mdlake.net

Monday was my first day as a sub. To my (very mild) surprise, I cut my teeth on chemistry, rather than math of physics. My work day was only six hours—as a sub, I didn’t have to put in any time grading papers, preparing lesson plans, meeting with parents, or any of that extra stuff tax-sensitive critics fail to consider when complaining of a teacher’s short work day. Nevertheless, it was exhausting. Despite knowing the material far better than necessarhy to coach some classes through their make-work assignments and to explain the mysteries of significant figures to others, I was treading unfamiliar waters, and therefore unable to relax, not even for a minute. (The so-called “grading period” set aside for lunch, grading, meetings with students or parents, or whatever else needs doing was actually the worst. I’ll explain why in a moment.)

Fortunately, I got some good advice. The principal instructed me that morning not to take any crap from the kid. Here’s a pad of detention slips, plenty more if you need ‘em. If anyone gives you any crap, write ‘em up. Thankfully, I didn’t need any slips; the kids were mostly well-behaved, and I got even better advice from my dad, a skilled veteran.

Not any particular piece of advice, but rather the way he spoke and carried himself in telling stories of being a teacher all the while I was growing up, a bearing that helped him remain well-liked as well as keep his authority in class.

He won that authority, and learned his techniques, through a lifetime of good teaching; I was on my first day. So I mimicked him.

Not exactly. I tossed in bits of other teachers I enjoyed in high school, and even a bit of Marty, the best of the subs while I was a student at good ol’ EHS, later to become a full-time teacher there. Out of my depth all day, I got by as a teacher less by teaching than by pretending to be a teacher. By about 10:30, I recognized that pretense, at which point I got better at it. Knowing what I was doing made it possible to draw upon skills honed in decades of role-playing games.

Yes. I credit RPGs. Take them seriously, even as entertainment, and keep at them long enough, and RPGs function as a kind of poor man’s acting school. (Many gamers liken RPGs to impromptu theater, with good reason.) Convention games, where players usually receive pre-made characters on the spot instead of designing their own over a conceptual stage of days or more, were especially helpful; they taught me to adopt, with no preparation, a persona for four hours at a stretch.

That’s why I found the grading period the hardest part of the day. In the classroom, I was supposed to be a teacher, wear a teacher mask, walk a teacher’s walk, speak with a teacher’s voice. In the teacher’s lounge, I was supposed to be genuine, just me with other just people. And without that persona to lean on, I was back to my awkward self, never quite understanding how normal people operate in the realm of small talk.

Posted by at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maxis and Electronic Arts had a little problem with their much-ballyhooed Spore. The game had a bad habit of crashing in the final, space age phase as a result of trying to overwrite cosmetic details on planetary colonies too often.

I say they had a little problem. This is because they issued a patch to take care of the problem. Now they’ve got a HUGE problem with their much-ballyhooed Spore game.

The patch was anything but. Many, many Spore players, who trustingly installed the patch, abruptly found their game reduced to the software equivalent of a full-blown schizophrenic episode, contaminating all five phases of game play, along with the start menu. Invisible creatures, for example. These can have a detrimental effect on your chances of survival. Also sound effects playing at the wrong time. Minutes-long lag issues. Looping behavior, where a player can command his units to do something, and they make gestures appropriate to the task, but the task never gets completed. Clipping issues in all the editors. Screen freezes upon exiting an editor. Options and planets not appearing in the start menu. The only way to undo the damage is to clear out the entire game, including what may be hours of personal designs, and reinstall from scratch. (I understand even that isn’t working for some people.) This patch was poison. Radioactive poison. With razor blades in it. On top of all that, I’m told the patch failed to fix the original issue—not that I have any way of verifying that from personal experience. My computer is one of those in which the patch exploded.

But even that isn’t the HUGE problem. Software purchasers have been well-conditioned by years of Microsoft operating systems to accept catastrophic failure as “Just something that happens. Oh, well.” Patches are practically expected these days. We accept software with catastrophic performance we would never accept from, say, our cars or medications. No, the problem is that nobody at Maxis or Electronic Arts seems interested in fixing the problem in any way.

Several topics on the official Spore forums are devoted to griping about the meltdown and hunting for some way out. There has been no official comment, neither from Maxis nor from Electronic Arts, that anything is being done to correct the problem. There has been no official apology for the damage caused and the hours of work on custom-designed game elements lost. There has been no official comment so much as acknowledging a problem exists. No official comment at all.

That’s a problem. Because, as surely as the sun rises in the east, these companies were looking forward to selling expansion packs to the game, following the business model that worked so well for The Sims. Maxis fans identify with their creations to an insane degree. They will pay $40 just to be able to add just the right visual accessory to their alter-ego, and another $40 to buy the matching shoes, and another $40 on top of that for a selection of hairstyles.

But not if they can’t even trust new content to leave their creations intact. A spore-eating virus masquerading as a patch is frustrating. Blowing off the customer base it’s disrupted is not merely callous and disgraceful, but a lousy business practice as well.

Posted by at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m currently reading Bad Magic, Stephan Zielinski’s somewhat punkish tale of modern magic. In brief, hostile magical entities are all over the world, but because they rarely attack humans who don’t directly notice them, humanity has been bred to be unable to see magical phenomena. All except a tiny handful, whose third eye makes them prey unless they band together (as “the Opposition”) in guerilla operations against the monsters (the “Incumbents”). The story follows the adventures of one eight-person band of mages from widely disparate traditions who find themselves confronting a death cult that crosses their turf.

Despite the glowing praise on the jacket cover, it’s not very good—too choppy, especially in the crossfire of snarky dialogue (octalogue?) between the cabal’s members. Zielinski tends to fail in his responsibility to keep tabs on who says what. Also, there’s gratuitous ass-kicking of magical, non-magical, and hybrid nature: fireballs, knife-throwing, alchemical mortar rounds, anything that looks sufficiently badass on the page. And a bit of nonsensical sex, accompanied by a whole lot of sordid sex humor, like being compelled to have sex with a were-squid ex-girlfriend who won’t take no for an answer just to avoid blowing fictional claims of being a double-agent. And the story veers off into a huge region of down time right in the middle, while every mage gets some time to be weird in his own special magical way. Yeah, not very good. Bad, to put it bluntly.

Except from a certain, narrow perspective, from which it becomes rather interesting.

See, the whole novel reads just like a role-playing campaign, most especially something done with White Wolf’s Mage system. (Indeed, I half suspect Zielinski merely wrote up a campaign he participated in, with some judicious editing.) Not an especially good RPG campaign, but a very typical one, as might be generated by a group with above-average eloquence. A band of mages, check. Conflicting paradigms—shamanism, thaumaturgy, alchemy, voodoo, etc.—check. Over-the-top pyrotechnic ass-kicking in large doses, pursued with adolescent gusto, check. Little or no consequences for same, check. Juvenile sex humor, check. Smack talk, check. Oh, the endless, unrelenting smack talk.

