And now a word for our sponsors...

Dear Gatorade company,

I wish to share with you some observations I've made regarding your new 3-stage "hydration system" of sports beverages. It might be fair to call me a loyal Gatorade customer. I've certainly popped an occasional bottle of lemon/lime consistently over the years. It took some time to acquire a taste for that flat, almost salty mouthfeel, but when I'm really thirsty, I admit that it does seem to do the trick better than water. Adding electrolytes to make my body absorb the stuff faster actually violates everything I know about osmosis, but frankly, I am not so knowledgeable about the anatomy of food absorption that I can rule out some cellular mechanism that clams up when presented with improper ionic strength. Or something. At any rate I can pull down your product a lot faster than I can as much water, which works for me, and even my flop sweat has got to be costing my body precious sodium that I'm unlikely to get from any other conceivable source.

So it's interesting to me that you've sought new additives for other chemicals I might crave before, during, or after physical exertion. Good idea, but I'm struggling with the marketing. See, it might be my physical resemblance to Peyton Manning, but I tend to associate my image as an athlete with your product. I may come off as a chubby dork in the office, but when I'm wiping my drenched brow, arching my back, and slugging down a Gatorade, that's when I feel awesome, like a real man. Now, it was bad enough when you started to put those little retractable nipples on the bottles a few years ago. No one feels manly when they slobber over one of those things to open it, and then suck plaintively at its tip. You had to hold it inches away from your mouth and squirt juice everywhere to avoid embarrassing yourself as you flop all over the stair-skier at the gym. So now there's a little sippy pouch full of Gatorade #1, and I've got to tell you that making this smaller doesn't help the coolness problem at all. (Although to be fair, I can see why you might avoid selling a bottle of yellowish liquid marked "#1.")

I mean, take a look at the guy you found to model it. This dude is a finer human specimen than I've ever even been able to imagine myself (and I used to whack my brother with a stick and yell, "I'm Conan!" which is even funnier if you ever saw the loincloth). He'd've zipped around the field three or four times while I was procrastinating my fat ass out of the car. And yet if we happened to meet up at the track for whatever reason, I'd be the one chortling at him. Do you see where I'm going with this? Your pouch of prime combines all of the serious, competitive athletic connotations of a baby bottle crossed with a juice box. Perhaps you might be better off marketing this stuff to my kids as a fun drink, just like all the other toxic crap they always ask me for.

Speaking of which, I happened to grow up in an artificially sweetened era that convinced me that primary-color red was the color of cherries, grapes glowed neon purple, and, most mysterious of all, that raspberries were bright blue. I'm used to associating these unnatural colors with liquified sugar-delivery mechanisms....but protein? You can suspend your disbelief and admit that fruit is in fact brightly colored, and that adding chemical colors only perfected what advertising nature had already begun. But good god, man: day-glo meat, garish dairy, fuzzy green nuts? Those are associations I have with with fumigating the refrigerator.

And while I'm offering this marketing advice, I can't leave out the fundamental flaw of this whole approach. Even with all this product development, you only get so thirsty as you work out. Offering different products for different stages of your workout is clever (and okay, it might get you back some market share, and the packaging industry might be happy with it), but it's not going to cause Gatorade drinkers to now purchase three times as much of your beverage. If they buy into the system, they'll still only be drinking the same volume of three different products. If you move just as many units but have more kinds of units, you've only made your life more complicated.

So here's my suggestion, and I think you'll like it. What you need to do is to convince non-athletic people to drink Gatorade for other purposes. Athletes only can drink so much, but what about Gatorade mixers for depressed housewives and husbands (just add grain alcohol)? Have you thought about high-tech throat hydration products for smokers and public speakers? Gatorine, that lemon/lime flavored oral antiseptic (with electrolytes!)? My best suggestion is based on why I ever thought it was a good idea to drink the stuff in the first place:

I'll be looking forward to the first royalty check. Thanks.

Beware the Ides of Bloomsday

Which I think is also Bloomsday Eve. Wait, no, all-knowing Wikipedia tells me that in June, the ides are the thirteenth, so the ides are the antepenultimate day before language nerds commemorate Lil' Leo's famous stroll. I'll be back soon enough with an 800-word review of a book from which people crank off theses by the bale--no doubt it'll be great--it just ain't going to happen by the sixteenth. Even the gigantic turd of a post that I've been simmering in the meantime--the one that sometimes keeps me from repairing to these damn idées fixes--doesn't look like it'll be cooked through by that time.

Oh well. Back soon.

Sympathy for the Devil You (Pretend to) Know and He is Us

I felt like writing a "perspective" post, one of those things where I get all uncomfortable with certain self-truths (about me, and about us, you buncha complicit fat-cats you), and I figured I'd take the double-edged sword to David Brooks, who pretty well deserves a twice-weekly evisceration (I originally had a whole over-complicated metaphor as my opening graph, by the way, which I've scrapped, only regretting that now I'll have to shelve the phrase "pissant Promethei" for some other time), and for whom I developed a small fascination with his particular form of contemptibility back when I was reading him a lot back in the firewall days (thanks, daveto). Instead of digging around for the best example of his form, I figured I'd just wait for his next column.

Here's today's. I regret for the purposes of this post that it's a little more coherent than usual--normally Dave likes to offer non-sequitur sorts of theses, conclusions that pretend to resolve to Republican wisdom as derived from the bigger ideas or the (better) counterarguments that precede the message, ideas which clearly grab his interest, but which he doesn't labor to understand (Last week's piece on the Enlightenment is a good example of this. Did you know that the whole intellectual movement hinged on arguments over "go fast," which is where deductive reasoning gets you, and which perfectly describes populists and Democrats today, versus "take it slow," because Edmund Burke? I'm no philosopher either, but that seems to, uh, elide some important thinking of the time.)--and that I disagree with him just a skosh less then usual this time around (He may be right, sort of, about complexity, or at least it's an idea that many people accept. But in the case of BP and minerals management in this country, not to mention his other examples, he kind of elides the long-standing and fundamental problems of resource extraction vis a vis the environment, of public vs. industrial interests, about which people have not quite been silent but they have certainly been marginalized by serious chin-strokers such as himself, and here he pops up like Wormtongue again, flattering the industry, telling the world on its behalf that it was inevitable anyway, and was in no way related to cost-cutting or insufficient attention to the dangers of drilling that have been known since 1853. Complex systems may or may not be extra sensitive to external shocks, but you know what Dave? Fuck you.), but it's not a bad example of the traits I most feel like picking on.

Bobo is forever about that critical elision. What gets me is that I can't tell if he's lazy or lying, if he's failing to apply the reason he celebrates because he's dumb, or because he purposely ignores it. I tend to think it's the latter, and my running images of him include a contented lickspittle in the service of power or a knowledgeable, self-selected operative (like that guy Syme in 1984, who understood what was going on with the Eurasian political philosophy, and bought in anyway; in the novel, they eventually disappeared him, as I recall), but there's really no evidence of inner intellectual turmoil in his writing or speaking gigs. Even if he's in the habit of skimming science and philosophy articles for smart-sounding quotes, his conclusions never stray from conservative cant, no matter how irrelevantly he introduces them or how soothingly he enunciates. There's never any work to show. Maybe I get this impression that he's too smart to believe this shit because Brooks is an okay writer, a guy who can master the tone of his arguments, clearly, and is capable of delivering the intellectual patina that thoughtful conservatives crave. Maybe he's just phoning in the columns that he knows will keep him in print, burnt out eons ago from actually believing (or disbelieving) in anything, regardless of however he claims to have seen the half-light of boring faux-moderation. (I was going with "low-rent Lucifers" in the first draft too. Just sayin'.)

And that brings me to my last mental image of the guy, the one where I project heavily. Two columns and a half-dozen television and radio appearances a week have got to shake the believerism out of all but the most clear-headed or righteous, and never mind that sincerity isn't really a job requirement anyway in his line of work. The David Brooks of my sometimes imagination has defended against this by not treating the subject seriously, and softens the usual bullshit with a dollop of the important stuff he imagines he's interested in. Here's the author authoring away on auto-pilot, and in his fantasies he's dreaming of a job where he could wear a white coat and and carry a lab notebook, hammering out the problems of cognition, philosophy, or whatever it that he imagines Richard Feynman did, never mind that he doesn't really have the analytical skills to really understand the subjects or the motivation to keep up the technical effort for very long.

And you know, here I am, a mediocre scientist in an unglamorous discipline, gliding along with what skills are easier for me, fucking around on my blog in my free time and wondering if I could have been a writer instead. There are natural and brilliant scientists out there (and far better opinion writers, Bobo), and I am not one, but I am even less well-suited to the job of my fantasy, as should be obvious. Even if Brooks is fatigued down to his soul, it doesn't excuse the stuff he writes, and in his public life, he's a terrible human being. But I look at what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, and even though I have a lot of good rationalizations, I'm in many ways feeding the same beast, with about as much passion. I'm struggling to discern a difference.

