Pluckings from the whirlwind

Accumulating culture

2011-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

Elijah leaves a thin layer of oil in the bottom of his cast iron pan. It pools in a thin circle around the smaller pan which stacks atop it. I never would have thought of this as normal. "Clean" and "greased-up" seemed mutually exclusive. But that pan will never rust, not while he owns it. It will accumulate the flavors, just hints of them, of a hundred meals, (most of them bacon-related) and impart them on the next hundred, so deliciously.

Elijah cooks excellently--he knows how food works, so he improvises with techniques and foods I wouldn't have considered. I watch, and try to absorb.

Culture, for years, meant behaviors and knowledge passed on through families, in regions, and shared. You learn how your mom's pandekage should taste, and tried to emulate it when you cooked your own. California gold miners taught each other the tricks to making sourdough, to coping with the problems of their environment. Wealthy Americans, in our closed face sandwiches, treated bread as vehicle for meat, while in Europe, with the long memory of poverty, meat was flavor for delicious bread.

Culture is far more than just accumulated behaviors--it's attitudes and worldviews, a shared agreement on how we'll interact and what we'll value, but the modes of transmission always remained the same. You absorb experience, and hope that in the time you spend with your family, you learn enough to pass on to your own children.

So guilt and satisfaction split the emotional paycheck when I realize I'm learning my own, completely new culture from the people I stay with, day in and day out. Pleasure is by far the stronger partner. In every new house I see lives at their most minute and revealing. I steal a trick from here: Justin and Jackson cut the corner off their counter sponges to signal their use, a necessary form of inter-roommate communication when the recession packs busy tenants together, and no designated dish-doer can track sponge age. (It's spreading through San Francisco.) I steal a concept from there: the Danes value, above all else, hygglet, which roughly means the cozy joy of shedding artifice in the company of dear people. The quality over quantity approach changes the approach to architecture and design, the primary uses of wealth, even the general humility of a nation.

I know I'm diluting the lessons and traditions of my parents--if I had stayed in Alaska, I'd learn to read the subtle details of the land the way my dad does, and understand more of the joyful attitudes of my friends. But instead, I get to pick and choose, so intimately, from the lives of so many people. And as my parents learn, and the internet stores trade tricks which once hid years into apprenticeships, I'm slowly building my own culture. As I share it with my friends, we'll make our own little corner of America, not only with the values we've inherited, but with the values we've considered, and chosen.

It sounds hygglet.

Now, I'm going to go bake Christmas cookies with a girl from Minnesota.

Barack Obama and Holden Caulfield Share the Same Unease

2011-08-16T12:56:00.001-07:00

So, apparently the White House is having Big Debates over whether they should actually try to explain their economic policy.

President Obama, in trying to be the anti-Bush, has always been hesitant about salesmanship. Take Libya. The name for our Libya incursion, "Operation Odyssey Dawn," emerged from a naming protocol for military operations, similar to the system for naming hurricanes. Recent politicians overrode the military names in favor of grandiose public relations stunts. The last war opened with a name that forced the media to repeat “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” until the word “freedom” sautered itself to the invasion in our brains. The last time we enforced a no-fly zone the politicians called it “Operation Provide Comfort.”

After eight years of public relations as policy, it’s refreshing to see a president refuse to interfere with his generals. But it shows that Obama lacks respect for the power of language, unlike his Rovian predecessor.

Barack Obama's presidency suffers from an unease about salesmanship. He disdains branding.

Substance over style is a great philosophy. It’s nerdism at its core, and I'm proud my president embraces it. However, as any graphic designer will explain, style is substance. What’s the cliché? Form is content.

This is how brains work—we sort the world in shorthand. Someone says “liberal media” and our brains call up an archetype and look for it. The more expertise you develop in a topic, the more refined and numerous the archetypes your brain can apply. Skilled Washington hands saw Obama’s move as a subtle middle finger to beltway PR jocks. The rest of us didn’t notice, because he only spoke to the experts.

In Adam Levin’s The Instructions, my favorite novel of 2010, the young narrator, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, studies with a black mentor. The mentor says, basically, “A guiding black character carries certain associations, so don’t write me as that guy from the Green Mile. Pay attention to what you signify.”

The Instructions is the latest in an American tradition of coming-of-age novels. From the Red Badge of Courage to Huck Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, something about American idealism makes us excel at the genre, the way Scandinavia seems to inspire mystery novels and earnest moralizing.

Obama, the new kid in Washington, D.C., ought to re-read the books. Like Holden Caulfield, Obama has just enough experience to notice the perversions of his new society, but he still hasn’t figured out how he wants to communicate with it.

Your English teacher probably characterized the central conflict of coming of age novels (bildungsroman for those who’d rather type one word than four) as youthful innocence encountering a sleazy society. The real conflict is a struggle to reconcile integrity and utility. However inconsistently, these young characters nurture a code of morals. As kids, they have to—they’re told that once we leave high school the petty bullshit stops, so figure out the type of adult you’re going to be. So they march forth, armed with a personal code, and the world couldn’t give a shit.

As Americans, we were told you can do anything you put your mind to. As new adults, we realize our futures depend on other people. An individual’s force of will is insignificant, which means despite one’s code of personal morals, the morals of strangers determine his success.

Getting shit done, then, depends on presenting oneself to millions of equally potent creatures of will. To survive, one must augment ones behavior. The battle is to maintain a sense of self while trimming the sails of one’s personality.

Gurion takes the hardest route—he rallies those potent wills to his service. Holden is weaker. He choreographs his behavior in order to impress girls, but the swamp of perverts and screwballs will never part for him.

For Holden, Gurion and Obama, the question is one of presentation. Society is irrational and overpowering, so getting the job done requires compromise. We spend a lifetime negotiating the border between reasonable compromise and selling out.

In terms of salesmanship, Obama negotiates this border like a rebel pacifist, David Bry wearing sweatpants to a first date, a PR Gandhi. Obama the pitchman refuses to even approach the sell-out line.

In terms of policy, Obama has erred resolutely on the side of the paycheck. He sold out the public option to guarantee heath care reform. His stimulus was full of tax cuts. Guantanamo is open. Goldman Sachs gets the same free pass they got under Bush. By refusing to enter the PR fray he has lost legitimate policy momentum.

For years, Republicans blatantly used the term “small government” to excuse custom-made markets for campaign donors. The economic collapse shoved that corruption in everyone’s face. Fox News frantically rewrote history, but one good Obama speech could have described the new archetype, and made certain legislative positions political poison. If the White House even clumsily applied their political leverage to an ideology caught red-handed, Republican politicians would have hastily distanced themselves from their oil, pharmaceutical and Wall Street friends. Senators would have stumbled over each other in a race to regulate Wall Street. Instead Rahm Emmanuel had to trade favors with Republicans just for the opportunity to hold an up-or-down vote.

Obama refused to stoop to bumper sticker branding, so he inherited the conversation the media gave him. His style hurt his content.

As an insider, Obama recognized blatant D.C. hypocrisy. (He clearly understood being pro-corporate as a right-wing thing, so by helping Wall Street, he considered himself bipartisan.)

Meanwhile, most of us couldn’t spot a blatant Washington lie if Paul Ryan were hooked to a polygraph. We’re not mavens. Obama thought “death panel” was so stupid it would self destruct. But in cable news politics, even imaginary weaknesses get attacked like steak in a hyena park. Because Obama didn’t attack “death panel” for the dirty lie that it was, he signified to the cable news universe that it was true. The same goes for not prosecuting Bush and Cheney for torture. And for not prosecuting Gonzalez and Rove for firing US Attorneys who failed to investigate Bush’s enemies fast enough. Obama thought he was staying above the partisan fray. Instead he was declaring their innocence.

Context signifies. Form is content.

Obama is a sellout without being a salesman, the opposite of what I’d want him to be. He’s still new to the society of politicians, the insane high school that is cable news in Washington D.C. To resist the D.C.’s temptations, he isolates himself from the posturing like a sullen teenager. He wears his PR tactlessness like a punk rock hairdo. He refuses engage society on its terms, then he can’t seem to figure out why nobody likes him.

I once tutored a high school student who kept writing about drugs for a class project we would publish for parents. “Keeping it real,” I told her, “means knowing your audience.”

Salesmanship is a fight for your audience’s limited attention. As Chip Kidd puts it in his coming of age novel, The Cheese Monkeys, communication is a war. Everything tells a story, and if you don’t tell your story, someone louder or catchier will.

Abstinence

2011-05-10T04:54:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons not to raise a child in the South. The heat alone sounds masochistic. Arcane social hierarchies involve debutantes and would confuse any child, especially one with parents unable to guide him. Then of course, there's this:

Now, admittedly, what this is really saying is that the South is a terrible place to be poor, or judging by the STD breakdowns by race, a terrible place to be black.

So: abstinence only education anyone? If get a disease, remember your health insurance card.

I saw this when I was six and it made me a man

2011-04-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

Winters of My Youth

2011-04-01T00:34:00.001-07:00

I sing for the winters of my youth, which in my mind begin airborne: watching the clouds and sky reel with the last scrape of sled ringing like silence in my ears, floating. Sky, silence. Sky, silence. Until whump! snow compacts to form fit and shouts approach and that cloud drifts, changes, and I don’t move even just to prove I’m alive, paying with tingles, aches, icy trickles down my neck.

These are the memories: hot chocolate with Mom and rosy cheeks in the little house in Spenard; Dad bursting home with snow on his beard, camping with Ian and Eric wrapped in tarps and watching stars – liners out of our of boots so they don’t freeze and can serve as sock puppets on Orion’s stage, a Snickers thawing on my belly.

These were winters of April blizzards and porch-high powder, the Sunday-morning scrape of Dad’s shovel on the roof, cold air inside with the newest color Calvin and Hobbes, a quilt and a fight with my sister; days of trenches on the shed roof and blueprints for fort-linking tunnels, of no enemies and grand defenses, winters of snowburm mountains and Dee Dee Jonroe swishing ‘round the corner at Goose Lake, dogs yapping tongues flapping and spray smacking your face as you jumped and cheered.

Our friend Gina made cranberry brandy and Mom and Dad took brisk skis with flasks and rosy cheeks, dragging us along through snow-draped birch, and I yelled bonzai on the downhill and tumbled into a knot of extended limbs.

I wasn’t hurt because the snow in those days made you invincible, even, somehow, to cold. That we learned winter camping with ten boy scouts and three dads, wrapping tarps in an octagon to reflect the heat and stripping layers until we bared our tiny eleven-year-old chests and ate marshmallows, toasted by fire, bravado and parents who couldn’t admit they’d never camped at six below, either.

This is about the cabin, the clatter of firewood thrown on the pile, heat sucking out the door, Dad brushing snow onto splinters and flakes of birch bark, sap smell and spruce smoke and the door groaning closed. Early morning at the cabin had dignity. Dad’s arms had thrown the logs up, his hands drawn the plans, and he could work without the stay-at-home coffee and want ads of a laid-off welder, had more to do than teach chess to a child to pass the time.

But in the city, hockey was the purest – cold air burning down your lungs and down to a steaming T-shirt, one-on-one in the backyard with Dad, dinner cooking, rink lit by Christmas lights in Febuary and a shadow from the moon on the spruce trees.

In the blue light of a Saturday afternoon our friends played, hypnotized by the rhythm of passes and dekes, ignoring the crystal-draped trees and hoar-frost on the chain-link fence that shuddered and shattered and rained broken ice if you shot it. It was shinny hockey, shinpads taped under jeans and chin yarn waving in the breeze that comes with pure and scraping speed – fakes and passes, rotating triangles and bursting til your lungs tore ‘cause even if it was just shinny there was no relent.

I recall the purity of those winter months and the year the snow kept falling, in April, May, and I was 8 and could make hobbit holes.

Now, for whatever pundit-mangled reason, it is raining on Christmas. Yellow grass penetrates the snow. The cross-country races sliced over a film of muddy shavings collected from zambonis. I realize my children will never believe that every winter, it never thawed.

So maybe Grandfather was as dashing in tails as Grandma claims, and maybe Dad really did free solo a chausy cliff in Mexico in the early days of rock climbing. If what I remember so clearly is so true and vanished, I don’t doubt Mom tried to canoe Cook Inlet, and Stuart Beard is that little dot on someone’s shoulders, bobbing along in an aerial photo of post-earthquake damage in ’64. Maybe there were sawdust bars and rowdy individualists, crazy sons of gold and oil telling themselves they wanted fortune and not freedom, that they were running to and not away. Maybe there were gods and demons, spirits and ravens, salmon thick as traffic and copper mountains green as grass.
This is for winters that I know were real, and the miracles that happen, true in every generation, while we build magic for the next.

Google, you creep me out

2010-12-28T20:49:00.000-08:00

On marraige

2010-12-26T03:27:00.000-08:00

This is all I really want.

This really seemed obvious to me.

2010-10-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

That's right. Politics. Because whether or not you want to deal with politics, politics wants to deal with you.

Dear Senator Begich,

Jim DeMint has announced that he plans to filibuster all Senate business until January, so that the government will shut down until Republicans are back in power.

This fact should be an enormous gift. Republicans have said, again and again, that they want America to fail during this administration. Republicans have made a record number of filibusters. They have stalled an unprecedented number of appointments.

Americans hate the partisan poison that has infected this country. Republicans have deliberately created it. The media feeds off it. Pundits are afraid to blame anyone for it (except for Fox News, who create it and then blame Democrats.) Using their own statements, you can prove that Republicans are responsible for stalling the machinery that keeps this country working. In our darkest hour, Republicans put partisanship first, and discarded their countrymen.

I know you think you know this already, but respectfully, I think that rather than fighting against partisanship, you are playing along with it, or trying to ignore it. That strategy won’t win.

Republican partisanship is a danger to all Americans. Make no mistake, Republicans do not care if our economy is robust, as much as they care that the powerful stay powerful. They would prefer stagnation to losing their status. A tea partier worries that he might count a Mexican as an equal in the job market. A corporate donor worries that he may have to improve performance to compete with small businesses, rather than just buying competitors. Our economy suffers as corporations manipulate laws to smother their competition.

You're an Alaskan. We're tougher up here. I urge you to rally your party to grow a spine. If you don't hold Republicans accountable for the poison they inject into the campaign system, if you don't make partisan obstruction a political liability, then it you reward it. If Democrats tolerate this poison, they encourage it, perhaps paralyzing America in the process.

In 1976, hockey in the NHL was a dirty game, led by the Broad Street Bullies, from Philly. Once the Flyers had some rings on their fingers, teams stocked up on goons, to emulate the Stanley Cup winners. But one team resisted. The Montreal Canadians were fast and talented, and size was not their first priority. They still had enforcers, though. In game two of the 1976 Stanley Cup Semis, Philadelphia’s Gary Doernhorfer raced over the Montreal blue line with the puck, bearing down on the goal. He thought he had enough space to score. Montreal’s Larry Robinson hammered him into the boards so hard the wood broke. That one hit changed hockey forever. Montreal won the Stanley Cup for the next few years, and teams emulated their fast style of play, paving the way for Wayne Gretzky and the early 1980s Islanders. Had Philadelphia won the ‘76 Stanley Cup, the age of skilled, fast hockey might not have emerged, and goons would have ruled. Wayne Gretzky, a skinny 17 year old kid, would have looked dubious, and he might have lacked a team to compliment his playing style. Instead, two decades of the most exciting hockey in history followed, all because when it counted, Robinson hit hard.

This is that kind of moment. Hit Republicans for their dishonesty, obstruction, and partisanship. If Democrats win using facts and stressing integrity, like Obama did in ’08, facts become the dominate political style for the next decade. Republicans have a vast vulnerability—the truth. Their own dirtiness is their greatest weakness. Hit them hard. Democrats can win this election, win back popular appeal, and use your majority to put America back to work. If you fail to hit while Republicans are still vulnerable, Republicans will stall this country into a mess that no one can fix. In desperate times, we need swift action, not partisan deadlock. Make obstruction a liability.

I'm asking you to pass this advice to Senators, Congressmen, and the DNC.

I urge you to lead Democrats to vote bravely--for middle class tax cuts but not wealthy tax cuts, for disclosure laws about campaign finance, to limit the monopoly power of banks and other big business. And I urge you, and all Democrats, to seek victory by shifting American opinion to the left, rather than inching your actions to the right. Every possible fact, from economics to partisanship to corporate recklessness to government corruption, is a fact in your arsenal. Use the facts to promote a culture of results over ideology. Use the truth like a warrior for the American people. You may never get another chance.

Thank you for serving our country.

Sincerely,

Wrestling

2010-10-04T13:37:00.001-07:00

More links....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19corner.html?_r=1

To the New York Times

2010-10-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Editor,

I was appalled to see Deborah Solomon say in her "questions" column with Lisa Murkowski that Murkowski threatened to split the Republican vote. This is utterly false. Before she declared as a write-in candidate, polls ran the race at about 50/50, Miler and McAdams. After she declared her candidacy, polls showed Murkowsi and McAdams at 20/20, with Miller holding steady. Murkowski is not splitting the Republican vote, she is splitting the educated vote. I know many, many lifelong Republicans in Alaska who could never bear to vote for a fool ideologue like Joe Miller.

Likewise, Sarah Palin only won the governorship because a moderate conservative third party candidate ran, splitting the educated vote in exactly the same way. Keep in mind that until Palin announced her VP candidacy, the Obama campaign considered Alaska a battleground state. Alaska is diverse in its people and viewpoints, and has a political math far different from that of the rest of the country. I'm tired of reporters coming up and writing stock profiles of Georgia and just changing the word "swamp" to "moose," and going on about how we all love God and guns, without knowing a damn thing about the place. We are a different kind of conservative, if we are conservative at all.

