July 2009 Archives

Has anyone else noticed a certain recurrent theme to the insurance industry’s contributions to the discussion of health care reform? Over and over I hear corporate reps for insurance companies insist they’re really for universal health care, or would be if it weren’t for certain difficulties…and then follow up with utterly bizarre descriptions of what those difficulties are. Not just the kind of fibbing lobbyists are known for, like exaggerating increasing health costs or portraying government bureaucracies as aiming to deny you treatment while ignoring the insurance bureaucracy’s policy of aggressively denying you treatment. But really weird stuff that makes no sense, like explaining that universal health care will raise insurance costs.

Or rather, stuff that makes sense only with the unspoken equation of insurance with health care. Listen carefully the next time one of the talking heads is an insurance rep. They speak as if anyone with insurance has health care, and anyone without doesn’t. Neither point is correct. Having insurance doesn’t mean the insurance companies will pay up when it’s their turn; just ask the Americans cut loose after years of paying premiums because—whoops!—they got cancer. Next to American horror stories, exaggerated or downright fabricated horror stories of Canadian and British health care (such as the Canadian woman featured in scare ads talking about having life-threatening brain cancer when she instead had a brain tumor blurring her vision with pressure on her eye) pale in comparison. Nor does being uninsured mean going without health care; just ask our veterans. Or our senators.

More to the point, a public health care option such as Europe and Canada employ would make health insurance obsolete for a vast majority of cases. (The public option also happily eliminates the paradox of unequal risk that bedevils health insurance generally, by placing the entire population into the same risk pool.) If you can walk into the doctor’s office, get treated, and send the bill to the fed (ultimately paying for it through taxes), you don’t need insurance. Insurance is for people without the means to pay for health care otherwise. Universal care doesn’t require universal coverage, which is precisely what insurance companies hope you’ll forget.

Surely corporate reps lobbying before Congress, or lobbying the public via the news media, deliberately conflate the two. Conflating care with coverage allows them to dissemble about higher expense: if you mandate universal coverage, you’ll have to subsidize poor people needing sufficient coverage, obviously—but if you mandate only universal care, you don’t. Conflating care with coverage lets them conceal the whopping 15% of medical costs that go to insurance costs, helping avert universal care legislation that would torpedo insurance companies if passed. Conflating care with coverage also plants the seeds for a massive corporate handout, if Congress, eager to be seen to do something, can be persuaded to pass universal coverage legislation instead of the universal care bills that face such stiff resistance.

But weirder still is the story I read today from a guy whose brother is an insurance salesman, who isn’t speaking for the cameras, or to the powerful, when he makes bizarre non sequitur statements about universal care. And he refuses to grasp the idea that universal care can be had without universal coverage. It’s just a big, throbbing blind spot hanging in the center of his world view: “Of course a massive insurance system is necessary; without insurance, no one would be covered.” Covered, no. But treated, quite possibly. Which is really the aim of health care reform, isn’t it?

Upton Sinclair quipped: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” True, true. The remedy, then, is to address the remaining 99%+ of America whose salary, in a very real if indirect sense, depends on understanding the issue. And, because attempts to muddy the waters will not die out of their own accord, that means carefully distinguishing between universal care and universal coverage every time the subject comes up.

We just got a pair of bikes: Eileene’s a curious folding contraption, mine a more ordinary dirt bike. The timing was poor; we picked them up at the start of the current heat wave—or rather, at the resumption of normal summer temperatures. June and July were colder and wetter here than they’ve been for 200 years or more.

When I chose to ride mine home, I underestimated how physically demanding the ride would be. Granted, the trip was uphill most of the way, but only a mild gradient. And I recognize I’m out of shape, but not that out of shape. I still run up staircases without getting winded, and hike downtown three days every week. Still, I made allowances for being a 41-year-old desk jockey. What I failed to allow for was the heat. New Jersey summers are oppressively muggy, even if we can’t match Florida’s claims to discomfort. Walking, the way I get most my exercise, doesn’t generate body heat so quickly, even if it generates a greater total. And I discovered those Styrofoam biking helmets are hotter than hell, despite the many air holes.

I haven’t properly ridden a bike since I was a kid. Had a couple stolen and never liked them much anyway since an accident that left me with a now-faint scar on my hip. Back then, bike helmets weren’t mandatory. Oh, various safety authorities urged everyone to wear them, but nobody did. That was dorky. But somehow the safety laws got passed in the past twenty-five years, and bike helmets are, if not quite normal, at least common enough not to draw comment. Normal among adults, sporadic among kids. Progress.

Come to think of it, seat belts weren’t mandatory when I was biking age, either. People howled at their vital freedoms being taken away when cops began issuing tickets, but we adapted and are better for it. Progress. The national 55mph speed limit failed when I was a kid—people went so far as to steal, deface, or even shoot up the hated signs—but we seem to have adopted a de facto 65mph limit nationally, apart from some large, flat areas in the Midwest that don’t need it, and both accidents and fatalities dropped. Nobody seems to mind a 55 limit when they hit one, either. Progress. The nation-wide crackdown on drunk driving started around the same time, and road fatalities plummeted. Having seen the results, sentiment has turned sharply in favor of severe penalties for drunk driving. Progress.