[Added: There are far better opinion writers out there.]

Media Monday

0. Luv.
I don't watch the televisions at the gym, and can't listen to them (why they haven't figured out closed captioning, I have no idea), but in context, there is no amount of stationary biking I could do, no number of squats--and playing tennis never got me close--that could ever fill out my woefully flat, quintessentially white-guy hindquarters. And that's why I was looking--I'm just sensitive to these things.

I was too far away this morning (and honestly, I was trying to not look) to realize that Venus Williams was, in fact, wearing flesh-colored bottoms on her bottom, and that the presentation spread coverage the attention that was given to her outfit across five simultaneous screens was relatively unfounded. I suspect the usual combination of titillation and disapproval was being employed by the networks, bringing in the entire middle American Good Morning America demographic, both the prudes and the unhappy people they're married to. ABC was definitely showing her off as they scowled, and the local news didn't hesitate either. Oddly, Fox and Friends made their angry faces without highlighting any revealing serves. (CNBC and the NFL network did not mention the incident at all.)

And if she looks that good, well, who can blame her for showing off? Venus is a badass cool.

1. Lost.
I still haven't seen a single episode, not even the pilot, which I avoided only due to the usual confluence of business trips and mild aviophobia. I don't necessarily shun commitments requiring lengthy analysis of lesser art, and even though I consider my time too valuable these days to comb the waste for improbable diamonds, I can't deny that I've wasted many happy hours discovering how the discussion and speculation can blow up into something far more entertaining than the story itself (and sometimes the story can pleasingly confound your expectations too).

Anyway, I got into a conversation with the microscopy guy on Friday about this very thing, and he attempted to convince me (as others have tried) that Lost really did so have it all plotted out from the get-go, and that it's totally worth the five years of your life. I've got far too much invested in being a non-watcher at this point, so I'm not likely to engage until well after the post-mortem, if at all. Nonetheless, it's fun to have opinions, and here's my top five predicitons, based on knowing not a goddamn thing about this show:

It was all a dream. (c.f., The Wizard of Oz.)

It was all a simulation in which the characters have participated, willingly or no. Something universal about human nature is asserted, in this case probably at the last minute, through the experience. An experiment on humans by higher beings is a likely possibility. (c.f., The Matrix. Also a number of sf books, my possible favorite of which is The Deep by John Crowley.)

It was a mysterious simulation, and these characters dissolve in a horrifying fade-out with the realization that none of them are "real". (I'm sure I've read or seen more than one story of this type, but I've got no canonical example. My favorite short along these lines is Forlesen, by Gene Wolfe. Maybe The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag by Robert Heinlein qualifies.)

They all died in the crash, and the time on the island has been a sort of Purgatory, as they unknowingly defend their lives for the appropriate torment, or else it's the last mad flailings of their minds before they all let go and pass on to oblivion. (The prime example is A Strange Occurrence at Owl's Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. For a more afterlife-themed version, see the movie, Jacob's Ladder. Aging is such a weird, slow disappointment that sometimes I wonder if I'm really in the back of an ambulance back in 1994 or something, hallucinating the whole thing.)

They're participating in some alternate reality, that is possibly just as true, due to death or delirium. The increasing madness of life on the island is a symptom, or maybe an unconscious metaphor, of trying to break free into "real" reality. (My favorite example of this is The Iron Dragon's Daughter, by Michael Swanwick.)

What do I win?

2. Iron Man 2
(Okay, let's note a certain method to the numbering here. Ain't I something.)

Speaking of surpassing expectations, there was a lot to like about the first Iron Man movie. To be sure, there was quality acting (including the Dude taking a turn as a meticulous, technologically savvy villain) that could sell it, but there was almost a--I don't want to go so far as to label it verisimilitude--there was also a low threshold for suspension of disbelief that let me accept Tony Stark flying around at unsurvivable accelerations and looking totally kickass. It's fairly obvious that they hired a technology consultant for the films, and even if putting a little fusion reactor into his chest made little medical sense (what, it was an electromagnet meant to prevent the migration of shrapnel? That's silly.), what makes Iron Man believable over Marvel's panoply of mutants is that you could convince yourself that these are merely engineering challenges overcome, not outright magic. The reactor in particular was a smart touch, with throwaways that it was a long-running failure by the company. It resembles a tiny tokamak (and the one in their lobby was a a more plausible big one, if you could imagine they'd build 'em with glass walls, or would keep one running down the grid as a demo piece), a real device and actual long-running failure, which is screaming for some revalatory inspiration from a gifted scientific mind. The suit too, in a compelling discovery sequence (a directorial achievement given its length) had its struggles and successes, to the extent that it was believable enough to warrant viewer apology (we assume that Stark Enterprises must have already developed some wicked shock absorbers, etc.).

Good stuff, but on to the sequel, and we're running into problems. First of all, palladium is a noble metal, and considering it doesn't react with things very much, I am not convinced that it's especially toxic. (Hey Tony, I realize that in the comics universe radiation often gives you powers instead of kills you, but maybe the neutron damage is, you know, the problem.) You encounter this in science, where a limited set of material properties (usually with complicated interdependence) gets in your way and I suppose with enough computational effort, you could identify hypothetical materials that are more amenable (and then hind them in your futurama floorplan for some reason). But a new element? What the fuck is up with that? Did they find a new number between 1 and 107 that no one has thought of before? And that shit isn't toxic and radioactive? Let's ask the science consultant how one might go about doing this. It was great that Tony built a particle accelerator in his garage, on top of old milk crates and piles of laundry, though I'm even more impressed that he could shoulder it and wing around a glowing beam like a laser. (See all that stuff inside, Homer? That's why your cyclotron didn't work.) And all he had to do was hit that little slab with his harmless high energy proton beam (or whatever), and blammo, a little coathanger made out of unobtainium. Man, if nuclear chemistry is that easy, then I'm back to the basement to work on my gold machine. Meanwhile, some nerd chucks off his glasses in disgust.

It's the sort of thing that makes me look for other flaws. The antogonsist Ivan Vanko, now given the run of a defense contractor's full secret facilities, can run giant production items without using any of the people on the floor, no people at all, except an occasional complaining visitor. Ivan had great potential for a character, and Mickey Rourke damn near sold him as both an impressively scary motherfucker and a brilliant physicist, but given his origin story, whatever's contributing to this guy's amorality really needed to be filled out. Revenge is usually a passionate enterprise, you know? (Also, did Iron Man just cold-cock him in a suit powerful enough to throw a tank? And he lived?) And Sam Rockwell was unpleasant and non-technical enough, but I'd no indication of how he could possibly run a big company. So at least that part was plausible.

Of course I wish that I could age as well as Robert Downey Jr.. Getting older has only made him better looking, and I was surprised to learn that Gwynneth Paltrow shares this quality. Scarlett Johanssen plays an alluringly blank-faced enigma, which, beautiful as she may be, might best be described as her "entire range." The silliest casting was Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, a pointless excercise that lengthened an already-long movie with sequel tie-ins: have they learned nothing from casting this guy as Mace Windu?

And they dared to crack open the military/technology/arms race can of worms, but then left it there stinking up the joint. Maybe it was better that way, at least approaching some basic philosophical challenges about the very existence of this stuff and leaving the questions open to the fanboys. I found myself thinking that the world would be bad enough off with one Iron Man, accountable to anyone only by his acquiescence, but an army full of them was even more terrifying. I'm not expecting deep political analysis from a superhero movie (and it's implied that Iron Man, as well as a number of other too-dangerous-for-just-anyone technologies will be relegated to oversight by special entities which would never, ever be tempted to fight covert or unjust wars), but no good is coming out of this. Didn't anyone regret the collateral damage when 20 giant robots started blowing up Madison Square Garden?

At least in comic book land, we can count on moral resolve from the good guys when we need it.

3. Treme
I like this show enough to only stay a week or two behind. There's the well-developed character dramas, of course, but you can watch it for the music alone, for what it means (and doesn't mean) in the culture. Sneaking in that many of the local artists was an act of sheer brilliance, but I want to tell Mr. Simon that there's a threshold for this sort of thing. Anyone who's routinely featured on television, or who's crossed the bar in record sales is going to be conspicuous, and their introduction needs a deft hand. When the dialogue reads, "Oh my god, that's Elvis Costello, famous musician and record producer," then something's a little off in the way you're bringing in your special guest cameos, even if some characters might actually talk like that in the situation. "That's Tom Colicchio, and he brought along Eric Ripert and Wylie DuFresne. They're notable New York chefs!" Or maybe there's just no good way. Why wouldn't people like that show up? Of course they would.

Five More Thoughts: Important Questions Ed.

