January 2009 Archives

I love Failblog. It satisfies my real though unseemly need to feel superior to my fellow man. Hell, reading it would feed anyone's need to feel superior to his fellow man. They come in several broad categories: inappropriate or accidental messages, bad engineering, officialdom run amok, extreme klutziness and extreme idiocy. I draw the line at laughing at people maiming themselves, which appears all too often in Failblog, but short of that, the extreme idiots are my favorites. Current favorite: a flyer looking for the owner of a found "cat"--not very friendly, not housebroken, and clearly an opossum even in the Xeroxed photo.

A couple days ago, Failblog featured a chat group post by a woman concerned for her son, and I can't stop thinking about it. Lately (in the time frame of the post), her son has been withdrawn from the family and unwilling to go to church, which is bad enough. On top of that, she recently found magazines with pictures of naked men hidden in his room. Her conclusion: her son is concealing a girlfriend from her, a girlfriend who brought the magazines into his room, and with whom the son is having intercourse. The mother is worried her son will get this mystery girlfriend pregnant. What should she do?

Clearly, the first thing she should do is stop worrying about a pregnancy. To everyone else but this poor, befuddled mother, her son is gay and, unsurprisingly, hasn't shared this fact with her. It takes a special kind of stupid to overlook the blindingly obvious like this, and yet...

Stupid isn't really the operative word here, is it? The mother's grammar isn't the best, but she's nowhere near the incoherence to be found on the internet. Given the church reference and her blind spot for homosexuality, we might imagine her to be a bible belter not normally given to critical thought, but that presumes rather a lot. She may indeed be stupid, but the source of the stupidity in her post isn't native stupidity. It's denial. So strong is the impulse to deny the possibility her son is gay that she makes five implausible leaps in rapid succession, a huge, wobbly tower of interlinked fabrications:

1. She concludes a priori that the porn must belong to someone else.
2. In the absence of a likely candidate, she fabricates a girl out of thin air. Presumably, she concludes it's a girl because, you know, who else would be interested in pictures of naked men?
3. Because she's never seen any evidence (other than the gay porn, of course) of any girl, the mother decides her son must be hiding one.
4. To explain why her son is hiding a girl (and to reinforce the belief he is not gay), she presumes they're having sex on the sly.
5. Because her son must be having sex with an imaginary girl without parental supervision, she worries that he'll cause an unwanted pregnancy. Apparently, he can hide a whole girlfriend, but not a pack of condoms.

To my mind, substituting anxiety over an unwanted pregnancy isn't any better than anxiety over her son's sexual orientation. But such is the power of homophobia, along with a raft of similarly indefensible prejudices. Such is the power of denial, and our ingrained urge to believe what we would prefer to be true, instead of what is objectively verifiable.

I rail against faith a lot in this journal: religious faith, economic faith, jingoistic faith--any kind of faith, really, but especially faith as a refuge for beliefs which are demonstrably wrong or hurtful or (most often) both, beliefs which cannot be defended in any other way. The hope is that people can be made to understand simple truths, if they're explained clearly enough. Items like this Failblog entry make me despair of this idealized principle. If this woman can find gay porn in her son's bedroom and conclude he's about to get a mystery girl pregnant, how are we ever to overcome the notion that God wants us to punish the infidel, or that cutting taxes for the rich makes us all better off, or that America is the best place on earth and has a right to rearrange the world in its own image, when such beliefs are backed by a huge and effective propaganda machine? Such battles can never be completely won; there's always that crazy 27%. But on bad days, I find myself fretting that the way to bring people around to healthier policies is not to reason with them, but simply to supplant one faith with another.

I had my attention called to a new game called this morning. It's pretty neat at first glance; I won't be able to give it a proper examination for a while. (Busy, busy, busy.)

Many have noticed that, despite all the talk of desire for bipartisanship in Washington, Obama's bailout package passed the House of Representatives today along party lines. Of the 178 Republicans currently in the House, precisely zero voted for it, despite its inclusion of tax cuts Obama did not want to back, and reductions in spending he wished to include. These concessions were made over the complaints of his fellow Democrats, who feel a certain amount of payback is due, in the hopes of cutting across party lines--you may recall that was a central theme of Obama's presidential campaign.

Well, he delivered on that promise. And it still didn't work.

Republicans--more specifically the Republican leadership at the national level--are fundamentally unappeasable. They view compromise as a sign of weakness. (As indeed it is, when dealing with the unappeasable.) Concessions by their opponents are simply taken as the new position from which to bargain, and the redefinition of the "moderate" or "center" position begins immediately. When Republicans controlled the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court in their triumph under Bush the lesser, "bipartisanship" meant "making concessions to the majority, without consideration."

When Bush called for the deceptively named "No Child Left Behind Plan," and Democrats objected, he offered to listen to their complaints and suggestions. Then he urged the Republican majority to pass his own plan, without Democratic input, which they did. When Bush called for a massive reduction in taxes for corporations and the very wealthy and Democrats balked, he nodded briefly and urged the Republican majority to pass his own plan, without Democratic input, which they did. By the time Bush demanded extraordinary and unconstitutional powers under the PATRIOT act, he had grown bolder, and simply ignored protestations from the opposition, and relied on Republican hawks to push it through, which they did...shamefully, with the support of Democrats who were scared of looking weak.

Now that Republicans are a discredited minority, "bipartisanship" means "giving the minority everything it wants, as an act of good will." Even if what the minority wants is a magnification of the failed policies of the past decade or more, which failure is directly responsible for the turnover the Republicans have just suffered in White House and both houses of Congress.

Obama and Congressional Democrats have been elected with a mandate--not a sweeping mandate, perhaps, but a mandate nonetheless: Stop doing this! Stop wrecking the economy for the benefit of the wealthy few. Stop colonial conquest. Stop treating law enforcement as optional when it comes to finance. Stop farming out vital government functions to campaign contributors. (I'd like to believe the mandate includes a call to stop the slide from essential civil liberties, but I don't. This is about money.)