So maybe twenty years from now, we’ll have fully automated cars, or the energy crunch will turn everyone to public transportation and driving safety won’t be an issue… Yeah. Sure. America isn’t relaxing its grip on its cars that readily. But it might stop clutching those damned cell phones. And when a cell phone abuser complains that he needs to phone while driving, remind him of the same arguments applied to bike helmets, seat belts, speed limits, and even drunk driving. That ought to shut him up for a bit.

Last week’s Entertainment Weekly featured the latest installment of Harry Potter as a cover story. I didn’t think anything of it at the time—nor indeed read it—but was reminded of the fact reading the current issue’s letter column. The magazine chose to print two responses: the first praised their substantial reporting of details, the second thanked them simply for doing an article on something other than Twilight the current revisionist vampire-themed teen romance phenomenon.

Now, I’m inclined to agree that we’ve seen too much of Twilight, but only because I’m a snobbish intellectual grouch who disdains popular media almost on principle, especially popular media aimed at squealing teen girls. (Well, that, and I positively hate revisionist vampire fiction, portraying what, by definition, are monsters preying upon living flesh as misunderstood but ruggedly handsome philanthropists.) Twilight appeals particularly to readers and writers of the amateur porn known as “slashfic,” or at least a large slice of that group; indeed, the book carries many of the signatures of the genre, starting with a Mary Sue protagonist and working rapidly up to sex with superhumans. Twilight is easy to despise on its own literary merits, but becomes much easier to despise, and unfairly so, for the fans it attracts. Still, while the movie is undeniably a vacuous and overrated bit of fluff, it deserves no less attention than the previous bit of vacuous and overrated bit of fluff, nor any less than the next. We’re all entitled to our own tawdry fantasies, so long as we recognize them as such.

A Harry Potter fan is in no position to complain about someone else’s entertainment fluff supplanting her own in the public eye. The B-list children’s lit devoted to Harry swamped the media general media as an entertainment sensation far more thoroughly, and for far longer, than Twilight is likely to, to the point of supplanting actual news. It also drew plenty of slashfic enthusiasts and an unseemly number of adult fans to what is indisputably a book for children, with a child’s appreciation of literature. The letter seems to say, “Okay, enough talking about this silly little fantasy world; now let’s get back to talking about Harry Potter.” Give it a rest, lady.

Sarah Palin has resigned from the Alaskan governorship, telling her former constituents as she did to “stiffen your spine and do what’s right for Alaska when the pressure mounts.” Hm. Palin sees no irony here, as she intends now to fight even harder, and she has “never felt like you need a title to do that.” She’s right: one doesn’t need a title to fight for truth. I’m told, however, that remaining in office helps.

Although her line now is that she wants to spare Alaska a lame duck governor—by handing the reins over to a Lieutenant governor who will have to run for office in a year—her original announcement, that she was ducking out because she was tired of enduring a critical media holds more of the ring of truth. This framing of her resignation has earned comparisons to Richard Nixon, who griped to the press upon losing the gubernatorial election of 1962 that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.” Of course, we were not rid of Tricky Dick; he returned to sully the White House in 1968. No doubt, Palin hopes to duplicate his achievement.

As deservedly maligned as he is, and as petty and vengeful as he was, Nixon was a hundred times the politician Palin will ever be, and still had a hundred times the class. Nixon prefaced his farewell speech with a recognition that “I think that each of you were—was writing it as you believed it, and I want that always to be the case in America.” Palin was not so gracious, aiming directly at the press in asking “So, how ‘bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quit makin’ things up?”—that is, reporting unflattering things about her, true or not. Especially the true ones.

Of course, this is the same froot loop candidate who campaigned against earmarks she herself accepted for the infamous “bridge to nowhere.” The one who, asked which newspapers she reads, replied, “All of them.” The one who claimed preparedness to lead the military by virtue of living near Russia. The one who claimed to be ready to step in and be president should something happen to McCain, immediately after complaining about Obama’s inexperience—roughly twice her own time on the national stage. And, of course, the one who is now leaving office the better to serve the public.

Stop making things up? You first, madame ex-governor. You first.

Not long ago, I complained about the dangers of remaking the classics, the central problem being that the classics are generally so admired because they’re already great, rubbing up against the edges of perfection. There’s nowhere to go with a remake but down. (Adaptation is risky, too, but not as dangerous, and the payoff for a really creative adaptation can be worth it.) If the entertainment industry is so desperate for new ideas that it must cannibalize its own output on an ever-shrinking cycle, it should work from the failures, especially the failures that could have been great, but weren’t. The movies (or TV shows, or books, or puppet shows, or what have you) with a brilliant concept but a poor execution.

For her birthday, I bought Eileene the DVD collection of The Prisoner. Mostly I hoped she would enjoy the series for the same reasons she enjoys The Avengers, whatever they are. Partly I was making a gift of time, being willing to watch the show with her rather than retreating from TV I rarely enjoy to my room to play computer games, which I usually enjoy.

