Peak

Having warned us about Peak Oil, James Howard Kunstler now also declares Peak Suburbia.

It is not an accident that the housing bubble coincided with the phenomenon of Peak Oil. First of all, the housing bubble should more properly be called the suburban bubble, because most of the activity came in the form of “greenfield“ housing subdivisions, and included all the additional crap-o-la accessories required by them—strip malls, power centers, Outback steak houses, car washes, et cetera. The suburban expansion has been based entirely on cheap-and-abundant supplies of oil. Similarly, it was not an accident that the suburban project faltered briefly in the 1970s, when America's oil production entered its long decline, OPEC seized the moment, and oil prices shot up. Notice that the final suburban blowout occurred after 1990, when the North Sea and Prudhoe Bay oil strikes came into full production, disabling OPEC, and a world oil glut finally drove prices as low as ten dollars a barrel in 1999. That ushered in the climactic phase of suburbia, as represented by things like the standard 4000-square-foot Toll Brother's McMansion and the heyday of the super-gigantic SUV to go with it.

The American public has no idea how over all that is.

This is, of course, a wrenching catastrophe on many levels, but I'm in a good mood, so I'm choosing to look on the bright side of how I hate suburbs and will be happy to see them go.

Superhero stories

Jim Henley asks what superhero stories are for, and has a good answer.

If science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story is the literature of ethics. Or say, rather, it should be.
....
The core question of the superhero story might be phrased as What do we owe other people? One problem is that superhero stories have typically answered the question before they've barely asked it: “With great power must come great responsibility!“ Spider-Man's Uncle Ben tells us. Are you sure about that? And how much is “great,“ anyway? What part of my life can I keep back for myself?

The whole piece is that intriguing.

Roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry was the creator and producer of Star Trek.

In Harlan Ellison’s fascinating book-length diatribe about his feud with Roddenberry over the Trek episode ”City on the Edge of Forever,” he has a passage from David Gerrold, whom I’ve noted before has good cause to take an unromantic view of Mr Roddenberry, saying:

Gene Roddenberry … was a TV producer. (A TV producer is an ordinary human being who has made the mistake of falling asleep next to a big green pod filled with money. When he awakes again, he has been transformed into an alien thing that feeds on power, talent, and the blood of the innocent. Now, some people I know have argued with me about this, saying that a TV producer is nowhere near as bad as a lawyer, but TV producers are one of the leading causes of lawyers in Los Angeles. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.)

At his best, Gene Roddenberry was an inspiring speaker. He knew how to say all the right things. He knew how to speak to a crowd or an individual with equal grace. He knew what you wanted to hear and that was what he told you. He made you want to believe again.

At his worst — well, he was a producer, the American version of a feudal lord. Despite whatever assertions for truth and justice a feudal lord might make, he’s still a lord. He might believe he's acting justly, but the way the system is constituted encourages acts of abuse, if not by the lord himself, then certainly by those who act in his name. The lord doesn't have to drive the steamroller; there are lots of peasants working in the fields who will happily do that job for him, without regard to whose home or livelihood they're rumbling over.

Which is to say that I don’t take the romantic view of Mr Roddenberry, or Trek, but still commend to your attention Wil Wheaton speaking in honour of Mr Roddenbery, describing him at his best. Even cold, cruel, evil Warren Ellis says, “Really nice piece today, squire.”

Wheaton’s original is linkrotted, so here it is for convenience:

Saturday night, I was given the tremendous honor of inducting Gene Roddenberry into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. For the three of you in the back who wandered in from Rob Corddry’s column looking for the cash bar, Gene created Star Trek. I was lucky enough to know him, and too young to appreciate it at the time.

I’ve given plenty of speeches before, in front of crowds as large as 5,000, in places as varied as a Holiday Inn convention hall to the Royal Albert Hall in London, but this speech was the most personally important speech I have ever been asked to give. Not only was I given the privilege of presenting Gene’s induction, but it would be accepted by Gene’s son, and my friend, Eugene Roddenberry, Junior. Rod, as he is known to his friends, has spent the bulk of his adult life getting to know his father. Gene died when Rod and I were still teenagers, and there was a vast generation gap between Rod and Gene. I’ve always admired Rod. He could easily sit back and cash checks from Paramount while drinking Courvoisier from the hollowed-out skulls of the vanquished, but instead he has worked tirelessly to honor and preserve Gene’s legacy. Rod, like his father, appreciates and embraces the legion of Trekkies around the world who are such an integral part of what Rod calls “The Trek Nation.” We are, in many ways, spiritual half-brothers who genuinely like each other, but only cross paths once or twice a year.

