October 2008 Archives

I went shopping for groceries this morning, at which point I planned to pick up Halloween candy, as well. We don’t need a lot. Living at the end of a dead-end street—and a very short one, at that—keeps us away from the general traffic of trick-or-treaters, such as can be found at all these days.

Turns out I’m lucky we don’t need a lot, because the grocery store didn’t have any Halloween candy, apart from a few bags of candy corn, which is unfit for human consumption, much less for handing out to strangers without the reassurance of safety wrapping. Our local drug store’s Halloween candy was gone, too, as was the Halloween candy from a second grocery store. I had to settle for a few “value-paks,” without holiday coloration or decals, and at somewhat higher prices than the packages intended for trick-or-treaters. (Well, that and the very large candy bars I buy to hand to the first kids to our door, in the hopes that they’ll tell their friends we’re a lucrative stop, or at least come back the next year.)

The problem was not that the stocks had been sold out. Oh, no. The shelves weren’t bare. They were full of Christmas chocolate, their merry red-and-green wrappers decorated with snowflakes.

Like we needed any more confusion over which holidays belong to the evil pagans and which belong to the virtuous Christians and which have simply been devoured whole by unbridled commercialism. The “holiday season” is rapidly growing into a literal season, a full quarter of the year.

Tomorrow is Halloween. As our pumpkin remains uncarved, I shall have to carve it tonight. Sadly, I’m unprepared. we skipped our usual trip to the pick-your-own apple orchard, where we also usually pick out a pumpkin or two; as a result, I’ve hardly given a thought as to what the eventual jack-o-lantern should look like. Our pumpkin this year was a gift for my mother-in-law, and rather too smooth and regular to lend itself well to carving a properly twisted goblin face.

I spent ten or fifteen minutes this morning cruising the internet for ideas, but there isn’t much to go on. You can find a few delightful pictures of somebody’s over-the-top projects involving a dozen or more pumpkins, outfits to stretch beneath the head, farm implements, possibly one of those monstrous sixty-pounders, but all of that takes far, far more than I am willing to invest. Apart from that, most of the pictures you find are of that sad new style which seems to grow more popular by the day.

Rather than following a traditional approach of treating the pumpkin like a head and carving in the facial features, the new technique merely treats the pumpkin as a screen onto which—or through which—a picture is projected. The picture is often a face, but it can be anything. Home computers can help with this: take any picture you like, use a graphic editor like Photoshop to lighten or darken it sufficiently (this may take a few attempts), and transform the picture into a blob-ridden black-and-white version. Many graphic editors include a specialized function to do the whole thing with a single command. Transfer the picture onto the broadest stretch of the pumpkin—I’ve seen it done with light projection, decal, or simply copying by hand—and shave the hardest outer rind away where the black-and-white picture is white. You needn’t cut through the pale yellow part of the shell beneath the dark orange rind to let the light shine out; in fact, the effect works better if you don’t, and allow the pale flesh to diffuse the light. (I don’t know how thick the skin can be without absorbing too much light to be seen from the sidewalk. I do know that lightbulbs almost always replace dimmer candles for the effect to work.)

Voila! An intricate picture in place of a crude, leering face. If faces are your thing, you can use a picture of a face. The Mona Lisa is popular; Barack Obama’s site has instructions for making a Barack-o-lantern. But just as often, people carve pictures of a cat, or a which on a broomstick, or some other Halloween-y icon.

I wish they didn’t. Pumpkins carved to resemble a head have character all their own, even the simple ones whose carvers are too timid to move beyond triangles. The carve-a-picture technique always looking formulaic, no matter how skillfully done. Perhaps I should say especially when skillfully done. If you want a picture of a cat or a witch, copied from some art file, it’s easy enough to buy one directly from a holiday outlet or drug store. If you want to keep with the spirit of the season, however, you need to step away from the mass-produced and try your hand at actual carving, looking to exploit the specifics of your very own pumpkin.

Done well, you can get a real grotesque, a goblin fit for Halloween. But even done badly, you still get something uniquely your own.

Postscript: Uninspired by the smooth, nearly spherical shell, I decided to go with a rat-like visage, with two prominent chisel teeth in place of the usual wide grimace. Eileene asked whether it was “supposed to be a killer bunny or something,” and pronounced it “cute.” So my work this year was an utter failure. But it was uniquely my own utter failure.

A couple years ago, Eileene told me of ongoing speculation as to the real name of Shadow, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The novel is rooted in the premise that the gods and other characters of myth walk among us, and depend on worship and sacrifice not only to power their miracles, but for their very survival. Shadow is only a nickname, and given the habit among the gods he meets of taking nicknames—“Wednesday” for Odin, “Mr. Nancy” for Anansi, “Low-Key” for Loki, and so on—along with numerous details of Shadow’s own background suggest that Shadow himself is a god or at least a divine hero of established myth in disguise, even if disguised from himself. The challenge, then, is to determine Shadow’s real name and/or his mythological identity. Lately, I returned to the challenge, studying the book in short segments, the better to concentrate on potentially significant details which might otherwise be lost in the story’s vast sweep.

This is difficult, not because of a lack of hints, but because of the mixed signals they, and the novel generally, give.

An obvious candidate is Baldur (also Balder or Baldr), the young, gentle, beautiful and widely loved Aesir. The points of comparison are thick through the book, and become increasingly obvious. Shadow is Wednesday/Odin’s son, by Wednesday’s own account. We must take this skeptically, because Wednesday is (inappropriately, in my opinion) treated as a trickster god and a skilled liar by his own admission, but other sources, none entirely beyond question, confirm it. A fortune-telling machine, for example, tells Shadow:

EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING.
YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE.
YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD.
Motto:
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.

thus suggesting Shadow is indeed Wednesday’s son, but also hearkening to Baldur’s misfortune of an early and unnatural death. Near the story’s climax, Loki murders Shadow in a manner mimicking Baldur’s death at blind Hodr’s hand through Loki’s trickery, tied to a stake and stabbed with a transformed wand of mistletoe, which is something akin to a broad hint, with a wink and an elbow in the ribs to punctuate it. The Aesir mourn Baldur’s death and passage into the underworld, Hel’s dominion, where he is metaphorically described as married to Hel, Loki’s wicked offspring who clothes herself as a half-rotten corpse. Shadow’s wife appears as a rotting corpse, as well, kept ambulatory with the magic of a gold coin representative of the sun. (It’s complicated. But trust me: it makes sense in the book.) You can find more similarities if you look, but not necessarily similarities unique to Baldur in world mythology.