The Prisoner holds a special place in my heart. It was part of a powerful bonding experience in my freshman year of college: a dorm room packed with members of the Assassins’ Guild, a particularly geeky subset of the already geeky culture of MIT, watching the entire series in a two-night marathon. But that nostalgia doesn’t blind me to the show’s severe flaws. The story about a man trapped in a surreal village of uncertain location, operating on sinister but bizarre rules of its own, wasn’t like anything that had come before, and predates Lost by nearly forty years. It held enormous promise but foundered on its metaphor of the independent mind against conformism. Between Number 6’s tantrums and wordplay that hinted at profundity without actually achieving even the merely substantial, welded onto a massive “WTF?” ending, the show too often resembled a comfortable suburbanite adolescent shaking his fist in self-important defiance at a vaguely defined oppressor.

(I understand McGoohan himself had a lot to do with the show’s failures. McGoohan was difficult to work with. The show began as a legal compromise when he balked at completing his contract for Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US). He fancied himself quite the auteur, writing and directing several episodes—the bad ones, if you ask me—under pseudonyms. Before the show’s end, he had a falling out with co-creator Markstein, whose proposed conclusion makes much, much more sense than “Fall Out,” rumored to have been written over a drug-addled weekend.)

But the show could have been great, in the hands of someone with less ego and more talent. So I am, guardedly, looking forward to the upcoming remake of the series. It could be great. It could also be baboon poo on toast; witness the Avengers movie. But hope springs eternal in the fanboy breast.

My current reading project is Iain Banks’s Consider Phlebas. I’m not very far into it, maybe eighty pages, but I’m getting a powerful first impression, one which simultaneously matches conflicting comments I’ve received on the book, an interesting trick.

In my youth, I was a voracious reader of sci fi, maturing rapidly from Asimov and Heinlein to Niven, who remains my sci fi anchor today. But I’ve largely given up science fiction, along with fiction generally, since then, so I’ve missed a lot of trends since cyberpunk petered out. I’ve barely touched the famed “B’s”—Benford, Bear, and Bova—and, knowing only of The Wasp Factory, hadn’t realized Banks was also considered a leading light of science fiction. So Eileene got me Consider Phlebas hoping I’d find something new and exciting.

Unfortunately, my friend Dave, who still reads sci fi voraciously, spotted it in my living room tonight and, on learning that this was my first exposure to Banks’s Culture series, worried aloud that Phlebas might not give me a proper appreciation for Banks; he wrote it when much younger, and has polished his craft considerably since then. Phlebas, while good, jerks spasmodically beneath a reader’s desire to identify with a character. Or so says Dave.

And yes, I get a strong sense of that already. Only eighty pages in, potential protagonists have met horrible ends, or proved to be horrible villains as the perspective careens about. (A changing perspective isn’t inherently bad, but it’s a difficult technique to use well.) But the writing also captures the flare of a good, old-fashioned space opera, the kind I thought I’d grown out of since tiring of Asimov’s dialogue and Anderson’s species chauvinism. If Phlebas proves less-than-skillful literature, it at least promises to be a ripping good story.

I wrote recently on Major Stefan Cook and his decision not to accept orders to Afghanistan on the strength of a fantasy that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, and indeed is not a citizen of the US at all, much less a natural-born one, any documentation notwithstanding. The “birther” movement is the kind of scary you might expect from millenialists. Or Nazis. Deep, unthinking, manichean anger and hatred, willing to settle for any target at hand.

Just watch this YouTube video of birthers attacking Congressman and former Governor Mike Castle (R-DE) for not being sufficiently conservative, defined as “equating liberal beliefs with treason.” Not upsetting enough? Flip through the comments attached below the video.

Jesus.

I’m no fan of monitoring our own citizenry, but if it’s to be done, birther meetings, and not mosques, are the place to start compiling dossiers and hunting for home-grown terrorists.

Before watching Moon last weekend, we were treated to a trailer for a romantic comedy—I forget the name—revolving around a guy with Asperger’s syndrome. My family and I had a laugh at my expense when the Asperger’s boy does his cute Asperger’s things during the “meet cute” scenes in ways that resemble things I’ve done. Or do. But more than thinking, “Hey, that’s what a romantic comedy about me would look like,” I ended up thinking, “Aw, jeez, another

Autism and its offshoots have been getting lots of attention in entertainment lately; I’m not sure whether that’s a result of an increase in reported cases or because Hoffman made autism highly saleable with his performance in Rain Man. Probably both. The two aren’t entirely independent; diagnosis (accurate or otherwise) of a condition rises sharply after it’s portrayed in a successful movie or TV show, and movies and TV are more likely to depict diseases on the rise in the population.

But I think there’s more at work here than the “sexiness” of autism, as Hollywood would describe it. And, if I’m right, we’re going to see a lot more of Asperger’s syndrome in popular entertainment than we really want to or need to before the trend dies down.

Asperger’s has some big advantages over other diseases or conditions for romantic comedies. For one thing, it’s behavioral, so your leading man or woman can still be gorgeous. For another, the lack of empathy and a raft of other inconvenient symptoms come with certain advantages, like powerful reasoning and verbal skills, so it’s easier to focus that Vaseline lens on the more attractive aspects of the syndrome when it’s time for the girl to start falling for the guy. But most of all, Asperger’s is a lot like an extreme form of nerdiness: social awkwardness, a literal mindset, earnestness, intense devotion to a few interests.