Sincerely,

Christopher Benz

The Journalistic Hampster Wheel

2010-09-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_hamster_wheel.php?page=all

More good reading: why journalism is becoming a modern-day hampster wheel. Note how the writer explicitly dismisses most modern arguments about why modern journalism is a failure, right at the outset. This way, he makes it really clear that you're about to hear something new.

On hot dog carts and banana republics

2010-09-26T01:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/39815/inside-dc-food-truck-wars/full/

This perfectly exemplifies the problem with our government, and the problem with our economy. In short, some people had a new business idea. The powerful, big businesses lobbied hard to change the laws to prevent the new business model from being viable. It's not a free market--it's a custom-made market for the best lobbyists.

a link

2010-09-23T19:47:00.001-07:00

http://nymag.com/print/?/nymetro/news/features/9503/

Just trying to keep this going. Gossip journalism is dumb. Here's an article about it.

Not all taxes come from the government

2010-07-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

BP’s oil spill magnifies a problem familiar to any high school economics student. BP is taxing all Americans. Even when the oil spill isn’t catastrophic, a miniscule degree of contamination or environmental impact is inherent BP’s daily effort. It’s simply the nature of the oil business, just like air pollution is the nature of coal power, or pesticide runoff is inseparable from industrial agriculture. These small taxes on Americans add up. The tourism industry in Mississippi loses money when pesticide runoff from the Midwest clears life from the Gulf Dead Zone. Federal agriculture subsidies and pesticide laws shaped the market so that Archer Daniels Midland’s profits in Illinois tax Cajun Resorts Gulf Shore Charter’s business in Mobile. Shrimp fisherman have lost jobs to create jobs at BP—in fact, the Minerals Management Agency has given those men’s jobs to BP. That’s simple economics, the tragedy of the commons.

Americans choose which businesses we allow to tax us, and how much to let them. By removing regulations, we automatically surrender our resources to whomever wastes most permanently. Like it or not, the government shapes which industries and business practices succeed, either by action or inaction.

This is the role of government in a market: maintaining competition. Did those fishermen have a way to compete with BP for the Gulf? Did you? The government could have helped, but politicians were busy taking campaign contributions to keep it “small.” There is only one way an ordinary citizen can compete with BP for clean air and relatively-less-cancer-causing fish. The American government is the American people’s lobby. It is no wonder corporate donors and corporate media have worked hard to discredit and corrupt it.

Every American deserves a competitive shot at our resources. Programs like carbon trading are one of the simplest, one of the most effective models of ensuring citizens can compete. Yes, the coal industry’s PR pitchmen are right: cap and trade is a tax. But pollution is a tax on us. Americans give our air and water to BP, and some of us are surrendering jobs to them. We should not give all that away for free.

Traditionally, Americans have reduced pollution or financial mismanagement with regulations. Regulations are standards of business we expect in exchange for access to our common goods. Taxpayers spend money to enforce those standards, by funding regulatory agencies. However, the current system taxes us twice: once to pay BP with our water, once to fund regulators to watch them. With cap and trade, corporations pay us back some, and incentives mean they earn money if they improve beyond the bare minimum. Polluters tax all of us. Cap and trade is a straightforward solution.

Why Democrats Will Lose the House This Fall

2010-07-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. President,

I make less than $20,000 a year. I donated the largest possible amount to your campaign. That's more than ten percent of my income. I ate the same meal of beans and rice three days a week, phone banked, wrote to the editor, and knocked on a lot of doors to make you president. I think you are the smartest man to occupy the White House in years. But you are dangerously close to losing my vote, my energy, and my respect.

I hear rumors that your administration intends to alter America's Miranda protections. That might be the last straw for me. It's not just that it gives unwarranted credibility to Dick Cheney's lies about the Christmas bomber, while abandoning American principles. It's that I can not bear more retreat in the face of right wing bluster. I voted for you because I thought you were a fighter. And you have shown some political courage, especially in your attempts to be truly post-partisan. I respect that. But you have consistently played along with right-wing games, especially on national security. You're better than that. It saddens me to see such a strong, intelligent man pretend that the emperor is wearing clothes--or that civil liberties are a threat to America.

When Republicans get ruthless for victory, they pander to the right. Why should Democrats, ruthless for victory, pander to the right as well? Clinton says he regrets introducing competition-killing aspects of Reaganomics. Please don’t repeat the mistake. Bring Americans to your position, rather than positioning yourself where you think we stand.

You are following an administration that kidnapped people from their homes and tortured them in secret prisons. It shouldn't be hard to argue that such behavior was un-American. Frankly, it was criminal. Bush’s economic performance begs for public repudiation as well. Markets don’t regulate themselves—from mining collapses to privatized ratings agencies to oil spills, it’s clear that “Voluntary Protection” didn’t work. This Miranda nonsense is just lending your stature to Bush administration policies that the results long ago discredited.

The facts are glaring everyone in the face—we need someone to say what we did wrong and why we won’t make those mistakes again. I believe you are the one to do it. So far, you’ve only sacrificed promise after promise, from Guantanamo to offshore drilling to ending no-bid contracts. Your ideas were right. Be a great communicator, hold your ground, and explain why. Don’t pretend American rights make us unsafe. They make us American. If you decide to fight on behalf of what makes us free, I will follow you, all the way. I’m sure millions of other Americans will, too.

Sincerely, and with a great deal of respect, I am yours,

Superbowl Commercial Breakdown

2010-06-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

An essay written hours after the 2010 Superbowl.

I watch the Superbowl for the game. However, if I’m well prepared and I’ve got my snacks and beer out in front of me before kickoff, I watch commercials, too.

This year, the commercials reminded me of prom royalty who all accidentally wore the same dress. Dockers wants men to “wear the pants.” Dodge believes you are a spineless yes-man who only feels strong while driving. FloTv personal televisions are a cure for men whose girlfriends have removed their spines. Did some memo circulate Madison on Avenue this year? “During a recession, males feel shame. Tell them your product will restore manhood.”

It isn’t just the Superbowl. There’s a new company called “Man Cave” that sells grilling products to men using the business model from Mary-K makeup and tupperware—have little parties, convince men they aren’t manly, and tell them your products will make the difference. Man Cave has a set of fake rules like “a man never turns down a free beer.” Now, I’m a big fan of free beer. I work at a bar. I’ve played a lot of rugby. I love free beer. But I drank beer long before I was a man. Being a man has nothing to do with what brand spatula you use or what beer you drink. Being a man means doing what’s right, even when it’s difficult.

I think we’ve witnessed a gradual wimpening of American culture, in which being a man is somehow associated with acting like a child. Selfish frat boy culture infected America’s most powerful businesses and politicians. Meanwhile, every immature schulb on tv dates some hot, inexplicably tolerant mother-figure. Advertisers even call expensive machines like four-wheelers “big boy toys.” Pop culture’s new vision of normal is the fifty-year old little boy.

There’s another ad campaign, for Diesel designer jeans. The ad reads, “smart has the brains, stupid has the balls.” May I suggest that no one wearing $145 jeans has the right to lecture me about balls? True courage requires intelligence. A lot of football is about just that, intelligence under pressure. Courage means knowing the risks and acting anyway. Berate brains all you want, but guts means knowing what you’re getting into.

Now, I don’t always make bright decisions. I enjoy snowmachines and four-wheelers as much as the next guy. In fact, I can operate a front-end loader and gut a fish, and I have performed first aid in the back-country and have acquitted myself well in bear and moose encounters. But what I did in the past doesn’t make me a man. Being a man means steeling your principles, glaring down reality, and dealing with it.

Advertisers aren’t alone. Political pundits love childishness. Whole campaigns translate to “do you feel weak, vulnerable, pushed around? A vote for me is like buying your balls back!” They sell moral compromise as “common sense” that experienced guys will get. They bully those who point out that the world is complex. If you don’t understand it, they say it doesn’t mean you’re ignorant—just listen to their simple version, and assume anything more complicated is a lie.

Being a man is not about what you buy or who you vote for. It is about the person you have forged yourself into. For years, our country was run by a group of grown children, playing moral-historical dress-up in times that weren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard. (A phrase I must credit to Josh Marshall.) They were cowards who surrendered American freedoms the minute something frightened them.They pulled American citizens from their homes on nothing more than suspicion, held them without trial and tortured them in secret prisons. They did medical experiments on prisoners and locked them in camps away from their families. Then, they tried to make us ignore it by saying that Arab-Americans aren’t “real” Americans like you and me. They sunk to acts no western culture has since World War two, because they were cowering with fear and they needed to feel safe. I’ll say it right now: torture is pussy shit. It’s un-American and cowardly, and it will remain so no matter how many fat guys on tv pretend it’s up for debate.

No pitchman in the world can make you a man. That’s the whole point.

On Having an Opponent

2010-06-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

I often think of writing in terms of rugby. This is undoubtedly a roundabout approach. But (according to cognitive scientists) the mind understands the intangible in terms of the physical (anger is heat, love is a journey) so since I have devoted years of energy to shaping my rugby skills, I suppose rugby was a natural vehicle for understanding hard-honed craft. I imagine the ideal way to understand writing is in terms of sex, but sadly, art as seduction just doesn’t translate for me. In any case, I was reading an interview with David Foster Wallace today, and I had an epiphany.

It was an old Believer interview, and in it, Wallace discussed distraction and work. He said that when a piece inspires him, he can write any which way, but when he is forcing himself to write, he has to set hours and build a routine. (DFW: “What often happens is that when work goes well all my routines and disciplines go out the window simply because I don’t need them, and then when it starts not going well I flounder around trying to reconstruct disciplines I can enforce and habits I can stick to.”)

You ever try to lift weights with no routine? You wander around the weight room sampling dumbbells and copying the exercises you overheard a personal trainer teaching to a lady named Fran who works out in a red tracksuit. When I lift properly, I have a schedule from my rugby coach of exercises, reps, and sometimes even specific rest times. This way, at 6:30 in the morning, with no motivation, I can plop myself down on the bench, see how much I lifted last week, and try to beat it. The momentum of a routine only helps you if you build it in a direction. You know what you plan to do and what you’re capable of, so the routine pulls you through uninspired moments.

Some of the excellent writers I know love structure. They tinker and toy with it, and brighten up like kittens when they find a new structure to experiment with. Even in my own writing, I’ve noticed that I write better within a structure. Structure frees up brainpower. It’s one of the reasons post-concussive syndrome wears on an artist—the first thing you lose in concussions is “working memory,” which is the ability to hold onto multiple ideas at once. An average person can remember seven things in their working memory, and it’s nice to use one of them on overall structure, one on what you’ve written so far, one grasping the truth you’re trying to communicate, and to use the final bits of working memory playing legos with sentences. Imagine tinkering with structure as you go, too. Something slips.

Writing within a structure, like lifting with an exercise schedule, means you don’t need to be inspired for every minute of effort. You wake up in the morning, plop down at your desk, and know where to start. You can fight through, using willpower when you lack inspiration’s gleam.

But your best rugby doesn’t emerge when you’re willing yourself to endure pain. Your best performances emerge when you’re having so much fun, the pain is incidental. Your lungs burn, sweat stings your eyes, your collarbone aches ominous and you need to sprint to the ruck, coldly read the field and call a play. Tricking yourself into ignoring your body just focuses your mind on the pain. You play best not in a frenzy, nor in prove-yourself blinders, but when you’re so busy toying with the other team, you forget yourself entirely.

Which is why I think inspiration, in this getting-yourself to write sense, comes down to the object of your focus. Allow me another sports example. Mike Tyson used to begin fights by staring down his opponent to find an eye twitch, a swallow, a hint of mental weakness. I play my smartest rugby when I am determining, with almost sadistic glee, how I intend to damage my opponent. In principle, this tiny attitude adjustment seems no different from spending the game dwelling on what my team should do. “I’m going to nail this tackle” barely differs in meaning from “this schmuck’s gonna hit the grass.” But the difference is vast.

Inspiration, I suspect, is partly a product of joy, of forgetting yourself while you test what you can do—you toy with the story, or the ideas, or the audience you’ll manipulate into ecstasy. On the other hand, when you’re thinking about you—and how to avoid distraction, how to trick yourself into sitting at a desk—you’re occupying bits of working memory that could be probing your story for weakness, imagining plans of attack. The effectiveness of a writing routine (or a stressful deadline) is that it walls off the girlfriend and internet and whatever might release you from the contest and return you to your own weak flesh.

Praying for the economy.

2010-01-31T15:36:00.000-08:00

People are praying for the economy. The New York Times reported an trend of recession-related religious services since Lehman Brothers failed. This explains how poorly Congressmen understand (and explain) the economy. If my car breaks down, I don’t pray for it to work again. Even if I’m not sure what’s wrong, I don’t pray. I find someone who can fix it. I may throw in an extra prayer for good measure, but I’m looking first to the mechanic.

One of the first ideas of anthropology is that religion forms around the experiences in which people are powerless. Polynesians prayed before venturing out into the open ocean, but not before boating in a safe lagoon. Agrarian societies pray for rain and harvest, but not that they will manage to pick the corn.

Too few people see the economy as a problem for an expert, and even fewer see the solution themselves. The economy is a system, like an engine, not a mysterious force. Yet I’d say 95% or more of people, even informed people, turn to religious reactions, performing rituals to appease economic gods. Republicans cut taxes and deregulate, regardless of circumstances. (In an unspoken platform plank, Republicans also stimulate spending by starting wars and buying arms.) Democrats, in theory, respond to broken economies with infrastructure investments and social safety net programs like welfare.

Both approaches, when a religious reaction rather than reasoned reaction, are like getting a jump start every time you have car trouble, even if it’s a leaky radiator or a frozen oil pan.

Maybe we just need a better diagram of the economy than supply-side and demand-side. Something that doesn’t use calculus, because that might spook the Senators. Just a really good diagram.

I think its safe to say that our current system occurred when we devoted ourselves to ritual deregulation and bloodletting through tax cuts far past the point it could have helped. The underlying problem is the willingness to treat economics like a shamanistic crapshoot.[1] The problem is people don’t even see the economy as a man-made system.

Our power is to vote and to educate. Those we elect need to learn to face a crisis. Instead of falling back to their party holy book, they should at least first call a mechanic.

[1] (We sacrifice a regulation, blow on our lucky tax cut, and roll.)

OK Go letter and video

2010-01-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

http://okgo.forumsunlimited.com/index.php?showtopic=4169

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

PORK

2009-04-14T21:40:00.000-07:00

I have stopped rugby for the season, and gotten some new jobs. To my surprise, I’m in a slightly less broke financial position and I don’t need to take care of my athletic health. So, all I eat is pork.

I’ve got some reindeer/pork sausages from home, perfect for cutting up and putting in eggs, or tomato sauce, or with vegetables. The cheapest meat available is bacon, and I’ve just moved from the legumes-and-pasta cash bracket to the some-meat-is-affordable cash bracket. Bacon it is. I cook, and every meal is like John Stewart in Half-Baked. “You ever try a lentil soup? You ever try a lentil soup…with bacon?”

Three meals a day, pork. Even if I eat out, I eat burritos al pastor, (with, you know, Latin pork.)

The cheap, easy ubiquitousness of this meat says something about our food processing system, sure. But I’d rather to talk about Easter. I feel like running down the street like the guy at the end of Soylent Green, yelling, “Passover is Easter! Passover is Easter!” The main difference between the two is that I, as a Christian, am welcome at a Passover Seder. I can eat gifilte fish, and drink manishevitz even if I can’t spell it. But when I want to invite my Jewish roommate to join our Easter dinner, it’s inherently awkward. Example: I walk in with a tray of hor d’oeuvres, toothpicks sticking out of them, and put them on the table. “Hey, Roommate,” I say. “I uh, know you’re not like…well, I know you just had Passover…but if you want any, you’re welcome to some bacon-wrapped SPAM.”

“No thanks.”

“Okay. Are you sure? I don’t think the Torah ever mentions SPAM by name. Do you know it’s a restricted trademark? God might have gotten sued. So I think you’re okay.”

“Even if I could eat pork, I don’t think I would eat bacon-wrapped SPAM.”

Now that I can afford meat, it throws a huge layer of complexity into my menu planning. Should I buy beef shanks on the bone so I can boil them for stock? Should I throw away ham glaze, or is there a soup I could throw that into? Holy smokes, I can cook stir-fry!

Ham began as an Easter tradition because pigs were slaughtered in the fall. With no refrigeration, ham spent all winter curing—Easter was about the right time to break out the cured pig. Now, we eat it because it's tradition, and because it’s cheap.

So, I understand the obesity epidemic in America. Meat is a luxury, but it’s just a little cheaper, and far easier, than slow-to-cook vegetables and beans. (If I cut a piece of ham and put it in a frying pan—pow, ham for dinner! If I cut a carrot and put it in a frying pan, I better own an onion.) Pork makes you feel rich to own, makes you feel like a good cook to include. But in the end, you have pork every night, cause it’s the only thing like it, this fast and filling fat. If we keep our food production system, pork will be in our lives and guts for quite a while. Better learn some recipes. For example, bacon-wrapped SPAM is better with cherries or pineapple, and a honey/thyme glaze.