Finally, Democrats seem willing to stand firm. The most powerful reason Republicans have turned into such bullies is that being a bully has worked very, very well for decades. They bullied their way with the infamous "contract with America," they bullied their way into Iraq, they bullied the PATRIOT Act through, they bullied their way through contempt of Congress charges. And Dems have let them, which makes me question their newfound commitment. Maybe Dems are hiding behind Obama, and it will only last as long as Obama's celebrity. Maybe they're only going to be elated as long as the election's afterglow lasts. Maybe they'll only find the guts to hold the line until some new terrorist act rekindles the cries for military adventures and undermining the Bill of Rights.

But, while it lasts, I'm happy to see that nascent spine growing. And I hope they take the latest example of Republican refusal to compromise, ever, under any circumstances as proof that, for the foreseeable future, there is nothing to be gained by seeking a middle ground. In time, if the right wing continues its crusade for ideological purity, it may marginalize itself to the point where fair-minded conservatives lo longer look to neocon leadership. Then, and only then, is compromise likely to be productive.

Let us look forward to that day, but let's not kid ourselves that it has arrived.

I learned today of a file package that can replace the voice on a GPS system with the voice of GLaDOS. For those who don't recognize GLaDOS, that's the pathological computer running the human lab-rat experiments in the five-star über-awesome computer game, Portal. Sort of like a female version of HAL from 2001, but funnier.

She provides voice-over instructions of a sort for navigating the human-sized (and often fatal) lab-rat mazes/puzzles. The lines are laden with euphemistic doublespeak, sarcasm, transparent lies, and, once the experiment goes awry, abusive taunting. It's some of the funniest material I've encountered in a game:

• "The Enrichment Center is committed to the well-being of all participants. Cake and grief counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test. Thank you for helping us help you help us all."
• "As part of a required Enreichment Center protocol, the previous statement that we would not monitor the test area was a complete fabrication. We will stop enhancing the truth in three...two...*bzzt*
• "We are pleased that you made it through the final challenge where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are very, very happy for your success. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Please place the device on the ground, then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party."

The best lines aren't even worth repeating here; they depend too much on the buildup of running gags about cake and your weighted companion cube. But trust me, they're worth it. And for anyone who's been through Portal, instantly recognizable. Getting the twisted GLaDOS version of "turn left in 500 feet" or "recalculating route" would be terrific.

Sadly, I don't know where the files can be found, nor whichGPS system(s) might be able to employ the voice. The account didn't include that much detail. Our GPS is a service on Eileene's cell phone--generally handy, although it's impossible to call someone without turning off the GPS, which can make getting directions past a bit of confusing GPS glitch tough. I wonder if we can get GLaDOS on her phone. That would be awesome.

The first nominal week of classes as I pursue a teaching certificate are over; now the homework begins in earnest. Three classes, three papers--assigned on Friday, due today. I hope the work load won't pile up quite so unevenly throughout the week as the term progresses, but I rather expect it will.

As a result, I'm rather pressed for time today, and have to keep it brief. I just want to comment on one of the first reading assignments.

It reads like the work of a visionary who hasn't actually been out in the field, teaching. Presumably he has, though I can't be positive; some few academics might go directly from Ph.D. to launching grand new programs. The introduction complains of the dehumanizing "factory system" of education, which he likens to the mass production of an assembly line. And he has a point: sometimes the limits of our basic teacher-class-lecture format is squeezed into rigidity. But he goes too far; his solution to the one-size-fits-all education is to restructure every subject into individual education, aimed as much as possible into direct, sensory experience, leaving mere instruction behind--an entirely different one-size-fits-all form of instruction. Speaking as a student who learned readily from lectures, that seems rather presumptuous.

But more to the point, school systems simply haven't the resources for individual educations. Perhaps if aliens swooped by and zapped the voting public with a mind-control ray that compelled them to support education before all other budgetary considerations, we might be able to afford it. But as things stand, schools are perpetually pushed to cut corners, drive up class size, abandon "non-essential" subjects like civics (!) for the three R's, because it's cheaper that way, and too many people have been infected with the "all taxes are bad; all government is bad" mental virus since the rise of Reagan in 1980.

More individual attention means better performance. Period. Consistently, smaller class sizes produce better educational results--whether measured by grades, standardized test scores, college matriculation, you name it--in studies designed to examine such questions, almost independent of the specific educational model employed. If we could divert the resources necessary to enact the plan I had to wade through in this week's reading, we might find the plan itself unnecessary.

Reminiscing about The Prisoner television series got me to look up the Wikipedia entry to see what collective wisdom might be found there on the strange program. One thing led to another, and eventually I stumbled on a site devoted to The Simpsons, where I was able to watch the entire episode of "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes," in which Homer gets a computer and turns to internet rumor mongering, only to be kidnapped and bundled off to the Island in an extended parody of The Prisoner when he accidentally gets one wild rumor right.

It's an odd episode, finishing without the usual back-to-normal conclusion, which The Simpsons typically does only in its Halloween specials. Which are terrific. And which, happily, I could also watch on the site, because it's got all...what? Twenty seasons? I won't share the address, because it looks sorta sketchy. Copyright violation is probably involved, and I'm not spreading that around.

I find the rest of the series is somewhat hit or miss, though rare indeed is the episode that doesn't pull at least a grin somewhere. But the Halloween specials are different. In the annual Treehouse of Horror episodes, the people behind the show feel free to just cut loose and do whatever the hell they want. To hell with continuity, consistent characterization, or anything else--if it's funny, it's in. Not funny, out. Why does Mr. Burns have a foot-long snake tongue in the Fantastic Voyage parody? Who knows? Who cares? It's funny.

In that respect, The Simpsons has much in common with Monty Python, which is credited with being such a pioneer largely for its funny in, not funny out attitude. Sketches ended abruptly, because the Pythons didn't want to waste air time on substandard jokes just to bring sketches to some kind of conclusion. Surreal interruptions punctuated the show because they didn't want to waste a good joke simply because it didn't fit the rest of the sketch. The Pythons drove BBC executive nuts by refusing to stick to a recognizable format, and deliberately muddying the waters by imitating other shows at times that could confuse the audience, just because it was funny.