If you’re a veteran role-player, or if you’re merely a dabbler with experience in Mage specifically, you’ll recognize a lot in this book that’s almost exactly like something you’ve done around a table littered with dice and half-finished pizza, right down to the irrepressible geek humor dialogue. And that just might make it worth your time. It might also be instructive for an outsider tempted but unsure about trying RPGs—this is what it’s like: wild swings between character development, action scenes, and banter, circling around a half-baked plot. Literature might be held to a higher standard, because a writer has time to think things through, and to go back and edit the parts he doesn't like. But this is very much standard for an RPG, which of necessity is always first draft.

Posted by at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The front-page headline of the day is the Wall Street meltdown and the questionable plan to bail out AIG to the tune of $700,000,000,000. The secondary headlines are all related news—for example, John McCain’s announcement that he does not intend to participate in the presidential debate scheduled for Friday. On first blush, it seems very presidential, very executive, placing the nation’s interests ahead of even his own political campaign, but his Democratic colleagues have their doubts, painting his refusal to debate as cowardice and playing politics.

Democrats would malign McCain’s decision regardless of circumstances, but perhaps there is something to the claim. McCain rarely comes off as well before a crowd as Obama, so he has proven reluctant to debate on principle. A debate in the midst of a national threat that can justly be blamed on his own stated fiscal and regulatory attitudes—just as Americans’ eyes are lit with vindictive fire over those attitudes’ consequences—could be disastrous.

Shall we examine the relevant evidence?

Exhibit A: Associated Press and MSNBC both report that it was the Obama campaign that contacted the McCain campaign in the hopes of joint, nonpartisan action on the bailout. Obama’s office called McCain’s at 8:30am Tuesday morning. He was unavailable, deliberately or otherwise, for six hours, time enough to prepare a press statement. At 2:30pm that day, McCain’s office returned the call to agree. Two minutes later, McCain was speaking to cameras, stating that he would be putting his own campaign on hold, the better to handle the crisis. Despite his protests that the economic meltdown is too important to play politics with, he spent six hours doing just that before making his stance public, and continues to do so now.

Exhibit B: Despite McCain’s protests that he would simply be too busy handling the business of the nation to appear in a presidential debate, he found time in his busy schedule to stop off in New York City to participate in a lightweight international conference, and to speak to hard-hitting reporter Katie Couric. The fiscal crisis is apparently more important than informing the nation about their choices of president, but less important than a photo op.

Exhibit C: Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, is also being withdrawn from the debates, despite having no official business in the Senate. No excuse has been given beyond ”We are part of the McCain-Palin campaign. It is one ticket.” Although Palin has proven very successful in rallying the Know-Nothing base, she has proved disastrous before less sympathetic audiences, and in political interviews. The McCain campaign is now going to extraordinary lengths to keep her from exposing any more ignorance before the camera, including cutting short a promise of camera time to little more than exchange of childrens’ photos. Now that Palin has proven unable to hold her own against hard-hitting investigative reporter Katie Couric and her sophisticated, media-savvy trick of asking a question a second time when it goes unanswered, any excuse to will do. As vice president, filling in for McCain when he is unavailable would be her job; this is a golden opportunity to demonstrate that she has the chops. But I guess not.

Exhibit D: McCain does not now, nor has he ever, led a sizable faction in the Senate, the kind of voting bloc which would likely need to be “brought on board” for any proposal. McCain is a Senatorial loner; it’s part of his “maverick” mantle. Nor does McCain bring any particular financial insights to the effort to craft a responsible response to the crisis; by his own admission, he knows little about economics, and relies on his financial advisors, advisors such as Phil Gramm, who, like McCain himself, have built their careers on expanding irresponsible economic policies.

Exhibit E: McCain has not voted in the Senate for the past five months. (Obama has not voted for the past two.) Understandably, he was busy with his presidential campaign. But, if McCain puts the national economy first, he should have been working those five months to avert the unsurprising crisis, rather than making political hay from it.

Is McCain placing national crisis before his own election? What do you think?

Postscript
Exhibit F: By all accounts, McCain showed up to the White House meeting where he had nothing to say for forty-five minutes, until prompted by Obama, showing actual bipartisan spirit. McCain attached himself to a caucus of obstructionist House Republicans—House, not Senate—ostensibly as their leader. You would be forgiven for concluding the obstructionists object to the expense of the bailout, or to the lack of oversight. The House is designed to be sensitive to the immediate will of the people, and the populace is angry at any notion of another bailout, not to mention one this big and this free of accountability. In fact, the caucus refuses to cooperate in the bailout without significant deregulatory legislation attached, along with even more regressive tax laws. It seems McCain has found once again that he is, at heart, a deregulator.

Exhibit G: Having helped to prevent the passage of any response to the financial crisis—which may be a good thing, but directly contrary to his stated purpose—McCain has decided that he is, after all, available for a presidential debate without passing any emergency legislation. Congressional deal-makers from both sides of the aisle blame McCain for torpedoing progress, and are happy to see him go.

Posted by at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

God, I wish I’d thought of this first. I’ve got writer’s envy. I planned to join in the laugh today, but before settling in for this essay, I got some sobering news.

The party’s over. Forget the $700B bailout; forget the Republicans’ sudden discovery that maybe regulation has its place in the economy after all; the American hegemony of the 20th century is over, as the British hegemony of the 19th century ended with WWI. It’s China’s turn.

We’ve spent the past thirty years running the country on debt. When the fortuitous but essentially unnatural hyper-development we enjoyed after WWII ran its course, we continued to spend as though we were the only major power with its economy intact, which simply wasn’t true. We pushed federal bonds, and when those ran out, we turned to foreign investment. When that proved insufficient, we emptied social security savings, paying current costs hand-to-mouth with current salaries, and even began to eye current salaries with the insanely risky idea of investing safety net funds in the stock market. We drew more debt to cover neocon tax cuts. We stopped building and maintaining our infrastructure and turned them into corporate welfare. And when vital services began to fail, we started selling off national assets—highways, schools, health care—to private interests to scrape up a bit more cash.

I’ve seen the meme bantered about lately that we’re the richest third world country in the world. There’s something to such a claim. For example, we pay more per capita for health care than any other industrialized nation, yet receive the poorest health service among industrialized nations. We rank near or at the bottom of industrialized nations for education, slashed to hide our growing debt. We’re developing some other nasty symptoms of third world-ism, too: increasingly centralized news services which grow increasingly compliant with government, overt cronyism in the highest levels of government, a national leader who seeks to draw all power directly to himself and to insulate himself from accountability to the populace. Private military forces.

But China’s announcement makes the idea of becoming a third world nation frighteningly official-sounding. Since the fall of communism—the forgotten second world—the dividing line between the first and third world, the haves and have-nots, has been that the first world has always been in a position to tut-tut at failed third world economies, while the third world has always turned to the first world for more charity, only to waste it on corruption and cronyism.

It’s galling to see China pulling the plug on our sick economy, motivated by its own interest, but viewed in a contest of “tough love.”

Posted by at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m seriously beginning to question the proposed $700 billion bailout of AIG and other imploding investment firms. Not the specific talking points of how quickly it should be done, or whether to trust Paulson without oversight, or whether any of that bailout should go into generous retirement packages for CEOs of distressed firms, nor even whether $700 billion is an accurate price, but whether it should be done at all.

