RAW

In case you haven't heard yet, Robert Anton Wilson needs our help.

October surprise

Via Ken MacLeod, the following news items:

The US Navy, three days ago.

Nearly 6,500 Sailors departed Oct. 3 with the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) Carrier Strike Group (IKE CSG)

The Nation, ten days ago.

the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major “strike group” of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

Turns out they are rushing things.

The Eisenhower had been in port at the Naval Station Norfolk for several years for refurbishing and refueling of its nuclear reactor; it had not been scheduled to depart for a new duty station until at least a month later, and possibly not till next spring. Family members, before the orders, had moved into the area and had until then expected to be with their sailor-spouses and parents in Virginia for some time yet.

What's their mission?

According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

Hmmnn. Election day is November 7. The ships should be in place two weeks before that.

What do you think will happen?

Size matters

Warren Ellis has been thinking about the form factor of comic books and paperback books.

It’s why paperbacks were such a revolution: they were cheap and they could be stuffed in a pocket.
....
Portable culture is crucial to any society in motion. Manga in all its indigenous forms has been a thing built for Japanese commuters. Part of why that style of anthology doesn’t play so well in America is that America’s a culture of private cars, not public transport.

Holy McLuhan, Batman!

And I thought my blog was frivolous

Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke in 500 words or less

Marmaduke is interrogated by Owner-Man about an inflammatory dog-authored diatribe that was published in that day's newspaper, as if he is the only dog in town who would write a letter to the editor. Marmaduke resents the implication, so he ignores the question and keeps napping in Owner-Man's chair.

Every day.

Charity

I live and work downtown in San Francisco; my apartment is on the periphery of the seedy Tenderloin district. I encounter beggars every day. I've given a lot of thought to how I respond to the hand outstretched. In this town, you have to.

I do not — I could not — offer money to everyone who asks, but as much as possible I try to at least recognize their humanity. I say “sorry,” or “not today,” or shrug. Sometimes a minute's conversation seems like a greater kindness than the change in my pocket. I try to make eye contact as much as possible.

And sometimes I'll decide that a little change, or a dollar or three, is the right thing to do. Maybe because I want to reward a beggar for asking so politely. Maybe it's someone who looks crazy enough to really need it. Maybe a lean kid on the road looks to have gotten herself into a tight spot, and will soon return home, having learned a valuable lesson. Maybe I just admire a well-executed example of the beggar's craft. The quarter I once paid to have a traffic light changed from red to green was a fair payment for the laugh I got from the offer.

Once a well-dressed stranger confronted me, angry, because I gave five dollars to a heartbreakingly strung-out crack addict. “Don't you realize that man is going to spend that money on drugs?” I told him the truth: I had looked at a man whose body was lying to him, telling him that he was going to die if he didn't get his fix, and lacking the power to free that man of his addiction the best thing I could think to do in that moment was to help relieve his pain a little.

There are a couple of folks I see on the street where I always stop and chat and give them five or ten or even twenty dollars if I have it. Casie is good-hearted and polite, sane enough to really benefit from a little money but far too mad to rejoin the working world; I've been giving him money for a decade now and I'm frankly surprised that he's survived so long. Anthony is ebullient and witty and forever plotting to get his life together; his addictions are stronger than he is, but I admire his cheerful determination.

And yes, of course, I also give money to charities that do a much more systematic job of these things than I can. I'm a soft touch. I know I am.

I want to quote an entire short post from Bluce about a beggar we both have seen downtown.

the test results came up negative

There's a beggar on the corner outside my office. Every morning I see him sitting crosslegged on the curb with a sign that says, “testing for human kindness.”

That sign is so heartwrenching, whenever I walk past him I have a strong urge to kick him in the face.

My point is not that I'm so much more compassionate than Bluce. My point is that I know exactly how he feels.

The city wears you down. I walk twenty minutes from office to home each night, and if only a dozen beggars come to me on that walk, it's been an easy day. I said I try to make eye contact with every one. But that's “I try,” because I fail. Sometimes I'm tired, or preoccupied, or in a hurry, and the beggars are too wretched, or hostile, or otherwise impossible to engage with in my current state.