I worked on my speech for two weeks, to ensure that I hit each note perfectly. I felt that it was important to honor and remember Gene correctly, and put his accomplishments into the correct context. In some ways, I felt like a Speaker for the Dead, and I wanted to ensure that I earned the distinction.

I went through everything I’ve ever written about my love of Star Trek and science fiction and about my admiration for and relationship with Gene. It took many late nights of massive rewriting and just a little bit of panic, but I finally ended up with something that I was proud of … about three hours before I drove to the airport for my flight to Seattle.

* * *

Neal Stephenson emceed the event. We were all supposed to act like it wasn’t a big deal, but my inner geek – no, this time it was My Inner Geek – got the better of me when he said that my blog was “more readable than most blogs out there.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement of blogs, granted, but it implied that he not only read a bit of my blog, but thought it didn’t suck. I took the stage to polite applause and, before I’d realized it, said, “Wow! Being introduced by one of your idols is great, but when he praises your writing, it’s even cooler.”

Ah, good one, genius. Good thing you practiced the speech so much so you could get up here and act like a fanboy in front of everyone. Stick to the script, Chachi.

I have no idea why my inner critic speaks with Dennis Miller’s voice as performed by Dana Carvey, but it always seems appropriate. I looked back at my notes, and out at the crowd.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Wil Wheaton, and I forgot to pack a tie.”

A wave of giggles started at a table in the back and spread out around the room.

See? Now get to it.

I smiled, and began my speech.

“Star Trek: The Next Generation turns twenty this year. If my math is correct, this means that it is almost old enough to get a drink in Ten Forward. Even more shocking to my fellow cast members, it means that I am old enough to run for president in 2008.”

Another wave of giggles rippled across the room.

“I have already articulated a strong anti-drug policy which some of you may be familiar with, from the first season episode ‘Symbiosis.’ “

I cocked my head to one side, affected a Wesley Crusher voice, and quoted myself from 1987.”Escape? How can a chemical substance provide an escape? I’m confused, Tasha.”

Real laughter erupted, mostly from a table near the back with some local Star Trek fan club members, all of them in very cool homemade Starfleet dress uniforms.

“To celebrate this milestone, Paramount is releasing the Really Super-Awesome Trust Us You Totally Need To Have This One Even If You’ve Already Bought All The Other Ones DVD box set.”

The audience laughed again, and I realized how important these first few beats in a speech are. While it’s good to relax the audience and get them on my side, it’s also good for me to spend two paragraphs with what is essentially “throw-away” material while I relax and get out of my own way.

“I’m hosting one of the special features, which looks at the people and places that have been affected by Star Trek: The Next Generation over the last two decades,” I said.

I deliberately looked up from the podium. “We are some of those people, and we are gathered tonight in one of those places. When we were here a few weeks ago to shoot footage for our documentary, I discovered that this museum is more than just a collection of cool artifacts from the final frontier and beyond. It is an affirmation of why I, and so many other people around the world, love science fiction, and why science fiction endures – whether created by Jules Verne in 1864, or Gene Roddenberry in 1964, or some hot new stereovision writer in 2064 – with a relevance that transcends generations.

“There are countless examples here of the real power that science fiction has to address current events in a way that’s safe and acceptable for most audiences, while speaking very seriously about them to those who look beyond the spaceships and rayguns to the ideas behind the stories. Whether it was written one hundred years ago or just published last month, science fiction can give us warnings about the future, hope for the future, or just blissful escape into the future, visiting fantastic worlds that are light-years away – and as close as our bookshelves and televisions. “I wasn’t even a glimmer in my father’s eye in 1966, but a few minutes on the Internet – Gene’s ‘library computer,’ on a scale that would have amazed him – gave me a pretty clear picture of what things were like back then. LBJ announced that American soldiers would stay in Vietnam indefinitely and increased troop levels to 250,000, turning an unpopular foreign war into the worst domestic conflict since the Civil War. Huge demonstrations exploded across the country. Racial and religious tensions were high, and bigotry was common throughout America. John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.”

I paused, but there was no laughter. Huh. I thought that was funny. Oh well.

I took a breath and noticed just how dry my mouth and throat were. I wondered if I’d ever reach a point where I can get on stage in front of a bunch of strangers and not feel nervous.