How scenic

2009-03-22T04:14:00.000-07:00

Golf Course

Prison View Golf Course, a nine-hole golf course featuring two tee boxes for an option to play 18 holes, is now open to the public. Tee times must be scheduled at least 24 hours in advance by contacting the Prison View Golf Pro Shop at (225) 655-2978 or by e-mail through www.prisonviewgolf.com. Cost to tee off at the state's only maximum- security prison is only $20.00, which includes cart rental.

Let's play with writing!

2009-03-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

Ok. I wrote these two sample Onion articles early last year. So here's the deal: one of these versions is technically proficient. The other, an earlier draft, may simply have more ineffable something. (Guts? Soul? Chutzpah?) So, take a look at the two, and tell me which one you like better.

Eggers, Jonze Collaboration only Needs Paul McCartney to Destroy World

In the hopes that their combined efforts will cause hipsters to orgasm so violently that their torsos actually explode, Dave Eggers, Spike Jones and Maurice Sendak have collaborated to produce a film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are.

“It seemed like a perfect trifecta,” said Eggers in a phone interview from the seat of his San Francisco empire. “We couldn’t have picked a better book to adapt.” He added that the story’s nostalgic potential could subvert the defenses of otherwise ironic twenty-somethings, so that combined with its camp value, high street-cred collaborators and monsters, the film should cause a severe hipster explosion. “Normally they might fight it, but they can’t,” Eggers said. “They loved this book before love was corny.”

Experts warn that Where the Wild Things Are, or WTWTA, as Eggers prefers to call it, may be a perfect fusion of pop and art, so powerful that it risks destroying creation.

“We’re very worried,” said scientist Giovanni Sacretti. “If the balance of intellectual insight, entertainment, and genuine emotion is off by even a little bit, the exploding hipsters may knock the earth off its axis.” If the balance is perfect, as many fear it might be, the entire universe will merge into perfect oneness, cease to drift towards entropy, and end life as we know it.

“Someone’s trying to bribe a key grip to mess with the shooting, but no one can figure out what a key grip is,” said Sacretti.

Scientists are speculating that art-induced oneness caused the fusion of matter that led to the last Big Bang. “We were confused about the origins of the Big Bang, and what might happen after the universe drifts into heat death, but when news came that Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze were collaborating with Maurice Sendak on Where the Wild Things Are, it all made sense,” said celebrity physicist Steven Hawking. “I guess once in few trillion millennia, a great work of art unites all time and matter into a single, potent entity, which then explodes. We have no idea how many times the cycle has repeated.”

While excited to see the end of the universe, Hawking said he would settle for a hipster apocalypse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or at least a three star movie.

Eggers, Jonze Collaborate in Secret Plot to Explode Hipsters

In the hopes that their combined efforts will cause hipsters to orgasm so violently that their torsos actually explode, Dave Eggers and Spike Jones have collaborated to produce a film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak is also involved in the film.

Experts warn that Where the Wild Things Are, or WTWTA, as Eggers prefers to call it, may be a perfect fusion of pop and art, so powerful that it risks an environmental catastrophe.

“We’re very worried,” said scientist Giovanni Sacretti. “If the balance of intellectual insight, entertainment, and genuine emotion is off by even a little bit, the exploding hipsters may knock the earth off its axis.” If the balance is perfect, as many fear it might be, the planet may be knocked out of the Sun's orbit, causing a desperate, slow freezing of humankind.

“Someone’s trying to bribe a key grip to mess with the shooting, but no one can figure out what a key grip is,” said Sacretti.

Local young person Ryan Wiesel said that he normally ignores big budget action movies, but said, “I trust Spike to do it with class.” When informed that Eggers would also be collaborating on the project, Wiesel clenched his abdominal muscles and squinted. “That’s like rolling all the Oscars up into one giant Oscar,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever, ever been made before. Oh!” When Sendak was mentioned, Wiesel collapsed.

Scientists speculate that if hipsters manage to spread the explosions out over time, it could minimize the threat to the Earth’s axis. Unfortunately, this is unlikely, says Cal Berkeley professor Julie van Sanderburg. “If this travels at anywhere near current trend velocity, we should see violent hipster orgasms from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Eugene, Oregon, within four hours of the opening,” she said. “Unless we can convince China to do simultaneous screenings to the Shanghai expat community, it all could be over,” she added. Because counter-balancing the impact of the event will involve complex and unreliable calculations, scientists will probably not take this desperate measure. “Wen Jiabao didn’t like the prospect of nurturing a hip scene in Asia,” said a source close to the matter.

memory loss

2009-03-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

I had a little epiphany I thought I'd share. The way my brain works (just fine, thank you.) is that I only remember things that I specifically decide to remember.

Show Business

2009-03-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

So, I have disk with about 250 images of slices of my brain from different angles. And I have found a computer program to render it in 3-D.

And my roommates are high.

So I've been rotating through my brain in front of them. It's the little pleasures you can give people that make life worth living.

Dungeons and Dragons redux

2009-02-28T15:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a compendium of D&D related articles. One by Paul La Farge from the Believer, which is long and excellent, and concerns the history of war games. Then, the Great Goth Armored Car Heist, an article about people playing D&D then stealing lots of money. Lastly, from this blog, about growing up without it.

One from right after the election

2009-02-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

So, sometimes I’m the sort of person who reads three page articles in the New York Times from 1969. (Yay, public libraries!) In any case, I found a long article about Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The idea was that Republicans, who had never had a chance in the South, but had been the party of the big business folks on Wall Street, could come back and hold a majority if they stitched together Southern Racists (who were a little pissed about LBJ’s voting rights acts and other Democratic civil rights laws) and the plutocratic deregulation types who had made the Republican party poison since the Great Depression. It was a long profile of the guy who wrote the strategy, and he more or less said that people will vote based on their ancestry. “We’ll lose the Scandinavian liberals in Minnesota but I think we can pick up the Irish Catholic vote, etc.” It was a careful, mathematical study of what people wanted, and how to promise it to win. The party platform relied on a careful pastiche of little wedge issues that could chip away from different Democratic constituencies. There are still anti-abortion Catholics that vote Republican even though they in all other ways prefer Democratic candidates. The Republican party was like an alliance of fringe groups.

You can see the results of this with Senator McCain’s canidacy. He was the strongest Republican candidate, but to win his party’s nomination, he had to change his stance on oil drilling, the separation between church and state, and gay marriage to cobble together the votes he needed to win the nomination. He had to more or less explicitly go back on everything he had said to make him a “Maverick.” The strength of each of these positions is waning. Republicans are screwed, and frankly, I hope the party goes the way of the Whigs.

In Berkeley California, the Democratic Party is the only party. This does not mean elections are easy. While people agree on things like affordable housing and that polluting industries are better off settling elsewhere, there are two clearly delineated camps within the Democrats. They fight bitterly about public transit.

Any people who share beliefs will stake out ground within the boundaries those shared beliefs. You’ll notice that no one in American politics is advocating rejoining the British or reinstituting slavery or prohibiting alcohol.

For all our bickering, Americans do share a lot of values. During the Bush years, Republicans pushed at those values until they expanded the spectrum of American beliefs. Warrantless wiretapping, a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, no-knock searches, prisoners held without a trial or charges, funding for programs that demonstrably do not work, like missile defense and abstinence only education—many of these never before fell within American values.

Currently, (to paint with a terribly wide brush) nut jobs are the only ones left in the Republican Party. They are a fringe party with a powerful hold on the media. My hope is that the crazies and their values will stay on the fringe. I hope we will never let the party of torture and hate-speech be a viable option again. Within our more rigid, freedom-loving beliefs, the Democratic Party will have to split. Then I can vote for someone with morals who also wants a balanced budget.

2009-02-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

It's hard to write what I really want to say when I know my Mom is reading. But old David Foster Wallace said that you have to be honest. You have to be God-damned honest. I met him once, and he told me I had my shit together for a guy so young. Not sure what to make about that compliment from a man who later hanged himself.

I'm scared. I'm completely frightened.

When we saw the Neurologist, Ladyface told him that I was only a little different since the brain injury. I had trouble distinguishing days from each other: is it Tuesday? Is it Thursday?

"You mean some days I'm in a daze?" I asked. It took her a while to explain.

"He doesn't seem that different," said Chris, my roommate.

But I can feel it. I can't handle hardly more than one task at once. I write and it's one paragraph at a time. There's no feel for how tiny details will effect the mood and power of the piece as a whole. For example, I mention suicide above. How does that play in to my current fear and sadness? Is it that another friend killed herself and everyone chalked it up to brain chemicals, that people who have suffered multiple concussions have a history of depression, mood changes? I feel so much frustration and anger, when I can't process things. I hate that my personality is somehow still the same, the same weaknesses are there, exacerbated by a lack of cunning. I hate that I don't remember what other point I wanted to add to this paragraph. I can't even gauge the point to see if it was worthwhile.

In short, the neurologist told me very little, except that I have the short-term memory of a goldfish. I can feel the difference. I can feel the tiny alterations to the speech center of my brain. Speaking English is like speaking a foreign language. I have spent years training my instincts, so that when I speak or write I cut words. I automatically transform "go back" to "return", "make better" improve, replace the verb "to be" with something stronger. Now those replacement words are harder to recall, and even simple things I would normally say (sentences? "simple sentences." Bam, five words replaced) come out clumsily.

I quit rugby for good. I was picking dirt from my cleats in the bathroom, gently washing them and wiping off the leather with a towel. I said to Ladyface, "How do you think--you know how there were people who are less smart than I was, are they stupid in the same ways I am now? Did we lose intelligence along the same scale?"

It's a simple question. It took so much concentration to say. I couldn't start and finish it right. (Right?) I couldn't muster the power to imagine the whole sentence before I said it. I try to think up interesting angles on ideas, but when I start down the path, I veer into cliches on the left, double back, and fall into cliche on the right. It just takes so much fucking energy to speak.

I'm still writing, and it's going well. It's about all I'm doing, and I'm happy to be doing it. FUCK! Then what was the point of this post, you know? What did I mean to write? Only that I can feel differences in myself.

I said I didn't want to go back to my magazine work until I had waited for my brain to heal more.

"I think that's good," said Ladyface. She rubbed my back, rested her chin on my shoulder. "It's not about your brain, though. Wait until you get your confidence back."

And that's what infuriated me. That what's done is done. My brain is full of scar tissue. I have to work with confidence. And that I can't remember what I was going to say about what she said.

It's funny, you learn so much being dumb. Now I see where bad writing comes from. Now I can see how you could write something meaningless, or cliche, or with obvious gaping logical holes.

But good writing is coming. I'm just going to work on it. I'm going to be fucking honest. It might not be as smooth. It might not pour like a waterfall of images and ideas, manipulating emotions to coincide with statements, a special calculus of observation. But I know the formulas. If I have to work it slowly, to water with a garden hose, to compute with an abacus, I can still create. It's going to be honest.

2009-02-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/7895043.stm

Bad Behavior?

2009-02-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

If Rick Santelli wants the Obama team to stop rewarding bad behavior, then clearly he wants the banks nationalized. The shareholders made irresponsible decisions, buying shares in bad banks. They should lose those shares. The U.S. taxpayers paid for banks, we might as well own them.

Nationalization is when the government of Venezuala takes over a rich oil company and says it is a government business. When you buy an insolvent business before it goes bankrupt, you're a white knight capitalist.

We've already spent almost a trillion on the banks that own those foreclosed homes. The banks are forclosing on the people who OWN the bank. How many of those derivatives traders work for a bailed out bank? So a bunch of derivatives traders cheering to forclose on the people who keep them employed is just revolting.

Shovel-ready

2009-02-17T23:28:00.000-08:00

I'll have more writing up here sooner or later, but I figure until then it's right to put up links.

Looking below, I look all whiny about memory loss and use the term "concussed" perhaps beyond the deadline. (At some point, you are no longer concussed, you are just a new, stupid person.) Because of this, I feel it's best to mention: I had pretty much no headache today, and things have really been clearing up the past few weeks. Maybe I'm not using my brain for anything, or maybe I'm just not so stupid after all.

UAA Women's Basketball at #1

2009-02-15T21:49:00.000-08:00

The Lady Seawolves were voted #1 in a recent coaches poll. Congrats.

Happy Valentines Day

2009-02-14T16:37:00.001-08:00

My head ached, so I stood stone-faced while the florist snapped rubber bands off a bouquet of daisies and other flowers. "Well, normally this time of year we give away a free bag of rose petals to anyone who buys dozen roses," she said. "But since you've become something of a regular, I'll give you a bag of petals free."

My first day buying flowers was a month ago, coincidentally my first day after this concussion. It could be easy to read something into this. Perhaps tis means damage to my frontal lobe has made me less restrained. Perhaps it means I've become more dependent on my girlfriend since getting hurt. (I assign her things to remember, when I'm away from my notebook, for example.) Or, perhaps it means you'd have to be brain damaged to spend $5 on a rose.

Happy Valentine's Day, from your grumpy, concussed friend.

Transcript of a scene.

2009-02-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

Ladyface sits on the couch near CHB. He says goodbye, closes his cellphone, and turns to her.

CHB: My mom wants your phone number.

Ladyface: Ok. Are you going to email it to her?

CHB: Is that ok with you?

Ladyface: Of course.

CHB: She also wants you to come to the hospital with me, if you can.

Ladyface: I was already planning on it.

CHB: I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with the two of you teaming up.

Ladyface: I’m not teaming up. I just thought you might want someone else listening. Your memory isn’t that great these days.

CHB: That’s what she said.

What with my brain injury, sometimes I forget how stupid people are.

2009-02-09T14:46:00.000-08:00

Here's more proof that idiots are running our media. The financial media specifically has been prone to blindness. This link is to a link, but the commentary is worth reading.

Head injuries

2009-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

I'm coming out of a pretty bad concussion. I've been knocked out before, but this was a little more severe than I'm used to. It happened about three weeks ago, and I'm still getting headaches and just now starting to remember details from my days. (I was just going to write "I woke up my girlfriend Sunday morning because I was so excited to remember Saturday," but I'm afraid I can't recall. Maybe she was already awake. Maybe it was Saturday night.)

Head injuries do interesting things to writing. I kept starting to write, and literally forgetting my point, my plan for the piece. Often as not I forgot what I had already written. I can recall how an essay started if think hard, but it's not a part of my consciousness like it used to be. I lose sight of the whole sculpture while I detail the eyes.

My brain injury has been like a drinking blackout that won't go away. The first day I was really out. The world was static, and one moment hardly connected to the previous. However, if someone reminded me of something that happened, I would think "oh, yeah!" and start to remember.

The experience has changed my perception of memory. Rather than long-term and short-term, I partition knowledge of events and memory for detail. My long term memories are no longer scenes, but facts, slightly more vivid to me than Washington crossing the Delaware. I know I went to first grade with Mrs. Scroggins. I know I once lived in Calcutta. What happened there? I couldn't tell you in detail, not story detail. There were sputtering rickshaws, incense keeping the flies from butchered meats, and the feel of cold marble on my forehead during mass. Images and sensations float disembodied in my murky mind. To recall a full scene of say, my last day, I have to plunge down and pull out the disembodied images, stitch them together, and trust some Frankenstein memory to do my bidding.

Some people change their personalities, in subtle ways or clear. I have found that without a back burner for my brain, I have an easier time just watching tv. My plans don't press on me, the actors don't remind me of ideas or needs. It's a fine excuse for not writing, for sleeping in, for blowing off appointments. But it's high time I got religious about to-do lists anyway. If personality is all just brain chemistry, then a change in brain chemistry changes few of my fundamentals. I still have to work with what I've got. I have to demand a high standard from myself, and find techniques to help me reach that standard.

Isn't that a doctor's oath or something?

2009-02-06T23:09:00.000-08:00

Just a thing about honeybees.

Daily Showness

2009-02-06T23:08:00.001-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Why Are You Such a Dick? - Audio Tape

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Get some perspective, Congress (long-term, preferably)

2009-02-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

A caucus in the Senate is trying to cut out all of parts of the stimulus bill that don’t immediately create jobs. This is the exact opposite of what the Senate should be doing. Japan tried a stimulus plan after their crash in the late ‘90s, one that spent lots of money on projects that weren’t entirely useful, but did create jobs. The effort failed.

This crisis is an opportunity to invest in the long-term efficiency of the American economy. Long-term investments like high-speed rail routes (which take pressure off of airports, too) and consolidated medical records improve the actual economy, rather than simple economic indicators.

We need smart projects. The infrastructure we build should encourage minimal energy consumption rather than the multi-hour exurban commutes our current system incentivizes. We must do this not because it reduces dependence on foreign oil, but because it’s more efficient. Regardless of how it protects us from foreign entanglements, it will improve our economy for centuries. Imagine if we had introduced hybrid cars in 1935, or even just built houses with hot-water pipes under the floorboards.

Three decades of short-term thinking got us into this mess. Short-term job creation will not make us more efficient or improve consumer confidence. Why focus on shovel-ready projects? Construction jobs don’t count more than engineering jobs. If the government starts a massive binge of construction and doesn’t prepare blueprints for when the first round of building ends, they will have created an artificial bubble in the construction industry. They’ll face a slack period when all those backhoe plants and electricians figure out what jobs the economy actually demands.

Some jobs need shedding. That’s right. It should not require 15% of our GDP to keep Americans healthy. I’d rather lose unnecessary insurance industry jobs than create unnecessary construction jobs. We’re going to be in a recession for a long time anyway. That is what our social safety net is for.

The Senate is wrong to say that we must shed any spending but instant gratification job creation. If there is a bright line on this package, it is that we must shed any spending that doesn’t make our economy more efficient.