Consider:

We are told that, without the bailout, the national economy will collapse. No one can place any specifics on the nature of this collapse—who will bear the greatest cost, how great that cost will be (including how it compares to $700B), how quickly it will strike—just that it will enter an open-ended collapse and the end of the world, and that we have to do something about it now-now-now! Without thinking it over! This same argument brought us the war in Iraq, and the PATRIOT Act, both of which proved…regrettable, in hindsight.

On the other hand, we’re told that shelling out $700B will stem the collapse...probably. Remember, the financial wizards predicting the collapse were telling us just two weeks ago that bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would stem the crisis. Probably. And bailing out Bear-Stearns would do the same two weeks before that. And that everything was fine two weeks before that. There’s not much reason to trust the predictions of the end of the world. Asked whether the taxpayers would see value for their money, that’s what Paulson himself had to say, after an uncomfortable pause: “…Probably.”

So the choice seems to be between giving nearly a trillion dollars to demonstrably bad credit risks and crossing our fingers, or not paying them nearly a trillion dollars and crossing our fingers.

I dunno. I’m not financially sophisticated. The jargon seems designed to make the subject opaque. (In fact, it often is. Refer to the scam artistry that went into the adjustable mortgages behind this crisis, or the bundling of bad debt into diffuse packages that compounded the problem.) Wiser heads than mine have sought and failed to unravel the often irrational behavior of markets. Still, admitting my ignorance, that second option is looking better and better to me. Maybe we can even set that $700B aside—if it can be found in the first place—for actual emergencies as they develop, involving real people and real houses instead of fictional people (corporations) and paper assets.

Posted by at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The bulk of my letter to my representatives in Congress. God knows whether it will do any good.
----------------------------------------
In the atmosphere of panic surrounding the current financial crisis, we must be more, not less, careful in our reactions. The White House proposal for a $700,000,000,000 bailout for Wall Street, and the urgency with which it presses for adoption without due thought, reeks of corruption.

In particular, section 8 of the proposal is unconscionable. In requiring that:

“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,”

the proposal requests a sum of money roughly equal to a third of the entire US annual budget, refuses to report how it is spent, and demands a guarantee against prosecution for possible misuse. In short: “Give me seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached, right now, or else. In return, I will spend it.”

This would be foolish in a healthy political climate; to grant such freedom from legal accountability or even public scrutiny to one of the engineers of the crisis, which was born primarily from a removal of legal accountability and public scrutiny, would be insane. Nonetheless, I understand that our representatives in Congress, terrified by the same White House scare tactics that brought us Iraq and the PATRIOT Act, are considering just such an emergency measure.

Greed, for money and for votes, has broken our nation’s finances, and is breaking our democratic institutions. I urge you to take this crisis as an opportunity to reassert Democratic values of government accountability and progressive financial policy in our national discourse. It is not enough that Congress reserve the power of oversight for the money it spends. Congress must also aggressively wield that authority to maintain transparency and accountability to public interest.

As a lifelong Democrat, I have resisted a growing belief that there is little practical difference between the parties. Such loyalty has become increasingly difficult over decades of capitulation to insatiable conservative demands: regressive tax measures, military adventurism, removal of vital corporate regulation, and erosion of constitutional rights. Capitulation on a $700B bailout without oversight, and without substantial compensation from the corporations which receive it, would be the final, irrefutable proof that my elected Democratic representatives do not and will not defend my interests in Washington. It is not enough to speak in protest before approving the bulk of the proposal; responsible officials must craft a sensible response to the crisis from scratch, with considered and open scrutiny.

In hope and anxiety,
Michael Lake

Posted by at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This needs to be bellowed across the rooftops, and bellowed until it is impossible not to hear.

The financial crisis created by irresponsible bankers has become serious; the bankers themselves now stand to lose money. And of course they have the ear of the president, for whom nothing is too dreadful to contemplate if it aids the very wealthy…not even socialism. The White House is screaming imminent doom if something is not done to save the banks and the speculators from their own bad investments. The plan is to give them seven hundred billion dollars to cover their losses.

Seven hundred billion. A seven with eleven zeroes after it: $700,000,000,000. Roughly a third of the annual federal budget.

That’s a metric shitload of money, and even if we do shell it out, there’s no guarantee it will work. It better be spent wisely, don’t you think? We’d better take a good, hard look at how that money is to be spent before signing it over, and keep a close eye on it afterwards.

But Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and the conservatives generally, don’t agree. Using the same scare tactics that brought us the war in Iraq and the PATRIOT Act, the White House has flung a proposal to Congress, announcing its expectation that it be signed by the end of the week. Not much time at all to think things through, they agree, but there is no time! We have to act now! Or we’re all doomed! Just hand over the $700 billion right now! Or else!

This is deeply wrong on many, many levels. Paulson is one of the architects of the crisis we’re in, and as recently as a month ago, promised it would remain contained in the housing market, just as he now claims $700 billion will contain the crisis now. Not a very reliable voice on how to address the problem, especially not under the current administration, which has made denial, secrecy, and outright lying lynchpins of its governing style from day one. By all accounts, the Wall Street meltdown was created precisely through the removal of accountability from our financial system, as our president and his crew have worked to remove accountability from all levels of government. Laws regulating the kind of risky lending and outright fraud that underlie the meltdown were removed, or, if that proved impossible, their enforcement neglected. If we’re to hand $700 billion of our money over to someone, it should surely not be the guys asking for it now. And if we must hand it over to these crooks, then we must surely hold them accountable for every cent. But that’s not the Bush proposal. I call your particular attention to Section 8:

“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.”

This sentence needs to be hammered home. This needs to be front-page news: White House plan designed to swindle nation out of $700 billion dollars.

In slightly less legalistic language, Section 8 reads: The Secretary can use the money however he wants. No one can call upon the Secretary for an accounting of how the money is used. If such an accounting is leaked and any objections are raised, neither Congress nor the courts nor any legal authority may prosecute anyone for misuse of the money. No one can hold the Secretary liable for how he uses the money, for any reason whatsoever. Paulson could tuck all $700 billion, one third of the annual budget, in his back pocket and walk away. He could spend it all on golden parachutes for his buddies in Goldman Sachs. He could spend it on cocaine and whores. He would not have to report how the money was spent, nor would he be liable for prosecution if he did.

Paulson, of course, will protest that he wouldn’t do any of those naughty things. The national economy needs saving. But think: if Paulson believes that the national economy is in such imminent peril, if the fallout would be so bad that we should simply fling $700 billion at it in the hopes that that money plugs the gap—a strategy conservatives swear won’t help our schools, or our environment, or a hundred other ailing institutions—then why would he publicly call limitations on the severance packages of senior management for the failing banks, packages to be paid with public money, “a deal-breaker”? Paulson considers saving the banks more important than the US budget, but he considers the pay of top financial executives, such as himself, more important still.

Don’t trust this man with a nickel.