Nerdy is easy to make cute, especially if the script overlooks stereotypical drawbacks like hygiene and a know-it-all attitude. Nerdy is easy to write into a romance, because the drawbacks of nerdiness, like a lousy dress sense, that seem so important to adolescents looking for a date fade over time: “popular” gives way to “interesting” (and “engineer’s salary”) as we grow from adolescence to adulthood. Still sucks to be a geek when you’re a teen, though. Nerdy is easy to sell as a way to identify with the central character, too: the tribulations of an Asperger’s victim learning the rules of social behavior parallel the awkwardness of early teens learning the rules of dating; it’s easy to make an audience feel, “Hey, I’ve been there. I did that. I was just like that.” Even though they probably weren’t. Asperger’s has all the charm for a romantic comedy of any awkward character learning to overcome his anxiety over dating, with the added benefit that it isn’t his fault. It’s genetic, not a lifestyle choice. And that makes him so much cuter.

For all their flattery, I’m going to get mighty sick of seeing trailers for movies that view Asperger’s through a romantic haze. Which is only appropriate. Nerds generally prefer a hard-eyed objective treatment of the world, in part because mixing in the humanly irrational, like wishful thinking, confuses us.

We have an ant problem, big enough that it won’t be taken care of with a simple spritz from a spray can. We took a trip to Home Depot to stock up on ant killer and see how it goes. Two trips, actually: one for traps and a spray bottle to outline our house with the modern version of a magic circle; a second for more traps, a jug of pellets to outline the house because the spray bottle ran out before the pentagram was complete, and a can for touching up vital spots when it became clear the traps wouldn’t do the job alone.

The traps employ a very clever idea, presuming it works. If not, well…not. They’re supposed to feed the ants a slow-acting poison, which they take back to the nest to get the queen, or at least prune so much of the colony’s population that the ants will leave us alone for a while. The main drawback, again presuming the technique works at all, is that it takes a week or more to take effect. That’s a week of lost opportunities to try new strategies if the traps fail, not to mention a week with ants.

But I must admit that the delay has a silver lining. Ants, as many a science goob will tell you, are pretty damn cool, collectively exhibiting incredibly sophisticated behavior when each individual ant is about as intelligent as a digital watch. If you have the patience and know they depend on chemical trails, you can manipulate those trails to create complex paths of your own design. If ants weren’t such a nuisance—getting in the sugar and so on—they’d be kind of fun to have around. So, in the short term of the week it will take to give the traps a chance to work, we’ll have a chance to see up close how ant trails develop. I get a particularly close look, because the line from their point of entry to the kitchen, where the goodies are, passes right through my work room. Every hour or so, I’ll look in on them, watching their paths shorten and straighten systemically, watching the paths branch or evaporate as food/bait is introduced or removed…and above all, trying to cut off their interest in the garbage can to focus entirely on the poison.

‘Cause after all, they’re still household pests.

The freepers have long been a large and fairly accessible group of foaming-at-the-mouth right wingers. Well, “accessible” in the sense that you can easily read what they have to say. The site is publicly readable, and freepers have a direct hindbrain-to-keyboard link—unlike, say, LaRouchies or the Mormon Church, which work to keep some of their more despicable ideas under the radar lest they hurt their political prospects. The Free Republic website is not at all accessible in the sense of allowing anyone else to participate in the discussion. Freepers feel freedom is only for those who deserve it, i.e., freepers.) So you can check out the rough draft for a plan to dissolve the current government and replace it wholesale with new officials.

Quite apart from its political viability (nil), the plan is a little skimpy on details like exactly how the government has become destructive of our unalienable rights (despite a complete lack of concern for Bush-era destruction of very concrete unalienable rights), or how the US government is no longer acting without the voters’ collective consent (which could be argued, but no moreso than it has throughout a Republican primacy) and doesn’t really explain how new elections on a schedule violating the Constitutional schedule will give us any better a set of leaders (as opposed to new bosses same as the old bosses). The plan is all bluster and rant. Totally ignorable, apart from a curious detail.

I call your attention to the proposal for who should lead the country as Chief Executive until the sweeping elections of 2010: the Secretary of State. The woman the right wing had been gearing up to hate since her name began circulating for a presidential bid did not actually win the presidency, and now some segment of the right wing who hated her wants to put her in charge. I guess it’s hard to give up the fantasy of the most hated figure in American politics taking over, hard to see hard-held paranoia go unrewarded by the wrong candidate getting in, hard to give up all that carefully-nurtured hate. (And freepers hate hard.) Easier to live their worst nightmare than to admit the nightmare isn’t going to come to pass—even if they have to destroy the Constitution to manufacture that nightmare in the first place.

That is one fucked up world view.