“It wasn’t a particularly optimistic period for our nation, and there wasn’t all that much going on to feel good about. Then, on September 8, 1966, a new show debuted. The network thought they were buying ‘Wagon Train to the stars,’ but just two commercial breaks into the show, it was clear that this was something new and different. As episodes aired over the following weeks and months, it was undeniable that this show, set in the future but reflecting so much of the contemporary world, was breaking new ground each week. Like all great science fiction, it held up a mirror and showed us our failings and triumphs — not by beating us over the head with a message, but by making that message easy enough to discover for those who cared to see it. Star Trek dared to do this during an incredibly turbulent time, when it was risky to even acknowledge that the mirror existed, much less hold it up on network television.

“It has been more than forty years since Kirk and Spock first boldly went where no man has gone before, and twenty years since Picard and some kid boldly went where no one has gone before.”

I didn’t have to pause this time. The Trekkies laughed, hard, and I looked up for a moment to enjoy it. I love it when a joke goes over with the audience the way I hoped it would when I wrote it.

“Today, many of us still dream of living in the Utopian world Gene envisioned, where we play in holodecks, beam ourselves to work, and embrace the crazy notion that race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation are differences to be celebrated and learned from, not feared and destroyed.”

Applause started with the Trekkies, and quickly spread to the entire room. That made me feel really good, because of everything Gene’s legacy encompasses. I know his vision of tolerance and equality was the one he wanted to realize more than any other.

“Gene’s legacy is also tangible in our world: our cell phones look an awful lot like the original communicators, our Bluetooth headsets work like the Next Generation communicators — though they don’t look nearly as cool and go in the wrong place, but there’s still time to get it right — and our PDAs are like those little PADD props we used to hide complicated technobabble crib notes on. Engineers, inspired by Scotty or Geordi, find ways of solving problems that no one thought possible — ahead of schedule and under budget. The list of significant achievements inspired by Star Trek — including the MRI — are so long, they’ve been the subject of enough film documentaries, critical articles, and mass-market books to fill a shelf. And the work continues.”

I paused briefly, less than a second, while dozens of images flashed through my mind: playing Star Trek on the playground in elementary school … listening to a Star Trek adventure on my portable Sesame Street record player in the sheet-and-broomsticks fort my dad built for me in the back yard … the first time I auditioned for The Next Generation.

“Even before I wore the space suit, I loved everything that Star Trek stands for,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “When I turn on the television today and see medical drama after crime drama after reality series after intelligence-insulting sitcom, I long for the original Star Trek, or the fourth season of The Next Generation. When I turn on CNN, I wish our world leaders would watch a little more Star Trek and a little less 24.”

Massive applause, accompanied by some whistling. I was uncertain about getting even a little political, but if Gene wasn’t afraid to do it in the 1960s, why should I be afraid to do it now?

“Star Trek is the most important and significant science fiction franchise in history. It brought science fiction into the mainstream and showed that science fiction can inspire while it entertains. Star Trek got an entire generation thinking about deep space exploration, using humanism and optimism to find peaceful solutions to complex problems. Star Trek has turned millions of potential science fiction fans into “one of us” and helped lay the foundation for the great science fiction on television and in the movies since its debut. Star Trek has showed audiences for 40 years — and counting — that there is real hope for our future, if we’re willing to work together to get there.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” I stepped back from the podium and held my arms over my head, palms out, toward the giant screen that hung behind and above the stage. “The life and work of Gene Roddenberry.”

A film that the museum had put together began to play. For the next five minutes, actors and fans towered over me while they all echoed, in their own way, what I said — and what we all believe — about Gene’s legacy. It was a very fitting tribute.

When the film ended, I stood at the podium again. “I am incredibly proud to be part of Gene’s legacy, and I am incredibly honored to present this award to his son, and my friend, Eugene Roddenberry.”

Rod stood. The audience applauded as he walked to the stage and stood next to me. I reached out to shake his hand, and he pulled me in for a hug — just like his dad always did.

“Now that I have you on stage,” I said, “I have something personal I’d like to add to this celebration tonight.”

Rod looked puzzled, just as I’d planned it. I turned back to my notes and addressed the audience.

“When Wesley was field-promoted to a real ensign at the end of season 3, Gene wanted to commemorate the occasion.” My voice grew thick with emotion, and I swallowed to steady myself. “He came to the bridge set one afternoon, gathered the cast and crew together, kicked out the set photographer, and shut down production for a few minutes to present me with the bars he’d received when he was field-promoted to ensign in the real military.”

That day, seventeen years distant on stage eight, flashed through my mind, a series of still images and strong emotions.