Posted by at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Neil Gaiman weaves a complicated story in Anansi Boys. I’d like to write here about a particular scene therein, but it will be difficult. I don’t want to get anything away for those who want to read it yet, but I have to explain some complicated background. Here goes:

Anansi the spider, trickster-god of West African folktales, is dead, although even now some doubt the fact, suspecting one of his many tricks. Still, his nemesis Tiger plans to take advantage of the situation by killing off Anansi’s bloodline. He calculates that when he does so, all the stories of the world will become his once again, and, with them, the world will be remade in his image, a world of savagery and terror. It was once so, when the stories were all Tiger’s, but Anansi tricked them away from Tiger long ago, since which time all stories have been Anansi’s, and the world has been about cleverness and gluttony and having a good time. Anansi has two sons: Fat Charley and Spider. Fat Charley is a kind-hearted loser, nothing like his father, while Spider is cunning and self-assured and greedy, the very image of Anansi, and has inherited all Anansi’s godlike powers.

In the scene I want to address, Tiger has trapped Spider in a magical world parallel to our own, where causality is ruled by symbolism and metaphor, rather than natural law. Spider has been staked out as a blood sacrifice to Tiger himself, although he has laboriously pulled himself free of the stakes and collected a few stones to hurl. Still, he is nowhere near safe: he is exhausted and pained by the ordeal of exposure; his ankles are twisted and swollen from the bindings, too painful to stand on properly; and his favorite weapon, his tongue, has been torn out, lest his cunning lies win the day once again. Tiger could slay him effortlessly. Still, Tiger is cautious, burned once too often in his dealings with Anansi, and circles in warily. Also, he can’t help relishing Spider’s fear and helplessness, and taunts the god’s son with his plans to kill Anansi’s bloodline and retake the stories.

I hope that’s enough.

Now, I’m not Spider. I’m not the son of a god, nor supremely self-confident, nor possessed of miraculous powers. Still, I imagine the speech I might give in Spider’s shoes if Tiger tried to pull this metaphysical shit on me. (This rather presumes I have one advantage over Spider in this situation: Spider can’t give a speech at all without a tongue. Not being the son of a trickster god, I generously presume my tongue would not be torn out in the first place.)

“Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, Tiger. So you think it will be that easy? Maybe so. I’m just one man, and a rather small one at that, with no more at hand than one of these stakes and a handful of throwing stones. Not enough to take down a tiger, eh? So why are you still lurking in the long grass? I think I can guess why.

“That isn’t how it works here, is it? A single tiger, with its steely fangs and its razor claws could always kill a single man. But here, on this great magical plane at the beginning of the world, you’re not a single tiger; you’re the symbol of all the tigers, all the great cats, all the great beasts man has feared, and the savagery of the whole world. Very impressive. But then, by a similar token, I’m not some scared and exhausted little man.

“I’m MAN.

“Or, in this enlightened age, I suppose I should say ‘humanity.’ The master of creation.

“Oh, you may have claws and teeth, Tiger, but I have steel and gunpowder and Uranium 238. You may be swift, Tiger, but I ride in carriages and locomotives and spaceships that circle the earth faster than you can reach the watering hole. You may be savage, Tiger, but I poison the countryside, and I war on my own kind, and I hunt your kind for sport. I whipped you and your kind when I first came down from the trees, when I stopped being Monkey and remade the world in my image. Today I have marvels, but even then, with nothing more than my wits, and a few pointy sticks and a few stones, I whipped you.

“Well, I have a few pointy sticks right now, sticks which you’ve graciously furnished to stake me down. I have a few stones; I’ve got all the stones it takes to bring you down. And I have my wits, wits enough to stare you in the eye and relish in the art of speech. So come on, Tiger. Come on, if you dare. Let’s see whether Tiger of bygone times has learned how to stand up to Man with his sticks and stones and wits, or whether I’ll beat you a second time, and this time beat you right off the face of the earth. Because if there’s one thing Man can’t abide, it’s a competitor for mastery of creation. And if you dare challenge me this second time, then this time, I’ll make good and sure you’ll never be able to stand up and challenge me, or do anything else for that matter, ever again.

“Well? I’m waiting.”

Oh, yeah. It’d work.

Posted by at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning’s (morning by local time) BBC news broadcast paused to remind us that difficult decisions in US immigration policy, especially as it relates to illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, are still around, even if they have dropped from the headlines. So, too, it seems, are entrenched attitudes. Despite my generally liberal mindset, I have to take umbrage at some of the plaintive pro-immigration cries.

“They [illegal immigrant] aren’t criminals!”

Um, hello? By definition, illegal immigrants are criminals. They crossed international borders in secret. There are many good reasons to monitor national borders, including blocking contraband, preventing the spread of diseases, catching fugitives. You don’t need to have a prior criminal record to justify monitoring at the border; the immigrant might know he isn’t a drug-running serial killer with the ebola virus, but the federal government does not, and must spend inordinate resources chasing him down when he refuse to pass legally through the figurative gate. Nor, for that matter, is more labor beneficial to the country—maybe it is, maybe it isn’t in an era of increased automation, but immigration advocates can’t claim with certainty that immigrants are nothing but good news for the country’s economy. The US is a sovereign power. It has the right to decide whether you can come in; you do not.

Beyond the tautological, illegal immigrants earn wages in the US without paying taxes. Making money is the whole point of being here, after all, for an overwhelming majority of them. Failing to pay taxes, too, is illegal, and with good reason. Taxes pay for services we all use: fire safety inspectors, road services, military defense (albeit a military often abused of late to pursue political objectives), subsidies to the cost of emergency medical care. Not to mention services of direct interest to the immigrant worker, like safety inspectors who monitor working conditions of field hands and construction workers. Even if one makes so little, or enjoys so many deductions, as to owe no money in taxes, filing provides useful data to the treasury, and the US has every right to demand an income tax return.

Not to mention a host of crimes directly related to illegal immigration: driving without a license, for fear of exposure at the DMV; keeping kids out of school for fear of exposure in the public education system, or putting them to work in violation of child labor laws out of a desire for more money; life-threatening safety violations in living quarters; abetting employers who illegally skirt minimum wage laws, concealing horrors like sweat shops and forced prostitution.

I can sympathize with a desire to earn money for a desperate family. I can even sympathize with the way desperation might make workers decide he can’t wait for due process and take the time to pass through the system as so many have before them. But they break the law doing so, and I have little sympathy for those who feel it’s unfair to pursue, prosecute, and punish them. Break the law, and you have no complaint when you get caught.

There is much to criticize in US immigration policy, both policies which work to the benefit of illegal immigrant and those which work to their detriment. Underfunding immigration offices out of a desire to curb taxes, or even as a shameless way to let cheap labor slip in to the benefit of political supporters. Occasions of police brutality, or bribe-taking, and insufficient policing of the police. Racist bias in the legal immigration process.

Then, too, there are problems with immigration policy which allow for no complete solution. If an illegal immigrant brings his children with him, should the children be educated at someone else’s expense, or ejected from schools for their parent’s sin? Because immigration law must choose between the horns of several ugly dilemmas, there will always be room for criticism.

No doubt much anti-immigration legislation is backed by some ugly people, racists and nationalists and religious bigots. You can find assholes backing the wisdom of Solomon if you look for them.

