the gang experience the magical fountain as a space palpably dead of possibility. The resident magician divulged an 18th-century version of quantum mechanics, explaining that the role of probabilities in subatomic nature had become fucked up in its vicinity. Now, you want to be careful about going too far when you import modern sensibilities into period literature (Powers probably went a little too far in manufacturing modern-minded characters too), and we've all seen those terrible movies where some classical villain's doomsday device looks suspciously like something out of 20th-century physics class. I don't think Powers handled this one much better you might get in a crappy skiffy flick.

Could he have done better? I mean, quantum mechanics has become essential to our understanding of nature, and the idea that the universe has aspects that can be described as probabilistic was a revolutionary advance in humanity's conception of things. Given that this is the understanding that Powers wants us readers to work with, could the character have better got there with the sort of book-learning, however abstruse, that was available in 1718? Or to look at it another way, could an open-minded seeker of secret knowledge found some other completely contemporary way to describe quantum reality if we can accept that he'd somehow been priveleged to the amazing secrets of the universe. I mean, in one sense, quantum is still just a description of the underlying reality, and while it's been made to be a reasonably accurate one, it's not not any less metaphorical than your standard selection of angels dancing on pinheads. With enough rigor, could a system of animating spirits be made as accurate as QM? Maybe I just want Ben Hurwood to use more convincing period language.

I should add that later in the book (too late in the book really), Powers tries this trick again trying to tie up the magic of iron into the story of the old and new worlds, and that second time it came out pitch perfect, and also funny. A character, now loopy with extreme age, observes that it's blood magic really, and celestial magic. Shandy is incredulous that anyone would think iron is in our blood. Exhaled from stars? That's crazy talk!

Animal Cruelty

2011-10-21T12:49:00.000-04:00

I've frequently been fascinated by the clarity of moral calculus that people engage in with respect to animals. Euthenasia of pets, for instance, is common when we owners come to the conclusion that they have lived a good enough life. People may get carried away, but it's usually a precise calculus what vet bills are worth what extension of beloved Fido's life. Our relationship to other species is complicated by the fact that we eat some of the more sentient ones, but this isn't generally hard to rationalize, on any number of levels, whether it's pure speciesism (they're just not as sentient as us, dammit, and it makes the whole consideration easier), preservation (cows might well be extinct by now if we didn't raise and kill them), paternalism (giving them as good a life as can be hoped for), or a certain fatalist appeal to the natural order (humans are, to some degree, predators and scavengers; prey animals tend to get eaten by animals like us). People can find good hay sown in that moral landscape, but by and large, the decision to kill animals can be sober and considered, but it's still an easy one . More than that, it's one we are more than happy to embrace.

It's almost pathological, how we jump at the opportunity for dignified bloodlust. I remember being about 11 years old, walking up the street to hang around with my friend Ron. There was important news! He came out and informed me of an impressive specimen he'd found just down the road a little, on the edge of the pasture. Push aside the tall grass , and yeah, sure enough there it was creeping along the rigging, a big, motherfucking garden spider, yellow stripes and hairy black legs. Ron looked carefully at me, and nodded portentiously. "We should kill it." (Why? Because it was guilty of being a big nasty spider. Grimly, we must face our fears.) I remember some misgivings of conscience, but I went right along in the quest for a big rock, and was entirely complicit in the deed.

I think I may have told this story before, but much more recently, a couple years ago, the neighbors called the cops about a skunk that was wandering around in the neighborhood. This is not entirely surprising, as our back yards are woodland-like, and wild animals emerge from time to time. The skunk had crossed the street when Johnny Law rolled in, and was by then slowly ambling along into the forest-esque square on the other side of the road. The policeman stepped out of his car and unholstered his pistol, taking careful aim from about ten or fifteen yards away. CRACK! Dead skunk. Now, I was in my living room watching this with my kids. I get that a skunk wandering so close to people might cause some concern (even if they were all indoors), but it's like the dumb beasts have ever figured out roads. I see the risk of the thing being rabid and attacking people not significantly outweighed by the risk of this chucklewit waving a gun around in a residential neighborhood and shooting my car or his foot. But there was a skunk. With a serious face, it had to be killed.

When it comes to mammals, we can also form clear conceptions of cruelty vs. necessary killing. People get upset about animal cruelty, as they have in this Ohio story (and I am pretty depressed about putting down a dozen friggin' Bengal tigers too), even if civilized murder is the necessary response to it (and in this case, the safety concern was much more immediate). I am not sure that the charge of cognitive dissonance is entirely fair when it comes to comparing the way we treat our food animals, automated feed lots and other modern horrors, to individual acts of cruelty, like this amateur zookeeper. I mean, among the people who care about this stuff even when it's not in the news, opposition to both forms is common. Likewise, people who do kill animals (hunters and farmers, say, or your enthusiastic foodies) I've noticed also tend to have their moral equations worked out consistently. I do think there's a pretty solid dissonance in the general public though, bemoaning the murder of tigers as they dig into their Big Macs, at least if my Facebook feed is any indication. If it's industrial cruelty, and hard to avoid in our lives as-lived, then it's invisible (and hell, I like a burger too). Specific acts of cruelty, though? Those are unconscionable. The parallel with war vs. murder is left as an exercise to the reader. Hell, it may be even worse on that level: people cry when random dogs get shot in movies.

Review: Anarchy Evolution, by Greg Graffin and Steve Olson

2011-10-04T21:56:00.008-04:00

[Full title: Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God]

Most of you have never met me in person, but rest assured, I am not, by any measure, one of the cool kids. I've been historically bemused by any social movement, and if there's any indication that the scene is years past its prime, then look for my enthusiastic presence. There you'll find me on the trailing edge of fandom, a day's detour from the concert, with only nine bucks in my pocket. "What's on your iPod, Keifus?" Same shit as last year, and it's no more interesting now. Although I have always had issues with rolling along the same general direction as everyone else, and I am not a big booster of authority, I'd rather heckle or dream than angrily defy it, and I'm certainly nothing like punk (even if, in theory, there may be punks like me).

So I've had a Bad Religion CD or two gathering dust for I'm not sure how many years, finding, as I mentioned a couple years back (that one time I did dare bare my playlist), that the music saddled an odd (and not exactly unappreciated) line between brilliance and trying way too fucking hard. Not long after that though, I picked up their Empire Strikes First album, and this time it did grow on me, to the point where I must have worn out the grooves on that CD. Not bad, considering it was already five or six years past its sell-by date, and these guys are even older than me. You're not supposed to pick up on punk in your mid-30s, right? Even the stuff made by emotionally and financially stable geezers. Empire perhaps picked up more coherent social messages than religious ones, which scratched a big itch I was developing, and it rides BR's usual themes of heady skepticism, empiricism, anger in the face of life's futility, and some mystery at the contrast between its depth and its smallness, which are tingles I've always had. More importantly for my enjoyment, I found it musically far more compelling than what had formerly occupied my playlist. They were writing more engaging (if not exactly unfamiliar) harmonies and arrangements, composing with some welcome dynamic range, and they dug up a kid drummer (named Wackerman!) who can really pound the things and very satisfyingly fill up the deeper parts of the acoustic space. (Disclosure: I have no clue the path they took between 1994 and 2004 to make that transition, and this is by no means a scholarly musicology. I'm nobody's goddamn fanboy.) This isn't the hardcore stuff that those couple of skateboarding kids in my high school were into; it's melodic and catchy. It sounds a little like Social Distortion with more composition, fun vocal harmonies, and a couple more chords. Throw in the lyrics and you have, in Empire anyway, something like the world's angriest and wordiest folk music (to hear Greg Graffin list his influences, I see now that that's no coincidence), and I am forced to conclude it's probably not cool, but I really like it anyway.

So what the hell, I went and bought the guy's book. Even here on the lower tiers of giftedness and drive, I'm sympathetically interested in those times that artistry and scholarship can find interesting ways to intersect. The book, however, is a mixed bag.

It's divided among memoir, life observation, and a scientific discussion, I think recreating, in a way, the bullshit sessions that passed the time and drove the lyrical content of the band all these years. The personal sections are arguably the most interesting. Graffin sets himself up, even as a high school misfit discovering punk while it was still real, man, as the world's most well-adjusted bad boy. (This describes his personal appearance pretty well, too. He reminds me a little of Matt Taibbi.) I can picture Mrs. Graffin clucking, not very far behind the scenes, that they're basically nice boys, and if some of them are a little wild, I know Greg's got his head in the right place, and at only 16 years old, he's already so successful. Graffin is wise enough to realize that he's lucky to have ended up with solid emotional grounding and alternate skill sets, and to be gifted without the addictive proclivities that were ruining some of his peers in those days. When the music track got too jaded, he managed to duck into an academic setting, and then back again, and today, he's somehow stabilized himself switching between teaching duties at Cornell, a popular music career, and a devoted family and community life. As a memoir, I thought that the conflict and interplay of these different drives was interesting, and could have used even more of it. It's a life not without its own small tragedies, but the dude's clearly got something figured out.

If the scientific content were presented in the style of a collegial bullshit session, I think I'd have been more down with it. Some of his takes are at least interesting (hell, I've been there often enough myself on some of them), and more than most people, I love stretching a metaphor, and letting empirical thought mingle with life wisdom, but you have to be a little careful about how seriously you take that sort of thing. There are some interesting speculations on how cultural evolution—human or animal behavior—may be a companion to genetic evolution, and patient readers of this-here blog may have noticed that I really love poking around this subject myself, but I think it's too much to say that animal behavior overrides genetics. I will agree with him (and I've been riding the theme a little lately in other conversations) that loving or even knowing people does require a well-placed element of faith, even for a naturalist.

The book's just not so deep. There's more to be said about the environment's role in evolution than he did in this little survey, and I'd have accepted as an answer that environment determines (a variety of possible) social behaviors, which feeds back to genetic selection, which feeds back again to the environment. I can't disagree that there's something a little more complicated going on in selection than mere adaptation, and I think it's cute to observe that "unnecessary" genetic selection (attractions to plumage, musicianship, or other things that don't produce a Darwinian concept of fitness*) can be a significant response to abundance instead of scarcity. As far as evolution being anarchic, well and good, and a popular vote against the whole "becoming man" thing is well placed, if not very novel, but it'd have been more interesting to read deeper thoughts about how the social context of evolutionary theory has affected the understanding itself (especially since one social context is being rather liberally extrapolated here). Why did eveolution get so radicalized in the public consciousness while other equally remarkable scientific revolutions sort of flew by? Well, it's touched on, but not much. Graffin comes off at his most scientifically interesting and competent in the role of a field biologist, and he's better in this book at interplaying evolutionary anecdotes with those from his life than he is in weaving together the shakier generalities, even if the effort sounds like it should be fun.

The big ideas are undermined by a scientific and philosophical outlook that comes off lightweight enough in the places I know pretty well to make me suspect the whole rest of it. I come off thinking that Graffin is a more enthusiastic biologist than a brilliant one. There's a piece, and I don't know if it's him or science writer Olson, that generalizes chemistry as mating puzzle shapes and the big bang as a giant cosmic fart of hydrogen atoms, which I found all sort of embarrassingly simplified. Nor do I think that a proper scientific philosophy demands that the universe be knowable, as suggested early on, and I tend to be more careful than to describe scientific (and if I accept the central metaphor, biological, social, or musical) creativity as embodied by big Eureka! moments, as I've blathered endlessly over the years. In the early stages of the book, he describes his religious views like the world's most patient internet atheist, and the science views are similarly pedantic but survey-ish. If he's taking it all down for the benefit of his intended audience (probably the college freshmen he also lectures to), then okay, I guess that's one thing, but for the guy who can put together some astute wordplay in his lyrics, using the biggest thesaurus in rock-n-roll, then I expected a lot more from the prose.

One thing I will take home is the use of "naturalist" as a worldview. Might be bad religion, but it refreshingly doesn't have to define itself against anything. It's good to base our understanding on what we can observe and deduce, and be open to the fact that the authorities, and we too, may damn well be wrong.

*Erratum: the idea of sexual selection did originate with Darwin. Oops.

Review: Blood, Bones, and Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton

2011-09-08T16:58:00.002-04:00

Full title: Blood Bones and Butter: The Inadvertant Education of a Reluctant Chef. Look, you know that the self-selected memoirs of anyone who has been lucky enough to find they've received an inadvertant education, and land a somewhat prestigious creative job are going to be just a little bit precious. I mean, who is even able to discover the things that really satisfy them, never mind make a successful (dual) career of them? It might be something you usually get from memoirs), but quite a lot of my investment here is puzzling out just how much I like and trust Gabrielle Hamilton. (I am struggling that I might having be a sexist reaction, but to be fair, I brought in similar suspicions about Anthony Bourdain's famous book, to which this one most easily compares, and while I find his self-deprecating sarcasm a slightly more palatable contrast to the underlying ego than her unremitting authenticity, the key difference between the two reads is that Hamilton is a much more personal and composed--that is, better--writer.) It's a hell of a story: a suddenly neglected kid in a 1970s suburbia that I can relate to, a teenage cokehead with a chip on her shoulder that I can't quite connect with, a talented serial dropout (at least she doesn't bullshit us that she's not also a writer), an itinerant American, a lucked-into career boost, a difficult marriage of convenience. It reads like so much self-mythologizing, but on the other hand, Hamilton's writing is very approachable, entertaining, and impeccable in the basic-but-elegant mode she's aiming for, and she doesn't offer any simple arcs for the development of her character. She is not unaware (nor is she apologetic) about the role she herself has played in the challenges she writes about, and she is thoughtful enough to keep turning around and questioning her instincts and understandings about her own story. It's the sort of honest exploration which really warms up this reader, and this sort of analysis was much appreciated. If I found myself occasionally annoyed to hear about some of the breaks, then the difficulties with people brought home a believable balance of both tragedy and a sort of privilege.

No, being left (possibly, arguably) alone for a summer as a thirteen-year-old, a big feature of the first third of her story, is no break, and it's hard not be taken aback by that one. On the other hand, let's not pretend that she's missing the chance to brag what a badass she was, and as she tells it, she (more than once) managed to push the resulting self-destruction just to the point of Reversible Damage, only to then get things together, not without the help of some timely benefactors. All that life experience, and considering the mean streets she roamed, few of the scars. When it comes to a cooking philosophy, she's turning the authenticity up to eleven as well. She takes on a book-jacket-worthy viewpoint of well-crafted simplicity, of real food, culled from an experience of growing up with it, from living poorly among it, of constantly falling back into the restaurant business, in environments ranging from deep integrity to the bullshit fads of the high-end catering world of the 1980s. Detouring a year of your life to work food service among the primitive farms in France, or living in a hut on tiny island in the Aegean will no doubt tune you in to real eating, genuine local character, close to the source, but from my lowly vantage, it's as unattainable as all the foo-foo technical cuisine that I also can't afford. You haven't had an egg until some wine-buzzed Frenchman with hay on his sweater yanks it warm from the nest and brings it to your door that morning, etc. Well, it is a wonderful inspiration, even if she often realizes the downsides too (not for dilettantes), but it's noted that it is one which sets me just as firmly among the have-nots.

And needless to say, it is probably with a conscious effort that she approaches writing with the same outlook, with a genuineness that she feels is missing from the joyless context-heavy anaysis that her finally-successful graduate education swam in. The fact that she's effective in writing with this earthy but artful style also makes me want to eat her food.

I've never realized how affirming it is to read a memoir from someone of your own generation (Hamilton is only a few years older than me). Long-time readers of this blog will understand the resonance I might feel of living through a transitional neighborhood, one caught in the moment between farmland and sprawl, with a soft spot for the few surviving geezers that kept the simpler life going for a bit longer than everyone else. I didn't want to live like that either, but on the other hand, I was pretty damn happy that my parents patronized the old folks as much as hers did. It's still interesting to me that American food chic has evolved, in a way, to a version of the source purity I remember, which, now that the lifestyle has all but disappeared, is considered a luxury, and I sort of wished Hamilton had somehow managed to fully Americanize her foodie inspirations (although maybe pulling from polyglot European country influences is Americanizing it). Of course my parents' friends didn't include legions of artists, and they didn't have theme parties, or Kerouac-style bashes with stream-cooled jug wine and mountains spit-roasted lamb either--even at nine years old, Hamilton is more authentic than you or I will ever be--but damn, I sure wish they did. I can see why the author would be driven to re-create that with her own family in her own life, and how she would be driven to write by the resistance she finds in everyone else. I mean, I don't think I needed the teen drug years, but that sort of missing adult experience is killing me too.

Editorial

2011-09-01T11:04:00.005-04:00

As many of you know, I'm looking for a new job. While the Doomsday Clock ticks inexorably down on the current one, I've begun to desperately expand my range of options, and I ask, not for the first time, what if there were a way to somehow merge my expensively utilized labor and my time-wasting hobbies into one single well-regarded career? How awesome would that be? Well...

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that, so far as careers go, writing is a lot like cooking. It's one of those things that lots of people think they can do well, whether or not they actually can, and it tends to garner some kind of amped-up mystique as a countercultural endeavor, you know, along the lines of, "yeah, I'm going to get the hell out of this place and live my dream of" (a) "opening a restaurant," or (b) "finally writing that novel." It's something that looks easy when you are not actually doing it. In reality, of course, things go differently, and the notoriously low success rate of new restuarants is re-learned in the usual hard way (or if making the food's your goal, then welcome to the factory version of prep, and also to an established career ladder that's got to look pretty vertiginous from down there by the dishwasher), or agents or editors give you an unwelcome bit of honesty about your great American epic, and even if you do manage to get in, then welcome to a world of unappealing effort-to-reward ratios and inadequate credit. As a career, professional writing is probably even more swamped with dreamers and hacks, given that there's no tradition in chefdom, so far as I know, of getting in the door by sending in unsolicitated of samples food. Although on the other hand, chefs appear to sometimes get laid, which has to be something of a draw.

[Oh hell, I've been here before, haven't I? The chef analogy is the product of my upcoming book review, and I'm only going to take it a little bit further here. Last time, it was a comparison to musicians. I think if we're going by nookie potential, then the order goes something like, rock star > live musician > chef > session artist > concert musician > line cook > novelist > journalist > ghost writer > scientist > blogger > bottle polisher > vagrant > me. Not that I'm bitter.]

Anyway, what's different about those posts and this one is that several years later, I'm looking at the idea a lot more seriously. The AAAS (publishers of Science magazine) has a series of blog posts on science writing and editorial careers, as do a few other sites, most of them garnered from gentler economic times, which is alarming enough it its own right. It might take different sorts of people to throw themselves into science writing than onto the fiction slushpile, but the tone of the advice sure sounds damn familiar, including the old nostrum of "if you can stop doing this, then you probably should." These posts paint a picture of a similar writing field, this one teeming with (other) hopeful refugees from the business and academic worlds, either unemployed or unfulfilled, and just as disrespected by the working writers. Much as I instinctively loathe the condescension of career advice columns, and much as I recognize the tendency of other narratively-inclined people to write things as their own personal Odyssey, reading those blog posts has been helpful, as it has given me some of the required language to put in my cover letter. [Adaptability to jargon may well be the most important science writing skill there is, and you know, you'd think that with ten years of doing this very thing, I would gone through this exercise a little more carefully before I started dashing off formal inquiries into the high-level positions.] Even among the current job listings I've trolled, a "science career off the bench" is reduced to something of a buzzword. Working scientists and engineers often need to be reassured that an alternate career is still an intellectually valid one (we have lots tied up in this conception of ourselves as the few truly indispensible members of society), but fuck it, I'm over that part. Writing about the good stuff still beats performing research on the uninspired stuff, and even though the confluence of science and English skills is less rare than popular prejudices suggest, doing both does at least access my fuller skill set.

I am merely competent at manipulating the physical elements. Usually, my bigger strength has been in manipulating the story about those things. Putting together a plausible narrative around what information I can gather at the last minute, or, better, to make a convincing argument in a field I just learned, is where I have occasionally shined. I say on my cover letter that I write maybe ten research proposals in a year, and on the order of twenty technical reports, which account for all of my real deadlines. Sometimes I mention blog posts and papers and patents too, and for some reason I fail to disclose the endless presentation slides. I think it's because I'm ashamed of all the time I spend with PowerPoint. So far as time management, seriousness, and meeting deadlines goes, that's the area where it's natural, and I don't worry a hell of a lot about that part of a potential job. If I do offer an advantage over all the other people who do this, it's that, unlike them, I'm a top-notch generalist and a congenital rationalizer. For your benefit, I'll leave off the play-by-play of how important it ends up being to understand and evaluate research in almost any field (I like to tell the editorial people that, and needed a little nudge that I should), but when you get down to it, verisimilitude is what I do.

I'm slowly gathering that one should be choosy about which sort of writing/editorial position to chase. A substantial pay cut looms for just about all of them, and if it provides other benefits, such as not being miserable, I may be okay with that. Here in Massachusetts, as usual, I'm set back by competition from the young college recruits facing a terrible job market, and the the biomedical industry that has taken over the local publishing sphere as well. The more legitimate writing jobs include, in approximately increasing order of appeal, writing manuals and regulations, ghostwriting your way through the terrible papers and reports of your more stereotypical technician, summarizing content for the for higher-ups or writing literature reviews the "real" scientists, and various flavors of journalism. A few of the advertisements seem to be data-entry sweatshops, and one place called an internal summarizer position a "research scientist" which really did manage to offend me. I'm really angling for a full-time university position where I can write or edit content (and maybe take the opportunity for some classes to improve my technical skill set too). There are a few of these out there, and they're my best hope just now.

Journalism, a lot like cooking, has taken a weird trip in this country from a trade into a profession, with arguable results. They like to peddle college degrees for what used to be job skills. The official outlets speak to credentialism, because after all, most of these folks have been credentialled themselves, and it counters other advice I've had about the skills needed in the field. Still, there are several science writing programs in the country (two of the best ones are in Massachusetts), which appear to provide an excellent sorting function. (The MIT one is run by one of the better Balloon Juice contributors, still blogrolled here.) I mean, I don't doubt that I'd learn better skills going into the program, and I'm mulling over the idea as a means to network, practice, and actually get a job, but again, I've already been doing this sort of thing professionally, if you accept my job description, for a decade or more now. Can I get in with my present resume? I guess I'll keep passing it around.

Review: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang

2011-08-24T11:45:00.001-04:00

In this book, Ha-Joon Chang makes a clear case, in easy language, for many of the things (23 of them) that are wrong with the official parables of market economies. There's something to be said about clarity of language, which I think reflects the clarity of his arguments, and Chang gets some partial credit for introducing a few jokes and quips, which are not badly timed, and maybe elevate all the way up to "wry," making him a deadly wit among the legions of employed economists. The arguments as presented are probably worth your while even if you're already a heterodox sort—sometimes it's a good thing to gesture pointedly at the obvious—although I would have personally preferred to read something like this ten years ago, when it could have been a starting challenge to the received wisdom rather than just echo of my own conclusions. I'm serious about that: a lot of this stuff I've either dully outlined in blog posts (for example, of course there's no such thing as a free market, and clearly the powerful always pick their winners) or else painfully tried to use for rhetorical flair (e.g., how can you decry central planning and love Wal Mart?). This is where I tend to fail you as a reviewer, because I'm more attracted to write about the things for which I have a less complete mental picture and my areas of disagreement than I am to tout the stuff that validates my own views. So go ahead and read the book for a supply of handily succinct retorts for the next time some troll lobs some free-market mumbo-jumbo at you. It's easy, and not very long. And I'll do my incomplete best to discuss it here.

Chang does what few free-market sorts of economists like to do, which is to pull out a bunch of data—and for that matter, data of a more basic and important kind, and not the stretched inferential reaches toward the trivial that certain pop contrarians (Christ, I reviewed that one way too charitably) prefer—and use it to point out the flamingly obvious counterexamples to free-market thinking, most of it from the past thirty or forty years, and demonstrate the points he's arguing. While judicious data-comparing is an interesting exercise and all, if you're making an economic argument, it's good of him to try and evaluate what actually matters. I mean, have you ever wondered why libertarians like to present everything as a counterintuitive thought experiment?

He makes these comparisons with as valid a scope as he can. He compares growth during respective nation's own development phases, which may be separated by a century or two, and not perfect, but better than comparing the U.S. in 2010 to Burkina Faso of the same year. When looking at major effects of free market policies, he compares the results before and after implementation (which is what confines his history to the last four decades), and between countries that did or did not implement them. From this evolves some general principles and observations: all large economies are (imperfectly) planned; manufacturing is still far more important than finance, and successful economies became that way by protecting and fostering industry; free-market economic policies have resulted in lower growth, higher instability, and greater inequality in the countries where they've been willingly adopted or forced; that separating managers and owners from negative economic impacts has been a disaster.

This isn't to say that Chang has got it all covered. Some things are only a matter of understated emphasis, a failure to really push things right through the wall. For example, like most people, Chang writes a distinction between state and capital. He takes care to reduce the clarity of distinction, saying that governments do guide industries, that capital really has a national character (although labor, not so much), and corporate planning isn't a special category from government planning, but look, if you're going to take a historical view of this, especially if you're going to cite examples of what made countries like the U.S., Britain, or the Soviet Union developed in the first place (which African, Asian, and South American nations have conspicuously lacked in their own twentieth century growth steps), then it's relevant that these economies owe a lot of their growth to conquest and exploitation too. They have become comparatively rich because a great deal of their governmental planning activities went to support the horrible crony industries of the day, such as enslavement, theft of gold, abuse of immigrants, and colonialism. It was a little more than tariffs, subsidies, and putting the screws on immigration. Did the Soviet Union pick badly, and in the sense of its constituents, immorally, to develop its military and space program at the expense of other industries? Yeah, probably. And how do we do with choosing our core companies above all else? It ain't just our financial sector that's pushing people around and diverting from more wholesome ends. I don't think any of the above is inconsistent with anything Chang writes, and he goes further than most to fuzz up the boundaries between economic and other human activity or motivations, but having raised these points, he could have taken them further.

My second criticism is that Chang ignores arguments of scale, and some basic challenges to measuring things by growth. [Why, it's another of my hobby horses he's somehow refusing to recognize! The nerve!] Using growth as an important variable of success tempts fallacies of large and small numbers, and can ignore some important external factors. If, say, Congo grew more rapidly in the 60s, or western Europe in the early 50s, then you might want to consider the starting points. (On the other hand, industrially awakened America and Asia are probably excellent comparison points.) Likewise, we can make the same point for contemporary America's condition, which sane people might expect to saturate and decline at some point thanks to fundamental issues with imperial and resource-intense growth models, or even just running out of markets to expand to, even without considering the drain of the financial bubbles. I mean, I agree with Chang about the negative effects of the financialization of the west and the IMFification of the third world, and again, his counterexamples are well-chosen, a few modern ones that didn't rely as much on a massive army to make it work (Chang is Korean, and in a good position to question what the fuck the bank nations are always talking about), but growth models also have inherent problems of their own.

The only other thing I wish that Chang had done was to introduce the chapters differently. I'm fine with the division and structure of the book, but each "what they tell you" section is a way to invite argument. I think that most of them are fair and accurate characterizations of free market views, and presented in good faith, but they're still kind of straw men. I don't think it would have been at all difficult to precede these paragraphs with a quote to pin the views on an actual right-wing or neoliberal luminary. Two hours picking through transcripts of Larry Kudlow, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, etc. could have given him more than enough material.

And if they didn't fit into a general review, here are a few points that captured my interest enough to write down:

He makes a point that the nature of the work we do affects the character of society. Farmers see things differently than do industrial workers than do researchers than do cube monkeys. He's making a point that it was more natural for people on the floor or living in the company towns to want to organize into unions, but there's a lot that could be made of this. And obviously, it feeds back on itself—we have the national priorities that validate "knowledge-workers" because we are those, but we are those because there are too few industrial jobs. Maybe here's an area where education does make an impact, defining more how we see ourselves.

I was surprised to see him ascribe only about 1/5 of American de-industrialization to outsourcing and trade balance. (A large fraction is also re-classification, he argues. As support roles are spun off from the industrial sector in the name of cutting staff—think your shop cafeteria, company nurse, or the cleaning crew—they become re-classified as service employees.) One thing is that we still manufacture a lot of stuff, but we're consuming more that costs less.

De-industrialization, he points out, leads to a decline in engineering and science (and the need for the same), and you have to wonder about all this math and science push in that fading light. Confirms a point I was making recently.

Chang observes that one measure of inequality is the cost of services. When there's a ready supply of cheap human labor, then your house cleaning and restaurant meals (and food in general) are a lot more affordable. Don't get angry that your meal in France is so expensive, maybe thing of why that we have chosen to keep it so cheap here. In comparing currencies, this doesn't factor in, because people are not internationally traded goods (any more).

I had no idea that microfinance had been such a fucking disaster. It was one of those things that seemed like a great idea, and I was as impressed with the success stories as much as anyone. Turns out that the low rates of loans had hidden subsidies, and quickly turned usurious when the west stopped paying attention. More than that, argues Chang, without any real industry going on, these local enterprises quickly saturate, and can't possibly grow into high-level industries, especially when foreign interests are running those interests.

He cites college as a sorting function, not as an absolute forward-pushing economic force (as evidenced by lots of educated but poor countries), or as real training for most fields. As such, it's basically an economic drain, because you have to go there to even have a chance. It doesn't make it a non-worthwhile experience, but the economics of it are increasingly crazy. Yeah, I guess it's another validation of recent points for me. Maybe I like that at least a little.

In regards to equality opportunity vs. equality of outcome, he finds a way to argue they're the same. Especially if you can cross generations. After all, if your parents had experienced massively different economic outcomes, then your opportunity is very much not the same. More generally, he points out (using data) that a welfare state tends to strengthen social mobility.

Calling out the separation of capital and management from other stakeholders (namely, employees and the masses of human beings occupying the commons), he found a clever way to unite the disasters of soviet Communism and limited liability Capitalism. The problem? In neither case did the workers or citizens reap much reward for their efforts, and the oligarchs have not been on the hook when the shit went down.

Anti-Authoritarian

2011-08-22T16:38:00.010-04:00

By the way, it would only be fair of me to note that the Christ of the gospels was a stand-up guy when it came to women. His brand of iconoclasm spread to physical contact with unclean (bleeding) women, to embarrassing his core disciples with the superior faith of females, to forgiveness for adulteresses, and when he explicitly invited a non-Jew to come and join the salvation party, it was a woman. Even if the executive committee is seen in the canon as a small fraternal clique, Jesus' language works out to include females in the broader realm of disciples (unless Wikipedia is lying to me). Jesus Christ, if we can compile a good novel character for him, had a habit of seeing women as real people, which thwarted the social conventions of the day, and is worth bringing up even in a modern context. One of the things I do like about Christianity is that its lead figure had such a wicked anti-authoritarian streak. He made smoke come out of the appropriate ears. That these revered parables and anecdotes evolved to somehow underlie all manner of brand new patriarchies in the next couple thousand years is probably not surprising, but this guy who's spewing the evils of long pants, wine, and general uppitiness is nonethelss doing it with unintended irony, and it's things like self-seriousness and humorlessness that can really garner up my enmity.

Okay, I realize that a lot of the justifications of official church misogyny come from some select quotations in Paul's letters. But really, Paul's kind of an irritating zealot anyway (although if I understand it correctly, Paul's "genuine" epistles predate most of the gospels). I am not clear just how few generations of telephone* it took to turn the subversive messages from the original sermons into the decades-later transcription of them and then to their adoption as the brand new unimpeachable authority. I wonder if it contributes a serious enough advancement of the understanding of humanity to count as a scientific revolution. The impact of Jesus' message shares some similarities of form.

You can cherry-pick messages from the holy books, and people have long sought to use them to validate their own purposes. I am being undoubtedly unfair to generalize Christians by that particular priest who is wielding God's love for a crusade that I see as less than holy (which is redundant). And while I agree that loud professions of belief can be something to watch out for, a handy bit of projection, or maybe justification for any number of more objective failings, on the other hand, I don't want to deny that the church draws in good people, and inspires them to do good things. It can be the bedrock to good families and communities.

Now in my opinion--and I know it's not really nice to keep saying this--holy writ is a terrible basis for society, morality and natural study, thanks to it's inadequate scope, committee-written passages, innumerable authors, varying contexts, presumed infallibility, and unverifiable mysticism, but twentieth century history suggests that you can pull this trick with any godless creed just as easily. You put the right amount of material in there, and you can take anything you want out, particularly the stuff you already wanted to have, and that's pretty much the point. Add a "holy" element and now nobody can disagree. There's enough variation in tone and message in the books to reinforce whatever bias or cherished cultural marker you want to take in, and those can be positive as easily as they can be negative. I might be able form up to a mighty nice message based on the parts I like, but I've mostly given up on trying to balance the other stuff in order to get to the more noble take-homes. I'm just not a very good follower.

And as a rule, I don't like the idea of guardians to power and knowledge, which is to say priests of any vernacular stripe. There's a point to ceding power to educators and administrators, for example, but really that's only justifiable only so far as you share an aim to accomplishing something (learning, effective organization). I have lived my life without ever annoying the authorities much, and you wouldn't peg me for a subversive: I'm lucky enough to look like everyone else, possess socially unobjectionable habits, generally fit in on the local level, and of course I'm cracker-white. But I don't, in fact, believe in the goodness of our social order, and think with some conviction that it's irrevocably fucked up in a number of critical ways. My growing opinion is that I need to fit in to it less. But mostly, on a basic level, I just resent the insinuation that I should look up to power for power's sake. When someone begins to justify himself with unassailable moral arguments that only he is entitled to use, then that's the motherfucker you need to watch out for. Jesus had that one right.

K

*Safe to say they called it something else back then. I believe there was an appropriate scene in The Life of Brian...

[edited somewhat for clarity]

My Wife, The Heretic

2011-08-20T16:24:00.004-04:00

Apologies for the even-lighter-than-usual posting this month. It comes down to a competition with the ongoing job search, as well as other, less soul-killing, distractions which have all combined to siphon my already spotty inspiration to other outlets. I often think that if I wanted to attract more readers, I should fall back on recurring material, like the nooze, or amusing attempts to anthropomorphize my coworkers or something, or Daddy blogging, but those things don't really scratch the right itches, or at least they don't well enough to justify the extra effort, and worse, in a lot of those cases I'd feel like such a bastard for talking about people behind their backs. Hey, speaking of which...