Rome is burning. Republicans need to stop fiddling.

I drank of your cup

2009-02-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

I used to wake up to this song. In Danish, "I drank of your cup" sounds very similar to "I drank of your body." Make of it what you will.

Drak Af Din Kop

History

2009-02-02T01:35:00.000-08:00

I admit I am tired of hearing newscasters call Barack Obama's inauguration historic. Every inauguration is history. But to watch CNN, you'd think that the man campaigned for about a year on the slogan "vote for me, I'm black." When history looks back, I hope they'll see a media preoccupied with race, ignoring that America elected a candidate who took the high road, and trusted Americans to be smart.

Poor bastard is inheriting an economy that has a lot of downward momentum left in it.

I get preachy, starting with evolution

2009-02-01T21:50:00.000-08:00

In an important moment in evolution, today I had to choose between condoms and food.

This is a pretty normal evolutionary pressure. Species must determine how much energy to spend reproducing and how much energy to spend on living. The environment determines which combinations survive.

Scientists recently observed this facet of evolution. Fifty years ago, farmers deliberately introduced Italian dung beetles to Australia and North America. Because each environment had a different balance of food and competition, the beetles evolved into separate species, each incapable of reproducing with each other, due incompatible genitalia. Environmental pressure created a different ratio of horns (with which beetles fight each other) to penis size. The larger the horns, the smaller the penis.

Resource-rich habitats demand adaptations to fight for resources. Sparse habitats demand adaptations to survive. (And survival is enough to ensure a shot at sex.) In a jungle, creatures evolve all manner of poisons, brilliant colors, and parasitic behavior. On the tundra, they get fat and hairy to deal with the winter, then grow antlers or claws to deal with each other. There are not enough resources in central Alaska to support the diversity of species (and niches) that bloom in the jungle.

This same quandary effects culture. Tlinket Indians in Southeast Alaska lived in a rich temperate rainforest. After gathering resources, they had time for war and art. Yu’upiks in the Arctic desert were no strangers to war, but life was harsher, so they fought less often.

The terrestrial Alaskan ecosystem is an economy, based on imported calories. Salmon, whales, caribou and migratory birds imported fat from nutrient-rich oceans and southern forests, in exchange for safety during reproduction. (1.) This funded the lifestyles of humans, orcas, bears and eagles, leaving the sparse sunlight to fuel full-time herbivores.

Likewise, the economy is an ecosystem, and humans must adapt. Changes in our resources and our system of distributing resources (the economy) are altering our niche.

We face several pressures, among them:
1. Peak oil.
2. Demolished Oceans, including overfishing and changed chemical compositions.
3. Massive US debt and the finance industry a jumble, precipating a credit crunch. And globalization.

Peak Oil

Human wealth relies on the efficiency of our economy. Efficiency means wealth in return for effort. Hunter-gatherers worked hard all day just for food and warm clothing. A modern hedge-fund manager invests similar effort for a warm bed and a speedboat. We achieved our current level of economic efficiency thanks to technology. This meant both cheap energy—gasoline engines harnessed solar energy from long dead-plants—and cheap information, with the written word and then the internet.

Human populations are rising exponentially while our oil supply falls. America in particular relies on cheap fuel. Our city layouts reflect the assumption of near-infinite oil, connecting people to one-stop commerce via highways, and filling those warehouse stores via globalized commerce, which runs on bunker fuel. Other energy sources may change the equation, but the current system will not last.

Ocean Collapse

Meanwhile, once bountiful oceans face disastrous overfishing. The Grand Banks off of Newfoundland have collapsed, and fish have not returned even fourteen years after fishing ended. The Baltic and North Atlantic face similar straights, while the Pacific salmon fisheries South of Washington had to close this year. Global warming has reduced the level of edible plankton. (There is a reason marine life thrives in cold water.) Pollution has raised acid levels so high that the only survivors in some parts of the ocean are the simplest organisms from the primordial soup. The Economist writes: The winners in these newly polluted, over-exploited, oxygen-starved seas are simple, primitive forms of life, whereas the losers are the ones that have taken aeons to develop. Algae, bacteria and jellyfish thrive while fish, coral and sea lions die.

Think about that: we have changed the fundamentals of a habitat so severely that we are chopping at the very trunk of the evolutionary tree. And it’s our habitat, too. This is NOT a self-correcting system. It is what scientists call a positive feedback system. Imagine a fulcrum balancing a tube of BBs. If you push on one end of the tube, BBs roll toward it, multiplying the upset balance.(2) The ocean’s chemical changes are similar: when kelp forests begin to die, sea otters die, and without otters to eat them, sea urchins devastate kelp forests. (3)

Economic Chaos

Ecological changes alone threaten our economic system. Our economy doesn’t need the help. Misincentives plague finance. No matter what stimulus we create, it’s going to be years before we clean up the shitty debt in our banks. Stimulus should not be seen as a way to get out of this situation. It is merely an opportunity to invest in a more efficient economy for once we do get out. Job creation is a byproduct. The credit crunch won’t ease until the worthless investment products have been written-down to nothing, and regulations return confidence to the finance industry.

You don’t have to adapt with the herd

Meanwhile, global trade puts all humanity in the same boat. Adaptation to these problems will require a great deal of diplomacy. China doesn’t want to hear us say that since we already ruined the atmosphere, we can’t let them finish the job.

Evolution does not just mean survival. It means death to those whose adaptations fail. (The Viking settlers in Greenland are a prime example.) Some Americans are stockpiling solar panels, guns and liquor to prepare for an unstable economy. I hope their post-apocalyptic vision doesn’t happen. But let’s not pretend it is impossible. Unstable economies happened often enough in the past century. We can adapt as a society or as individuals. There will be hard choices to make.

For me, all this extinction reaffirms the value of my short and bountiful life. I bought the condoms.

FOOTNOTES

(1) (Barrenness made Alaska an ecological suburb.)

(2)The misunderstanding of the positive feedback system is a danger to the economy. Simplistic free-marketers think that the economy is a self-correcting system. On a micro level, supply and demand are just that. On a macro-level, the economy is much more complicated and eddies of positive feedback loops brush up against tides of negative feedback and currents of upheaval.

For example: The growth of monopolies are often a positive feedback system: Rupert Murdoch can influence elections through the power of his media empire, and has used this influence to get lawmakers to roll back FCC regulations, allowing him to expand his empire. Confidence in the stock market rises when the stock market rises, which happens when investors are confident.

It was false and dangerous to make a morality of greed, as if markets had a balance that made self-interest common interest. (Adam Smith didn’t call it the invisible even-hand.)

(3)This is why the BBC documentary Planet Earth feels like a eulogy.

Rap Battle Translated

2009-02-01T19:43:00.001-08:00

One More Task For Obama

2009-01-23T22:46:00.000-08:00

I occasionally hitchhike to get where I need to go. I meet interesting people, who have insight into things that I would never ordinarily experience.

Last year, I got a ride from a man who used to negotiate shipping prices for Clorox bleach. They ship by rail. In the last few years, especially decades, the railroad companies have conglomerated again and again. They have monopolies on certain routes—in the Pacific Northwest, you don’t get to choose which railroad you negotiate with. As such, the price of shipping bleach has increased markedly. The man told me that once upon a time, if you wanted to ship a trailerful to Salt Lake City, The Union Pacific might name a price, and you could say, "You can ship it for lower, or I'll go to the Rocky Mountain or the Southern Pacific." Now, the Union Pacific is all of those.*

Monopolies increase the price of goods on the shelves, and American consumers suffer. Because of this infrastructure weakness, American businesses are less competitive. Why produce a product in Michigan and pay out the nose to ship it to San Francisco by rail when you could produce it in Mexico, ship it over the ocean at a reasonable rate, and make up for the mileage by paying lower wages?

Monopolies and oligopolies hurt free market competition. For decades, Republicans have pushed deregulation, and suffocated the free market by allowing merger after merger. (Ma Bell, which was broken up in the 1984 as the world’s largest corporation, was small in comparison to AT&T’s potential 28% share in all American phone revenues, $110 billion annual income and control of the phone lines over which this blog reaches you.) In oil companies, and everything else, I’m sure you’ve noticed mergers at breakneck pace over the past few decades. It’s good for CEOs, but it’s bad for American consumers, and for the American economy.

This problem is already beyond reason in certain industries. Obama needs to add protecting free markets within our borders to his to-do list.

*(Hobos will confirm this. Different railways have different policies on beating train-hoppers. As mergers reduce the focus on shipping goods efficiently so as to compete, some railway companies invest more time and manpower in preventing lawsuits through bum-beatings.)

It's not too late for impeachment

2009-01-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

Seriously.

I am still in favor of impeachment

2009-01-13T12:25:00.000-08:00

Bush has a few days left to pardon himself. He's not above it. He'll do it.

To make it easier to prosecute him, you don't want to have to run through all the legal B.S. that it would take to undo a pardon. (It's possible. I forget the legal thing I found about it.) In any case, just impeach the man. He deserves to go down in history as an impeached president. And it prevents him from abusing his power in the last four days to excuse the way he abused power the last 8 years.

UPDATE:

It is possible to undo a pardon if it has not yet been enacted: i.e. if the guy isn't out of jail yet (or hasn't yet been tried) a lot of legal footwork and powerful opinion can repeal a pardon.

To get some colors on this page

2009-01-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Links, news

2009-01-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Krugman.

Michael Lewis in a long article about the economy.

Joe the plumber, now a reporter, thinks media should be abolished from reporting.

Also, I changed the blog format. Now the words can stretch as wide as you like. It makes it easier to read than that skinny little column. I'll fiddle with the colors someday.

Purges

2009-01-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

I purged my computer music library the other day. Because of my strict goals for the project, I started by mercilessly removing everything good, but not mind-blowing. Then I got rid of the awful. I also kept any song that was in a playlist.

My music is organized in folders by band name. I got lazy by the time I reached the middle of the alphabet, as well as sick of bothering with bands for whom I only had one song. So, I gave up.

Listening in shuffle mode today, I was happily surprised what had survived the purge: a lot of bands I had not even thought to keep or remove. They Might Be Giants, Frank Sinatra and Flogging Molly all made the cut, even though I would have sliced them away if I had thought of them.

This made me realize that I had just done the same thing as a Soviet gulag purge. The only survivors were the outstanding, the unobtrusively mediocre and the irreplaceable. I suppose this is what it is like to be an administrator.

Now, if it’s that hard to selectively cut my ipod, imagine cutting the U.S. government. For employees at federal agencies, the odds favor mediocrity as a career choice. You can take risks to join the outstanding, or find a good niche to stay indispensable. (No one is likely to cut the spying on China jobs, for example.) However, taking risks to become outstanding makes you visible when you fail. It’s safer to keep your head down, not to screw up, and not try too hard to improve things.

It seems like a silly system, especially for the military. They say you’ll never make general with a failure on your record. However, military action requires risk. I’m not saying you want a general who got his men killed when he was a sergeant, but you don’t want a general who managed to avoid challenges his whole career, or who is afraid to try something new in a new type of war.

How can a large system reward risk and effort? Anyone with a solution should let me know, or at least have sympathy for the poor lady trimming the government right now.

Stimulus

2009-01-09T20:07:00.001-08:00

Here's something to add to the stimulus bill: full funding of a college education for military personnel. Veterans deserve it. And our military is stretched far too thin to handle the way the Taliban is surging in Afganistan, not to mention in that country from which our news stations have removed their bureaus.

That's an investment in social mobility and in our future. The only drawback is that tuition money, while certainly something that pumps back into the economy, doesn't pump back into it as fast as construction projects.

Still, it's more important than a high speed light rail. (Which ought to happen, too.)

foundation up economics

2009-01-08T16:20:00.000-08:00

Many people, from Republicans to Congressional Democrats to Obama himself, are trying to add tax cuts, especially for business, to the stimulus plan. Senator Tom Harkin recently came out of a meeting calling it "trickle-down stimulus."

This money needs to go to infrastructure investments and the construction jobs they create. The whole nature of a depression, of a credit crisis, is that liquidity is frozen. It doesn't trickle anywhere. If you cut people's taxes, they save the money. Smaller businesses collapse, because, (just as in Paulson's idiotic bailout) they have no incentive to spend or loan. On the other hand, if you create jobs or even give away foodstamps, the people with those jobs or stamps spend every cent they've got just to stay alive. It gets pumped back in the market, and gets liquidity moving.

We really have to go all out on this stimulus. It's no time for ideology, or grandstanding, or congressional horse trading. This needed to be on the president's desk for inauguration. And it can't be half-assed. Bush has proven, pretty damn conclusively, that you can't ignore scientists and academics. The American people have proven that they have no more tolerance for dicking around.

So, Congress, pass this bill. Make it about job creation. Tax cuts don't trickle down in a credit freeze.

random writing by better writers

2008-12-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

I think I may have already posted this, but also, I think I'm getting complacent about the type of stuff I post up here. I feel like I'm sleepwalking, some weeks.

http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2008/06/04/the-tao-of-vagabond-travel/

Lost Sarah Palin Speech

2008-12-23T16:11:00.000-08:00

(I found this drafted campaign speech months ago, and just rediscovered it in the depths of my hard drive. Enjoy.)

Election is like battle. Few people know what’s really going on, because the fog of war and journalist “objectivity” prevents it. We, however, are not afraid to tell you the truth that the quote-unquote “demonstrable facts” keep trying to hide.

Barack Obama wants to end the world. You see that smile? Don’t you trust it? You do, don’t you. That’s because the anti-christ is supposed to be a leader you don’t suspect of being the anti-christ.

Now, you’ve heard me say here before that Senator Obama is a Muslim, and I know you may be asking yourself—how could an avowed harbinger of Satan, who knows firsthand the terrifying might of Jesus, fully believe that Mohammed is the Messiah?

Well, that in itself is proof of Senator Obama’s role as the son of Satan. It is an unholy miracle! Take heed.

I know you may be thinking, “well, I thought Hitler was the anti-christ, the Rapture was when all the good people died in World War Two, and this is a sort of post-apocalyptic Mad-max freak-show world, so since I don’t believe he’s the anti-christ, shouldn’t we be concerned about Barack Obama’s policies?

Good question. We should.

Barack Obama said himself he wants to “spread the wealth around” by adopting an anti-Jesus tax plan with a specifc tax bracket for our Lord and Savior, and as we all know, a mandate that gives immunity to his friends to loot all small businesses. He wants to cut taxes for quote-unquote “working Americans,” what he calls “the Middle Class.” That’s welfare, like the kind welfare queens use to buy Cadillacs.

This lower taxes idea is what we call socialism. Socialism is what happens when a group of elected officials join together to tax people, and then spread the wealth around through big government services like the fire department, health care, law enforcement, or kakimeme lefty concoctions like a mail delivery service. Socialism is what they have in Sweden. But remember: socialism means that hard-working Americans pay for things lazy Americans want, and Barack Obama is socialist. That’s all I’m saying. Obama can play the race card and blame people of being racist all he wants, but I don’t care about his race. I care that he might be a socialist. His policies are socialist. And he’ll make this an athiestic, socialist country like Sweden.

I know some you, maybe out in San Francisco, are still saying “Hey! I’m a pro-antichrist socialist, and all I really care about is the economy, so I want to vote for Barack Omaba.

Ha! You know so little of economics, my friend. Many people say the Republican party’s religious devotion to deregulation caused the housing crisis, in particular John McCain’s deregulations of savings and loans in the 1980s which legalized the sale of mortgages as investment products. They say privatized ratings agencies rated these MBOs and CDOs as safe investments because their incentive structure encouraged privatized ratings, allowing them to be sold to nearly every institution in the world, creating a demand for subprime mortgages in high finance and thus a demand for realestate agents to push them, while Republican repeals of New Deal leverage regulations let investing institutions buy far more toxic debt than they normally could afford, all of which factors acted out a perfect storm among a complex web of market forces, not least among them a two massive wars driving up the demand for oil and increasing food prices while destabilizing equities.

This is a consipiracy theory. If you paid any attention to economics at all, my friend, you would know it was entirely the fault of Jimmy Carter, working in collusion with Barack Obama and ACORN in 1978 in a scheme finally set in motion by Bill Clinton in 1996. See that? Dates. Dates are specific and prove my point. What happened was, Obama was palling around with terrorist Bill Ayers by being on the same board meetings. Obama was a community organizer and ACORN means community organizer, and Obama, being an effeminite liberal elite, thought it would be a good idea to force banks to sell subprime mortgages. The poor banks had no choice. They were victims of community organization.

Now, if you’re someone who doesn’t like having a job or money, and you think Obama’s speeches sound good, let me remind you: Obama is a slick talker, all eloquence and no real meaning. Howver, for all his talking, Obama is illiterate. Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s books for him.

So, do you know the real Barack Obama? You don’t. Stick with someone you can trust: a Republican. The Republican party won’t lie to you with any naïve ideas about “a new kind of politics.” We won’t trick you with pretty talk and excting buzzwords. Show that you won’t be fooled. Vote Republican.

from summer of 2007

2008-12-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

I part the branches of a tree. Low liquid sunrise oozes over the edges of a skybridge and splashes on the corporate glass in downtown Tulsa. I drop my hand to the tarp, lay my head back to stare up at leaves. Light on the dust, on the brick wall and the outside of this tree mean it's time to wake up before the cops find me. I crawl out to the sidewalk. I pack meticulously, remove burs from my legs, my shoes. I always sleep with my shoes on, and long underwear. I like to think that insects will have a harder time biting me.