1. Does this ever happen naturally?
In the first place, it impresses me that such a gigantic quantity of hydrocarbons has been infusing the crust all these millennia. Crazy that it's even there; crazier still that it's so well seized up in the rocks for so long. Organic crud is lighter than stones are, and lighter than water too for that matter, and you'd think that it'd've bubbled up eons ago, farted out into the air by seismic activity, tracked across the verdure by the dinosaurs' gooey talons. The earth's geological cycles, evidently (or at least by successful analogy) swirl around similarly to other convecting systems, they just do it really slowly. Impossibly slowly. The forests and pond scum of yesteryear get drowned, buried, subducted, chemically reduced. The suite of un-oxygenated organic materials ranging from from methane to graphite gets caught up in the cracks and pores, frozen bubbles waiting out the interminable centuries till the crust gets turned over and the pressure's released.

The oil leak in the Gulf is horrific, really, shaping up to be a generational national disaster, maybe an epochal one. What fucking hubris--nothing can go wrong? you really thought that?--and yet I keep thinking that with all these pressure bombs lurking under the surface, don't any of them go off from time to time without human influence? Are there no recorded gushers due to earthquakes? Along faults? This is not meant to be an exercise in douchey climatological contrarianism, just something that got me curious. There is (or was) a lot of oil under there, and are we the only reason it ever gets out? Sounds anthropocentric.

No Googling turned up any inadvertent natural blowouts, although the crust certainly outgasses regularly. Some of the more famous modes are gas seeps from the sea floor, along which methane-eating microbes flourish. Near active geological regions and fault lines, these trapped organics, as well as water, can also get hot and get released. Mud volcanoes are one way that hydrocarbons get released from the earth, causing trouble, or just looking cool when observed in the depths. (Hee hee, mud "diapir"!)

Other reading has suggested that an oil slick emerged from Haiti's recent earthquake, maybe from new faults that released the subterranean material. Oil formations might underlie one of the Caribbean's more tragically impoverished communities. Would energy development save the island? (Resources have had ambiguous benefits in the past.)

Some hydrocarbons on the ocean floor are present in clathrates, crystals composed of methane and water, resembling ice (more generally, clathrates have cage-like molecular structures in which various compounds can be incorporated). Methane clathrates burn, which is just awesome--I want some in my freezer to impress my friends. These are evidently sedimentary minerals, formed by the reduction of carbon dioxide by methanogens or some similar bugs, and fallen to the anoxic depths. It's been hypothesized that enough atmospheric warming and ocean acidification could release all this otherwise stable methane (a greenhouse gas), raising global temperature in a runaway fashion. This may have even caused the big Permian extinction. Scary, but according to the Wikipedian sages, most of it is deep enough that it's not expected to play the major part in our own lurking doom--I'm thinking of these clathrates as the shallower turns of the carbon cycle, an epicycle jiggling along the even slower elemental circuit. Methane lives a relatively short time in an oxidative environment, and if you go back far enough, free methane must have been more significant in the reducing Achaean proto-atmosphere. Where did the carbon originally come from? Condensed with the rest of the planet probably, buoying itself along the surface regions with record ebullience, as far as geological terms go.

And so we have mud volcanoes, but tar pits are famous too. They're still here, having leaked the heavier crude fractions along fault lines for ages, sustaining permanent lakes of sludge. We've found a lot of cool stuff preserved in there, and my suggestion is that we deliver time capsules into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sunken offerings for far-future paleontologists to discover, for whatever they may make of all of this.

2. Seriously, if the problem was that we neglected to clean the bathtub for a whole month, what makes us think that the solution is to get one of those spray bottles that you have to use *every single day*?
Update: it's still sitting there.

3. Did coal cause the Renaissance?
A lot of things changed at the end of the middle ages, which to us moderns, appear to have happened very fast (we like to forget the generations that passed in obscurity, as always, and celebrate the pockets of leisurely thinkers that woke up here and there). Anyway, suddenly we imagine a Renaissance, an explosion of art, science, economics, population, international instability, schism, and war. I've been asking myself, off and on, over the years of this blog, how the hell did it happen? Did prosperity cause democritization of power? Or maybe it was the other way around. Did the establishment of systems of learning and patronage (universities, monasteries, pet intellectuals) spur secularism in Europe (or Protestantism, the next-best thing at the time), or was it the reverse? To pick any one observation as the cause of the others is to taint yourself with ideology, and I try to avoid that. Well, usually I do.

Even if an inferiority complex about the grandeur that was Rome pervaded the West for centuries, progress didn't exactly grind to a halt. The accelerated close of the late middle ages may well have been a consequence of the enthusiastic recovery from the famines, plagues, and climate disaster of the the regrettable 14th century. Urbanization was happening apace, and it was running on wood: by the 1500s deforestation was already major problem. Northern Italy was pretty well wiped clean of trees when the Medicis aspired to employ the likes of DaVinci and Machiavelli. Later, Elizabethan England would be built on, and run on, imported timber.

Coal was well known enough by the time of the Renaissance, but it was not preferred thanks to its general stinkiness. But as the economy took off, there was little else to go on. Surely there was an interdependence in all these changes: innovations required fuel, and even if, say, ship-building couldn't help but be wood-intensive, the means of manufacture of everything else still had to be accounted for. It might be too much to say that new fuels caused the new thinking, but they certainly sustained it. Coal came just in time, and if it came to soot up the streets of London with obscene quantities of filth, it kept the imagineers of the age employed too. In our own times, the industrial revolution couldn't have proceeded without an immense supply of oil either.

Without energy availability, you can't do anything. What scares the shit out of me is that (regardless of the rest of the ecology) if sixteenth century people couldn't be sustained by wood, the current population sure as hell can't come close. If we're low on hydrocarbons, what the hell are we going to revert to as fossil fuels get scarce? The next amazing fuel? We might be a little behind. I deeply fear the limits to Cornucopianism.

4. Daddy, can we watch Spider Man tonight?
I am surprised to regard myself as an authoritarian. "What's allowed" is what they ask. Apparently, these royal indulgences are sufficiently rare that they're scooped up with budding entitlement. Uh, rated PG? I guess. (I don't give much of a shit about the language, but I tell the kids they can't watch violence until they understand irony, and as far as sex goes, I'd rather they learn to be in charge of it--I know far too well how much you should trust boys, and, well, we can have a discussion of what happens if you don't treat fucking very seriously--which the media seems a bit sketchy on, and I'm less comfortable sharing this than I thought I'd be when I first joined the club.)

Anyway, what's curious is that if a movie is watched once together, it becomes part of the family canon. Spider Man, now that he's been admitted into the club, is one of the handful of flicks that my little darling troll for obsessively on the on-demand (not to mention the sequels). Cartoons that I've happened to mention hating less are the preferred viewing when I'm around. It's like the cargo cult of parental affection, television selections in place of non-functioning airstrips. "See Daddy, we reproduce the stuff that was on when you loved us," or maybe it's a just their stretch for common ground. Am I so stingy in my interaction? In my affection? What a terrible thought! My god, turn it off, let's do something real!

5. Will this change the price of beer?
Yes!

I take back whatever I might have ever said about John Kerry over the years. The senator is proposing to reduce the taxes on brewers that make less than two million barrels of beer yearly (about the Sam Adams threshold). He's clearly targeting the microbrew industry, which is still strong in New England, despite the decline in the small-brew fad over the last ten years or so. For the tax discount, we're talking three bucks a barrel for the little guys, an excise tax, which I guess means on production, which according to my calculations, might save me as much as six cents on a ten dollar six-pack if it all of the windfall is reaped by the consumer. But you know, it's the priciple of the thing, and if it's an edge to keep local brewers alive, then I'm all for it.

(I hope they have similar relaxations for local agriculture. As it is, the regulations often favor the big boys...)

A Sciencimilitudinous Three-Fer

1. Naughty Economics
You know, there are lots of things I wish I wrote. Happens all the time. More rarely, I encounter stuff that I like to pretend some more sophisiticated, educated, practiced, knowledgable, motivated, and skilled version of myself could pull off--not just what they said, but I'd like to have said it that way too. Readers of this-here blog, and God bless both of you for sticking around this long, might have noticed my sometimes-uneasy fascination when it comes to contrasting things like macroeconomics and demographics against engineering and the physical sciences. Maybe the fact that I'm such a slapdash practitioner of the latter is why those former things appeal in the first place, but I also think, more generally, that quantification and understanding the relationships between variables are important skills for understanding aspects of the world beyond basic science, and I believe that there are patterns in those dynamics that either actually repeat, or that humans are especially adept at recognizing, and that these different schools of understanding should inform each other better than they appear to. And I love nothing better than torturing a scientific metaphor as well, there's always that.