Truth is, I'm breaking a couple of my rules with this anecdote. First, I'm putting an excerpt of personal conversation into the public space, which I try not to do, but to be fair, it's one of those things that I have every intention of developing into one of those entertaining stories to tell at parties and stuff, and I further aim to embellish the hell out of its original version. The other contraindicated item is talking about my marriage, but you know what? I'm proud of the old girl for this one, and I never find myself saying enough good things about her, so here's one.

Here's a vocabulary exercise, which most of you probably don't need. The word "pariah" is an artifact of the Indian caste system. That it got adopted into English suggests that there was a need for it, which is surprising to me, and frustrating with respect to this post. It's not like the west has any shortage of persecutorial social structures, and hell, maybe it says something that the Indians at least admitted it all to themselves. You'd particularly think that some Roman Catholic equivalent should be floating around out there (although a catholic pariah would be an oxymoron), but I had a hard time finding the pejorative for those people who manage to define themselves without a Church at all, it's as if it's something completely outside their worldview. Best I managed was "non-Catholic," which didn't really carry the same punch. Words like "outcast" or "excommunicant" assume prior membership, whereas pagans and witches are people who have competing beliefs, and that's wholly inappropriate here. Even a heathen would need to be someone who's content out on the primitive English scrublands. Who's the official non-participant of the Catholic church? Do the popelings even have a word for someone who just doesn't give a fuck? Let me know if you know the right designation. "Heretic" was the best I came up with, and it's at least a word I do like.

Well, in any case, my wife is one of those. I have recently learned that she has attained some kind of official antithetical status according to the self-nominated assembly of God. I couldn't be more proud.

D makes friends about as easily as I do, but as life has turned out, she was able to bond with another adult student when she went back to re-edjumication camp a few years ago. There, she found an organic chemist making a similar change in her life, a kindred soul to help gleefully blow the curve for the rest of the preplexed little go-getters. Would they have been credentialed enough to work in a medical lab with just the chemistry or the chemical engineering degree and mere years of experience? Well sure, but there's a big step of focusing yourself after a substantial time off, and classes helped them both get into their new groove. Things have worked out so that they're employed at the same place, and they're best buds of the sort I've sorely missed myself for the last 15 years or so. And good for them. It's not like everyone should be this miserable.

We've hung out a few times together family-style, and it hasn't quite gone smoothly. My previous opinion of P's husband was merely as a boringly quiet guy that it's impossible (especially for another quiet guy) to have a conversation with, but I've learned recently that there are deep convictions underlying his essential gormlessness. He is also something of True Believer, of a deeply conservative Catholic stripe, grimacing to digest a wealth of conservative views of women's roles, and, no doubt, every other sort of dyspeptic social convention that used to not fail to put a healthy fear of god into folks back in better centuries. The ironic part is that P, like my wife, has a pretty short delay between brain and mouth, and how she gets by with all this is something of a mystery to me. I think she saves up for the confessions.

Guiding this constant challenge of will is the P family priest, and kindly members of the flock as they are, they have the shepherd over for dinner once every so many weeks. Several months ago, my dear wife was in their area and without calling first, she showed up at her friend's door, during one of those formal and (I assume) joyless little affairs. My godless sweetie is unused to seeing holy men in full evangelical attire, but managed to not comment on the robes. In fact, she tells me, she showed uncharacteristic restraint even as she got whisked away, perhaps as impressed with the inherent dignity of a man who shows up dressed in his office. But she managed to make an impression just the same.

It's come back around. The priest, rather severely, does not approve this devious Sodomite that I married. It is enough for him that my wife always wears pants. And that she drinks wine, enticing P to do the same once a month. Most threatening of all, my darling doesn't give a thought whatsoever about "knowing her place" in the jealous hierarchy of souls. (If this guy knew what we did before we were decently married...) P suffers stern opprobrium from the priest that her "friends" (of which there is only one) are, literally, parading her straight down into the Pit of Fire. And from this end, I think it's a mark of achievement that my someone who consented to marry me is cool enough to have some creepy repressed narrowbrain in a dress actively preaching against her, evidently because she is an independent, confident, and relatively well-adjusted woman, without the fear of Hell in her. How many people get to claim that level of distinction?

I'm on record having a soft spot for Christians. Having known some exceptional ones in my time, I can find myself inclined to think well of them in general, or at least of certain sorts. I think that for all its failings, the good people that the faith manages to attract can sometimes make the whole enterprise look classy, which is probably true of any faith. But on the other hand, people like this priest are still out there, demanding subservience of half the population and then telling themselves that they make the world better though boundless love. Jesus Christ!

Greetings, My Employers!

2011-08-02T13:43:00.004-04:00

Nothing to see here...

Black Box Economics

2011-07-25T21:47:00.002-04:00

Apologies to whatever's left of my readers for this one. I'm contractually obligated by the anti-establishment (which is getting exactly what it paid for) to churn out an update of my general understanding of economics every few months. Call it part of an ongoing series if you want. More like, some stuff I read got the brain swirling around in its usual sorry circles, and now it needs to drain.

As someone who doesn't understand all of the fine details of economics so well, and is suspicious of them anyway, I often like to try to and look at them from a coarser level, from farther away, and see if it makes sense on that necessary approximation. I find this a rewarding exercise usually, and like any human being, I grow to believe that my comfortable way of looking at things is in fact the important one. Engineers have a habit of this sort of thing anyway, as I've blathered about in times past. Those subatomic details are distracting, and obviously this is why macroeconomics is different from microeconomics, and so far as I can glean (this is my sporadic recreational reading, god help me), addressing macroeconomics based on "microfoundations" is, a lot like resource economics, only a young field struggling against an increasingly inadequate paradigm. Better late than never, I guess.

[And it's fun to ask whether microfoundations are more like statistical thermodynamics, from which macro properties can be statistically derived, or more like quantum mechanics, in which they are consistent with macro properties, but produce negligible predictive value for problems of that scale. I never developed a good answer for that analogy, and I didn't like the handful of discussions I read, because it kept coming back to me that economics isn't fundamental enough to describe primate behavior, and is insufficient with respect to the physical laws it apes.]

I agree that the macroeconomy is necessarily a statistical average of all the busy-bee activity that can be called economic, and that there is feedback with macroeconomic policy and all, but this doesn't really cover enough ground. If we can look at the economy as a big black box, then "the economy" really is how we distribute what we collectively make the effort to produce or do. (This is definitionally true, which will only make the next fuckhead who talks about "redistribution" that much more irritating.) On some level, the redistribution is arbitrary, as is the level of effort (once we get past the point of keeping a critical fraction of us fed) we put in. In American capitalism, it's a great conceit that the divvying of effort and rewards is conducted according to some rules-based algorithms. These rules are a compromise between some pet philosophical justifications of ownership, baseline standards of living (that'd be the Socialism that crept in), and variously weighted assessments of the value of different types of contributions. People can get paid to do work or make stuff and people who own can manage the value of improving their property, or so the story goes.

I'm finding that black box viewpoint useful to help weed out the parts of the economy that are fake. The GDP, for instance, is somewhat real (even if it measures things in imaginary numbers), demarking the total amount of goods-n-services that are produced, more or less. In real life though, all this stuff is limited by resources – by population, energy, land and food (elementary stuff, I know, at least with respect to land, for which more patient students than me can describe how it turned into "capital"). Call it the first law: you can't get out more than you put in, and even if you quip about optimized non-zero-sum exchanges, you're still using many implicit assumptions about where the producion must come from. You're still only optimizing efficiency. Game theory does not obviate physics.

There are times when resources directly affect the volume of worldwide production. Oil shocks are, at a minimum, a common ad hoc reason thrown around to discuss disruptions. It's the conventional understanding of the stagnant 1970s economy, and I also remember it standing in as a cause of the 2008 recession, at least for a short time, until people finally started questioning the screwy financials. It's a running curiosity that a more fundamental connection isn't observed more routinely. Given its pretense as the only social science, economics has ironically done a very bad job of integrating that first law, as outlined in this entertaining excerpt. You can't assume stuff that doesn't exist (although I lose him when he dismisses the rebuttal that things are fine to a certain level of approximation—of course it's fine when the assumptions hold). If you like to think in terms of the second law (or if you pedantically want to call process dynamics, my preferred choice of technical metaphor, an analysis of the second law, as is done in this interesting article), then "production" is even better described as a dissipative process (which can have more or less stable dynamic states, mind you), that is, kinetics rather than equilibrium. Civilization is then a transient species, something that has happened in between turning carbon and sunlight into food into shit.

Although it is essential, count money among the things that are useful fabrications. Credit, even more so. In the macro world, I try to remember that money and credit is more of an indicator of the asset distribution than a driver. Money is really a mutual agreement to accept money as a medium of exchange, which definitely helps the process along. (This is true even of gold, which upon a time was useful for this role because it was durable and people liked it. But it's no more fundamentally valuable than other representative things, and since it's value represents a narrow slice of things people really value--notably you can't eat or burn it--it's probably less good.) I see debt as basically a bet on the short-term persistence of the status quo, the human reaction to gamble that things will soon regress back to the mean. When that's a reasonable bet, it facilitates activity, and when it's not, it does the opposite. Money and credit are super useful, but they are more like written laws than physical ones, and economists are more like lawyers than scientists. Which is fine, but consider that legal rules are also only followed in principle by the robotic force of algorithm, and given that we are really creating an economy on the basis of mutual agreements, and even through we specify the goal and the rules, it's also true that we try to constantly get around them.

American capitalism (at least as it is marketed) has a lot invested in the idea that the macroeconomy emerges from its microfoundations, but I keep coming back to the idea that it's a fundamentally flawed assumption. American capitalism has done a very shitty job, to my mind, of integrating the role of power, coercion, and security, which I think is safe to also classify as fundamental parts of our overall system of agreed-upon rules, but somehow economics gets away with dismissing to the arena of politics and sociology instead, unwisely imagining that some mutual agreements can be neatly separated from others. I would say that the rules instead evolve as a consequence of the status hierarchy, which exists at a more fundamental human level than "economics" does. And the powerful are (by definition) able to influence the rules (albeit without much collective intellect or finesse) until it reaches a distribution favorable to themselves. The iron rule of oligarchy gets it so much better, and is immensely more succinct.

Where the fake meets the real, then at least we can say it gets interesting. If the "real" economy is, although maybe fuzzily defined at the edges, the redistribution of all the stuff we produce, then it's worth noting where the idea of that distribution gets most deeply obfuscated. Dr. Leo Strauss (obvioulsy not the actual one) recently summed it up as well as anyone: we don't "make" nuthin but finance these days, a service that has managed to massively overvalue itself at the expense of every other service or product. (Doc Strauss also provided some awesome interviews with David Simon about The Wire, the guiding ethos of which, he says, is that human life is declining in value in the post-industrial age.) A bubble economy is a matter of pretending that we make more than we do, and that we can distribute more than we actually have. It works because the black box of American economy has some inputs and outputs into it. In comes goods and energy, and out goes what little extra we still produce. In and out also go complex systems of agreements and arguments on how we value it in paper, full of double negatives and hot air and backed by force. The world economy doesn't have inputs and outputs other than the heat balance, however, and if we consider stored resources, then it is in fact zero sum, according to the goddamn first law of thermodynamics.

We are propping up the value of the dollar (which contracts and verbage direct oil into this country more easily and help to let other people actually do the producing of things so long as we get to keep gambling), keeping up the value of real estate (which contracts keep people with more license to make that gamble), keeping our armies massive (enforcing all the wheeling and dealing), and keeps the level of inequality high as hell. I don't know, letting oil prices rise, un-developing arable land, bringing industry back to these shores, and letting the super-rich finally absorb a kick in the neck seems to be exactly what is necessary to bring the whole system into something resembling local reality, although it's likely to be painful for all of us, and I don't want that either. We can only impoverish everyone else for so long before we start going down with them (or until maybe we get weak enough and they get pissed enough).

If the current trend we are seeing in the world today is actual GDP shrinkage driven by first-law sorts of pressures, such as limits to oil and water, or even just bad bets on expansion, then expect that huge network of agreements to stretch and become rigid (that seems consistent with a serial bubble economy, increased indenture, and IMF-style forced austerity everywhere you look) in an effort to keep the head on top, and then falter in glorious financial collapse. It's a global behavior consistent with what you'd expect from shrinking fundamental resources, and that's worth pointing out (and it's also my suspicion), but it's inconclusive on its own. It also has happened sometimes in history when power concentrates too much in social and financial spheres and the loss is painful in the living memory of everyone else. Some collapses can be tied to extension beyond resource sustainability (Rome's slow decline probably fits this model), but others are just human behavior taken too far (more like the Great Depression maybe).

I don't really know where we are at now, but I'm not super optimistic about the future.

Peas In Our Time

2011-07-19T21:28:00.006-04:00

A true confession: I blew this one tonight. We did it last weekend, and it was of those dishes that transcended at least two of my senses, but tonight...not so much. Part of the problem was just the peas. Peas are one of those things that are heavenly for about a week out of the year, after which they become fodder, and this week's peas are just not the same as last week's peas, and moreover, we did them no favors by making the dish two fucking days after they were bought and shelled. (Yes, that is in fact shame I feel—I was brought up better than this—but it may not be too late for my dear mom, who didn't even manage to plant the things until May, which is the main reason I am writing this down.) But even worse was knowing that I just munged up the balance of things.

I should point out that we basically copied a recipe we had in New York way back in May, at Eataly, and merely put the peas and mint on the outside instead of in the filling. I suppose in the city that never sleeps, you can get some quality legumes overnighted from a few states down if you have the culinary pull. We were stuck waiting until they came ready in north central Massachusetts, but fresher is always better anyway. Here in ____, we also have a tremendous Italian population, but evidently not an impressive Eatalian one, and after at least three remarkably craptastic ethnic restaurant adventures, we gave up on 'em almost a decade ago. And so we were completely and pleasantly surprised to have discovered a little old lady with a good pasta shop in town. We made the dish with a combination of her gnocchi and cheese-filled ravioli, which all I had to do was not screw up. Making me one for two, I guess. If you make this, go with the nicest fresh pasta you can make or get your hands on.

My wife tells me that we have had the combination of peas and mint before, and it's both natural and obvious, she says. To me, it seemed revelatory in May, and then even better eight days ago. The nuttiness (a food adjective I find annoying) of the brown butter pushes the sweet and aromatic, the vegetable and salt and toast together like a seventh predicts the tonic. When it's good, it's very very good. My advice, just don't fuck it up.

The ingredients:

about 1-2 c. fresh peas, shelled. (Look, I am not a farmer, but I am a glutton, and grew up with people who cared about this sort of thing. If they're touching in the pods, it's no doubt too late, and if the skins of the pods are thinned and dry, it's really too late. But you know, just taste them. They will be that good.)

about 1 lb. fresh cheese pasta. (Best you can get your hands on. Maybe you make pasta. If so, now would be the time. I'm horrified to think of Marie Callender clodhopping the toes of this fine little dance. Find a real old lady.)

about 3/4 c. finely grated fresh parmesan cheese. (Here I am not a zealot. Yet.)

1 stick of butter

about 2-3 T. mint chiffonade. (I wish I knew the variety in the herb garden that's Mom's mint. Probably not spearmint, certainly not peppermint, and definitely not the ridiculous furry "apple" crap that is taking over everything. It's just "mint." It also makes outstanding mojitos. Maybe I'll write that one up this weekend, if it's a good one.)

couple twists of pepper.

So salt your water, and boil your pasta, like you are supposed to. Don't overcook it. I have heard that gnocchi, if you go that way, can be a little sensitive, or something like that. Don't know where I got that idea. I did not find it critical to time the pasta (it finished a little before), and while I sure didn't rinse it, I removed it, and did not any of the water to make up the sauce. Just butter and cheese.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan, then raise the heat to medium-high and cook the butter until it foams and just starts to brown. Pull it off and reduce the heat. Add the peas and mint, and cover for a minute or two, not past "warm" on your cooling burner. Stir in the cheese and pepper. Then gently toss or fold the pasta. Garnish with a sprig of mint, if you're so motivated.

Public Service Advisory

2011-07-08T13:43:00.004-04:00

Nope, it's not a hiatus (so sorry about your position in the pool, bright), just going to try an experiment with all the book reviews. That's right, I'm going to try and monetize the motherfuckers. Ooo-ooh.

Although the number of regular readers here (and I love you all) is, um, not large, I have been following the Statcounter recently, and the poorly-named Keifus Writes! somehow gets about 75 search hits a day, most of them from people who are looking for book reviews. (People also look for mandolin fingerings and a chance to buy my virginity.) Some of these regularly come up in the top ten google hits, which is pretty surprising to me. So I'm going to start putting links to Amazon, in case I manage to convince anyone that they want to purchase those items.

If anyone reading this post wants to use one of those links as a portal to purchase your next big-screen TV, then I won't complain, but I'm not trying to make money off of my friends, and I encourage you, if you are so motivated, to go and patronize someone who needs the money more than I do. (And if the whole idea really bothers y'all, I'll just take out the ads.) I'm just thinking I might round up enough scratch from casual interlopers to purchase a new book once in a while. Worth a shot anyway.

K

Review: The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

2011-07-05T14:15:00.005-04:00

It's always fun to review famous books that everyone has heard of. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle made the world familiar with muckraking journalism, and shocked the country into adopting somewhat improved food safety standards. President Roosevelt, we're told, was swayed by discovering, from passages of the book, what goes into embalmed meat and sausage. It seems safe to say that he didn't read the rest of it. The Jungle may deserve a review for the plot that no one talks about, of which only a small fraction is spent in the Chicago meat empire. It follows the first few years in the life of Jurgis Rudkus upon immigration to America from Lithuania. Sinclair takes us through a handy travelogue of institutionalized hardship, starting with extortion on the passage, through the subtle or overt systematic coercion and humiliation and pestilence that bedeviled the teeming ranks of unskilled labor in the meat industry in 1904. He'd originally centered it on the failed meat-packer's strike of that year, but the book takes Jurgis and his family through several other modes of contemporary employment (factory work, begging, prostitution, crime, vagrancy, politics), all born of, and failing, their good intentions to live as decently and independently as they can conceive.

It ends with an improvement on their conceptions, a veritable epiphany. The Jungle is a Socialist marketing pitch, a surprising survivor in the American canon. Poor Jurgis is slated to experience every version of the underside of the machine that Sinclair can think of to add, a sort of pilgrim's progress that is maybe not strict allegory, but runs at least as a series of representative anecdotes. (I am sure there's an appropriate literary term.)

I think that there is some real conflict with Sinclair the novelist and Sinclair the propagandist, to the detriment of both missions. The book opens with Jurgis' wedding, the only scene of joy and vitality before the ending, and once it ends, there is only a dismantling of the happiness that developed in that moment, with each new subtraction coming through like a shot in the gut. But there is only so much there to take apart, and when it's gone, we find that Sinclair still has half a book to go. Cool lefty types remark with regret that people remember the horrible abuses of the meat industry but neglect to take home what it did to reveal the anguish of working people, but it's not entirely the fault of the reader. Once Jurgis leaves Packingtown, once the last connection to his family goes under the mire in yet another tragedy, his story gets a whole lot less immediate, and any mystery we have invested in the happiness of these characters vanishes under the weight of obvious authorial intent. The student correctly sniffs out a lesson coming at this point, and grows bored. A novel is an excellent medium to convey an individual story, but this everyman thing loses its punch for needing to include, well, every man.

As writing goes, an occasional moments of satisfaction, however impoverished, could have gone far to accentuating the far larger negatives that Sinclair was after. The only positive outlet for Jurgis, the author lectures, was chasing the hazy phantoms of joy at the bottom of a bottle. Sinclair lectures a good deal, and while his appeals to human dignity are strong, his reversion to Christian-style morality (temperance, abstinance, moderation) are tedious. The introduction (written by Maura Spiegel, in the B&N cheapo edition) notes that the author did not describe his characters with a rich inner life, but instead went for a more observational style that was the fashion of some of his contemporaries. But this is no vivid little Chekhov-style tableau we're talking. There is no shortage of moralizing and psychological mechanics, they just happen to all come from the author instead of the characters. The editorializing doesn't go down much easier for the obvious distance that exists between the supercilious Sinclair and his earthy protagonist. The author has got every article of mild slang doubt-quoted, sniffs at every hint of debauchery, is affronted by black people, adds exclamations to every larger observation, and dear-readers us nearly to death. The climax is a speech, and the denouement is a goddamn lecture, in which we're reminded, sadly without irony, that like many another ethos, national Socialism offers a brilliant critique, but a provides a very sketchy prescription. The faith by which the world should fall into place under its influence seems rather quaint with a century's hindsight.

I like novels, and I don't mind polemics if the writing is good, but this combination felt a bit distasteful to me, even though Upton Sinclair is good enough to put satisfying thoughts and words and plots together. And I am sympathetic to his criticism (even if I lack his faith in a Socialist panacea), so it's not really the content that's the problem. If this thing were a satire—or showed any trace of humor whatever—then it could have carried a lot more weight with me. It may be just my own weird predilections.

[Edited slightly, with apologies to the English language.]

Review: Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, by Max H. Bazerman

2011-07-05T14:09:00.008-04:00

Among my many excuses for dragging my feet this month is that I was in a recent conversation that absorbed some of the "creative" energy that I usually bundle up and deposit in the blog, which is great and all, but it also happens to be none of your damn business. There was a book recommendation tangentially involved, however, and it leaves me in a funny place: my opinion of it had to be reported back privately, but what about my obligation to the book-review-reading community? What about my obligation to you, dear reader? How will some little MBA proto-sociopath cheat on his homework without services like mine? So I can't guarantee there won't be a sentence or two of crossover here in this longer-form dealie. Just on the off chance anyone's ever moved to read this.

Well, I liked the book, and I didn't expect to, although my skepticism was probably a function of the title and the intended audience. I have enjoyed reading about cognitive biases and how they govern our interactions in the past, and Bazerman took me some distance beyond what I already knew or figured out, and he was kind of enough to elaborate. In addition, filling the concepts out with the accepted vocabulary has since proven handy. Some of these biases, like the fallacy of small numbers ("fastest-growing" is a fine indicator of something unimportant), have been long-standing pet peeves of mine, while others, like the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent people are the ones most likely to judge themselves as skillful and correct, were more like inchoate little complaints needing the help of some wise academician to identify and label. Things like "competitive escalation" I readily identified as true (he said half-seriously) because I've seen them in innumerable cartoon plots, while others, like these associative heuristics he warns against, are a little closer to my own areas of psychological susceptibility (in Mr. Downer's case here, intense negative feelings that get weighted too heavily in matters of self-judgment), and were not at all as fun to read, even if I did my best to keep an open mind about them. At least I was comforted that I don't share the thinking patterns of MBA students.

I do want to point out that some biases can be more rational than Bazerman lets on. People judge probabilities poorly, and we know it. While it's fine to assume accurate odds or trusted outcomes for the purposes of a word problem, I think the whole "X will earn 4% interest", or "Y has a 60% chance of failing" thing has, in real life, little chance of being true. The assumption of randomness is often false. The stock or housing market doesn't always grow over meaningful time periods (imagine, for one well-chosen example, that you were foolish enough to start saving in it ten or fifteen years ago) and inflationary discounting omits a lot of factors that actually matter in the cost of living. In real life, people often lie to their own advantage about statistics and odds, or assess them badly, or, of course, weigh them down with the offeror's own assortment of mental fuckups. To his credit, Bazerman gets into that a little in the decision-making chapters, but these remain tragically neat little story problems too, clearly and unrealistically mapped on an x-y axis.

The idea that people suffer from many cognitive biases that reinforce their positive illusions is a powerful one I think, and in my opinion, it goes farther than, say, the entire field of economics in explaining the shape of human society. [I keep entertaining a longer post about this, but every draft I write has come out with too much crackpot in it, and I am furthermore not completely sure where I stand on the larger details.] Maximizing your self-interest, or maximizing mutual interest, are things that go only so far, and there are all sorts of cognitive hiccups that must be served in the meantime. That is, any rational analysis of cognitive bias shouldn't exclude the observation that we tend to believe that we are more rational than we actually are. In the edition I have, Max Bazerman addresses some of these erroneous conceptions of fairness in the appropriate chapters, and does draw some broad pictures of, say, resource conservation on those terms (the usual tragedy of the commons, now with a new twist) and how it suffers. Even the rational strategies he outlines for negotiations (where sometimes there is mutual benefit to ceding power) appear that they could gradually produce inequality, and this does also get a brief and late mention in the short book, some time after I angrily scribbled my note.

I have a few other blurbs that I had noted as more useful or interesting to watch out for. Anyone want some insight to what makes me tick?

I thought it relevant that we tend to count gains and losses more in terms of the number of occurrances than as a net value. I often like to laugh at my particular brand of (self-created) bad luck and frustrations, but I do try and realize I'm basically a privileged little dude. He recommends setting up a mental ledger for this sort of thing, and I was happy that it affirmed something I thought was useful, but hadn't ever outlined explicitly.

He had a sentence that actions tend to produce more short-term regrets, but failure to act tends to haunt us longer. I am not really sure I agree with that, and I don't think it's a good decision-making heuristic, but I know a little of both sorts of regret, and of course it is indeed wise to weigh the cost of inaction too. (Someone get Neil Peart on the phone, I've got an idea for some song lyrics.)

I'd mentioned this in a conversation, but there's a note that depressed people might be less susceptible to positive fallacies. (I suspect we might overvalue negative ones though.) Implicit in the discussion is an observation that a facility for thinking about consequences and counterfactuals is also pretty depressing. Can't disagree with that one.

The idea of anchoring to arbitrary reference points is a useful thing to think about, but an annoying one to pretend to quantify. (If I read about the fucking "Overton Window" one more time...) Bazerman writes that in negotions, an offeror's anchoring value is less powerful if you know your alternatives and objectives. I think we can file that one under "cheap advice." On the other hand, remembering that many people have a tendency to reference the status quo is useful, keeping in mind the half dozen caveats I mentioned above.

I have been looking for a new job. Bazerman makes a point that people tend to over-emphasize things like prestige, and undervalue the work environment, how happy we will be, when considering these things. Couldn't agree more, and it's a lesson hard-won. (You know, provided you're in a position to be choosey. I wouldn't mention this point to the character in the next book review.)

As a final note, I find "regression to the mean" a highly annoying term, mostly for some vocabulary issues with "regression" and "mean" as used in the phrase. Turns out, it's a meaning about as close to the original ideas of regression analysis as you can get. Well, they got better.

Random Roundup

2011-06-12T10:05:00.003-04:00

1. Why would-be engineers end up as English majors
Well, to dispense with the obvious, it's not for the job opportunities. Things are bad out there for engineers, but I'd hate to be trying to parlay a literature degree into paying work these days. And I've seen how hard even brilliant writers have to work to be noticed. There is an insult built into that headline.

This article was thrown out by the RPI alumni association, and I was uncharacteristically moved to respond. The problem is that I fail to grasp its justification that we need more scientists and engineers. As mentioned, the job market for even experienced engineers and scientists isn't great, or at least no one's falling over themselves to hire me. We're not so valued that we're actually paid a whole lot compared to the remunerative sort of "knowledge" work (unless we go into management), especially if you're a science researcher, which career path also includes some massive opportunity costs. It seems like the establishment job opportunities are shrinking, and there are not such prestige positions floating in the manufacturing plants anymore to inspire the working class kids, because the damn plants are gone. Thankfully, there remains hope on the new ideas side of science and engineering, and I agree that innovation is incredibly important for our economy. To be an innovator, that's an exhausting life of start-up-like environments, but it's great if you make it, or fit that mold, but you're basically on your own swimming in the big world with a rational probability to sink, and as any manager will opportunistically tell you, managing a startup is not necessarily the same skill as science and engineering.

I do not agree to the full faithful extent that innovation will fuel American job growth. It should, but how long has it been since this was actually the case in America? (Outside of the defense industry?) Seems the first thing that happens to a startup project when it hits the big time, they go and build a production plant in China. The problem of disappering manufacturing in the US has little or nothing to do with science education.

Like teaching, science and engineering is basically a professional field that American society pretends to value more than it actually values, and I'd complain about it more, except I have not missed how much less they value teaching. The real utility I see for science education is meta: the country would probably be better off with a bunch of trained engineers and scientists we don't hire rather than with a bunch of trained lawyers we don't hire. Our society suffers from our abject terribleness at quantitation and empiricism. But I don't think training kids in liberal arts is a bad idea either, and disagree it's an educational ultimatum. Our society also suffers from our abject terribleness at humanity.

RPI is an institution that, at least in the early 90s, unrepentantly adopted the sink-or-swim system. Lots of incoming freshman, and they gave us the "look to your left, look to your right" deal at orientation. As a student, I had little problem with it, although it did feel pretty impersonal. I doubt that learning to flourish in an environment where I could perform without really interacting with the professors or grad students did any wonders for my character or my later career. I did like it better than the grad school environment, where I didn't feel any particular expectations.

As a parent seeing college in the not-so-distant horizon, I am a lot happier to imagine a system that's liberal about admissions, but rigorous about academics. This at least gets kids through the increasingly ridiculous application and acceptance process (at least if all the scare stories are true), and gives a chance to the young people who have the capacity to tough it out, or who have an aptitude that is not well-reflected by their SAT score. It's already bad enough how kids are classified and sorted as alphas, betas, etc., at the frist opportunity, and sink-or-swim at least gives them the opportunity to swim.

And personally, I'd love an English-major type of job. How do I get one? I am vain to think I might get a little farther as an engineer who dabbles in English than as a wordsmith who decides to take up engineering, or at least I've seen it happen that way more often. Or maybe I'm already there. My boss told me last week that what I really produce is PowerPoint slides. Depressingly, he's right.

2. Obligatory Weiner Stroking
I'm brave about statements like that right up until I actually enounter people who are good at English, at which point I can be counted on to, uh, um, do some speak-stuff or something, er, and stuff. It's more accurate to say that I've seen mediocre engineers turn to mediocre wordsmiths more than the other way around, but the quality literary folks seem to be cut from some other cloth entirely. This sorry segment is derived from a comment I left among my betters in wit and words over at alicublog. The fuckers.

I'd like to firm up an opinion here, take the wax off the subject, but it's such a damn tiresome thing to flog. I don't approve of celebrity worship either, but what ever happened to placing these guys up as the world's most unlikely hearthrobs? I mean Jackie was a fashionable gal, but Jack? The dude looked like he just emerged from under a bridge. The next batch of under-50s were more fuckable than he was, by the questionable judgment of this straight stiff, but look where that ever got 'em. The one dude, it got impeached. The way I see it, politicians, even the good guys, already live a prurient double life. There's the public face of integrity, representation and idealism, and then there's the actual business end of it, forging compromises with the deeply anti-democratic power elite. Weiner, to his credit, thrust against a famous supreme court justice, not just his disreputable tendency to address the female staff with porn and pubes, but the slim feller was gripped in a campaign to confront the quiet man's wife's conveniently undisclosed lobbying efforts. Andrew "supervillain" (thanks, Roy!) Breitbart's cozy relationship to the selectively adjudicating motherfucker is a factor here too.

And although recent news looks as if Weiner's boned, if that public/private friction only comes out as fairly juvenile dick pix, then to this citizen, it's almost a relief. I mean, it sure beats the sort of fucking the Clarence Thomas family endorses, and at the very least, Weiner wasn't a hypocritical Family Values sort of bullshitter.

The whole thing makes me wonder how much more ridiculous politics is going to be for the generation that came of age after digital photography was commonplace. I can see it now. "Judge Stuart, your record is remarkably impartial and you are highly respected by your peers, presenting only the most serious judicial countenance. But on the other hand, how do we know you can be trusted not to once again" [dramatic pause, and then flourished photos] "go wild?" Either we're going to reach a point where we only elect the most horrid prudes to office, or else evidence of mild deviancy is going to be so common among the general population, we'll finally stop giving such a righteous fuck about it all. Obviously I'm hoping for the latter--hell, I wish I had a little more deviancy of my own as a reference, but I also wouldn't rule out the next Not-So-Great Awakening hitting us as everything else in the world goes to shit too.

3. Traveling, Part N+1.
I've got another trip coming up next week. Yeah, you've already heard a hundred-and-four ways that I loathe these trips, so why not offer number up the 105th, even if we're getting into the territory of sheer pettiness.

A day trip is bad enough, but let's observe for a moment that your typical military-industrial hub is frequently peppered with museums, and, less frequently, nice restaurants. Does the trip have to be so joyless, boss? I'm figuring if you're willing to dump twenty-five bucks to feed me at the mid-scale airport chain, then fine, I can spring for another twenty-five for a quality meal and a glass of decent wine and the privilege to not have to think of any anodyne conversation to fill up an otherwise spiritually vacant forty-five minutes of my life. Find a hotel in walking distance of something, you soulless monster, or at least let me borrow the keys to the car for once. The scheduling of these things, and next week's is no exception, is an inspiration of dullness. Land at about 7:30 (clamber into the hotel room a little after 8) for a 9 AM meeting. Brilliantly, this leaves me a wealth of time to listlessly stand around, but not quite enough of it to shoehorn in a movie, even. It's enough to drive a man to blog.

At least when I used to work in Washington, I had an excuse. I was limited by where I lived (the least interesting highway stop in northern Virginia) and worked (the other side of the river), and a need to hightail it back to my young family every night. It's an extra special "free" time of travel, however, when I can depend on a dinnertime flight out of Boston (mmm-mm, Logan's finest, and no booze), a morning meeting, and a carefully scheduled return trip designed to preclude any stops on the way to National Airport's feasts of grease, salt and upscale plastic utensils. I can't wait!