Buddha compassion is limitless, but my time and money and energy are not limitless, so there are days when I feel fresh out of Buddha compassion. There are days when I hear the voice from my reptilian brainstem that wants to kick a beggar in the face, out of sheer frustration with the whole situation. It's human. The frustration and the compassion both, human.

The thing that's really happening is that Bluce and I are having our circuits blown by our circumstances. Remember I started by saying that I've given a lot of thought to how I respond to beggars because I have to. If I tried to respond completely fresh, a dozen or more times a day, I could not hold it together. Choosing a philosophy for dealing with beggars may be called wisdom, but it could also be called a scar.

This, I think, is the hidden meaning to all those myths where a king or an angel or a god comes to town disguised as a beggar, and judges the whole society on the basis of the aid they do or do not receive. It's not a caprice, where a few random individuals encountered by the faux beggar bear inordinate responsibility on their shoulders. It's not a test of the virtue of the citizens, as though the people of one place would have more kindness in their hearts than the people of another.

No, it's a test of the society as a whole because it's a test of whether that society exhausts the compassion of individuals. If the society systematically cares for its citizens who are poor, or lost, or broken, or mad, then individuals in that society will encounter the open hand rarely, and have the strength to respond with an open heart when they do meet it. If a society lets its needy wander the streets, then its' people's individual compassion will be quickly exhausted.

I'm a person who takes myths seriously. So I worry about the fate of my society.

Updates

Vinay Gupta on “selfish helplessness”.

Test, a little story

Gods and Beggars, a meditation from Sarah Gailey about this theme in their novelette Fisher of Bones.

Perhaps the Beggar-God is looking for a culture where such sacrificial giving is a natural, compassionate response to the suffering of another, because the idea of turning one’s back on such suffering is simply unthinkable.

A Twitter thread from Ana Mardoll.

Every time I give this ^$20 bill to the person who finds me, two things happen. (EVERY TIME.)

1. The person asking for money tries to give it back to me because “^$20 is too much!”
2. The people who observe this interaction get angry and scold me afterwards.

David Roberts at his mailing list Volts rejects the trolly problem, which leads him to explain Why I Am A Progressive.

Life is composed of dozens of small decisions every day, decisions in which conflicting interests and principles must be resolved, long-term benefits, personal and social, weighed against short-term desires. To maximize the net welfare of society, which ought to be our goal, we need to improve those decisions, incrementally, at the margins, bit by bit.

We do that by creating better moral agents, which we know how to do. We make sure that everyone has their basic needs cared for; that every family expecting a baby receives prenatal care and basic childcare training; that every family with a new child receives time off from work and regular nurse visits; that every child has access to quality public education, from pre-school through college; and that every adult receives adequate health care and housing. We create a compassionate, law-bound society that incentivizes prosocial behaviors.

Doors

I think the door vault chase at the end of Monsters, Inc. is probably the greatest science fiction film ever made.

I'm serious. It takes the idea of the magic closet doors and really follows through on the implications. It acheives an effect that really is best suited to film—in fact, would have been impossible to do nearly as well in anything other than a 3D animated film. The result is playful, inventive, unique, kinetic, visually exciting, and intellectually delightful. A milestone in the history of film, no exaggeration.

It understands something that I've mentioned before, “Professor” Brian Moriarty's chant to his brethren and sistren in the computer game industry.

The cyberpunk conception of virtual reality is not really very interesting. Only a hacker would find the problem of avatar collision interesting.
...
Space and time are not intrinsic properties of virtual presence. Space and time will not exist in virtual presence unless we bring them with us. Space and time are boring. Let's not invite them.

Via Cobb, I learn that someone in the computer game business has finally taken the lesson. Wow. Even if you have no taste for games, you should go take a look; it's brilliant. Even the format of the demo is exceptionally witty.

Nontransitive dice

Dig this crazy math.

The game involves four specially numbered dice. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three dice. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins the throw. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more throws, you will nearly always have more wins.