On the other hand, there’s plenty against the notion, too. Shadow’s last name is Moon, for example, which you can work out by noting his wife’s name is Laura Moon while his mother-in-law is named McCabe—but the fact has to be worked out, which suggests a deliberate attempt to disguise it in the manner of a mystery writer distracting the reader from a vital clue. There’s no obvious connection between Baldur and the moon. Baldur’s (living) wife Nanna bears no similarity to Laura, by name or otherwise, nor is there any clear link in Shadow’s choice of a griffon to ride on the carousel, or that he should receive dream visions from Buffalo. Shadow is a mortal, born of a mortal woman, unlike Baldur the god, with two gods for parents. Although he learns magic when taught them by gods, mortal heroes do the same in many myths. There’s nothing in Baldur’s history to suggest a temper, or prison, or a lot of other items which are likely mere artifacts of the story at hand, and not hints to Shadow’s identity.

As I say, Baldur is an obvious candidate, but only a candidate on the strength of evidence from the book itself. There’s too much noise from which to extract the signal. If we consider only points of comparison, and not points of divergence, which is necessary if we’re to presume Shadow is Baldur, then similar cases for other candidates can be made, as well.

For a while, I speculated that the Aztec Teotihuacan (literally, “smoky mirror”) made some sense: he is associated with both moon and shadow, and he is a true American god, and not merely an import. I’ve seen attempts to liken Shadow to Prometheus or Raven in a tenuous connection to stealing fire from the sun in the form of that gold coin. At least one professional reviewer, apparently insufficiently familiar with mythology to realize that divine ancestry and sacrifice on a tree do not feature only in Christian myth, identified Shadow with Jesus. These ideas aren’t necessarily wrong, but the evidence for them is a little thin. Still, I couldn’t yet settle on Baldur through my own study, largely because at least one robust alternative remained.

My pet theory was Hiawatha. They are both mortals with divine parentage; Hiawatha traces his heritage through Nikomos—daughter of the moon, Nikomos—and could thus take the surname Moon. Hiawatha is a proper American figure, not an import. Shadow was born in Chicago—on the shores of Gitchee Gummee, by the shining big-sea water—and lived in Eagle Point, Indiana, before starting the story in prison; all the subsequent action happens in Illinois and Wisconsin, always circling that same lake. Buffalo, sacred to plains Indians, speaks to Shadow of his own volition, and not at the machinations of Wednesday; perhaps this is merely coincidence, but perhaps it is a native god looking after his own. Sam, she of the quick eye and frank expression, questions Shadow closely about his heritage, accusing him of being part Indian, belaboring the point as an author might wish to have a clue pushed forward. I would be tempted to toss in Gaiman’s incorrect claim elsewhere that the Song of Hiawatha was stolen from the Kalevala (Only the rhythmic meter came from the Kalevala; the story was Ojibwa in origin.) to draw a connection between Shadow and Vainamoinen, first man of Finnish myth, if I could find reason to consider Vainamoinen the son of Odin or a close facsimilie.

But when you get right down to it, the case for Hiawatha is no stronger than the case for Baldur. Somewhat weaker, to be honest, if not much weaker. Ultimately, I had to abandon my pet theory in the face of Gaiman’s own account: at a press conference, he agreed with a fan’s conclusion that Shadow’s real name is Baldur Moon, confessing that he thought it a bit of a giveaway. Learning this was rather disappointing.

Giveaway? No. While the signs are certainly there for anyone with any significant exposure to Norse myth, there is plenty material to cast Baldur into doubt, of which the above is only a sample. Gaiman plays fast and loose with his mythological similarities, which is just fine for the book as literature, but plays merry hell with the book as puzzle. It’s all a matter of which details you consider important, and which ones you write off as “just part of the story,” which is easy to do when Astarte and Odin and Anansi and others hang out together, occasionally swiping each other’s techniques, and frequently breaking character. For Gaiman, who wrote American Gods, it’s easy to guess which bits the author considers significant. For the rest of us, who do not share his every waking thought, there’s not much to do but take a guess. An educated guess is more likely to be right, but the more educated you are in world myth, the more hesitant any guess must become, as the parallels and contradictions multiply.

When Hank Paulson came to Congress with his request for an emergency appropriation of $750,000,000,000—roughly a third of the entire annual budget—to save the rapidly imploding economy by sparing large banks and speculators (but not small ones) the losses of their own bad investments, he explicitly asked for a complete lack of oversight and accountability. I repeat the infamous sentence from Section 8 of his three-page proposal:

“Decisions by the secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

A lot of people were incensed at the chutzpah of the proposal, and with good reason. Even Congress sat up and squawked. Perhaps it only wanted to go on record looking briefly responsible, because after a few days’ hand-wringing and finger-wagging, it agreed to the deal. Not without a few changes, of course. Large chunks of pork had to be tacked on, to help a few reluctant Congressmen forget their reservations, and there was even a firm-toned insistence that there be some accountability here, repeated frequently to the American public. In a tone that suggested the thought had never crossed his mind, even Paulson hastily agreed that yes, transparency and some kind of accompanying accountability might be desirable when disposing of a trillion dollars of unbudgeted emergency money. A radical approach to spending taxpayer dollars, to be sure, but one he was willing to try, given the peril of the situation, and the critical need to help the very wealthy to consolidate more wealth at the rest of the country’s expense.

Transparency my ass.

The first contracts issued by the Treasury Department as part of the bailout have the critical bits—just who is getting the money, and how much they are being paid—blacked out. See this official treasury document on fees for handling the money for an example, or this one on legal fees for another.

So. Is Congress—in both houses, and from both sides of the aisle—going to sit up and challenge this opacity and block all funds until the information is made public, or were promises of accountability just another sonorous sound bite for pre-election press? I wouldn’t bet heavily on any public challenges, if I were you.