Review: Lamb, by Christopher Moore

2011-06-03T10:36:00.001-04:00

I felt that I was clever to choose this book for Easter reading, not by virtue of the menu item (which in the context of one of the story episodes, would have been a little off-putting anyway), but for its holiday theme. Lamb is a retelling of the life of Jesus Christ (some time later, thanks to some divine intervention) by his best friend Biff. That cover synopsis gives you all you need to understand the tone and theme of the book, but there's a note of honesty beneath the levity, and a touch of context under the unlikely adventures. Biff's just a nickname anyway, based, he tells us, onomatopoeically on the frequent disciplinary whacks to the head he tended to receive. The son of God is given to us as his friend Joshua, which is a little bit closer to his Hebrew name, not thanks to Moore's sense of accuracy I think—he doesn't do the same thing with the rest of the gang—but to help create a little more distance between the character and the usual weight of his Christian associations. If nothing else, it's all worth it to make a joke when a reanimated Biff encounters a guy named Jesus. Moore can't resist a healthy bit of this sort of intentionally anachronistic humor, and Biff gets to "invent" a lot of modern traditions for this sake. Sometimes it's brilliant: Biff's dissertation on sarcasm vs. irony, for example, is priceless, but some of the others are just good-natured groaners. Sure, it's a given that Jesus Christ might appreciate some of the mental discipline of studying martial arts, and reject the aggressiveness. But Jew-do, "the way of the Jew"? Where's my tomato. (On the other hand, I agree completely with the author that the question of "what if Jesus knew kung-fu" is indeed an essential one.) Moore also smartly works in a few early bits that Jesus would later use in his sermons. You might learn about foundations, for example, if you're apprenticed at an early age to the depressing life of a stonemason. And I think I laughed every single time Biff said Jeez! in the usual modern way. It's a silly book, but one where the jokes belie a certain depth, reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's writing, the style and tone (and subject) of Good Omens in particular. Biff is a great narrator, the obnoxious smartass who is funny enough, with enough underlying decency, and who gets a regular enough comeuppance to keep him loveable. The whole thing is obviously playful and speculative about a story that some people take very seriously, and it clearly doesn't place much weight on the hard-to-swallow-anyway One True Wordiness of the gospels, but it's irreverent in a way that I think will affirm the basic message if you're a more liberal-minded believer, and that will draw out the power of the story if you're not a believer at all. After all, if there was anyone who was entitled to a little gallows humor, it was Jesus H. Christ.

Because when you get to it, it's the human element of the Christ story that's the powerful one. Here's some poor bastard (literally) who's saddled with being the son of God, has some idea of what's in store for him, and, if you want to take the tradition as, um, gospel, then he's got some idea of the sacrifices that his sort of sinlessness is going to entail. How hard it must be to embody the contradiction of a loving god who has nonetheless consigned us to all of this crap (which was even more craptastic than usual in occupied Judea). Moore does a good job finding a uniting character to marry together the various accounts of his life, making Joshua some combination of a distant brooding studious sort and one of those rare truly decent folks, irrepressibly earnest, oblivious to the danger of speaking his mind, and yet engaged with the people, impossible to dislike. The girls loved him of course, but the poor guy was destined to love everyone, which isn't easy when you're 14. It's got to take a little inner torture to get to the inner peace. Jesus would have needed a friend like Biff to get him through his youth at least, someone to lie and distract for him as he went about his righteous subversion. Otherwise, how would he even make it to 33 with that habit of calling things as he wisely saw them and showing up the authorities.

The first third of the book, covering the early years, is probably the most entertaining, where we can see Josh and Biff acting most like children and teenagers, and dealing with the pressures of growing up fast in tough times, as well as with some of the neighborhood awkwardness that comes with Josh's whole who's-your-daddy issue. I think here's where Jesus most convincingly needs a helpful Biff too. As they get old enough, the boys are inspired to explore Joshua's heritage, and hunt down the three wise men. This takes them on a rather lengthy trip east, devoting years of their life to the study of Chinese and Arab teachings, early Chinese Buddhism (the admitted stretch—in addition to karate, he learns something about compassion and original sin from a yeti), and some yogi mysticism. (He eventually outclasses these teachers as much as he did the Pharisees.) And this is great, because now we can finally make a guess as to where Jesus might have obtained his Buddha nature, not to mention some select bits of Confucianism, some inner-spirit conjuring tricks, and in an earlier cameo, the version of the golden rule attributed to the rabbi Hillel. The last third of the book takes us through the gospels, kind of the backstage view of the events we're familiar with. This is the weakest section to my mind, as Moore doesn't get to innovate as flippantly, and is stuck trying to find a new angle on old material. Most of the disciple gang are a bunch of useless fuckups and true believers—I was especially disappointed with Thomas, who was made into a dolt to serve a pun--but we do get some good jokes here and there. After a Looney Tunes moment at Peter's expense on the lake, it's "Peter, you're dumber than a box of rocks. I'm going to call you..."

The apostles quickly attain the wisecracking level repartee of a fraternity bullshit session, which is okay by me and all, but it comes at the point where the book most needs to acknowledge its serious points. If we're running under the assumption that the new testament is basically a true story, then someone had to be capable of pulling off all that evangelizing. But on the other hand, our narrator Biff is given to deconstructing things like capability an leadership (his whole raison d'être is to humanize his friend after all), so it fits pretty well. And poor Biff. He's constantly accused of being dense, which he may have been—willfully—but it comes through that it's really his annoyingness that made the writers of the original gospels ignore his contributions. That's tragic enough, but among all of them, he was clearly the most loyal, and clearly understood Jesus/Joshua far beyond the capability of the rest. And he is the one whose passion for the guy prevented him from buying in at the very end, his wisdom to challenge the truth and the justice of it only left him out-saved by an endless bunch of simpleton zealots. Biff at least, with a chance to tell his story, is given a touching second go.

Pretty Soon You're Talking Real Money, Part II

2011-05-29T11:52:00.002-04:00

In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman was asked his opinion on whether another Michael Faraday could emerge in today's (some today twenty-odd years ago, that is) scientific milieu. Faraday was a rare and spectacular sort of genius, one of the fathers of electromagnetic theory. He never had formal training, reportedly found the mathematical basis of the early theorists incomprehensible, and yet he managed to piece together the basic relationship of electricity and magnetism, figured out some of the subtle business of electrical polarizaiton of materials, describing qualitatively (as I write in my occasional proposal) physics that it would take another sixty or seventy years to report the mathematics for. He did this on a combination of pure intuition, language, and a facility for cobbling together chewing gum and baling wire experiments. That he managed this before the invention of duct tape is no doubt equally remarkably to experimental physicists. As for me, my admiration for Faraday is only enhanced by the fact he looked like some plausible combination of a sideshow barker and garage-tinkering lunatic, but then nearly everyone in the early 19th century looked like that.

Anyway, Feynman replied that a late twentieth-century Faraday was unlikely. Physics had evolved, he thought, to the point where it was necessary to understand the current mathematics to really make a new innovation in the field. Naturally, he held out that it wasn't impossible, but he didn't currently see enough new area where even the basics needed to be worked out. He believed that the questions that were being asked in the 1980s were on the forward edge of theory, or outside of the easily measurable.

This morning on NPR, as part of a series this week that is evidently sponsored by the damn Chamber of Commerce, I learned that Peter Thiel, the co-founder (wait, which half did he found?) of PayPal is offering students $100,000 to drop a couple years of college and become entrepreneurs. Now, on one hand, I get it. With some colleges topping $50k per year these days, it's a hell of an investment, and if you're nineteen and can get into the grind without first sinking that cost, then you're ahead of the game. I'd tell you college is a pure scam if I didn't personally value it so much, and if my engineer's training (mostly trained judgment, but no doubt some people are born with that) wasn't so helpful. But if you're the kind of kid that can create high tech with twist ties and duct tape, then those two extra years of theory are probably not going to make the difference in your career. For the right kind of kid, thihs is a good deal: high-risk, sure, and it's not competitive remuneration with a full-time employment with benefits and existing capital equipment, but you 'll be ahead of your peers looking for that deal in two years when your venture fails. But is it a good way to be looking at engineering in society?

I mean, fucking PayPal, anyway. There was a short window where the acceptance of the internet, as a new medium, supported innovation that could get by on concepts (that is, without fucking doing or making anything), an arena freshly enough sodden where any goddamn thing had a chance of taking root. You idea men flourished precisely because you were in a unique moment when there were no established competitors, or because your particular branding took a little better than C2it or CertaPay or whatthefuckever unremembered version of pets.com failed to find utility, and if I remember 1999 at all, about 99.4% of those conceptual masterpieces still managed to blow other people's fortunes, thanks to about as much actual technical or business savvy as your typical 1830s peddlar of miracle tonic. But yeah Pete, your confirmation bias tells you you're a genius. Let's ask for your next business opinion.

As a professional bullshitter in the field of applied research, I have a good idea how far the lower five figures are going to get you. A hundred grand is exactly the business I'm in. To identify a problem, to propose a solution, and work it out is hard enough. Often you find it's for marginal improvement (or marginal loss) that requires a detailed cost analysis, and that's on the off-chance it works at all. There's a question of how far you can get in your garage, a question of far can you get without infrastructure. To do technical research you need to measure things. You need a laboratory, tools, at a minimum, materials to build things out of, and while there is room for innovation in the area, even the basic areas, it's not so virgin a field as it once was. As I started to write this up, CNN was broadcasting an excited news piece on the latest X Prize, which rewards complicated high-tech ventures after they demonstrate success. How much do you think you have to invest for a 10% chance to win a $1.4 million for a mechanical oil separator? We need 'em so badly (and we do), then why are we doing it on people's own thin dimes? Fucking cheapskates.

Now, we're not quite in the place with engineering as we are with fundamental physics: there's room for tinkerers, and the entrepreneurial model isn't completely broken. I don't intend to discourage the effort by any means, and I think that finding these people and supporting them is wise. But spotting a hundred grand to spark a high-risk research program is chump change, and doing it for the equivalent expected value is even worse. Baiting kids with dreams of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Wozniak to fabricate shit in their dorm rooms and garages is probably not the best alternative to more comprehensive funding research the sciences, and it's not as if you can count on the paradigm shifting every generation, especially when you leave it to revolutionize itself, while fluffing the egos and fortunes of the people who recognize talent instead of apply it. Democraticization of innovation seems to correlate with the speed of its progress (rich patrons and then universities was better for progress than keeping it in the monastaries, letting women into the academy was a plus, that sort of thing), although it's hard to generalize across the slow sweep of history. Twenty Under Twenty and the X-Prizes are not bad ideas, and it's great to have something like that in the suite of science investment. But relying on them over straight-up funding seems like a giant step backward.

Review: The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

2011-05-24T10:47:00.002-04:00

Browsing randomly through the non-genre aisles is just a terrible way to shop for books, no matter what your dotty strollers and romantically-inclined geeks would prefer to tell you. It's great to get drawn in by something stacked nearby and all (I might have been rewarded to find my way here if, for example, I happened to be mired in the Stephen King wing of the store) but if you don't have much free time, it's a lot better to have a list. This time I didn't, and so when I made a trip to the local Barnes and Noble to support one my daughter's school programs, I was encouraged to buy something quickly, but also listlessly. The Barbara Kingsolver book I had intended to buy, had I remembered to write it down, was her charming manifesto about gardening, not her Important Novel from the fiction section. I'm not angry about it. It's more of a segue than a complaint.

The Poisonwood Bible was very enjoyable—I tore right through it—although if you ever catch me without some criticisms, then look for signs of encroaching senility. I hate to be pushed that hard by the display, and a novel marketed as significant has got to face some high standards. In that light, I'll try and reveal my usual assortment of faint damns as quickly as I can; there were definitely some small contentions that kept creeping in. The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a missionary family's attempt to evangelize a village in the Congo in the early 1960s, told in a sequence of rotating (all-female) character points of view. We are introduced to Orleanna first, the mother, who in the opening sequence appears to be addressing the reader (she actually is not, and there is a nice symmetry with the Orleanna pieces that is not obvious at the outset, which do well under a re-read) and introducing the story as a stand-in for the author herself. This next shifts to the point of view of Leah, one of the middle children, and she is similar enough to her mother's voice, and so damnably precocious for a 14-year-old, that she sounds a lot like the author too. Two of the other sisters (Ruth May and Rachel, the oldest and youngest) feel again similar, but now straightjacketed respectively by childhood and by general dimwittedness, which leaves Adah as the odd girl out, physically handicapped, sly, secretive, and cynical, and of course I liked her best from the get-go. For the other four, it takes a while for their individual natures to be drawn out. To be fair, they're family, facing the same immovable obstacles, and I am sure that Kingsolver realizes that it's not uncommon to get to know a bunch of sisters this way.

The bulk of the novel covers the 18 months or so they lived in the Congo village, a period which takes them through the nation's independence from Belgium, and quick subjugation under the Mobutu regime. A frame story for revealing the alternating anecdotes would have helped this book a great deal. The individual sequences comes off a little like the indistinctly-timed interview portions of your lazier television mockumentary. It is unclear how do their composition might fit in alongside with the contemporaneously occurring drama. It's as if the characters are being deposed in some neutral purgatory space by the omniscient narrator. It would be a plausible explanation if Nathan had ordered the kids to write about their experiences--it would have been within his character, and they had plenty of downtime--but if the parents had been aware of children's' diaries, then some of the challenges in the book could have been overcome by reading them. And only Adah is ever portrayed as keeping a journal (a coded one). Touching on this framing issue could have helped some other things too. Leah (who I continue to see as the author's stand-in) is the only character that really seems to grow and change much in that long real-time section. If they wrote them all at once (as hinted by the section headings), then that would explain the stasis in tone, but in that case, the voices still don't change in the next sections, years or months later. Maybe we expect this from Rachel, who only grows into a bigger nitwit during this stretch, but here's Ruth May, who's somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 years old at the beginning (I missed her revealed age, but old enough to write?) and in almost two years, we'd expect her especially to evolve a great deal.

A few throwaways and Kingsolver could have settled the minds of certain kinds of continuity-minded geeks, but the stasis goes even a little beyond that. The conflict in the story is very well laid out, and the set pieces are well-positioned to proceed to a logical and probably inevitable conclusion, which they do. And to an extent they are revealed or they intensify (I don't want to give the impression that the plot is poorly written), but the conflicts do not develop. It's stated at the outset that Orleanna resents her husband, she doesn't grow to that point. Nathan doesn't become a tyrant, he starts as one. The only one that moves away from Nathan (and that needs to) is Leah, and she moves to someone else, a(n improbably appropriate) romantic interest, but that one's telegraphed from miles away too. The sections play out as examples of the known difficulties, but those misunderstandings were always there. And it's weird, because in the last third of the book, the long epilogue, the characters age in great leaps, and get a chance to look back to understand how their experience in Africa has defined them. Here the evolution of their characters is suddenly wholly plausible and highly persuasive. Now Adah is challenged with the selfishness of her conception of things. (Is it plausible that her handicap was merely learned behavior, incidentally? It gives her an interesting vehicle for self-reflection, but I'm not sure how realistic that is.) Now Leah develops depth to her cultural understanding. Hell, even Rachel evolves postscripturally into the true mode of her uselessness, and Kingsolver is able to subtly put an iota of wisdom in her head too. Certainly she's grown beyond a Georgia debutante, despite her disinclination to.

A modern reader might find it hard to buy into Nathan. He's a smart and motivated guy, but how could he maintain his will over a family of wiser, cleverer, more dynamic, and more interesting women by the mere force of patriarchy? If he didn't resemble so many of that, and even the children's (my parents') generation, if I didn't see my own family members so clearly right in there, then I might think him a caricature. Instead, I see him as an accurate (if extreme) portrayal of how people can oppress and subdue the families they imagine they nurture. His religious inflexibility is ironic--as if Christianity hadn't evolved to accommodate any number of societies, including his distinctively American Baptist take on it—but Nathan isn't a man with the slightest dose of irony, nor one to question the singularity of the American experience. If we learn anything more about Nathan, it's the perfect depth of his contemptibility.

The parallel of the Price family with America's treatment of the Congo isn't very subtle, and it gets a mention, but admirably, Kingsolver doesn't really harp on it. Viewing (patriarchal) politics and society from the angle of motherhood and womanhood is useful. The author shows, in the context of an interesting story, how power can be willfully blind and self-interested, as well as how its use can extend from the powerful, or fail to, instead extending from the setting. (To that running interest of mine, she makes a good anthropological case, intentionally or no, about calorie (and protein) availability as it dictates certain modes of civilization.) The African women are focused mostly on the basic dynamics of life and the forces above impinge on it, but change things only with difficulty, more by changing the conditions of things than imposing rules and ideas. I thought Kingsolver did an excellent job of positioning that observational understanding against the larger relationships in the world theater, giving the modern corporate state the indictment it deserves, although occasionally you do occasionally get a whiff of credulity when it comes to the prospect of any better proposals (Could Lumumba really have been so benevolent? Could the pre-contact Congolese society really have been so well balanced?) but it's smart to pose them from Leah who is given to a bit of ideal-worship in spite of moving past her old man, and anyway, it's understood that these are lost questions, worth regretting.

[There's probably a good case to be made that the Enlightenment- or colonial-era Europeans did not understand primitivism very well, or were at least ill-equipped to study it. (I say "probably" because I'm still not very willing to delve into the source literature.) It seems like a related issue, although I think it'd be better to say that your typical citizen these days, with more available information but lots of his own society's structure and benefits in front of his eyes, simply declines to make a validating comparison. I think that Kingsolver (based as much on Animal, Vegetable, Miracle than this one) and I, as well as of other writers on the theme (Wendell Berry or Eduardo Galeano come to mind), and a couple readers of this blog, will agree that we've ignored some valuable lessons from the throwback days, that would be worth re-examining in a modern context. A community of interconnected but more deeply rooted localities, each appropriate to its own environment, is probably a better one, and possibly an end-point of our own arc anyway. I don't know if it's realistic to think we can up and go all Iroquois Confederation or anything, but it's interesting how radical that would really be. Western history has been a long story of consolidation and subjugation over the couple of millennia (and of course people got the empire bug in Asia, Africa and the Americas from time to time too). Localizing like that would certainly throw the European-style bordered nation-state right on its ass, but I have my usual urge to caveat the hell out of that sort of thing: (1) we'd need a lot fewer people; (2) it's a better land-use and community support model, but it's society model that has a lot of room to righteously suck. Ample interconnections between the nodes has got to be an improvement over a more primitive form, as does technology and exchange. Imagine limited but versatile travel, easy communication, ready access to ideas, science and history. Also, (3) centralization works for some things, although it seems very difficult to pick and choose what we employ it for. Public insurance and resource management without ruling classes and wars between them? Good luck with that. Maybe I should call all this out as a longer post, but it fits in Kingsolver's themes, and frankly, I desperately need some new headlines.]

Pretty Soon You're Talking Real Money

2011-05-19T16:58:00.004-04:00

So, I saw on TV last night that Obama is looking to raise a billion dollars for his 2012 presidential campaign. There's not a candidate alive who doesn't think his stewardship is worth the effort and manpower required to put him in that capacity, but still, a billion bucks? Wow.

I'll admit that a billion doesn't buy what it used to. If so inclined, candidate Obama could bankroll both Feeding America and Doctors without Borders for a year ($400M and $600M respectively) with that kind of scratch. If he had the gall, he could also front the entire budget of federal alternative energy research for a year too. Or fund three free days (more or less) blowing people up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A billion dollars spread out to every hospital in the country (about 6000 of them) could donate about $170,000 to each, about a doctor for a year. Spread to every town (about 25000) could be about $40,000 each, employing yet another sorely underpaid teacher for twelve months, although probably not with benefits. Spread to every household (about 100M), then it's crisp clean ten dollar bill. Not much, but we can certainly appreciate the thought. Once I got past my justifiable suspicions, I would at least drink the sixpack the president bought for my family. Chump change I can believe in.

(Parenthetically, I suppose that this implies if everyone and their spouse checked off the $3 box on their 1040s, then these fuckers would have more than enough money for campaigning and related graft.)

It's not like we don't know who the guy is, but let's assume he still needs to extract a couple hundred thousand bucks to attend the inevitable debates. He can explain the other details of the stunt to the incredulous press during the usual briefings. If president Obama decided to forgo the rest of the business (and taking the further improbable assumption that one can fundraise a billion without returning a significant chunk of it to the fundraising activities)--no babykissing, no ad buys, no rubber chicken meet-n-greets--would you vote for Barack Obama if he gave you ten bucks?

Sure you'd just be getting bought off by the donors directly, but at least you'd be in the loop for once. And it'd be a lot fucking quieter. And who knows, maybe the pundit goobers could find something useful to talk about besides the campaign.

Review: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard Feynman

2011-05-19T13:40:00.005-04:00

By Richard Feynman? Well, it's a series of presentations and interviews given by him, so the byline is mostly correct. Although it includes some of his famous technical predictions (on the future of computing and nanotechnology) and indictments (his report on the Challenger disaster), it's basically non-technical, filled up with anecdotes and the wider variety of his thoughts. It contains most of what I had actually read or heard of Feynman before I picked up some of his physics lectures the year before last. I saw the video following his report on the space shuttle in materials science class back when I was a freshman—the one where he dunks the o-ring into the ice water—and thought it was a bit of grandstanding actually. I was more impressed with the report statement this time around, which seems less out to impress and more to rather boldly condemn the deserving. I'd read the same snippet of Cargo Cult Science on the internet a half dozen times, which seems to get at something profound, and I remain ambivalent about the plenty of room on the bottom speech, as pull-quotes have appeared in front of approximately forty bazillion talks or review papers in the past 20 years. And, right, I am sure that Feynman diagrams got mentioned in passing somewhere near the end of physics III, where they wrapped up a survey of the stuff that was part of the field but you probably wouldn't need unless you chose to study it. And that's it. I was aware of who he was, knew something of his general contributions, and had heard of his mercurial approach to life. The influence on scientists and rationalists of my acquaintance has tended to sneak in here and there.

So let me tell you why I am disappointed. It just makes my own quasi-public bloviating seem so pointless. Maybe it should be validating, but the science philosophy you'll find here is of a tune with what I've been occasionally wailing about for more or less the entirety of time I've held this blog: accepting doubt as part of an honest worldview; evidence-based thinking; the dynamism between theory and measurement; approximations and representations pitted against objective reality; inquiry as a sort of moral imperative; informed wiseassery. What more does that leave me to comment about it? And I am forced to ask: how much debt does my own struggling worldview owe to this guy? Obviously I've read and interacted with many folks who were influenced by him. How corrupted am I by the company I've kept? Do we all think the same? What a depressing thought. (I don't actually think it's quite right: here's only one of many giants who asked the questions I, and you, happened to land in the middle of a public answering.)

Feynman's science philosophy was clearly important to him, but from these interviews, espousing it was more of a byproduct of his life than a motivation. (He always had quantum electrodynamics to fall back on, after all, not to mention rhythm.) He didn't read a lot of the stuff (and I still wonder how much it shows, really), dismissed what little he did read as an elaborate exercise in simplistic thinking, but for all that, he did do a lot of philosophizing. If this collection is representative of all his interviews, then it's a big part of what the public wanted to hear from him, and what we took away, and so he gets the role by default. It's a shame, almost, that he never really took it as far as he took his science, and while he was willing to march up and acknowledge the big moral questions of his career, I think he chose to leave some of the difficult ones hanging. Was he haunted by his role in the Manhattan project? He has a story about it that he liked to tell (he must have been asked about it a lot), and from it, I think the answer was yes. He tells us of the distinction between the thrill of the intellectual work, and of being a part of a community of exceptional and quirky scientists, and the late-dawning realization of the bomb's implications, which might be the end of all things. But acknowledgement is not judgment. Was there shame, regret, disillusionment? I can't really tell from the writing. In various of these interviews, Feynman would rather set judgment and decisions apart from the scientific process, and I think that's a fair peace, if it's a valid one. But if your research is driven with an intent to do massive harm, then should you do it? He doesn't seem to be the guy to indulge in very much self recrimination, and what the hell, he was really young at that time. By the time he challenged the NASA higher-ups later in life, his view of managerial competence had obviously dimmed. In the last segment of the book, he makes some similar observations on religion, noting, diplomatically, that its matters of spiritual fulfillment are, and should probably remain, unchallenged by science, but that faith exceeded its power of natural explanation some centuries ago. He avoids reaching a deeper conclusion about this, but maybe he's only offering a properly skeptical interpretation, and leaving the actual judgment to the audience. Maybe that's the best thing an honest thinker can do.

It must have been a big score to interview Feynman about religion. But for a few vestigial cultural trappings, I don't get Feynman as any kind of deist, but in ways he thinks like one, really one of these wonder-in-the-miracle-of-god's-creation types. He is infectious when he's talking about the surprising elegance of the universe, and the surprisingly deep logical reach of mathematics, and the underappreciated poetry of these things. He talks about his early mentors, especially his father, who taught him to approach an understanding of the world with appreciation, playfulness and creativity. And speaking of cargo cults, you could do all the things his dad did with little Richard, and you still wouldn't get a Feynman--any more than freezing over your yard and strapping the skates onto Junior gets you a little Gretzky--there was no doubt some outstanding nature that came together with the outstanding nurture. You could see where it grew from: here's the rare scientist who you'd imagine could get himself to devalue his own beliefs or theories with pure objectivity, given the proper evidence, possibly because he was humble enough, or had a knack to see things clearly from several different approaches, or because it was easy and exciting for him to reformulate his understanding of things.

I've mentioned that I picked this to read paired against that David Foster Wallace romp, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which looks at childhood and other power structures with every intention of holding the reader down, and biting him back, a wit which was the definition of mordant. Since both were broken up into shorts, I basically shuffled them together, like an angel/devil sort of thing on each shoulder. One guy felt paralyzed by doubt, the other energized by it. Feynman's wit was more the force of inspiration, clear thinking, and optimism in new discoveries, which he retained even after catching a glimpse of how people and nature really work.

And I'm Over Getting Older

2011-05-09T14:50:00.004-04:00

Well, it's obvious that thinking about the state and trajectory of the species couldn't depress me very much more, so maybe it's time to change the subject to something that is a madcap buzz of positivity and optimism, you know, like getting older. Thirty-eight and counting, and somehow, without realizing it, I've crossed over into crinkled-forehead, responsible adulthood. This sucks! I mean, what the fuck, how did this happen? How did it happen to me?

I was never huge into trendy music movements, but there were a few bands I'd try and see if I could, and I generally liked the experience of a good crowd enough to try and get out once in a while. I haven't gone and seen a big rock show for ten years now, and I'm not sure how I got permission even that time, but the last experience was typical. Waiting in traffic, watching everyone toke weed in the parking lot, a run to the beer tent to pleasantly remove the edge, sweat, noise, screaming, darkness, dancing with minimal rhythm. It was almost exactly ten years ago, and I tell you, there's nothing like being outdoors with a beer in a crowd on a summery evening. It's exhilirating. I've never seen a professional baseball game, but last weekend's concert had me walking the kids on the sidewalk outside of Fenway park right before the Red Sox game, and there was something similar. Since the last show though, my live music experience has generally been limited to bar blues (meaning the setting rather than the musical structure), and your more ecumenical sort of outdoor event (a number of bluegrass festivals in that last category). I've really come to appreciate the summertime show that can get multiple generations up there and dancing around. Somehow, I've drifted away from any venue where you might readily spot a defiant youth.

I went to my first "real" concert when I was 15, when a friend dragged me along to go see Cheap Trick at a small outdoor venue. Good times, enjoyable show, but there wasn't a lot of 'em I needed to see at that age. At 13, safe to say that I had no friggin' clue at all about the music scene. My daughter, well, hasn't been quite the same. She's been following a Canadian band for about a year, and in February not only got her chance to see them, but actually got her picture taken wih her favorite singer (supervised, thank goodness). Since then, she has become totally insufferable, branching out into an appreciation of the general scene, blasting the radio or plugging herself into it, and coming up with all these annoying expectations.

What's her music like? I'm googling up some descriptors of the genre, including punk, rock, pop, and emo, but I probably would have used none of those words. Or maybe you need to use all of them, either as some kind of post-generational fusion, or (depending on the artist) the usual approach to the lowest common denominator. I've found it to be musically competent (even if it failed to melt my face off, dude), and it doesn't suck out of the gate. I'd describe the sound as something resembling dance tracks that someone finally decided would be more worthwhile with actual instrumentalists playing them and with songwriting that actually aspired to care what the lyrics said. I'd warrant a guess that the fan community occupies some transitional ground between the factory-made teenybopper garbage and whatever the college kids are into nowadays. Or maybe it's the legitimate big thing--who can tell now that there's no radio anymore?

Suggestively, it rises to about an entendre and a half, which appears to fly right over the heads of the fangirls (and it's just as well). I can't tell if the whole thing has been strangled down to semi-authenticity by what's left of the music industry, or if they're all just resigned to not out-do their parents and grandparents. I mean, our rock icons have already got the sexual ambiguity, religious affront, tuneless shouting, drug culture, music comprised entirely of sampling, death iconography, creepy body art, and angry rebellion covered, so what's left to piss off the parents? All that hasn't gone out of style is the stuff that never will: sex and youth. I mean, if these guys were to pump their fists and scream how it's all bullshit anyway and fuck The Man, then Mom and Dad are going to be cheering louder than the kids are.

Anyway, I digress. Here's the scene from a couple weeks ago. "Please Daddy, my friend already bought tickets. I love this band, you can't say no."

Now, I am a pretty permissive parent, but telling me that I can't say no is right up there with telling me that that's all you can eat--I'll show her what I can or can't do. Also, I really didn't want to have to deal with it, so I thought that saying the dad thing played up nicely to the family gift for contrarianism and reverse psychology. "No way are you going to a concert without an adult. Thirteen years old? You must be joking. Hell no." (Yes! Triumph!)

Which how I ended up with a ticket to go see All Time Low on Friday, along with a couple of other bands a that fanned out a little bit in either direction on the teenager/adult spectrum. (The headlining band collected bras, which is a bit creepy given the fans' age, but I suspect they weren't removed at the scene. My daughter's friend brought some pajamas in her bag to throw, but we were too far to reach, and had a better chance at hitting the sound guys and so refrained.) As mentioned above, it wasn't the music that was so bad, but the crowd was definitely ...offputting. A two-hour drive with the Fenway traffic, and the beer was overpriced and crappy, but the line to the bar, as well as to the men's room, was non-existent. There were 13-14 year old girls as far as the eye could see, and I failed to pass myself off as a teenager, even though I tried to dress down. On the second-tier section, where we were, the kids all lined up along the along the balcony, and there was enough space behind them for the straggling minority of parents to mill around and look bored. The cheering was decidedly high-pitched.

(Late in the show, they put the Bruins game on in the bars, and sometimes male cheers would sound up out of nowhere, drowning out the kids for a few seconds. I think it pissed off the band a little, but you know, welcome to Boston.)

When I used to go to rock concerts, people would hold up lighters during the inevitable ballads. (The one Grateful Dead show I watched, the place looked like a Christmas tree the second the lights went down, as the lighters got to more normal use as well.) Now it's constantly-waved iphones and cameras, to similar audience effect. It's weird without the (absence of) smells, but smoking is now outlawed here in Massachusetts for just about all public places (the single most benevolent accomplishment of the nanny state), and it's weird without the general intoxication, but most of the audience was too young to drink. There wasn't much press of crowd up in the balcony, as I said, but it looked somewhat energetic down below. Kids still mosh evidently, to varying approval of the bands.

My daughter and her friend snapped about ten dozen pictures, and at least one bedroom now has a new All Time Low shrine. And of course I'm curious what it will grow into. But what's the rush? Older comes before you're ready anyway.

Close it out, kiddos:
Maybe it's not my weekend, but it's gonna be my year,
And I've been going crazy, I'm stuck in here...

Perspective

2011-05-03T16:52:00.007-04:00

What usually jars is the racism. You're reading along, and suddenly some horrible slur leaps from a dead author's pen. Ethnic characters are confined to minor roles, and generally reduced to accommodate popular caricatures. Hook-nosed and oleaginous Jews haunt the boundaries of European literature; pickaninnies and injuns pop up to offend from American books (and hell, from American television in living memory); British novels are populated with innumerable demeaning extras from the various colonies. Examples are so trivial and common that it's hard to hunt for them. When race is addressed consciously, there's some threshold of skill under which the thinking of the time could be exposed and subverted, but that was still done from a worldview that included the racism. I am thinking of your Faulkners or Twains or Conrads in that second category, who showed us whiteness with its scars and its travesties, and were observant and capable enough to complicate identities and entertain true personhood, but still used racial characters to to tell stories about what it meant to be white in those times, even with the knowing gleam that it meant being a monster. Looking back, you almost wonder why those great minds tortured themselves around a now-obvious empathy, why they instead elected to develop complexities which didn't fail to include the simplified foreignness, but of course it's how they, or everyone around them, were used to thinking about darker people. More than that: it's how they were used to observing them. We underappreciate how difficult it was to look past the prejudices that their society was built around, as well as how thoroughly we fail to see the ones which inform our own. Writing character fiction is so much extrapolation of ourselves into alien minds (and they all are alien), and even extending the map as far as possible still communicates something to readers about you and the worldview you inhabit. It had to be hard for a 19th century white man to write realistically about black identity and experience, especially when it was not customary to sit and have a conversation on an equal footing. (There is plenty historical literary trend to dismiss women too, but at least there, a fella had incentive and excuse to occasionally talk to them.) Can we judge a writer for being part of his times? Maybe and maybe not, but I think we can judge their times. Ours too.

[Jews may have gotten a head start on rehabilitation in the western canon. I was interested to read, for example, how Charles Dickens revised Fagin after the original publication of Oliver Twist, following the feedback of Jewish friends. But his subsequent efforts to create empathetic Jews still seem a little patronizing, don't they? Fifty years later, and I thought that James Joyce was a smidge patronizing to Leopold Bloom too, despite all the effort at a realistic in-the-head representation of him.]