The field of economics adopts phsyics math concepts rather consciously at times, and I've frequently thought I should be able to get some traction there, at least get it up to my shitty physics comprehension. But there's something that's always been niggling at me about the whole damn thing, and in all those posts (and as usual) I sidle up to a point repeatedly, and try to wrestle the language into representing what the hell it is exactly that's bugging me. And so I say that economics just doesn't support the precision it claims. I say it's a behavior model which in many cases fails to model behavior, one that tries to be a phenomenological representation, but that thinking about it that way will only get you so far. Also, I distrust financiers who purport to give me advice, when they own suits that are more expensive than my car. Fuck those guys.

Anyway, I found this paper via a commenter on Balloon Juice, who referenced another blog. You should read the article, it's awesome. I very much enjoyed the discussions of deductive reasoning vs. empiricism (both good things), and I also liked the just-enough-epistemology-to-be-dangerous, including the part acknowledging some continuity between natural sciences and the humanities, so that's why all my friends are engineers and lawyers.* Deirdre McCloskey details the sins of economics, including the virtues that are mistaken for sins (should economists apologize for the urge to quantify? for trying to understand via deductive reasoning? absolutely not!), serious sins, and ultimately the two dark, secret sins:

Economics in its most prestigious and academically published versions engages in two activities, qualitative theorems and statistical significance, which look like theorizing and observing, and have (apparently) the same tough math and tough statistics that actual theorizing and actual observing would have. But neither of them is what it claims to be.

Okay, the article is not perfect; there's always something to complain about. I don't how her Libertarianism has survived, why assumptions about fairness are supposed to be an ennobling (and weakly defended) virtue instead of a perhaps venial sin of naïvete (even if a motivation to fairness is all well and good). But she gives plenty of tools to address what's wrong with this outlook. It's a bit more implicit in her piece, but I might further emphasize a general failure to embrace induction--observing laws based on the data—maybe it's buried in her sin of institutional ignorance (not spending time in the places where economics actually happens), the first serious one not unique to the field, or maybe it's a part of the second secret sin.

[I don't know about her anthropology either. I have never suspected a tendency to exclude impersonal variables in favor of humanist ones, and my limited reading has certainly suggested the opposite. If Marvin Harris and E. O. Wilson (who, okay, is not really an anthropologist) are atypical, then I'm going to have to revise my opinion of the field! The poster at Language Log didn't think her closing comparison with linguistics was apt, either. Oh, and Euler's formula is damn useful in addition to being a particularly elegant expression of pure mathematical theory. Dissention noted.]

The second sin is a discussion of what we choose to measure and say is important, which I think is common everywhere, but when you're dealing with human variables, as you do in ecomics, what matters is inherently subjective. McCloskey tells us that the field has deviated unforgivably from this, and has, almost as a rule, confused statistical significance with either an essential truth, or worse, an essential importance. I appreciate the first argument more: that economic theory is based on pure deduction, heavily dependent on its description of starting conditions and its governing assumptions, both of which can be suspect, and which does not result in a quantitative, measurable result. That's an artifact of my naïve background, of course; my last ten years has been more about exploring the humanism.

None of which means that such an endeavor is not useful and important, just that we should understand what it is.

*that and the life of relative, though not impressive, privilege

2. Inherent Complexity
Dear Deirdre:

"I have to keep saying “pure” because of course it is entirely possible—indeed commonplace—for novelists, say, to take a scientific view of their subjects...Likewise scientists use elements of pure narration...or elements of pure mathematics...to make scientific arguments. I do not want to get entangled in the apparently hopeless task of solving what is known as the Demarcation Problem, discerning a line between science and other activities. It is doubtful such a line exists. The efforts of many intelligent philosophers of science appear to have gotten exactly nowhere in solving it. I am merely suggesting that a science like many other human practices...should be about the world, which means it should attend to the world.

It's not quite where she's going with the quote, but I'm taking a chance on using it as a segue. It's not easy to dispassionately observe the world even in the pure sciences; the fact that we're people is hard to escape. A recent Archdruid Report post was about complexity (I have no intention of latching onto the guy like a remora nibbling up post ideas--it's more that I made a long comment, the only reply to which leaked over here and wrung another long comment out of me. He's been getting the brain working.). He points out some contemporary versions of complexity, and relates it to Joseph Tainter's theories of societal collapse, in which the diminishing returns of bifurcated attempts at problem-solving doom the endeavor at some critical point. It sounds like a reasonable description of how humans behave when they run into problems, and sometimes diversifying the approach isn't going to be enough to overcome a deeper problem (simplification may be—can we branch from an earlier point?). I can't quite get myself to describe collapse is an inevitable consequence of complexity, however. And I think we need to be clear about what complexity actually means.

As I understand it (knowledge! I read a paper yesterday), the usual measure of complexity, pulled from the computational world, is defined as the length of the minimum necessary description of something. As a useful description of the natural universe, of course, this is fucking nuts. Anything can be "minimally described" by nothing more than "that thing." When I describe a pin, it's simple as can be, but I tend to neglect the innumerable quantum mechanical angels dancing around on its head. Nature gets more complex the deeper you look at it. Wheels within wheels, dude, and turtles all the way down. For that matter, some things that look complex are overestimated. A wave looks more complex than a gradient...until you do the appropriate transformation on it. I mean, "complexity" is so obviously and closely tied with our ability to describe something, that working on that definition as a natural phenomenon is a mighty philosophical head-scratcher. You can't have complexity without invoking the ability of humans to represent a system, right?

[And as far as the complexity of finance goes, it doesn't seem to follow Occam's suggestion of a minimum necessary description of trade and investment. That's something beyond what an inherent complexity might be: I think intellectual positions of power within society (whether financiers, academics, or priests) have a temptation to add complication in order to perpetuate their exalted and insulated role. (But don't worry, when I use jargon it's only because it's necessary.) Unnecessary complexity is another word for bullshit.]

And yet....

Complexity really seems like it could be a material property, a thermodynamic variable. We already have entropy, which--and this still blows my mind--has a statistics basis that is related to the information content of something. Maybe call entropy a measure of meaninglessness, or of equivalence. Complexity, if it can be cornered, has got to be something related. And statistical thermo also has some of the same issues that a description of complexity would, namely, how do we account for the all of the microstates (not to mention all the underlying nano-, pico-, femto-, and myrmecological attostates, and so on, all the way down)? The dodge is that any coarse-grained microstate is a superposition of a ridiculous number of quantum mechanical (atto?)states, which end up being equivalent enough for government funding.

I'm going past my own observations now. I'm not the first to head down this path, unsurprisingly, and now I'm specifically looking at some descriptions from a paper by paper by Rojdestvenski et al. (It was the first credible-looking source when I Googled the topic yesterday, and I mean, really, if I knew you could publish irresponsible speculations like this, I'd have quit this thankless paying job long ago. Maybe they were reading my blog? Nah, the dates don't work out.) Unfortunately, I can't link a pdf, but trust me that it introduces itself via a ride on some of my old bloggy hobby horses (shameless self-linking follows), such as admitting an early problem with completeness in describing the information content of something real, the peculiar situation of looking at coded things when we are the expressions of coded things, and entropy vs. evolution. It was a little validating, I admit.

They make a point that complexity, like the usual thermodynamic variables, is better thought of in terms of differential changes anyway (whether any third-law equivalent applies to complexity, who knows). The macro relations hold, in other words, and if complexity is a valid thermodynamic quantity, then this is how it must behave. If you think about things like internal energy, then the microstates aren't generally counted well there either. It's not that unusual, but it still feels weak on what complexity is.

I am a good deal less comfortable with their evasion of that question. They say that DNA, which has an inherent pattern, is independent of our observation, and is thus especially well-described by some (hypothetical) thermodynamic complexity. But doesn't everything have some level of organization? Surely any such material property must apply to non-living systems as well. It reminds me uncomfortably of the crank arguments that say the second law of thermodynamics proves creationism, and for that matter "complexity" is also a buzzword of intelligent design, so who knows what sort of search results I'll get on this one. Rojdestvenski has the opposite agenda, I suppose, and unlike creationists (or irresponsible economists), he (or she) is at least trying to refine a theory that describes evidence. The reason the authors wish to keep complexity in the realm of living things is because they are interested in forming a physics-based description of evolutionary processes, and they draw up some entertaining little cellular automata simuations to describe how evolutionary adaptions to deal with that energy balance might affect the development of populations. But still, even if evolution is unique to living things, I don't believe that complexity is.

I don't know enough about Tainter's ideas to know if they can work with evolutionary theory or not. For some extreme perturbations, the more complex individual (or species) will fail, even while complexity of the whole ecosystem appears to make life itself more robust, just giving us a bigger toolbox of accessible traits and adaptations to adjust to the big change. Evolution appears to increase complexity, but there also should be something to explain that the populations of complex organisms ain't got nothing on the simpler ones--even at this late date the bacteria are outnumbering us, possibly even pound for pound. The authors observe that in their highly limited simulation, highly variable conditions favor simpler organisms. That seems reasonable enough.