I slide a hand along my greasy face. Cuts intersect my knuckles and stripes of dirt stain my fingertips. I scratch what I hope is a mosquito bite, because Lyme Disease disgusts me. In the Lower 48, I don't know which insects to kill or how to avoid them. I saw my first tick ever two months ago. Other insects are foreign, too.

I splash water on my face from a plastic bottle, but my forehead stays greasy when I wipe it off and flick my fingers. I shoulder my pack, walk washed in sun past the bridge and the tracks. No one is awake. I pass a silent construction site. At a bench in the shade I sit. I want to nap, but then I would be asleep in a public place. I do not trust the police with the distinction between napping and vagrancy.

On the bench, exhaustion seeps through me. It is not a pain in any muscles or my brain, just a lack of density, as if hunger had pressed me out like a squeegee. I ate my last bagel yesterday. In my bag, there is a 10g pack of peanuts. I decide to save it. I have not had work since hanging gutters in North Carolina, where I bought the bagels.

A man named TJ offered me money last night. He held it in his palm and tried to shake my hand. "Thank you for all your help," he said. It was 3:00am and all that was left of the concert was some people in D-Fest t-shirts consolidating an expansive carpet of trash with leaf blowers and pushbrooms. "I don't need that," I said. I bet it was at least twenty dollars, maybe as much as eighty. I had worked since that morning as a volunteer, setting up tents, dropping off fire extinguishers at the outdoor venues, even helping the Flaming Lips unload some things onto the main stage.

Twenty dollars would last me a week at least. I could buy bagels and peanut butter. My mom gave me a plastic spork before I left, and it’s great for peanut butter. (I only buy creamy. If you share crunchy with toothless men, they have to spit out the nuts like watermelon seeds.)

What compelled me to turn the money down? I had worked all day, and it turned out that most of the people I took for volunteers were being paid. I had four dollars left. There were savings if I wanted to dig into the bank, but I needed them for when I got to San Francisco. Still, knowing the money is there, I feel like a cheat when people try to help. They fit me to a backstory that isn’t mine.

TJ saw my pack and it clicked with the work I had done for him, my eagerness, into some story. I had worked my ass off like a Golden Retriever who hasn’t had his head scratched in a while. It wasn’t money I needed.

I had trouble interacting with people even before hitchhiking. Now, I hardly have an excuse to practice. Sleep in the grass behind a truck stop, stick out a thumb, listen to a driver who speaks over his shoulder. A country singer who lived in his van told me, "you gotta be tough to ride the highway," and he did not mean risks but loneliness, smiling with your thumb out as another car sends a funnel of dust rolling at your feet. He told me if things got really bad, you could eat worms. They taste like earth.

The singer said that at the bar in the last town they cavity searched him to look for drugs, and he let them because he was drunk and wanted to stay in the bar. People always thought he was a drug dealer.

"Do I look like a drug dealer?" he asked, and he honestly wanted to know. He didn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t afraid of him. We are all kicked puppies, or panting before the boot.

I am sloppy now when I tell stories. I do not hide details like I used to, force someone to pull them out of me. Now I say it at all once, everything that might impress a person, throwing at a stranger how legitimately interesting I am. I am not desperate for friendship, but I am irrelevant. I am scenery.

In Knoxville I met a man named Hank. Hank was a traveling preacher, which can mean bum with Bible verses on his cardboard sign. It was pouring sheets and dark at a truck stop, and Hank stumbled out of the rain shivering, beard dripping, so hypothermic I thought he was drunk. Bony shoulders poked from his wet t-shirt. We stayed under the concrete awning over the gas pumps. The overhead lights shined through a plastic casing. A stream of water crawled down the inside edge of the casing, pooled in the bottom, and dripped out of a crack, while a downpour roared just outside the roof. When Hank could talk again, he said he was part blind and fell, hence the mud all over him. I had him dry off and gave him a long sleeve shirt, a white collared hand-me-down. Wild, salt and pepper hair bloomed from his head like Einstien’s, and a grey beard grew from the highest parts of his cheekbones, so that all you could really see was his wrinkled eyes. He looked like a reverse racoon. At first I was afraid he would die.

We tried to walk to Wal-mart in the pitch dark, when the rain let up. Cars honked at us, or sped up and splashed, and I had to warn Hank not to walk into ditches. He wanted to get to Nashville to pitch a song he had been working on for 10 years. His uncle was a DJ there. “He’s my foot in the door,” said Hank. “He’s 93, so I have to get there before he kicks the bucket.” I asked him to sing it, and he chanted a poem with an irregular rhythym. Hank’s gear had been stolen many times, and I doubt he had the words to his song written down.

The night before, Hank had tried to unload gear by giving a man one of the two tents he had. The man had beat him and stolen his other tent, all his clothes, and his coat. "It had a lifetime guarantee," he said. He was sad about the lifetime guarantee. He called the police but they arrested him instead of the theif. He said maybe he was drunk when he called.

When he thought we would part, he shook my hand, and he prayed for me, which is the gift he could give, and I could feel a power rising up my arm from where his hand touched me, cool electricity, to make you believe in God.

I don’t know what we have when we run out of friends or money. I never will get away that far. Even the most destitute I’ve met have family in some city, a friend on some corner.

A year ago I might have accepted TJ’s roll of twenties. I might have shook the man's hand and taken it if I didn't need it so much. "It's for the work you've done," he said. "I'm a volunteer," I said. "If you want to pay me back, you can buy me a beer tomorrow." I shook his wrist. Freedom is important, but it's not always smart to assert your independence from food. By refusing, I wasn't beholden to this man. I was not just a paid social debt, my invisibility rightfully purchased. I was a man like him, just with less to eat and no specific place to sleep. Or something. The transaction meant something. There was not time to think.

I learned that the other people sweeping weren't volunteers. They were paid employees wearing festival t-shirts. It was dark, and the Lips were on stage mingling with admirers and girlfriends. I shouldered my pack and walked out to find a safe place to sleep, and found the bush by the train tracks, and under branches in streetlight shadows I spread my tarp and changed into those bug-proof long johns. I hid my pack by my face to make it harder to steal. And this morning, I woke.

I walk down the early morning street. Women jog past, and they eye me sideways, move away. At the bus station, a man witnesses to me. A lot of men have tried to save me these last weeks. I am still not a person, just a soul. The sun rises hot. At the bus station, they tell me to march toward downtown. Two types who make me flinch are jovial, and one turns and aims bananas at me, bang bang! He says, "They's feedin!" and offers the bananas to me, says he is full. I accept. A man's last dignity is the power to give. So I sit on the steps of the church. The church is ornate stone and the sun is just warming up. People walk away from the back door of the church, where they are handing out plastic baggies of white bread sandwhiches with bolonga.

A woman joins me, eating a bologna sandwich. She talks about seeing her friend, someone she met once, years before. She pulls out a cell phone. A man joins her and they enjoy each other’s company, and mine, I like to think. Then I dig up a phone number, and call my friend Streeter’s mom, who lives in Tulsa. Soon, a sedan pulls up, clean, with a cheery woman inside. I hoist my pack, and step in. This is part of being me. I am a person with friends in Tulsa. I am a person with boundaries. I earn my money. I bum my food. I’m learning.

Madoff had a network

2008-12-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

The thing people haven’t mentioned about the Madoff scandal is how important his connections were. Madoff didn’t have much to show, that anyone else didn’t, to made him the guy to lend your $50 billion. But he knew the right people. He got the introductions to the heads of foundations, had dinner with the richest in the business.

America works like this. Who you know matters. There are so many people with good qualifications, that it is often impossible to be familiar with their previous work. Jobs are so specialized that it can be hard to tell if a contractor is even doing a good job. (Can you tell if your new house or fixed roof will last 30 years, or if your mechanic is charging you for a necessary part? So how would you choose a hedge fund manager?) People rely on reputation and relationships. In a way, nepotism makes business sense: if your son-in-law owes you a job, he isn’t going to want to embarrass you by messing up.

Remember this next time someone tells you that in the land of opportunity, a black man or a poor man has just as much a chance of succeeding as anyone else. Two years at a top university can cost more than the yearly income of 80% of American families. Top universities hire the best professors, who already know the best people in industries, from tech to fiction writing. It takes money to make money. Opportunity isn’t equal.

This isn’t just about white-collar jobs. When I worked on the slope, surprisingly few of the laborers on Alaskan oilfields were Alaskans. With good manual labor jobs especially, you were increasingly likely to meet people from Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, or Louisiana—the places where oilfield service companies are owned. I think there are five black guys on that whole Arctic coastline. The old white boys network even excludes white guys from the wrong states. To get a shot and not know someone (I knew someone) you have to be ten times better than anyone else around. You have to be like Chris Gardener from The Pursuit of Happyness, able to solve a rubix cube in a cab ride.

I’m not saying our system of networks and favors is wrong. To some degree, business operates on trust. Our favors network could be much worse. Our lack of corruption compared to other countries is what makes our economy smooth and our nation (at least sort of) a powerhouse.

I am saying it is worth it to give people in disadvantaged communities a shot. You don’t meet the right people in the ghetto, or in rural North Carolina, to teach you how to navigate the college admissions process. No one you know is going to introduce you to this dude at Google. In college, you probably don’t even know the cultural language to interact in an academic environment. So if the dumb kid whose parents can buy a swimming pool for the school can get admitted and get a shot, why not the kid who was one of the best in a rough environment? Not only those kids deserve a shot, but their communities and families ought to have someone in that network. It’s one more path to social mobility, and one more way to offer all Americans the opportunity which our country promises.

an inconsistent post

2008-12-18T02:16:00.000-08:00

It's late at night, I'm damned stressed, and I've been drinking, so maybe I'm just not thinking clearly. Maybe it's cause I was reading Time, and the world seems much simpler. But I'm thinking about the bailouts.

AIG was going to collapse, that's true. But the other companies (especially car companies) could be easier served, (it seems in this dim, dim moment) if the Fed just started being the go-to lender for commercial paper.

Commercial paper means the day to day loans corporations make. Say Ford needs to pay for parts Friday, but dealerships who bought Fords can't pay until Monday. Ford takes out a couple million dollar loan from, say, GM, or AIG, or Terminix. It pays its paychecks on time, pays for parts, and the day all the cash flow comes in, it's up several million, pays folks back, and makes million dollar loan to Eureka Vacuum cleaners so they can pay factory workers.

That's in a normal market. Your up a million one day, down a million the next, and at the end of the month, you add it up and you've got a profit.

Right now, everyone is afraid to make loans. Loans would keep people operating, and not failing. Of course, people are afraid to make other investments, and there's the idiotic CDS thing, but I'm just talking on the level above the underlying low-home-value/default/MBO problem. But again, I must be distracted if this simple solution didn't occur to the feds. Businesses won't hoard their bailout cash or pay huge bonuses if the bailout came in the form of commercial paper. Maybe we just lack oversight.

In other news:

*buy PANIC. One of my jobs for most of last year was as a research assistant for the housing crisis part of this book.

*the prime rate is practically zero. (3.25%) Which means because of inflation (which should rise crazy-style) the Fed will pay you to take their money. I guarantee you if you borrow twenty bucks from someone today and pay back twenty bucks and sixty-five cents in 2018, the twenty bucks you repay won't buy half as much Spam and ammo as it buys today. So borrow some money, straight from the Fed if you can, and invest it in anything. Houses, for example. I hear the value on those doesn't go down. Shoot, you can't lose on houses. After that burn in the tech market, I think houses are...whoops, sorry, flashback. I meant green technology. I hear there's loads to be made in green technology.

Webcomics

2008-12-18T01:56:00.000-08:00

Folks have asked about webcomics. Those who read this and want a reminder:

Achewood and

XKCD

prosecution on my mind

2008-12-18T01:51:00.000-08:00

Read this editorial on torture.

Write a letter.

The only way to bring these people to justice is if Bush doesn't issue the F-you pardon he's going to issue.

There are two things that could do this:

*impeachment

*a constitutional amendment redefining presidential pardon power to exclude acts committed while he is in office, or by members of his administration.

Ok, he's probably not the guy to ask

2008-12-17T11:17:00.001-08:00

Dear Mr. President,

It would besmirch America's honor to pardon people for crimes they committed while serving your office. Be tough. Like George Washington resigning after two terms, all great presidents must sacrifice personal power for the prinicples of democracy. Do one last act to protect America--do not pardon anyone for their choices in public office. Give them the opportunity to stand up like men and take responsibility.

You have sacrificed a lot to spread democracy. You spread the American system. If there were crimes, let that system deal with them. Show the world that in America, no man is above the law.

Sincerely.

Rain Day

2008-12-16T02:46:00.001-08:00

Today was one of those all day rainstorms where the gutters flow like rivers and drops drum like BBs on windowpanes and the roof. I woke up and the wood floor was cold. My girl refused to get dressed and I typed under a comforter while she curled up and did anatomy flashcards, and I watched deep puddles on the roof of the building across from us. It still poured and my roommates got up and we had bean soup for lunch and drank hot toddies until dark.

I left and tutored and trains were late because the tunnel was flooding and the tracks were slow stopping, so I was stuck on the train for an hour with someone fun to talk to.

But what made me want to write was coming home, and some argument starting, I don't know what, but one in jest. I might leave someday and someday she'll be old, but tonight she slid in socks down the hallway while I gave chase. She looked over her shoulder with a smile and black curls swinging, like a driad nymph, like a painting. We went in circles around the kitchen and the hall and back, and I thought, what is the point of this? Why am I going in circles? She slid down the hall and skidded past the bedroom door. I scooped her up by the waist.

And I know it's a common sentiment, but when we kissed in the dark and I watched her face, I wished I had chased her longer.

I made up for it later by letting her be first to quit the stick fight.

Distilling Blago

2008-12-15T21:55:00.000-08:00

It's great living with a lawyer. They have insights, sometimes. So, a few key points that may not have been clear in the feeding frenzy:

*The bright line is taking money. Campaign contributions for access is a normal, if uncool thing. Money for access is totally illegal. Money for a senate seat is unheard of.

*Pay to Play is generally legal, if unethical. There's nothing to prove a connection between the fact that the only lobbies your candidate happens to listen to are the lobbies that happen to do him favors.

*There may be a grey area because the story broke before a crime had been committed. He was just talking about it. Blago never actually found anyone to conspire with, as far as we know.

*There is what we know happened, and there is what the investigation could reveal.

*The real loser is Jesse Jackson Jr. There's no way he can come out of this looking better. He had a pretty good shot at the seat, too.

*Jackson himself wasn't involved. (As far as anyone knows.) His handlers expressed interest in the seat: a normal step for anyone who wanted it. They did not express willingness to pay for it.

*A third party who thinks he has access to Jackson considered an offer to raise money on Jackson's behalf. As far as we know, this happened independent of Jackson. The businessman is Raguveer Nayak, a Chicago Drive-in Surgery Baron. This is where the interesting parts are going to emerge.

Set an example: prosecute

2008-12-15T16:26:00.000-08:00

To prosecute Bush, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and others would be a powerful statement to other countries about America's commitment to democracy and the rule of law. To let them rot in jail would be a statement on par with George Washington stepping down as president after two terms. Leaders of other countries never voluntarily gave up their rule before America's example. Now, they would never dream of trying powerful party elders for war crimes without a revolution. In Nuremburg, Nazis had been deposed. An example like ours, to show that it can be done--the power of that image would resonate across the world.

It's time to retake the world's moral leadership.

Bio-Ethics

2008-12-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

So, last weekend, someone invited me to a UC Berkeley party. I arrived, and the people were good, and it was good. So I sat on a porch swing, where a young, drunk gentleman said that he had just finished Bio-Ethics class. I had to know: "Woolly Mammoth Cloning: yes or no?"

He said it was best to approach the problem from a utilitarian perspective. This talk somehow devolved into Capitalism and Exploitation (I argued that capitalism does not only reward the ruthless, and the system certainly doesn't rely on ruthless accumulation of profit to work. Capitalism assumes that one maximizes utility, not profit.) After all this blahbity-blah, I thought the issue could be boiled down more succinctly in a chart. I'm having trouble making it big enough, so I think you have to click on it.

In simple terms

2008-12-09T23:22:00.000-08:00

Al Qaeda is like a whole coalition of Islamic Dick Cheneys.

And everyone thought John Stewart would run out of work

2008-12-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

Ok. It's funny that the governor of Illinois was auctioning off Obama's senate seat.

I knew Blagojevich was under investigation two weeks ago. How could HE not know? Or if he was going to sell the Senate seat to the highest bidder, could he at least avoid talking about it on the phone?

Also, I'd like to point out one last glorious thing:

In a conversation with Harris on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect [Obama] wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them."

[Expletive] you, Mr. Blagojevich.

Recipe: Italian Burritos

2008-12-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

RECIPE: ITALIAN BURRITOS

Today I’d like to share a recipe. It is nothing fancy: good bachelor food. It’s the right sort of meal for coming home late from work, 9:00 on a dark and chilly San Francisco Monday. Your lady friend has just got home from class, and she’s hungry too. She lays her head on your shoulder, says her stomach hurts a little and she’ll probably go to bed as soon as you finish eating. She’s been sleeping a lot lately. You’re really hungry because you’ve started playing rugby in earnest and you can hardly afford to keep up with the increased appetite. You’ve had three meals already today but each of them was an anemic snack: eggs, soup, a muffin.
Kiss your girl, rest hands on her hips, and have a conversation like this:
LadyFriend: I think I’m getting sick.
Cook/Bachelor: Better not get me sick. (Kiss) Does it feel like AIDS?
LF: I’m getting cramps. I feel a little nauseous, too, though. Maybe I’m just tired cause I woke up at 3:00am for a snack last night.
CB: I think I’m catching these “cramps” from you. I’ve been a little nauseous. I’m really hungry though.
LF: Maybe we’re both pregnant.
CB: I’ll be angy with the mailman if he got me pregnant.