There are a couple of associations I've had in my life that, while I don't really approve of the traditional view, were nonetheless wonderful experiences. As an adult, it fills me with fondness and apology, torturing me with ambivalence and presents a lot of conflict about institutions and individuality thanks to good personal experiences in them and the quality of people that inhabit them. (Sound familiar?) A big one of those was the boy scouts, which I loved for some of the reasons I was supposed to, and also for the aspects our little band of losers, misfits, and assholes refused to take seriously. Recently, I was reminded of Boy's Life. (Can I now justify leaving that perplexing comment?) When I was a kid, I used to go to the library and pore over that magazine, skipping to the comic serializations of John Christopher's Tripod stories (since I stole this person's thumbnail, go ahead and check the thing out at length on their blog; I get a kick out of the dangly schlonginess of that lone Tripod tentacle), and stayed for the boy's outdoor adventure porn. The Tripods would put a little mesh hat on you, and you'd go through life hypnotized, oblivious to their nefarious alien schemes (which of course I no longer remember, probably they were stealing our precious resources, aliens always do that). Science fiction likes to invent reasons to blind people to the horrifying truths, but I think the reality is more banal.

For example, the boy scouts. Please ignore here the recent blowups the organization has had over gay members and at which point it discards moms, the weird thing about the boy scouts is that they are, at heart, a military-friendly organization. We've got the uniforms, the regimentation, the pledges and purity oaths. (About half of my leaders were veterans too, and I should note good people, but I don't want to confuse anecdote and data here.) More than that, there's the history. I mean, scouting is a combat job. Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the revered founder, looms over the movement like some benevolent spirit, cast in fading colors in a Stetson and fatherly mustache, more symbolic than real, like the George Washington of self-reliant boys. In life, he was a career military man, advancing Britain in its imperial heyday, forging his scoutcraft in Africa and melding it with a naturalist appreciation there, fighting in India and the Mediterranean, rising rapidly through the ranks to cement his reputation leading a miraculous resistance at the siege of Mafeking in the second Boer War. It was a decidedly odd sensation to roll across a boyhood icon in one of Churchill's histories, and you know, it's a far different perspective than what I got when I was 10. The Boer war is remembered for the Brits' innovative use of pestilential concentration camps to their military advantage, and as Wikipedia notes, the boy soldiers (participating in a civilized junior capacity) at Mafeking contributed to his ideas to promote military scouting skills to kids too. And look, I don't want to demolish the man's reputation so much as I want to develop ambiguity and complexity about it. He was an important figure in a monstrous enterprise as well as an educational one. Baden-Powell may well be shining example of personal discipline, a Kipling-esque model of integrity, a genuine survivalist and naturalist. On the other hand, what reason to think he didn't order improper executions, or send legions of expedient locals to their doom? Any cause beyond revisionism to believe he wasn't impressed, however naively, with fascist ideals later in life? I mean, the overlap in style is a little discomfiting. Was he not also a propagandist, a guiltless and decent face to paste on Britain's foul imperial reach, monarchical infestation, and heartless butchery of the dusky hordes? I don't remember any of those things getting much attention when I combed the back issues of Boy's Life.

We might call the man a product of his times too, and aren't we all. Baden-Powell shot people that, to his understanding, it was okay to shoot. He operated nobly within his idiom, which is the usual and understandable approach to the human experience, but the legacy of that worldview is still actively fucking up the globe. And things like imperialism and peonage, violence and exploitation, deforestation and extinction, persist because people are inclined to make the best of their various situations, and not push much against the bounds they're born into. (Should they? How should they? Isn't revolution its own evil?) It's hard to bust out of the paradigm. It's hard even to identify it. I am certainly doing no better, and I admit that paradigms can come with some redeeming features too.

Do you remember how you felt in 2001 when you saw this?

Disgusted, angry is how I felt. How does it compare to these assholes?

In 2011, it's hard to find a picture of those cheering Palestinians (of which there were evidently as many as a couple dozen) that isn't linked to some really noxious blog. The cheering Americans are all over the quality outlets, but hey, it's more recent. (It took me till the ride home to find the right expression of my distaste, and of course I only find that I was beaten to it, but at least that was one less photo I had to look up.) Similarly, it's almost been enough to make me swear off Facebook.

I don't read books for the lessons and I hate to preach (really, what the hell has happened to me?), and by no means do I suggest giving up on the literary canon. Beauty, insight, and entertainment are justification enough, and the apologies get easier the farther you go back in the past, or the more disconnected you let yourself feel. (Parenthetically, it took a while to understand how lucky it is to be so removed. I remember I took a class in college where we were instructed read Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea back to back. It was an interesting contrast I thought, but I felt like an outside observer to both narratives, and no doubt still would. For some of us doofi, this empathy thing takes years.) But the act of working out context, of mapping our own worldview onto the alien mind and strange times of a great writer is a project with some nice side benefits, not a bad tool when it comes to building understanding and perspective.

They'll judge us for our times too, possibly by some distasteful or unanticipated standard, or maybe on standards we just prefer to not admit. 19th century racism and imperialism didn't exactly go unopposed. Maybe it's worth asking what are we ignoring in our bliss. As for me, I tell myself that I am at least struggling to an awareness of the paradigm, that at least I won't celebrate my cognitive dissonance. It's not like history will view me any better.

Review: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace

2011-04-20T15:27:00.004-04:00

In 1985, Richard Feynman presented a suite of ideas to a Japanese audience about the future of computing, the text of which was included in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, the second half of this paired review, coming to a blog near you, um, real soon now. Feynman, of course, was a remarkably clear thinker, and is remembered for being rather accurate in his predictions about these things (or at least enough prognostication hit the mark that lectures could be plucked 15 years later to support a reputation of prescience). He talked about miniaturization, which was obviously an early trend (and a safe prediction in '85!), and parallel computing is also something we adopted before so very long, although more interested scientists than me can tell me how closely and how well he called that one. One of the ideas he threw around that was new to me were about using (more) reversible processes for low-energy computing. Imagine the inside of your computer shredded down to the very cells: at the component level, the basic functions of almost all the devices--transistors and diodes--are to control the flow and direction of an electrical current, open and shutting like little informational ratchets. When they are powered, they're meant to be irreversible. As you wire these up together into little logic structures and present inputs, as shown in the NAND gate from his lecture (could have been any of them: NAND returns 0 if both inputs are 1, and returns 1 otherwise), it presents a new output and then neglects what brought it there. If the output were allowed to roll back through the gate, then it would become meaningless--you have to run each device at energies many orders of magnitude higher than thermal diffusion, so that the gate does not do that. You have to supply enough power to make sure your computation rolls down to the very end.

If, on the other hand, your output function preserves information which produced the decision, then, said Feynman, rolling back over the little hills wouldn't be a big deal. So shown here is his picture of a reversible NAND logic gate. Letting the system diffuse backwards is no longer so disconcerting, it can slosh back and forth at the local scale, so long as there is a net energy gradient pushing the whole thing forward. It may well end up being slower than CMOS, but it'll use far less energy.

[And let's do have fun thinking about that a sec. Imagining a characteristic clock cycle or distance between gates, could computation still occur very well as we encroached on that spatial or temporal period? Couldn't we have a low-activation energy irreversible computer? Presumably that would run along a cascade of chemical reactions—would that DNA computer I talked about a few years ago qualify? Would you bother to make a reversible logic gate out of transistors, or would you find some other element?]

I suppose that's the way that statistical (thermodynamic) processes tend to work in nature, cumulatively, but since we're talking computers, doesn't that seem like how we think too? I mean that as a personal observation and not a scientific statement, that is, I don't know if amounts to a servicable model of neural behavior, but as far as the way thoughts roll along in my tiny brain, the surging forward and racing back like waves, caught in loops as they chase their imaginary tails, maybe making some forward progress but only with effort and a great deal of redundance, making conclusions but only after gently wearing in the path and trucking the assumptions along, then it seems to be right on. I'm happy that it does go forward, at least sometimes, and maybe it's as useful a scale of intelligence as we'll get. I can almost hear the engine roaring along for some people while the clutch fails to engage, and it may be Feynman's genius that he was better able than most people to keep it clicking forward (and was fearless enough to let the path take him where it led).

And this may well be one of the pleasures of fiction too, to extract the linear trends out of the highly recursive subjective experiences. I think it's good writing to engage a deeper understanding of what cognition and communication really feels like in the extreme close-up, but on the other hand, there's a reason we've been lying to ourselves about it for 6000+ years. We humans seem to find this intellectual muddling forward to be just a touch unpleasant and like to make our stories about sequences and decisions. And then let's throw into that bubbling stew some other human frailties--depression, negative comparisons, failed standards—and a deep awareness of the process can start to be a real bitch. Self-loathing can achieve a very special circularity among smart people, where it leads to an analysis of your own character, which leads an understanding of why you're miserable and how you've failed to change it, which is loathsome. It may be astute, but how much of this does anyone really want to read?

This is the spirit that suffuses almost everything in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. (There are many such brief interviews, and the whole book includes those among a long series of other vignettes and shorts.) The title of the book is the punchline: the many depressed or disturbed characters are exposed by the text as, in fact, horrible people, despite their lies and notwithstanding their occasional awareness. I hate that I got sick of them halfway through, and after a while I stopped distinguishing them so well, particularly in the "hideous men" sections, where everyone shared the same mannerisms (unpunctuated quote unquote speech qualifiers and so forth) and a universally easy intellectual access to the world of the therapist's couch, whatever the actual varied settings of the interview. Too much self-help styled recrimination hanging under a very affected textual experiment. Eventually it all started to sound in my mind like the relentless thumps and scratches of David Foster Wallace flogging himself.

I don't think it had to connect in such a leaden fashion with me. There are points of this book that are funny, which would have worked even better if he had made his jokes and kept things short. I wish there were more of them. I remarked to Schmutzie that some of the sections could read a little like a comedy routine, and a feeling of external context would have done wonders for that, but I didn't often have enough in the text itself to spot Wallace's humor cues (and it wasn't quite satisfying enough to run the experiment assuming it's humor). Some of the situations are sufficiently absurd (there's an episode of intimidation by literal dick-waving) that they're worth a bemused chuckle, and some of the characters attain a self-negating Humbertish pomposity that is entertainment gold (god help me, I thought the episode where the old man elaborates on his deathbed his resentment of his offspring—babies are such users—was hilarious). But that's not an author comparison I'd have preferred to make, because while I can accept the discomforting marriage of felicity and nastiness, it's got to balance, and Nabokov comes off as a far better writer in the matchup, while Wallace leaves me heavy on the hideousness. Likewise, the contrast of their stated equanimity to everything else they reveal in their interviews was well-positioned and entertaining when it was covered the first dozen times, but eventually the mode got too well-used. I do wonder how those parts would have grabbed me as a teenager, when I was more willing to entertain that "what women want" could be compartmentalized from their existence as human beings.

Wallace tried to break the short story form often and consciously in this book. Breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader worked much less well than taking apart the language and monkeying with it. There is a story—told disjointed, tinted, and almost poetic—that elevates a personal tragedy into something almost beautiful and dreamlike. I also enjoyed the freewheeling retelling of a California drama in the style of some futuristic mythic versificator. The skills are there, and more playfulness and less hideousness would have gone a long way toward my enjoyment. I don't want the self-loathing spiral to seem even more shallow and yet inescapable.

Yes Asshole, the Rich Are Getting Richer

2011-03-30T15:19:00.007-04:00

I visited my parents last weekend, and as I once mentioned before, these excursions usually include a lazy Sunday morning with the old home-town news rag. The city of Waterbury is most recently famous for the frightening habits of former mayors, but many years before that (maybe stretching into my early youth) the region I grew up was part of an important industrial hub. It's an urban mix peculiar to the northeastern United States: decades of corporate flight that should, you'd think, have given them some perspective by now on how difficult it is to run a city—whipping up its economy or providing services, depending on which church of ideas you attend—when the local hiring firms keep disappearing and abandoning the tax base. Despite this long trend, the Waterbury paper remains a bastion of conservative opinion, dancing with the one that brought 'em (down) over this timespan, and is currently and constantly worked up about Big Government as well as the scarier, swarthier immigrant population which is no longer from European countries that begin with the letter "I" (and which lacks those erstwhile job prospects). [Although maybe there's something to the Big Government points: no doubt any incentive the city can now offer—tax breaks, loans, industrial sites with all the hookups—is piddling consolation for taking away the freedom to dump all of the tailings you can directly into the Naugatuck river, and that pesky Superfund law clearly did slow down that mall project a few years ago, but those fine, fine minimum wage retail jobs got there anyway, they did.]

Which is not really what I'm getting at, beyond to say that the old local paper grants me a special annoyance. When my wife turns on the news at home or when I drive back listening to All Things Considered, then I only need to marvel about how extreme the mainstream has become, and the distress doesn't last. When I steal time online, I see the accepted conservatives actually subjected to the comments they so richly invite, which sates me enough to not have to write anything about it myself. But when I go to visit Mom and Dad, and the op-eds are framed in official-looking black-and-white, and what letters filter in through the editors are as supportive as they are illiterate, when, it's editorial policy aside, it's a pretty decent paper for its market size, then I find that no one is getting livid here but me. Among the usual inveterate assembly of Malkins and Wills and Krauthammers, the Republican American trucks in your more shameless (and artless) variety of deniers and class warriors for its editorial page. On Sunday, it was some guy named Steven R. Cunningham of the American Institute for Economic Research. (The version I read is behind a subscription wall, but you can find plenty of copies online from other venues.) I don't really know anything about the AIER, other than it's in the most beautiful part of Massachusetts, but if this guy is an example of its alleged mission of objective economics education and not representing concentration of wealth, then its founders are surely spinning in their graves. More likely it's just your standard pro-power think tank. Cunningham is out to skewer "one of the most enduring economic myths" that the rich are getting richer.

"It isn't true. When most people think of the rich, they probably are thinking of people with great wealth. When they think of the poor, they probably are thinking of people with low incomes. While there's obviously a correlation between wealth and income, they're not the same. And we shouldn't confuse them."

I'm going to limit the line-by-lines for this guy—the full FJM thing is not my bag, and I'm not quite making that the central point either—and excessive charts are boring (I'll link for you though), but that article should not pass without comment. From the opening graf, he proceeds from here to thrash, not this alleged myth, but a fairly irrelevant straw person, noting that people who have the most wealth are generally older, which may or may not mean something or other, but certainly leads the reader away from the important distinctions he didn't make between wealth and income, and rich and poor.

Most people consider "rich" or "poor" to be a state of concern about meeting basic necessities, extraneous pleasures, and once those things are taken care of, of attaining status. I suppose it's nice that we weren't treated to the usual false equivalence between modern pleasures (like iPods and TVs) and necessities (like cost of living and, if we wish to outlive our pre-industrial counterparts, medical care, and, of course, the indenture that most people accept to attain those things), but since richness is in part something you feel, then it's not surprising there's some subjectivity in the definitions.

But income and wealth are more quantitative. And yes, it's an important distinction, but as an economics educator (yar har), Mr. Cunningham might understand that the reason people prefer to discuss income distribution is because it's just easier to come by. Most countries keep statistics on this sort of thing, which is handy if you try to make informed economic arguments, comparisons between countries, and other stuff you'd think would be important to economics educators. Wealth assets, meanwhile, are more varied in form, and more likely to be undisclosed and private. Wealth can mean less liquidity than the numbers on your paycheck represent, but lets not kid ourselves that the "wealthy" are exemplified by the old people receiving fixed annuity payments in Cunningham's hypothetical anecdote, or that the very wealthy are in any way not rich. Steve-O is counting on his readers to neglect looking very closely at the wealth distribution he mentions, which in Waterbury is evidently a good bet. When you do look at those numbers, they're far more damning than income distribution when it comes to inequality: the top 1% of the wealthy own about 35% of it, and the top 20% own about half. It's slightly less unequal in terms of net worth (because lots of people have home equity) than it is for financial wealth, but either one is sufficient to roundfile his whole thesis. Yes, based on analysis of wealth, more of it is concentrating in the upper levels and yes, there is less distributed among us proles in the lower 80% as time goes by. The rich are getting richer, and the wealthy are getting wealthier.

"For example, from 2000 to 2009, inflation-adjusted household income fell 4.5 percent, but consumer spending increased 22.4 percent. This raises an obvious question: How did people dramatically increase spending on shrinking paychecks? The answer is: They didn't."

Hey, I wonder if anything else changed in 2000-2009! I won't keep you in suspense. Among other things, household debt increased in this timeframe by about 12% per year, while income fell as stated. I'm sure there's a relationship to spending here somewhere.

"They did increase spending. But paychecks weren't shrinking. Instead, the number of individuals per U.S. household was shrinking, which lowered the average. Real disposable income, which is essentially total after-tax income, rose 25.2 percent from 2000 to 2009. At the same time, however, households got smaller, as more people divorced, or rejected or delayed marriage. So total spending went up, while average household income - due to the larger number of households - went down."

I'm the last person to buy into the idea that economics is a field with engineering precision and scientific understanding, but we can still endeavor to put useful numbers to this sort of thing for the purposes of estimates, and some of these institutional numbers are publicly recorded and pretty easy to come by.

Households only shrank a little in this time period, but there's definitely been a downward trend since the 1960s. Cunningham is probably tooting some social dogwhistles here, but the down-slope has correlated pretty strongly with decreased fertility rate, and the smaller households are largely a result of there being fewer children in all, and more people living alone (e.g.). We can look at this a little more objectively using useful variables such as the dependency ratio, which is the ratio of the too-young and/or too-old (depending on how it is broken down; the latter usually trotted out for Social Security scare stories, but the former is more relevant to household size) compared to people of working age, and this has also declined in the cited time frame, most of the decline coming from, again, fewer children. We can also look at the participation rate, which is the number of people of working age that are in fact working. Eyeballing the graphs and applying some simple math gives relevant ratios:

2000: 1.1 children per worker
2010: 1.3 children per worker

So people are, on average, supporting more kids, contrary to Cunningham's statement, but hold the phone for a minute here... The trend since the sixties has been fewer children. If you click on the chart for participation rate, you'll note another awesome economic revolution that happened in about 2000, when the bubble burst: all of a sudden there turned out to be a lot more people than jobs. Household size shrunk slightly, but the fact that the number of available jobs dried up affected the number more.

[Most of the post-1960 growth in the participation rate is due to women entering the workforce, which no doubt has contributed to the decreasing fertility rate as well. But these two trends before 2000 (not to mention extant retirement schemes since 1935 or so) have overall been to drastically reduce the number of dependents per worker. Cunningham is, of course, prevaricating here in a general sense, even if he's picked out a little patch on which he can daub on some bullshit. Fewer dependents from 1960-2000 probably did help people feel richer though, but I don't think the increased participation rate did. Are you richer when you need two incomes to do what your dad managede with one? (If you are a woman, you may indeed be freer.) This is a reason that household income is relevant.]

"The problem is that we are not told that the top 20 percent of households includes four times as many workers as the bottom 20 percent, and nearly six times as many full-time, year-round workers. Knowing this makes a lot of difference in interpreting the original statement."

People in lower quintiles have fewer earners per household, but they also have fewer children to support. The ratios of earners per household are pretty shocking, really. The summaries in the Wiki article are consistent with all of the above figures. And what exactly do they prove? Rich households, we are pretty sure from experience and data, do not tend to have six earners in them, not without some hefty violations of child labor laws, nor are they comprised of sprawling complexes filled with in-laws and cousins, or at least that's not the sort of arrangement that pops up on the lifestyle shows. Rich households (obviously) top out at a little less than two earners per home. You have to conclude that poorer households have not only a significant fraction of zero income people, but to approach four-to-one, over half of them need to have no earners in them at all. And among those working in the bottom 20%, most of them are only doing it part time. This seems to be a horrifying reason that they're poor, and not really a point in favor of the awesomeness of the rich. I mean, it's another way of looking unemployment—of course the lowest income group is going to include all the people who have zero income—but these numbers are telling us that that comprises a hell of a lot of people. Is this sinecured fucker really ginning up contempt for all those lucky duckies with no jobs at all? (Yes.) And it's clear from the same data that working part time isn't going to do a damned thing for you either.

And needless to say, the income that the quintiles receive is well-published, and only the top two really have made gains, before or after taxes, in forty years. The fact that the lowest quintile is largely unemployed does not refute this.

"Yet, economic mobility is a characteristic that helps differentiate the United States from many other countries. Between 2004 and 2007, for example, roughly a third of the households in the lowest income group moved up to a higher income group, according to the Census Bureau, while roughly a third of the households in the highest income group moved down."

Sure, income mobility is a great thing in this country. The fact that it's less great than it used to be, or is less great than in other countries (even historically aristocratic ones), well, we peasants should shut up and be thankful for what we've got.

#

And look, I'm sorry, but that had to be exorcised. It used to be even longer. If I am so motivated, I'll take out the hyperbole and send it as a letter to the editor to be unpublished. Here's the part that's getting me though, the actual point if you want to call it that. I can understand why people employed by the AIER write and publish this sort of crap—they're paid to, directly, by people who have the wealth and power they're apologizing for—but I'm disgusted by people who continue, despite evidence, to lap it up and sell it on the retail market. You'd think that anyone above drinking age might have noticed some general economic trends by this point, and yet the entire News-o-verse has already let go of Two Thousand Eight. I don't expect Truth to be folded up and handed to me, but a little more than a thin gruel of shallow marketing disguised as evidence would be okay. Hell, just losing the certitude would be a plus, especially when you're peddling the same crap you were two decades ago, during which time the wealth community has gotten pretty much everything it's asked for. At least this Cunningham guy's an obvious whore, obviously shilling for interests that aren't mine. What the hell is the editor's excuse? What power is he speaking the truth to?

The game I usually see played with things like this (and that I am playing here too) is one of competing narratives, of different takes on the same data. Commenters like me don't usually angle straight for the lie, and call it. We like to see the twists of truth instead, different takes on it, and target a rebuttal that harvests the seeds of refutation that the writer himself sowed, and there's plenty of that here. (Maybe this thought would be better spared for the next someone who is inclined to fact-check a Megan McArdle column or something, but whatever.) But Steven Cunningham is doing more than misleading with statistics. When he poses the idea that the rich are getting richer and leads with "it isn't true," it's baldfaced.

Review: Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson

2011-03-24T16:34:00.006-04:00

Axis is the sequel to Spin, which I (much more succinctly than usual) enjoyed. A worthy followup I suppose, but I the enjoyment this time around was somewhat less. (Spin was well-received and won some awards, and maybe Wilson worked fast to sell a few books while his brand was hot.) I found the characters likeable, but not especially compelling. Or rather, I found that the intersting people were the ones who spent most of the novel offscreen while protagonist Lise Adams, in her effort to find out about the disappearance of her father, gets turned into too many expository circles for the purposes info-dumping. Wilson does a lot of telling of the background, stuff which, in other novels I remember, he was decent enough to get into a story of discovery or else just remain decently unanswered. It might be because this version has a substantial backstory that it needs to submit to the reader, in order to get to the questions of What's Really Happening down there with the deep magic.

He gave himself a lot of good stuff to work with. There's a sudden injection of the world into a universe a couple billion years older, and populated a bit more completely by a thin, slowly expanding skein of self-replicating hardware. There's the big puzzle of its baffling, disconnected attention to human society. There's humanity's brash attempts to understand it, a sort of self-exiled biochemical Manhattan project with human subjects. There's the boy Isaac (said subject) and Sulean Moi, an unwelcome observer in the compound getting on as outcasts' outcasts. There's competing ideas of human anthropological development in different circumstances. The polyglot colonial landscape that set the detective and chase scenes is well-conceived too, but, while not especially horrible, that particular plot was only just enough to keep the pages turning until the last quarter of the book, where the characters finally come to face the strangeness. I could have done with more Sulean and Isaac, more evidence of crazed obsession among the true believers. More internal conflict needed here please, and less 'splainin.

And while I liked the large questions that Wilson plays with, a little bit more philosophical meandering on the ideas wouldn't have upset me too much either. I mean, he's basically, and later explicitly, offered a plausible--on a science-fiction level--conception of what a powerful and indifferent god might actually look like. And it's just a damn cool idea: a universe that's full of designed machines that (very slowly, and with the aid of some fourth-dimensional physics without which they couldn't cover much volume (these don't even get a handwave, which is just as well)) reproduce and expand and communicate with each other among the cold vast reaches of space. Is it evolutionary and insensate, the characters ask, or is it thinking out there, mimicking meat heads on an impossible scale? Does it live and die too, is it finite? The manifestations of the big celestial mind, the behavior of its "cells", are pretty cool too, machine-like, life-like, weird, and pretty innovative when seen from the ground. It's use for civilization, we learn, is to grow itself. Biological societies at a certain state of development will eventually launch hardware into the void, and when they encounter evidence of that network, will want to swap collected information on that scale too. Maybe, like our jelly life, the cosmic mind is out to create pockets of information in eternal defiance of the second law.

It's likely that many of Wilson's novels (well, that I've read) could get retconned back into this same universe. The themes presented here are definitely his usual schtick, which I've always liked. The couple requisite moments of sentimentality are not forgotten, finding compassion in that weird juxtaposition of the cosmic against the human.

In between the bright lights and the far unlit unknown...

2011-03-06T18:10:00.003-05:00

You know, there's a pretty good incentive to get that current turgid blob of a post off of the top of the queue and try to write something which, at least for me, passes as entertaining. Well, better luck next post. That I'm feeling somewhat less than entertaining is obviously part of the problem, and my mood these last few weeks has been anchored by the disheartening realization of the mutually exclusive financial realities of cultivating my own damn garden and giving my children future opportunities to do the same. If only...blah blah blah, it's not like I haven't been over it before. And anyway, gardening has its own share of commitment and frustration. Even in an ideal world of unfettered self-actualization, there it's hard to figure out what your passions and skills are, and in this bizarre world where livings have to be made, then good luck on that passion, if you have one, keeping you fed. At thirteen years old? Did you know what you wanted to do at thirteen?

I'm not unaware that I'm talking about problems of relative privilege. What I'm really doing is pissing and moaning about the governing social paradigm (handy concept, that) which for all of its papered-over inequity, evil, structural inequality, and destructiveness has in this country at least managed to foster a middle class full of crackers like me for almost 80 years now. Lots of different treadmills, many of them decently upholstered, and even those of us without connections have some options about which one we hop on, and the sooner we decide the sooner we can put in a down payment.

Okay, at thirteen I did have a vague idea, if not a passion. I'm thinking that I must have seemed like a promising kid, and god knows that my parents tried to keep doors open and encourage things. When I was little, I alternatively wanted to be an astronomer or a chef (I was joking to a friend last month that I split the difference and went into chemistry). Mom cooked a lot at home, so that makes sense, but I don't where the science bug came from. And all these years later, I am acutely aware that there's something that keeps me apart from passionate scientists too, and that I'm a mediocre performer, and I have reservations about role of the field and its future, but I don't know what the hell else I'd do (although doing honest work with a science hobby seems like it could be more rewarding than the current arrangement). That general orientation helped my parents do what they could to get things started in my life. Strange to think of it that way, but I was pretty lucky for that.

My daughter will be entering high school next year. She's already presented with a choice between technical and academic programs, and these too are mutually exclusive. The tech ed seems like a good program, but it definitely takes her off the academic path. If she takes the culinary arts training, there aren't, at a minimum, any advanced placement courses available (I think AP is a scam, but as a synonym for "more challenging classes", this is annoying), and by junior or senior year, it's special alternative tech courses, a recent innovation, thanks to Massachusetts' graduation requirements. The kids, the instructor told me, tend to go on to culinary college, which seems to me like a strange metric. While I'm happy that cooking is taken as a serious vocation in this country now, it's disappointing to be reminded how far we're down the Player Piano timeline. I mean, that's what sets trades apart, right? Learning by doing, and a tradition of apprenticeship? Do you need that cooking doctorate before you take the $4/hr dishwasher job to get started in the actual industry? (I bet the chemistry requirements would be pretty cool though.) On the other hand, assuming the normal vocational path is still available, then I'd be happy to support that route too (with the fortune I save an added bonus). Adding to it all, there is my opinion that general high-level education is good for humans, and the way we tend to squander it when we're young, well, that can be too. (Good times.) But if she's got a real passion there, then she's ahead of the game.

And speaking of paradigms, I wish I could shake the sense that this is all about picking teams for the next generation's class structure. There are lots of ways to live even within the system, and since my town offers so few examples of them, we (by which I mean my wife) have doing a lot of research for enrichment programs for young people. We've just enrolled Junior for what is basically an educational summer camp, which, at least as far as I can gather from the brochure and the orientation seminar, is totally awesome, with not only classes and workshops, but also optional cruises and outings and all kinds of genuinely fun activities—stuff I wish I had some excuse to do as an adult. It's not exactly the Bohemian Grove, but there's a strong networking component here, and there's much they're encouraged to do together in a variety of overlapping groups: let's forge bonds among the kids labeled up-and-comers, build up those intra-class intangibles. A stronger experience is expected with those that supply more cash, and I expect my little girl might find a small cultural divide between her and the residential students.

The administrator of the program gave us parents a short presentation last week, talking how much more satisfying (and easier) this job is for him than actually teaching middle school. Well, sure, when you run a word-of-mouth sort of program among the helicopter set, and when you keep the riffraff out with a stiff $2500 minimum requirement for enrollment, no credit cards, thanks, then it probably makes it all a little easier. The imagination and enthusiasm is impressive so far, don't get me wrong, but as for the kids without these opportunities or motivations, then they're left to the same devices as before.

And for all this, the course themes, all these new opportunities, they're are all targeting the petit-bourgeoisie. They have cooking, woodwork, art and music, production, sports, along with some business- and law-themed classes, and a smattering of medical industry sorts of enrichment. Some themed chemistry too, I note approvingly. Not a lot of financial analysis or "leadership" training. And it's fine, I guess, from one point of view, as these are all things that people do in the part of working America that doesn't have it too easy or too hard. And it's a fuller set of ideas than we've been able to showcase so far. Welcome to the middle class, kiddo. I'll do my part and start getting used to the crippling payments that go along with your indoctrination.

The future looks vast from far away, and has a habit of shrinking as you meet it. You find the wide open road gets narrower as you walk , and its direction depends on many more people than you. It's great to be young, to be starting out on the journey. I hope my daughter can find more paths than I've been able to show, wish I were better at pointing them out.

On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Part 2: Kuhn's Epistemology

2011-02-23T15:31:00.004-05:00

Here's the second part of my post. These are the points that are more closely connected to the various discussions I had that motivated me to read Thomas Kuhn in the first place. I do want to reiterate that I think that his idea of paradigm- and revolution-based science history is usefully descriptive, and I mostly like it very much. I do take some exceptions here and there, however, and have some disagreements with respect to its universality. Mostly, I'm interested in challenging it against this epistemological paradigm that I've gone and developed in spite of myself.

A TEXTBOOK MISTAKE
Kuhn generally equates the current mature scientific paradigm to the stultifying stuff taught in textbooks. I have a few texts written before 1962, but those tend to be either highly specialized (not yet obviated I guess by new ways of looking at things) or else artifacts that I picked up and keep around as souvenirs instead of sources of information. Maybe things were a little different forty years ago. I mean, yes, textbooks serve to indoctrinate people into the current state of knowledge, but no, I don't think that these texts define very well what science is. To some smaller points of his, advanced book-writing isn't really frowned upon, and I also disagree somewhat that science separates itself from the larger community quite so much. There's a reputation of intellectual superiority that I think scientists vainly like to keep, but on the other hand, premier publications such as Nature and Science, really aim for general understanding of highly complicated fields. Or (I just added) go read the Feynman lectures (these clock in a couple years after Kuhn's essay). My introductory college textbooks often talked about past and current controversies, including the paradigms that stuck and the ones that didn't. The story of a gestalt switcheroo that turns a bug into a feature is an enduring favorite. The sort of triumphant narrative of toppling a progression of barriers that made Kuhn bristle? I don't know if I got that one quite as much, and when I did, it was more concerning the early discoveries. (We'll go back to classical waves, in other words, but not to a continuum of angels.) In my observation, the idea of thriving within a heady open-ended scientific crisis period is closer to the idealized self-congratulating story of many "top tier" scientists (as a colleague once liked to say) today. Even here in the dregs of applied science, "innovation" is the name of the game.

I think anyone working in a research field understands that scientific paradigms are articulated almost like a correspondence, a slow-motion argument consisting of innumerable published articles, conferences, and less-formal meetings. Underlying this communication is the normal science that Kuhn describes, but I don't think the subject matter is chosen solely to gratify a bunch of expected hypotheses. The popular sessions at a conference are the ones chasing after the sexy new field and lighting up the current controversies. Scientists, at least certain kinds of scientists, are just plain hungry for anomalies to fight about. They go looking for a crisis. And even for the bigger paradigm busters, there's plenty of room for brilliant kookery (e.g.) out there on the fringes.

Kuhn made a lot of hay about the seminal insights that John Dalton, a meteorologist, brought to the early days of chemical theory. The mode of thinking that he brought from a different discipline gave him tools to look at chemistry problems in a new way. Again, I don't know what it was like in the early 1960s, and maybe it's Kuhn that helped to begin this newer intellectual paradigm, but much like sexy research, digging around for nuggets in other fields is accepted, common, and encouraged these days. "Interdisciplinary" has become a buzzword too.

WHERE DOES A PARADIGM END AND NORMAL SCIENCE BEGIN?
Kuhn often implies that not all paradigm changes are the same, that there's a gradation in revolutionary goodness. Roentgen did more than just articulate his paradigm when he discovered x-rays, but on the other hand, he was no Copernicus. We can scale down and down too. Every scientific experiment (or thought experiment) has a challenge and a reconciliation built into it. It's meant to test the paradigm and explain the results. Most researchers will be presented with anomalous measurements even in the course of normal science—if everything goes as expected on the first try, then you really are doing common engineering—which they might ignore, fail to notice, or suitably explain within the existing paradigm. Paradigm shift, Kuhn explains, is a consequence of this kind of normal puzzle-solving difficulty, a question of only how important and persistent the anomalies seem to the community. Kuhn also notes that one person's anomaly is another's puzzle problem, depending on what viewpoint they subscribe to. There is no bright line.

Furthermore, while "paradigm" describes the full body of communication, everyone carries around an individualized understanding of it. If other fields (perhaps even the impure ones) are allowed to come in and interact, it can be a source of competing ideas. As we introduce the idea of competing paradigms, subdivided fields, when we don't let the unpopular ones quite fade away, then we might observe that all of these ideas, dead and alive, can always be compiled into a paradigm-of-paradigms that we can never approach from the outside. I don't have much to add to that, except to note that it does give an unpleasant point from which to voice disagreement, and also from which to advocate, when a paradigm can have a broad or a narrow meaning as the discussion demands.