And it might also not be a bad shot at imagining how societies end. If the perturbations are big enough, then a more complex system will be less robust, and if I were clearer on what Tainter says, this would be a far better post. I'll go back to this eventually. Maybe in another couple years.

3. Pissed Epistemology
Okay, this is getting long, but since I've cited the thread already, here's a good example of something that's bothered me for a long time. The poster had a great start:

Mental constructions of gardens are much simpler to create than real ones, because putting a theoretical person on a plot of rhetorical soil is just the beginning...

What follows is a description of examples of the challenge of understanding a small agricultural ecosystem, much of which is ignored by industrial-scale farming, which, I'll bet you a lap in the nearest shit lagoon, is at our long-term peril. Gardening is a complex effort, even in the human-limited language of the comment. But clearly, gardening is technology. Hawk1eye starts advocating a better, deeper level of understanding, and the conclusion, to "chuck the idea that the best way to proceed is by working the industrial teeter-totter of 'empirical observations' leading to 'theoretical formulation'" just doesn't follow from those kinds of arguments. I mean seriously, if we want to entertain the idea of intuitively listening to the land instead of gaining an understanding and keeping track of what works and what's real, then let's start shitting in the wild, eating random berries, and take our best chance at surviving the first cold night. What, all of a sudden we have to observe and be careful? Well, no shit! So how should we know how much to observe, and how are you going to justify how much? If there's one bottom-line lesson I learned from nearly a decade of engineering edjumication is that intuition is something that's earned.

Here's my broader complaint: I hate it when people try to invoke reason to dismiss reason. People arguing something like intelligent design will often try to corner you in a rational-esque Encyclopedia Brown kind of gotcha moment. "Hey, it couldn't be that complex without thwarting thermodynamics, so therefore God made it six thousand years ago. Huh? Am I right?" Faith isn't necessarily such a bad thing, but when it's willfully pitted against science (which is really just an organized attempt to be descriptive), sometimes I wish they'd go full-on mystic and be done with it.

It's a similar phenomenon as demanding authority to regulate authority. Maybe it works when it's different authority with a different constituency, or if you're reasoning around different observations or assumptions, but you know, if that's what you're saying, then go ahead and say that. For a guy who doesn't know much philosophy, I realize that using rational argument to probe the nature of rationality (to uncover paradoxes and such) is valid enough, but that's a slightly different animal than using reason to prove non-reason. If arguments in general are not valid, then neither are the arguments making that case. (And maybe a contradiction like that can be derived from some advanced thinking--those knowledge paradoxes again—but those don’t really deny the thinking that got them there, and I don't think what we're talking about incorporates quite that much thought--on the practical human scale, it's well past the why-bother point.)

Describing our epistomologies and ontologies while using those same things is a formidible challenge, but making the effort to do so is both reasonable and important. Like Deirdre said, the asking of the why is no sin.

Stupidity has compound interest

Yesterday morning I took my car to the gym as usual not that you'd know it by looking at me but I remain a regular even if I can't convince myself to swim eight miles a week anymore and anyway just like I always do I locked my wallet and other valuables in the car before I went in which is fine but little did I remember to take it out of the car later you see because I needed to take my wife's car which is bigger and has a moonroof but I didn't need it for the pre-morning routine but more for the afternoon to pick my cousin up from college in Boston where she attends or her stuff does and it was a pile of boxes that I really had to pick up to save the kid a few bucks on shipping two hundred pounds of near-worthless dormroom accessories to the Northwest and back again which would be a pretty pointless and expensive exercise so I don't mind stuffing the boxes in the attic for a couple months except that my wallet remember was in my other car and I didn't realize it until I got to work and I didn't have my id to get into her building and I didn't have the toll transponder either which also resides in the other car but not my wife's and I didn't have any cash for the ever-increasing fare to enter the city and so I gathered up the change under the seats and mooched a couple of bucks off of my co-worker worrying that I might not even have enough cash to get into Boston and quite confident indeed that I won't be able to drive out of it and I'd have to ask my cousin for a couple more which is embarrassing because she's just a broke college kid and what the hell I'd rather offer to buy her dinner out or something like that to show an example of how nice and responsible try to act which in essence is something other than mooching off of broke people and she's got an injured leg and had to bin up her crap and take it down herself because I can't sign in especially with my seedy badly shaven shaggy-haired thirtysomething maleness and don't I feel like an idiot but it's not like I have a credit card either to identify myself or an atm card to get toll cash and I beg my couple of quarters from my cousin and head out on the Pike thinking that if the toll adds up to more than $3.25 then I'm screwed because my absence of cash is going to make me more likely to run a toll which is going to make it more likely get pulled over which my absense of a license is going to really exacerbate to the level of court appearance and I'm humming along and failing to resist the urge to speed and my knuckles are pale on the steering wheel and I'm beating myself up for the minor error that added up to such a ineluctably dumb situation and I think back to the stupid things I did in college and since too for that matter and it comes to me that this near-panicked sense of intense embarrassment and belayed consequences all deriving from some trivial fuckup or failure to plan some minor detail isn't exactly unfamiliar and while it hasn't happened all the time it's still been a companion all my life and I figure I really have to re-evaluate but re-evaluate what exactly and what then?

Yes, But is it Good for the Druids?

So I've been reading The Archdruid Report lately. Druidry? Well, best I can tell it's a practice of spirituality in nature, and without any evident orthodoxy, doctrine, belief, or pantheon (whatever the original druids might have worshipped or practiced is long since lost after all), it seems benign enough. If I were going to invent a religion from new cloth, it might go something like that, but on the other hand, the world already has more than enough faiths for its own good. I am sometimes attracted to these sorts of big-picture environment-and-society blogs as a matter of general understanding of how people fill up the planet and what we do here, and because I like to imagine where it goes from this point. Also, it's good to remind yourself that life could be lived much differently than whatever it is you're doing now. For the future, assuming a whimper rather than a bang (or, unfortunately, a rocketship), peak oil is estimated within a five-year time frame (via), and one imagines that coal and uranium won't net more than a generation or two using it at this pace. What will we do?

So I like reading these sorts of blogs...with reservations. Although the field appears to draw good writers, the commenters often scare me. Dmitry Orlov has the benefit of being funny, and brings a first-hand perspective of the Soviet collapse of a couple decades ago. I think he understands better than most people what happens to society when political reach rapidly disintigrates (hint: it's violent), but enough calls of "yeah Dmitry, but don't forget the coming race war," in one comments thread was enough to get me to stop reading altogether. Jim Kunstler has a delightfully named blog, and writes well even if he sometimes borders on nutty, but he attracts assholes like a Turkish bathhouse, and the sanctimony that his rural Lake George upperclass writer's life provides for him makes me want to sock him in the eye. By contrast, the Archdruid is gentler than these other guys, and he thinks in that comprehensively generalist way that I sometimes aspire to, even if I find him to be casual with numbers. He had some discussion of Systems Theory, which I'd never heard of even though I spent two years writing about it, that really won me over. (And yeah, it's always these guys: men look forward to a collapse more than women do, for obvious reasons. Even the kindly druid got my blood boiling a little with suggestions that we'll have to revert to more traditional domestic arrangements. Maybe that'll happen, and maybe it doesn't have to be sexist, but it probably will be: some commenter opined that feminism will simply one price we have to pay. I'm sure it would be a big sacrifice for him.)

In this week's post, the Archdruid discusses modern economics vis a vis energy sustainability. I love his notion of economists as court soothsayers, suddenly finding themselves out of their depth as circumstances (appear ready to) change. Yes, the pursuit has been a good-faith attempt to describe human behavior that is deep-down based on observations, but it's also frequently been self-serving justification, and I don't believe the precision that some economists claim, nor the omnipotence that capital is attributed. Economics is a useful description of human activity, in other words, but it's still not a comprehensive one.

But it's important to realize that Greer is describing a few schools of economic thought, schools that have adapted to a political landscape that includes 200 years of amazing energy abundance. That's not how the study developed, however, and early modern economists were more closely concerned with the balance of resources, population, capital, and land. Malthus and Mill didn't have the numerical finesse (or tools) of the eggheads and sharks on Wall Street, but that doesn't mean they weren't sharp. We can say that this is the original basis of validity that he's talking about, just like a superstition started in observation, but that's still not quite right. Economics may not have the precision of a real science, but it's still based on observation and models of behavior that have evolved to fit it. Malthus' theory, as I've babbled about, was done in by some timely technological innovations. The underlying premises changed around him, and it wasn't a valid analysis anymore. Today's capitalists (not that they don't have a lot to answer for) are more or less in the same boat that Malthus was. They may find themselves outside the range of their base assumptions as well, at which point the study will adapt again--is adapting--still trying to describe the world accurately, and hopefully not forgetting the previous lessons. It's interesting how economic theory has supported governing or dominant-class interests (like mercantilism, or the capitalism of today) or opposed them (like Marxism, or Enlightenment-vintage capitalism) at various points in history, but it's pretty much always been some kind of explanation of known events and concerns, and that won't disappear soon.