The result for both programs is a generally superior level of comedy. If nothing else, they score points by being surprising.

Color me astonished. The Bush pardon list, which I expected to rival Clinton's infamous final act, has come to nothing: the commutation of sentence (but not pardon) for two border patrol vigilantes. Nothing for the legal architects of Gitmo, nothing for the torturers, nothing for the warrantless wiretappers, nothing for John Woo, nothing for Rumsfeld, nothing for a whole lot of people who look increasingly culpable. Nothing naming specific names, nothing naming specific behaviors, nothing for general categories (c.f., Lincoln's pardon towards Confederate rebels), nothing for unspecific behaviors (c.f., Ford's pardon towards Nixon). Nothing.

This is especially odd now that the press corps, less cowed by disappointingly successful White House tactics, almost daily turns up more material suggesting explicit culpability, and now that presidency and both houses of Congress are in the hands of Democrats without a commitment to overlook Republican misdeeds out of party loyalty. If our leaders can stick to their promises of accountability, people--big people--can go to jail.

Why Bush should choose not to provide the cover of pardon is an interesting question. I've heard several theories:

1. That effective pardons would be dangerous, either to Bush himself or to close friends: Bush couldn't offer pardons without exposing too much in the pardon itself.
2. That effective pardons would be dangerous to Bush's legacy, and he values that without caring a tinker's damn whether any of his staff or their underlings go to jail.
3. He considers pardons unnecessary, believing nobody has the will to pursue investigations to conviction.
4. He truly believes he and his staff, from Cheney and Rumsfeld on down, did nothing wrong, and that pardons are therefore unnecessary.
5. He has issued pardons, but they're secret pardons, hidden from public records ostensibly for security reasons, to be revealed when and if necessary.

Personally, I subscribe to theory #2; it would be perfectly in character for the eternal child of privilege. But I wish #4 were the true reason. If the new administration proves to have the will after all, the irony would be delicious. I would love to watch creep after creep go to prison because their puppet believed their press all to well. It could happen.

Perhaps that's why Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) is leading the efforts to block Eric Holder as attorney general. Holder explicitly informed the Judiciary Committee that he considers waterboarding to be torture. Cornyn and others want to prevent Holder from taking office without a promise not to prosecute those who took part in that torture. He argues that the Military Commissions Act provides immunity from prosecution if agents believed they were acting lawfully: "there were provisions providing immunity to intelligence officials based upon good faith and what they understood the law to be." As if it were possible to torture in good faith. At least eight prisoners died under torture at Guantanamo.

It's a pretty sleazy position to take, especially after the US had Japanese officers executed precisely for waterboarding American soldiers in WWII. As the Nuremburg trials judged, "I was only following orders" cannot be an acceptable legal defense. But holding the attorney general hostage to a promise of immunity for crimes against American law and against humanity is reprehensible under any circumstances.

And these circumstances particularly call for crimes to be prosecuted. US citizens have suffered repeated violations of constitutional law under Bush; US reputation abroad has suffered under repeated violations of international law. The only way to begin repairing that damage is by shining a lot of light into some very dark corners. Please let it be so. Let Holder be confirmed; let him pursue charges as far as the law allows; let Obama give him the power to do so, rather than seeking compromise and conciliation--there is no conciliation with totalitarian thugs. And let Holder offer Senator Cornyn the reassurance that the DoJ will only pursue guilty parties, and will only do so within the limits of the law. Then Cornyn can take comfort in that loathsome platitude he and his kind have handed American citizens for generations as their fundamental rights were trampled: "The innocent have nothing to fear."

Of course, that may be precisely what worries Cornyn and those he hopes to protect.

Despite having much to celebrate, along with the rest of my country, I didn't really feel much interest in the inauguration ceremony yesterday; I'm just not a party guy, I guess. Because there won't be any particular consequences of the inauguration itself, it didn't seem like proper news. But I did listen to, and later read, a transcript of the inaugural address, traditionally the point where the incoming president can set the tone and direction of his administration, after the threat that saying the wrong thing will jeopardize his election has passed. (Although saying the wrong thing may yet jeopardize one or more pet programs, the danger is nevertheless much reduced.)

Obama didn't reach some of the oratorical heights of earlier speeches, which is a shame for the word-conscious, but touched on all the right points: our economy is screwed up by individual greed and collective cowardice; solutions can be found, but not quickly or painlessly; our greatness does not entitle us to dictate to the world; an end to the ideology of small government; a pledge to respect Islamic nations and to aid poor nations; a departure from Iraq, where we have no business, while remaining in Afghanistan, where the threat was real.

I have to question his claim that a choice between safety and our ideals is a false dichotomy; really living up to our ideals would mean a decline in our safety. There is no way to eliminate the threat of terrorism without embracing a draconian state. His promise of an end to compromising ideals for expedience sounds a little hollow, too: Obama promises to bridge ideological divides, which pretty well demands compromising ideals for expedience, and isn't representative government all about compromising ideals for expedience in the first place? But I take his point that the excesses of the past eight years--torture and indefinite arrest without charges, for example--are over.

What was missing, and what I had sought most eagerly in the speech, was a promise to hold accountable the criminals of the past administration. I can't say I expected such a promise; doing so would run counter to Obama's general tenor or consensus and conciliation. But a commitment, if not an explicit promise, is vital.

Accountability cannot simply run forward. If there are no consequences for corruption, the corrupt have nothing to lose by trying. Even after getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they will return to try again once the heat is off. The villains behind the Red Scare were back to contribute to Watergate; those who were behind Watergate--those who were not prosecuted and jailed, at least--were back for Iran-Contra; those who were let off the hook for Iran-Contra were back for Guantanamo. They have no shame, no compunctions, and only a dim sense of fear. Letting them off the hook, again, simply reinforces a sense that "we can get away with it, or, at the very least, have a good chance of getting away with it and no reason not to try."