DOES AN UNDERSTANDING OF PARADIGMS INVALIDATE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD?
Prior to reading, as well as throughout the text, I imagined the description of scientific paradigms as a meta-construction built around the normal operation of science. Kuhn calls out normal science as the process of hypothesizing and delivering (until the point where this process fails to deliver) expected results. The anomalies he discusses, the ones that are seen as significant enough (and timely enough, and seen by the right eyes) to demand a new way to look at things, he stresses do come out of the normal operation of science. I don't think he means his views to invalidate this established investigatory process (even if they might require us think of it differently).

I tend to think of the scientific method mostly as a flowchart, starting with observation, study or review, followed by hypothesis, tests for agreement, and conclusions based on results of the test, adding and constantly revising the body of work. I've said that I don't think of this dogmatically, and see it mostly as a general guideline. Kuhn mentions that scientists tend to proceed day-to-day without thinking very much about the rules they're following, and this is true in my experience. I agree that research is goals-biased, and certainly test methods, standards of proof, and so forth are informed by (or are) the paradigm. The scientific method might count as a rough approximation of the quotidian work ("hey, let's see if this idea works"), and even if it's an imperfect decision-making hierarchy, it gets reinforced at the higher level in the conventions of scientific reporting (the customary sections of a paper—Introduction, Experiment, Results and Discussion, Conclusions—restate it outright) and also at the level of scientific funding decisions (write a proposal, and get money to see if it works). The scientific method is a beloved part of our current science philosophy paradigm, but much more than that, it is also part of a fundamental literary one. It maps the process of investigation on to a classic story: what is our subject like, what happened to him, and how did he change.

We like to construct narratives around science, just like everything else. If that can be seen as a template for the scientific method, then can the paradigm approach be mapped that way too? Is the articulation of normal science equivalent to a background study? Is investigating the anomaly the test of normal science? Do the conclusions and revisions amount to the delivery of a revolutionary new paradigm (or the reconciliation with an old one)? Well sure, if we are willing to speak broadly enough.

WHAT DISTINGUISHES SCIENCE?
There remains a need to evaluate theory with respect to observations, and when Kuhn discusses the acceptance of new theories, he addresses this in terms of scientific validation. He denies a Popperian sort of straight-up falsification (rightly I think), and also more probabilistic sorts of validation (that is, accepting things more strongly when they agree better; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence). We might take on a new paradigm that's popular, or elegant, or simpler, or seems to promise richer articulation, or fits with the other ones, or maybe it's all just arbitrary. Kuhn speculates that what makes it science isn't necessarily the acceptance criteria, but maybe the fact that it's imagined as intellectual progress. I don't agree with that. I think what makes it science instead of something else is that it's evidence-based.

I remember a quote from my freshman physics book, paraphrasing, that in reality, electrons are neither particles nor waves, they're electrons. Kuhn eventually gets to a similar point and cites it as the resolution of a scientific revolution. I don't want to give him this one. I think that the probabilistic way of looking at things, more than Kuhn's, suggests that nature is an independent thing, and that more than one view can be held simultaneously, within some range of validity. Of course, that could be just me thinking like an engineer, bringing in a less-than-pure-science viewpoint of my own, which perhaps has more of a most-workable-understanding-given-the-data sort of culture. I prefer to couch my understanding of science as a series of known assumptions and constraining rules (maybe the same thing as a paradigm as Kuhn means it), under which some theory is known to be useful, sometimes only good-enough useful, and sometimes only preferred because it's consistent with other theory. I don't feel anyone has to take one rigid outlook to the table.

I concede that science revolutions may not always go to the best theory (it's too early to tell when they're busy being all radical), and certainly doesn't result in the best possible one, but to say that it's a competition between existing paradigms doesn't, to me, refute very well a probabilistic validation approach. At a minimum, there's a requirement of descriptiveness that contributes to the appeal of a new paradigm.

BEWARE OF FALSE SYLLOGISMS!
The old understanding of the scientific method is also useful for categorizing ideas. It's good to keep in mind that a "hypothesis" is a proposal, while a "theory" is well-understood within its definition and constraints. Mostly, this serves as a helpful tool for dealing with poorly-informed blowhards.

One thing that a probabilistic validation is good for (and which I think a paradigm model deals with less effectively) is to keep down the poorly supported competing theories. It's a continuation of the point, but it deserves a special heading. It's true that all iconoclasts don't fit in within the popular paradigm. On the other hand, just because you are out there taking a chisel to everyone's favorite statues doesn't mean you're a revolutionary. Maybe you're just an asshole. It's good to have some rules of thumb here. You'd better have a damn good argument if you want to show me your perpetuum mobile.

WHY PICK ON SCIENCE?
I am most comfortable spotting paradigms outside of science, as well I might be. Politics and economics seem, to me, to be filthy with the things, and far more than with scientific study, they are unburdened by the rigors of empiricism. Why do people come to suddenly believe in Communism, in consumerism, in American party politics, in popular revolution, in abolition? These are more gestalt-style shifts, nudged on, I often like to think, by events as well as the evolution of scientific paradigms, but colored more heavily by the whimsical human imagination. The failure of old networks to address perceived social crises, suddenly perceived broadly enough, precipitates revolutions of a more political (and generally violent) sort. Kuhn touches on this at the end (it may have been his starting point), but if you've ever witnessed a debate between an American liberal and conservative, then you've seen very clearly a failure to accept the other's set of assumptions and evaluations, not to mention a rather questionable concept of progress, in addition to a craptastic analysis of data (usually worse for the person with a threatened advantage). Living in a political climate that I loathe is difficult, especially when the tools I have for analyzing it are also the ones it provides. I give the social dissenters some major props, including, and maybe especially, those who can spot the system and find a way to conscientiously object to it. I think that much of the alternative social paradigms come from literature and art (and science may owe more to these than is usually acknowledged—I liked Kuhn's point that in the Renaissance, there was little distinction between science and art). I love to see when scientific principles are applied in a more honest manner than number-crunching your way to a foregone economic conclusion from dubious assumptions, and it's governed a lot of my reading in the past few years. My minor observation is that a more evidence-based approach would do wonders for the world.

Boring! But it's out of my head.

On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Part 1: The Evolution of Science

2011-02-22T15:07:00.003-05:00

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is, it would seem, a seminal book in the philosophy of science. I admit that, while I am supportive or at least open to many of Kuhn's points and find the general concept to be extremely useful, my thoughts on the subject matter have been negatively biased by a couple of very special groups of people. This first is the small handful of insufferable bastards who, in their embrace of this structure, feel that they're members of some elite clan of practical philosophers, who regard anyone laboring under an older paradigm as their inferiors, and talk past their interlocutors, as Kuhn suggests they must, as if in validation of their superior worldview. (Such indignation is obviously a very loaded interpretation of my own, but Kuhn is very sympathetic to people reasoning in the old motif, and doesn't judge them as "wrong.") This group of people resembles the sorts of college sophomores who discover Bayesian inference and then parade around like they've personally set upon a secret of the universe revealed to all but a few, instead of understanding that these models have already been worked into the existing paradigm to the extent that they've been judged collectively useful. (It's possible that subjects in epistemology attract a generally tedious and narrowly doctrinaire lot, which would actually explain a great deal about how Kuhn came to his worldview.) As for the second group of bad influences, keep in mind that Kuhn is the guy who coined the term "paradigm shift" as a description of scientific revolutions, and we know who uses that sort of language these days, the class of leaders who found similar inspiration in such philosophical classics as Who Moved My Cheese. But it's not really the fault of the thinker that his magnum opus got reduced to a chit for buzzword bingo, and it is more likely a sign of his success. Everyone knows what "paradigm shift" is. It's deeply within the paradigm.

In his long essay, Thomas Kuhn proffers a historical interpretation of scientific progress. It is not so much a cumulative process, he argues, so much as it is an evolutionary one, where governing paradigms (the dominant way of looking at the world, that is, the set of theories, methods, tools, analogies, governing assumptions, and evidentiary standards) progress under a process that he calls "normal science" (meaning, predictive experimentation with reasonable expectation of success under the paradigm), until this process reveals sufficient anomalies, until it leads to enough doubtful interpretation to generate a crisis in the field under which new, competing paradigms can be generated and normalized. Some of his favorite examples of scientific revolutions of this sort are Newtonian mechanics (adios, Aristotle), Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen (farewell, phlogiston) and Copernicus' description of celestial motion (toodles, Ptolemy). Current (or recent) fields in sufficient crisis to regard no paradigm as quite satisfactory may include celestial mechanics at sufficiently large scales (dark what-now?) or the continued challenge of understanding gravity in similar terms as the other forces on perhaps smaller scales (how many dimensions again?).

And I should say that basically, I agree with the Kuhn's general outline, but then again, I'm not particularly dogmatic about this sort of thing (and I'm not sure it's wise to be) despite having some strong convictions here and there. The thing is, if Kuhn did indeed help to establish a new paradigm, then I'm already 40 years into it, and it tempers my analysis a great deal, as Kuhn tells me it must. (I am always suspicious of philosophies that use this sort of self-updating definitional argument to protect themselves from criticism. If I could perceive any sense of humor in there, I'd suspect Kuhn was getting a laugh out of it.) I wonder, for example, how a community can be so wed to any set of theories, so closed to alternatives, that it discards them in all available circumstances. But see, I would say that in the post-Kuhn paradigm. Anyway, I apologize for what is shaping up to be an exceedingly long post. For those who are already bored, consider the above the "book review" and go click on one of the many better blogs along the sidebar. I'm going to proceed to outline a number of specific thoughts and criticisms, that I collected while reading the book. Many of these simmered in my brain through much of the book, some of them even before I cracked it, some have been percolating for years now. Toward the end, Kuhn actually got to a good bunch of the things I've been thinking. While that all makes me look smart in my own mind, it doesn’t make me look as sharp in front of you people. To compensate, I have linked myself gratuitously, like a true schmuck.

For my own long essay, since this thing bloated up so much, and since I can only steal time in small increments, I'm going to split it into two parts. This first part includes some of the points that I could tie to an evolutionary paradigm. The second does more to rate the structure of scientific revolutions against my other thoughts on epistemology.

SCIENCE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
Kuhn's system of changing paradigms looks a lot like an evolutionary model, specifically, the stasis-and-change sorts of dynamics advanced by Stephen Jay Gould. In that, the species is better considered the evolutionary entity as opposed to the organism, locked in (that is, prevented from variation) by reproduction. A great deal of genetic intermingling helps average things out. In that sense, a species is much like a scientific paradigm, preserved by the prolific but sadly figurative intercourse of individual scientists. The sudden speciation that Gould sees is not so different from the scientific revolution that is advocated here, and is probably similarly brought on by crisis, by sudden new requirements for fitness, that tends to produce an adequacy of performance from the genetic tools at hand. Much as we like to attribute the contributions of scientist-individuals, it may be more accurate in terms of science history to think about paradigm-individuals, even while recognizing the genius (and the sometimes big brass balls) of outstanding human practitioners. Kuhn spends an entire section on discovery and attribution, noting that it's the guy who converts it to a new paradigm who tends to get the credit more than the one who found it (who is often the foil in the story), and that it's impossible really to see any aspect as the solo effort. A skim of Punctuated Equilibrium confirms that Gould definitely did see this parallel with scientific paradigms, and it informed his work. Kuhn gets half a dozen cites.

Kuhn also acknowledges the evolutionary analog somewhere late in his essay. He asserts, like Gould does with respect to genetic evolution, that it's fallacious to look at scientific progress as some sort of achievement, reaching toward some pinnacle which generally includes us, right now or soon. But in biological evolution, old species don't necessarily go away. The growth of ecological diversity of course depends on the destruction rate of species as well as their creation. Is this the case for scientific history as well? Kuhn thinks that old paradigms need to die in order to generate the new versions. I disagree with that generality.

NO GOOD PARADIGM EVER DIES
So, did Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium scuttle the origin of species? I think (and Kuhn would agree) that it asked and answered a different question. It used additional knowledge about the fossil record and a greater body of data about living species, it starts to touch on contemporary genetics (although I think Darwin might have readily grasped many of these logical extensions), and more importantly, it utilizes an intellectual tradition that had already thoroughly assimilated Darwin. But does it necessarily abandon the old man? Punctuated equilibrium rejects gradualism, but it doesn't (at least as far as I remember) present an alternative paradigm for species change. It observes that groups separated from mixing their genes with the rest of the species might be more likely to undergo a Darwinian selection. Which sounds more like a modification than a revolution. Kuhn presents some different cases where this has been closer to the historical process too, but his argument is that it's still a necessary reversal. He states that this idea of theory expansion is (like gradualism in biological evolution) one that the intellectual heirs to a paradigm tend to prefer, or which can appear less disruptive to scientists outside the field. His example for this is that when Roentgen advanced the understanding of x-rays, it wasn't quite so illogical to people studying electromagnetism—just a modification to what they already knew—but to chemical physicists it added some unsettling angles to chemistry, and they needed to think about their field in a new way as a consequence.

And maybe it's a better case that Einstein did strike Newton down to his very fundamentals, and the inarguably broader way of looking at the universe may have ended up including Newton, but could no longer pretend to think on his terms even if they liked his math. I don't know if there's cutting-edge research in classical mechanics, but it sure as hell survives in engineering, which I don't commit so readily as Kuhn to the rabble hovering below even normal science. (I mean, ask Buckminster Fuller.) Getting closer to modernity, statistical thermodynamics didn't quite kill off the classical version either. Even knowing that there's an information basis to thermodynamic quantities, it doesn't change a great deal of the classical understanding—or the usefulness of the classical understanding—heat is still thought of as something that flows phenomenologically with intrinsic states helpfully washed out. Neglecting the ability to predict every possible state of every damn particle in the universe, choosing the appropriate granularity is always necessary for science as well as engineering. Electrical fluid models are in Kuhn's bozo bin too, but a great deal of that analysis still works pretty damn well with the same ancient (by technological terms) differential equations, and you wouldn't have invented the transistor—an engineering-style paradigm-cracker right there—without soaking in that lowly level of (semi-)classical understanding.

I could go on. The basis of the modern understanding of chemistry is damn near entirely about the quantum behavior of electrons, and yet in teaching the paradigm, plenty of more primitive versions are held on to quite happily, and are used. For example, you don't need to get past Lewis's science to get to the plastics revolution of the 1940s. In optics, articulation of Fresnel's and Maxwell's paradigms remain on the cutting edge without invoking a single corpuscle. Now, Kuhn's answer to this is probably that by judging usefulness I'm talking mere engineering, which is not the same as the pure science revolutions he intends, but I don't agree with that. To my mind, these researchers are still busy as hell articulating the old paradigms. (Kuhn would further contend that the old paradigm didn't include an acknowledgement of a newer one, so no dice. That's a semantic purity argument that I maybe can't win.) For another example, I've spent the last couple of years researching metamaterials, possibly a small revolution on the order of Roentgen's, in that it expands (or claims to expand—a lot of scientific revolution these days is in the marketing, as hinted at in the introduction) the ideas of what materials are, and what properties they are allowed to attain. And yet it can be, and usually is, explained completely in terms of classical wave mechanics.

Some paradigms do die complete deaths, deemed too unfit for any niche. No scientist worth her salt really believes in phlogiston anymore, for example, and I very nearly reject Kuhn's idea that there were some ideas that the spooky substance was better at describing. I don't reject that there were questions more readily suggested by phlogiston theory, but (no doubt my paradigm talkin' here) I don't think it raises many interesting ones. If those ideas remained worth knowing (because we do have engineering now to make science do tricks), then chemical theory has found an alternate way of getting there. But even down there among the truly obsolete, people do seem to return to the same sorts of assumptions when confronted with a scientific crisis: maybe things interact with an invisible permeating substance; that fudge factor might amount to something; categories of things have intrinsic properties; stuff is made out of tiny essences.

HISTORY AND EMBIGGENING
Kuhn frequently cites a pre-paradigm period in which science, when practiced, was very nearly limited to the investigations of a single scientist. There just was not enough community to keep up a good correspondence, nor a tradition of communication that might reach that critical mass of feedback from your peers. But it's not as though there were only ever two modes at play.

It's interesting to look at the governing social paradigms that were involved with science. Study has moved splotchily through various settings: philosophical schools, monasteries, gentlemanly pastimes, universities, patronage, structural civic funding (with, no doubt, plenty of throwbacks to pre-paradigmatic practice along the way). There have been periods of a pure research ideal, periods burdened by philosophical and logical traditions, the weight of authority, or theological conformity, periods strangled by applied military research. Even Kuhn here is evidently male- and certainly Eurocentric, not to mention oblivious to the science still done under older paradigms, which rather limits his own point of view.

Kuhn makes a dramatic attempt to generalize the whole post-paradigm period, but my question now is whether history has been consistent enough in that time to generalize. Connecting to the evolutionary point, is there instead a larger trajectory of paradigm development? (A meta-meta-structure? Sheesh.) Maybe there really is progress, but much like the biological sort, it increases diversity more than it increases in some absolute measure of awesomeness. Science gets bigger as new paradigms evolve, especially if the old ones tend to stick around in some fashion. I'm inclined to look at the sheer amount of our usefully accurate (or paradigmatically fit) descriptive power as a less-arbitrary measure of going foward intellectually. As science has developed, the general move has been to describe more things. If there's an absolute yardstick for progress, it's that science now covers way more ground with fewer self-contradictions. It does too go somewhere.

Enough for now. I'll try and post the rest of this monster tomorrow.

Review: Spook Country by William Gibson

2011-02-15T16:09:00.000-05:00

Perhaps, dear reader, you can help me to find the right metaphorical space here. I keep wanting to go with cooking--it had good ingredients, but didn't bake quite long enough; mixed nicely but the souffle fell; something along those lines--but that doesn't seem appropriate for a story about spycraft and secret lives and subterfuge. Maybe it was as artlessly manipulated as a CIA-sponsored foreign election? No, see, that kind of awareness needs to stay on the outskirts. It's not a bad novel, doesn't invite the word "bungled," and it's not, despite the forces that have developed and honed these various characters, about a great evil. Or rather, it's not about a great menacing evil, or [spoilers!] better still to say that it's more about the nonviolent side effects of a great evil, a colorful spinoff of a violent interventionist American foreign policy. And while the note is lightly played, Gibson doesn't let pass the nasty spookery that enabled the plot in the first place, and more than I recall with other of his novels, he shows a glimpse of the amoral ways that incredible wealth can drive the social inequities that so many of his characters have found themselves looking at from the underside. Spook Country probably owes more to spy novels than it does to actual espionage: I'm thinking of the incredibly high level of competence on display, the strange international and parallel-world existence of the characters, and this whole business of respected opponents clambering through the spook world for no net gain and with amazing budgets. As such, Gibson does bring an interesting, and I think by genre terms, unconventional humanity to these sorts of characters and a gratifyingly weird dynamic to their actions,* and he pens a quick observational wit in some places (but a couple of infelicitous phrases stuck out in others, and the barrage of brand names that Gibson likes to use is generally annoying). Not bad stuff here at all, and the problem is mostly that it needed a little more elaboration. How about "underplotted?" I knew I'd find a metaphor eventually.

The story trails three separate groups of characters in a more or less evenly shuffled series of very short chapters. The book suffers that the first, and primary, subplot is the weakest. Former rock star and now freelance journalist Hollis Henry is assigned to write about an interesting new cultural scene. Quickly, she's pushed toward shady characters that enable some of the "geohacking" technology the artists use, by equally mysterious benefactors and employers. Locative art (not sure how real an item it is), which uses computer viewers to paint in artistic comments onto real-world space, is a compelling way to imagine annotated reality creeping into the mainstream, and I liked how Gibson nabs a cultural element as an introduction. It's a stretch, however, to elevate the idea of geolocation (which I'm pretty sure that I was doing on my Blackberry, if not in 2007, then at least in2008) to the status of a terrifying cautionary tale about technology (and naming its practitioner after the transcendent beauty of some numerical integration package is dorky enough to make me to feel a little embarrassed). As a character, Hollis occasionally borders on interesting when her post-celebrity life is poked very hard, although mostly that's just provided for color. She is surprisingly quick to commit to dubious conspiracies, and while she doesn't much trust her benefactor, she expresses, to my mind, too little journalistic curiosity as to how this advertising giant, who doesn't appear to ever do any marketing, or anything at at all beyond setting up clients in obscenely wealthy trappings as he whispers hints to them from the shadows, has achieved this amazing commercial status. Hubertus Bigend's (that's his name) dangerous curiosity and Hollis's selective caution would have made for great television characters in the sort of fun drama that moves along faster than the viewer can spot the holes, but you get the feeling that the aspirations of Spook Country are a little higher than fridge logic. (I think the reader is meant to know that Bigend's marketing is the viral sort that also wasn't very convincing in Gibson's last novel, Pattern Recognition, and he may even be a crossover character. I no longer remember.)

The other two plot threads, showcasing life among the perpetually shadowy, were more fun and stocked with more compelling people. In one, young Tito (last name unknown) lives a quiet life but for his involvement in the family spy business, an unquestioned custom that has been steeped in Cold War era espionage and a little Caribbean magic culture just for fun. It's taken a few tolls on Tito (he lost his father, and the flight from Cuba was hard on his mother), but he comes off as a fundamentally nice, sincere kid, despite making such an impermanent footprint on the world, and despite his Bruce Lee level kung fu skills and James Bond level spycraft. It sounds like it should be cornball, but he's interesting and well done. Chasing Tito are Brown and Milgrim, the former a dickhead cop type, and the latter a translator of intercepted texts (how do you spell LOL in Russian, using an English key set?) who he's conscripted and kept in line with a managed drug addiction. This section is told entirely from Milgrim's point of view, and this is entertaining too, presenting a druggie's almost entertaining difficulty with resolve, childlike defiance and mental escapes. Milgrim's decency, humanity, and intelligence come through too, even though he's such a collossal fuckup.

Between Milgrim's benzedrine-inspired hallucinations, Tito's spirit riders, and the machine-produced ghosts that Hollis was reporting on, there was plenty of room here for thematic explorations of the title, but most of that is unfortunately left to the reader. Similarly, explaining the book's worth of mysterious motivations in a final unifying sequence is a fine way to put together a story, and I can imagine that Gibson thought one about the lives of the world's shadow operators naturally fit this sort of structure. But in this case, putting it off to the end delayed engagement with the characters. I don't think the story would have been any worse if the the good spooks and bad spooks were identified much earlier. That the authoritarian prick ended up as the bad guy is clear enough from his character, and is completely unsurprising to anyone who remembers cyberpunk. Or any kind of punk. (Writing Tito's people as good guys, against the war racket, inspired by example and loyalty, cautious of other people, is a bigger stretch considering the arena in which they had to develop those kinds of skills.) To be fair to my earlier description of Hubertus Bigend, he is seen doing a little actual business at the end of the novel too, and that may have been intended as part of the revelation, but man, the climactic twists weren't so mind-blowing that they couldn't have been added earlier as badly needed background.

*but I'll say, if you want to go here, go read Tim Powers' Declare .

Random Roundup

2011-01-29T07:30:00.008-05:00

1. Obama's State of the Union speech last week announced, in a way that has become customary for this sort of thing, an increased emphasis on math and science education. I think it's a line that gets more guffaws than it used to, not without reason, and I've followed some conversations from some of my very favorite out-of-network blogs, where American technololgical exceptionalism was derided with some of the good, bitter humor that our situation has earned. I'm tempted to laugh along with, but wait... I'm not joking, this is my job! I guess I feel stung enough about these points to offer a mild rebuttal. Since those posts are, like, already from last week, and since I do not wish my infrequent commenting to be limited to the dickheaded antagonistic variety, I guess I'll just deposit the thought here.

It's worth asking how much power scientists and engineers command in American society right now. It's a solidly middle-class occupation, and in an era when the middle class is shrinking and the price of extensive training is skyrocketing, that's at least something. It's not the sort of career that makes you rich or a leader, and I often cynically suspect it's lauded in the press precisely because it's a non-threatening pursuit. Even in pricey endeavors like defense contracting and medicine, scientists aren't running things, or if they are, they need to abandon science in order to get on the management track. And as Ed points out, it's not as if the people doing R&D are immune from cut-rate Asian competition. The folks working in the field today understand that (outside of the military-industrial complex), technical work is quietly getting frog-marched out of the country right behind Labor.

I did add a pallid point to one of those posts that I fear the tyranny of humanities majors who can't assess technical data at least as much as I do the inhumanity of technical people, and that's true, although I may have understated it. I also agree that the humanities is important (if you have seen any portion of my craptacular archives, then you're aware of what I spend my time writing about). But look, oppression by the innumerate is what we have right now, and if you don't believe me, then please let me interest you in my homeopathic cures, Amway sales, and supply side economics. If we break down the leadership class by occupation, then observe how we're ruled by lawyers, lobbyists, financiers, and managers, perfectly respectable occupations and all, but these are people for whom persuasion is more important than evidence, and they're the ones reminding us that the atmosphere can't possibly be affected by the megatons of carbon we pump into it. We're constantly pushed around by the professional definition of poli-sci geeks (politicians) and visual artists (advertisers). No fair you say, to define humanities and social sciences by the evil versions. Well, that's my point.

2. Why the hell is it that I can never sleep in on weekends but on Monday through Friday, I can't wake up with the alarm? I think the answer is that my body is actually accustomed to waking up at 5:39 or 5:48 every morning, which is a weekday challenge and a Saturday travesty.

3. The two most useful links I've found all week, via the Roy Edroso gang:
- What's happening in Egypt
- What happened in Iraq (and Afghanistan--to another abyss, motherfuckers)

Both of them provide an easy entry point to describe a situation that is considerably more complicated (and in the second case, depressing) than official announcements and the evening news would prefer to discuss.

4. I've complained at length about new and improved information business models that force you to subscribe to your own content. This is an egregious way to distribute books and music, which many people prefer to keep for decades, and for which, now that digital formats are more fungible, they can otherwise no longer scam you to replace your collection every couple of years.

But there's a place where this kind of business makes a hell of a lot more sense, a business where you don't necessarily hold onto the content for a long time, but frequently reference a very small fraction of a very large body of it. (Hell, like cable TV, which is maybe why the fuckers are trying to get away from subscription to more pay-per-view.) Additionally, let's replace a system where the current subscription model is so prohibitively expensive and onerous that only your large overpriced institutions can handle it. I'm thinking subscriptions to scientific journals.

I work at a small scientific company (Massachusetts is littered with these) that can't afford this kind of thing, and I'm constantly forced to sneak onto various university library systems to get the papers that I routinely need to understand to do my damn job. Why can't I find a Rhapsody-like service, a virtual library, that fronts the ridiculous prices of journal services and then lets second parties subscribe to some number of downloads per month for a modest fee? That would be incredibly useful. (Most journals will let you download a pdf for a one-time charge of 20 or 30 bucks, which I guess helps if you have a corporate card, and are willing to take the risk that this low-impact paper is not a likely piece of shit. Note this is a pay-per-view model too. The fuckers.)

Your Free Market at Work

2011-01-26T10:16:00.005-05:00

So let me get this straight: One of the great triumphs of Milton Friedman-style American capitalist economics is monetarism, wherein the currency is manipulated to achieve a couple of macroeconomic and/or social goals. China also manipulates its currency to achieve a couple of macroeconomic and/or social goals. The opinion of this practice isn't as salutory when foreigners do it, but that's to be expected, just garden-variety hypocrisy.

If I understand things correctly, the economic do-si-do between these two countries relies on extremely cheap credit provided to American consumers and extremely cheap wages (and inexpensive social programs, regulations, etc.) provided to Chinese workers, neither of which valuations are especially well connected to what either group actually produces. Although this situation generates tension (at least so far as macroeconomics properly describes international relations), it's currently very lucrative to people who facilitate lending to American consumers, hiring Chinese workers, or selling their low-overhead products. While fear of instability may be real (and hence the occasional mild pokes against exchange rate manipulation), it's unlikely to change before the feces actually makes contact with the whirling blades (and if the finance crisis has taught us anything, probably not even then). Presumably this will happen if Chinese workers can command some more compensation for their effort, if Americans' consumer debt becomes too hopeless, if they can find a new population to do technical work on the cheap, or something like that. Pessimistically, China will prefer to open up its markets to consumer credit, American wage and job growth will still be held in check, and the mechanisms of wealth consolidation will be maintained as global resource limitations finally begin to resist the edges of growth. I think I understand the gist of all that. As practiced, at large enough scales, capitalism and communism concentrate power, just like everything else. Check. Free trade ain't no such thing. Got it.

I don't keep up well with the blogosphere when it comes to making this entertaining or intellectual, and this story's already a week old, but it's noteworthy when these relationships condense into such a powerful and relatively open meeting. (What do you suppose goes on at those things? I imagine it's a bunch of dull yay-rah powerpoint speeches full of mission statements and global visions, followed by a dinner that breaks down, as usual, to jostling over where the cool kids sit, or which are the power tables, and after that there are a hundred informal breakout discussions, filled with harrumphing, agreeing to talk to your people or theirs, awkward cross-cultural affection: what, no cocktail? ha ha do we shake hands or bow first?) This is expression of political power at its more outward and banal, and it's hard to see them agreeing to any arrangement that makes them less rich. I'll give Obama the benefit of the doubt and assume that he really does want to see clean energy products exported to China (whose environmental concerns are probably real), and maybe we'll even do better than the usual tactic of exporting clean energy jobs there. Well, at least GE is a surviving American non-defense company that actually makes stuff, so there's that, even if society can't seem to rid itself of Lloyd Blankfein.

Worth noting, however, that this inner party arrangement is our leader's preferred mileu, none of that weenie Carter-style public incentivizing that worked so poorly for, say, Germany. Meeting with business interests to orchestrate the economic push and pull is probably inevitable to the process of governance, and the moral balance comes down to which parties Obama or Hu feel they represent, and to achieve what ends. If the presidents are representatives of their populations, then they sure are outweighed by business interests in meetings like this. Personally, I think that Barack Obama (or any other president in memory) represents the people about as much, and in a similar capacity, as Jeff Immelt (or any other CEO of a gigantic multinational corporate empire) represents his employees, which is to say that the minions are an inevitable component to their power, a necessary evil, probably not hated, but of secondary and sometimes contradictory concern to the governing idea of the organization, as voiced by those who get rich by owning or administering pieces of it. I'm sure they'd rather not and all, but fucking the lower-downs is certainly on the table, while fucking themselves is not. And I don't think it's necessarily a question of evil so much that representation has inherent limitations—when the problem becomes the entrenchment of an elite group that is insulated from the concerns of everyone else, then the process of elevating someone to the elite makes it hard to accomplish things.

Has conservative economics disowned Milt Friedman yet? I know that the Fed is a pariah among the freedumb wing, not that they slow it down, but even so, it still has to be difficult to advocate for the idea of "competitiveness" when so much of the economy is the flow-down of executive decisions rather than market forces or other cost optimization. Mostly, I kind of wish the usual assortment of advocates would just shut up for a while.

Review: Mission Child, by Maureen F. McHugh

2011-01-21T14:06:00.001-05:00

Science fiction has a strong tradition of short story writing. It's a great length to elaborate an idea, and in the best cases, a writer can build the tension around the underlying concept as effectively as with the more conventional constructs of characters or plot. I think the desire to elaborate these quick poses must be common among many writers of the form. The Missionary's Child, the short that this novel built from was published in 1992, and I read it about ten years ago in a science fiction anthology. I liked it enough to try and remember to find the novel version, which evidently I did at some point in the intervening decade, because there it was in the pile. I have usually enjoyed McHugh's short stories when I've found them, but it is difficult to formulate a readable novel whose only purpose is to exhibit an idea. It's hard to support a story in the long form when there is not any special plot. There's a character and setting, and there's conflict here—our protagonist, Janna, has no shortage of external or internal struggles—but these do not really suggest or deliver any clear resolutions. It's more a matter of unfolding the understanding the character and where she lives setting, but here too, there's not a well-conceived pace of the discovery, it's really more like a tour. The world is not earth, but it is earth-like, populated with human societies that have been around long enough to be considered aboriginal, now struggling with a cultural invasion of well-intended colonial types. Maureen McHugh creates an environment with enough intimate and honest detail that it makes the outré circumstances of the story take a back seat to the cultural and personal issues. On one hand, it's an impressive accomplishment to make the unreal realistic, but on another, it sort of takes the fun out of it. It's difficult to generate a (cheap) skiffy thrill when the book features believable people who spend most of their time going about their boring lives. The only other novel of hers that I read was utterly sunk by the mundane: it had a city under the sea, cool Voudon rituals, and it bored me to the point of depression. Mission Child is much better than this, chiefly because it's a central character that is sympathetic, troubled, resourceful, accessible, and alien—you know, interesting.

McHugh is making some direct comparisons to known societies here, a couple that are chosen to reflect less a background of outright conquest and more the unintentional casualties of European expansion, which suits the mood she's trying to build. The story starts on the cultural fringe of a fictionalized version of the nomadic Sámi people (I had to look that one up—Lapplander is considered derogatory these days), comprised of a tribal Scandinavian-ish population moving between semi-permanent settlements up north of that planet's arctic circle, supported by an economy of genetically engineered reindeer which have long since run as wild as the people. The push from more recent Earth settlements in the south is probably, inadvertantly, the cause of the violent consolidation of the nomadic clans that claims Janna's family, the early tragedy around which she's forced to define her character. Janna starts her life in an ecumenical mission (run by an Indian couple, trying to teach the white locals technical culture at a non-threatening rate), a mixed background from the start, and is lucky enough to survive an encounter from a neighboring clan that escalates to the murder of nearly the whole settlement. The poor kid flees into a war (which also has few survivors) and then from it (even fewer), becoming a wife, a mother of a sick baby, a pariah, a widow in the process. While her age is purposefully left indeterminate, she can't be more than sixteen or so by the time she wanders into a refugee camp two (local) years later, and decides, for her own protection as well as psychologically complex reasons she is unable to assess, to compartmentalize her gender and present herself as a male. This gender confusion eventually gets reinforced by her spiritual practices, and later by some modern magic as well. Janna makes it out of the refugee camp to another mission, now in an industrial city further south, where she's sharp enough to expand her English and land a job and a training program for a factory technician. The story here is more of a back-country girl skirting the modern urban culture and counterculture. The final setting brings us to something of a South China Sea that Conrad might have recognized, an already robust trading economy recently beset with new pressures from outside. (Or maybe it's more like the end of the 20th century than the end of the 19th, a handful of hopeful NGOs have also recently arrived of the scene.)