None of these make the act of monitoring or limiting immigration wrong. Illegal immigrants, like any other criminal, consider themselves above the law, or at least above specific laws they find personally confining. Unsurprisingly, they make enforcing the applicable laws difficult, no matter how kindly those laws are designed. Inevitably, harsher methods are used when gentle ones fail. That does not make harsh laws hateful, just a necessary second choice.

Illegal immigrants themselves may not live in denial, but those who speak for them often do. I tire of the worn-out defense of illegal immigrants as victims of the law, and not violators. Literally millions of people enter our country legally every year, and I welcome them. I’d be happy to accept most of the illegal immigrants, too, if they went through legal channels instead of deciding unilaterally which laws don’t count when applied to themselves.

Posted by at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Wall Street continues to melt down, mainstream news media are doing a pretty good job of covering the stories as facts, instead of the disturbingly common he-said-she-said approach to politically sensitive news these days. Hurrah! I’m seeing very little speculation as to what, oh what could have caused such problems; instead, news services are pursuing the obvious line that sweeping deregulation—or more accurately, deliberate negligence of necessary government oversight—is responsible, and seem prepared to remind us who embraced such negligence as a matter of public policy.

It’s easy, and entirely just, to pin this on Bush and his pals, especially since they’re so unpopular these days. It’s also easy to pin the crisis on Wall Street greed, and some blame deserves to fall there, too, although feigning surprise that Wall Street is motivated by greed would be a little silly, and news services generally aren’t bothering. More pleasing is the way news services are pausing to question John McCain’s newfound desire for regulation and to remind us that McCain has for years trumpeted himself as anti-regulation. They are also asking, over and over, why some institutions are being bailed out while others are not, especially why banks and speculators are being bailed out while homeowners are not. This is the “Hey, wait a minute” reaction which is the raison d’etre for mainstream news, which was so disastrously lacking during the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004, and prior to Little Georgie’s Big Iraqi Adventure.

So I have little to add to the mainstream discussion of the banking crisis. People are already sticking to the important talking points. But I would like to repeat to a particularly telling line from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson that isn’t getting quite the attention it should.

Asked why the Fed decided to bail out Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, but left the Lehman Group to founder on its own bad investment, Paulson could have offered a variety of answers. He could have pointed out the semi-public nature of Fannie and Freddie; although not strictly publicly owned, nor (in theory) backed by public money, they are chartered for a public service of facilitating home and college loans, while the Lehman Group is purely a private concern, aimed at making money, money, money instead of more heartwarming concerns like home and education. Paulson could also have alluded to the respective sizes of these interests; although bailing out a large interest is, by definition, more costly than bailing out a smaller one, the fallout from Fannie and Freddie’s failure would have been far greater, too. Or Paulson could have claimed, truthfully or otherwise, that Fannie and Freddie were the first, that failing financial institutions was not yet clearly a growing trend, that further bailouts would reinforce the moral hazard of government rescue of speculators, and that bailing them out may have seemed less risky to public interests at that time than bailing out Lehman did at this time—although such a claim would later have undermined the current decision to bail out insurance giant AIG as well.

Instead, Paulson explained the decision to let Lehman Group die of its poor investments precisely as a matter of the abruptness of the downturn—according to CNN Money: “Lehman, Paulson said, was different from Bear Stearns. He argued that Lehman had been spiraling downwards for months, and that the investment bank, its creditors and investors had time to prepare for a shock.” In short, Paulson felt that speculators had time to get out and leave someone else holding the bag, while the news of Bear Stearns, or Fannie and Freddie, were too sudden for the speculators, or, worse, the upper management, to duck their losses.

When an investment interest suddenly turns south with little or no hope for recovery, its various shareholders are in a race against time and against each other: who can dump his shares first and minimize his loss before the rest dump their shares and drive the price still further. CEOs and other senior managers are obviously in an advantageous position in this regard; they have direct access to the data before it becomes public. Large speculators are also fairly well off in this regard; they watch their investments full time, and follow moves with second-by-second reactions. Small investors are virtually helpless. They have neither time nor resources to watch every investment so closely; many don’t even know in detail where their investments lie, beyond being part of a mutual fund package or a retirement package. On top of this disadvantage, unscrupulous management can really screw the small investor in creative ways, as Enron did when it froze employee holdings in Enron itself to buy time for upper management to get out first.

Delaying the news of an investment company’s failure, or clouding the waters with rumors of a bailout, compounds this problem. While small investors are still busy trying to figure out whether they are exposed and guessing whether rumors of an upcoming bailout are reliable, and whether such a bailout will have an appreciable impact, large investors, who stay on top of such minutiae and are conversant with the legal niceties of financial jargon, move. Paulson’s belief that “everyone knew” about Lehman’s sinking fortunes “for a long time” may be true for major investors, for whom a week is a long time. But it surely isn’t true of small investors, who may only check monthly or annually on their retirement plan, if that. Paulson’s attitude, that quick collapses must be covered, while slow collapses are all right, reflects once again an attitude that public funds should insure the large speculator’s private investments, but that small investors’, along with their homes and retirement funds, are nothing more than fuel to be burned in order to keep an overheated economy alight just a bit longer.

Posted by at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By the curious route of watching actual nuclear engineers chatting about nuclear energy safety, I came across this test this morning, a fifteen-question multiple choice test on some kind of emergency procedure involving nuclear material. Do yourself a favor, and go take it; it’ll only take a couple minutes. Yes, I know it’s probably all gibberish to you; it was all gibberish to me, too. That’s okay. Indeed, it’s part of the point. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Back? Right. How’d you do?

Presumably a nuclear safety inspector or nuclear engineer could understand the test, even if acing it would require specialized knowledge even within the field, and could make intelligent guesses about the bits he didn’t know by rote. Probably a nuclear physicist, or even an engineer conversant with safety standards in another field could make some educated guesses, too. But if you don’t fall in any of these categories, you’d have to take the test by blind guesswork. Me, too.

Nevertheless, I scored a 73%—11 out of 15 correct, using no more knowledge than what little I retain from high school chemistry, well above the 33% mark you could expect from truly random selections. Of the four I missed, the correct answer to three of them was my second choice. Maybe you did better than I did, maybe you didn’t, but I’d be willing to bet you beat 33%, because it’s possible to psych a multiple-choice test, succeeding through techniques aimed at taking advantage of the knowledge that you are taking a test.

To illustrate what I mean: question #7 asks which of two reactions might take place. Notice how your options are phrased. “All of the above” is often a safe choice, especially if the subject is moralizing about civic virtue or safety. Beyond this, the answer that both might occur comes with qualifiers: both might occur, if steam is present. It’s more carefully parsed, and it takes more variables into account. Now it’s possible that a cunning test designer might create a question with just such a trap, but it’s much more likely that the qualifiers are necessary for accuracy; if the answer isn’t phrased just right, it’s incorrect. Knowing the correct answer must be unambiguous, I went for that one. Score!