Wow. With only a week until election day, the fissures in the McCain camp are now visible, possibly from orbit, instead of being merely fault lines buried deeply enough that the pundits can only guess at them by what they see of movement on the surface. Several of McCain’s campaign insiders are complaining to the press that Palin is “going rogue,” deliberately departing from the campaign message to deliver her own, and predicting there is worse to come. They only hint, but they hint clearly, that she’s cutting her losses and burning what remains of the ticket’s chances to fire her chances for a campaign of her own in 2012.

Palin’s supporters in the campaign report, also to the press, that she feels badly handled, compelled to campaign in a way that doesn’t suit her and even makes her look bad. Her defenders also claim she is being set up as the fall guy to blame for a likely McCain loss.

The situation must pain McCain like a bad tooth. Schisms within a campaign are toxic in the best of circumstances—just consult Hillary Clinton on how bad feeling toward her own campaign manager poisoned her primary bid—but schisms between running mates are particularly lethal. To have grievances aired at all is bad; having them aired a mere week before election day is about the worst possible time: late enough to prevent a proper reconciliation, or to let the issue drift beyond the reach of the voting public’s short memory, yet not so late that it no longer matters.

I suppose McCain is the more wounded party; he is the presidential candidate, and therefore entitled to set campaign strategy. Palin, as merely a vice presidential candidate, is supposed to support that effort. The charge that Palin is willing to sacrifice McCain for her own political career is entirely plausible, given her popularity with the party base; the charge that the McCain campaign is looking to scapegoat her is a little less so. Quite probably, some major McCain campaign workers resent her unvetted appearance, and may well be looking to soothe their disappointment by blaming her instead of their own failed efforts; certainly, she’s drawn a lot of fire from the somber-suit wing of the party. On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine McCain himself, or the campaign as a whole, worrying about anything but how to win. If she wasn’t comfortable with placing McCain’s immediate chances before her own longer-term interests, she never should have taken the offer.

Still, it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for McCain. Palin was his choice, and his alone—even his own inner circle are reported to have been shocked at the choice, possibly made in a fit of pique after being refused a more centrist running mate like Lieberman. McCain had met Palin once—once!—before asking her on board, without allowing his campaign the time to examine her background. He shot from the hip, and missed. Or rather, snagged the gun in the holster and shot himself in the foot.

But more to the point, McCain, despite his “country first” slogan, didn’t just place himself at risk with a reckless decision, he placed the whole country at risk. Clearly he didn’t know what he was getting in his selection of running mate. Obviously, then, he didn’t know what he was choosing on the country’s behalf should anything happen to him. It is only just, then, that Palin, proving grossly unfit for the office, is hurting McCain, and hurting him badly, and doing it before she gets a chance to hurt the rest of the country. Let McCain bear the brunt of his own irresponsibility so that the rest of us won’t have to.

Schadenfreude fairly bursts my heart this morning. Republicans in almost every national race have long been gnawing off their own legs to escape the trap of association with president Dubya. In their eagerness to cut loose the baggage that is weighing them down, they are now beginning to turn on one another.

McCain has never made a centerpiece of his argument that we need a Republican president to keep a Democratic Congress in check, but it’s been out there. Apparently, Congressional Republicans feel the same way: that it’s vital to elect them in order to balance a Democratic president, because McCain is going to lose. The NRCC is now sponsoring ads for Elizabeth Dole making that very point. It does me good to see both presidential and Senatorial candidates tacitly announce one another to be a lost cause and a drag on the ticket.

But the real point here is the re-emergence of what must surely be the strangest campaign theme ever. A monster too bizarre to die, it merely continues mutating to match the emerging political environment. Essentially, the Republican argument in 2008 is “We fucked everything up, so you have to re-elect us.”

We saw it in McCain’s nomination speech, when he openly admitted that his party had become corrupt and lost the trust of the American people—which was why we had to elect him to go in and shake up Washington. (Apparently without irony, that same speech explained that he intends to do so by cutting taxes and antagonizing our Mideast rivals and cutting social spending and encouraging big oil and so on.) Almost simultaneously, Trent Lott admitted in a BBC interview that his party had made a lot of mistakes in the past years, that it had been arrogant and earned the distrust of Americans—which he felt meant we should elect the Republicans again, to give them another chance now that they feel really, really bad about it. The idea resurfaced in McCain’s rejoinder to Obama ads reminding us that this “maverick” voted with Bush 90% of the time; McCain began painting Obama in ads and presidential debates as a party loyalist, one who had reliably voted against almost every Republican initiative. Now, any reasonable person might think this was a good thing: voting against really bad policies demonstrates legislative wisdom. But from the Republican camp, the argument was that anyone who didn’t agree with ruinous policies (and uncompromising attitude) at least half the time is simply not to be trusted.

Today’s argument is that leaving either party in control of too much of government is a recipe for disaster. Why, just look what a disaster it was when we Republicans held the presidency, both houses of Congress, and seven of the nine seats on the Supreme Court! We fucked everything up! So now you have to elect us again, because otherwise the Democrats will be able to change things!

They say it with a straight face, too.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) appeared on MSNBC recently and delivered a long, hate-filled harangue equating liberals with terrorists and traitors, reaching a climax when she called for investigations into un-American beliefs of some members of Congress, in essence a call for the rebirth of McCarthyism. Guilt by association.

Unsurprisingly, Bachmann has attempted to deflect criticism without actually retracting any particular statement, and certainly without apologizing for what she said. One of those not-really-apologies-at-all apologies politicians practice. Speaking to the Rotary club, she blamed the media:

Early voting is underway in many states, and early voter turnout is setting records, especially in the swing states. This is due in part to an aggressive and spectacularly well-organized voter registration drive by the Obama campaign, beginning way back when he was an outside contender in the primaries. It is also due in part to a record interest in the election generally, fueled largely by resentment towards the meatballs in charge. But mostly, I’m afraid, it’s due to a suspicion that votes, especially in states with tight presidential races, are at risk of going uncounted due to a variety of dirty Republican tricks.