For all this not-entirely-unfamiliar changing of times going on, McHugh does a very good thing with Janna, letting her take on a "native" view of the cultural invasion, and an individual one. This may be one of those cases where science fiction is a good tool to explore an otherwise sensitive or typically ill-informed setting. Coming from a survival culture, Janna makes for an interesting narrator. She is pragmatic instead of introspective, is relatively stoic, and has difficulty forming an internal conception this character of hers, divided between both worlds and genders. She lends herself to terse matter-of-fact descriptions of violence, death, and hunger that leave it more poignant. Janna has a moral sense, but she impressively (and believably) maintains little investment in foreign cultural baggage (both the good and bad kind; the author isn't given to the sort of moralizing that lets her character adopt modern notions of charity and tolerance while rejecting the general bullshit of working for a living or the danger of street culture), and mentions them as irrelevencies or sources of confusion, or in some cases finds the right analogy from her own experiences. We sophisticated readers can spot a great deal of childhood trauma in her, but she gives us a worldview that doesn't include the concept that our character is defined through formative events.

I wonder how much of this thematic weight can be pinned on female authorship. We have endurance trumping triumph here, and flight a bigger motivator than exploration, neither of which is the usual stick used to poke around brave new worlds. We have some gender identity issues, a focus on how those affect relationships, a theme that is much more self-acceptance than it is self-discovery or self-motivation. We have an ambiguous opinion of charity and conquest and culture, which worries more about lost self than it does lost dignity. Mission Child is a view of cultural change from the receiving end, with some clear connection to our own history. Anyone want to recommend a similar novel in a real historical setting? (All I can think of for the moment are one or two stories about Native American that I didn't read in high school. It'd be interesting to compare science fiction vs. the historical kind, or male vs. female writers.)

Finally, a Serious Subject: Blogging The Biggest Loser

2011-01-13T18:04:00.005-05:00

With a mountain of work on my desk (most of it recently prioritized by my twice-weekly chewing out, and no, morale has not improved, thanks so much for asking), then the obvious course of action is ~~Road Trip!~~ to waste an hour or two blogging about some utterly pointless piece of cultural trash. I'm not quite in stupid and futile gesture territory yet, but we'll see how next week's meetings go.

So yeah, as I mentioned, I'd never seen the show before this season. That makes me seven years and eleven seasons behind it's peak popularity, with an interest that is, I have to admit, less than completely sincere. But that's just how I like to approach fandom. And, like with most Americans, I find some personal relevance here. Although I don't know how I could ever hit a quarter ton, I've nonetheless slid far enough up and down the BMI scale to appreciate just how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. I have an intimate understanding of what it takes to do that through exertion and discipline, how damn much more that takes for some people than others, and how even small changes of habit, not all of which you have a good handle on (for example, your sedentary job may be unhealthy, but so is not paying the mortgage), can tip you right back to an unattractive equilibrium porkulence. Watching this show makes me appreciate the minor blessing that my own Weebley resting poundage is only in the lower 200s. This, of course, is one of the major unstated selling points of the show. The others include Americans' undying love for cheap sanctimony, and the fact that there's no easier straight line to set up than one for a fat joke. I'll do my best to be sensitive.

1. Let's first dissect the show's basic premise. Yes, we have some people who have really let themselves go, and they've been selected thanks to some (I imagine) intense psychological and physical screening to help predict that the success rate will be high enough among this carefully chosen sample so they will at least not to depress the entire viewership in their where-are-they-now spot. These folks are then subjected to a grueling supervised workout schedule, every filmable moment of which (again I assume) is recorded in order to mine for positive storylines, in an effort to drop the pounds.

And really, good for them, they have every reason to be proud of themselves. But the corrollary to all that production is that unless you have 16 hours a day available for exercise under the direction of a crack personal trainer and a team of possibly competent doctors, then don't expect to lose 3% of your body mass every week. Obviously not everyone has this option. It's encouraging how they follow up and all, but I wonder how the average contestant does 2 or 5 years out, because unless your job is "personal trainer" (and more about that in a second), then your regimen is unlikely to be sustainable, or to be compatible with full-time employment. Even here, beyond the careful screening, the TBL constentants have a better shot at staying thin than your average schlub does, because they always have a chance at making a career of their minor celebrity. If they keep the weight off, there's always an endorsement to be had, maybe not full Jared, but there's the opening the new GNC in the Niceville mall and that sort of thing.

2. The show does not neglect to include a smidgen of contempt for its participants by inviting fat jokes. (You'll notice that this formulation cleverly removes the moral responsibility from me, the sarcastic viewer, who is responding to those invitations.) I'll give them a pass on the title, whose backhandedness is overt, and instead present the location as exhibit A. Do the biggest losers compete on a compound? On a set? In a complex? A retreat? A campus? Even a farm or a camp? Nope, it's the Bigger Loser Ranch. Moooo-ve over, losers.

3. I don't know if the whole season is like this, but the first two episodes of the damn show have been drawn out to two interminable hours. Now look, as hinted above, the sedentary but stressful lifestyle of Americans, often forced on them, is an important factor contributing to our general rotundity. (Independent of exercise level! An ariticle in a high-impact journal, but man, if there's any medical research that needs airtight scrutiny, it's obesity research.) This show which exhorts us to get off our expanding asses is all about dulling up the programming in an effort to extend the fraction of precious free time that we spend sitting on them.

(On the other hand, maybe it prepares us for the tedium of riding an exercise bike for 16 hours a day if we do get the bug.)

4. The show is decent enough to limit its advertisers to (among the usual purveyors of cars, investment assistance, and penis stiffeners) to diets and healthy things. I don't believe for a second that this is done out of decency, however. I suspect that the producers have spent some quality time with their actuarial models and concluded that the recriminatory backlash of Very Concerned Viewers would cost more than the substantially increased profits they could get from pitching Doritos and Twinkies to hungry and self-loathing viewers.

5. One of the female contestants is an opera singer. For some reason, I have her to make the finale.

6. I understand the need to milk every emotional angle, but I can't be the only one who finds this policeman's family situation horrifyingly unlikely to lead to fulfilling reconciliation. Dude, if your son said that he doesn't love you because you're a fatass, the problem is not that you are obese, it is that your son is a dick.

7. And okay, I know this is wrong, and I feel like a terrible person mentioning it, but can we please get a shot of Dan and Don on tiny motorcycles. Just one quick clip?

8. Contempt for the contestants exhibit B: they really played up that doughnut thing last night, lingering on the torture the poor guy was feeling about tossing that pancaked cruller into the dumpster. I mean, I thought for sure he was going back for it as soon as the cameras were off. I expected to learn this at the big weigh-in ceremony. (Good for him though.)

9. In my own life, it took some time for me to realize that aches and pains from exercise weren't an effect of my general conditioning. When I get a regular enough cycle going, I can look forward to constant discomfort of one kind or another. Now I realize that if you get fat enough, you will be pretty uncomfortable already, but I'm impressed that they are not complaining constantly about screaming knees, shin splints, stiff-as-hell muscles. These poor folks must be so sore they need to be pried out of bed with a canoe paddle in the morning, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see anybody stretching once.

10. What was interesting about Rulon Gardner wasn't precisely that he was an olympic wrestler, but that he was a kind of unlikely one even ten years ago, a doughy kid with a strained but honest grin who somehow bested a Russian genetic cyborg by the space of a quarter-inch of a lost hold. Presumably there are legal reasons for not including Alexander Karelin's picture in there, but the images of the two of them together were what really told the tale of the match.

Judging your lifetime fitness level against your prime bulemic high-effort wrestling best is a forbidding standard, and while he seems like a nice guy, even in 2000, you could see that he was on the thin side of his normal weight. You could see that those heavy-guy features were ready to threaten the integrity of his unitard about five minutes after he stopped training. More than most of the contestants, he's well-suited to a mad dash of weight loss, and while they need the pounds off, feast or flail is not the strategy they need for the rest of their life.

11. I don't much like Bob and Jillian. I mean, it's somewhat refreshing that Bob is fit and attractive into his forties (and even Jillian would have been retired from MTV ten years ago), but the cult of Bob and Jillian is creepy. Look what those contestants gave up last week just to bask in their twin glow.

I do think that the two of them are sincere in their drive for the Losers to succeed (who wouldn't be?), but I'm not buying the shows of empathy for a second. Not only are they high-metabolism people feigning to understand folks cursed with a low one, but exercise is their job! That Jillian confesses to having been tubby when she was twelve years old or so is telling. Adolescence is a tough time, and there are lots of kids who grow out of it late, but it's not really the same thing as weight maintenance as an adult. I think trainers have a valuable role as teachers, for people who don't know how to exercise, or who need some new suggestions. But inspiring? How is a normal person supposed to relate?

12. I'm ambivalent about the trainers, but I attained an instant and active loathing for that smarmy blonde doctor they trotted out. First, you figure that your average doctor on the show has about as much professional integrity as the medicos who signed off on the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. (Given the size of these people, and how hard they're pushed, it's a bit alarming. The wiki article on TBL doesn't suggest that everything is perfectly kosher, even though a heart attack would take a worse toll on the viewership than an advertisement for Little Debbie.) That age calculator he drags is about as scientific as that computer simulation that told Lisa Simpson she needed braces, and his accusing "evidence" hurled at Dan (or was it Don?) was about the lamest tv-drama bombast that ever failed an audition.

But what really gets me is that here's the guy on the show who's not holding back to belittle these people in the bad way. I mean, they're here because they want to make a change and are willing to do it. Does it help to rub it in their face how badly they've been fucking their lives up?

Obligatory thoughts on the Arizona shooting

2011-01-09T18:50:00.012-05:00

Obviously nobody's pestering me for my thoughts here, but I've seen so damn much CNN in the last two days, that it's hard to avoid forming an opinion or two. I'd like to get it off my chest before I go and try to be entertaining.

1. A nine-year-old girl as well as half a dozen grownups were killed. This kind of thing just ties me up in knots, and I wish I could stop thinking about it. I mean, if you're losing your positive outlook on the human race, then the best thing you can do is to get to know a well-balanced nine-year-old girl. Taking that away is the stuff of enduring heartbreak and terrifying nightmares. When little girls start to fall under your vision of acceptable collateral damage, then maybe it's time it's time to give a serious second thought to what you imagine it is you're trying to accomplish.

Of course, this draws up the usual unsettling disconnect. How many little girls are getting shot, orphaned, abused, and starved thanks to accepted violence? It happens far too commonly outside of society's purview or its capability to control, and that's awful enough, but we're out there killing them too, on purpose, or as an accepted consequence, through intentional policy, domestic and foreign. Political violence is common and condoned, while violence against politics has been pretty rare here by comparison in the last hundred years, and roundly condemned. Increasingly, I find I am sick with both. If you want to remember what the middle east wars cost, then try to imagine the thousands of nine-year-old kids, if you can take it.

2. I tend to agree that inflammatory rhetoric and the more-belligerent pose of the right wing is partly to blame here. I think that actual concentration and expression of economic power is also part of the problem. Powerlessness and ignorance seem to be common themes of many a confused American revolutionary poser, if you want to call in the Truthers and Birthers and the rest, not to mention the Tea Party. I don't think that's an entirely wrong perception: the political representation in our system is not engineered to make the system fair even according to the points of its own narrative, or to give these folks much of a voice. I mean, people have obviously been incited from time to time in history, and oppression and (limited) freedom are the fuel and oxygen of certain kinds of political conflagration. Are we there yet? I don't know. I think it's early to spot a general trend from this (not that it matters what I think), and occasional violent outbursts seem to be part of human behavior, no matter what causes the stress.

Of course, glibly supporting violence and throwing around martial rhetoric beforehand sure does make you look like an asshole when it finally does occur.

3. I liked the sherriff dude abetter on an extended interview this morning (I actually plugged into the sound!), but still, "consequences" sounds like a menacing addendum to free speech. It's worrying what people choose to believe, but if we're talking susceptibility to propaganda, then I find that our media is similarly infuriating. I think I'd still care, but if it weren't for twenty-four hours of concerned opinion, then I don't think I'd be this fucking irritated. Every time I calm down, I go a round on the hamster wheel and read one of the zillions of blog posts on the subject and I get annoyed again. We have several familiar themes emerging in the professional press, including that the dude was nuts, that you shouldn't challenge authority, that he was incoherently political, that both sides have troublemakers, that the political climate is just too nasty and it must unite for healing. Maybe he's nuts, and probably he's a poor thinker, and sure, people should calm the fuck down, but I'm not learning anything here about what people get angry about. I'm annoyed that this lone whackjob is a standard script for someone who does not speak with an accent. I think reporting like this is why people question authority.

I worry about cracking down, as false syllogisms continue to emerge with respect to violence and dissent. All terrorists disagree with the system, but not all complainers are violent, right? A high fraction of people against the establishment are selfish and too stupid to breathe, but that's true of people for it too. If our governing outlook does change as a response, it will probably be at the expense of the lower economic orders, who usually bear it. I suspect that amendments 1 and 4-10 are at more danger of being compromised than the second one. More than that, I'm worried about what we get for this affirmation of bipartisanship, if no one dares protest a crazy idea from the establishment. The last few times they came together as a concerned whole, we got bailouts, and a war, and a Patriot act.

4. This kind of false syllogism thing writes itself: Obviously these damn white dudes are nothing but trouble, and the only rational response is to crack down on them. I don't think we should randomly pull them over or anything, but airports? In schools? The bleeding hearts call it "profiling" but if they are the ones who commit these terrorist acts, then that's only a matter of using the information we have. Maybe there are good white guys out there (maybe!) but until they get together and keep their nutjobs in line, then they obviously don't deserve to be treated like real citizens. If they want respect, they have to earn it. They say it's a culture of peace, but really, who we kidding here?

5. What to make of the reading list? The nooze cites Animal Farm, The Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf, and although you can sense a theme there, that's a pretty contradictory set of inspirations. The liberal blogs add that an Ayn Rand doorstop or two was in the mix, perhaps omitted in the media since that's too close to our own governing madness. Now, I've read Animal Farm a couple of times, and the first time I did it was assigned. I haven't read Marx's manifesto but I've heard that it is powerful as a critique (and not so controversial as advertised), even if it turned out to be a terrible prescription when it got into certain hands. You couldn't fucking pay me enough to read Mein Kampf, but I think that there's an argument that it should be read, to help understand where a fascist monster came from. I don't see the reading list as sufficient evidence of lunacy, in other words, but it's been hauled up a lot.

Based on reports from people who read his screeds, the guy really does look unhinged, but I still think it was an early call by the media. Like "radicalized," it's a facile judgement that dismisses all disagreement with the dominant narrative as bonkers. Meanwhile, the same simple view can be applied to policy and our dominant ideologies when we look at what those things actually do--they're nuts too!

Well, maybe they all are. Maybe the sane people are the ones who don't waste their lives thinking about this crap. Right up to the point when they have to live with it.

Review: The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa

2011-01-04T12:29:00.001-05:00

[This review contains spoilers. Cleaned up a little too.]

To recap from previous comments, when Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel literature prize last year, the choice was lauded from many quarters, a sometimes political novelist (and a sometimes politician novelist) who found supporters from many surprising quarters. When pressed the crack team of commenters over at alicublog recommended The War of the End of the World as particularly impressive, and that was a good enough excuse for me to pick it up.

The story involves a relatively large cast of players and several significant intertwining threads, moving along approximately linearly, which keep up tension despite a few gigantic giveaways, despite this being a story whose outcome is already known anyway. It's a fictionalized account of the "War of Canudos" that took place in Brazil in 1897, a stunningly tragic affair in which the government, at great cost to its own military, mercilessly eradicated some twenty thousand souls that had founded a religious colony in the dusty backlands of the state of Bahia. The villagers, composed of fanatics, pilgrims, and former bandits, turned back three invasions before being overwhelmed and butchered by an ovewhelming final force. The conflict was by various respects an extension of the struggle between the country's contemporary republican and conservative political factions, an assertion of state authority over independent homegrown autonomous movements, or even an understandable attempt (gone horribly awry) to curtail extortion of the neighboring localities by the upstart community. Modern American parallels might include the massacres at Waco or Jonestown, although those were at not nearly the scale.

The Canudos war was chronicled by a Brazilian war correspondent named Euclides da Cunha, who published Os Sertões (the title is usually translated, apparently not well, as Rebellion in the Backlands) in 1902 after his experinces there. Now, Os Sertões is highly acclaimed in its own right, thought by some to rival Tolstoy, a comparison which, when it comes to scope and its morally tinged realism, is easy to draw for The War of the End of the World as well. (Or if not War and Peace, then at least War.) Although he remains unnamed in the novel, da Cunha is one of Llosa's primary characters, and the author does not present him very favorably. His physical deficiencies are used instead of his name (he is "the nearsighted journalist"), and no mention passes without a reference to his irritating voice, his ungainliness, his social awkwardness, his crippling myopia, his insufferable allergies. (I would add cowardice to the list, but I don't think Llosa condemns cowardice so much, and it may even be a byproduct of relative sanity.) He is moreover offered as a shallow hipster sort, possessed of a tiny, spent cachet of coolness among the other journalists, which only makes him more of a misfit among the serious people and ascetics. The actual journalist's Wikipedia entry has a photo of a handsome man, however, and while I don't want to add much approving weight to ideologies in this review, he seems to have been motivated by a reasonably decent naturalist one. And of course there's that great book he wrote. As one of a handful of survivors, Llosa's journalist is also one of the two people to experience a positive character evolution from the conflict, and may be the only one gifted with both intelligence and, at the end, something like maturity. I wish I had read Os Sertões too, wish I knew what comment Llosa was making on it and why he felt one was needed. Is he looking to remove that early 19th century gloss? To call out its simple ideologies? Possibly The War of the End of the World is ultimately a novel of becoming Euclides da Cunha.

I have the characters in War divided loosely among three types: the mad idealists; the pragmatists; and lastly, the group that includes the journalist, the dependents at the mercy of the rest. The first are the most striking, and include the inscrutable Counselor (Antônio Conselheiro) who founded the place, Colonel Moreira César who led the second expidition against the rebels at Canudos, the peasant guide Ruffino, and the itinerant revolutionary Galileo Gall. As a group they favor extreme views of their individual philosophies (the Counselor's Catholic-derived teachings; Moreira César's Republicanism; Ruffino's code of personal honor; and Gall's anarchism) and they have considerable overlap in terms of personality and even the structure of their ideas, but the intensity of conviction makes them utterly incompatible with one another, to the point of death for each one of them.

The pragmatists temper their belief with necessity, and great examples of this are Antônio Vilanova and Abbot (a.k.a. Satan) João who lead Canudos' surprisingly effective administration and military staff. They are motivated by idealism, but it's tempered enough to make them useful people. This category could also include the baron de Canabrava (monarchist and the nominal landowner of Canudos, gradually losing his grip to the republicans) and his opponent Epanimondas Gonçalves (the schemer of the other political faction). These people tend to survive, or at least die less fantastically, in the novel. They're shown capable of change, but don't necissarily manifest any worthwhile personal growth. The baron shrinks in moral stature; Vilanova's left to re-start his life yet again; and Epanimondas continues to shift around like a perpetual Reynard. Further down the spectrum, other dependant types include Ruffino's wife Jurema, a circus dwarf (doesn't every epic novel have to have a traveling circus?), and the deformed, lenonine scribe of Canudos. These people are given to fear, doubt, and childish displays of need. You might call them the victims, the real people (although these are all of them novel-style people) least infected with zealotry, and in the absence of spiritual salvation or other true belief, they're the ones who at least have a chance of a hward-won literary redemption.

[In addition to the journalist, known historical figures include the Counselor and Colonel Moreira César. My guess about Epanimondas Gonçalves is that his name is meant to suggest a political provocateur that history forgot, but I had similar and stronger suspicions about a militant little shit named César, and I was wrong about that one. Presumably there was a real Baron de Canabrava at this time; hopefully history did not give us a Galileo Gall.]

Now this can clearly lead to a lot of smaller personal conflicts and all kinds of compare-and-contrast kinds of exercises, and that's the meat that Llosa fills his book up with. (The skeleton is a story of sad deaths and unlikely survivals, and a hate-to-admit-it gripping military tale of plucky underdogs versus the hostile empire.) Although I had early difficulties with some aspects of the book, I really loved the way he could jump gears to weave in a background story or a subplot into the body of the text. There is no loss for words or ideas here. The story of Canudos is, as the journalist describes it late in the novel, in reality a tree of stories, with expansive roots, and branching everywhere.

I want to put the uniting theme of the book as a failure of idealism, but there's the troubling fact that Canudos, as Llosa presents it, basically works as an idealist society before it's squashed. Is it a story specifying the conditions for ideology's success then? Well, the town works nearly in spite of the loopy counselor and his inner core of whackos; and the various other modes of belief presented in it could have similar interpretations. There's a more-or-less effective Brazilian state or of a more-or-less successful mutualism going on in town.(It happens that the faithful follower of Proudhon has no hope of understanding it, but he is also sort of right about it.) Is it about the correctness of that faith, of that brand of libertarianism? No, the counselor's specific objections to the Republic are basically silly (at best a well-motivated misunderstanding), and Gall is a philosphically ineffectual but personally monstrous buffoon (his ideas are cast off as naive and he unrepentently fails to practice them when it comes to individual people--he's a real Alden Pyle type). Is it a contrast between European (Gall's) vs. Brazilian ideas of liberty? Not really--it'd take some familiarity with European history to use "Jacobin" as an epithet for the political ascendents. Speaking of the rapist Gall, is the message to put the abuse of women and the poor in the inevitable denominator of society? Well not even that: a woman is the other character lucky enough to catch an epiphany through all that; the poor rebels were happy as well as oppressed; and the rich had their successes and failures too. It's maybe all of those things. Or maybe it's just given as a bunch of stuff that happened, with a healthy nod to how things relate to ideologies, but aren't really.

I'll have you know that it's a bitch to type out all of those special characters, and I found the early abundance tilded, carated, and accent-marked proper nouns (the first 50 Brazilians that you meet are all named either Antônio or João) for which I had little feeling of a correct pronunciation to be an extra difficulty. Add to this that I didn't have a good intuition for the geography, and was learning fast to loathe this redheaded Scottish asshole featured so prominently at the front end of the book, and the first 75 pages was actually a bit of a slog. After that, however, (and maybe because I was home and had time to read) I caught the groove of it, and the book suddenly flew. I enjoyed the rest of the novel enough to go back and reread the first parts, which no longer seemed so slow.

The geography issue wasn't the backlands of Bahia, which are presented in great fine detail. As I mentioned yesterday, I got a distinct Victor Hugo vibe from their description, as Llosa lovingly and condescendingly re-introduces to the reader these superstitious country folks that modern society has stopped thinking about. He gets across that we're in an arid climate of scrub forest and Andean pampas in this part of the country. No, what I really missed here was any useful contrast between that and the coastal parts of Bahia. I didn't get a good picture of Salvador as an urbane, cosmopolitan place, and it took a while to figure out that Queimadas was the railway terminus, the cutoff point between civilization and the rest of the state. I mean, Llosa is writing to a South American audience which has some of the requisite cultural baggage, and that's all fine, but I kept thinking that if this was straight fiction instead of the historical variety, I'd have been content to have it spelled a little clearer. In a great departure from the inability of the characters of the novel to communicate with each other and the difficulty they had in traveling out there, I scouted out Canudos and environs with Google Maps, and it helped a lot.

Happy Christmas

2010-12-24T09:44:00.001-05:00

I'm not going to leave off with that one!

Light posting this month has been mostly due to the year-end silly season at work, all kinds of stress from that medical scare, and the fact that every single night for the past five weeks has included some kind of children's activity.

I'm not complaining--it's not lost on me that these are the good times, and I'm thrilled to be getting a week off to spend with my family. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Inheritance

2010-12-24T09:43:00.000-05:00

It's anecdote time, everyone!

At the end of October, my grandmother proved, despite the growing evidence, the limits of her resilience. She'd shown an impressive constitution for an old lady. In her eighties, a little less than ten years ago, she broke her hip, and within a year, recovered from it. A handful of years after that, she moved from her own house in Florida to be closer to family, opting for a new life in an assisted living facility. It's not the worst arrangement for someone who is used to independence: basically it's an apartment of your own that comes with a red phone to care facilities, a common meal a day, and someone who is paid to notice if you don't show up for it. She'd been increasingly unsteady on her feet however, and five or six months ago, she fell once more, and this time broke her pelvis. At 92 years old, it really fucked her up, not just laying her flat, but taking an exceptional mental toll as well. Confusion and depression isn't something you want to see in someone in that state. I got sad emails from my mom and my aunt, fearing it was the end, but she dug in and started pulling around from this injury too. She moved in with her daughter, and when I saw her in August, she was confined to a wheelchair, showing her age, but nearly herself, despite everything. Unfortunately, a bacterial infection took root at some point in her stomach and progressed unknown on the inside for a while, and when she was rushed to the hospital intravenous antibiotics at least drove out the bugs. Amazingly, she appeared to be recovering from this too, but the 93-year-old body only had so much of a rally left in it.

[The point is that she needed care, but still had a lot of life going on. I don't want to neglect to say how great a person she was, and I miss her a lot. She was a woman who liked pretty much everyone she came across, enjoying the conversation and company, not generally thinking to notice people's flaws and issues. She had friends wherever she went, and it wasn't so much that she was sweet and nice, although she was very nice, but she wasn't about drama. My cousin said at her funeral that she was cool without having the slightest notion that she was cool. She was someone who made decency look effortless.]

Her care was financed mostly by the investments that my grandfather had put together over the years. (I think that he would have been happy to know that these did indeed provide over all that time.) Caring for her pretty much wound down the whole shebang though, including the house the old man had built with his own hands. They don't keep me in the loop with all the details, but I understand it came extremely close to breaking even. The state may have picked up a few bucks right at the end.

On the other side of the family, years before, my father's mother's odd behavior after her husband's death turned out not to be, as 25-year-old Keifus would have preferred to believe, the natural product of solitude and her own quirkiness, but rather the early stages of Alzheimer's, and it slowly worsened over a period of years. She lived by herself, with lots of visits from her children, for as long as she was capable of doing that, and afterwards moved to a nursing home when she was not so capable. I wasn't around all that much at the time (winding up grad school, moving to the DC area), but I still failed to take many of the opportunities to visit that I did have. I feel terrible about this. It may well be one of the three or four clinging regrets that I rave about when it's my turn for my mind to disintegrate. It deserves to be.

She was my family's first encounter with long-term medical finances, and, on top of watching someone's warmth and wit dissolve, I remember that it was pretty damn wrenching to have to work the system. These grandparents were also frugal (a more throwback Yankee sort of frugality), but it didn't take long at all to burn through all their assets, and after that it was years of government assistance to maintain that modest level of care.

[Both of my grandfathers, if you were wondering, were done in by prostate cancer and predeceased their wives. They'd both received hospitalization and some home care. I don't know how it was taken care of financially.]

Here's some final anecdata, what's actually driving the post. There's been a health scare from my wife's side of the family this month too, from someone not so old. Complications from routine surgery led to weeks in the ICU (a close thing, but now recovering, thanks). A completely different set of finances there (veterans and state retirement benefits), but my wife came back with tales from the waiting room of the humiliating dissolution of wealth and dignity that everyone else was dealing with as their loved ones were making the transition to state aid to cover their massive medical burden.

It's not in most of our characters to put our elders on the nearest ice floe at the first signs of impairment. We'd rather, if possible, that they decline with comfort and dignity: because we owe them, because we love them, because we'd like to limit the pain and humiliation for ourselves too when it's our turn. Because they're still human beings dammit. And if that's insufficiently cynical, then remember that the senior care industry only grows, and there's more than adequate economic motivation for the governors to allow it continue to hoover our last dimes.

In Weldon's last post, he had a line that got me. The context was different, but the point the same: A lot of people won’t get help before they’ve lost everything.

Long-term care was part of the Medicare discussion when it was drafted, but that didn't really survive into the ultimate legislation. Medicare is more designed for hospitalization and any coverage for convalescence is meant in the context of recovery from an acute illness or injury, and it only will cover limited care in this regard (a little over 3 months is all, by specialized providers, following at least 3 required days of hospitalization). Non-specialist care in an assisted living center or in a nursing home (I am not what proportion, although this is no doubt depressing too) is provided for the "medically needy" through the Medicaid program, the specific requirements and benefits of which vary by state. We all know about Medicaid for the unwashed poor, and our cracker classes are plenty indignant about that idea of course, but it's a good chance that even your typical pasty boomer, if those that hang on long enough, is going to wind up there, just like their parents did. You typically becomes medically needy by spending all of your liquid assets and all of your income on medical care. It's not a euphemism, it's actually a requirement: you have to spend everything you own before they will give you a nickel. If you were wily enough to see this coming and started giving it away, then (within three years) that's illegal too. In 2004, 56% of nursing home expenditures were provided by Medicaid, a good measure, I suspect, of how long people currently outlive that 100 days, or their fortunes.

The budget alarmists are afraid of escalating trends in medical costs, and for long-term care of the aged, and no doubt they should be. Unfortunately, the policy argument to address this tends to be between people who want to provide some level of care without using the word "Socialism" and without threatening the precious health industry with regulation, and people who flat out don't want to provide it at all. In the CBO report linked above, the prescription that it advocates, or the question it begs, is private long-term care insurance. (I realize this is Bush-era stuff, but (a) it's the damn CBO, and (b) the spectre of entitlement reform hasn't exactly disappeared with the Harvard cowboy.) After presenting its data and offering the correct observation that people are not incentivized to accumulate extra savings when the price of keeping them in pudding and rough-handed orderlies in their waning days corresponds exactly to how much they got, it then concludes that Medicaid benefits should be cut, that whatever few breaks still exist should be quickly removed in order to provide more tough-love incentives to save or buy private insurance. This is good evidence of why you should never mistake establishment-friendly economists for human beings. I mean, what the fuck else is Medicaid going to take away from you? And an automatic impoverishment in the last phase of your life is only one reason to avoid savings, but let's not pretend it's the only one: zippo return on reasonably secure vehicles, a bigger take of your life for homes and educations, and 40 years of increased credit instead of increased wages. Fuck you, the CBO.

But it'd surely be worse if we lost Medicaid, wouldn't it? For the people, yes, but more important than that, we're talking money that people are willing to pay, and that always has a voice. The way I see it, there is a constituency that stands to get rich off of expensive care (medical providers), and one that stands to get rich off of expensive administration of it (medical insurers). A push toward private long-term care insurance may be more expensive and less efficient for the people (assuming it follows other kinds of health care), but it's a win win for the favored sons.

My grandfather was a smart and resourceful guy. He got his P.E. in middle age without any of the usual college attainment and changed his career path. (I'm sincerely impressed with this--I keep some of his old-school slide rules and drafting tools to remind me what a sorry excuse for an engineer I turned out to be by comparison). He managed his savings as shrewdly as anyone who has something to manage, but who is not by any means a player, can. (That's a compliment too, but now intended a little backhandedly--having something to manage is an important part of that equation.) I didn't realize that he had help building it up in the first place with a surprise inheritance from one of his uncles. There are fewer men that are self-made than have improved their forward trajectory, but certainly either one is hard enough. The thing is, those sorts of windfalls don't float around in quite the same way as they used to, not for us little people. Too expensive to get old.

Who makes it out these days without experiencing a steady decline? I personally think it's worth it for general humanist principles that we extend quality of life as best we can, and although it's a shitty answer, Medicaid, savings and long-term care insurance are at least answers. We are priveleged to have some forward social trajectory, but inheritance is not really part of it for the middle classes these days, and we should probably count ourselves lucky that the expense is for now avoided between generations and between spouses, and that there's still a chance of keeping the house. But let's be honest here: the system as constructed is designed to consume a modest estate. This is is what happens to the net worth of the non-rich. I don't like inheritance as the mechanism to keep people less than poor, but forced liquidation on the low end adds to inequality. The next priveleged fucker who starts whining about the estate tax deserves to get hit with a bat.

Review: Berlin: City of Stones, and Berlin: City of Smoke, by Jason Lutes

2010-12-10T10:26:00.003-05:00

Berlin: City of Stones and Berlin: City of Smoke are the first two of a series of graphic novels by Jason Lutes, depicting the city at the end of the Weimar republic.

I've started a ramble on graphic novels before, and this is a fine excuse to elaborate. I am not the best ambassador for the form. I don't read a whole lot of them, and my tastes reflect a strong imprinting on silver age styles, that happened between 1978 and 1989 maybe, starting at the point I could ever convince Mom to buy me one off the carousel and ending when I outgrew too many of the dramatic elements and finally got sufficiently disgusted with the constant disregard for Our Story So Far. The art of that era was undoubtedly marketed to teenage boys, and it came with hyperkinetic action, exaggerated perspectives, and a human form (male and female) idealized to the point of eroticism--the artistic equivalent of overacting--but there was some fabulous drawing going on, and anything I've leafed since has been sorry (certainly it hasn't been pale) in the comparison. I realize I'm biased, but I think I was lucky to catch the artistic peak, not just for the highly-detailed lines that the era favored, but I also think digital colorization turned everything to shit.

I read up: in those earlier days, artist hand-colored proofs according to an industry palate, and further indicated shading and tone for the benefit of the printers: the color plates were made up by these specifications. (Previously, I thought that colored proofs were photographed through filtered cameras to generate the plates--maybe this was done too?). Details of shading were no doubt lost, but I think that hand coloring kept the artists close to the detail work, and, I think, gave us a great deal of black-ink shading to compensate for the paucity of available colors. You know, art benefiting from constraints and all. Over the years (and at the time I was reading the things), an expanded palate emerged, and eventually (around the time I stopped), it went digital, producing as unlimited a choice as you can generate with your favorite computerized painting tool. Personally, I think old medium produced much better art than the solid photoshopped fills they use today, now paint-bucketing the careful lines with virulent computer-provided patches of monochrome. I can't look at the things these days--they're garish, and while I like to think that there's good storytelling to be developed in that medium, it's mostly the art that keeps me away.