“I was too young and immature to fully absorb the magnitude of the gesture, but I remember that Gene shook my hand, pulled me into him for a big hug, and told me that, in many ways, Wesley Crusher was as close as he had come to writing himself into Star Trek as a character, so it seemed only fitting.”

I could hear Gene’s voice and feel the roughness of his ever-present red sweater vest rub against my face as he hugged me and held me, literally and figuratively, beneath the wing of the Great Bird of the Galaxy. I could hear the applause from the crew. I could see the smiling faces of my friends in the cast. At that point in my life, nobody — not even my own father — had made me feel like they were as proud of me as Gene did in that moment. I wanted to look at Rod, but I was having a hard enough time keeping it together.

“Tonight we honor Gene for creating the Roddenberry legacy. But while I only wore Gene’s shoes on the set, this man walks in Gene’s shoes every day, and they fit him perfectly.”

I reached into my pocket, and removed a small, simple, gray box. Inside were two small brass bars, slightly tarnished with age, affixed to the same narrow strip of thin white cardboard they were on when Gene gave them to me so many years ago.

I looked at Rod. Tears welled up in both of our eyes.

“To commemorate this occasion, therefore, I would like to present Eugene Roddenberry with his father’s ensign’s bars, because he has done more to earn these bars than I ever could have. More than anyone else today, he continues to honor the legacy his father created, and I know that Gene would want him to have them.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Rod said.

“I know,” I said. I opened the box and put it into his hand, just as Gene had done for me on stage eight so long ago. I had honored Gene with my words, and it was time for Rod to do what he has done so well: honor Gene not only with what he does, but (and most importantly) how he does it. I left the stage.

Vito Russo

In honour of San Francisco Pride weekend, a few words about Vito Russo.

Russo was an important gay rights activist and a cinephile best known for his book about the representation of GLBT characters in film, The Celluloid Closet.

In 1989, a year before AIDS would take him from us, he taught two classes at the University of California at Santa Cruz. One was on the history of GLBT culture in the US, including his eyewitness account (!) of Stonewall.

The other was Celluloid Closet and somehow, in spite of being a heterosexual physics student, I decided to take it. Good decision; it was the best class I've ever taken on any subject.

Among many fascinating clips from films, Russo showed us a lot of sissy characters in 1930s films, particularly as played by Franklin Pangborn. Russo was quite a fan. Sure, he knew that these characters represented a stereotype that was a problem in several ways, but they were charming and were far preferable to the invisibility of the '40s and '50s and the monsters and Problem Characters of the '60s and '70s. They were allowed to just be who they were and speak for themselves, if in a limited, one-note way.

So years later, when I saw Con Air in a theater in San Francisco, it was his sensibility that enabled me to enjoy the silly, swishy character Ramon “Sally-Can't-Dance” Martinez without cringing too much. There's a bit where the escaped prisoners are getting ready to make a stand against a bunch of cops. Sally-Can't-Dance has been AWOL from the preparations, having stumbled across a trunk full of dresses in his size. He rejoins the fray in drag, and goes to their leader, Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, asking, “What can I do?”

Cyrus doesn't even blink at Sally-Can't-Dance's outfit, and says in deadpan thug professionalism, “Take this [handing over a big rifle] and head to the boneyard. Anyone makes it through, you scratch their eyes out.” Sally-Can't-Dance has Cyrus' respect.

I'm quite certain that I heard the shade of Vito Russo laughing in the seat next to me.

My other story about him takes place at the start of a class session sometime in the middle of the quarter. He announces that a local TV crew is thinking about doing a story on the course. They've interviewed him, and they want to get some shots of the class in session. He's made arrangements with them that they will position the camera such that it won't see any of the students sitting in a particular corner of the classroom, so any student who doesn't want to take a chance of someone seeing them in the news report should sit there. He pauses after explaining this, then says, “Please folks, so it's not a disruption later, if you don't want to be on camera, move now.”

There's maybe 200 of us in the classroom. Nobody moves. It takes a few moments for it to register with him that none of the students care if someone sees us in the class.

He's astonished. Then he doesn't cry. Just barely, but he doesn't.

Happy birthday to me

Science proves that my birthday is the happiest day of the year.

Catblogging

One of my readers has informed me about the Mr Lee Cat-cam.

Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would say. This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.

Much more fun than ordinary catblogging.

I drink single malt scotch

Find out what your drink says about you.

Solstice

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.

Sumer is i-cumin in,
Lhude sing, cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lamb,
Lhouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing, cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singes thu, cuccu.
Ne swik thu naver nu!