A running theme of much post-collapse thinking is that old skills will become valuable again. Probably true, but I'm extremely wary of romantic views of the past. Oil's long twilight won't be a succession of porch-time family story hours and monthly community music, knitting on a dusky quiet eventing, surrounded by fireflies or crackling wood fires, miles from the nearest neighbors. Or it won't just be that. Frontier arts might become valuable knowledge, but they are still unlikely to make you top dog in the community, which won't just go away. It may be fulfilling, but that's a challenging life, harder still if your family's survival depends on the yearly whims of the weather. Or the whims of the local power structures. Romantics hope that the powers won't have all that much reach, but that sounds ahistorical to me. We imagine that the dominant culture will improve to something less coercive, but frankly, that sounds inhuman. One thing I'm sure of, is that the future won't be a return to the past, and certainly not to a fake, idealized past. I don't believe that humanity's been around anywhere near long enough to have exhausted the possible modes of coexistence. We may go somewhere worse, but it's safe to say it will be somewhere different.

Modern economics has brought plenty of new insights and methods, and if theories of agricultural production and land rents become important again, it's not going easily back to the pre-math days, any more than society is going to suddenly forget about the germ theory of disease, or of civic organization, or how guns work. If computation energy is harder to come by, then abstract knowledgable pursuits might divert themseleves into gentlemanly or monastic activities again, sure. (If my post-collapse descendents become bookleggers, my ghost will look favorably on them.) But even in the friggin' dark ages of the West, when the political means basically evaporated, practical technology still kept going, whether adapted from the achievements of the past or the achievements of the East. There were a number of important technological developments in the middle ages, which is why when European society gradually woke up (and gave birth to protestants, anti-monarchists, modern science, and new economics) it didn't look much like primitive Rome anymore. We probably shouldn't exclude political developments, either--ugly and violent, many of them, but they did stabilize society for long stretches.

So holding on to practical and frugal life skills? Sounds smart to me, but even if we find ourselves a hundred years out envying the 21st century third world, there's still no way we're going to discard the present. It'll loom over us like the past does today. We'll start from the current understanding, and adapt it (well or poorly) to meet the constraints of the day. Unlike the old Druids, or even the Romans, we've produced such a colossal quantity of recorded knowledge, it's hard to imagine it won't keep turning up for centuries this time.

Review: Who Rules America, by G. William Domhoff

Who Rules America: Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance is the sixth edition of Domhoff's book, rewritten especially for our 2009 American political environment. It advances a class- and power-based framework to describe our society, goes into some details on how the networks the powerful form and how they operate in our society, and dismisses some of the more conventional interpretations of political science. I suppose I have to call it a necessary book, not precisely because it's some occasionally useful alternate viewpoint--although that might describe it's place in a saner political atmosphere--but more that the last decade or so has encompassed such spectacular failures of both the usual pluralist (the high school Civics version of representative democracies and the will of the people and so forth) and what Domhoff calls institutional absolutist (those who consider government as the only important power agency--throw a dart at the intertubes, and you're sure to hit in the eye some scold going on about the "state" or the "legitimate monopoly of force"--talking about those guys), that their inadequacy is hard to ignore. Neither political theory (I cringe a little to pair those words) has represented very well, for example, how we've managed to defend a handful of industries and insiders at any and all costs while our leaders hedge endlessly and ignore obvious favorable evidence when it comes to throwing the masses a bone or two. To put the financial bailout, say, or existing tax and regulatory structures, or the century-old categorical aversion to labor (I hate unions as much as the next salaried wanker, but I do try to apply my criticisms consistently) into a pluralist framework requires such a tremendous dose of ad hoc fallacious bullshitting--at least a whole blogosphere's worth--to make old Irv Langmuir weep. Somehow the answer is always to benefit a group that contains the deciders and to keep the rest of the unwashed out of the decision-making process (even if they occasionally benefit too).

In my more jaded moments, I suspect a pluralist model has been cynically advanced by a secretive power elite as a diversion. More accurately it has evolved to serve some sort of institutionalized obfuscatory function in the policy and opinion networks that Domhoff describes. But I think the persistence of the pluralism argument, or of the idea of distinct separation of government and citizen, is based on our individual experiences. The general way to formulate an argument on these grounds is to try and extend philosophies about human nature to human institutions. It's a sort of first-principles approach, which is fine, but I think we tend to overstate the rationality of our nature, and I think the societal descriptions that come from these points of view tend to be more like a narrative, more anecdotal, with a sneaky tendency to proceed toward preferred conclusions. And I think these views are used more often to justify human institutions, at least lately. (God knows class theory has been used as justification too, but I wish some better blogger than me would take it on him or herself to pick on the Enlightenment thinkers now and again. I like the ideas to a large extent, but I am fairly sure that much of this business of the nature of property and the universality of rights also had something to do with a new class of wealthy people trying to explain why they deserved to be.) But it's also worth the effort to look at the empirical macro effects and try to think about how our behavioral tendencies might have informed them, and I'll be honest here: one reason I'm liking these class and power theories right now is that they support my bias that we are less philosophical deliberators than we are a bunch of self-congratulating pack-apes. I mean we do operate on principles to an extent, but I think ideologies fall far short in predicting the way we continue to organize ourselves. It seems more reliable to observe that we tend to look out for our section of the herd; we organize hierarchies on whatever scale, we seek to define our subgroup and are impressed with its contribution, even if we're fond of other groups. The reason politics looks like high school (or a fraternity of jackasses) is because they're both manifestations of typical human activity.

Now we may be able to create external conditions that restrain that, or fail to, and the collective knowledge and experience matters (the subject of about a million other posts of mine, written and procrastinated), and situations of greater real prosperity (1950-1970, say) appears to correlate with some democratization of power, but I deeply distrust either claim of causation on that one. While I'm at it, let me dismiss my own generational myopia too. I see a lot of willing suspension of disbelief in the past ten years only because I was living them and trying to pay half-attention. Not only was the American power distribution more unequal 100 or 150 years ago, it more blatant, more obvious, better understood by the public, and more vigorously resisted. Noted.

Okay, so Domhoff's thesis is that the dominant power network in the U.S. isn't military or theological, but economic. The first contentious part is that a class-based power structure exists here in the first place, and he gets to it by defining class and power with semi-statistical data: cross-referencing influential memberships (who knew graph theory was useful), analyzing wealth and income distributions, and describing power indicators (as Domhoff summarizes them: Who benefits? Who governs? and Who wins?). I like thinking of power as some kind of statistical variable, measuring, to the extent stuff in this field is quantitative, how power and wealth can be more concentrated or less concentrated in society. It's not a matter of arguing people must behave this way, it's a matter of observing that statistically, they do. Domhoff writes nothing to dispute these observations, really. The power people and the upper class people, as Domhoff variously (and I think uncontroversially) says, overlap to comprise a common group, and I guess what makes this a theory rather than just an observation is the argument that power indicators aren't chiefly achieved by otherwise neutral, unconnected means. It's hard to get status in the herd without plugging in to the powerful networks. That those networks will support the shared values of the people in them and the people underwriting them isn't a shocker either. (I spent some time thinking of the networks I'm plugged into too, a future post if its boringness can be somehow contained.)

A barrier is that it feels very strange to talk about a "class" of people comprised of individuals I might know or meet, that are basically like me. Not aliens at all, even if they (we?) aspire to some shared experiences. And some people who win, even with the networks, fought to get there. The upper class isn't some cadre of moustache-twirling archvillains promoting a pluralist viewpoint because it disguises their true goals. They probably believe in the pluralist model too. And there's a trace of validity that when corporations succeed, they're helping their employees too. (A lot depends on the corporations, what they do, how they distribute revenues, and whom they employ!) Looking at the distribution of power indicators as a property of a given society, then the extent to which typical people (let's not say "you") are in charge of their destiny through effort and training (or whatever other narrative) can be thought of as a measurement the power structure.

Although the book radically opposes the usual descriptions of our economic hierarchy (and uses a lot of liberal PoliSci jargon to do it), and although Dohmoff's judgements can be discerned in there, the viewpoint can still be read as remaining fairly neutral on the broad questions of "is it good." If there weren't a loosely defined group of corporate and upperclass interests running things, then it'd be pro bureaucrats, or labor representatives, or soldiers, or priests. Not exactly uncommon in other places and times. The corporate community owns more than its share of evil, but I can't convince myself it's more inherently nasty than the other avenues though. The biggest problem Domhoff implies, and I tend to agree with him, is that power is currently overly concentrated in one small sector that doesn't like to give it up, and it'd be better to have an environment where status was less a foregone conclusion. (Or which was more attendant to our long-term survival, but that's another hobby horse.)