In the small handful of "serious" graphic novels I've read since I turned 17, and most of the newspaper strips, the drawing itself appears to be less important than the art layout. How do the frames and the objects in them relate to tell the story, move along a conversation, create a kinetic sequence, whereas the drawings themselves are expected to be sylized according to the medium, about only as much as to be identifiable. And the emphasis on well organized frames is important, but I need some minimum drawing ability for my appreciation. I know it's been noted the cartoons too: I remember Bill Watterson complaining in the introduction to one of his Calvin and Hobbes anthologies about the general low quality of drawing in his medium (which he since recanted, I believe), and he had something of a point, and made up for it in some of his strips, which is no small part of why I loved 'em. (Now there was a guy who knew how to quit when he was ahead.) My tattered pile of old MADs sort of spanned the spectrum between raw art and layout.

It's a long segue, but a lot of my reaction to things like Berlin ends up closely related to how I look at them. I spent some time in the above contexts trying to pinpoint Lutes' syle. The drawing is decent, passing the art bar, and including nice scenery shots, and I think is improved by avoiding color in the first place. It's a far cry from the tradition of the gory and lascivious detail you'd get in an old black and white Savage Sword of Conan, and if it did make use of all kinds of city views, the creative layouts are rarely rolled into large complicated images, and the scene changes are more in the lines of storytelling transitions than tricky artistic ones. When he does go there--I'm remembering the way he worked in art-school technique in one series of panes about a lecture, and how in a different series, he brought some full-bacchanal scenery in his glimpses of underground nightlife, and there were a couple intrusive uses of white space--it instantly becomes more interesting. Given the clever vehicle of making one of his characters sketch compulsively, you kind of wish he worked that conceit into his own art more. I will say that I enjoyed the way Lutes moves between a character's dreams and reality as a means to shift the point of view from the dreamer to the dreamed-of, and he does a nice job of employing the comics-equivalent of a roving camera to lead us between plot arcs too, but these aren't things that are contained in the drawing.

The usual dialogue balloons, thought balloons, and text boxes seem more ingrained to the medium to the point they're unnoticable. Lutes is big on thoughtful dialogue and faces, not really on any of the raw action and cheesey drama of the superhero tradition. He lets the characters' expressions reveal emotions most of the time, but still not in a way that feels very new. There's something familiar about doing it that way: it frequently reminded me of an old Lighter Side strip, where the point is more about writing, that is, more about setting up and delivering a piece of dialogue. The ways Lutes' conversations get spaced-out in a series of panels, the way that situations are introduced with people-free panes, and the use of facial shots with minimal background drawing, it all lends a strange quiet feeling to the book, and when Lutes falls back on comics tropes like punctuation marks over people's heads, big-graphic sound effects, and swirl lines, it feels like he's regressing. The quiet space does seem appropriate to convey the impending political fate that we know is coming for all of these characters.

Berlin did what I wanted it to do, what Sinclair Lewis failed to do, which was to set up a feeling of how it happened there. I'm falling back too much on my history-for-engineers classes here, but as I remember learning it, the usual story of the fall of the republic and the rise of fascism is told as a series of calculated political moves and power grabs by you-know-who, against a backdrop of economic depression. The classroom version sort of leaves out the city as a hub of European culture, the hopeful liberalism of the Weimar Republic, the personal wounds of the Great War, the vibrancy of urban life, and Lutes gets a good chunk of that in his comic, as well as the sense of how it is beginning to untie. Here in America, we also tend to leave out the Communist influence in prewar Germany and the National Socialist's definitional opposition to it. Lutes doesn't give up much love for the actual Reds--they're given to rallies and thuggery too--but he expends a great deal of sympathy toward those characters attracted to the philosophy, and none towards those inclined toward authoritarian Nazism. (Curiously, he has yet to draw a swastika--flags are represented with a big blank space devoid of party emblem.) A great deal of dialogue is devoted to the spectrum of characters' resistance to the growing popular ideas, and to their bonds of class, at a time, in the story so far, when they still feel free to express these things.

Berlin is advertised as a graphic novel with as much texture and depth as a regular novel. I contend that it makes good use of the comic form (with the caveats noted above) to tell the same kind of story, but if this is novel-like, then it's wicked thin. I think I knocked off each of the volumes in about an hour, less time than it's taken me to write about them, and I am not a fast reader. The art is reasonably well-done, but it's not so engaging as to make the eye linger. I think the bigger problem is that we have an ensemble cast in which none of the characters have enough pages under their belt to be especially memorable. This many people in a 150-page prose novel would be just as difficult to develop. It's worse that Marthe Muller, the closest thing we have to a protagonist, is devoid of much defining personality. She's a little introspective, and a little independent-minded, has a ghost or two, but her spontaneity, devotion, and likeability don't really seem to come from anything we can see her say or do. Worse, she's the most generically drawn of all of them (defined with a weariness in her face that marks her as slightly older than the other students, but younger than the workers and newsmen, but that level of detail varies by pane, and sometimes I was reduced to carefully checking noses to make sure I knew who the story was following at the time). The journalist Severing is a little better realized, but a downer, and mostly I wait for his descent into real depression. Marthe's friend and lover, Anna comes off the more sincere, with actual challenges with a modern identity and mixed cues in a straight socity, and the Jewish boy David is given some interesting private life beyond the external story as well. The bigger drama we see is from the folks from the working and poorer classes, but it's also a cheaper sort, more basic stories of violence and sacrifice. A runaway girl, and dead mother, and some unlikely compassion, and finally I'm finding myself engaged.

Berlin takes a look at a transitional place, and recovers the forgotten human and social elements, and I think this is very much its strength. As a comic, it's not deeply innovative, but it uses the medium well in getting this story told. As a novel, it's readable, but I can't bring myself to see it as the great black and white hope, whatever NPR would like us to believe.

The Next Bubble?

2010-12-02T10:54:00.017-05:00

[There was cleanup called on Aisle Keifus. This post is still among my most boring, not to mention borderline ignorant, but the more egregious writing errors have been corrected. It's not like this blog is going to hit the big-time, and sometimes I just have to get stuff out.]

Complicated life choices are an unavoidable consequence of living in interesting times. How can I guide the kids toward a positive life experience that doesn't charge the price of defiance (or doesn't insist on charging it), but can still minimize their indenture to the Way Things Are.* How to offer them options for success or happiness that aren't limited to the treadmill, or the rat race? Convince each of them to invest in a hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of college, with no savings to speak of, an unsure direction (as it should be at this point, before they're even in highschool), and no solid expectation of future employment? My feelings about the value of learning, the value of keeping our citizens educated, and my memories of the experience--let's face it, my elitism--are running straight at the wall of rapidly escalating costs. I prefer my kids to go if it fits into their still-hard-to-judge life plan, even if The Man callously demands it from them anyway. I just have no idea how I'm going to pay for it.

Here is a graph of college costs posted recently at the Naked Capitalism blog.

Since the early 1980s (at least), they have been rising a great deal faster than inflation, faster even than our monstrously inflated home values did. Given what happened there, Yves Smith points out in that post her fears of a bubble. Student debt (as oppposed to mere costs) has jumped up 25%, and meanwhile, a job upon exit is harder to come by than ever. Currently, unemployment rates among 20- to 24-year-olds is up around 15%, and even with the 2005 "improvements" on bankruptcy laws, defaults on student loans are also rising. Meanwhile the lifetime net income gain of a college education is estimated at a couple hundred thousand dollars, which might leave my kids just enough dough to put my grandkids through, assuming no one in this chain plans on ever retiring, or getting sick.

At some point in our lives, we all get the "savings" spiel, how compounded growth is magical and how great it is to get in early. But exponential growth applies to negative rates too, making it so much harder to get out of the hole (especially if you get in early), and differences in those rates tends to open up chasms when they're perpetuated over years. Here is a helpful aricle by the College Board talking about rising student costs. They estimate that the growth rates in college prices from 1977 to 2007 (approximately the same range as in Yves' graph), has been about 4.5% for public schools, 3% for private ones (which remain much more expensive), and about 1.5% for public 2-year colleges ("community colleges") per year over inflation. Factoring in room and board makes the four-year schools (students are assumed to commute to two-year ones) look a little better, knocking about a percentage point off of each of those values. This tells us that tuition alone is bloating faster than the cost of dormitories or apartment rentals, but that the net effect has still been growing faster than everything else has for 35 years.

What about all that sweet, sweet financial aid? I'm glad that the College Board reports this too, and net costs show similar trends. They also break 'em down relative to household income, and here's a result that I didn't expect: according to their data, "upper middle class" folks such as me have seen no change in the percentage of their income they devote to their kids' college costs between 1992 (when my college was getting financed) and 2003 ("now" for the purposes of conversation). Although, I can still salvage a little self-pity. Here in New England, both college costs and incomes are higher than in other parts of the country, so I can look forward to increased net payout, and also life in a lower income group than the national averages suggest.

On the other hand, and as usual, it's far worse for lower income people, who are not only getting pushed into college much more than they used to, but have a bigger burden than they once did. It's not just that a matter of costs growing equally for everyone. The increase on the lower end of costs relative to income is reflective of the fact that these families have become poorer since 1992. The growth rate of income has been much different for the different qunitiles (Why the census likes to bin things up in quintiles, while the college board prefers quartiles is left as an exercise to the reader. Downloadable tabulated data could have given you a better post, but would have wasted more of my time.). Lower income people didn't benefit from a growing economy at all, while rich folks did so disproportionality, and the speed of that separation has accelerated, a grand canyon of inequality. Middle class people (at least outside of New England) have been just barely keeping up with the growing expense of those important things that are not in the CPI, which is perhaps why we don't have a revolution yet.

But anyway, the data tells me, to my surprise, that it shouldn't be any harder for me to put my kids through school than it was for my parents (who pretty much killed themselves to do it), even while great other segments of the population are getting right fucked. Even there, there are a few key omissions in that analysis:

Fuel costs have risen relative to inflation since the early 90s.

So have housing costs, a lot. Note that first chart.

It's taking two individual incomes to make that same household rate of 20 years ago.

We just finished paying off our goddamned loans. Mom and dad didn't have that issue.

Income still ain't wealth, and savings in terms of home equity has been devalued.

Student loans are an expected finance mechanism, more, I think, than they used to be. There are industry incentives to push them, in terms of government guarantees and protection from bankruptcy laws. Like in Taibbi's Griftopia, these were legislated changes in policy.

So even for the middle class, that nominally static fraction of our income still looks a lot like a growing debt trap, as the other demands on that income have increased, and as the cycle of debt closes to meet across the generations. As mentioned above, student loan debt has shot up 25% since the early nineties, which is far beyond what costs did. Mom and Dad have less to contribute, and so Junior takes on a bigger chunk himself. More people need to go to college to provide the credentialism that employers increasingly demand, (and to soak up the lack of quality jobs they offer) and meanwhile the economy is recessing, and unemployment is high.

If it's a bubble, then how does it collapse? When you default on your mortgage, at least they can take your house. The justification for your college loan is your future income. What's in the deal for lenders when you can't cough it up? Are we looking at peonage? Debtor's prisons? (It's a trick question of course. Student loans are guaranteed by the government. They'll take your taxes and slowly rescind your benefits.)

I'll accept that loan availability gradually drives up tuition prices. People can generate more money to go, and so they get charged more for the same thing. Where does it all go? Universities don't pay professors a hell of a lot more than they used to, especially given the purported value of their extensive education, and there are fewer tenure positions available, and more temporary ones, not to mention a glut of eager degreed people to fill them all. Administration as a buck-sucker is a good hypothesis, but even CEO-scale pay increases at the top don't really seem enough to be enough to soak up all those additional dollars. Not only are tuitions skyrocketing, attendance is going up too. In public universities, decreasing state funds is blamed, and that is no doubt part of the story, but it still doesn't account for the way that private education has similarly ballooned. It probably does explain the difference in the rates of cost growth vs. private school, but they're both still growing.

Another usual story is that it goes to ridiculous infrastructure improvements: spiffy buildings, meticulous landscaping, sports teams, palatial dorms, sparkling research facilities. Speaking anecdotally, every residential universtiy I've been within a mile of has been sick with this improvement disease, and it probably explains why commuter schools are growing less fast (but dorms alone don't seem to cut it as a cause, looking at the mroe modest growth of room and board compared to tuition that the College Board reports). The story is that all of this is done to attract students, but that doesn't compute, considering there are more students than ever, coughing up more bucks. Even if they didn't raise the margin, colleges should be be raking it in based on volume. I have mixed feelings about these big collegiate infrastructure investments. I am sentimental about tradition, preserving the older feel of these places, and hate to see unnecessary changes, at absurd cost. But as for the attention, these institutions may be reinforcing the last connections with learning and culture our society can expect, and that strikes me as worth preservational effort. And the improvements don't need to be constant: if the money spigot does start to lose flow, they can always stop building all this shit, just let the basketball team go pro already.

I've been intrigued (and not at all surprised) by statements, usually in blog comments, that the loan availability is also largely influenced by loan providers. More money lent means more business, and maybe sharking accounts for the baseline super-inflationary growth that we see in community colleges (which, as opposed to the residential four-years, don't spend anything on superstar professors, computer systems, and media castles). From the investment end, a couple percent growth per year seems like a pretty stable vehicle, and it's foolish to imagine they're treated as anything else, and naive to think that how this fact may benefit the borrower is a chief concern. [Editors note: Keifus was taken behind the woodpile and is now aware that baseline 1.5% growth is the increase in alleged value of an education, not of an existing investment. An already-written-up loan package only grows by its own interest rate structures, although it's perceived stability, the presence of side bets, and suckers to sell it to, no doubt help to increase what you can sell the next loan for, just like in the mortgage world. Does the increase in new loan values correlate with an actual 1.5% increase in value of an education? That's kind of the danger.] Are student loans securitized and ranked like mortgages have been? Yes, although asset-backed securities like this are reputed to be more stable and conservative than housing stock. I don't have the faintest idea whether these loan packages are as shakily insured and inappropriately leveraged as the mortgage obligations were--that'd take a real researcher to uncover. (It looks like they managed to remove caps on adjustable rates somewhere around 2000, although I might not be understanding that ~~report~~ primer correctly.) I'm sure nothing good will happen if people start massively defaulting on them in any case.

* We're by no means there yet. My opinion is that it's worth it to learn what's good about life before you're forced to accept its inadequacies, which will happen soon enough.

Review: Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi

2010-11-26T12:08:00.005-05:00

I can't believe it. It's even worse than I thought.

In Griftopia, Matt Taibbi takes us through the series of financial disasters of the last decade, presenting them to us as a succession of long cons on the American consuming public, enabled by the government and perpetrated by the finance industry. He bookends the drama by a bit of political analysis, pointing out some basic and comic misunderstandings of the "Tea Party" demonstrators with a dollop of sympathy. They're right that the government is crapping on them. They just don't understand how it works, or who wins. (Writing this now with a family-time turkey hangover, and I'm appreciating Matt's point more than when I read it last week.) He tells us how it's intentionally complex, to obscure what the hell is going on, buried in miles of double negatives and lawyerly fine print, mostly as a justification for separating the rubes from their bucks. In the epilogue he notes how the political campaigns have sifted it down into idiotic narratives that ignore the essential conflict. In between, Matt offers the quasi-philosophical excuses for graft that began to seep up in the Reagan years, walks us through the tech bubble, the recent commodities spike, skims across the health insurance morrass, and spends a good couple chapters on the current real estate mess and its corrolary finance disasters, each given as a different view of the whole enterprise too structural to call a scam, each a different tentacle of some gigantic insensate octopus (his imagery), not much aware of the activities of the rest of it. At least one of the chapters is a reprise of one of his big Rolling Stone pieces, but the format is logical enough.

Most of the criticisms I've seen Matt Taibbi receive from his articles have boiled down to attacks on his style, or hurt feelings. (The multitrillion net grift that he tosses up once or twice is something I've seen disputed, but he's obviously including some lending actions of the federal reserve that's not well-disclosed, and is necessarily estimated, and is used in the text as a synonym for "huge" I think with the appropriate amount of confidence.) Me, I like the colorful language so much (evidence: this-here blog, although both us might go a little heavy on the adjectives) that I worry that it probably soften up my objectivity, although I can see how for normal people, frequent superlative use of words like "collossal" and "insane" and "fuck-ton" may be mistaken for an absence of mathematical precision, and how calling Alan Greenspan "the biggest asshole in the universe" or Rick Santelli a "shameless douchewad" or Lloyd Blankfein a "motherfucker" may worry semantic purists that Matt could be offering a smidgen too much of a personal hit. But keep in mind that attacking the man doesn't necessary mean it's an ad hominem fallacy. Matt's not calling them names in order to discredit their argument. For that, he's offering a couple hundred pages of evidence. What Taibbi is instead doing is examining their behavior and reporting the logical conclusion that they are, according to any useful colloquial understanding, major-league assholes. Sure it's an opinion, but it's supported. And it's a good antidote for the beetle-browed driness, jargon-heavy passion, or Delphic gobbldegook that is the usually accepted tone for the financial discussion, at least when it is directed toward the public. The admonition against strong words can serve as a cover for behavior that is outrageous enough to be worthy of them. Taibbi's technique of generating an emotional connection is useful. And it's worth noting that some the basic humanity in the big-time profit-seeking calculus is so deeply ignored. Call it an incredulous style, but I would likewise avoid calling it a fallacious appeal to incredulity. It's more like a comic act of frantically trying to point out something too large and obvious to easily notice. ("The fucking elephant! Don't you see?") And yeah, even if you want to argue (and I don't really) that Taibbi's a one-eyed journalist, it still puts him among the sparse royalty of that profession. He's not a comedian, but fuck it, he's funny, and the emotional connection he generates is of that vein, the sort that can help you accept uncomfortable little truths.

My objections to Griftopia are small, and run in the territory of praising the book with faint damns. I appreciate the research Taibbi did here, and his willingness to explain and condense things for his readers is bloody useful. But on the other hand, I'm wary of entertaining explanations of boring subjects. My spider-sense occasionally got tingling, got me thinking it's little too like an "edgy" kids' science show or something (a certain glibness that sometimes generates allergy symptoms, even if I don't generally find them to be wrong), and maybe he's missing important subtleties in the service of a greater valid point. The issue is that the grift penetrates deeper into some economic sectors than others, and even there, on some firms and practices more than others. I don't think this is lost exactly, but the chapters are given approximately equal emphasis, and I don't think all of them have purely economic causes, or were generated with the same level of gleeful amorality or outright contempt toward the lower classes.

For example, like most people, I suspected that speculation played a role in the 2008commodities bubble, but how much of a role? Now, I didn't realize how much was of the disruptive speculation was of a newly legal type, and Matt makes a good case explaining what useful service commoditiy futures have provided since the Depression, and for the role the empowered commodity futures trading commission made in creating a structure so damn fragile and ripe for collapse. It explains why some worries about regional stability made the futures market go so much more flighty and generally fucktarded (not to be so casual about this--it made people go hungry, a worse thing than losing your house) than investors normally make things. But dude, there are very good reasons why "anyone would want to invest in a rise in commodoties prices over time". I don't think in the long term that we can really count on technologies to continually improve yields and so forth, not without a brand new energy source and a revolutionary chemicals infrastructure. The market scare that sparked it--middle east instability sparked by U.S. military actions there--were real, and if there was still any of the shit in Texas, wouldn't have been an issue in the first place. It's a response to oil peaking (and I'd love to see Matt Taibbi on oil, by the way). The spike was caused by the futures overinvestment, but I think it's still governed by gradual resource depletion. I think the inappropriateness of long futures in normally-functioning commodities markets makes sense. Would it be good to be able to short oil on some long-term scale?

There is a later chapter on last year's health care reform, and Taibbi makes the case that, like other corporate actors, Washington sees insurers as among their real constituents, who need to be served more than they need to be legislated against on behalf of us lowly worker bees. He is certainly right to trash the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by the health insurance market, which flies against the public interest, and is, you know, completely inconsistent with the sorts of pluralist models that most people believe apply to our country and economy. It still takes amazing balls to ignore medical or insurance that work cheaply, and after basing parts of your campaign on spelling them out, to then take 'em right off the table before negotiations even start. Matt acknowledges that it's well-impossible to buck the insurers when you're a senator, for those even inclined to, but didn't any politician imagine an ounce of good could be done, that chink in the armor was useful as a price to give 'em something they'd get anyway? Aren't some of them merely misguided compromisers instead of pure sellouts? Isn't it good that at least some people are insured and we have a medical complex that works even if its finances amount to extortion? I am Taibbi's side here, but he offers evidence more than proof. Failing to rescind something evil is perfectly consistent with cluelessness or a broken system, but isn't actively malicious in the way that a financial con can be. And when they get that far in the book, Matt's going to make the commenters at Balloon Juice hate him all over again.

When it gets to auctioning public utilities for short-term budget-balancing, I was similarly educated on the extent of it all, although I'm not sure if I've been convinced that foreign wealth funds are any specific problem here. Makes it seem more like "looting" than anything else. But Matt's at his best going over the stuff he researched so heavily for the Rolling Stone pieces. If the grift is merely good for commodities and health care markets, it's been grrrreat! for the investment banks, who, at the top eschelons, have not failed to garner their cut, even as pensions tank and our governors eye our federal benefits to fight the deficits they suddenly care about. I've read a fair amount about this (much like any reluctantly responsible citizen), and I liked how he added some depth and, really, some perspective to the mortgage racket as it all went down. There are so many details of this game, that it's difficult to organize and prioritize, and I thought as a summary of the chain of fraud it was splendid, and the wrapup (p. 121) was artful. I liked his quip that it's Griftopia for the handful powerful entities working in the priveleged sphere where they can manipulate the economy, while it's the free market for the rest of us. Which is the exact opposite of the message they sell.

[Wrapped this one up in a hurry. Happy holidays, everyone.]

Unpacking Ayn Rand

2010-11-19T22:34:00.010-05:00

It's weird to think about it, but I've been haunting the internet for a long time--about twenty years if we count the time that my then-friend Mang (it got so I didn't see him so much sophomore year, and later I'd heard he pretty much disowned me when he found out I was pledging a fraternity) showed me some tricks with the email, where to ftp a few naughty pictures and local urban legends, and some especially nerdy ways to waste time--it puts me approximately in the Precambrian era of its evolution, just before AOL exploded the place with a diversity of lusers. A minor, sporadic and unnoticed spook I was then (and am now), but it was a long enough stretch for me to have eyeballed a few types, observe them, get bored by them, and still here they fucking are. One of these long-established members of the internet prickarazzi is the Objectivist (close! but this guy's too astute), the serious spouter of Ayn Rand's claptrap, typically a pustule-faced nineteen-year-old Rush fan, but also trending toward those unlovable middle-age stiffs who'd manage to be excitable and passionless at the same time, whatever humor generally veering to the nasty sort, the sorts of people who had unshakable theoretical views of human behavior, and whom you'd pray would never, ever have any kids. (And of course that's not fair, because even here I'm remembering "libertarian" types more clearly than "objectivists." The Randites were narrower and stupider.) Or that's how I grew to picture them anyway, while the characters who later evolved to pick on John Galt (or at a minimum, pick on his prose), enjoyed a mental picture that included a healthy laugh and a charming joi de vivre. In the meat world, most people seem to separate their beliefs from their lives, reserving philosophical passion for the rare times those worlds happen to intersect: it's turned out that either of these groups of people are indistinguishable from my officemates.

I am embarrassed to come back to all this pseudo-philosophy as much as I do. It's sort of like being annoyed as an adult about Dr. Seuss's inaccurate grasp of physics and biology. (An elephant bird? You don't transfer genes by just sitting on an egg! And for that matter how did that tree hold Horton up, Ted? Answer me that one!) I never went so that far down as to believe in "rational self interest," but it's the sort of idea that I associate with those formative times. Being surrounded by other baby engineers was part of it, but our freshman experience was more about playing tennis, computer games, and endless rounds of Asshole, and, hard as this is to believe, never getting laid. To fill out the requisite dormroom bullshitting, I was forced to go online. I don't want to offer the impression that most engineers are so closed-minded, and there remain an abundance of people on the other side of the screen who aren't antisocial kooks, but bright, arrogant and immature? All I'm saying is that I know the type.

I've read far more about Ayn Rand than I've read anything she wrote. And the anecdote doesn't lead up to a review of Atlas Shrugged even now. Still don't have the stomach for that one. No, I'm reading Matt Taibbi's Griftopia (good for a tangential post or two before the review), and it's a kick to read someone introducing Rand and the world of objectivism to newbies with appropriate contempt. It's a critique addressed to an audience insufficiently geeky, or composed of the wrong sort of geek, an audience lucky enough to have never inadvertantly let this crap suffuse anything in their thinking lives before Taibbi told them about it.

Here's Matt, quoting:

Rand's rhetorical strategy was to create the impression of depth through overwhelming verbal quanitity, battering the reader with a relentless barrage of meaningless literary curlicues. Take this bit from Galt's famous speech in Atlas Shrugged:
Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over the act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from teh task of perceiving to the task of faking reality--that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind--that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.

If you're sane, you skimmed that, and depending on what you're looking for, you might have come away with (a) that an external reality is important and is independent of belief, or (b) some unsettling bullshit about the infallibility of the rational mind. The former seems a reasonable-ish philosophical view, but the latter seems like a disturbing justification for something or other. Taibbi goes on to sum up the whole deal in four bullet points:

Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
Charity is immoral.
Pay for your own fucking schools.

I love Matt Taibbi.

Once you account for the hyperbole, this is not really so far from the Wikipedia entry (and if Wiki's going to represent anything more thoroughly and charitably than Star Wars, it's Ayn friggin' Rand). I look at the promulgation of "objective reality," and I worry. Why, that's not so much different from my own struggled-at epistemology! The one which I can't get myself to shut the fuck up about. I wouldn't go so far as to call "facts" unassailable, but on the question of whether there is a universe separated from our consciousness by our senses, then I have to agree that there is. I guess it's classified generally as a materialist viewpoint, a label to which Rand felt herself above, to the extent she acknowledged the history of the art at all. But objectivist philosophy seems to fall apart going forward from that. Details of knowing probably matter, but as a bottom line, I contend that knowledge of the world should, as a necessary minimum, not violate evidence. Objective reality taken as the-universe-is-the-universe (of which we are part, and not above) is something I get behind, and have blathered about. Getting down, however, toward such derivative concepts as facts-is-facts and existence-exists, well that now seems confuse subjective and objective realities (and is also conveniently circular), regardless of how the Randies prefer to organize their labels. How, after all, do you judge something a fact?

My favorite summary joke about Ayn Rand (and I've mentioned this before) comes from Matt Ruff's book, Sewer, Gas and Electric (a near-future romp from ten years ago--I thought about re-reading it recently, but I wasn't in the mood to find humor in some of his structural gags). It features a pocket-sized Rand advising characters, and while Ruff mocks her, he does so fondly. He'd been a regular at rec.arts.sf.written, so maybe given that early internet environment, that's not completely surprising. In any case, my favorite quote still makes me laugh for its capsule perfection:

"'Ayn' rhymes with 'sane'?"

"Rhymes with 'mine'."

My observations are that while objectivism looks evidence-based, it carefully limits the allowable evidence and then goes even further and supports its ideas with elaborate and boring fiction. It looks like it pushes a certain logical amorality, but it instead constructs a morality that is whatever the fuck creepy Ayn says it is. I like a focus on the value of inductive reasoning, but it appears to not think very hard about induction, to the point where assertion of "facts" is enough to support their validity. It is a "philosophy" that tells people that they're indeed exceptional and limited by a globe-full of littlebrains, which strikes me as more than a little dangerous. My long-standing impression, never disproven, is that objectivism is to real philosophy like scientology is to real cognitive science. No coincidence it rose to a similar sort of cult.

My general feeling is that as basis of reason, objectivism is comically underripe. I may be philosophically impaired, but I'm smart enough to catch on to what's the kiddie material. Digging around, I found some excellent critiques. Here's popular blogger Incertus worrying about the inevitable hangers-on now that Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, with his copy of The Virtue of Selfishness under his arm, has pretty well fucked the whole place up. It's a good post, but I am hesitant about damning a philosophy just because the resulting movement was comprised of the worst sorts of assholes. That hardly seems exceptional. I also want to be careful about dismissing Rand on the basis of her wretched personal life, or of her turgid writing style (even though it's so very, very tempting to do this; I also want to be careful about confusing Taibbi's felicity for truth, although I admit I'm still riding on some ideas of humor and power). Her scholarship has been accused as, um, lacking, which I take as a serious accusation, although I don't really know if philosophy is enough like physical science to say that violating established thinking requires extraordinary evidence, but the contrarian approach doesn't strike me as a likely road to honest investigation. Here's a guy named Rob Bass dissecting the epistemology, and outlines the appeal and concerns better than I just did. I like this dude--he makes clear and interesting arguments in comfortable modern language, and he appears be coming from a similar direction, uncovering similar questions, as I have been over the last several years. I will try to remember to follow up with his papers. (Does Rob want to rock right now? I was curious enough to do a where-are-they-now search, and both he and Gary Merrill (the guy from the previous link) are in the UNC academic system these days, and good for them. Is the fact that these posts are 1993-vintage Usenet material also revealing of my formative experiences? It's not out of the question.)

I entertain cautious apologies on behalf of Rand because I still haven't made myself read the doorstops, and that fact limits any substantive arguments I might raise against them, even though I find the objections quite convincing. Ordinarily, what with the limited lifespan and all, it'd be sufficient to weed out those bad ideas, but Ayn Rand has somehow managed to be important. I have read that even beyond her cultish band of followers, she grew into a more influential sort of quackery back in the 1950s, the results of which have helped fuck the country over for at least another half-century. You can imagine how people with money and power may have felt to consider that their self-interest was virtuous.

If there's more evidence needed of objectivism as philosophical juvenilia, then there's always the fact that so many of those college kids grew out of it. I mentioned Rush, but Neal Peart never claimed inspiration deeper than a damned short story, hasn't gone down that road in his lyrics since he was 23 or so, and even back then he wrote about relationships, youthfulness, fantasy books, anti-authoritarianism, and balancing logic with compassion as much as he wrote about anything else. It's good to grow up: one thing you realize is that there's nothing wrong with empathy, that the world outside your experience is every bit as valid as the one between your ears. I can see the appeal of allegedly objective realith and intellectual isolation, especially when you're young and bright and dorky--lots of engineers are also capable--at least they were before colleges capitalized so heavily on the game--and anyone fucking around on the message boards before ca. 1990 had an independent streak--so maybe it's reasonable that my proxy bullshitting sessions were biased this way. But the most damning thing about objectivism is that objective reality has pretty well proven Ayn Rand's philosophy to be a collossal disaster, isn't that right Mr. Greenspan? Can we let the damn thing go now?

Review: Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach

2010-11-16T20:06:00.001-05:00

There is a premise underlying Packing for Mars, and best to address it before moving on. The idea for the book is that sending human beings into space is a fundamentally absurd, which is true. I don't, however, think that this enterprise is without intellectual merit, engineering challenge, and even if it limited itself at the beginning to the blue-eyed and ball-sacked variety, sheer American moxie. It doesn't really seem fair to go straight for the poops jokes, but she's right that the unintentional funniness of people who make it a poop business really needs to be acknowledged. Roach seems sharp enough--she handles pretty well stuff the scientific stuff she professes to have recently learned (the fact that she had no rough working knowledge of free-fall and orbits and so forth before writing the book, however, does bother me)--but she's not a NASA fangirl. And maybe it's just as well, there are enough stories about spaceflight that fit the required notes of geeky love. Roach is writing a secret history, an open secret history, and not forgetting just how weird it is for every human behavior and function to be engineered. Fortunately for this reader, I am by no means too mature to fail to appreciate personality quirks and crap jokes, and I'm also curious and respectful of the effort to make the ludicrous enterprise work--how does a space toilet work ("separation" is indeed an issue in zero g), how is nausea addressed, is it scary up there, does everyone get along, and if any astronauts endured some historic moments with a legful of piss thanks to a badly fitting urine collection device (condoms, not catheters), then you bet I want to know about it. Or look at it another way, here are hundreds of serious researchers and workers in the space program, each with a headful of inside jokes longing to be told. And finally here's some appreciation.

It helps that Roach writes it well, balances a seriousness of subject, good journalism, with a comic tone. She's a good enough sport to do it, for the sake of the story or for the entertainment potential. She digs in and finds the details, and is not very shy about interviewing anyone, and wants to see everything. I've been stalling on the review because I think of anything better to say than it's like a book-length episode of Dirty Jobs, a different voice and a different medium than Mike Rowe's thing, but about as well done. It's humor without insult, it manages that rare combination of being good-natured, informative and funny. Roach has been doing it longer, but I doubt anyone's copying anyone. I suppose it's nice that the world managed to let two of these types succeed.

Review: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis

2010-11-09T08:41:00.003-05:00

It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935, is a famous book. It retains a cultural cachet (in way that political predictions do, but scientific predictions don't) for its contemporary awareness, for having been accurately cognizant of fascism when it was not politically nescessary in this country to be so, and for anticipating some of its expansionist aims. It is, as the title suggests, the development of an American version of the movement, developed shamelessly from our own national myths, and opposed (or not opposed) by various liberal cultural or philosophical elements. Having cultivated this sort of cynicsm for a couple of years, I was expecting to find some connection to this book, at least as a warning against the self-proclaimed authorities. And, so, how to put this exactly? It has a couple of moments, but I don't think it was a great work, maybe not even an especially good one.