Nothing sounds appetizing. You’re out of both milk and cereal even if you weren’t sick of it. There are only so many ways to fry an egg. Ramen won’t replace the muscles you eroded sprinting up and down every seat in the Cal soccer stadium this morning. Your ladyfriend suggests pasta but it just doesn’t have protein in it. Anything you own, you’ve eaten over and over in the past few weeks.

You have the perfect solution: It may sound basic, but we can heat up some canned beans. Burritos would be just the ticket. Your lady friend replies, “There are no tortillas. You know this. We go through this like twice a week.” This is true.

You inventory your refrigerator and wallet. You have canned food, grains, no leftovers. So make Italian burritos.

Italian burritos are:
An Arborio rice bed, made with the rice you bought for Saturday’s risotto.
1 can refried black beans spread over that
A layer of cheese
Pasta sauce on top.

Start with the rice and the pasta sauce, because rice takes the longest to make and pasta sauce tastes better the longer it simmers.

Rice is simple: a pot, olive oil, a 2:1 rice to water ratio. Stir it once it boils, sprinkle in salt and pepper, and let it simmer. If you don’t forget, add extra rice to reheat at work tomorrow.

Kiss your girl. Open the fridge crisper drawer and ask her to help you chop a salad. The lettuce is wilted. Coming from Alaska is no excuse, because your Dad grew greens in the backyard, but you just don’t like touching wilted lettuce. She says she hopes this doesn’t mean you plan to start a dish and rely on her to cook every part of it. Reply: “absolutely not.”

Sauté an onion she has chopped, then pour a can of tomatoes in the frying pan. These can be diced, stewed, or whole. The longer they have to reduce into mush, the more likely they are to taste like a uniform sauce, rather than like a can of diced tomatoes. Promise to simmer your sauce two days in advance next time.

Once the sauce is boiling, add a tablespoon of olive oil, garlic, some Frank’s Hot Sauce you find in the back of the spice drawer, liberal amounts of crushed red pepper, and some white wine. The wine isn’t required, but if you have an open bottle that’s just going to go bad, go ahead and pour a little in.

Open a can of refried beans and hold it upside down over a small pot until a cylinder of beans falls out. Mash it with a wooden spoon. Loosen over low heat.

Your ladyfriend may ask you what you plan to tell Dave tomorrow. This is normal. Consider whether you want to work in this city for another year. Simply say you do not know.

During this time, it is appropriate to chop pears while your lady friend rests a chin on your shoulder from behind. Her cheeks should be smooth and her voice from her throat. The side dish is a pear and gorgonzola salad. Add pears and gorgonzola to lettuce. Once the pears are chopped, your ladyfriend may lament that she has hardly studied any anatomy all day. Tell her you’ll finish cooking if she wants to study. You’ll even proofread med-school applications later. When she declines, ask her to chop up some gorgonzola and find the mini whisk. It is stupid to ask her to find the whisk when you’re the one who cleans up everything around here. It is in the spatula drawer.

You can dress the salad with an emulsified vinaigrette dressing, made by whisking a vinegar/pepper/mustard mixture while slowly pouring in olive oil. (Ratio: olive oil:balsalmic vinegar = 3:1). This is also good with walnuts, but those are even more expensive than the gorgonzola you stupidly bought a week ago because you wanted to impress someone. Try to think of a different salad. For example, apple gorgonzola with dried cranberries. (You don’t have dried cranberries either.)

By now, the food should be ready. Fluff the rice, prepare plates, grate cheese onto the hot beans and join your ladyfriend at the dinner table. You’ll notice that the pasta sauce does not conflict with the beans, and instead tastes like a rich, mild salsa. This recipe works best if your dinner table stands across from a wall-length mirror. That way you can observe the curve of your lady friend’s chin, the v- of her collarbone, the Italian Burrito in it’s red, white and black layers, and your belly sticking out of your tight busboy t-shirt. Check carefully. Are you already 25? Do you think you could have done better than this by now? Isn’t this a little early for you to start doughing up in the middle? Will you now lose the energy to dream up the projects you never had the energy to finish?

Thank your ladyfriend for making the salad. Make small talk. UAA ought to have a med school. “Do they need doctors in Alaska?” she asks.

We could use some.

You two speak obliquely, this way. Suggest that a good way to fight this cold snap is to combine blankets and sleep together. She may point out that this step has been taken. Tell her no one would be sick if you were more diligent about it. It is only 50º! You used to play in the sprinklers in this weather. Mention it.
LF: Why would you do that?
CB: Playing in the sprinklers is fun.
LF: How cold does it get in Alaska? I have no conception of it at all.
CB: Not bad at all. At worst 20º below, but I’ve seen it get to 40º below. Mostly it’s between 0º and 20º in the winter. None of that matters. You put on warm clothes and then it’s all the same after the first five minutes.
LF: I don’t think I could handle it.
CB: It’s really simple. You just adapt.
LF: I’ve never experienced anything colder than 25. I couldn’t do it.
CB: It’s not as hard as it seems.

Mush the rice and pasta sauce together. The salad might be kind of drippy with the vinaigrette. Remember, that’s natural with wilted lettuce.

That’s about it. Stay up to do the dishes when she goes to bed, even though she says she’ll do them in the morning. You have to do some things right away.

coverage bias?

2008-12-03T01:21:00.000-08:00

Journalists have spent the last month dissecting the election, and they will continue. Statistics will emerge about the media. Studies will use different criteria to define what constitutes “positive coverage” and what constitutes negative. They will compare the two, and probably, Obama will come out on top. None of these will really be able to account for frames like tone of voice or throw-away comments that accompany the TV news, and they will probably not count the severity of negativity. “Barack Obama has terrorist connections,” doesn’t quite add up to “John McCain doesn’t use computers.”

The same thing happened with Clinton in 1992, but the statistical results will be for different reasons. The press was kind to Clinton because they had mauled him in the primaries over Gennifer Flowers. When he survived, it was the apologetic media pendulum. (Also, Clinton had discovered exit polls, and worked them to his advantage. After every primary, the press had no choice but to report “Clinton won today because of people who cared about the economy.”)

Obama got better coverage, however, because his opponent ran a campaign of full-time shenanigans. McCain’s entire campaign was based on lies or un-provable assertions. No kidding. The main strategy at the beginning was “He’s inexperienced,” and “Obama will raise your taxes.” When enough people discovered that was false, McCain’s strategy was “You don’t know the Real Barack Obama.” The stump speech was about an out of context quote about air raiding villages, (seriously out of context. Obama said more or less the opposite of what Sarah Palin pretended he meant.) a distortion of a vote against criminalizing infanticide, (it wasn’t infanticide, but a procedure in partial birth abortions which was already illegal in Illinois. The bill would have done nothing to change the law.) and the genius “Palling around with terrorists.” (When you go to a PTA meeting, do you ask everyone in the room if they used to be terrorists?) Oh, there was also ACORN, a stunt conservatives have pulled every election for about a decade. Rove assigned crony attorneys general to seek out voter fraud in swing states as a full-time priority, and they couldn’t find a single instance of voter fraud. Registration fraud, against ACORN, was discovered, but that does little to discredit Democrats, especially when the Bush camp broke the law even starting an FBI investigation, let alone leaking it. (An FBI guy was fired for doing the exact same thing in the waning days of the 2006 election.)

They ended it lying about the community reinvestment act. Republican claimed it proved that Bill Clinton caused the financial crisis by creating quotas for subprime loans. Actually, the act only required savings and loans to invest in the area their deposits came from, and it was weakened by Republicans in ‘02 anyway. It did not force anyone to make subprime loans. Only 30% of banks that were issuing MBOs were Savings and Loans, because McCain’s deregulation as one of the Keating 5 eliminated the distinction between S&Ls and investment banks.

So, when the media covered John McCain’s lie-filled, nastier even than George Bush campaign, of course it wasn’t in good terms. They had to fact-check again and again, as well as examine McCain’s voting record and personal history. (Oh, he cheated on his wife? He voted against the torture ban even though he was an ex-POW? He voted against the new G.I Bill? How do you report that in the “positive” column?)

So if someone tells you that Obama only won because the media loved him, tell them that the media has to report the truth, not pretend, as it did so often, that two sides are equally corrupt. Reality isn’t fair, and truth isn’t balanced. In 2008, they happened to lean towards one candidate. Statistics are like trying to use Morse Code to paint the Sistine Chapel. They won’t quite convey the whole truth.

Thoughts today

2008-11-28T10:10:00.001-08:00

Four years ago my buddy Zach and I rambled through Dehli. Monkeys darted across the marble roof of India’s national library, and across the street from it, they hung above the white marble collonades of India's version of the Pentagon. We couldn’t enter because we weren’t Indian nationals, or had no place to stash our bags, or somesuch: the point is, they were screening for terrorism. A soldier in a ceremonial garb peed on the wall of the Department of Defense. We joined suit, as there were few public restrooms. We walked away, a little indignant about these Fraidy-cat Indians and irrational security measures the world over (what terrorist wants to sneak South into Mexico?), even though we knew Dehli was close to Kashmir, that Islamists had bombed it before. Building bombings seemed minor: we had both seen our share of deaths. More people died during a stampede at a Hindu pilgrimage than in any small-time Kashmiri seperatist attack.

It makes the recent attacks in Mumbai that much harder to take. Extra-paranoid security measures, especially ones posed at foreigners, wouldn’t have helped much yesterday. But if India is a target for serious terror, any democracy of wealth and tolerance is at risk. So freedom everywhere is at risk (because people will sacrifice it for safety.) Homegrown terror in India means radical Islam is spreading to moderate countries.

You go through stages of grief: denial, anger. There was a part of me that wanted to see mushroom clouds over Khartoum, Pakistan wiped clean of rapists and those who harbor them. A woman in Pakistan was kidnapped, raped, and held as a sex slave for years. When she escaped a few months ago, and spoke out about it, her family tried to silence her to hide that she “lost her virginity.” Then police tortured her family members in front of her to try to convince her to drop charges. After news like that, I think: Islam is a dirty, archaic religion that ought to have died out long ago, and if not for oil wealth, would have.

Those are harsh thoughts. Islam provides some of the beauty of India. Nuking Pakistan would eradicate the same brave women who are willing to stand up to power in the face of overwhelming oppression. Violence is a childish response to a chaotic world, an attempt to force it into the order of a simple intellect. Violence can be neceessary, too. God help the Indian Special Forces right now.

My next impulse was to grope at blame. Because of my pragmatism, I think in terms of things Westerners like me had control over: Mountbatten’s partition of India and Pakistan, Muhammed Ali Jinnah advocating for an Islamic state in the Western Raj, British strategists divinding Bengal and the Punjab to weaken them. (Thousands died in 1947, when endless channels of Hindu and Sihk refugees flooded away from the new country of Pakistan, and a millions of Muslims fled West from the new state of India. Pakistan exists because of a nearly abritrary British choice, much like Iraq, Syria and Jordan.) That stuff is so old, though. I could blame Cain, too.

To look closer to home, I could blame Republicans for kissing so much ass in Saudi Arabia, for cosying up to the Saudi royal family without demanding that they shut down Wahabbi schools and violent indoctrination. I could blame the 1920s CIA for overthrowing a democratic Iran in favor of a puppet-dictatorship run by the Shah, which was so brutal it bred Islamic extremists and an Islamist state. I could blame Bill Clinton for not taking Osamsa bin Laden when the Sudanese offered to turn him over. I could blame George Bush for wasting our resources and recruiting jihadists for bin Laden in Iraq. Those excuses are feeble. These things are out of my control and long past. Very little from these instances could have prevented these violent men from India.

I can most honestly blame the attackers. It is threadbare comfort. They aren’t going to learn something and feel sorry if I point and say “Look at what you’ve done.”

The only real solution is, sadly, as old as Jesus. A fundamental, humble respect for other humans is your only power to keep yourself safe. Your power is to know that even when your gut tells you to bomb Islamabad, it has real inhabitants, peddlers ildly watching monkeys sprint across the buildings, lovers and children and families.

The only action truly in our power in a chaotic, complex world is the power not to mess up the lives of our fellow humans. We must use the power unconditionally, strictly, because the people we consider the most vile are the only ones we kill anyway. This, too, can devolve into a complex calculus, who to attack in mercy for whom. To do it with love is the best solution I can offer, and solutions, to a pragmatist, are the only comfort worth taking.

Business syphilis

2008-11-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

There are some great explanations of the financial crisis out there. This is one of my favorites.

Benz

Oh Economist. You're so British.

2008-11-20T12:38:00.000-08:00

I don't know if it is ok to post an entire Economist article. However, I don't think they're really reading my blog, and if I just provided a link you'd have to buy the magazine to read it. To be fair, here's a link anyway.

O give me a home...
Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The Maldives’ president has come up with a solution to the world’s problems

Rex Features

LOSING one’s home is a sadly common experience in these dark economic days, but it normally happens at an individual, rather than a national, level. The residents of the Maldives, however, face collective homelessness as a result of rising sea levels, which are expected eventually to engulf the 1,200-island nation, whose highest point is 2.3 metres above sea level. Faced with this alarming prospect, the country’s new president, Mohamed Nasheed, has come up with an equally dramatic solution: put aside some of the Maldives’ tourism revenues to buy another homeland.

At first blush Mr Nasheed’s notion seems a bit over the top. Countries don’t usually go round purchasing large lumps of other nations. The only precedent he cites—Jews buying up bits of Palestine before Israel was established—does not inspire confidence that his plan would increase world harmony. And since the rich countries that caused the climate to change and the seas to rise can easily absorb the Maldives’ 370,000 people, it seems reasonable to assume that Mr Nasheed and his compatriots will be offered citizenship elsewhere.

The empty quarter beckons
Reasonable, but wrong. Australia’s government has already turned down a request to offer citizenship to the 12,000 people of Tuvalu, another small, drowning island; so a few hundred thousand Maldivians knocking on rich-country doors seem likely to get even shorter shrift. Anyway, they may not want to be absorbed into a larger nation. They might prefer to stay together to maintain their community spirit and traditions of folk-dancing and imprisoning political dissidents. So a solution as radical as Mr Nasheed’s may be the only answer.

It’s a buyer’s market in property these days; and, if the Maldivians are looking for an island, Iceland is said to be going cheap. But they may be spoilt for choice: think of all the tiresome bits of territory that other countries would like to offload. The snooty English, for instance, have long disparaged Wales, which they caricature unfairly as being populated mostly by Methodist preachers and disaffected sheep. It might be a challenge to persuade the Maldivians to swap their palm-fringed paradise for Llandudno pier on a wet Sunday afternoon; still, a bit of adroit marketing, focusing on the height of the hills, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anthony Hopkins (both sadly no longer resident) might do the trick.

Once Mr Nasheed’s visionary notion gains acceptance, it could have far wider application. The Israelis, for instance, could put an end to a hundred years of futile hostilities by buying somewhere for the Palestinians. If they clubbed together, they could get somewhere really nice—Florida, maybe. China could stop making aggressive gestures towards Taiwan and buy Malaysia instead. It’s already run by Chinese, so they’d hardly notice the difference. And Barack Obama, committed to uniting America, could defuse the nation’s culture wars by purchasing an alternative homeland for those of his countrymen who want more use of the death penalty, less gun control and no gay marriage. A slice of Saudia Arabia’s empty quarter would do nicely: there’s plenty of space and the new occupants would have lots in common with the locals.

The British are familiar with the notion that, if you’re bored at home, you grab somebody else’s country; but recent experience suggests that invading places can be expensive and troublesome, so a market solution seems a better way of dealing with national dissatisfaction. The British are, let’s face it, fed up with their damp little country. Instead of renting villas in Tuscany, they should buy the place; instead of complaining about the weather, they could complain about Silvio Berlusconi. The Russians suffer from too much crime and too much snow; the Gulf Arabs from too much heat and too little fun. Both should think of buying a temperate, orderly city with decent nightlife, such as London. Wait a minute…

Detroit Bailout Thoughts

2008-11-20T02:25:00.001-08:00

Before I render any opinions on this mess, might add one question about Detroit:

Are the automakers failing because they can't get commercial paper, the loans that let them conduct day to day business? Or are they failing because they aren't selling enough cars?

It's common knowledge that the Big Three suffer from terrible management. Rather than create more fuel efficient cars or innovate in production, they have spent millions lobbying Congress for relaxed fuel efficiency standards and special tax breaks. They just don't compete. But I don't know yet if that is the reason they're failing. (Maybe I just need to research it.)

If Detroit is failing because of credit problems, not management problems, then sure, why not? Keep them going for a while. Everyone else is too afraid to loan them leveraged money, but Uncle Sam loans with Chinese dollars. If so, however, the taxpayer needs to receive stock. If you're going to pay the homeowner to fix his plumbing, buy a little of the house. Yeah. Nationalize. Fire the directors, all that stuff. That is a last resort. However, in that instance there is less of a question about whether that last resort is a right choice. (In this scenario, GM is failing because it needs a loan for to buy a bunch of steel the same day payroll is due, but it can't get credit because everyone is afraid to trade commercial paper--i.e. afraid to make loans.)