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu!

If your Middle English is rusty:

Summer has arrived,
Sing loudly, cuckoo!

The seed is growing
And the meadow is blooming,
And the wood is coming into leaf now,
Sing, cuckoo!

The ewe is bleating after her lamb,
The cow is lowing after her calf;
The bullock is prancing,
The billy-goat farting,
Sing merrily, cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo,
You sing well, cuckoo,
Never stop now.

Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo;
Sing, cuckoo; sing, cuckoo, now!

Soviet collapse

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings points us to an American Enterprise Institute paper by Yegor Gaidar on why the Soviet Union collapsed.

Summarizing Hilzoy's summary:

1. Soviet agricultural policy was a complete disaster
2. As a result, the Soviets needed to import grain
3. Luckily, “at almost exactly the time when serious problems with the import of grain emerged, rich oil fields were discovered in the Tyumen region of Western Siberia”
4. Then it all came unglued

Attentive readers will notice the complete absence of Ronald Reagan from this account.

Silver Surfer

Everybody's talking about how gawdawful Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is. Which it truly, profoundly is.

Even the line lifted directly from Warren Ellis fell flat. Ugh.

Over at Slate, Dana Stevens almost makes a virtue of the film's sins.

It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness. At the height of the trend toward moody, self-reflexive, slickly produced comic-book movies with A-list casts, Fox just cranks out this seeming refugee from Saturday-morning television (at moments, Silver Surfer feels like a worthy subject for commentary on MST:3000) and plonks it on the screen, as if to say, “Yo suckers, you like superheroes? Watch this!”

The Occasional Superheroine was at least impressed by the Silver Surfer himself.

Didn't it seem like the Silver Surfer was too good for the film? Like when they hire Christopher Lee for Gremlins 2 or John Hurt/William Hurt for most of the films they do. It's like between all the goofy Mr. Fantastic stretch scenes and Julian McMahon pouting evilly at the camera you dropped down the comic book equivalent of Jesus and he's like in a completely different film. Surfer's in a Ingmar Bergman film, everybody else is in The Goonies 6.

But after the insults of Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End, Ocean's 13, Shreck 3, Spiderman 3, et cetara, ad nauseum, Charlie Anders of Other has had enough.

Dear Movie Industry:

This is it. We have reached an end. I will never trust you again, or even hope for the least crappy experience from one of your shitfests. You have burned up the last of my goodwill, as surely as if the Human Torch had farted into my soul. It’s over between us. You’ve violated the basic compact between film and filmgoer — a summer blockbuster is supposed to maintain a certain level of dumb thrill-packed plot-wrangling .... By violating the summer-blockbuster compact, you have inviolated all laws. You have ruptured the social contract itself. Every human action is permissible.

Don't give up hope in comic book movies, Charlie. Sure, they took Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman away from us, but there's good stuff coming down the pike.

Christopher Nolan is going to give us The Dark Knight, his sequel to the excellent Batman Begins. David Bowie will not be playing the Joker, as all right-thinking people believe he should, but other than that Mr Nolan seems to know what he's doing.

The Incredible Hulk won't have Sam Elliot as General “Thunderbolt” Ross—I guess he's too busy being perfectly cast as Lee Scoresby in The Golden Compass—but it will have Edward Norton as Dr Bruce Banner.

Iron Man is gonna have Robert Downey, Jr. as everybody's favourite alcoholic superhero. How good is that? Even the publicity stills look encouraging.

Someone agrees with the Occasional Superheroine: they're talking about a Silver Surfer film with the help of J. Michael Strazynski, who has written real (and good) superhero comics, plus the thematically ambitious Babylon 5 TV series.

And we have Neil Gaiman adaptations up the wazoo coming. Stardust is in postproduction, Coraline is shooting now, and Beowulf from his screenplay also in post. Death and Neverwhere are in the running ... as well as, maybe, Sandman, heaven help us, if Stardust does as well as it should. The Dream King himself seems pretty happy with how things look.

Hang in there. This cruel summer is not the end of the world.

Cutlery

Bram Cohen, the father of BitTorrent, occasionally ruminates on his LiveJournal in a lively, geeky way about subjects like trust and security, poker odds, ergonomic keyboards, and esoteric math problems.

Today he's thinking about forks.

Why does the fork have four tines? The Evolution of Useful Things has an explanation of how the fork came to be, but not a coherent explanation as to why the number stopped at four. More tines would clearly be better, because it would require less force to skewer food and hold it in place better. It appears to be an engineering limitation ...