Sinclair Lewis (I learn) made his living, and eventually garnered a Nobel prize, for chronicling the middle class American angst of his pre-Depression day. This puts him as his generation's Franzen maybe, or Updike, or any of that stable of writers that I've neither read, nor can get myself to notice outside of their tedious "great writer" acclaim, which for me anyway, doesn't add up to an optimum set of associations, but still hardly enough to condemn. In any case, It Can't Happen Here is considered one of Lewis's late novels, published after his prime, and no doubt it got some penetration based on the famous name. The blurbs stress "important" and damn the reading with a faint "almost-as-good" praise when compared to his earlier works. Failing an easy connection to himself, you might be tempted to compare this novel with those of other authors who've also been astute and lonely critics of power, something like The Quiet American, but it doesn't hold as well as a character or a political study. As well as being observant, Graham Greene's will also go down as being an objectively good novel (to the extent that these things can be considered objective of course). Not to say it's awful--It Can't Happen Here has an impressive comic start, taking the gimlet to a couple Rotarian speakers—from the military and the DAR—but it doesn't decide well where it wants to be. The humor and the cuts don't keep up past the first 30 pages or so, and after that, the reader can look forward to only two or three episodes later in the novel that remind us that there was ever a satirical intent. The book makes a sorry bridge between the wit of Mark Twain and the bitter satire of Vonnegut or Heller. To my mind, It Can't Happen Here is closer in spirit to any number of late-model counterfactuals, and if AH writers like S.M. Stirling or Harry Turtledove might include more armchair generalism and less couched liberalism; more heroic violence and less subversive penmanship, the literary depths are similarly plumbed as by those more niche-oriented authors. Not necessarily a bad read, but it ain't indispensible.

Here's the basic problem: it's not enough to say it can happen here, what made it happen here? There's only a smidgen of this, in the brief satirical opening and in the description of the growing appeal of president Buzz Windrip, but mostly what we get is mechanism, a sequence of events, a lot more what and not much why. Even there, the sections where external drama is given to unfold (outside of the protagonist's, Doremus Jessup's, point of view) are told in summary form, a lot of this-happened-and-then-that-happened, and the higherups don't develop into particularly understandable characters. These parts are like reading an outline of a novel instead of the book itself, breaking the cardinal rule of showing instead of telling. What's in the national (or hey, human) character that leaves us open to dictators? We don't get a good deal of the psychological landscape that let Windrip-mania take root, other than what's revealed through a few meetings and dismissive opinons of Jessup, who is standing in as an obvious proxy for the author. Jessup is the only real point-of-view character we get, the only head we get too far inside, and he's likeable enough, coming together as a gentle critique of the American liberal, drawn by circumstances into radicalism.

Lewis was a writer, and his wife a journalist. Making heroes and martyrs out of writers and journalists (Doremus was an newspaper editor, and the plot revolves around his criticism of, punishment by, and resistance to the fascists; team Jessup worked against the "Corporate State" by printing and distributing pamphlets) may be drawing on autobiographical fantasies. We all like to think we'd be the ones to stand up to tyranny, and those of us with a wordy inclination like to think that we see the world clearer than others, and that anything we write matters. If we switch to a contemporary context, it's hard not to see Doremus as a blogger. I spent an inordinate time (supported by Lewis of course, and I bookmarked a bunch of well-written paragraphs that maybe I'll remember to throw at people who annoy me later, but which don't seem terribly relevant for the purposes of a review) wondering just what his political philosophy was. He identifies as liberal, but he starts out with a healthy (in that downplayed upstate Yankee way) wisdom about authority and politics and general. In a few occasions, Doremus defends middle-class intellectualism (we're not the same as the proletariat, he thinks, and that's okay), and finds both common ground and ultimate differences with the radical leftists of the 1930s brand. His viewpoint solidifies a bit in opposition to the Corpos, and maybe Lewis is offering a lesson that we resist to a degree that's appropriate to the political environment, mildly cynical in civil times, and bravely defiant in violent ones, a revolutionary that (somehow!) resists the formation of alternate tyrannies. This moderation moves from a weakness to, as Jessup's role solidifies, something definitive of the American version (evidently similar to the writer's own views), perhaps giving in to some myths of national character after everything. Pinning a philosophy on Corpoism is harder, and after some reading (particularly as he opens a succession of chapters with excerpts from Windrip's intentionally risible Mein Kampf knockoff), it's obvious that the actual version is vacuous. Some egalitarian-seeming or even Socialist measures are offered to the public, in a way that doesn't offend power interest too much, which I might have taken differently if Jessup didn't take a moment to pick it apart. It's funny how a fascist takeover is fronted by language of freedom and liberty.

A couple of odds and ends. Increasingly, I'm looking, when possible, for personal figures to help place novels in time. Jessup's daughter Sissy (who seems like a great kid even though she was stuck with awkward dialogue) was born in 1917, the same year as my grandmother. In 2010, she'd have had a full life behind her, which feels like a strange and sad perspective. Also in 2010, we're living in the wake of a banking, um, crisis, sufficient to generate some real antipathy for the industry. In 1935, a complaint against "bankers" was often veiled anti-semitism, and Lewis certainly intended this to be an element of the Corpoist rhetoric. Is that the case today? It never before crossed my mind to make a connection like this when I get mad at the current financial industry. I wrote in my last post "the Democrats didn't exactly give the lenders a hard time." I was going to write "didn't exactly chase the lenders from the temple" but suddenly sensitized, I didn't want to go there. I guess I'll have to be careful to be precise about those sorts of things.

Five More Thoughts: Air Travel, Yet Again

2010-11-05T13:59:00.011-04:00

1. End of the line, pal.
Flying is, as I've mentioned in some other mostly-forgotten post, it's own little universe, an ariport culture that exists outside of normal cultures, with its own bizarre and superstitious rituals, from the security screening to the demo of the oxygen masks (in the sixty-odd years of passenger jets, has anyone ever used these things?), and all the aggressively imported Americana only makes the experience more like a high-stress, undignified, and well-liquored Disneyland. I realize that we can look to the history of air travel for this, but for whatever the origin, it remains a special niche. People are less unwilling to admit they fear flying than other things. I think the usual aviophobia, at least mine, is not so much a fear as it is an anxiety. I don't worry that the thing's going to crash—the odds are with me there; I don't honestly think that it will—but rather it's that exclusion from the normal world, floating in such an otherwise unsurvivable place with so little control over the situation, that makes want to claw at the walls. It's the helplessness which the whole flying experience amplifies. We're herded through velvet ropes and crammed into narrow seats, paraded, penned, and locked in. It reduces humans to farm animals, and under the circumstances, it's no wonder the caged-sheep anxieties tend to leak out. You could forgive Juan Williams, if you could believe that he actually felt bad about it.

That special slow panic of flight is common enough that it's a well-used target for fear. Not just for terrorists, although they sure judged Americans right on that one, but also for those Americans for whom it's convenient to ramp up insecurity of the masses from time to time. And on that note, I want to place a special shoutout to whoever the fuck "leaked" the reveal of a cargo bomb plot, shipped from the country in whose affairs our leaders desperately need some fig-leaf of justification, not to mention something to ratchet up worries on election day. Plot foiled! Security works, but stay scared! USA! Fuck you.

Captive and herded, we go along, and no one is shy to push on those sensitive spots. And so here's one thing I don't understand...why don’t they advertise at us more?

2. Flying creative class
Speaking of which, I sat next to a woman on one leg of the trip (they'd nicely moved me away from the 400-ish-pound fellow who was originally next to me, which was awkward socially, but conceded to be in both our interests) who had ripped out a few pages of a recent Advertising Age. It's an industry rag best I can tell, and as I peeked (I'm not a good conversationalist when I'm flying, or otherwise, glazed looks being more my specialty), was carefully underlining names and important-looking trend statements. Maybe it was a job interview or something. I'm not a fan of being subjected so constantly to marketing, or of the way it influences our society, but I can understand why people consider it to be a valuable service. I consider the role of advertising people to be somewhat overvalued (not surprising considering that folks who are good at promotion will also advertise themselves), but it's not in financial captain territory, and they do still have to work.

Anyway, what amused me was that every headline on those pages was like an assurance of their specialness. "Creativity corner." "Whither the creatives?" Don't they sell stuff that other people create? It's like they're overcompensating for those nagging doubts.

In my industry, the word "innovative" is tossed around with similar abandon. Although not usually as a noun.

3. How I book a flight.
Some of my caged-animal instincts are to resort to borderline OCD behaviors, repeating a script that kept the misery in check last time (even though it didn't). When I get on a plane, one of those nonsense rules requires me to buy some new reading material at the airport. This is wise when you're planning a for a full day of plane travel anyway, adn the trick is to get something far removed from the situation, nothing that's going to angry up the blood too much. This meant that I didn't take Mr. Lewis out of my bag to finish reading about an American-style fascist takeover, but I managed to let the written word ruin my election week just the same.

It's bad enough that half the airports I find myself in offer a forced reintroduction to CNN. Maybe it was only because the great game was afoot, but as I bellied up to the bar for lunch, I found the channel about as aggressively stupid as FOX News was ten years ago. (I concede that it's possible that my allergies have become more acute. I snarl at NPR these days too.) But on Thursday I picked up a presumably anodyne New York Times, not really expecting the Gray Lady to play up the election day gloat as much as everyone else. I mean, you'd think the revolutionary conservative takeover of our politics might have come with some context (or consequence!) of this story comprising about the past 30 years of boilerplate, but somehow the Tea Party has made it all wide-eyed and new.

Reading the convenient summary section that the Times provided yesterday, I see they've already predicted that any government activity of which I might approve --or at least may have been naively hopeful about--is already consigned gleefully to the block. John Boehner is already getting juiced about reviving Bush's tax cuts and balancing the budget (and it's as laughable as it sounds, but to point out the poorly-camouflaged obvious, "balancing the budget" is cover for abolishing Medicare and Social Security, which they are reluctant to admit to their base, but are happy to balance on behalf of my generation), giddy about crippling NOAA and other science and technology programs that produce unwanted facts (it is not clear yet whether they will outlaw evolution), and is sharpening his sword to eviscerate the two or three good things that came out of Obama's insurance booster program (in America, the average health picture may be among the lowest in the first world, but at least it's twice the cost!) The Times informed me that Wall Street (wherein bonuses grow apace) and other carefully protected "free traders" are pleased with the Republicans ascendance, not evidently much concerned about their candidates' complaints about the financial bailout, which, by the way, was also getting to be getting a little more sugar from the Fed. That business-Republicans item may well be the usual lazy journalist stereotyping, since after all, the Democrats didn't exactly give the lenders a hard time.

Look, I don't retain much faith in the integrity of the system, but given that I am stuck here, I do have to say that I find it precious that our oligarchs feel so uninhibited about taking that extra step from selfishness into assholery. I mean, we may lose hope in the ability to change the world, but couldn't we at least deign to work with evidence-based outcomes? (he asked rhetorically). In the rest of the civilized world, at least they get fucking health insurance to go with their institutional graft. I suppose I shouldn't be this upset by the Republican takeover, and I suppose it comes down only to a matter of style. We've lost one set of leaders that hems and hedges our way into the abyss, and replaced it with the one that marches triumphantly in. I'm not a big fan of parades.

4. Anti-anxiety.
My brother concurs with taking a Xanax on the plane, but this violates other OCD scripts of mine. He also has a system of smuggled nippers that he suggested I take, bagging them carefully within the legal fright-limit as if they were deadly toothpastes, and I refused these too. I never used to buy booze on the plane because I never had cash, and I don't at this point because it became something I don't do. If that makes sense. In the airports, however, I don't usually waste the opportunity to load up if the boss isn't around. Why yes, please, I'll have that second pint with my mayonnaise-smothered grease-fries. A third? I might just have time.

Obviously you don't want to risk getting airsick, but on a long flight, a good buzz makes perfect sense. Not just for the point of relaxing you. The three or four times you get up to pee is a good opportunity to stretch your legs, and it gives you something to do. That much stasis, and feeling yourself slowly growing sober (controlling your boozy odors, beginning to taste that godawful lunch again, slowly regaining focus) is almost interesting. Sobering up becomes an activity.

5. There ought to be a law!
Or let's just say it'd be a small and inarguable step in world decency if airlines would agree to generous standards for carrying musical instruments on board. The Senate was debating as recently as August on the FAA reauthorization bill, and there was a petition to include such language in it (here, if you are given to signing such things), asking that regs be standardized so that people carrying instruments could at least more easily plan.

I didn't have any chance for a conversation with the guy, but I did spot one mandolin case in the airport. These aren't difficult to fit in the overhead bin, but one argument with a flight attendant a couple years ago discouraged me from taking mine with me again. Guitar players have it worse, but there is no reason not to allow those things up on top at the expense of one or two of J. Random Traveler's obscenely large carry-on bags. Obviously other instruments are less negotiable, but how can you not encourage erring on the side of preservation? You don't really want 'em bouncing around in the baggage hold if you can help it.

Cognitive Dissidents

2010-10-27T14:43:00.010-04:00

Sorry to be caught blogging again, not to mention riding this hobby horse once more, but I'd like to use up my monthly allotment of diacriticals to recommend this article by Slavoj Žižek at the London Review of Books (via). It's a discussion of the relationship between the Party and the government using a couple of famous Communist examples (he is reviewing a book called The Party, by Allen Lane), dwelling on the carefully held democratic fiction (as he calls it), especially prevalent in China, that the entities are separate, that the central role of the Communists remains the country's biggest open secret. Since you may have problems with the LRB link (it has made my computer implode five or six times now, although I can see the article on my Blackberry), here are some pull-quotes and paraphrases:

"One consequence of the [Chinese Communist] Party’s need to maintain hegemony is its close monitoring and regulation of the way Chinese history is presented, especially that of the last two centuries. [...] When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique.[...]"

"The government and other state organs, ‘which ostensibly behave much as they do in many countries’, are centre stage: the Ministry of Finance proposes the budget, courts deliver verdicts, universities teach and award degrees, priests lead rituals. So, on the one hand, we have the legal system, the government, the elected national assembly, the judiciary, the rule of law etc. But on the other [...] we have the Party, which is omnipresent but always in the background [...] The Party committees (known as ‘leading small groups’) which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing it, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions."

"The irony is that the Party itself, its complex workings hidden from public scrutiny, is the ultimate source of corruption. The inner circle, comprising top Party and state functionaries as well as chiefs of industry, communicate via an exclusive phone network, the ‘Red Machine’ – possessing one of its unlisted numbers is a clear sign of one’s status. A vice-minister tells McGregor that ‘more than half of the calls he received on his “red machine” were requests for favours from senior Party officials, along the lines of: “Can you give my son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin or good friend and so on, a job?”’"

"This model will, of course, be criticised as being non-democratic. The ethico-political preference for a democratic model in which parties are – formally, at least – subordinate to state mechanisms falls into the trap of the ‘democratic fiction’. It ignores the fact that, in a ‘free’ society, domination and servitude are located in the ‘apolitical’ economic sphere of property and managerial power."

Žižek doesn't go to the next step here, to relate it to western democracies, and I want to be careful myself with those sorts of extrapolations. Obviously the U.S. is not China: we have no formal Party in place to secretly pull strings and direct both the government and economy. Whatever networks inform these things here are more de facto affairs, composed of, I think, the integrated total of individual or corporate acts of opportunism, as mild as padding a bonus or hiring your son-in-law, or as nasty as Dick Cheney's energy task force. The existence of a class on this continent that is both more capable and less encumbered by legal constraints than the rest of the citizenry might similarly appear to be a more free-form and emergent, an outgrowth of our establishment of separate legal classifications for businesses, investments, and property. There has been justification for this—companies do different things than citizens do, and there are advantages to forming groups of similar or competing interests which will naturally behave differently than individuals—and it's inevitable that any social institution will coalesce around its own jargon. But you know, all this was true of Communism too, and of the perceived need for Communism. In the U.S., there are limits to business success without moving into, employing, and acting within that loose network. It's not the same as The Party, but I see each manifestation as something consistent with a general human organizational behavior under the parameters of modern times (which doesn't get less boring the more I write about it). Whether the U.S. version has been based on egalitarian first-principles—which is one of our democratic fictions—or whether it's been designed from the get-go to enable an American-style class distinction is an open question. Personally, I don't think those aims have proved mutually exclusive.

It should probably also be noted that we have a different history of what those democratic fictions belie. Rarely has the United States approached Communist levels of murder and disappearance of political dissenters, and speech here remains relatively free, among other things—I'm happy that writing my conscience is unlikely to get me jailed. But that's not to say that everything is just awesome. [To point out the more obvious cracks in our democratic fiction, we shutter up the underclass at a rate six or seven times that of China, while looking the other way at a finance apparatus whose collective effect has been to claim jus primae noctis on our savings and assets as a condition of managing them, and we also hesitate to acknowledge this loose internal network that would rather avoid paying workers (or paying benefits for workers or other citizens) even while they want them to buy stuff (and let the people at large pick up the tab for punishing the deprivations of the destitute, among other externalities). We're also the most recent major power to cultivate a slave class, and we've rounded up and penned the indiginous people we didn't roll over or outright butcher. To say nothing of 200 years of dubious foreign adventures. No saints, us.] I don't want to sound too radical in this post, but let's admit we have our own brand of governing lies and undiscussed licenses. The tendency to avoid any substantial self-critique is what I am calling out as the similar thing.

I am sick of weaseling that a flawed democracy is better than anything else. The flaws suck. What gets me is that if there are any objective historians several hundred years from now, the social conditions of current empires will look obvious, or at least the will not be argued about too much: overextended military, insufficient domestic economy, costly maintenance of various forms of class segregation, and, probably, a wind-down of readily available fossil fuel energy. But when we're living in it, it's hard to see (I mean, how isn't seven and a half percent of the population in jail what oppression looks like?) and the discussion on those stark and universal terms isn't taken very seriously among people who would be criticized under them. To make a metaphor, we constantly bitch about the weather, and obsess over the mapped fronts and the three-day forecasts, when so many of the problems are really associated with the political climate. We can judge easily across geography too, calling out, as a hilarious example, the corruption of leaders who take money from other people than us. But looking at corruption at home? So much of the anger seems to miss its target, or even when it's pointed the right way, the target is too well-protected for it to matter. We can't easily believe how thoroughly we fail ourselves. We have too much invested in our own mythology here too.

(Title stolen from a William Gibson novel.)

Ad Hominem Three-fer

2010-10-22T20:04:00.005-04:00

Let's face it, it's not like I have much mojo to lose here. I look around and think that I'm clearly doing it the hard way, too few naked links and too many big questions that I address in too poor a generalizing manner. Reviews of unpopular books, and of literature above my reading level. Science for dummies. The ticket to this blog thing, where the big bucks really start to flow in, is in baseless opinions, mercurial little eels that they may be, and in current events, the dynamic national equilibrium, as it were, where the sum total of all that sound and fury really gets together to signify nothing. Well, why can't I be that idiot?

Obviously, instead of beating up on myself, it's healthier to go after deserving targets. Research is difficult though, and getting accurate details of these actors is only going to end up revealing them as challengingly human, or else frighteningly reptilian, and who wants to go to either of those places. It's a lot easier to speculate and embellish, to create characters out of them, than it is go into the subtle territory of really knowing someone. It's not as though they're insufficiently loathsome. For your reading pleasure, here is the newest edition of my nasty book:

1. Chuck Todd
Elections are sort of like the holiday season of the television networks. The whole dynamic of reporting changes: festive bunting rolling across the screen, and there's a certain cheer in the air. The Nooze is in its most energetic element when there's a campaign on. There are observances to be kept, rubber chickens to consume, and cash bars to be swarmed. Powerful people pay attention to the reporters for awhile, and the new kids get a chance to clamor for the freely given facetime, and some cynical old Scrooge or other may choke up with emotion on election morning.

Reporting is never easier than during an election. They might smugly get a "fact-check" or two in, but by and large, it's a business of monitoring ad campaigns, speculating about murky polls, retrofitting the same contest stories yet again. A reporter is called upon to demonstrate his vast knowledge of left/right stereotypes and faux demographic and geographical niches. The guy or gal who comes up with this year's "Soccer Moms" ("Twitter Youth?" "Working Hispanics?" "Heartland Knowledge-Voters?" "Medicare Patriots?") gets some kind of prize. The truly great thing about elections, for reporters, is that the most ludicrous campaign-related crap counts as newsworthy, and any analysis that's not based on utterly unquantifiable garbage like compellingness of narratives, resonance of platforms, or feelings about ideologies can be safely avoided. It's not a discussion of facts, not even of reasoned arguments, but of weighing opinions, which gleefully can never be refuted. Cost analysis? Historical context? That shit's for suckers, and where's your campaign spirit anyway?

It seems unfair to single out Chuck Todd for this, not that he doesn't deserve it as much as anybody (one may remember Glenn Greenwald embarrassing the little guy in an argument a while ago). It might be because he (Todd) is my age, and I feel like I could place him in one of my old homerooms. He was that dim but eager little fellow who'd occasionally become animated in class with an idea, jaw slightly adrop, and eyes flickering, as if the lightbulb were struggling for an audible crackle or two, and invariably ask a stupid question to which he'd fail to understand the answer. I don't want to confuse that kind of enthusiasm with energy or animation (and certainly not with creativity), but more a kind of a benign and unresourceful persistence, the basically happy kid who wouldn't lose interest, no matter how many times things were repeated. He once called himself a news junkie (not a historian, demographer, etc, "oddly excited" as Peter Sagal put it) in a way that did bother me, for which those character traits must be his major qualification. He probably watches it for hours and claps like a three-year-old parked in front of Sesame Street. Fuck, maybe he's my generation's legacy of being babysat by the tube.

Anyway, this otherwise harmless dude would be perfectly tolerable if his job wasn't to inform me of stuff. Hell, in other circumstances, I'd be more appreciative (or jealous) of his ability to happily pretend. There, but for self-awareness, go I. He's avoided my radar screen since the Greenwald thing, and I'd actually forgotten that he was NBC's head Washington correspondent, but now it's mid-term elections, and there he is again, dully unflappable, opining about the Commuter-rail Grandpas, or something like that, on the morning fare that even news junkies must find insipid, and my teeth grind. Thank god the sound was off.

2. Virginia Thomas
When my daughter was a little younger, she'd storm around the house in certain moods (usually after we'd been asking for a week that she do some avoided chore), performing inconsequential services, and growling out a "You're welcome!" after every one.

"C—, could you hand me a pencil?"

[pause, scowl]

"Uh, could you hand that to me?"

[glower, thrust] "You're welcome, Daddy. I said, you're welcome!"

It's textbook passive aggression, perhaps not rare in seven-year-olds, and of course you could imagine how the exasperated requests to stop screaming at her sister tended to go. I've never been the sort of parent to demand insincere apologies (which has to count for something in the cosmic balance), but it's not exactly a stretch to extrapolate how they might have gone.

It's just not how you normally go about mending fences. "Hey Anita, I know it's been twenty years since my husband allegedly harassed you, but I thought I'd call and give you the opportunity to apologize for nearly ruining his prestigious career of shaping the Republic."

"Um, is this..."

" You're welcome."

What do you suppose the interior lives of the Thomases is like? Ginny is the acerbic sweetheart that dresses up in a foam Statue of Liberty hat, breaking out as a would-be star in the currently popular role of inciting the rubes, fomenting angry cognitive dissonance. Clarence is the guy in perpetual danger of a broken nose should Antonin Scalia ever stop suddenly, and would surely be adjudicating with a faceguard were not both men so amply padded. I imagine Clarence and Ginny as either incredibly frustrated sexually, taking it out, in their respective ways, on the American public, or else as totally uninhibited freaks, pursuing their passions outside the boudoir as much as they do inside it, a lot of dominance play, insults (which is fine among the consenting, don't get me wrong, but where's my safe word when the cops are rifling the closet at gunpoint), nasty porn flickering on the big-screen. Either would be consistent with their antipathy for women, or for people with less power than them. Since this is America, and they're conservative, I'm voting for the frustrated perversion. For Clarence, there's testimony to the fact.

3. Juan Williams
I've never been a fan of this guy as a commentator. On NPR, his job was to report, in the usual boring sort of both-sidesism, the conservative point of view in a reasonable-sounding but unconvincing way. On FOX, (best I can tell with the mute on, anyway) his job is to do the same thing describing a liberal point of view. By this, I conclude that (a) he has no point of view of his own, and (b) he is generally unconvincing. I guess that leaves reasonable-sounding, which is everything you need to explain his NPR career. Good riddance and all, but it was pretty hard this morning to stomach the always-gloating Fox and Friends as they struggled to find NPR stories that proved who the real bigots are. Or that Everybody Does It, or whatever the fuck it was that they were trying to scold. Why, one time Public Television weighted a discussion with panelists who were against the Israeli commando raid on peace activists, which makes them total hypocrites, not like those gentlefolks at FOX. (They also did not decline the opportunity to shit on the continued employment of Nina Totenberg, a little revenge ploy no doubt too subtle for their viewers.) Assholes.

I wanted to call out Williams' chief sin as hackery (I mean, uninspired careerism is endemic to the biz, but I'll take ten Helen Thomases over that schmuck), but that's already been done better than I was about to. Maybe if their hands are digging among the pink slips, they can finally shitcan Mara Liasson as well? (Dammit, beat to that one too!)

Death, Violence, Grief, War, Brain-Eater, Tea Parties

2010-10-21T20:33:00.001-04:00

It's been bugging me for a very long time, and who knows, I may yet be motivated to finish that ginormous post expressing my opinion of the long trajectory of civilization and our point on the arc. The short version is that I think there has in fact been progress in several important measures, and, like any miniature Odysseus who imagines that the gods are swirling portentiously around me, that the progress of the world has peaked, or is peaking, in my lifetime. Not peaking culturally—that's an even more foolish conceit—but in terms of the opportunity to attain and examine that which makes it all feel worth doing. Is there a good basic measure for the quality of our lives? There are a lot of lines that I liked in Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors, but one that took it home pitted the human spirit against an excess of grief:

Love wanes, life weighs, death wastes.

Some griefs are inevitable. That is the way it is, and not much can be done about it.

But those in charge of the planet pile grief on top of grief, and then charge us for the favor.

We pay the value-added tax every day in cold hard cash.

And every day in cold hard misfortune, we pay the grief-added tax.

The added grief comes disguised as fate or destiny, as if the anguish born of the fleeting nature of life were the same as the anguish born of the fleeting nature of jobs.

Well, the spirit of the book is to extend it beyond an economic argument, but death and taxes have always gone together. There is no doubt that sadness is our ultimate due, but a good evaluation of the state of the species is a number for how long how big a fraction of us can coast without a loved one dying in our arms, without suffering crippling pain, succumbing to disease, isolating ourselves, becoming impoverished, or any of the mountain of things that make the big nap seem like a fitting end. (There are many more subjective ways that the quality of life is limited—subjectivity is one thing that has held back that awful post—although it's telling who gets to assert what experience you deserve, and how stable it is perceived to be.) It's difficult to really work out a balance of things in our own times, never mind in the long view back. For example, in the United States, crime statistics suggest that we are less likely to suffer violence from each other, but these analyses usually fail to consider that we've got a greater number of people suffering the official and pre-emptive version, wasting in our teeming jails or simmering in our shantytowns. It also soft-pedals any crimes rich people might do, even if they add grief to the lives of the underclass or to other populations. Arrestable crime in this country has zigzagged over a more or less constant mean value for the past century or so. If you go back to the centuries before that, then the likelihood of murder and assault was depressingly higher. We're a good deal less likely be killed by another civilian here and now than if we lived in 14th century Europe, which enjoyed a homicide rate that was ten times higher than America's today.

Life expectency and other mortality rates are frequent measures of progress when pitting the first world against the third, or when making comparisons between groups. Mortality rates (I like to cope here with jokes about inevitability, but any good physical chemist will automatically think of a rate as 1/lifetime) are a good measure of excess grief in Galeano's sense: we all die, but how often are people dropping around us? Statistics for mortality are also more accessable and less debatable than other measures of misery. In those terms, humans appear to have improved drastically. Life expectancy in U.S. has nearly doubled since 1850, and infant mortality has dropped by an order of magnitude, which puts us (much as with other useful measures) at about number 20 in the world, but it's still pretty awesome historically. In the greater impoverished globe, the death rate has dropped by a factor of three over the last century. It appears to be more due to a scientific understanding of health and hygiene than anything else, whatever political ideologes like to claim. It may also be due to a more universal discovery and dissemination of knowledge, images and communication technologies take us to the battlefronts, wide access to art and literature that gives us personal glimpses into other lives—all modern vehicles to help establish empathy. But that's probably more hopeful than true.

If people can experience a greater freedom from grief, then what does that say about war? The univeral balance must include how much grief we spare ourselves, but also how much we spread to others. Would longer lives make them more precious, and be an impediment to large-scale murder? It doesn't seem to stop it. I remain unconvinced about the additional humanity that the modern American war strategy profers: hell of a low bar for one thing, and you know, the point is still to destroy people. COIN is shameful enough, but when the demons are really let fly, the murderous endeavor has become far more devastating in its scope and scale (and unthinkable in its potential scope and scale).

I spent some time wandering about this site, a compilation of mortality studies put together by one Matthew White. (It is very interesting to wade through, if you don't think too personally about the water. I wish the site had some interesting and handy compilation figures and was more conveniently indexed, but it was evidently produced a few web generations ago.) According to its stats, intentional death, mostly by war and its effects (attendant starvation and lawlessness, and other such minor details) in the 20th century was suffered by about 5% of the population, whereas "only" 1-2% of the world population suffered unnatural death in the nineteenth century. Beating the age of colonialism in a murder contest is a hell of an achievment. White finds a source estimating about a 15% likelihood of death by violence for prehistorical times, obviously a rough estimate, and some similar level of validation by other sources would have been nice. If it's true, it's a point for civilization. Finally.

A picture this big tends to smooth out the details to a point that can easily become offensively glib, which is another reason I keep not wanting to write these things up. Where war occurs, it has become more concentrated and more monstrous, and the quantity of dead has only grown. World War II remains, according to the same body of statistics, the singular horrorshow our species had yet produced by 2005. The disappearance of the Native Americans (however variously intentioned it may have been), and enslavement of native Africans also make the top ten (abetted by how long those things went on, but not a bad effort for an upstart empire), right up there with Stalin's purges and Mao's famine-enhanced revolution. Technology and (possibly) organization have decreased the overall mortality rate and may, arguably, palliate some burdens of living, but they have also let us achieve more spectacular evil, and we were more likely to be killed by other people last century than in the century before. I can not bring myself to say that the one justifies the other, especially when people have to face ever-more-unnatural death. Nor am I clear what the trend was between prehistory and 1900. It may have been better to live as some frictionless, spherical average world citizen in 1945 than it was in 1345, in other words, but it is hard to think of that in terms of anyone lucky enough to shamble out of a concentration camp or the ruins of Nagasaki.

I usually think of these things after reading a John Varley novel, but election season brings it out too. I've paid attention through several rounds of campaigns by now, and the recurrence of theme has become insufferable. Jesus fuck, how many times are they going to tell the lie that a budget has enough pareable waste to balance itself? How many times will they reinvent a dangerous Other to not quite threaten a dire world scenario? How many times are we going to try to introduce bogus economic fixes that enrich the rich and empower the powerful? We've been soaking in conservative principles for 40 years now (after a brief industrial-inspired disruption of the similar order that was going on 350 years or so on these shores), and the media fawns over the Tea Party when it spouts the same platitudes as if they've discovered a new continent. Are they retarded?

Well, they are probably not bright or motivated enough to carefully report and tell a new story, and campaigns, more than other reporting, don't require a presentation of challenging facts, and the thrill it induces in reporters should embarrass them. But more than that, politics survives when people keep stepping up to buy the same old snake oil. Where mortality rate comes in, is that it takes a steady supply of the inexperienced to keep the votes coming. P. T. Barnum obviously had it right, but looking closer at the aphorism, he was concerned about the birthrate of suckers, thinking perhaps, that after a few dozen times, even partisans might outgrow their faith in the more ludicrous cons. If economic impacts were to develop in the space of a generation, would we have as much faith in them? If generations were longer, then maybe we'd borrow less from the future. The news, too, is famously reported on a fifth grade level, and it's probably stayed back a year or two since the early telelvision era (but promoted from the early newspapers). Neglecting such variations, the tone of the news mostly stays constant as people mature around it. I suppose the average information consumer can expect to learn it the popular narrative, then embrace it, and finally outgrow it. If people had time to develop a more thorough understanding of things, would the representative grade-level also float up, and could we expect a better product? Or else maybe given enough time, the race for meaning would get less frenetic, and we'd give up on believing anything after a while.

It's a nice theory. The average age of the Tea Party doesn't inspire confidence (and it's probably worth noting that I'm writing as a middle-aged man) about the likelihood of people to know better by now. People like to get set in their ways, and don't like to change their minds even as circumstances evolve. The bullshit that Reagan told people resonated, dammit, and who wants to acknowledge that life isn't much like Mayberry, or that it wasn't like Mayberry back then either. In science fiction geekdom, it would be sometimes imagined that an author might succumb to brain-eater if he or she lived long enough, divested of all the good and original ideas that powered the early career. And any casual observation of sf nerds further suggests that people can hit a level of emotional maturity, and then stay there. Peak age is a common belief for other achievers too, from athletes to mathletes, there's a window at which we're the best. So let's extend the definition of the grief rate to include infirmity—would the world improve if we could live longer and also suffer less of our time enduring the depredations of age?

A correlated question is whether any intellectual change would occur if people didn't constantly replace themselves. Do we need to die off to change? (I know, time to read Kuhn, shut up.) But on the opposite side, I wonder if resistance is just the end game, the need to validate youth as the inevitability of death looms closer. If there's no lifetime benefit to changing your mind, then clinging to some notion of posterity seems more logical. I also wonder if the extreme late life of a thinker just tends to give way to fatalism or opportunism: I mean, if you grow out of the overheated race for meaning that the young pursue, and that causes you to stop believing in things, then what's left? Does it worry anyone else that we're ruled by an assembly of desiccated old bastards who have selected themselves out by their ability to peddle the same lies for 40 years?

Some people don't lose it, keeping their wonder of discovery, or keep developing their thoughtful sense of values. They manage to keep expanding their notions of dignity and decency and knowledge until it goes black, and it impresses the hell out of me. If I can't go out like that, then I hope that whatever understanding I attain leads me to ignore the bullshit, so that I am able to concentrate on the good stuff, the timeless stuff, that's left. Or maybe I can postpone the end indefinitely. That would be nice.