Sadly, the concern is well justified. Voting irregularities, particularly in Ohio and Florida, called those states’ results into question, and with them, the national presidential races. Nor is there any reason to think fair play will be any more in evidence this year. Ohio Republicans sought to remove 200,000 new voters from the rolls on such flimsy “discrepancies” as a period appearing after a middle initial in one record but not in another. Montana Republicans sought to remove voters from their state rolls for having moved (even when moving within the state’s lone congressional district, or even when they hadn’t moved at all)—but only those voters who moved in the state’s six predominantly Democratic precincts. The Wisconsin GOP is calling for large, intimidating men, preferably with military, police, or security backgrounds, to “observe” inner city polling stations. Several Republican governors in swing states are calling for increased police presence at polling stations just in case there should be any rioting when the Republican candidate wins against all expectation.

Voting early is no guarantee against ballot manipulation. There’s ways to cheat that voters have no control over. An Ohio voting booth registering -16,000 (yes, less than zero) votes for Kerry in 2004 comes to mind, as does the seizure of Florida ballot boxes by Republican authorities in the 2000 election without allowing Democratic scrutiny. Nor is safeguarding against the dirty tricks of past elections protection against creative new ways to cheat. Still, voting early may help avoid certain tactics we have already seen employed, like deliberately providing too few voting booths to opposition districts, or illegally closing voting stations while voters remain in line for their turn to vote, or last-minute challenges on frivolous grounds throwing enough votes in doubt for the courts to decide the matter instead of voters.

I am not voting early. I really, really enjoy voting on Election Day, despite the efficiencies early voting offers to overburdened election workers. I relish the two-year ritual of walking down to my local firehouse, exchanging pleasantries with the voting officials, confirming my name on the list, closing the curtain, pushing buttons. Voting in person provides a more palpable sense of participation in the electoral process than tucking a ballot in an envelope in the privacy of my home ever could.

But I have that luxury. I live in a more-or-less blue state, in a decidedly blue neighborhood, both of which are deep, deep blue this year. I also have the time to drop by in the middle of the day, to avoid the rush. If I had any question at all that some irregularity might get my ballot pushed into the “for examination” box, to be studied for irregularities and counted later, after the election was decided, or perhaps not counted at all, you can bet I’d be voting early.

I’m glad to see so many voters in contested states feel the same.

From yesterday’s NYT:

“Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.”

Gee, he’d really like to, but he can’t. Sure, he’s the decider, the unitary executive, answerable to no one. If he truly wants to close Gitmo, nobody can stop him. But he can’t. He just…can’t.

Why not? Ever since Boumediene v. Bush confirmed that holding people indefinitely, without trial, charges, or evidence, without private legal counsel or even protection from (ahem) “harsh interrogation techniques” was too stark a step into authoritarianism even for a sympathetic Supreme Court, the whole rationale for using Guantanamo—that it was somehow outside US, Cuban, international, and indeed all legal accountability—was pretty well shot. Guantanamo could not serve its purpose, and it was a huge political liability for both President Bush himself in American eyes and for America as a whole in the world’s eyes. So why can’t the decider decide to shut it down, or even consider someone else’s proposals to do so?

The Times reports later in that same article that “Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantanamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon.”

Too many legal and political risks. Not mentioning any names, mind you.

Just about says it all, really.

I was sick as a dog last Friday, various body parts playing “tag-team symptom.” By turns, it was headache, joint soreness, dizziness, fever…what have you got? The nose was the ringleader, running all day. I blame my sister-in-law, Ella, who brought the germ in from somewhere and passed it to Stan and Joe as well, before I passed it to Eileene in turn and who knows how many others.

While the flu lasted for several days, only on Friday was I incapacitated; otherwise, from Thursday on it was just sniffles and coughing, more or less, and today I’m essentially well.

Not that I sound it. I’m still clogged with thick, gooey mucus that, if the past several years are any indicator, will take a week or more to clear out of my head and chest. This wasn’t always the case. Most of my life, the cold ran its entire course in a four- or five-day span. Every case of a cold or the flu I’ve had since 2000, however, has settled into my chest and taken a week or more to clear out, and even my doctor can’t explain why.

I have a half-baked theory. In 2000, we visited the Philippines, and between the disruption of my sleep cycle, sleeping under 24/7 air conditioning, and the exposure to alien germs in the airport and on foreign soil, I got terribly, terribly sick—a three-week illness that required a proper doctor’s visit and antibiotic regimen instead of a few Tylenol and a day’s bed rest. Plus another week or so of coughing repulsive gobbets of green ooze after I once again felt well. My hypothesis is that the extended sickness has somehow damaged the tissues in some part of my breathing apparatus: lungs, bronchi, trachea, something. Not gross, highly visible damage, just some light scarring, maybe just enough to strip the cilia whose job it is to sweep mucus up and out of the system. It wouldn’t even have to cover a large area, just a small enough stretch to interrupt the continuous flow, causing mucus to continue to tumble back down, so the only way to clear it is by coughing.

Or maybe this, too, is an artifact of reaching middle age. I dunno. I just wish there were something to do about it, apart from waiting in the slow, certain knowledge that I’ll die of pneumonia, regardless of what particular condition weakens me to the point where a cold carries me off.

Sick, sick, sick today.

I just learned that John McCain is having some trouble with YouTube. YouTube has removed a number of his campaign videos for alleged copyright violations, under its policy to do so with any video challenged for copyright violation. When so challenged, YouTube categorically refuses to re-post such a video for at least ten days, and up to fourteen days, after receiving a counterchallenge, regardless of the merits of either challenge or counterchallenge. McCain feels he should be exempt from this policy.

YouTube has also removed Obama videos under the same policy, although not so many. This may be because Obama’s campaign, enjoying a larger working budget, feels less pressure to use copyright material without permission in order to save a buck. It may be because McCain has far less support in the arts-and-entertainment community—certainly, he’s faced challenges from Fankie Vallie and Heart, who didn’t want McCain peddling his message with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and “Barracuda,” respectively, although he has also had videos removed on challenges from sympathetically partisan Fox News. Or maybe Obama’s campaign simply recognizes the difficulties YouTube faces in such copyright challenges and forgives a necessary if unpalatable acquiescence to frivolous challenges, while McCain’s campaign feels entitled to special treatment. Note that McCain doesn’t want to protect YouTube from any lawsuits it suffers by re-posting his material, he just wants the company to risk lawsuits for his benefit—excuse me, the benefit of the electorate.