The second scenario is one in which American car makers just suck at making cars. In that case, the money would not pay for day to day operations. (In this scenario, GM is asking for money to cover its shoddy operation until someday it hypothetically gets its shit together.)

The second scenario is a little more challenging. If the auto industry is allowed to fail, a lot of Americans will lose jobs, and those losses will ripple out into the rest of the economy. It's unfair that all of America should suffer just because Michigan is a swing state.

There is a poor record of this sort of thing working, however. If management can't hold it together now, wait until the Depression gets bad. If the government takes charge, how will their politics-charged bureaucracy do any better?

I don't have my mind made up on the second scenario. What I enjoy about it, though, is following the blame.

Millions of Americans may lose jobs because these businesses failed. These businesses failed because of incompetent managers. The managers were able to float by on incompetence by relying on government subsidies, tariffs and rule changes to protect them from the full brutality of the free market. (Not that there's anything wrong with that?) We elected the government. The system is complex enough and the problem pervasive enough that finger-pointing is fruitless. We are all in this together. Distill the issue, and that's the only solid fact.

Lobby change

2008-11-13T23:53:00.000-08:00

Ed Rogers, D.C. Lobbyist: "People will need the expertise and guidance [of lobbies] more in the next year than they have in the last five."

In other words, back in the good 'ol days of Republican rule, when corporations could buy votes directly, they didn't need lobbyists. The people who did need a lobby were the ones who couldn't afford it. Now, the powerful are back on the defensive, trying to buy tax loopholes in the new regulations they face. I think this says a lot more about the sincerity of the word "change" than any assurances Democrats could have made. Looks like it wasn't a buzzword after all.

That Grey Lady sure tiptoes into change

2008-11-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

BBC Sport

NY Times

I'm just not sure it translates.

Why the Weeping

2008-11-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

Last night, when Wolf Blitzer declared Virginia for Barack Obama, Adria stuck her head out the balcony of our Vegas hotel and shouted “Barack Obama’s our next president bitches!”

The casino erupted. People who had been watching in their rooms flooded to the balconies and started shouting and whooping.

Chelsea, and old Anchorage friend called from New York, where she lives now. People were kissing and crying and dancing in the streets. In DC an impromptu party began in front of the White House and down U street. Americans flooded neighborhoods all over the United States in celebration.

The resounding defeat of a political party shouldn’t feel like VE day. I know some of my friends from Alaska might not understand the euphoria. Back home we’re somewhat insulated from the loss of civil liberties. We’re not the target of daily attacks for being un-American. Most Alaskans I know didn’t feel the unease of a college campus where a cute nineteen-year old vegetarian can end up on the terror watch list for a letter to the editor, where the guy down the hall finds out his phone is tapped when airport police strip-search him after a telling a Saudi Arabia joke on his cell phone. While Alaskans were flush on high oil prices, we didn’t notice wages fall for regular families while almost 40% of America’s wealth consolidated in the hands of the wealthiest 1%.

Americans didn’t cry for joy Tuesday night just because they wanted an economic policy that accounts for the quality of the jobs it creates. They were crying because Obama won based on a new style of politics. He didn’t vilify his opponent’s supporters. He didn’t make it about identity, about what sort of person votes Democratic. He didn’t use polls to target a slice of the electorate—he won with a surge in every category of voter. He bought 2:00 minute commercials to talk about economic policy. Barack Obama won by staying above the 1960s culture wars.

In 2004, Chelsea and our friends cooked food for Christmas. Outside the window, snow fell through cones of streetlights. She was deep in debt for a college education that would qualify her for low paying non-profit jobs. She had been writing a thesis about abstinence-only education. Chelsea showed us a story they were teaching to third graders, in which a princess rescues a knight from three dragons. The knight marries a peasant girl instead because he doesn’t want to marry so headstrong a princess. Republicans mandated the programs even though 80% of curricula contained factual inaccuracies and graduates were more likely to catch STDs.

In 2004, Americans knew about torture in our name, but not yet about Americans in secret prisons. We knew Bush had lied about Iraq’s weapons, and that the White House had risked the lives CIA spies to discredit a man telling the truth. Whistle-blower after whistle-blower stood up and quit the Bush White House, only to find themselves the targets of full-scale smears by Fox News. It surfaced that the White House was producing “news” segments for Fox News and others, as well as planting fake “experts” on cable news to sell the war. The public record alone was enough to send half the White House to jail.

The Republican Party’s betrayal of America’s values should have aroused universal, non-partisan outrage, even if their policies had worked. Instead, George Bush won reelection in 2004 by stoking hatred and anger about Vietnam, a forty year old war.

Of course young people became increasingly ironic and silly. We didn’t even remember Vietnam, much less McCarthyism, and somehow it still overshadowed concrete proof that Bush’s policies were harmful and his methods for implementing them were immoral.
My neighbors had bumper stickers that called for me to die, or dissapear. It’s no surprise. Fear and pride are powerful tools for politicians. The leading conservative pundits all produce books advocating violence against liberals. They say that the American left are as dangerous as terrorists who want to kill Americans with dirty bombs. It doesn’t come from crazy bloggers but from respected pundits who have tv shows, publish books and speak at mega-churches.

Sean Hannity: "I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress."

Michael Savage: "To fight only the al-Qaeda scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders... Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that's who."

Ann Coulter: "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too."

Dinesh D’Souza: “The left is the domestic insurgency that provides a counterpart to the Iraq insurgency. It is at least as dangerous as any of bin Laden's American sleeper cells.”

Rush Limbagh: “Don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus.”

In July a man in Tennessee walked into a Unitarian church during a children’s performance. He fired a shotgun into two 60-year old churchgoers and wounded 7 others, four of them over 65-years old, before they wrestled him to the ground. He told police, “liberals should be killed because they are ruining America.” At his home, they found a library of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, New York Times bestsellers by the neo-conservative priesthood. Two weeks later, a gunman shot the director of the Arkansas Democratic Party. After the election, the Secret Service revealed that death threats to Barack Obama rose substantially once Palin began leading rallies.

That blood leaking out on the church floor is the result of a cancerous hatred that politicians nurse to win elections. The reason people cried when Barack Obama won is that he won on a message of inclusiveness, not vilification. He never accused his opponent of treason (he wants to lose a war to win an election) or of sympathy to treason (he dislikes America so much he pals around with terrorists) or of being supported by sheep (he’s a celebrity, college graduates are not real Americans, they are liberal elites who lack common sense, he talks pretty but says nothing, etc.)

Obama’s prominent supporters, not bloggers but the respected pundits, never advocated blowing up the Fox News building, never said that McCain supporters were un-American.
On Tuesday people were weeping, kissing, and laughing because Americans proved that we are not the lowest common denominator. People hugged strangers and cried on their shoulders because the democracy we love had once again surprised us by fulfilling its promise: a man was elected based on his ideas. We cried because we are all real Americans now, and we don’t intend to let hatred brew again.

Get inspired

2008-10-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

Adventure

2008-10-26T12:45:00.000-07:00

Alright. So it’s been a Michael Chabon-as-a-springboard-into-concepts-about-writing sort of a week. Here’s one.

Years ago I heard Chabon speak, and he read an essay called “Golems I Have Known.” It was a complete lie, and soon enough you realized that parts of it must have been embellished, if not made up entirely. It drew a relationship between writing an lying, creating lies that grew a dangerous life of their own. He later said he was surprised how many people believed parts of his essay, if not all of it.

When I first head it, I pretty much believed all of it. I wanted to speak to him afterwards, to ask, almost indignantly, how he could attest that the world is made more magical by lies? Isn’t it crazy and beautiful enough?

The memory reminds me of a camping trip a year later. I was co leading a F.O.O.T trip (Freshman Outdoor Orientation or something) and we drove deep into the forest up a gnarled Colorado mountian, sliding a van full of frightened but boisturous college freshmen up a sharp, muddy switchback. Rock and roll from the tape deck made it surreal. We managed not to slide off the mountian, or get the van stuck, and we even found a place for my older co-leader to turn the van around, drive it back down the mountain and drop it off at the other end of our trail.

He returned hours later. He said the van had flipped on the way down, as we had feared, but on those steep switchbacks, it had managed to do one roll and land back on it’s wheels again. Four days later, we emerged from sharp and water-carved mountains to find our van unscathed. I and a few others had believed every word.

But I didn’t feel foolish. One month earlier, I had led a different backpacking trip. We had ventured into the mountains up to a hot springs. One girl had inexplicably broken her foot in a way that only hurt on downhills, so she didn’t discover the hairline fracture until she reached the top. The ten of us sat naked in the warm springs, stared at the stars, and contemplated the wonder and possibility of our futures. On the way down, we all pitched in to evacuate the injured young lady. We divided her gear, cut holes in a pack so she could ride piggyback, but even the bouncing of descent hurt her feet, so we lashed a splint out of sticks, ace bandages and my slipper sock. She was able to hike out. So, after these grueling miles, we emerged in the high altitude parking lot, excited to drive home, and to rest in the van.

I was taking up the rear of the hike, so by the time I reached the van, there was already a crowd around it, staring. A bear had broken in and torn holes in the seats, snapped out the middle row of seats, eaten our things, strewn trash, and taken a huge dump in the middle of the van. We cleaned it up. I crawled on my belly on the floorboards to lash the broken row of seats together with string, to prevent it from sliding into someone’s shins.

We drove home and listened to Ain’t Wasting Time No More by the Allman Brothers and Free Bird and songs about mistakes and regret and loving it anyway. The mountain passes conceded to plains and I was full of joy.

How, after that much adventure, could a van that rolled 360 degrees and landed on its wheels sound odd? Of course we believed it, those of us who had been on the last trip.

Today, the sun shines through leaves in this residential neighborhood. The whine of a tablesaw from someone’s backyard reminds me of my childhood. I’m listening to some pretty sublime rock and roll, and out my window is a whole ocean, a sea going to anywhere. I’m going to see my friend. We’re going to find something to do. I don’t care what. With the amazing people I’ve met, the crazies in Alaska all loving life as hard as they can, Kelly shooting rapids in some deep stone gorge in the Blue Ridge Mountians, and my home in Matanuska awaiting me someday, harsh and sharp edged, I don’t feel for a minute like you have to lie to make life an adventure. I’ve hauled myself up Himalayan paths and found monastaries in the mist. I’ve slept under bushes in North Carolina and on benches in Tulsa. Life is nothing but adventure, and when I write, the most trouble I have is expressing my hunger for more of it, my joy at having lived any of it at all.

If Michael Chabon wants to lie, I encourage him to. He’s my neighhor now, and he’s darn good at those lies. I wish I were. But today, who cares. I’m twenty-five years old, and I’m going outside to play.

UPDATE:

The actual lesson of this essay is that clearly, I am no judge of reality, and ought not to be permitted to explain it to people. As such, I might as well write fiction and become a professional liar, because odds are, my observations will be just as true.

That said, life will still be amazing. If my limited perception makes what I learn while living untrue, the parts I miss will still be too amazing to understand.

Women and Elephants

2008-10-23T18:29:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Parker wrote a poem that concludes

Prince, a precept I’d leave to you,
coined in Eden, existing yet
skirt the parlor and shun the zoo—
women and elephants never forget.

I always found this a little ridiculous. I don’t know anyone with a more vivid memory for things, especially dealings with women, than I have. Traditionally, panic burns these events into my brain more or less forever. I sometimes need a shock to recall them through state-dependent memory, but for the most part I just think it’s an Al Bundy cliché that men somehow are childish and can’t remember things.

So, I was shocked, this morning, to be reminded that apparently, my lady-friend had a birthday about a month ago. Apparently, this was concurrent with a one-month/six-month aniversary of sorts. (Depends on where you start counting.)

I resolved to do something nice to make up for missing it but I didn’t feel that guilty, as I hadn’t even known about it. However, she recounts that I did know, and responded to the news by saying “You have a birthday? That’s disgusting.”

This seems pretty in character. In fact, I had apparently cooked her a dinner for her birthday. Apparently I also said something along the lines of “if you want a cake you can make it yourself.”

Now, I’m sure I fully intended to bake a cake for her. I’m sure I was pretty busy, and we were full, and there was no time to make cake, because I get home from work at like 9:30 many days. I’m sure she had some other activity she wanted me to escort her to, rather than waiting around while I baked a cake I couldn’t afford.

Regardless, however, all of this explains how for my birthday today I got a beer, two eggs and a box of cake mix.

Eggers on adolescent fantasy

2008-10-17T13:46:00.001-07:00

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/11/070611fa_fact_eggers

I just reread an article from the New Yorker. (I was studying the relationship between childhood violence and self-knowledge.) Read it. It ties in admirably to this morning's post on D&D.

Some freeform thoughts on Dungeons and Dragons

2008-10-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

So, this 14-year-old kid, a really cool dude, was showing me his Dungeons and Dragons drawings. I got to thinking about how I wish I had spent a lot of time playing Dungeons and Dragons. It sounds freaking cool. Assigning numerical values to the components of fighting appeals to my OCD logical side. Calling fighting “battle” appeals to my over-dramatic/chivalric side. Huge books of made-up fantasy worlds, and telling stories about them? It’s like reading, but you get to be creative at the same time. Brilliant. From this vantage point, I am becoming increasingly resentful of my junior-high friends for never doing anything with 12-sided die.

Looking back, I was remarkably resilient at avoiding nerdy things, especially for what a nerd I was. No pokemon, no D&D, not more than three games of Magic™ the Gathering, and a significant amount of time spent playing hockey, camping, and playing in the snow. (I also regret not playing in the snow even more.)

I did have an X-men card collection as a10 year-old, but let’s be honest, that shit was expensive. During the fall of 4th grade, to earn $40 for a box—I’m talking a carton—of X-men cards, I had to spend a few hours of weekend roofing our family friend’s addition, shooting shingles into place with a pneumatic staple gun, the tarpaper hot in September sun, the air crisp like autumn Sundays and back to school, grit from shingles scuffing up my new white shoes for the school year. Lindsay and Jenny and Nick and I carried piles of shingles and smudged chalklines as we crawled. There was a real nail gun, and we were on the roof: who expected this?

We drank lemonade with butter-blackened grilled cheese sandwiches on paid breaks, and I remember standing on the edge of the roof, fearing to knock over a stack of shingles into the black, leaf-rotted dirt, far more vividly than I remember any x-men card I unwrapped. I do recall the backseat of the car on the ride home from the comics store. The foil wrappers glinted.

Cole, the neighbor kid across the street, was 6 years older, and a child of the 80s, when D&D was normal. (It’s just as common now, but kids and adults do it alone, in the privacy of their glowing computer screens.)

Cole and his friends invited some of the younger of us along one day for a role-playing game, although it wasn’t elf and orc oriented, but something dark and futuristic, out of an expensive and hefty book, from which we chose our character types. Each chapter had a glamorous ink drawing like a badge on one-page descriptions. The details were intricate to a remarkable degree. Cyborgs were less intelligent, spies got extra points for stealth, and one type of character was stronger and faster than normal because he injected a carefully balanced concoction of amphetamines and steroids. I remember the book warning that such a character would be stronger, yet have a shorter life, and thinking, “There is no way we’re going to go through this guy’s entire lifespan before dinner.” Except my mind must have framed it as a doubt, cause I was playing with the high school kids, and I had no idea what their plans were.

We wove a story. The “gamemaster” could see our feeble attempts at choosing our destiny and just as bluntly threw surprises and roadblocks to shift a character’s course. Had I been older, I would have seen in our futuristic game a link to the past, a kinship with children in a flame-lit mead hall 1000 years ago, describing the trolls and dragons who hide, bicker and love in the mountains beyond the snow-plains. We have a need to tell stories, and to live stories. It is a way to combine our feeble experiences, and prepare explorers for the challenges beyond our borders. From childhood, stories explain the mechanics of a fascinating world. Peek-a-boo itself explains that what you see is not all that is present.

At that D&D age when I chastely burnt energy in daily hockey games against imaginary opponents, stories built a new borderland for expectation of wonder. A world of elf-lords felt as distant and exciting to this twelve year-old as did sex, or success. Stories had expanded the borders from the physical: “beyond this valley are soldiers with weaponized helicopters” to the rules of life: “great deeds are possible.” Lessons, (“life isn’t fair.” “I am so powerful.”) sink in at the base of your brain.

I wish the younger me had the courage to play nerd games because I would have become a better storyteller. I would understood with more nuance the characters in my current world. The hours I spent playing hockey made me physically tough, mentally intense, and tenacious. Yet while these were no waste, time spent rolling die and telling stories would have developed some discipline on my imagination, some practice shaping plots, strengthened the muscles I now use daily.

The way one channels sexual frustration in adolescence forms the foundations of one’s skills, even builds of a framework for organizing information. Some kids play guitar, some pray fervently and win at youth group. Some learn science by experimenting with potato cannons and motors, others hunt or memorize civil war history. Let’s face it, those guys in realistic felt uniforms in the dirt in Gettysburg are the D&D nerds of the military world, and the 12-year old who can’t sleep before the first day of hunting season is feeling just the same as the 12-year old who has been mapping a dungeon for months and is about to roll the die. They are ready to taste the promise of an improbable world—an improbable world with a place for them. It was silly of me ever to have avoided an activity, any at all, that seemed interesting. I wish I had been a stronger man, opened up to new games, sought them out. But of course, I wasn’t. I was a boy.

Debate Prep for McCain

2008-10-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

(hat tip, Ezra Klein)

Seriously, this is awesome.