You can then invite your opponent to pick a different die, perhaps even the one that worked so well for you. You select one of the remaining dice. Again, in a game of at least 10 throws, you're very likely to come out the winner.

Indeed, it doesn't matter which die your opponent picks.

There has got to be some cool application for these dice, but I cannot think of what it could possibly be.

Popkultur commodification

MIT's Convergence Culture gang pays a visit to ComiCon and learns a lesson about the economic consequences of fan love.

he had been hesitant to invest in the development of Firefly-affiliated merchandise, until he saw that fans were willing to pay—and pay well—for anything connected to the show
....
a small, engaged audience can be far more lucrative, especially to niche marketers, than a massive casual audience. After all, as he pointed out to me, there's no market for CSI: Miami trading cards, even if it is the number one show in the world

Fourteen episodes, cancelled four years ago, and Firefly still sells cards.

Reminds me of a story I read about how Lucas had sold the merchandising rights for Episode I-III of Star Wars for a billion dollars. For that kind of money, he could have made the movies and shown them for free as a promotional cost. Think about that.

Apologetics

For those of you who say, “omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent—choose two,” I say that I have a few hundred proofs of God's existence handy.

A few samples:

Argument from Lots of Books

1. The Bible has lots of books written by lots of authors over a long period of time.
2. Through centuries of vigorous apologetics we've been able to forge a more or less coherent plot for the whole Bible.
3. It is beyond human ability for so many authors over so long a time to write so many books from which we could hammer such a plot.
4. Therefore, God exists.

Argument from Troy

1. There is little archeological evidence for the events in Exodus.
2. But look at Troy! It is discovered when people thought the Iliad was only a story! So who knows if there would be a time evidence for Exodus was discovered?
3. Therefore the Exodus actually happened.
4. Therefore, God exists.

Pascal's Argument, aka Pascal's Wager

1. If God exists, it would be really cool. (And I would win big-time.)
2. If God didn't exist, it would really suck. (But I wouldn't lose much.)
3. Therefore, God exists. (Or, at least I should believe in God because it's the best bet.)

My Thelemite readers may particularly enjoy proofs 241 and 242.

And mind you, most of these are arguments for a well-known flavour of Big Daddy God. Apply to Ha'shem, Ram, Ptah, Ahura Mazda, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster at your own risk.

Infinite mouse

Cory Doctrow asks a question.

Almost all the movies made when the first Mickey cartoon was made are rotting and running to slime. No one can bring them back to life because they can't even figure out who they belong to, 78 years after the fact. Why should all of those movies vanish so that you, Disney, can go on making money off of less than one percent of the creative works from the 1920s?

Lawrence Lessig explains further.

On the road

After all that about this blog showing up irregularly on LJ, I should also say that I am likely going on haitus for about a week, since I'm going to be travelling such that I probably won't have good 'net access.

Feed

There's something screwy with Blogger Beta's feed behaviour, such that I see that the LiveJournal syndicated version of my blog has apparently been, uh, constipated. It's not been working the last several days, but just now has shown a flood of posts from the last several days.

Sorry about that, O LiveJournal readers. Though one of 'em reports that I needn't apologize, so relieved she is that I'm broadcasting on that channel again—she even recommends to her LJ Friends that they Friend my syndicated feed. Speaking for myself, I figure that this recent wacky behavior doesn't exactly constitute encouragement to read me via feed. This is twice that I've flooded those readers' Friends pages.

But if you're a LiveJournalist who didn't know about my syndicated version and is brave enough to want my blog on your Friends page, this link should set you up. You'll get the same bloggy goodness every day, though the formatting is sometimes a touch less elegant. (I do, however, insert LJ cuts in my occasional very long posts, if that's a consideration.) FWIW, I don't get automatically notified when someone comments on the LJ posts, the way I do on the original Blog*Spot version of the blog. I try to check the comments on the LJ version regularly, but I probably miss some, so if you have a comment that you really want me to see, put it on Blog*Spot.

If you've never heard of LiveJournal and don't understand anything I'm talking about ... never mind.