Unfortunately, YouTube must take even frivolous challenges seriously because of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provides stiff penalties for (among others) online service providers like YouTube who merely carry materials published in violation of copyright by a third party. It also has good reason to respond quickly, as title II of the DMCA provides freedom from liability if the server quickly removes challenged material (along with other conditions).

The DMCA was passed in 1998 by unanimous vote in the US Senate, including the vote of John McCain.

McCain promises to shake up the old order, where his own party has treated the law as applying only to other people, and sought at every turn to remove themselves from all accountability—prosecution, censure, or even transparency. His campaign’s plea for special consideration under a law he helped pass suggests otherwise.

For the third and final time, for there are only to be three debates, I listened to Obama square off directly against McCain—listened, rather than watched. Listening gives me an unusual perspective, less distracted by the appearance and mannerisms of the candidates, perhaps I hear more of what they have to say. It reminds me of the televised debate of 1960, where a radio audience considered Nixon the winner but the television audience firmly preferred Kennedy.

Which is not to say appearance and mannerisms aren’t important. Much of the post-debate commentary has revolved around how relaxed and presidential Obama appears, while McCain seems to be a twitching mass of barely concealed rage. Simply appearing cool and collected may not be the most important virtue a president might possess, but it is something, especially since a panic is brewing in our domestic economy. I missed that by listening, as I missed McCain’s hasty departure from the stage and refusal to meet the crowd after the first debate, and as I missed the facial language that suggests to some that McCain’s infamous “that one” line was less a mark of contempt for his opponent than of failing memory, or a clumsy attempt to avoid a verbal stumble. I missed Palin’s cringe-inducing wink as she cutely announced she wouldn’t be answering the questions put to her in her debate, and its insult-to-injury contempt for public opinion.

But I didn’t miss McCain’s air quotes last night as he painted concern for a pregnant woman’s health as “extremist.” The air quotes, and with them, McCain’s contempt for the hypothetical mother, were as audible as a Bush gaffe or a Cheney sneer.

Air quotes indeed. When, pray tell, did concern for the mother become fit for derision? When did a desire to protect a human life become the mark of extremism, fanaticism, and the radical left? Asked whether he would, given the chance, appoint a Supreme Court justice to overturn Roe v. Wade, McCain insisted he would employ no acid test, but let himself talk too long, revealing his feelings about the matter all too clearly. We saw, and heard, far too much of McCain’s views on the value of human life last night. May we never have cause to see that—ahem—“respect for human life” expressed through our courts.

My current gaming group keeps a quote log, a list of amusing things people say in or out of character. I suppose a quote log could, even should, contain memorable lines which aren’t funny, but I have yet to see a quote log for any group do so. Also, while the others appreciate the quote log, I’m the only one who cares enough to add things to it—so I guess the opening line should read, “I keep a quote log for my current gaming group”—and as a lifetime mocker of poorly chosen words, I stick to the jokes.

Not that I begrudge the microscopic effort. The results are entirely worth it. Going back and reading those lines again can provide smiles for a long time. I’ve still got quotes that make me smile to remember a Champions game back in college, so that’s two decades and counting.

Quotes characteristically fall into one (or, occasionally several) of four categories:

1. Unintentional double-entendres, usually of a risqué nature, e.g., after one PC expresses a fear that another is carrying communicable diseases into the lab, the suspect PC’s player announces, “Does penetrating help with any of that?”
2. Words which you can confidently say have never been uttered together before and will never be uttered together again except to repeat them for posterity, e.g., “There could be other…purposes.” “Like what?” “Tourism?” “Oh. ‘Come see our black hole, we made it ourselves?’”
3. Preservation of the moment when a PC makes an utter fool of himself, or the moment when he’s just about to, e.g., “Hey, you!” “Yes?” “What you doing here?” “Oh, ah, we’re burying these bodies.” “But they still standing!” “Oh. We’ll have to kill you then.”
4. Bon mots which deserve to be preserved as well, e.g, “Well, paint me purple and call me a turnip!”

Okay, sometimes you just have to be there. If you were fortunate enough to be there, those are gems, roughly like baby pictures that didn’t seem so important twenty years ago. But even if you weren’t, they can be a laugh for gamers who have been at it long enough to recognize the general context, if not the specifics of the moment. A few enterprising gamers make their logs available to the public. Here’s one of my favorites, and another. Maybe they’ll persuade you to start your own log, or even to share it with the rest of us.

So.

The scandal over the firing of Walt Monegan, allegedly for refusing to fire Sarah Palin’s ex-brother-in-law on her behalf, has been investigated, and the investigation’s report is due. The investigation was shortened, and the report moved earlier, out of deference to the McCain-Palin presidential race; the natural time frame for the investigation would have placed its release a few days before the election.

The McCain-Palin campaign has shown no such civility. The McCain campaign filed suit to stop the investigation on spurious grounds. When those grounds were rejected in court, the campaign sought to smear the proceedings and its participants from both political parties. It has attempted to pre-empt the release of findings and muddy the news accounts by releasing two days beforehand the results of its own investigation, which—surprise!—finds Palin not guilty on all counts. Palin herself openly broke the law in refusing to testify before the state legislature, ignoring a subpoena on further spurious grounds, claiming that Alaskan law protected her from investigation while running for office, when it only protects her while running for state office.

But none of that stopped the investigation, or the report on findings due today. Clearly fearful of what it might say, the McCain-Palin campaign has announced that it is wholly unreliable. Because it is woefully incomplete. Because it doesn’t contain any testimony from Palin herself.

Because she refused to provide any when asked, and again when legally bound to do so.

Ye gods.

Proposition 8 is an initiative to amend the Californian constitution to prohibit gay marriage; the actual wording of the intended addition reads: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” I would argue the amendment, in addition to being hateful and immoral is also simply out of place in a Constitution, which is supposed to be about the rules of governance—how laws are made, how they are applied, who may vote, who may take office—and should not be a dumping ground for legislation that people feel strongly about.