Right, so obviously it took me three weeks to read a couple hundred pages. How does Who Rules pass as a book? It's an undergrad text, and typically, it's simultaneously audacious, dull, and didactic by design. Mostly I got some useful terms defined, and my prejudices were confirmed in a richer depth than usual. Domhoff has a good supply of supplemental info and a companion web site (I think all textbooks do this now--what a pain in the ass), and I found the supporting material more informative and to provide the depth and convincing information that the text sometimes lacks. Since we're only talking 50 or 60 pages added to a relatively short book, I wish they were supplied as written appendices, it would have worked more nicely by my bed.

This edition of the book was written shortly after Barack Obama was elected to office, and Domhoff took pains to leave an open-ended critique of the new administration, noting that there are slightly fewer board members in the president's cabinet than in preceding ones. He offers a checklist of signs for hope, which, in 2009, were speculative: how will Barry handle the financial bailout, the promises on healthcare, corporate lawsuits, and the other things mentioned up there in the first paragraph. A year later, and it's not very encouraging.

Review: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

[Note: I'm not sure it's possible to spoil this book, but I do talk about events near the end of the story in relation to the rest of it.]

Lolita, of course, doesn't occupy a savory moral place, and might as well get that right out of the way. There's no forgiveness there, not on my part and not on Nabokov's, when it comes to an evaluation of the novel and its characters. If you could distill it from the language (second language? No fair!), it's a story about the serial rape of a minor by her stepfather, and concludes in a jealous murder, and unlike some recent selections of mine in which inhumanity is hidden by humor and shifts of emphasis, Nabokov never lets Humbert Humbert's depravity out of the reader's sight, and not all of the humor is of the sort that can soften the blow. Lolita is a cousin (though the thought must have the curmudgeonly literary Humbert spinning in his grave) of the Hollywood staple of the colorful and emotionally complex hit man, and it's the beloved daddy of novels about amoral time-traveling torturers and the like. Nabokov is not just manipulating assumptions that the reader makes with respect to the language and the form, he's doing it in a variety of very conscious ways, maybe working up an understanding of those relationships.

The story is told in the first person, and it's hard to sum up narrator Humbert in a paragraph, even if there's a temptation to try (Martin Amis takes a shot or two in the introduction*; the protagonist's fictional executor estate has some words; Humbert himself tries frequently; and Nabokov offers a summary or two of his own in the afterword). He's got a great writing style, a sarcastically lyrical twist, as given to unintentional irony as the intentional sort, full of both self-aggrandization and self-pity. He's the sort of tireless villain that, when easily thwarted, returns to his lab to double down on his calculations (or in Humbert's case, his words) with comic fervor, clamping down on defeat with forced dignity and sarcasm. (Could Peter Sellers have played Humbert? Could Alan Rickman maybe?) His self-regard (with all of its obvious but unspoken doubts) is amusing; his jealousies are comic; his moral double-standards are ridiculous. We spend a lot of time laughing at Humbert, which does help distance us from his predilections, but there's Humbert's power of words for us to contend with too, and so many of his barbs find purchase, and we sometimes laugh with him too. Nabokov pokes at the character in much the same way that Humbert cruelly invests his attention in everything around him.

Humbert's selective attention to detail is essential to the character, as well as the development of the story. He can recall (with a photographic memory, he brags), twenty pages of obsessive journal entries when he first meets twelve-year-old Lolita. He's got an eye for landmarks and names when they can take on a pun or a literary allusion. He remembers episodes of his travels for the poetic or storylike settings. But he's an imbecile when it comes to useful facts, chronologies, or detective-like connections. His pursuit of Clare Quilty, his rival and double, in the last quarter of the book gets a little bizarre, and it's because the intellectual performance it requires is outside of Humbert's skill set. It's remarkably self-centered, this outlook of his, and it also leaves no room for anyone else's humanity. Countervailing points of view are mostly invisible to the man, caricatured and bitingly mocked when Humbert can see them at all. (I really wish I'd encountered Humbert years ago. His spirit occupies a good number of online kooks, even if his writing ability is gifted to so few of them.  In the real world, it's furthermore clear that whatever could make professional monsters like Chuck Buckley or George Will tolerable was a certain Humbertness. What a fine epithet I've missed out on all this time.) It takes a while for the reader to gauge how much Lolita is suffering (or not suffering), because Humbert is incapable of perceiving it. It gradually comes out as he (comically) characterizes her complaints and apathy, or in the briefly-seen opinion of her educators. We can sense a trauma under there, a lost childhood that's eventually spelled out, but there's also a pervasive character that is adjusting to her circumstances regardless, a normal kid, who doesn't know better, dealing with it, sometimes better and sometimes worse. When Humbert is finally overcome with what he has taken from Lolita, he still doesn't get it.

Lolita herself, of course, is the star example of the chasm between Humbert's words and the underlying reality of their relationship. Humbert is furiously writing erotica onto the character. Lolita isn't "innocent" really, maybe a little precocious for a twelve-year-old, and she has heretofore approached sexuality in an age-appropriate fashion. In the moment when her proto-sexuality finally, briefly overlaps with Humbert's over-intellectualized lust, it's uncomfortable, it's a taken advantage and a disturbing rape, but (if Humbert is telling the truth) it's not completely incongruous. Quickly, the relationship returns to its normally skew character paths. Lolita continues as an insolent, indolent tween at every available reveal, and for all the abuse, she doesn't come a jot closer to Humbert's erotic portrait, nor does her stepfather ever approach her child-like level of sexual exploration. Humbert writes a great deal of plot and character onto her, but Lolita never ceases to be a young girl, as revealed by the details that Nabokov cleverly lets slip through Humbert's story. She is never womanly, never complex in a way that Humbert would understand.

The relationship between Lolita and Humbert is ultimately nasty and banal, but really there's a similar pettiness infusing everything that Humbert sees. It's almost embarrassing: the car trips; the shallow, simple people; the cheesy motels; my god, fucking suburbia. Humbert traipses through them like the proverbial Martian examining all the stupid details of existence and mocking them. The symphony of toilet flushes is entertaining, teenagers can be pustulent freaks, and middle age is relentlessly unflattering—it's mordantly funny stuff, but Humbert doesn't rise to assess life on higher terms for most of the novel. In the late scenes, among his imagined revelations surrounding the adult (boring, domestic) Dolores (she's only seventeen, but plenty of cause to grow up fast), she's no less misrepresented by Humbert's bathetic streak. Different subject, but more erotica, Humbert crying the fat hot tears of a poet, gifted with the ability to grant immortality. And the really brilliant part about the ending is that it succeeds in making this sad life beautiful, and fifty years later, Lolita is immortal enough. For all Humbert's evil, it does end up a beautifying sort of evil, which may be what sets him apart (even from the non-criminal but similarly degenerate Quilty).

I can run with this a little. We're reminded frequently that the novel is ersatz reality—there's Humbert as discussed, there's a distancing effect of the silly pseudonyms, there's the fact that most of the characters leave the novel to go off and perish offscreen, there's this obvious metafictional bit with the Enchanted Hunters play (a script fit to the events of the novel), there are revisitiations, doubles, and echoing scenes, there's the effort to sink the whole thing into a frame story. I hate to reduce the novel to some modernist experiment because it's too small a box, but let's imagine Humbert as Writer: is the reality of human existence always lesser and apart from the stories we build up to romanticize it? Is a writer's feeling both cheaper and more poetic than the scripts our lives proffer? Is it still beautiful when we inevitably get it wrong? Even though Lolita works plenty well as a novel, it's not about sexuality exactly, it's about language, observation and life.


*Wish I didn't read the intro, at least not until after I wrote this, but for a novel this famous, it's not very easy to act as an untainted jury. Amis makes a point about Nabokov's cruelty to Humbert (a bit beyond the "sarcasm" I was going with) but he's right and I'm going with it; he points out the significance of some of the where-are-they-nows in the introduction, that I indeed might have missed.

Review: Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

'Take a large bowl,' I said. 'Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei--which means "dry cup"--and drink to the dregs.' Procopius stared at me. 'And I will be wise?' he asked. 'Better,' I said. 'You will be Chinese.'