Who's winning

Security guru Bruce Scheiner tells us what the terrorists want.

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

He is exactly correct, and you really, really ought to click through and read the whole thing.

Cathartic media

Everything you know is wrong.

Youth violence is decreasing, and this coincides neatly with the increasing prevalance of violent video games. Take that, Jack Thompson!

Rates of of rape are decreasing, and this coincides with the increasing availability of pornography. Take that, Catherine MacKinnon!

Or, more likely, trying to figure these things out using statistics is just very, very difficult.

Today's quote

• Remember, a tiger is not a toy.
• Don't try to impress people by brandishing your tiger.
• Don't ever point your tiger at anything you are not prepared to have eaten.
• Always keep you tiger cleaned, and in proper working condition.
• Don't use more tiger than you can handle.
• Keep your tiger away from children until they are mature enough to use it wisely.

From comments on a post by Majikthise, who informs us of a funny yet subtly important civil liberties question, as DeLong observes.

Perpetual motion machine

Katherine at Obsidian Wings tells us some backstory about Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was picked up by US airport security at JFK International Airport and sent to Syria for interrogation in a process called “extraordinary rendition,” which some readers may remember me mentioning earlier.

Syrian intelligence forces beat Maher Arar into falsely confessing that he had received terrorist training in Afghanistan. It's actually worse than that. Arar wasn't just tortured into a false confession in a Syrian prison. He also seems to have been sent to be tortured in Palestine Branch partly because of false confessions that two other Canadian citizens made under torture in the same prison.

Their names are Ahmad Abou El-Maati and Abdullah Almalki.
...
El-Maati's first interrogation:

During his first interrogation session, when the Syrian intelligence officers found El-Maati's initial answers to their questions unsatisfactory, they threatened to imprison and rape his wife. El-Maati said he had told the truth and that he ‘could not invent a story.’ But, according to El-Maati,

[T]hey told him yes, he could invent a story.

They told him to strip naked except for his shorts and made him lie down, and hancuffed his hands behind his back to his legs. He was still blindfoled. They poured ice water all over him and brought in thick electrical cables and started beating him with them on his feet, legs, knees and back. They would occasionally stop and take him back to his cell. This continued for two days.

Ahmad broke down and agreed to say what they wanted him to say.

Emphasis mine.

Mind you, this isn't what the President means when he talks about the importance of permitting the US to use “tough interrogation methods.” This was the bad Syrians, not the good and virtuous US. All the US did was send Arar to Syria to be interrogated, because the US had evidence that suggested that he was a al-Qaeda terrorist. Okay, it turns out that this evidence was incorrect, in part because some of it was beaten out of people. But that was done by the Syrians, not the US, so you see that this is all the Syrians' responsibility, not ours. I am sure that this process will eventually lead to the torture of people who really are terrorists, and the US will take responsibility for doing that torture.

I mean interrogation. Did I say “torture?” Sorry. Interrogation. Tough but legal interrogation.

Obsidian Wings has a lot more on the Maher Arar story.

Space marines

Codic at Everything2 has a request.

I'm not saying that movies falling into the idea of “everyone dies but Sean Connery, Sigourney Weaver, and Arnold Schwarzenegger,” is incredibly terrible. But cliché is a horrible thing, especially when you start fucking up the overly macho guy movies I need so desperately in my horribly drab life. Please, I have so little. So very little. Rekindle my hope in military training effectiveness. Show me that orders can be followed with cohesion, precision, and guile on that big movie screen. Give me beautiful wide angle panning shots of snipers effectively covering the field of fire on his forward scout teams. Give me a zoom in on the team leader's face correctly ascertaining the fire lines of potential hidden artillery bunkers. Show me coolness under pressure. I want to see flanks covered, effective room clearing, and proper use of a goddamn pulse rifle within close proximity of enemy targets. I want to see hostages rescued, aliens gutted, and beers being toasted ...