Somewhere out in the intellectual wilderness, one clan of True Believers insists that, not only should Obama be removed from office, but that he never legally took office in the first place. The wilder ones preach armed insurrection; the less violent continue to launch lawsuits denouncing Obama’s foreign birth, Justice Roberts’s slip of the tongue in delivering the oath of office, Obama’s (imaginary) Muslim background, his (equally imaginary) faked birth certificate, the (also imaginary) treasons he has committed…anything, really. Contact at some point with demonstrable reality is a welcome coincidence, but not considered strictly necessary in lawsuits from the Fringe. Often, these lawsuits ignore such niceties as filing with the appropriate court, or appending a required fee, or an understanding of what “citizen arrest” means—and, when the complaint is returned with an explanation as to proper procedures which must be followed before the court will pursue the matter, why, that’s just proof that the courts are mere puppets of the imposter in the White House. Also, competing lawsuits with the same goal and roughly the same bizarro-world arguments must be part of the conspiracy, on the grounds that they are somehow undermining the True Cause.

One such suit surrounds Major Stefan Cook, who decided unilaterally that he was not obligated to accept his reservist’s posting to Afghanistan, on the grounds that the authority to issue such orders derives ultimately from Obama, who, obviously, has no authority to do anything. (A desire to avoid the dangers of entering a war zone and similar inconveniences of living up to obligations of service, no doubt, have nothing to do with it.) I bring the case up only because of the fallout following his refusal of orders. One: Cook was told, also ultimately on the authority of the commander-in-chief, not to report for duty, after all—in fact, that discharge proceedings are underway. Two: Cook was told boss not to report to work, either; he was fired from his job at Simtek.

As deserving a candidate as Cook is for some karmic retribution, I have problems with both decisions.

For starters, I’m not sure a discharge qualifies as karmic retribution at all; whatever problems may accompany a dishonorable discharge, he still isn’t going into combat. Military enlistment comes with benefits. That process is something of a gamble: the government gets a potential soldier should it need one, and the soldier gets a lot of perks in exchange for the peacetime nuisance of soldiering and for the chance that he’ll be called to war. If we allow anyone to join, enjoy the benefits, and then refuse to pay up when the gamble turns against him, we create a risk-free expense, and we’ll see a lot more cases like this. (Compare market speculators who get paid when they win and bailed out when they lose…) Even lesser penalties, like the permanent black mark of a dishonorable discharge, or being compelled to repay the government for his salary, education, et cetera—and I’m not sure he will be required to—cannot compensate for a huge imbalance in what was once considered a fair wager of benefits for hazard. Not that I would wish a fruitbat soldier onto combat troops. But if Cook can’t be sent into combat, for fear he’ll get his squad killed, military prison seems a more appropriate consequence of refusing combat orders. Especially since, as I am given to understand, Cook volunteered to serve for a year in Afghanistan on May 8, 2009—after the 2008 election.

On the other side of the coin, I’m deeply uncomfortable at the idea of an employee being fired from his job for the political views he holds. Cook is obviously either a nutjob or cannot be trusted to honor a contract, or, most likely, both. I wouldn’t want him as my employee. But if Wal-Mart hypothetically sacks a worker for union sympathies, that’s both wrong and illegal, even if Wal-Mart has good business reasons for wanting to avoid union workers. (Prosecuting the crime or setting it right with a personal or class-action lawsuit is a long shot, but in theory, the firing should come with painful legal action for Wal-Mart.) How is this case any different, apart from which end of the political spectrum the employee comes? Cook not only worked for a government contractor, but worked specifically in the branch providing background checks for security clearances. Cook’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the current government is certainly grounds for redacting his own security clearance. No clearance, no job. Simtek is obliged to employ only those who have clearances of their own, for obvious reasons. Still…that sounds more like convenient excuse for a decision Simtek would prefer to make anyway, keeping in good with the powers that be by firing employees who prove embarrassing to them. Again, is this case any different from McDonnell-Douglas hypothetically sacking an engineer for marching in a peace demonstration?

Both decisions smack of expedience rather than justice, or even established procedure. Certainly not what’s best for the country.

We are lucky enough to have a local theater showing Moon, and we watched it last Sunday. If you’re so lucky, you should see it, too.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a technician wrapping up his three-year tour of duty tending a He-3 mining station on the moon. His only companions are a HAL-like computer named Gertie and recorded messages from home—live messages are impossible due to a glitch in the communications array that the corporate overlords have yet to repair.

That recorded messages can come through but live ones cannot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but Sam doesn’t move beyond grousing to questioning the state of affairs until a string of new incidents also fail to make sense. These small but disconcerting questions soon give way to bigger, more disconcerting questions when Sam rescues his own duplicate, nearly dead, from one of the automated mining machines that scour the moon’s surface.

More than that is impossible to describe without giving away large chunks of the plot. Seasoned sci-fi fans, especially those with a taste for the head games of authors like Philip K. Dick, will be able to reconstruct 90% or more of the story from the trailer alone.

But that’s okay. The script is intelligent and convincing, and wisely refuses to let the gee-whizzery of science fiction interfere with the meat of the story. Moon manages the tricky task of remaining accessible to a general public while sticking to nearly-plausible hard science, and for that alone deserves props. While the film obviously embraces several sci-fi tropes, it equally intelligently avoids several which would be easy but stupid—excepting, perhaps, the very ending, shoehorning closure into a story about a life that can have none. Damn the Hollywood code. Though I would recommend the film for most sci fi fans, simply on the grounds that this is a familiar story done well, I would more heartily recommend it to those who do not regularly play the “what if” game of sci fi; these will find interesting, eye-opening ideas treated with a somber respect uncommon in movies with spaceships.