To take another illustration: consider the worst-case scenarios for immediate and long-term deaths in questions #12 and #13 as a unit. So far as we ignoramuses know, any of these numbers in isolation could be the answer. But the two questions together, and the range of possibilities, suggested to me that the questions were designed to reinforce an important lesson, which often happens in trade tests. In this case, the test wanted to remind the engineer that radiation is a slow killer, or at least check whether he understands this basic principle. In either case, the first answer had better be smaller than the second, probably a lot smaller. So I guessed the minimum 10 immediate deaths and the maximum10,000 long-term deaths. Score! Again, a cunning designer could set up questions to turn guessing techniques like that back on the test taker, but if you’ve got nothing to go on, psyching a test is better than nothing.

That’s what makes this test so interesting for people outside the nuclear safety profession. The data is so obscure—the actual nuclear engineers mentioned in the opening paragraph took the test for fun and pointed out that accurate answers would require specific technical data like the size and construction of the tank—that almost no one could answer the questions with actual understanding. That makes the test a useful tool for demonstrating how to take a test so as to score higher than you deserve, or, if you like, testing your ability to do so.

Those tutoring services that propose to improve your ability to take standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, or GRE know what they’re talking about. It’s definitely possible to raise your score, often dramatically, without learning anything more on the test subject. Of course, learning the subject in the first place is preferred, but a little educated guesswork comes in useful.

Posted by at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With three rounds of Spore under my belt, I feel I have enough of a grasp on the game to offer meaningful first impressions, minus an opinion on the final, terraforming section—a very, very annoying bug has twice prevented me from moving any farther than the spaceship piloting tutorial.

Three rounds is the minimum for complete experimentation, because each phase presents a series of repeated choices between pacifism and militancy:

• As a bacterium, do you choose to eat plant matter, or to attack and devour other microbes?
• As a large creature, do you eat fruit and socialize with other species (attacking or avoiding the implacably hostile), or do you kill them for their meat?
• As a primitive tribe, do you socialize with other tribes through music and bribes of food, or do you kill them and raze their huts?
• As a nation-state, do you trade with your rivals and buy them out, or do you conquer with engines of war?

Either way, every new conquest accomplishes the same thing. First, you move along a progressing scale towards evolutionary advancement, entering the new stage once you earn enough points. Second, you gain whatever accessories—body parts or tools—your target guarded. Periodically, you’ll want to drop into the editor and update yourself with these new accessories and the bonuses they provide.

Most screens offer a third, compromise option between peace and war: creatures can equip a (pricey) omnivorous mouth. Religious nations conquer through propaganda instead of arms. Or you can buy redundant body parts, like a carnivorous mouth and an herbivorous mouth below it. Again, the game slightly discourages such compromise, simply because it’s much easier to max out the accessories for one technique or another and stick to it; hybrid body parts offer much inferior bonuses, and redundant mouths are expensive.

Or you can mix the pacifist and militant strategies; you can, for example, raze one tribal village and make peace with the next. The game tends to discourage this, however, because loading up with accessories for one strategy means neglecting accessories to help with the other. Unless you want to trot home and reconfigure your accessories after every encounter, it’s much easier simply to use the same technique over and over again. Although you can reconfigure frequently, if that’s your cup of tea—see below.

Not that you’ll need to, if it isn’t your cup of tea. From surviving the primordial soup to conquering the world, Spore has proven very easy. I accidentally completed one level without buying or equipping a single accessory. Simply forgot that my Mesolithic tribes could wear masks and hats and feathery belts to improve their chances, and they just kept right on winning. Nor is there any need to mix strategies. Just about every approach works just fine. Sing for your neighbors and hand them shiny beads, and they’ll obligingly roll over and submit to your cultural superiority. Pelt them with venom or spears or atom bombs, and they’ll obligingly roll over and die. Any challenge must come from self-imposed handicaps: can you make it through this level without any upgrades, or with a purely peaceful strategy, or never making left turns? Can you make it through an entire game without dying or losing a single city? Can you take out every species in alphabetical order?

While the challenge is almost nonexistent, even on “hard” difficulty, this makes the game wholly accessible. Anyone can sit down and make it from euglena to space alien in one colorful, quirky go. They’ll make less-than-optimal decisions along the way, but that’s no real obstacle. For creatures, even death is a temporary nuisance, rendered toothless by an identical replacement born on your demise. I’m told that losing to barbarian neighbors in later stages is permanent, but I’ve never seen it happen, never even came close, even in my first, “what the heck am I doing?” game. You can relax and fool around to your heart’s content, because fooling around won’t lead quickly to an ominous “You Lose” screen.

There’s a lot to be said for that approach, because the creature, building, and vehicle editors are a triumph of accessibility, and worrying about using them to win would interfere with the joy of using them to design. While not, strictly speaking, doing much for Spore as a game, the editors promise plenty of fun for players more interested in how they look than in how well they play. Like the Sims but better, Spore offers a complete, easy-to-use package of self-decoration, from cilia for a cell to death rays for a flying saucer. Without a lick of talent, you can design perfectly decent game elements just by sticking to the basics, but if you’re incurably ashamed of your esthetic sense, Maxis makes it easy to access and appropriate the designs of some clever, creative people. Every creature, building, and vehicle you design to play with is dumped into a vast online database; you can just riffle through those by a variety of search criteria and take what you like, and others can ooh and ahh at your own handiwork just as easily. The editors do an amazing job of allowing, nay, forcing you to identify with your creations, and to care how they look as well as how they function.

The decisions you make in game are likewise not strategic, but esthetic: Do I want to dance at my neighbors’ feast, or on their bloody corpses? Do I want to be a fanged, two-headed snake-beast, or a fuzzy, twelve-eyed caterpillar with feathers? You can be anything you like, do anything you like, and—with the possible exception of some of those super-amoebas in the first stage--Spore will do very little to challenge you on the way.

It’s pure Maxis—in ways both good and bad. The point is less to figure out how to win than to wear a great outfit while you do it. Barbie Dolls for Darwinians. That’s a two-edged sword: “serious” gamers will achieve every goal within a week and drop Spore like yesterday’s newspaper, probably with a grouse about how they expected so much more after all the hype. Such complaints are a little silly; anyone reading the press could see the likelihood for Spore to be a beautiful lightweight, although I confess I’d hoped for, if not actually expected, better integration of the game’s five phases. “Casual” gamers will find a lot to like, even love, about it. This is less a game than five mini-games, roughly as deep as something you could get from PopCap Games, designed with more charm and higher production values than five mass-produced Tetris clones could manage.

Posted by at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spent the entire day on Spore yesterday. Eileene, too. I won’t discuss it in detail yet because I haven’t made it past the floundering stage, but my first impression is that it’s vintage Maxis: colorful and accessible, but shallow. Never cleared the imposing hurdle of integrating the five phases tightly, and ended up with the five disjoint minigames everyone feared.

But that didn’t stop both of us from spending the day on almost nothing else. I didn’t write (“Yesterday’s” essay was actually written this morning), didn’t do any housework. I hardly looked up until past dinner time, when I slipped into the kitchen and quickly fried a salmon filet. Supper itself took about fifteen minutes, and then it was back to the shiny, glowing monitor. My only other activity that day was taking my daily walk shortly before bed, when I realized my butt hurt from sitting too long in one position.