He goes on to do the math for what kind of materials could have how many tines, talking about the advantages and disadvantages of titanium, Lexan, and (perhaps thinking of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer) sapphire.

I think I disagree that more tines would be be better. The tines would of course have to be narrower, which it seems might interfere with the fork's food-platform function.

Neither data nor information

Earl Boykins at emo + beer = busted career blogs a series of infographics about music albums and shows he reviews. Though I should say that they're a lot less info- than they are -graphic.

Greenwald vs Freidman

Glenn Greenwald is a strong, brave man.

I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary.

Greenwald reports that Friedman has had a consistent position on the war in Iraq. Consistent as in repeatedly stated, that is—not consistent as in logical.

Put another way, these are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:

1. If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
2. If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
3. The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
4. Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the “wrong way” and would thus—also by his own reasoning—create nothing but untold damage on every level. And he did so all because there was some imaginary, hypothetical, fantasy way of doing the war that Friedman thought was good, but that he knew isn't what we would get.

Greenwald says that there's more at stake here than logic.

To support a war that you know is going to be executed in a destructive manner is as morally monstrous as it gets. The fact that there is some idealized, Platonic way to fight the war doesn't make that any better if you know that that isn't what is going to happen. We learn in adolescence that wanting things that we can't have—pining for things that aren't real or possible—is futile and irrational. To apply that adolescent fantasy world to war advocacy is the hallmark of a deeply frivolous and amoral person.

Greenwald then goes on to argue that this kind of reasoning remains endemic to pundits and politicians.

Establishment Washington is concerned right now with only one thing—saving their own credibility and reputation .... the Washington Establishment still thinks that those who opposed the war from the beginning don't count, that they're still the unserious, know-nothing losers who should be ignored.

Greenwald lays all of this out with his usual lucidity.

Body

Oscar Pistorius is a champion runner.

Pistorius handily won the 100 and 200 meters .... his victories came decisively and kept him aimed toward his goal of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, even though international track officials seek to block his entrance.

Why don't the officials want him competing?

Pistorius wants to be the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics.

It's a deep, serious question.

Among ethicists, Pistorius’s success has spurred talk of “transhumans” and “cyborgs.” Some note that athletes already modify themselves in a number of ways, including baseball sluggers who undergo laser eye surgery to enhance their vision and pitchers who have elbow reconstruction using sturdier ligaments from elsewhere in the body. At least three disabled athletes have competed in the Summer Olympics: George Eyser, an American, won a gold medal in gymnastics while competing on a wooden leg at the 1904 Games in St. Louis; Neroli Fairhall, a paraplegic from New Zealand, competed in archery in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles; and Marla Runyan, a legally blind runner from the United States, competed in the 1,500 meters at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. But Pistorius would be the first amputee to compete in a track event, international officials said.

A sobering question was posed recently on the Web site of the Connecticut-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. “Given the arms race nature of competition,” will technological advantages cause “athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones?” wrote George Dvorsky, a member of the institute’s board of directors. “Is it self-mutilation when you’re getting a better limb?”

Why stop at thinking about atheletes? People already get surgery to look sexier. How long before someone turns to the surgeon to become the same kind of sexy as Aimee Mullins?

Music

I have a stack of YouTube clips to restore your faith in popular culture.

First, there's Stevie Wonder doing “Superstition” live on Sesame Street. I recommend pausing it while it loads fully so that the audio and video don't skip while you watch it; I swear, he has a halo there for a minute.

Second, there's a guy named Paul Potts bringing down the house on some talent show TV thing called Britain's Got Talent, singing a beautiful, unexpected song.

Third, Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova perform their songs “When Your Mind's Made Up” and “Falling Slowly.” (Hat tip to Yezida on this one; she has some other music picks as well.) And if you want some more of that, check out their gem of a film Once, which is out now.

You may want to have a handkerchief handy; this is stuff that will get the better of you. Really.

Qabalah

A friend passes along a catalogue listing which offers a cornucopia of crackpottery. This sentence from it is truly magnificent:

The Miraculous Kabbalah Talisman™ is a functional scientific creation based on the principles of sacred geometry, zero-point energy, orgonomy, superconductivity, and harmonic frequencies of light.

And a pony, I am sure.

Not only do I owe Life Technology™ a word of thanks for the laugh, I also should thank them a second time for this bit:

It is widely recognised in esoteric science and by academics such as James Hurtak (www.keysofenoch.org) and Stan Tenen (www.meru.org) among others that Hebrew letters through their specific mathematical structural geometry contain information that encodes life force energy,ie it provides an intelligent conscious template for archetypal energies and natural creative forces.