My latest little time-waster is Hex Empires, a web game offering yet another chance to conquer the world from a single starting city, turn by turn. Your highly abstract armies grow in strength according to the quantity of territory you hold; cities producing more strength than open land, so fights tend to gravitate toward clusters of towns. Armies can be joined (up to a maximum strength of 99), but not split, which is important; you can only move five armies per turn, so a few big armies project your strength more efficiently than a lot of little ones. Ports are the exit points for traveling overseas, but an army-cum-fleet can land on any coastal space. Capturing an enemy capital annexes all its territory at a blow. Capture all four capitals simultaneously to win; you’re out of the game if you lose your own capital.

For a web game, it’s pretty good—Civ for short attention spans. But not great. Like all too many web games (and even more embarrassingly, far too many games for which you pay good money), it cheats.

It took me a few games to realize the human player is the preferred target of all the computer opponents; at first, I simply presumed it might only seem like rival armies were flowing my way as they moved toward the center of the map, or that they might be engaged in some kind of crazy algorithmic imperative, like lunging for the least protected capital without regard to the intervening armies, and besides, the random placement of seas obscured the AI’s intended targets for several games. But no, all three opponents consistently make a bee-line for you. They’ll attack one another from time to time, perhaps even take one another out of the game, but the first big thrust is always directly at the human, whether or not there’s a rich supply of cities to be captured en route. Because the map is rectangular, this generally results in an early battle to the death with the nearest opponent, while the remaining two opponents enrich themselves on uncontested territory to meet you in the midgame. If necessary, a computer opponent will strip his base of defenses to float a string of puny armies at you, letting his own nearest neighbor absorb all his territory without a fight.

As irksome as anti-human coalitions are, the tiny discrepancies of army reinforcements are worse. Your opponents gain a tiny fraction more strength than you do for executing an identical move, or for annexing identical territory. I have absolutely confirmed such cheating in the first few turns of the game; presumably, it continues throughout the game, although spotting unequivocal cases of cheating once the situation is no longer symmetric would be prohibitively difficult. Discovering this was just as disappointing as discovering that Star Baron—another fine web game—slips an extra few ships to your opponents to jump start their initial growth, and quite probably has a finger on the scales throughout the game.

In a game of exponential growth through conquest, an early bonus has huge and far-reaching effects—enough to guarantee victory between evenly matched opponents. An informal coalition is equally imbalanced, and equally arbitrary. A human so disadvantaged can still win by virtue of smarter play; a human’s superior skill is the fundamental justification for stacking the deck in the first place. But it’s still frustrating to be forced to design strategies to cope with a cheating game than to explore what the game was supposed to be.

My birthday is due in a few days; I’m turning 41. And I’m going to miss 40.

The big four-oh is widely considered a grim milestone. The first 20 years are largely a period of continual growth in all ways; the period from 20 to 40 is one of losing youthful vigor but gaining in experience, wealth, status, self-esteem, and other facets of the good life. But beyond 40, physical decay accelerates, and the return on other fine things decelerates. It’s mostly downhill from here. And, as the rough mid-point of a 80-year (or thereabouts) lifespan, it’s hard not to pause at least momentarily to consider that. Hitting 40 is a psychological burden for many.

Not me. I’ve been a thorough curmudgeon roughly since I was 25, with strong hints of curmudgeonliness before that. Once I hit 40, I was no longer a grouchy old man before my years; I was just a grouchy old man, period. I had a ready-made preamble to griping, often expressed in a sentence like “I’m forty; I can’t keep up with what you kids are listening to any more,” or “I’m forty; my fingers are too slow for these video games,” or “I’m forty; I can’t stay up all night partying any more.” I was never up on pop music, nor much good at video games, nor a party kinda guy. Hitting 40 made it official; people didn’t expect me to do them any more.

I suppose the same argument applies to 41, but starting a sentence with “I’m 41…” doesn’t have the same ring. The greeting card industry and generations of institutionalized hazing over age has made 40 seem old, whereas 41 doesn’t. Objectively, 40 isn’t really old; it’s just the midpoint. It’s harder to embrace novelty now, to learn new things, to gain new perspectives, than it was at 20, but hardly impossible, and there is no actual excuse for closing off the world at any age. And griping “I’m 41…” is like complaining you can’t afford to pay for something you don’t want to pay for because your annual income is $200 below the national mean, or that you don’t have time to wash the car because you have a 45-hour work-week.

Now I’m going to have to wait another ten years before I can blame my faults on age again.

I have nothing to add to Jonathan Weil’s editorial, except a desire to shift the emphasis.

There is nothing (obviously) wrong with Assistant US Attorney Facciponti arresting former Goldman Sachs employee for (allegedly) illegally stealing proprietary software; that’s what property laws are for. That may not be the truth of the matter: there are counter-charges and the disturbing suggestion that Goldman Sachs arranged for the programmer’s arrest merely on the grounds that he might release it—more pre-emptive arrests of people for simply being in a position to commit a crime, and not for crime itself, or even for criminal intent—but then, the defendant’s lawyer isn’t exactly a trustworthy source, either. There is something wrong with the idea that it’s okay for Goldman Sachs to have the same software they feel presents a menace to society—at least if Facciponti’s account of Goldman Sachs’ initial report is accurate.