Prosecuting the people behind Guantanamo torture, warrantless wiretaps, no-bid contracts, politicizing the DoJ, and many crimes besides isn't revenge; it's justice, and sound prevention.

I find myself with reason to try to learn "Ochi Chernye," a ballad which has become something of an unofficial anthem for Russia. You'd recognize it if you heard it.

The haunting melody would make a fine tone-setter for our current half-baked campaign, a quickly conceived stop-gap we're employing to keep busy until someone is ready to take over properly as GM. The lyrics can also be taken out of context in a useful fashion:

"Dark eyes, burning eyes
They implore me into faraway lands"

and

"I see a triumphant flame in you"

can be taken as a metaphor, not for a lover's bewitching glance, but for the seductive dangers of a kind of super-coal in a steampunk world, capable of building and fueling miracles even as it poisons the spirit of the world in which it is burnt in a myriad of disastrous ways.

But boy damn is it hard to learn, and I say that as someone with a knack for languages and verbal memory. The words don't seem to line up with the song's meter. The diphthongs are tortuous and torturous. "Zghuchiye"? "Gde"? "Vstrechal"? Apparently, Russian includes words like "v." Is that supposed to be pronounced as a separate word sans vowels, or slurred into the next one, as it seems to be in YouTube performances--and if it's supposed to be slurred into the next, how do the tongue and lips move easily from v to zhizni? Chinese is hard: my American ear can't always distinguish sounds in Chinese. But Russian goes beyond, becoming unpronounceable even when my ear can hear what it should sound like. It seems to be some kind of demonic tongue not meant for human pronunciation.

...which could also serve as a kind of metaphor in this campaign, although I'm pretty sure that so fine a detail will be lost in the general weirdness.

Predictably, the news is chock-full of coverage of the Obama inauguration. I don't begrudge the celebrants--neither the chilly citizens crowding D. C., nor the talking heads crowding the airwaves--their celebration, although I cannot yet bring myself to share in it. In addition to a changing of the guard, we may well be witnessing the end of an era, and none too soon.

Along with the inauguration hype, the news is filled with equally predictable retrospectives. If you can bring yourself to watch them, you may be disturbed, as I was, to re-examine the depths of the disaster that was the Bush administration: the scandals of the first two or three years, which have been forgotten as the administration's behavior has gotten steadily worse, every few months seeming to top its brazen disregard for propriety or even the rule of law. Such retrospectives are worth watching, if only to overcome an apparent limit to the number of outrages a human mind can hang onto at once.

Three that affected me:

Keith Olbermann--not my favorite commentator, given to ranting whether or not the subject at hand is, in fact, beyond the pale. But when he's on the mark, he's on the mark.

Five failures--goals set by Bush himself. Worth hanging onto as the right-wingers continue their efforts to rewrite history and redefine the past eight years as a success.

Onion headlines (see the January 19 entry) are not exactly a factual account, but, as Making Light points out, as essentially true a narrative of the Bush years as those which are factual. Particulary "Bush Grants Self Permission To Grant More Power To Self."

I observed this may be the end of an era. But only if we continue to be mindful of these stories. The older I get, the firmer a grip I get on the span of public attention: about two years, at the outside. The Republican machine, and especially the nastiest elements of that machine, have proven very skillful at blaming the mess on the poor guy who tries to clean up the mess they created. There's every chance that, if we don't pay attention, we'll somehow attach the pains the nation is undergoing, and must surely continue to suffer, on Obama and not the responsible parties. In which case, today does not mark the end of an era, but simply another breathing space in which the authoritarians and plutocrats refresh themselves for another round.

Sad news on the pop culture front: Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan are both dead. They starred in some really crappy television shows that are remembered fondly because people don't know any better.

Dark confession: I remember McGoohan, and his cult success The Prisoner fondly, even though I do know better. I saw the whole series late in my freshman year, when a fan and fellow student decided to spread the faith among the MIT Assassin's Guild. (Since the Guild was considered hopelessly geeky by a fair segment of even the MIT student body, and played games with a spy-thriller theme, this was fertile ground for recruitment into this particular cult fandom.) About twenty of us crammed into a single largish dorm room and played all seventeen episodes. Whether someone watched all seventeen was a function of free time and tolerance for boredom and discomfort; I got through all seventeen, though I was fueled more by froshling excitement at belonging to a peer group than by the show itself.

The theme song was great. The opening sequence was good, though it was long and began to get tiresome after a dozen repetitions. The episodes were...irregular, ranging from slightly silly to deeply, embarrassingly pretentious. The basic premise was that the prisoner known only as "Number 6"--implied to be the lead character from the recently wrapped-up Danger Man (UK)/Secret Agent (US) in which McGoohan also starred--angrily stormed out of his job, and was sent to a candy-colored village ("The Village") on a small island of undisclosed location, where his captors tried to squeeze from him the reason he quit. Their preferred technique was to engage him in bizarre mind games, either to break his spirit or to trick him into letting his secret slip, while Number 6 would attempt to turn their methods back on them, all the while seeking means of escaping the Village. His primary foil was a string of Number 2s, subject to frequent replacement as each failed in turn.

The best episode wasn't even a spy show, properly, but a medically-induced hallucination placing Number 6 in a western reminiscent of High Noon. I later learned that the worst episodes were all written by McGoohan himself, too much in love with himself as auteur, and prepared to sacrifice plot for his extended metaphor of The Prisoner as the independent man raging against the conformist pressures of society. Or something. He wasn't a very good auteur, and his meaning didn't always come across. Drugs may have had something to do with it; the rumor is that the last two episodes, particularly, were written in a weekend-long binge during which McGoohan locked himself in his apartment and let the acid do the talking. Whether or not there's any truth to the rumors, the last episode plunges right off the cliff of continuity, consistency, and coherency. Also, McGoohan was too fond of cute little turns of phrase: "free for all" used to mean "freedom for all," and the episodic exchange of "Who is number one?" "You are number six" getting twisted somewhere along the way to hint, "You are, number six." Whether that means number six was also code named number one because he was the whole purpose of creating and operating the Village, or because he was the one true human in a dehumanizing environment, or because of something even murkier, is anyone's guess. Feel free to make up your own. Presumably, it all made sense to Patrick at the time.