More pre-debate stuff

2008-10-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

Alright. Just expect McCain to try to make this about Frannie and Freddie. (Palin didn't even know who they were in the week after she got nominated.)

That's because Fannie and Freddy are the closest things that Republicans can find to a part of this mess that is connected to Democrats. Those two are all that they have. They've been in control of every branch of government.

Also, keep an eye on Brokaw. He's gotten a lot of flack for being good friends with McCain and for being the one who goes to the table for NBC when the Republicans get mad at them for, you know, reporting. I'm sure he's able to be a balanced moderator, but, you know, for the water cooler, keep an eye on him.

Well, let's see what happens.

How I Keep From Killing Myself: a Daily Guide

2008-10-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

(I wrote this a year ago, when I really needed to cheer myself up. This is wholly sincere, just not serious. Life is not serious.)

*First, I don’t think about women. This much is a given.

*I remember high school. It felt like such a big deal. It was not a big deal. Now is probably not a big deal. I should go make a pass at that popular girl with the big titties, cause someday, she’s not going to be so big of a deal, and having titties won’t be, either.

*I think of my mother, and father, and sister, and my friends, and how painful a suicide is, how much people blame themselves. It’s horrible. Everyone else gets screwed up forever. A true self-punishment would be to stay out of everyone’s way, get a boring job, own some cats, and watch daytime tv.

*I do NOT think of the kickass funeral my friends would have, and what a good party it would be. There are some people who really should meet, and probably only would if I died young and tragically. So I don’t think about that. I bet they’d tell some great stories.

*My goal for every day is survival. I have the Wilderness Survival Merit Badge.

*Survivors have a positive mental attitude. My positive attitude: I will survive!

*I procrastinate.

*Bet on hell.

*The pending economic apocalypse, disappearance of our water supply, bird-flu epidemic, spread of medicine-resistant flesh-eating bacteria, end of the oil production, and rise of the Chinese as a ruthless and oppressive world superpower: these things are going to be fun, like a circus, a really seriously awesome circus. Maybe with clones. Why pass up tickets for the front row?

*Never construct narratives! The story of my life is not over. Maybe I’m only a loser in chapter one. Well, one through twenty four, at this point.

*Still with the narratives. Neither may I squish my life story into a genre or populate it with stock characters. Stock characters like myself as a tragic failure.

*I wrap myself up serving a higher calling, like my rugby team. Four more concussions, and I’ll volunteer with the Boy Scouts.

*There are a lot of chores to do.

More vote suppression

2008-10-04T01:38:00.000-07:00

This article by the Michigan Messenger, Lose Your Home, Lose Your Vote describes local G.O.P. efforts to suppress the vote in Michigan.

Palin Debate Pregame

2008-10-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Alright Alaskans, the debate is in three hours. To better prepare you, I've rounded up a few articles.

First, take a look at Andrew Halcro's debate experience against Palin.

This , called "Sarah, We're Not That Different, You and I" humanizes Palin, and talks about the destructive impact of John McCain's diversionary tactic on the poor woman.

This article, Moo, by some Egan dude, is about crony capitalism in Alaska.

Both sides are frantically trying to raise/lower expectations for Palin in the debate. The Republicans want it to be a victory if she can utter a complete sentence, and the Democrats keep talking about what a dangerous and skilled debater she is. (I think the term they were looking for is "bullshitter.")

I think the true story is the renegotiated debate format. Republicans changed the format for the debate, so that Biden and Palin cannot speak to each other directly, and each person's time to speak is shorter. Palin just gets time to shoot out talking points. In fact, I always considered the ability to engage in conversation, testing the nimbleness of minds, as part of a debate. Oh well. I'm sure she'll hit Biden on his opposition to ANWR development, the one issue she absolutely is an expert on.

For the rest, grab some popcorn and your apocalypse survival kit, kiss someone beautiful, and enjoy the show.

Ah, El Paso County

2008-10-02T01:10:00.001-07:00

So, I just started dicking around the internet for the last post, to find an article on voting machines. (I ended up finding that great video.) I started to read articles on voter fraud.

Colorado College, my alma matter, has been targeted for vote suppression. The Republican County Clerk sent CC president Dick Celeste, and many students, false information stating that if you voted in Colorado, and your parents lived in a different state, they could not list you as a dependent on their tax returns. (Story) The exact same false information travelled Virginia Tech.

Clerks in South Carolina college towns are doing the same thing.

When I was a student at CC in 2004, Republicans assigned a minuscule number of voting machines to the college's precinct, and scrutinized every ID card to make sure it matched up with the address and names on the rolls: no Bob Dickey was going to vote if his ID said Robert Dickey. There was a four hour wait to vote. Precinct volunteers lied to voters and sent them home. (An out of state driver's licence does not disqualify you, as far as I know.)

So, this is clearly a co-ordinated Republican effort. I want to see Democrats, Biden especially, bringing it to light and forcing it to stop.

The prerequisite for a politician, regardless of his policies, should be integrity. The American system only works if every vote counts, and if the rule of law actually rules, blind to party affiliation, and protects Americans. If a guy has a plan to convert the entire country to solar power for ten cents a person, but he tries to destroy the constitutional power of habeus corpus, the right to only be arrested if police charge you with a crime--I'm voting against him.

Voter fraud is a massive problem in the U.S.. Poor neighborhoods receive robo-calls warning that if they show up to vote, they better have paid their parking tickets. The elderly and Hispanics get doorknob knockers that say "don't forget to vote on Wednesday!" Counties in Michigan are taking lists of home foreclosures and challenging the right to vote of anyone on the list. (On the grounds that you have to have a current address when you register.) When they challenge these ballots, the massive lines of disenfranchised voters will stall everyone who is in a hurry to get to the polls.

Meanwhile, while Fox News stokes fears of Democrats systematically buying homeless votes with ice cream, Republican lawmakers have passed serious voter registration bills, which are meant to deter poor people from voting with ID restrictions: No one from Watts can afford a $100 passport just to vote.

Tens of thousands of names have been purged from voter rolls in 19 states, CBS news reports. One of the illegal US attorney firings that is now (thank God and the few honest people left in Washington, D.C.) under investigation, worked in Mississippi. He was fairly conservative, but he listed "independent" as a the best word to describe himself in a questionnaire. The G.O.P. fired him because they needed someone to dismiss challenges to the voter purge.

This is systematic and widespread. The Republicans are doing the equivalent of finding every WWII vet, leaders like MLK Jr., JFK, and LBJ,--everyone who ever fought for an American's right to vote, and pissing all over their graves.

Double check that you're registered, and tell someone about this.

Forget something?

2008-10-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

Bailout thoughts coming.

As for now, I realized that the Obama campaign has forgotten something very important.

They are out, working their assess off to win more votes. They very well may win more supporters, and have more people vote for them, in the relevant states.

However, the Republicans wrote the voting law. The Help America Vote Act, which flew through the Republican congress in 2004 like shit through a goose, mandates the use of electronic voting machines, which we now conclusively know are easier to hack than your stamp-collecting uncle's geocities page.

Winning an election is not about getting more votes than the other candidate. It is about getting into office. George Bush didn't win an election once, and he certainly won the power to destroy our country. John McCain will take over, let the crooks free, and demolish the remnants of our country .

This is the end of an era, folks. I just don't think it's going to be a happy ending.

P.S.

This is the Democratic Congress's fault for being too stupid to fix this law that clearly fucks them over. Don't you know if Bush calls a law "Help America Vote" it does the opposite? Clear Skies, No Child Left Behind...these coddled, gutless idiots are going to let America die.

I'm a little excited to see the new, post-democracy, corporate zombie America, however.

Exxon wrist slap

2008-09-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

See the Exxon verdict here.

2008-09-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

This was another thing I held back on in my hiatus. It's from the Republican convention:

From the Boston Globe Blog:

"One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.

The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers' subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.

The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one's opponents to Hitler."

Now, what angers me more is the constant "be afraid" message of the Republican Party. "Islamic Terrorism" is a deliberate attempt to link racial fears to fears of terrorism. If Republicans can create a fear and hatred of Muslims, then maybe we won't count those Muslims as Americans. And when Republicans continue to take away the laws that protect us from persecution at the hands of our government, people won't speak up about Americans being tortured, held without charges--you know, losing their freedom. If Republicans can make us afraid, we won't throw throw them in jail for what they've done to our fellow Americans.

On Palin

2008-09-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

I actually wrote this to as a comment on an article, but I thought it was worth repeating here.

So, first, my Palin gripes, from an Alaskan. Then, the reason its important that Alaskans protested her.

I don't think Palin's politics are that awful, and I dig her story. However, her way of doing things is about personal vendettas (not just troopergate) and hiding her tracks (emails on private accounts). She is also simply over her head as Governor.

The fact is, Palin is hard core into cronyism and she has not even shown interest in politics outside Alaska. (At least recognize the term Bush Doctrine.)

The only thing she has going for her is that the press, to even make a pretense of accuracy, has to call her qualifications into question. That lets the Republicans pretend they're being persecuted by the media, which lets them distract us from issues. Meanwhile, Palin's stance on abortion regains the support of the less excited Republican base.

When McCain chose her (or caved and let his new advisors choose her) he proved he puts politics first and country second.

Now, the biggest political rally in the state of Alaska was an anti-Palin protest. Here's why that matters:

The media is trying to say that she is somehow the face of Alaska. They run these prepackaged "freakish red state" stories about how all anyone in Alaska wants is God and guns and simple-minded politics. We're more complex than that. I like both guns and God, but they don't make me rabid for McCain. Alaska was leaning towards Obama.

The point of these people standing up is that we refuse to lend our state's image to the Republican campaign, and we refuse to redefine our state's character with a politician as our mascot. Susan Butcher is an Alaskan. Scott Gomez is an Alaskan. Sarah Palin is too, but I won't have people believing we're all like her.

That's why that protest mattered.

Cancel debates?

2008-09-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I've been saving up political rants, trying not to put them up, because they seem innapproriate after the DFW news, and because I want to write some good, soul-searching essays or something. But McCain is now trying to suspend the debates and it's time he was called on why.

McCain is just faking an injury cause he's losing. He wants a time out. If the economy were his real concern, he would have done this back when the crisis started, not the day the polls came out.

He wants to keep Palin off the campaign trail, because he doesn't think she can handle simple questions. Then he wants Congress the pass any bailout bill so he can blame the bailout on the Dems.

The guy who thinks the fundamentals of our economy are strong suddenly wants to rush back to Washington when his numbers get bad? The guy who missed almost every vote since April, including votes on the new GI Bill and alternative fuels, suddenly thinks Congressional negotiations can't survive without him, his entourage, and the press he'll carry with him? Lincoln and FDR could campaign through a war, but McCain can't campaign through a bailout bill that's about 98% written already?

Does he think Congress will still be debating this at 9:00 at night, or that its that difficult to fly from Washington to Mississppi?

Let's be honest: Every sensation McCain makes is media attention on something other than the issues. Issues just don't favor him. (Hence his campaign manager saying "this campaign is not about the issues.") It makes sense to distract: McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, was on Freddie Mac's payroll until they nationalized it.

Presidents don't get to call timeouts in the real world.

Here

2008-09-24T14:30:00.001-07:00

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/24/16146/9377/154/609039

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-15T01:32:00.000-07:00

Last night, David Foster Wallace hanged himself.

It’s hard. There were little things you didn’t realize you were looking forward to in life, little things on which you staked hope even though you didn’t realize it. David Foster Wallace’s writing was one of those things for me. I expected him to continue to rally in the name of intelligence, and to make humor out of the depressing, the mundane, and the potentially meaningless. He stared fearlessly in the face of the infinitely abstract and declared that it was pertinent and comprehensible to the layman.

I don’t want to write his obituary. There are other, more qualified people to do that. But for me, one of the few perks of this media-soaked, post-postmodern, intellectually ghettoized generation, is seeing how a few brilliant minds coped. DFW was one of America’s best writers, and best minds. He wasn’t necessarily trying to entertain anyone but himself – his essays ranged topics from suburban tennis to the meaning of self-referential television. His fiction could be hilarious, creative, and gratingly dark. No matter what terrible circus our world was going to become, I expected Wallace to cope with it in a unique manner.

His death is a sad and painful loss. He was 46.

Hiatus

2008-09-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

In an effort not to make my head explode by visiting the internet, and due to an impending and important deadline this Sunday, don't expect new stuff for a little while. Plus, I need to cool off after all the politics.

Hurricanes and responses

2008-09-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

So, I don't have time for new writing, and such good things are floating around the intertubes. This Krugman piece is great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/opinion/01krugman.html?em

Palin talking points

2008-08-31T13:05:00.001-07:00

Okay, some thoughts:

Don't make moose jokes, Maureen Dowd.
Almost 20 months in office is not more experience than 4 years in the Senate, Mr. Guliani.
Almost 20 months in office with one serious abuse of power scandal is about par for the course for a Republican.
She fired the Public Safety Commissioner for refusing to bow to political pressure and for refusing to do something illegal.

McCain lies when he says he puts country first and politics second.

Economic plans

2008-08-31T12:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31view.html?em

Good lady says good things

2008-08-29T15:16:00.001-07:00

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/08/29/iwhc

P.S.
I think the word to describe this move from a feminist perspective is: "patronizing."

Sketchy Dealings at the Associated Press

2008-08-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

Add the AP to the list of media outlets that have it in for liberals. This time, it was a house-cleaning of non-republicans. The press loves to report on how much the press loves Obama, but it seems like poppycock to me. They cover the horse race and not the horses. I repeat: if the press wanted Obama to win, they would report on the issues.

It's easier (and far cheaper) to make news dramatic and look at a race to win the White House, and to pretend that race is competitive. But its not true. There isn't a shred of competition on issues, character, intelligence, even experience--every time someone asks McCain about his plans, he talks about being a POW.

Anyway, read the piece about the AP.

Well, one last day

2008-08-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

My thoughts on Barack’s speech:

This man is president right now.

Please, let’s not pretend McCain will be more of the same. He will take things in a worse direction for four years. It’s hard to fuck the country up so bad after Clinton era prosperity. After Bush, it is a delicate mess that only a skillful man like Obama can clean up. A senile guy who answers economics questions with answers like “I can find you a hundred billion dollars right now” and “I was a prisoner of war,” can't do it.

Obama clearly knows more about the economy than McCain does. How can McCain paint him as inexperienced?

It wasn’t inspirational for how he said it. It’s inspirational because of what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to say we can’t have tyrrany here. That sensible policies, as difficult to enact as they are (because they hurt the most powerful) are possible.

I thought his purple tie made up for ending it on country music.

Obama wants it about issues, not character. But he’s got an ass kicked on both counts.

I can’t imagine anyone actually disagreeing with him, but the pundits will tear him down. It’s going to be a tight race. But Barack Obama will win.

From my Mom

2008-08-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

Hi Christopher and Heather:

I cried during Hillary's speech tonight, and I thought you deserve to know why. In my tears I talked out loud to the TV: "Hillary, this was to be your night, and you blew it." It tears me up; there is a generational divide between Clinton and Obama supporters. You take for granted what we fought for. Here is my frame of reference:

9th grade. 1968. My first political action. I led a campaign at my high school my freshman year to allow girls to wear pants to school. Only dresses and skirts were allowed. I went on to be active in student government all four years. And yes, by the end of my freshman year I wore pants to high school without the fear of expulsion.

1972. Pre-Roe v. Wade. I had several friends who had to go to great lengths to get an abortion, at great expense, and mostly great personal trauma. Please, we need to focus on who will be appointing the next several supreme court justices.

Sophomore year college: 1973. I transferred to Dartmouth College in year 2 of coeducation after 200 YEARS as an all male institution. The insecure male students called us "co-hogs" to our faces instead of "co-eds". I changed my major from sociology, even though I had lots of credits toward my major, because my first sociology professor at Dartmouth refused to let the 6 females in the class of 25 students sit together. It sounds trite, it did then too, but I had to be more than better than my male colleagues to be considered an equal. Even the Dartmouth Outing Club had trouble accepting women members.

I can't really explain well what it was like growing up in in the Bay Area in the heat of the anti War protests, in the throes of the Summer of Love, close to the Haight-Ashbury. It impacted my view of life.

I supported other women who made the slow clinks in the glass ceiling:

Shirley Chisholm, Geraldine Ferraro. And yes Hillary Clinton. She would have been a phenomenal president. She is vastly more qualified that Barrack Obama. She blew it. Even the conservatives in our Mother-Daughter Book Club said after we read Hillary's book Living History, I'd vote for her, but she's not being true to herself, she's trying to run like a guy. Hillary "got it" too late. It cost us all.

So I am all torn up that I don't get to vote now for the first woman president. I said a number of years ago the first woman president could actually be Chelsea Clinton, not Hillary. I am sorry I may be right.

I will vote for Sen. Obama, but I hope you understand that while doing so I will mourn the missed opportunity of the first woman president.

Love Mom

Day 3-- I give up on live blogging

2008-08-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

Alright. Live commentary is one reason I hate TV news. You have to play to your strengths, and one of the things I love about the written word is that you have time to carefully consider what you're saying. I shouldn't live blog when I don't have time to think and am too distracted by what I should be doing instead of watching a convention. Shit, I watch on PBS and C-SPAN so I don't have to deal with commentators.

Although, really, the reason I'm not live blogging is that the convention is over and I'm still at work. Here is the text of John Kerry's speech, to be followed by video when I find it. A little birdie said it was the best of the convention so far.

Update:

video