Eileene was much the same, dragging large portions of her nest out to my room where she could watch my game as well as play her own. The arrangement was helpful for sharing observations, since Maxis maintains the long tradition of inadequate rulebook and in-game tutorial, and a much of “how to play” must be picked up by stumbling across elements. (And hoping you aren’t so busy with the action elsewhere on screen that you miss it. Two heads are more likely to spot such details than one is.) She didn’t indicate any interest in eating, either, or in her fandom chat addiction. Neither of us showered or dressed properly.

Gamer paradise: blowing off an entire day on a fresh new game with high production values. The only way to improve the activity would be to eat junk food all day, even if it meant a junk-food hangover today.

Posted by at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I noticed a new design feature on fire hydrants in Philadelphia during my parents’ visit last week: the bolt that holds the cap on the mouth of the pipe has been changed from a pentagonal to a roughly triangular cross-section.

“Huh,” said I to myself, “I wonder why they would do that.” A pentagonal bolt has been the standard for fire hydrants for a long time, all my life at least. Retooling would be expensive, and might occasionally cause problems with mismatched equipment; there must be a good reason to change the design. Fortunately, for me, I recognized that roughly triangular shape immediately from my mathematical readings, and I’m pretty confident the answer lies therein.

Start with an equilateral triangle. Now, using a compass with its centering foot on each of the vertices in turn, draw three 60° arcs, one for each vertex, connecting the other two vertices. The result is a “fat triangle,” a roughly triangular shape with its sides bulging outward. That “fat triangle” is the second-simplest (after a true circle) of what are called “shapes of constant diameter.” Most shapes’ heights change as they rotate: a square, for example, of one inch per side, would be a little over 1.4 inches high if tipped up 45° onto a corner to look like a diamond. Shapes of constant diameter are different; no matter how you roll it across a flat surface, the highest point will always be found at a fixed distance from the surface. Imagine whittling a dozen pegs with that “fat triangle” shape for a cross-section and rolling them back and forth across a table. The pegs would visibly wobble as they rolled, the center of gravity rising and falling, but the highest point would remain a constant distance off the table. You could set a crate on top of those rollers and roll it smoothly back and forth, even as the rollers themselves wobbled beneath it.

The “fat triangle” isn’t the only shape with this property. Analogous shapes exist in higher dimensions—you could construct “fat pyramid” ball bearings, for example—and can be constructed from different polygons and can be constructed with more complicated curves than simple circular arcs. They also have some other interesting properties, like the ability to drill non-circular holes. But the “fat triangle” is the simplest shape to imagine, and the simplest to construct.

So what does this have to do with fire hydrant bolts?

The bolts on fire hydrant caps are deliberately designed to be difficult to open—difficult without the proper tool, at least. If it’s too easy to open, then any old rube can open one for a bit of fun: petty vandalism, or a poor man’s bathing fountain. Unfortunately, doing so causes serious safety problems: open fire hydrants lower the water pressure throughout the system, and a fire hydrant that’s desperately needed to put out a fire somewhere else in the city might not work if others are opened irresponsibly. That’s why the bolts used to be pentagonal: most wrenches are hexagonal, and the man in the street wouldn’t be able to use his wrenches on a pentagon. (And because a pentagon has an odd number of sides, heavy pliers don’t work very well, either.) Firefighters carry specially designed pentagonal wrenches so that, in theory at least, only they have access to the hydrant.

A few years ago, however, we saw a new kind of wrench introduced. You may have seen them advertised on local TV ads as a gimmicky one-size-fits-all wonder product, capable of turning stripped nuts as well as both English and metric sizes. Essentially, these miracle wrenches consisted of an angled collar and an off-center lever; the collar fit around the nut, any nut that wasn’t too large, and the lever would pinch down until it found purchase on an odd corner, and the nut could be turned. The television version might have been a cheap rip-off, but better-made and more expensive wrenches using the same principle turned out to work pretty well on damaged, oddly-sized, or oddly shaped nuts, so they began appearing on respectable tool racks and in a wider range of sizes, including a version that could turn a pentagonal bolt.

Suddenly, fire departments needed a bolt that could defeat the new wonder wrench. The “fat triangle” came to the rescue. Because it’s the same width from any angle, it’s as good as a circle to the wonder wrench: you can set one corner of the bolt into an angle of the collar, but then the lever just slides around the opposite edge as though it were a circle. There’s no odd corner for it to find purchase on.

That’s my working theory, at least, and I’m satisfied with it. Not bad for a bit of out-of-left-field recreational mathematics trivia.

Posted by at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning (New York time), BBC featured an interview with Trent Lott. Lott was, and is, one of the primary architects of the culture of corruption in Washington generally, and in his party specifically. Happily, he’s no longer Senate majority leader, or even in the Senate at all, resigning abruptly in order to spend more time with his family. A desire to move to lucrative lobbying jobs before legislation requiring a waiting period went into effect had nothing to do with it, nor did ongoing investigations into illegal handling of his campaign finances. Sure. Sadly, he’s still with us as lobbyist and advisor of this and that, a senior voice in the Grand Old Party.

Trent had some surprising things to say, notably that his party had made a lot of mistakes in the past eight years, that it had been arrogant, and that it was responsible for the distrust the American people feel toward it today. Hardly a surprising revelation, but positively astounding coming from his lips. In particular, I was shocked to hear Lott adopt a pleading tone as he promised the Republican party had reformed, that it would get things right this time...just elect them and they’d be really, really good now.

A truly absurd claim, of course. I rolled my eyes and chalked it all up to a party that has grown to used to a world voters accepting that black is white, war is peace, and freedom is slavery…or not, all according to the neocons’ momentary needs.

Until, over lunch, a Republican speech writer on Leonard Lopate talked up almost exactly the same point, that Republicans were really fed up with the way they’d been betraying the public trust for so long, and had determined to turn over a new leaf. That it would be really, really good now, with McCain’s election, that America could trust Republicans this time, really, really, cross my heart and hope to die…just elect them again and they’d prove it. Two really, really weird and desperate-sounding campaign messages couldn’t just be coincidence.

So I hopped over to CNN, and, sure enough, that’s McCain’s talking point. He blew the “experience” play with his choice of running mate, so his campaign is reduced to begging for one more chance. Seriously. CNN political headlines read: “Cindy McCain: Trust John.” And “McCain sincere, short on answers.” And: “McCain: Stand up and fight with me” as he reforms Washington and puts behind us the bad old days of Bush. Another mouse click, and I got to McCain’s acceptance speech, wringing hands over how Washington had lost the trust of the American public, but promising that we—McCain and his lot—are GOING TO CHANGE THAT, which I suppose is where the talking point started.