The show wasn't a complete loss. The head games and plot twists were sometimes delicious, if not entirely rational, and the series plunged with an exciting gusto into the paradoxes of that subset of spy fiction where a paranoid conspiracy really does know all and control everything. It had a lot in common with the current hit Lost. If you like head games, and aren't overly troubled by the question of whether they make sense, or if you're just really into mod-era British fashions, you might enjoy it, too. I did...but only, I hasten to add, more for the communal act of watching it than for the show itself.

I take comfort in Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

That doesn't mean what it sounds like. It sounds like a general distaste for the world, an estimation that it's almost all worthless. That, too, can be a comforting thought on occasion, when I'm feeling frustrated and generally ticked off at the world. But it wasn't what Sturgeon meant.

The story is a little muddled: depending on who's telling the story, maybe Sturgeon was talking to a fan, or a literary critic/reporter; maybe he was speaking in a forum, or touting his latest book. But the essence of the story is generally agreed: somebody asked Sturgeon why he bothered with science fiction--why he read it, and why he was wasting his talents writing drek. "Isn't 90% of science fiction crap?" Sturgeon agreed, "Well, yeah, but 90% of everything is crap."

Sturgeon's bon mot isn't about the 90% of everything that's crap; it's about the remaining 10%. That 10% will survive, while the crap is forgotten within a generation or two, and it's worth picking through the dross to get to that golden 10%, whether you're picking through pop culture or philosophical arguments or human beings.

When you're cursed with a cynical and skeptical nature, as I am, Sturgeon's law provides protection from simply giving up on the world. Yeah, maybe what you just picked up to examine is crap. No surprise, eh? 90% of everything is. But you knew that going in, didn't you? Go on, try again. There's still a constant 10% chance of getting lucky and making the last nine tries worthwhile.

(Incidentally, Sturgeon's off-the-cuff remark did proper service to the notion that science fiction is somehow inherently inferior to other literature, too. Granted, it often is; second-class writers can survive the Darwinian process more easily in the smaller ponds of genre fiction. But it doesn't have to be, any more than Wuthering Heights is inferior literature just because Harlequin romances are drek. I find it particularly strange that the questioner seemed to believe simultaneously that science fiction is bad by definition, and therefore not worthy of Sturgeon's talents, but also that Sturgeon's writing was good, despite being science fiction. Quite a conundrum for the snob.)

B. Kliban, surreal comic strip artist best known for "Cat" and related products like cat calendars, once did a self-referential strip of a couple in a living room, with body language suitable to hanging a painting or arranging furniture. The woman is holding up a badly-outlined and badly-lettered speech balloon, point towards her own mouth, stating "This doesn't work as well as the other one." The man looks on critically while holding a smoother, better-lettered speech balloon with the same caption at his side. As a kid, I liked to ponder the implication that the better balloon would have appeared earlier only if it, in turn, replaced a better one, an infinite regress of speech balloons replaced by increasingly poor substitutes. Once that thought occurs to you, there's no avoiding the unanswerable question of why the couple would continue exchanging bad for worse.

Obviously, they did it because a perverse cartoonist drew them that way. But I couldn't help thinking of that strip when grappling with the new Moveable Type engine.

Eileene is the web-savvy partner in our marriage, and she set up my journal using Moveable Type for various reasons, some inscrutable, but mostly because MT offered a largely hassle-free, no-frills standardized format for bloggers, journalers, and their online kin to put up their material without needing an understanding of HTML or other coding. That's what I needed: cut-and-paste publishing. Just cut your text from your preferred text editor, paste it into a box, and push a button to make the engine generate a page containing that text.

But time marches on, and with it, technology. In the ephemeral world of the web, if you aren't moving forward, you're dead. Like business or empire-building, but with a turnaround measured in months rather than decades. MT decided, for whatever reason, to update its format. Eileene didn't show much enthusiasm for the changeover, but realized that nothing was to be gained from putting it off. Putting off an update just makes the next one more painful, and refusing updates altogether eventually just renders the material unusable, stranded in a format that no system recognizes any longer.

I expected growing pains with the change in format, and got them. I have to get used to a new layout, a new set of flags to activate (or deactivate), a new function tree to navigate. That's okay; such is the price of progress. The new MT doesn't interact properly with the browsers I had been using to deal with the web (Opera on my laptop, Firefox on my desktop), and so far I've only been able to get it to work at all with Internet Explorer. That's not so okay. Then there's the tags utility.

Tags are used to attach an entry to search terms that may not appear in the text itself. For example, if I gripe yet again about team Bush, I may add a "politics" tag in the journal entry's background infrastructure so that anyone searching with the term "politics" can find that article, even if the word appears nowhere in the essay.

The new, improved MT keeps track of tags used, and offers a quick, semi-random search tool by which you can click one of the more common tags and get a list of offerings using that tag. In the background infrastructure, the new, improved MT also keeps track of tags and tries to anticipate what tag I intend to use. You may have seen predictive technology in Google. Lately, it's begun keeping track of my search terms, and helpfully offers them again in a pulldown menu should I want to repeat a search days or months later. If I want to search for "police," for example, I start by typing the letter P, and instantly a large menu appears below the input window offering search terms I have already used, all beginning with the letter P. Either now, or any time later as I continue to type my search term(s), I can stop and pull down to the earlier match. In theory, this can save some typing. As I move on to O, L, and I, the list grows shorter and shorter, until, when I type C, the engine realizes that I don't intend to type any of the search terms it's seen me use before, and quietly shuts up and lets me finish typing.