Stan Tenen!

I haven't thought of him in years. I first saw one of his videos in the early '90s, something like this more recent video summing up his work.

Mr Tennen is a true kabbalist, though a very ideosyncratic one who draws very little on traditional kabbalist sources. He is obsessed with the patterns of letters in Genesis, as well as the nature of the Hebrew alphabet itself, and he is convinced that they contain a set of secret encoded messages from the Divine. He says he wasn't even aware of traditional kabbalah when he started to think about all this.

He concludes that the Hebrew letters all derive from a 3-dimensional figure ... which is an abstracted torus ... which represents the great Abrahamic religions ... and which represents the hand ... which means that the letters represent hand positions ... which means that Genesis is a series of mudras ... and on and on.

Mr Tennen is lucid, levelheaded, and articulate in a charmingly nerdy way ... though I often find his website is just beyond the edge of my comprehension in that way makes me unsure: am I not getting it? Or does it just not make sense?

I don't care, so long as he produces such magnificent conceptual diagrams.

Szilard

When I was in college I read Richard Rhodes' dazzling The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and I was fascinated by the eccentric Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd. He was one of the first people to realize that you could create a chain reaction of nuclear fission to build a power plant or a bomb, and he was the one who convinced Einstein to write to FDR about building the Bomb, fearing the consequences if the Nazis beat us to it.

He was also quite a character. He lived in hotel rooms and always kept a suitcase packed, so he could move on a moment's notice ... a sensibility that had him scent what was in the wind for Germany such that he emigrated in 1933.

While looking for something else, I recently found a nifty little article about him, Szilard's 10 Commandments, by a Dr Ray Cooper. So called because Szilárd did compose his own set of Commandments, half in jest but half seriously. Dr Cooper has been kind enough to translate them from German for us.

1. Recognize the relationships between things and the laws which govern men's actions, so that you know what you are doing.
2. Direct your deeds to a worthy goal, but do not ask if they will achieve the goal; let them be models and examples rather than means to an end.
3. Speak to all others as you do to yourself, without regard to the effect you make, so that you do not expel them from your world and in your isolation lose sight of the meaning of life and the perfection of the creation.
4. Do not destroy what you cannot create.
5. Touch no dish unless you are hungry. (A pun that could read—Do not turn to the court of law unless you are hungry).
6. Do not desire what you cannot have.
7. Do not lie without need.
8. Honor children. Listen to their words with reverence and speak to them with endless love.
9. Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not prevent you from being what you have become.
10. Lead your life with a gentle hand and be ready to depart whenever you are called.

Dr Cooper uses the Commandments as the theme of an interesting portrait of Szilárd.

phiLOLsophers

The LOLcats meme and its variations is running amok.

From a whole phiLOLsophers collection. Many of 'em are pretty damned obscure, including more than a few that I have to admit I didn't get. My favourites are the Kurt Gödel above, plus another one with him, Mary Wolstoncroft, Camus, and ... look out! ... Ayn Rand.

Advice

Ezra Klein has been reading Seventeen.

In a finely conceived piece on “Dating Dares,” the wise and forward-thinking Elisa Benson of Seventeen explains that she's “uncovered a few new guys for you to try! AMong them are those old mainstays The Emo Guy (“Find him at: A dive-y dinner with his buddies, discussing the merits of My Chemical Romance.”), The Club Promoter, and The Store Clerk (“Your first move: Write your name and phone number on the receipt he hands you, then slyly push it back across the counter.”). But watch out, girls, because we've now got, The Blogger:

You don't agree with all his posts, but they make you think about new issues—and whether he's as cute as his pics!

Find him at: A friend of a friend's Top 8 Your first move: Bloggers love having an audience almost as much as they like a battle of wits, so stir up some controversy by telling him when you disagree with a post.

Hidden payoff: An outspoken guy can stir up passions you never knew what you had—and help you figure out what you really stand for.

Like universal health care!?

Amen, brother.

Hear that, my exceptionally-sexy readers? A passion for universal health care is a passion indeed.

Community and sanity

Via Rivet Pep Squad: Robert Wright writing for Time magazine in 1995 describes the problems of suburbanization in The Evolution of Despair, which was a response to the Unabomber, his manifesto ... and evolutionary psychology.

nostalgia for the suburban nuclear family of the 1950s—which often accompanies current enthusiasm for “family values”—is ironic. The insular coziness of Ozzie and Harriet's home is less like our natural habitat than, say, the more diffuse social integration of Andy Griffith's Mayberry. Andy's son Opie is motherless, but he has a dutiful great- aunt to watch over him—and, anyway, can barely sit on the front porch without seeing a family friend.