Weil rightly raises the question of what is to stop a private firm (and one with a demonstrated willingness to skirt the law, if not break it outright) from using the same program illegally. That question receives no special emphasis in a column devoted mostly to the treatment of programmer Aleynikov and Facciponti’s methods and testimonial accuracy. But it should. If the software is too dangerous to be in the hands of a private individual, it is far, far too dangerous to be in the hands of a private corporation, with a vastly magnified ability to manipulate the markets, legally or otherwise. So why isn’t Facciponti particularly concerned about the threat Goldman Sachs presents the world economy?

I was an early adolescent when Michael Jackson was at the peak of his fame, but I never got into pop music, so I never understood his appeal. I have to accept his memorial services from a great intellectual distance, crediting him for reaching millions—maybe billions—with his art, whether or not he reached me.

And the fans, by and large, have impressed me with their sense of perspective as well as their devotion. While I’m sure the memorials must include some fraction of wing-nuts chanting over and over that Michael Jackson was the greatest, that Michael Jackson cured cancer, that Michael Jackson is more important than life itself, I don’t see any in the news. And you know the news media focus on the wing-nuts when discussing fans of any stripe, so the nutters must be few and far between. No, by and large the fans I hear aren’t going in for hyperbole, claiming greater merit for Jackson than for Elvis or Sinatra or the Beatles. They don’t mistake their own nostalgia for something greater. They aren’t weeping or squealing for hours on end. The crowds are simply engaged in a sober but genuine celebration of how Jackson once made them feel. Maybe a little dancing and singing, too. That’s a fine tribute.

So I’d like to see twerps like Al Sharpton yanked from the spotlight and denied re-admittance. His podium-thumping insistence that Jackson was black! Jackson was black! No, he ain’t no white dude; he was black! is inappropriate. He measures people not as individuals nor members of humanity as a whole, but by race, and insists that it’s important to keep score—an attitude not only harmful to society, but at odds with Jackson’s own ambivalence towards his race and the sentiment of his song “Black is White.” Reverend Al isn’t just extraneous to the memorial service; he’s actively disrespecting Jackson’s memory, though you’d never in a million years get him to realize that, much less admit it. And the media are happy to give Reverend Al all the screen time he wants, hoping he’ll say something scandalous. Maybe someone closer to the Jacksons, or more celebrated for civil rights work could get him to put a sock in it, and let his actual fans pay their respects in peace.

I gather Michael Jackson left his father out of his will. Seems appropriate, given my admittedly limited understanding of the Jackson family’s relations. Jackson’s father certainly used his sons, whether or not he physically abused them, as seems likely.

Which has me wondering whether ol’ Joe Jackson feels cheated out of a rightful share of the estate. Human capacity for rationalization is virtually unlimited, and the old “he owes all his later successes to my earlier guidance” argument must come easily to the lips, particularly for someone so full of a sense of entitlement as to treat his sons so badly for personal profit in the first place.

A few years ago, I wrote of watching the Independence Day fireworks with a sense of shame. My country had not only elected but re-elected a criminal regime, openly involved in torture of foreign nationals, pursuing war for profit, actively dismantling constitutional protections for its own citizens, and just generally governing through lies and fear and violence.

It isn’t all better now. We’re still tangled in imperial adventurism abroad, we still have oppressive and unconstitutional legislation at home, and we still haven’t abandoned our faith in an unbridled free market to make everything better for everybody. Nor are a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president rushing to undo the grossest violations of the rule of law we suffered in the Bush years, as they should, before turning to a gentler dismantling of a generation of Reagan-era self-destruction. It’s not enough to stop anti-democratic, anti-populist policy; we must actively reverse them and seek to prevent their return in the future. Otherwise, they’ll be back, and sooner than liberals believe possible.

Nevertheless, I watched the fireworks this year with some measure of love for my country once again. There’s a long way to go in reversing a generation of irresponsible governance, but we are at long last working to reverse it, however slowly. We are at long last headed in something closer to a healthy direction. Even with our news media failing us and widespread apathy toward politics and government, we as a people chose, first in 2006 and again in 2008, that we wanted to start fixing things again.

God bless America.

Our overnight trip to Springfield included a stop at the Lincoln Memorial Library. Despite the name, it is more museum than library, at least to the general public. It’s a research library for scholars, but the general public isn’t allowed to handle fragile documents and artifacts; for the rest of us, the library holds some interesting exhibits.

Among them was a state-by-state map of the 1860 electoral results, divided strictly according to the slavery question, including victories for the compromise-and-reconciliation candidate in the Union slave states. The coloration of the map struck a powerful chord with me: not only were the north-east states and California blue and the Confederacy red, but the non-state territories were a reddish-orange, which vaguely (and inaccurately) seemed to suggest an alignment of the territories with the slave states.

We occasionally hear that the slave question is with us today, although it’s usually described in terms of race relations. There’s a lot to such claims; this correlation between cotton and voting is striking. But there’s a lot against them, too; while racism isn’t dead, I understand southern states have largely come to terms with their racist heritage and Civil Rights Era behavior and younger southerners have renounced their states’ racism, often more completely than northern states not forced to admit theirs, much as Germany has addressed its anti-Semitism more thoroughly than European nations that enjoy the luxury of pretending they’re free of it.