Of course, the tales of Master Li and Number Ten Ox are written with an audience of us pink-faced occidental barbarians in mind, a heritage (and, I assume, lineage) which Mr. Hughart shares. What we really end up with is a fusion of western storytelling (which playfully gifts some traditions and allusions directly to the older culture) and a Chinese setting and worldview that borders on mythic. I have no idea how Chinese it really ends up being, nor can I say precisely how deeply the history and folklore finally career off into the metatextual weeds. In the quote, a throwaway as far as the plot is concerned, the venerable but flawed sage Li Kao has just sold that Procopius a bill of goods with regards to silk production (so there's one early swerve). In terms of cultural history, Hughart is taking sudden turns and and liberally imbibing reality and fantasy, but who cares when it's such a fun ride. Kan pei!

I don't normally re-read very often, but this is probably my third time through this novel. I wanted something comforting for the plane ride to my most recent program crucifixion last month. Bridge of Birds unfolds wonderfully, riding along on that lovely re-imagined setting that has room for everything from ghosts to chemistry ("The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science."), incorporating wild extremes of political horrors, human dignity, and real beauty. Hughart wrote a couple of sequels (one of which I reviewed), but you can only crack open the beginning of the story at the beginning. It remains pleasant to meet Ox and Master Li again for the first time. The middle of the story gets shaggy, and a little generous with ridiculous coincidences, but the ending remains sweet as ever. This is, at the end of the day, a princess story that can get even a guy like me a little sniffly.

As I read, my thoughts wrestled with similar questions as I found in the previous book (why do I love these drunks who wreck stuff and take liberties with the female students?) and, as it turned out, the next one (how can I take so much pleasure reading this Humbert monster?), which I guess makes it a surprise theme, and worthy of a review, comfort pick and all. Bridge of Birds has a spectacular body count, and yet it still goes down like a bedtime story. Not just talking historical bodies here, of which there are no shortage, but gory mass executions, unrepentant murders, torture and dissection, and bloody violent retribution, no few of which our beloved heroes are responsible for, or which occur with their sanction. For an explanation, I suppose we can start with the characters themselves. Li Kao is one of fantasy literature's finest rogues, and one half of one of its finest duos. Allegedly too bored with actual crime, he turned to detective work as a more worthy intellectual challenge. Apparently a decrepit alcoholic, he cavorts and argues like Father William (Lewis Carroll suffuses this fictional China), finding a curiosity, joy and satisfaction in life that is infectious to the reader. Master Li is sufficiently wise--and crafty--that he can distinguish the worth of others accurately, and apply the slight flaws in his character to only the deserving, letting (we discover to no great surprise) his affection for the gentle and the just survive unmolested. His counterpart, Number Ten Ox, we understand isn't the most reliable narrator ever, and much of his modesty is stylistic, but the big-hearted innocence of this character still manages to shine through in the pages, even when neck-deep in Li Kao's elaborate gambits of discovery.

This triumph of tone and theme over the bloody details is something that only happens in fiction, really, and children's literature and folklore has always thrived under that approximation. Bridge of Birds is explicitly intended as the marriage of these old forms with something like reality. ("Nothing on the face of this earth--and I do mean nothing--is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real," says Li Kao) I mean, I've spent more than enough time reading books that explore that conceit, but Hughart does an exceptional job of embracing the unapologetic, eternal unreality of these old stories, and adding just enough cynicism and humor to give even deeper power to the simple ideas of love, justice, and beauty. It's doing something more elaborate than messing around with archetypes, it's finding the right adult setting for an entire storytelling form, and Hughart's imaginative view of China works brilliantly here. Injustice and superstition have rooted deeply in the old soil of its civilization, but human love has formed the bedrock, and in its most honest cases, becomes almost transcendent. The weight of the place is rock-solid and ancient, a seamless mixture of opposites, as timeless as a fairy tale.

The New Political Capital

Via multiple sources, I learned yesterday that there's a House proposal to put St. Ronnie on the fifty dollar bill, because, you know, an airport, an aircraft carrier, a dozen highways, another dozen schools, a think tank chair (presumably for doddering emeritus "thinkers"), a DC building complex, a hospital wing, not to mention the borderline necrophilic esteem of a whole generation of bow-tied opinionators, and it's just possible his legacy isn't getting all the attention it needs anymore. Seems like a fine time for a Facebook quip, right? They should, I reply, put the old bastard on a $50 treasury bill or some other debt instrument instead. (Another commenter adds: and they should put Ron Jr. on a three dollar bill!) Rather proud of myself, I hop on the hamster wheel and roll on over to find that Doghouse Riley and his commenters have already covered that, as well as a dozen or so other, better jokes than I'll ever come up with. The point? I'd better move fast. Don't let 'em tell you blogging isn't hard work.

In the spirit of this historic proposal, Keifus Writes!, in collaboration with the Franklin Mint, the U.S. Mint, environ-mint, firma-mint, and, by means of excuse, a few mint juleps, offers an exciting new investment opportunity in commemorative currency representing United States icons and luminaries. The Reagan 50-spot is only the beginning. Don't miss out on the entire collection:

The George W. Bush Memorial War Bond.
Two series of these hot items began printing in 2001 and 2003. Although the debt has been running over the trillion mark, hardly any of these fascinating collectibles have been put in the hands of American citizens. This is a perfect graduation or christening gift. Be sure to let your kids own a tiny portion of the debt they'll enjoy paying off for their entire lives. The Bush War Bond will help them remember that it was all worth it. (Long-term yield subject to inflation.)

The Carly Fiorina Dollar-Peso
It's difficult for lay people out there to understand the complicated deals of economic transactions, and that's why decisions are left to the serious political thinkers, such as Ms. Carly Fiorina, California Republican senatorial candidate currently challenging Barbara Boxer's seat. Fiorina also served as John McMaverick's economic advisor last year, and she's most famous of all for leading Hewlett-Packard as CEO, bringing on a merger with Compaq in those heady days when the internet was approaching peak profitability. Why is she a brilliant economic mind? Because shut up, that's why!

Technical people of a certain age might remember HP as a top-line electronics powerhouse that used to employ people and make stuff. (Even older people probably remember the whole country that way.) The Dollar-Peso was established in the spirit of the fabled HP-Compaq merger.

The Sandra Day O'Connor Commemorative Decision Quarter
If your eyes, dear reader, glaze like mine whenever supreme logic drifts onto the scene, then rest assured that SCOTUS opinions are merely lengthy rationalizations to confuse the uninitiated and keep lawyers employed. The actual decision-making process can be much more perfunctory. This limited edition quarter is inspired by the famous swing-voting justice's real-life deliberations in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. Heads, and Affirmative Action lives another day. Tails, and it's time for lunch.

The Gen. Stanley McChrystal Video Game Token
In honor of our ninth year of whistling past the Graveyard of Empires, we're proud to announce this beautifully minted coin. On the front is the highest Afghanistan commander's face, and the opposite side depicts an unmanned aircraft gliding through beautifully engraved mountains. Drop one of these in the machine, and imagine that you too could control a Predator drone, delivering fiery death from the comfort of your armchair. (And really, celebrating a wedding outside and firing Kalashnikovs? What did you expect, you fucking barbarians?) No one develops eye-hand coordination like an American, and now it's a strategic national asset. Someone pass the Cheetos.

The Al Gore Carbon Chit
If the 1990s taught us anything, it was that energy assets can be made even more valuable by dicing them up into marketable shares, and, much more importantly, trading them creatively and without close scrutiny. With new innovations, the cost of emissions can be disguised and swapped too (which may be better than ignored), and polluters can buy off honest farmers and ranchers to plant trees or some other hard-to-verify mitigating activity.

The best part about capping and trading is that conservation that you must trust, can't verify, and can no longer understand will now become valuable. It's a great investment opportunity, that can only grow! Trust us. This America.

The Hank Paulson Cigar Lighter
The rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, aren't like you or me. After all if they let us riffraff date their daughters, pretty soon they'd have teachers and toolmakers in their network, and how lucrative would that be? We hoi polloi are in no position to influence the free market. Only people that run financial firms can craft the policy by which financial firms thrive or die.

Now, for an investment of only a hundred dollars, you can directly keep Henry Paulson, or one of his associates, in the lifestyle he deserves. Cough it up, peasant. It's your patriotic duty.

The New Barack Obama Five Dollar Bill
The historic election of Barack Obama has changed the way we think about everything. Our parents always said that any kid could grow up and be a powerful centrist president, but we never thought they actually meant it. Obama proves it all wrong; it's the dawn of a new era. Warmaking will be different; new economic priorities will come into force; a focus on the disadvantaged will become prominent; and of course a constitutional law professor has brought a new emphasis to the Bill of Rights.

Through a bloody war, Abraham Lincoln freed slaves in both the north and the south, and in honor of that, his portrait will remain on the new Obama five dollar bill. The note can buy as much product or capital as it used to. It's printed on the same paper stock, on the same machines, and is backed by as much full faith and credit of the U.S. government as it ever was. For a limited time, this revolutionary new bill can be yours for the low cost of $5.00. It's all about change!