Californians seemed to agree, since sentiment was moving against the proposition until a massive influx of out-of-state advertising money imbalanced the state discussion. The ad money went into deliberate misrepresentations like this one of the proposition’s intent and effect. In its usual fashion, the religious right conflates legalizing gay marriage with actively requiring every citizen to embrace it, and perversely treats protective legislation as an assault and bigotry as the defender of liberty. In particular, the ad treats a recognition of homosexual families in public schools as an assault on a parent’s right to teach children to treat homosexuality as a sin, and treats the arrest of a parent ranting and threatening and generally creating a scene on school grounds as somehow inappropriate.

If that argument holds true, then Alan Turner’s brilliant send-up is equally true. (Turner graciously granted Well participants license to pass his satire around, along with permission—nay, an implied request—to tidy up any minor errors of grammar resulting from the conversational way he simply tossed it off. I have done so, but his text is essentially intact here.)

So, my family was horrified to learn that they were teaching kindergarteners that in some households, people eat pork. I went to the school, and they said that eating pork is legal in this state. So I sat my ass down and said that I wasn't going to leave until I got some kind of an
agreement that they wouldn't teach my children that some people eat pork, because earing pork is a sin. When it was time for the school to close and I still wouldn't leave, they handcuffed me and put me in jail, as if I was one of those filthy hippie protesters that staged sit-ins back in the 60s.

I've been meaning to get around to that. In the meantime, thousands of children all over the country are being taught that some families eat pork and get by just fine, and that we should live among them and tolerate them. This affects all of our children. Think of the children.

Or, if you prefer, substitute how dreadful it is to tell kids that some people eat red meat on Fridays without ill effect, or that they sometimes carelessly step on insects, or that they shave, and how teaching such things cannot be tolerated in our schools, and the sheer audacity and silliness of the argument becomes clear. “They actually depict men who have trimmed their sideburns, when Leviticus clearly describes that as an abomination! Our schools must be forced to excuse children on days when a clean-shaven man, or a picture of one, is to be seen in class! Can you believe I was arrested for refusing to leave school grounds after closing time because no one would promise me that?!”

Or, conversely, consider what the ad would prefer: Homosexuals and homosexuality must never be acknowledged in school; they are unpersons. Homosexual families are not families and should enjoy no recognition by the state, nor legal protection of any kind as families. Children should not be allowed to recognize their real or adoptive parents if those parents share a homosexual marriage.

That’s a true assault on a parent’s relationship with a child, and has no place in our public schools.

The veep debate has come and gone, with little to show for itself. Palin disappointed the left wing by avoiding a diuplication of her meltdown in her Katie Couric interview, but that idea was always more hope than reasonable expectation. Biden likewise another outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease, although his reputation, too, is more a fantasy than a real equivalent to Palin’s visible ignorance, as the right wing would like us to believe.

Post-debate analysis shows a strong consensus: that Biden won the debate as debate, but that Palin sufficiently salvaged her reputation to score points, too. Her critics argue that this is only because the bar had been set so terribly low, and that by any objective standard Palin failed miserably. They are correct; being able to speak coherently is a mighty low bar for someone who may be asked to run the country, and if you parse Palin’s statements or try to connect them to the questions, you’ll find her speech almost entirely content-free. But such observations are rooted in a belief that voters are swayed by reasonable argument. Many voters are not, and the few remaining fence-sitters particularly reliant on last-minute impulse instead of parsing sentences and remembering the questions all the way to the end of the response.

I’d just like to make a point on which I won’t simply be repeating the mainstream opinion:

Palin’s deliberate refusal to answer questions is a disturbing habit. Observers familiar with her style before her vice-presidential candidacy point to the non-answer as the lynchpin of her debating technique, and indeed a common and useful tool for any politician. Palin takes it to new heights, however; I don’t recall her actually answering a single question, certainly no question she hadn’t decided to speak on before the debate started. One of the conditions of the debate was that there be no follow-up questions; this allowed her to get away with not answering, since host Gwen Ifill could not, by the rules, follow up with: “You didn’t answer my question. At all. So again, what would you consider your Achilles’ heel?” At one point, Palin didn’t merely dodge the question with verbiage, but explicitly stated that she would not answer the question, and would instead discuss what she preferred to.

That’s Palin’s style, and a contemptible one. But I think the problem goes much deeper than that. I think it’s representative of national Republican leadership, and of the corruption and incompetence that produced the crises on all fronts the country now faces. Dick Cheney is not the only one to express a belief in the past eight years that “I don’t have to answer your questions; I simply tell you how it’s going to be. I’m not answerable to the public.” Bush refused to answer questions before being elected, and people thought it was cute. He continued to refuse after being elected, and only then did people begin to wonder if that’s really what we want in a president, like the time he refused to share evidence of WMD with Congress, much less the American public, to allow them to judge whether another war in Iraq was justified. Rove refused to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Gonzales acquiesced to his, but refused to answer questions. DeLay refused to cooperate with criminal investigation. Guantanamo was designed as a place beyond the law, where no questions of any kind had to be answered, ever, if the authorities didn’t feel like it.

This “I’m not answerable to the public” premise continues, not just as unchallenged assertions of the past eight years, but in today’s headlines. Paulson’s plan began with a demand that his decision of how to dispose of $700B not be reviewable by any authority but his own. McCain refused to share his medical records, and, when that began to look dangerous, only let reporters see 3000 pages for one hour, in which they weren’t allowed to take notes. He still refuses to share his wife’s tax returns, after joining demands in 2004 that Kerry do so. Palin refuses to cooperate with a corruption investigation launched before her candidacy, deliberately misreading state law as a pretense of immunity.

That attitude is toxic to democracy. It’s time to treat any official, elected or appointed, who cops that attitude as an enemy of democracy. Starting with a refusal to elect or appoint them to any post.

So I was just thinking…

The $700,000,000,000 Wall Street bailout was packaged as something that had to be done immediately. We were facing a complete, irrevocable, and above all imminent economic collapse without a massive cash infusion to banks that had speculated unwisely and now faced ruin, taking the rest of the country with them.