MT is a little different. Like Google, it tries to anticipate the tag I want by comparing my progressive typing to its existing list of tags. Unlike Google, if and when it realizes I'm entering an entirely new tag, it doesn't simply turn itself off. No, it abruptly flicks the cursor back to the beginning of the window, leaving the typing up to this point intact after the cursor. So at the point when MT decides the new "police" tag doesn't match "politics," it snaps to the start of the window again, without clearing away the "poli" part, and not-so-helpfully continues to print what I type, inserting "ce" at the beginning of the window. Then I have to backspace over the "ce|poli" and type the word again properly, along with moving the cursor with the arrow keys so I can delete the entire word, instead of just the last/first two leters. This is more work, and far, far more irritating, than simply typing an entire tag by hand would be, even if I had to do it every time. It's like a waiter interrupting you after your salad choice to guess what you'll have for dinner and desert according to your past orders, guessing the wrong thing most of the time, and garbling the order when you try to correct his guess.

The mysteries of changing formats in computer code are arcane indeed. The bootstrap nature of advances in the industry, combined with the proprietary urge of competing companies' systems, seem to ensure that for every two steps forward, to include new functions, there's at least one step back, as old formats become obsolete. Sometimes the failures are spectacular. This failure is a small one, one that Eileene seeks to make my fault somehow, arguing that, since she's never had this problem, I must be doing something wrong. I don't see how. I'm not employing any kind of coding, just typing letters into a field. MT sells itself on simplicity and directness, trading sophistication for idiot-proof design, something the less technically savvy need. A system like this admits it can't do everything, but insists that what it does do it does without complications, as long as the user paints within the lines. Well, I painted within the lines, and I found a complication. That's not okay; that's not part of the price of progress. It's just a glitch in what used to be glitch-free. This doesn't work as well as the other one.

I am pleased to witness the arrival of a full version of "Crayon Physics." I first encountered Crayon Physics in summer of 2007, as part of a brutal regimen by which Finnish designer Petri Purho put it to himself to design and implement a complete, functioning game a week, in the hopes of cranking up his creativity and exploring ideas without getting bogged down in niceties like graphics and interface. He managed to keep it up for several months.

Predictably, many of the games were pretty pretty, especially in weeks when he was busy with other activities. That's the nature of experimentation. But several were at least briefly entertaining, or at qualified as interesting ideas. One title, Crayon Physics, shone above all the others. The object was to draw figures on the screen so as to cause a little red circle, powered by gravity and collisions with board elements and your own drawings, to roll over one or more stars. The innovative premise, along with the charming graphical conceit that the play area resembled an animated child's crayon drawing, made the game an instant success in the freeware game community. So great a success that Purho agreed to demands for a larger, more sophisticated version.

Making a game worth paying money for takes a lot more effort than a week's spare time, however, and as Crayon Physics went into development, I slowly lost track of it, even began to suspect it wasn't going to arrive at all. Last week, I learned it finally has. A video demonstrates that you can draw any shape you like--the freeware experiment would usually simplify everything into a rectangle bounding the figure you drew, if a glitch didn't get in the way--and you can pin objects to the paper--twice to fix them in place, once to allow them to rotate about a single axis. It promises to be fun.

But don't take my word for it. Crayon Physics Deluxe made the news on NPR. Either the buzz among the intelligentsia is widespread enough to earn it a slot on All Things Considered, or someone who helps put the show together is crazy devoted to it. Either way, it's worth a look. You can get the free demo, or buy the whole game, at crayonphysics.com, or learn more about Purho's other works at kloonigames.com.

Man, this blog entry is good. We've lived with the myth of the free market--or, more precisely, the unregulated market--for far too long.

Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand guiding society to good through the mechanism of selfishness is a powerful one, and has accomplished much good, but it can be terribly dangerous when misapplied. In embracing free markets, Smith himself recognized a place for institutions that have no place in neoconservative economic theory, institutions like a progressive tax system ("It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence [sic], not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than that in proportion.") or strict regulation to make sure that the markets actually remain free, rather than crumbling under the power of monopoly or too-cozy arrangements for government charters.

Alas, Smith's invisible hand is all too easily exaggerated into an argument that corporations should be allowed to do whatever the hell they like, without hindrance of any kind beyond that of consumers themselves. Obviously, the argument breaks down if the consumers are unaware--or kept unaware--of the real costs of the products and services they buy, and regulation is necessary to ensure that they can remain aware. Obviously, too, the argument breaks down if the consumer is effectively unable to choose freely between competitors--if, for example, the expense and nuisance of changing services exceeds the difference in customer satisfaction (phone companies), or if a large corporation destroys smaller competitors with crippling (and short-term) predatory pricing (Deans ice cream versus Ben & Jerry's) or frivolous lawsuits (TSR versus small-press game designers), or if a given supplier maintains a competitive advantage through government subsidy (auto manufacturers), or if suppliers tacitly agree to the same profitable abuses (credit card companies). Widespread regulation is necessary to preserve the free market in the face of such assaults.

But the notion that regulation is inherently bad has been with us a long time. (Or rather, the notion that regulation of business is inherently bad has been with us a long time. Corporations had no problem with union-busting regulations in the 1890s, or the 1930s, or today.) Worse, it's held the ascendancy since Ronald Reagan's catchy but poisonous anti-government speeches in his 1980 presidential run. We're seeing a lot of the fallout from toxic deregulation policy right now, because Bush the lesser has been so aggressive in wielding it, but the pain of careless deregulation begins shortly after the deregulation itself begins. When Reagan pooh-poohed pollution controls, pollution skyrocketed. When GHW Bush undercut the SEC, we got Milken and his junk bonds. When Clinton eased off of whistleblower protections, whistleblowers got creamed, and quickly began to vanish. Dubya practically deserves a category to himself.

Wondering aloud how this toxic belief in deregulation can survive is tempting, but it's not really much of a mystery. It's the product of decades of disciplined propagandizing. A broad consolidation of news outlets to a half dozen large sources, unsurprisingly controlled by men who approve of pro-corporate legislation and regressive economics, has made the spread of a belief that deregulation is always good easier, but the pressure is there, and has been there for generations, as the right wing skillfully rewrote the values of the richest, most successful era of any nation in history, wealth and success largely created by regulations designed to preserve a free market.