Codic goes on to instruct us on “how to properly assemble a combat insertion team.“

1. Choose an effective team leader.
2. Shoot the new guy in the foot before you teleport, dock, or otherwise leave the transport vessel.
3. Have someone Cisco certified or Wedge on your team.
4. Group hug and calm down the paranoid guy on your team before anything horrible happens.
5. Give the medic, scientist, or any otherwise non-military squad member a gun. And make sure it's a serious-ass gun with lots of buttons and blinking things on it, too.

Codic elaborates on each of these at length, explaining why, f'rinstance, an effective team leader in a space alien attack is almost certainly going to have to be female. Having seen a lot of space alien attack movies, I have to agree that this is good advice.

Eye chart

Available for sale on Cafepress in poster and t-shirt form. Add, subtract, multiply, and be confused!

If you don't understand the joke ... never mind. It's a very inside joke.

Generational politics

In the early ’90s, Generation Xers like me started to develop some generational consciousness. There was something weird going on in the gap between Xers and our elders that was tricky to put your finger on ... at least until you figured out something that is obvious once you think about it, that the Xers’ gap experience is just plain different from the Baby Boomers’ experience. Once you step away from the previous example, things become a lot clearer.

It was at that time that I found out about Niel Howe and William Strauss, a pair of historians who have a theory about generational cycles in American history and culture. They say that American culture moves in a four-generation cycle, with recurring generational archetypes: Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, and Artists. Boomers are Prophets, while Xers are Nomads, like the Lost Generation that come of age in the 1920s. Folks born since around Reagan's inauguration they call “Millenials,” and Howe and Strauss classify them as Heroes, like the generation that came of age in the Great Depression and WWII.

Their theory is that this generational cycle corresponds to a historical cycle, moving through what they call “turnings:” a High, an Awakening, an Unravelling, and a Crisis. In their book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, they said that past Crises included the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression / WWII. If you do the math that means that we're just about due for another Crisis. The book was published six years ago and the subtitle turns out to be disconcertingly apt.

So I want to talk about our Crisis, and how it connects to the generations.

I thought of them when I read yet another great post from Digby, this time about the disconcerting implications of recent Boomer veneration of the “Greatest Generation” who came of age during the last Crisis and fought World War Two. It's worth reading Digby's whole post, but I'll quote just a bit to make my point about the generational dynamics here.

I don't think younger people can understand the depth of the generation gap between the baby boomers and their parents, the Greatest Generation. It was a chasm and it turned families inside out for many years. But by the 90's our parents were starting to get very old and for many of us, the fetishizing of the Greatest Generation was a form of generational rapprochement.

For conservative baby boomers, however, it had much more resonance. Vietnam was their war, of course, the most lethal, meaningful hot war of the Cold War, but they had largely avoided it like most of their age group, even as they extolled the warrior virtues and supported the policy. (This led to cognitive dissonance that never left them.) They also sat out or opposed the successful, defining social movements of their generation — civil rights and women's rights — and were looking back at a life made up of nothing more than petty culture war resentment. By the time they came into power even the Cold War was over — resolved by the last presidents of the Greatest Generation. It looked as if the conservative baby boomers were going to be left without any meaningful legacy at all. You could feel their emptiness.

Digby argues that the architects of the Bush administration stood ready to turn that void into the hunger for endless war which I've commented on before.

... if you follow the talk of a grand Clash of Civilizations with “Islamofasists” since 9/11 ... you see that there is an unwholesome satisfaction at the prospect
....
I see some transparent hungers at work.
....

I also suspect that there's a kind of generational hunger at work here, too .... [I reference Strauss and Howe's prediction of a Crisis] .... The wheel has turned, and it's that time again. I've felt the call myself, a hunger for national purpose. But the kind of national purpose that speaks to me is very different than what these hawks dream of—their dream is of endless, bloody war.

Digby's piece is largely a reaction to an excellent article by Christopher Hayes from In These Times about how Greatest Generation nostalgia in the ’90s helped to set us up for this attitude.