Let us set aside some very reasonable skepticism towards the plan. Let us set aside the question of why banks deserved to be saved from their own mistakes while ordinary home owners did not. Let us set aside the Bush administration’s consistent technique of pushing bad legislation through Congress by declaring that the urgency of the crisis of the day allowed no time to debate or even examine its proposals very closely. Let us set aside the worrying admission of even the strongest advocates of the bailout that it might not work, leaving us nothing to show for our $700B. Let us even set aside the question of whether the very premise that ruin would follow if Wall Street were not saved from itself, at the taxpayers’ expense.

Grant that everything Secretary Paulson, and behind him, George Bush and the big financial institutions had to say: that stock prices would tumble and credit would freeze up without an immediate bailout. Grant hat immediate action was more important than wise action, because the crisis lay in confidence, and not in actual assets. The whole point was to restore the credit system immediately, before confidence evaporated, and to stabilize stock prices before a bull market got any traction. The bailout needed to do its work immediately or not at all.

Well…

Here we are week since the passage of the legislation—two weeks past the time limit Bush set for disaster—and I can’t help but notice that credit is still frozen up, and that stock prices are still tumbling. In short, the Paulson plan has failed.

Not “partial success.” Not “better than the alternative.” Not “still working its intended purpose,” despite Bush’s abrupt reversal of position, insisting that economic policy takes time to have an effect. Failed.

Given the failure of the Paulson plan, can anyone think of a good reason why we shouldn’t demand our money back?

From the never-knew-you-needed-this-product school of consumerism comes gamer grub. Yes, a snack food, or at least vaguely food-like snack substance designed for the special needs of the hungry gamer…whatever the hell those might be.

The ads suggest some ideas of why one snack food might be better than another for gamers: crumbs in the keyboard, for example, and vitamins for high performance. Also, it comes in an “ergonomic container,” because…um…because gamers might want to use the empty container as a cup to shake their dice, and you definitely don’t want to get wrist cramps that way. Or something.

Clearly this product hasn’t been thought through, beyond a desire to capitalize on an emerging market that some sales team heard about recently. Once you get down to the kind of fine-tuning necessary to distinguish food designed for gamers from all other kinds of food, the different kinds of games one might play must surely become important. Chess players, for example, would not need the boost to “signal processing and muscle reflexes for maximum gaming performance” the ads promise to the same degree as someone who goes in for first-person shooters, while they would need an extra dose of ingredients to enhance “cognitive processing.”

It’s unclear whether the different flavors take such differences into account. You have your choice of “action pizza,” “wasabi racing,” “strategy chocolate,” and “sports PB&J.” While it seems likely that such labels are purely a product of some marketing department dork dead set on pandering to gamers without actually being one—who else would seriously promote something called “action pizza”?—it is just remotely possible that the formulae of these products (not counting flavoring ingredients) are designed for these specific activities. In which case, if you like racing games but dislike wasabi, you’re out of luck. God help you if you eat “strategy chocolate” before starting a racing game; you might end up stuck at the staring line, thinking your plan through in those precious first seconds while other racers seize a commanding lead.

Or you could just stick with Mountain Dew and pizza, chock full of caffeine and carbs for a quick burst of energy, something to enhance your signal processing and muscle reflexes for maximum gaming performance. If you’re really serious about improving your performance, you could even try real food. You know, like carrot sticks or an apple or something. I hear they have performance-enhancing vitamins, and they don’t get crumbs in your keyboard, either.

I’ve noted before that I hang out online with some political junkies, mostly of a liberal stripe. Some of them are very smart—smarter than me, at least—and back their smarts up with direct political experience. Almost all of us, however, smart or otherwise, are bullshitters. That is to say, we offer pronouncements on things we know nothing about, such as the nature and identity of the real power making all the decisions, or what the next campaign tactic will be, or who will win an election by how much, or the deep-seated psychological motivations of political figures. Occasionally, a bullshitter will proclaim diametric opposites in the space of a week. Some people on the Well are nothing but bullshitters, but few indeed are immune to the urge to groundless pontification.

I bring this up in the context of one recent pronouncement of armchair political science: that the Powers That Be, which have been placing Republicans on the presidential throne for decades, have decided that there is more to be gained by losing this election and blaming the now all-too-apparent catastrophes of their policies on a hapless patsy, preferably a democrat. Like many conspiracy theories, it works backwards, begging the question by simultaneously explaining current events and citing those same events as proof of the theory. Notably, it cites McCain’s presidential campaign.

By this theory, McCain has been set up to take the fall for the inevitable Republican losses come November. He was never “one of us,” just some upstart who married into real money and influence. He sometimes put principle before loyalty, publicly questioning fellow members of “us.” So “us” felt free to set him up to lose, blame him for the losses in 2008, and come back fresh in 2012 with “one of us,” just in time for a public disenchanted with the pains of cleaning up Bush’s mess, and bamboozled once again into blaming Democrats for a Republican’s failures. McCain himself is too blinded by ambition, to driven by vengeance for how the party treated him in 2000, and possibly even losing his edge in the haziness of old age, to see how he’s being used. And if he happens to win, well, that’s okay, too—we have another cocksure know-nothing loyalist waiting in the wings to replace him…or, more accurately, replace Bush the lesser.

Well, maybe. It’s within the realm of physical possibility. It’s possible—even probable—that some self-styled cabal within the old boys’ network is thinking just that, but it’s far less evident that such a cabal is really calling the shots. More likely they merely comprise one voice among many in the inner circles of party strategy. I note particularly that the theory admits to no disproof, a reliable cause for suspicion. When McCain drops in the polls, the theory presumes he is meeting his destiny; when he rises, it’s merely part of the pretense of the election cycle, making it look like a contest. When McCain does something true to form for Rovian politics, it proves he’s merely following orders from the infallible political savant; when he breaks from Republican campaign traditions that have proven so successful since 1968, it proves he’s being left to his own destruction.

So no, I don’t believe it. If I did, I’d have to be equally certain that McCain’s dimming chances in 2008 are part of McCain’s own master stroke to lose the election.