As the rant above proves, I'm given to ivory tower pontification. I talk in large-scale abstractions. The site I link above does not, which is why it's worth your time. While it discusses the big picture, it gets down to specifics: your gas bill, your phone bill, your medical expenses. Toxic deregulation gives us bullshit like hidden credit card fees, and inflated utility bill "errors," and indefensible insurance exceptions. Most of us can afford a $220 bill if we have to. But some people can't--see the comment on a $150 rip-off meaning somebody has to go without their meds for a month. And no people should have to.

Don't you love convenient coincidences? Eileene found a two-episode BBC program on animal swarms and swarming behavior, titled (unsurprisingly) "Swarm." It covers a lot of ground: animals from fish to ants to mice to herd animals, and swarming behavior from mating to feeding to migration. Lots of startling images, my favorite being the crab migration, although the starlings that collect over Rome are the most impressive and alien of the lot.

Eileene picked up the show because it's narrated by David Tennant, lately of Doctor Who fame. As it happens, I have reason to watch the show, too. I'm trying to design a character for an RPG campaign employing gods, demons, heroes, and similar mythical entities, and I'd already chosen to play the cosmic embodiment of vermin. Call it a god if you like, although for the most part it's a small-time god, manifesting as swarms of vermin. The swarms can speak after a fashion through collective buzzes and chirps, and my character can manifest anywhere vermin exist, all at the same time, possessing their tiny bodies as long as it has business to conduct through them. The creatures treated in "Swarm" don't line up perfectly with the creatures I label "vermin," but there's a lot of overlap, especially since both definitions are treated loosely. The TV show examines the herd behavior of large ungulates, stretching the technical definition of "swarm," and my verminous god goes beyond rats and cockroaches to include pigeons, mussels, ants, mildew--any small, teeming, and often offensive organism that lives off of human detritus.

Twice during the show, I found myself thinking, "Oh! I want my character to be able to do that." In mechanical terms, the show featured behavior to include under the variable Shapechange power, according to what kind of organisms I possess at any given moment. Possibly more useful, the show could act as evidence that, yes, what I might want my character to do can be found in the wild, among small, teeming creatures.

Someday.

My good luck is considerably undercut by the fact that the plug has already been pulled on the campaign in question. The intended GM decided he couldn't spare the time, after all. We may return to it someday, but chances are good we'll never look at it again, in which case, neither the work I put into the character nor the content of the show will do me any good. Still, it was a happy moment to think the show might be entertaining far beyond its two-hour time slot.

As we were waking to the alarm/radio this morning, NPR played a brief article on the upcoming trial--or sentencing, I wasn't yet awake enough to catch all the details--of a small band of thugs. Angry at the election of Obama, they decided to vent their frustrations in a small crime spree against any black people they could catch. I think the radio said there were six counts in all, including knocking a black man down and running over a white person they'd misidentified in their enthusiasm.

For all that the event wasn't funny for the victims, black or white, I just have to laugh at articles like this. I mean, if there were any doubt in anyone's mind at this point that white supremacists are the absolute bottom of the barrel of human potential, this is it: filled with violent rage against people for their skin color, but too stupid to actually recognize the skin color they hate so much. It's too late for these losers to get a new set of genes, of course, but I find exquisite irony in the fact that the best thing they could possibly do for their families is to engage in some miscegenation in the hopes of passing some functional genetics on to their children.

Yes, I realize this is an ad hominem argument against racism, and therefore not particularly compelling. I realize, too, that not every hardened racist is too stupid to count to three if you spot them the first two numbers. You can still find racists--hardened, nasty racists, too, not just the ignorant or condescending trying and failing to treat people equally--wearing suits around the boardroom table, or shaking hands on the golf course. "Not our kind of folks" may be dying out most slowly among people with every reason to know better.

Nevertheless, it's encouraging to see the linkage, however inaccurate, between racism and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging numbskulls reinforced; for people who can't figure it out on their own, it magnifies the un-coolness factor by a lot. Even if it's too late to change older folks set in their ways, kids can pick up the idea that the people who want to decide who should go to the back of the bus really deserve a bus for their own, exclusive use.

A short bus.

I picked up a comic book at the local library yesterday, "The Best of Ray Bradbury," containing illustrated versions of several short stories by Ray Bradbury. It's filled with some heavy-duty talent, too; obviously, the text is by Bradbury, and the illustrators include names big enough that I recognize them, despite my distant relationship with comics: Richard Corben, Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russell, Daniel Torres, Dave Gibbons, Harvey Kurtzmann. The names I don't recognize are probably just as big, but, like I said, my contact with comics is extremely spotty.

Bradbury includes a forward, too, in which he waxes rhapsodic about the comic books of his childhood and their impact on his psyche, and career. Buck Rogers was his entry point to fandom, and he regrets being talked out of taking comic seriously, and out of collecting them as worthwhile forms of art, however briefly that may have happened. Now he is proud to be collecting himself in comic book form.

Even in his enthusiasm, however, there was a jarring note of latent shame, which sounds worse here, out of the context of the introduction, than it does as part of the whole, but only slightly so:

"For I still believe there's nothing wrong with comics that a good idea and good presentation can't cure, providing books whereby you yank kids, through excitement, into reading, by gosh, real live books. But you must start somewhere, mustn't you?"
Sadly, the stigma of comics is still not dead, even among ardent supporters of the medium, Bradbury can't help slipping into a deferential justification of comics as a gateway to real art, and not art in themselves, which they certainly can be, and which these selections certainly are. It's like he's been caught doing something bad, and, coming from the already stigmatized genre of science fiction, no matter how high atop that pile he sits, that says something.
The same self-conscious sense of dishonor in comics can be seen on the cover, which calls the book a "graphic novel," that dreadful euphemism designed to lend comics respectability they should already enjoy. Some would argue that "graphic novel" isn't an attempt to pretend that a comic isn't a comic, but a more accurate description of a particular kind of comic, but that argument obviously doesn't apply here--remember, these are short stories, and not a novel of any kind. Calling the comic a "graphic novel" isn't an attempt at accuracy. Just another sad capitulation to the belief that comics are only for kids.