McCain is breaking that promise right now; he’s been doing it his whole campaign. Remember his attempt to renege on the decision to accept public funds and the concomitant restrictions? Remember his promise to run a respectful campaign? It was McCain who went negative first, and did it full-bore when he took Karl Rove on as his campaign advisor. (Even now, Obama’s campaign remains civil, if icily so.) Remember his promise to put country first? Kos has an excellent observation on McCain’s first presidential decision: choosing, with only days’ vetting, an untried running mate, who he’d previously met only once, to replace him should anything happen to this oldest potential president in office, even as he worried aloud that a second-term senator is simply too inexperienced for the office, just to score a few, possibly imaginary, angry woman votes is the very antithesis of putting country first. Even now, he promises to correct the failings of the Bush administration while vowing to magnify its signature policies: a regressive tax code and military entanglements in the Mideast. Oh, and he’s also eager to offer more subsidies to big oil.

Obviously all this can’t be true at once. There is only one possible conclusion: McCain is lying, as are his staff and adherents. He’s lying right now, as he says you can trust him. His campaign staff and adherents are lying right now as they air an explicit message that we can at last trust him and his party. It’s like that old TV ad where Joe Isuzu hooks himself up to a lie detector, and it explodes when he finishes his spiel with an unctuous “See? You can trust me.”

When Lott spoke to the BBC, I desperately wanted the interviewer to ask, “So, what policies and statements of the past eight years do you think justify such distrust toward the Republican party? Specifically.” The question went unasked. But we may get our chance yet. If the McCain campaign really intends to run with this slogan of “You can trust us now. No, really,” begging for swing voters to believe that he won’t be like bad old days of Bush II even as he promises the Republican base that he’ll be just like Bush II, then let’s make a point of asking exactly what he and his supporters believe make little Georgie and his friends so untrustworthy. The subsequent contortions should be amusing.

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As if I needed any more reminders that I don’t understand politics.

My fundamental problem is an inability to digest the notion that people overwhelmingly believe what they would prefer to be true over what actually is true, or, failing such absolute knowledge, what enjoys the support of evidence and reason. Even when I recognize the principle intellectually, it undermines my predictive ability: once you grant that people will act irrationally, there’s still the question of which irrational direction they’ll bounce.

But I’ve learned that people vote with disastrous frequency according to narrative, even wholly fictional narrative, of a politician’s personality instead of policy analysis. Witness the persistent belief that the Reagan years were years of economic growth as well as groundless optimism. (They weren’t. And Carter’s administration, surprisingly, was a period of economic growth.) Witness the election of Bush the lesser, or even moreso, his re-election.

Which is why I came out of a five-day parental visit and consequent isolation from the news to react with horror to Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech for the vice presidential nomination. I’d had enough news exposure to learn she’s a religious crackpot and a fan of the “personal loyalty” style of government, and the cynicism of the move to capture the disgruntled Clintonite vote is obvious to all. Still, the hail Mary pass to an untested governor currently under investigation for corruption charges seemed to have paid off, big time.

…or did it? Here’s the source of my confusion:

Palin certainly delivered her speech well. Though I despise almost everything she had to say, she’s a terrific speaker, and brought the house down, precisely the kind of energy that John “you cunt” McCain’s campaign needed to survive. I firmly believe the suggestion to cancel the Republican convention as Gustav approached was grounded in a desire to duck the looming embarrassment of low turn-out and McCain’s doddering speech. McCain’s greatest weakness is the complete lack of enthusiasm from the right (resentful over his past failures to march in lock-step with the neocon agenda) coupled to the complete lack of enthusiasm from the center (suspicious over his current move to do so). This shouldn’t have an impact, but it does: he’s boring to watch. Palin gave McCain just what he needed: enthusiasm from his base and a pleasant if wholly counterfeit world view the center can buy into, just as long as it doesn’t stop to question the facts…a duty it has consistently failed to meet for the past generation. She also seemed to deliver just what she was chosen to deliver, tapping directly into the image of a woman prepared to beat men in a man’s game, just the thing to win the angry pro-Hillary PUMAs. Again, this only holds up if you don’t look too closely: Palin is a polar opposite to Clinton on actual policy measures. But Palin’s delivery was expert, delivering the prepared soundbites with aplomb, and my stomach sank to hear it, and to hear the cheers it elicited.

And yet…across the board, political polls show a sizeable spike in support for Obama after her speech, and almost nothing for McCain. As happy as I am to learn it…WTF? Maybe the PUMAs are better at aiming their anger than I gave them credit for; certainly some registered anger at the cheap move to win them over by selecting a woman out of left field with little other visible qualification, but it’s impossible to know how representative the angry remarks I read were of PUMAs generally. Maybe the general populace is smarter than I give it credit for, seeing in Palin charisma but a promise of just the kind of loyalty-before-competence principle and shameless courting of the right wing nutters that have proven so disastrous in Bush the lesser. Maybe they just didn’t like her sharply partisan tone; maybe they found it growing nasty after the first two or three jabs. Could we really see that much smarts from an electorate that put Bush in office for a second term, much less a first one? I saw enthusiasm on the floor when Palin spoke. Why didn’t any of it show in the polls?

I don’t get people. Facts and reason don’t seem to accomplish anything in politics. Neither does it seem possible to predict elections by treating the electorate as a vast pool of dimwits and crazies moving by some crazed Brownian motion. Or even by the preferred model of several reliable camps separated by a lubricating flow of unpredictable swing voters. How frustrating, then, to find myself and my country so vulnerable to the folly and downright insanity of a voting public that defies analysis, much less direction. It’s almost enough to make one despair of democracy.

But sometimes, in defiance of all cynicism, the ball bounces in a healthy direction. Such bounces sustain hope for justice in the future. Let it be so.

Posted by at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the whole, I dislike theater, and really dislike musicals. It’s not that the art form is somehow deficient, but rather that all art forms have their strengths and weaknesses, and the particular deficiencies of this particular art form are significant to my personal tastes. While there are exceptions, I generally dislike the artificial speech and behavior stage performances demand: enunciation, sidling about while facing the audience, exaggerated passion, that sort of thing. Musicals intensify such artifice with three-minute songs spent repeating the gist of a conversation which is itself redundant, the chest-clutching “I want” song, even more exaggerated passion.

So it means something when I say I really enjoyed Avenue Q, which we watched with my parents as they visited over Labor Day. In short, it’s Sesame Street for twenty-somethings, with a mixed human/puppet cast addressing the anxieties and triumphs of a generation past learning it’s A-B-C’s: paying the rent with a liberal arts degree, finding a girlfriend/boyfriend, coming to terms with the persistence of racism (as opposed to noble efforts to stamp it out). And it ends with the same reassuring message: you can handle this.

Maybe it’s because I’m still struggling with the hurdles most of us clear by our late twenties, but I enjoyed the open recognition that life often sucks, that it often fails to live up to the expectations of our childhoods (expectations often learned from Sesame Street), but that it’s still worth it. Maybe it’s just easier to accept puppets behaving in almost-human fashion than it is to accept human actors speaking and moving too stiffly so as to be seen and heard in the back rows. But I enjoyed the musical for more than the shock value of seeing Bert and Ernie and the Cookie Monster (or their close analogues) say “fuck” and otherwise being naughty.

And yeah, the humor relies heavily on the shock value of Bert and Ernie and the Cookie Monster saying “fuck” and otherwise being naughty. That can be fun, too.

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