See, for years, Maverick John has bemoaned the purging of ethics from his own party. The vicious smears it spread against him, one of their own, in 2000 finally made it clear to him that the party of Lincoln was so in name only. So John determined to make nice and get in nice and tight, the better to cause the national Republicans to melt down all the way. He groveled and gave George a big ol’ hug. He made kissy-face with those bible-thumpers in Oral Roberts. He started agreeing on financial deregulation, abandoned election reform, whatever it took to get the nomination. The way the Bush administration mishandled the military and openly embraced torture simply redoubled his resolve. And now, he’s throwing it all away, for everybody on the red side of the political divide. Events prove it: when his polls rise, it’s because he wants to make a credible showing; when they fall, it’s because he’s playing out his master plan. When he toes the party line, it’s just far enough to keep Congressional elections tangled with his; when he pulls a maverick maneuver, it’s designed to give right-wing apologists conniptions.

Pure bullshit, of course. But no less seductive a narrative than the McCain-was-meant-to-fail theory.

Don’t be distracted by the crazy theories. Just follow the candidates’ stated policy proposals, and study their records. And vote from there.

I was present at the birth of an urban legend. I enjoy a mailing list devoted to the Unknown Armies RPG, even though I’m not especially attached to the game itself. Like the game itself, the mailing list is a little too in love with the game’s tone, even at the expense of the explicit narrative philosophy that underpins it, and prone to endless variations on a rather narrow theme. But also like the game itself, some of the stuff on the mailing list is really, really neat.

Case in point is the tale of “Resusci Annie,” a head-and-torso doll designed for CPR classes. By the time Scott Dorward got ahold of the story, the rumor was already out that the designer had modeled it after his dead daughter, as an odd way of preserving her in human memory. If my memory serves, he did lose a daughter, but that had nothing to do with the Annie doll—no modeling, no renewed commitment to spreading CPR, just an unrelated event in his life. The model was a death mask of a Parisian drowning victim, possibly a suicide.

The UA list habitually digs up odd news stories, which it then seeks to interpret as a creepy scheme by some underground magician or another, usually starting with an act of pigeonholing into a canonical school of magic, rather than treating the ineffable wonders of magic and the limitless variety of human pathology with the originality they deserve.

Scott sidestepped that particular trap, and simply told a cautionary tale of meddling in magic, never mind the UA canon.

I loved the story. I don’t know how I’d turn it into an adventure, but it was fun to read nonetheless, and I shared it orally with a couple of friends, who were unimpressed—I bungled the telling. But apparently some other UA readers liked the story, too, and didn’t bungle the telling, or had the wisdom to cut-and-paste, because now it’s out there in the urban legend ether. I'm sorry to spoil it for those who want to believe, but it's nice to be able to trace an urban legend to its source; it happens so rarely.

Not that that will kill the tale. Like Annie, it will keep coming back no matter how many times it's shot.

Bravo, Scott. Bravo.

The veep debate has come and gone, with little to show for itself. Palin disappointed the left wing by avoiding a diuplication of her meltdown in her Katie Couric interview, but that idea was always more hope than reasonable expectation. Biden likewise another outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease, although his reputation, too, is more a fantasy than a real equivalent to Palin’s visible ignorance, as the right wing would like us to believe.

Post-debate analysis shows a strong consensus: that Biden won the debate as debate, but that Palin sufficiently salvaged her reputation to score points, too. Her critics argue that this is only because the bar had been set so terribly low, and that by any objective standard Palin failed miserably. They are correct; being able to speak coherently is a mighty low bar for someone who may be asked to run the country, and if you parse Palin’s statements or try to connect them to the questions, you’ll find her speech almost entirely content-free. But such observations are rooted in a belief that voters are swayed by reasonable argument. Many voters are not, and the few remaining fence-sitters particularly reliant on last-minute impulse instead of parsing sentences and remembering the questions all the way to the end of the response.

I’d just like to make a point on which I won’t simply be repeating the mainstream opinion:

Palin’s deliberate refusal to answer questions is a disturbing habit. Observers familiar with her style before her vice-presidential candidacy point to the non-answer as the lynchpin of her debating technique, and indeed a common and useful tool for any politician. Palin takes it to new heights, however; I don’t recall her actually answering a single question, certainly no question she hadn’t decided to speak on before the debate started. One of the conditions of the debate was that there be no follow-up questions; this allowed her to get away with not answering, since host Gwen Ifill could not, by the rules, follow up with: “You didn’t answer my question. At all. So again, what would you consider your Achilles’ heel?” At one point, Palin didn’t merely dodge the question with verbiage, but explicitly stated that she would not answer the question, and would instead discuss what she preferred to.

That’s Palin’s style, and a contemptible one. But I think the problem goes much deeper than that. I think it’s representative of national Republican leadership, and of the corruption and incompetence that produced the crises on all fronts the country now faces. Dick Cheney is not the only one to express a belief in the past eight years that “I don’t have to answer your questions; I simply tell you how it’s going to be. I’m not answerable to the public.” Bush refused to answer questions before being elected, and people thought it was cute. He continued to refuse after being elected, and only then did people begin to wonder if that’s really what we want in a president, like the time he refused to share evidence of WMD with Congress, much less the American public, to allow them to judge whether another war in Iraq was justified. Rove refused to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Gonzales acquiesced to his, but refused to answer questions. DeLay refused to cooperate with criminal investigation. Guantanamo was designed as a place beyond the law, where no questions of any kind had to be answered, ever, if the authorities didn’t feel like it.

This “I’m not answerable to the public” premise continues, not just as unchallenged assertions of the past eight years, but in today’s headlines. Paulson’s plan began with a demand that his decision of how to dispose of $700B not be reviewable by any authority but his own. McCain refused to share his medical records, and, when that began to look dangerous, only let reporters see 3000 pages for one hour, in which they weren’t allowed to take notes. He still refuses to share his wife’s tax returns, after joining demands in 2004 that Kerry do so. Palin refuses to cooperate with a corruption investigation launched before her candidacy, deliberately misreading state law as a pretense of immunity.

That attitude is toxic to democracy. It’s time to treat any official, elected or appointed, who cops that attitude as an enemy of democracy. Starting with a refusal to elect or appoint them to any post.