I had a discipline problem with a student today, the first of my substitute teaching career. A young lady pretended to have trouble with the notion that using a cell phone in class is inappropriate behavior.

Even if the school allowed cell phone use in class (It doesn't.), and even if Mrs. Gunoff (spelling?) allowed it anyway (I believe that was a barefaced lie.), Mrs. Gunoff wasn't in charge of the class today; I was. Mrs. Gunoff was busy with the Martian death flu, and I was busy with the twenty-seven kids who could behave themselves, so I didn't bother arguing past "When Mrs. Gunoff is here, knock yourself out. But for now, put it away." I just wrote out a detention slip and sent her off to the principal's office.

Which, strangely, seemed to satisfy her. She didn't stop huffing, but she did pack up her stuff and depart, which suggests to me that she aimed to get kicked out of class in the first place, or was at least prepared to do so for the privilege of challenging me, or authority generally. She may have found staring into space in detention more entertaining than answering an algebra question, or was earning some kind of points in the teen rebel pecking order, or figured the risk was worth the chance she could win telephone use for the whole class anytime I came in to sub, or was simply having a bad day and taking it out on the hapless sub. Whatever.

I'm grateful again for the many teachers in my family. Without their work stories, I might have chosen to argue it out with the girl. My reflexive response to conflict is an appeal to reason. But, armed with a knowledge of the importance of keeping students focused--entertained if possible, but focused--I was able to cut that off and instead establish that, no, I will not be jerked around just because I'm new to the school. I may only be teacher for a day, but I am the teacher for that day, and I'm ready to use the school's disciplinary structure because, being here a day, I can't apply my own. I'm confident it was the right decision, too. Not at this school, but at another--my first day subbing anywhere--the principal handed me a stack of detention slips and reassured me "there's plenty more where these came from." I figured the principle holds true in just about any high school, where the students are, after all, teens, and liable to challenging adults for no more reason than that they are teens, approaching adulthood and pushing the limits imposed on them from childhood.

Maybe the unruly student agrees. Maybe that's why she seemed so satisfied to go: she'd tested the natural order and found it behaved as she expected.

Eileene dug up a BBC series called "Around the World in 80 Faiths," in which an Anglican minister samples world religion for the camera. She thought we might enjoy it, and, hearing the premise, so did I.

On watching the first episode, however, my hopes were dashed. The treatment given the other 79 religions is rather shallow, but we expected that--with ten religions covered in the space of an hour, less padding for commercial breaks and other operating necessities, there's not much anyone can do to share a profound understanding of an unfamiliar, even wholly alien religion. Possibly as a result of severe time constraints, the show also focused heavily on the outward spectacle of religions' ceremonies instead of their central tenets, and actively sought the weirdest, most alien aspects of each religion to examine.

Possibly. I have a strong suspicion that the host himself would have done so anyway, with or without severe time constraints.

Those suspicions arose quickly, when he began describing mere curiosities as somehow mind-blowing, or truly wild and bizarre. I dunno. Forcing a sacrificial bull to bow periodically before the might of Jesus during a parade to its slaughter, as a ritual left over from an era when Christian missionaries were working to undermine the bull as sacred to the Sulewi people may be a little odd. But it doesn't strike me as any more bizarre or mind-blowing than searching for colored eggs to celebrate the rebirth of Jesus on Easter--also a tradition stolen from and papered over pagan traditions that Christian missionaries once hoped to supplant. I expected more from a minister, who presumably was required to (or should be required to) examine other beliefs as part of his ordination, and who definitely was exposed to the idea that symbolic meaning may be far removed from the literal reality of the symbol itself, and that different cultures can use different symbols to represent very similar principles.

The suspicions were confirmed when the host got around to witnessing a witches' coven. These were pretty ordinary post-modern witches, open and friendly, maybe a little flaky, but seemingly the most down-to-earth of all the religions featured in the episode. It was hard to tell in the space of 45 seconds of conversation on their beliefs, but the guy putting up some quick decorations to reshape a cubical room into a more natural/mystical circular space seemed to acknowledge with his grin that doing so was just a bit of ceremony for its own sake, and not exactly charging the worship area with sacred power in any empirical sense. Or maybe he believed it was, and simply had the sense not to say so to a potentially hostile audience.

Never mind the television viewers; the host himself was a hostile audience. For all his intellectual desire to approach other beliefs with an anthropologist's clinical detachment, he was frankly disturbed at the very idea of witchcraft. He could barely bring himself to watch the ceremony, and definitely couldn't bring himself to participate. The mere sight of a pentagram made him visibly nervous. (It's just a star, dude!) The camera spent more time portraying his hand-wringing than it did on the actual witches. Again, I'd expect more of a minister. If these were the baby-murdering witches of fables and late medieval urban legend, if their version of witchcraft were actual devil worship, as the Compendium Maleficarum would have it, I could understand his anxiety, but they weren't. Just ordinary, slightly geeky twenty- and thirty-somethings who found the churches they were brought up in unacceptable, yet still wanted religion in their lives.

I'm as ready to snicker at the New-Ageyness of modern witchcraft as anyone, or as I am at any other religion, but my immediate impression was that I'd get along with this particular group of celebrants, and find more common theological ground with them, than with any of the other religions featured in the first episode, or indeed with the Anglican host. Seeing him unable to deal with a little crystal-waving made me a lot more sympathetic towards practitioners of wicca, if not towards their actual beliefs. If a Christian minister enlightened enough to want to sample other religions couldn't get over his deep-seated conditioning equating paganism with evil, how much more must the dabblers in witchcraft go through with less enlightened Christians, including, quite possibly, their own families?

Every year, I become more convinced that religion may not make people sick, but religious doctrine does. Religion has been a force for both good and evil in the world. When it leaves behind simple human decency for doctrinal abstractions, it's on the path to hell.