The WWII that emerges from accounts of the late ’90s is one scrubbed clean of its moral complexity. There is no mention of American big business financing the build-up of the Nazi war machine, no America First campaign determined not to shed American blood for European Jews, no firebombing of civilians in Dresden. The war was difficult, yes, and bloody, but pure and just: a battle, not to put too fine a point on it, between good and evil.

In the hands of the men who would come to dominate American military policy in the Bush administration, this Manichean framework was a useful template to apply indiscriminately to any and all of the military confrontations they had long sought. To the neocons and some breakaway lefties, al-Qaeda members are “Islamofascists,” 21st century heirs to the murderous ideologies of Nazism, fascism and totalitarianism. It is always Munich 1938, every dictator is a “tyrant,” and anyone opposed to a state of perpetual war is guilty of “appeasement.”

In short, in the ’90s many Boomers were psyching themselves up for this bloodthirsty decade, and we didn't know.

I remember that when I first read Howe and Strauss, I had a hard time accepting their prediction that the Prophet Boomers—who of course produced the hippies—would mature into a generation that would send Hero Millenials off to war, just like the Hero Greatest generation before them. I don't have a hard time with that one at all, any more.

Shortly after 9/11, I was near Ground Zero in Manhattan with a friend who had also read Howe and Strauss. We saw a couple of New York's Finest interacting with a gaggle of kids and teenagers there. It was close enough to 9/11 that the kids' natural immunity to the solemnity of any occasion did not protect them from the aura of Ground Zero. The cops still wore the haloes they all had in the wake of their valor on 9/11. Kids, heroes, and a smoking hole in the ground: there was something spooky happening. The kids were very deferential to the cops. There was hope in the eyes of the cops. And there was hope in the eyes of the kids, too, but a different kind. I couldn't quite name what was happening, but my friend did.

“Look at that,” she said. “We're ready to send them off to war. And they're ready to go. It'll be easy.”

Aliens, demons, fairies, angels, and the brain

LiveScience offers us an article with the irresistable title Creepy Experiment Exposes Paranoia and Sense of Alien Control.

The young woman went to doctors to have them probe her brain, to root out where her seizures came from. But unexpectedly, their investigations and the procedure they performed led her to experience the creepy illusion of a person standing behind her, where nobody was actually present.

The patient described the illusory person as young and of indeterminate sex, a “shadow” who did not speak or move. “He is behind me, almost at my body, but I do not feel it,” she reported.

When the patient sat and embraced her knees with her arms, she noted the “man” was now also sitting and clasping her in his arms, which she described as unpleasant. When asked to read a card in her right hand, she noted the shadow tried to interfere, saying, “wants to take the card” and “he doesn't want me to read.”
...
The researchers found stimulating a region known as the left temporoparietal junction caused the woman to feel the presence of a shadowy person.

The temporoparietal junction is involved in distinguishing self from other and integrating body-related sensory information. Since the shadowy person closely mimicked the woman, the researchers propose she was experiencing an illusion based on her own body. This effect is a symptom of schizophrenia, and the scientists noted hyperactivity in the temporoparietal cortex of schizophrenics could lead to include the sensation that one's actions are being performed by someone else.

Fascinating stuff.

But, I gotta say, “the young woman went to doctors to have them probe her brain” and then she had some paranoid hallucinations. There's a part of me that says that it ain't exactly a surprise, y'know?

Torture

Eugene Robinson writes at the Washington Post.

I wish I could turn to cheerier matters, but I just can't get past this torture issue—the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a “high-value” terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening.

Found via Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings, who describes the story thus.

the President put torture back in the news, campaigning for a bill to make torture okay so long as the President meets the strict requirement of deciding to torture someone

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Consent

One thing that a worldly person learns living here in this den of iniquity we call San Francisco is that folks who enjoy the giving and receiving of recreational spankings and so forth are very sophisticated about the concept of consent. Unlike many folks who seem to not get the concept of consent at all.

So I was charmed by this observation in an anecdote from a professional dominatrix.

By asking me a question, you consent to having your question answered, even if that answer makes you uncomfortable.

Ah. Good observation.

Carbon

Al Gore is gutsier than I realized. Dig this from a recent speech.