No, what I saw in the map was the preservation not of racial divisions but of political divisions. Taking the red-orange territories as red, the map looked just like the red-blue party-political divisions of the electoral map today. Race is obviously still part of that result: the South, reliably Democratic for generations, defected almost as a body when Lyndon Johnson tore his party from the “southern strategy” of turning a blind eye to racism, and Nixon cheerfully picked the abandoned strategy for his own party. (And similarly, blacks stopped voting for the “party of Lincoln,” and turned reliably Democrat.) But racism doesn’t explain why the plains and mountain states are also deeply red.

I propose a slightly different take on the regional divisions.

When abolitionists fought to end slavery, they couched their argument in that highest of American virtues, freedom. When slavers fought to retain it, they too couched their position in freedom, albeit a diabolic twisting of the notion. How does one equate freedom with slavery in so Orwellian a fashion? Lincoln, as he so often did, put his finger on the crux of the matter, complaining that the Nebraska Bill, along with the Dred Scott decision and other pillars of slavery, held freedom to mean that “if one man undertake to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”

We no longer divide our country over the question of slavery, nor even of race, although race is still a powerful force in politics. But we continue to divide our country over the definition of freedom. Liberals, and the blue states they dominate, seek to use government to equalize opportunity in life, protect everyone from the depredations of the powerful, and broaden participation in government itself. Conservatives seek use government to maximize the opportunities for an individual to profit from, and even to prey upon, others. They don’t couch the position that way—that would be political suicide—but that’s the essence of the conservative platform. Sweeping business deregulation. Privatizing vital government functions. Regressive tax codes. Union busting. Restructuring public schooling to match religious doctrine. Bush-era abandonment of due process. And keeping all those uppity broads, fags, and darkies in their place with abortion law, marriage law, and racial profiling.

And if you’ve got a problem with that, well, they’re working on that, too. The PATRIOT Act, for example. The consolidation of news media. And, when all else fails, talk radio-style shouting. Given their way, no third man shall be allowed to object.

This sort of view of freedom, the freedom to grab as much as you can get away with, and to punish those you don’t like by any means available, is no freedom at all, although it sadly retains an appeal for a sizeable segment of the populace. Given this world view, slavery is not so much a singular issue underlying all our national politics, even this long after its elimination, as a logical extreme of one side of a broader debate that is still underway, and still split along the same regional lines.

The debasement of our money, at least as far as the metal content is concerned, is old news. Quarters were silver-copper sandwiches before I was born, and pennies get shinier every few years because there’s more zinc than copper. Even resorting electroplating zinc pennies with a thin copper surface hasn’t prevented the price of producing a penny exceeding their value as legal tender. But one ramification of this continual debasement caught me by surprise.

We visited Springfield with my parents today. I shelled out 50¢—51¢, actually—for one of those souvenir pennies, stretched and flattened and stamped with the image of a local historical landmark. You get to turn the crank to turn the gears and flatten the penny yourself, watching the process through the transparent plexiglas walls. What caught me by surprise is how cruddy the souvenir penny came out—not because the machine did a poor job, but because the penny contained far too little copper. The flattening gears smudged the copper plating across the surface of the metal slug, leaving me with a souvenir more gray than red-orange, copper only visible in a few tiger-stripe streaks.

The overall effect was more of patriotic disenchantment than patriotic sentiment. Rather than reminding us what a swell guy one of our presidents was, the flattened coin is a visible reminder of what more recent presidents have done to our real wealth.

Our visit with my parents began today, and we had to rise so early to catch the flight that I hardly had any media contact. Apart from thirty seconds of some symphony on the clock/radio to wake me, the only news I’ve taken in was a glance at the big-screen TV hanging in the diner attached to the hotel where our connecting bus dropped us off. From the corridor outside the diner, I couldn’t pick up any sound, so the entirety of my news input today consisted of:

1. A station identifier for Fox “news.”
2. Barack Obama’s lips moving silently.
3. A helpful caption reading “Alert! Obama speaks on better health care and how to pay for it,” or words very close to that.

That’s it. And even in that tiny, tiny exposure to the day’s news, an exposure containing no actual news whatsoever, there is one point of note.

Politics in the suburban Midwest—we’re on the outskirts of Rockford, which feels very suburban, despite lying beyond the orbit of Chicago, but closer to rural than urban—is different from that in the urbanized east coast. Keeping the television turned to Fox is not considered unseemly, and one might well hear its coverage described as “fair and balanced” without intended irony.

Yet so biased is the coverage that even in my tiny, tiny exposure lies a blatant attempt to slant the news to the right-wing mindset. “Alert,” indeed. Thirteen words, and the alarmist tone is evident, as though whatever the president has to say deserves to be treated as alarming, simply because he’s a Democrat. And no suggestion of improving health care without a caution that it’ll be expensive.

Don’t give me “fair and balanced.” Not until Dick Cheney’s tickertape reads, “Warning! Cheney speaks on interrogation and what civil liberties were sacrificed to make it possible.”