For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all payroll taxes—including those for social security and unemployment compensation—and the replacement of that revenue in the form of pollution taxes—principally on CO₂. The overall level of taxation would remain exactly the same. It would be, in other words, a revenue neutral tax swap. But, instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees, it would discourage business from producing more pollution.

In comments at Ezra Klien's blog, Nicholas Beaudrot takes out a pencil and works out the figures.

Do the math!

The US produced roughly 6 million metric tons of CO₂ last year. Social Insurance taxes brought in $733 Billion in revenue Table F-3. A gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO₂.

The math says ... $.06 per pound of CO₂, or $1.20 per gallon of gas. pre-2004, gas was about $4.50/gal US in Europe, and below $2.00/gal in most of the States. This means we could enact a CO₂ tax and still pay less than Europeans pay for gas (which is around $6.50 today).

What's more, the payroll tax is almost entirely born by the worker. Someone who makes $40,000/year and drives 18,000 miles in a 20 mpg car (or cars) would still come out way ahead.

Avast!

Don't ye be fergettin', mateys, that today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Arrr!

Bonus! Via Makeda55, an excellent pirate language learning resource.

Is it fascism yet?

Digby gives good rant, starting from a quote from conservative pundit Fred Barnes.

“It's really important at this stage ... to be thinking about how to institutionalize courses of action that will enable future presidents to gain the information necessary to prevent attack,” [Bush] said. This, presumably, would include the use of secret prisons, tough but legal interrogation techniques, a ban on lawsuits against interrogators, electronic eavesdropping, and monitoring of bank transfers, among other measures.

....
I assume he's accurately reporting what the president said. And he's reporting that Bush's plan to combat terrorism is to institutionalize torture, warrentless spying on his own citizens, indefinite detention, secret prisons, warrantless monitoring of bank transfers and legal immunity for those who carry out those tasks.

There is, of course, more, if you care to follow through the link.

Geeks saving the universe

Lance Mannion has a commentary on Stars Trek, Wars, and -gate so good that he makes me want to watch Stargate SG-1, which I would have thought impossible.

the other thing I like about SG-1 is that it was made by adults who aren't just remembering what it was like to be 8 years old and love Star Trek. It's made by adults who are remembering also what it was like to be 12 and to start seeing plot holes and logic failures in what used to be your favorite sci-fi movies and TV shows.

Mannion's commentary meanders, so he manages to tie together some observations about geeky TV characters, George Lucas' egomania, and Cagney and Lacey such that it all makes sense.

Really. Cagney and Lacey. It's one of the best parts, actually.

Venn

Indexed offers us art using a very simple formalism in a very simple medium.

Mirrorshades

If the word “cyberspace” has any metaphorical resonance for you, you probably want to see a little something that Warren Ellis reports from Second Life.

Gumbo

Luxcannon offers wise words about gumbo.

The magic in the cauldron starts happening when the third and fourth order chemical compounds get to mixing. Each meat is cooked or prepared separately, and then combined into the big pot when it's the appropriate time. You have to suss that out based on what you want matching up with what. The big engineering trick is to cook something so long but not have it all end up tasting like undifferentiated stuff. That would be the antithesis of gumbo-- a freeze-dried powder that was stirred into a softened brick of noodles .... There is an emulsifying that occurs. Yes, my motherfucking gumbo motherfucking stratifies.

Sounds tasty.

Say hello to the new boss

Via DeLong, I see that Associated Press reports that the government of Iraq which we are fighting to defend is maintaining the Abu Ghraib tradition.

The notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities, with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors.
...
An independent witness who went into Abu Ghraib this week told The Sunday Telegraph that screams were coming from the cell blocks housing the terrorist suspects. Prisoners released from the jail this week spoke of routine torture of terrorism suspects and on Wednesday, 27 prisoners were hanged in the first mass execution since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

I am sure that the President is right that if we have the resolve to keep American troops in Iraq through the end of his term, the insurgency against the Iraqi government will be defeated, because the Iraqi people yearn for the freedom and democracy that the new government of Iraq is offering.