To be sure, keeping nuclear families intact has virtues that are underscored by evolutionary psychology .... But to worship the suburban household of the 1950s is to miss much of the trouble with contemporary life.

Though people talk about “urbanization” as the process that ushered in modern ills, many urban neighborhoods at mid-century were in fact fairly communal; it's hard to walk into a Brooklyn brownstone day after day without bumping into neighbors. It was suburbanization that brought the combination of transience and residential isolation that leaves many people feeling a bit alone in their own neighborhoods. (These days, thanks to electric garage-door openers, you can drive straight into your house, never risking contact with a neighbor.)

The suburbs have been particularly hard on women with young children. In the typical hunter-gatherer village, mothers can reconcile a homelife with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context. When they gather food, their children stay either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or lifelong friends. When they're back at the village, child care is a mostly public task—extensively social, even communal. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote of life in an African hunter-gatherer village, “The isolated mother burdened with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life.”

Evolutionary psychology thus helps explain why modern feminism got its start after the suburbanization of the 1950s. The landmark 1963 book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan grew out of her 1959 conversation with a suburban mother who spoke with “quiet desperation” about the anger and despair that Friedan came to call “the problem with no name” and a doctor dubbed “the housewife's syndrome.”

It is only natural that modern mothers rearing children at home are more prone to depression than working mothers, and that they should rebel.
....
Suburbs are largely products of the automobile. (In the forthcoming book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt notes the irony of Henry Ford, in his 60s, building a replica of his hometown—gravel roads, gas lamps—to recapture the “saner and sweeter idea of life” he had helped destroy.) And in a thousand little ways—from the telephone to the refrigerator to ready-made microwavable meals—technology has eroded the bonds of neighborly interdependence. Among the Aranda Aborigines of Australia, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock noted early this century, it was common for a woman to breast-feed her neighbor's child while the neighbor gathered food. Today in America it's no longer common for a neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar.

I'm not entirely comfortable with Wright's beating the drum of evolutionary psychology as hard as he does—everyone seems to be able to justify their own view of society by some kind of “evolutionary psychology” reasoning—but his fundamental point about the problems of the suburbs is right on. And this plugs into something I've said before about the relationship between the mechanics of our society and the human experience we have within it.

One of the things that we American lefties find frustrating about all of this “family values” blather in the social/political sphere is the assumption by social conservatives that the solution to the problems facing the American nuclear family is ultimately for people to just try harder. Lefties argue that rather, we just don't support families as well as we did in the old days, economically, logistically, and socially.

We have to start digging our way out of the suburbs right away.

Thomas Scoville

Some years ago, Mr Thomas Scoville created the Silicon Valley Tarot, primarily as a satire of the culture of the industry ... but it's also a cracking good demonstration of the principles of tarot.

It's an unconventional deck in several ways; it doesn't always map neatly to traditional tarot symbolism. The four suits are networks, discs, cubicles, and hosts, numbered one through eight because of course the deck counts in binary. Court cards are CIOs, Marketeers, Salesmen, and New Hires. But the major arcana correspond surprisingly well.

The art is crude but effective, and the card descriptions are just genius.

Spam
Frustration, stupidity, mindless repetition, wasted effort, lost bandwidth. The Spamee is consumed in fiery indignation, but the Spammer also wastes time and resources—nobody cares about his message. Lose/lose royale. Reversed: unenlightened self-interest, failure to comprehend the appropriate use of the Network.

Ace of Cubicles
It's the dawn of the Age of the Cubicle. “Tell us again, Grandpa, of the days when office walls stretched all the way to the ceiling.” Anonymity, facelessness. Reversed: safety in numbers

Salesman of Disks
Start with a little Dale Carnegie, add some Tony Robbins, some fire-walking, and a slice of some musty, well-aged EST. Garnish with words like “synergy”, “value chain”, and “incent.” Finish with hairspray just prior to serving. Bon Appetit! Annoying, formulaic rhetoric. Reversed: garden-variety stupidity.

I own a deck and keep it at the office. I don't use it often, but on a large handful of occasions at work, it has given me pretty good guidance in the biz.

I learn that Mr Scoville has recently returned to the well, to give us the even sillier Metrosexual Tarot.

Four of Shoes
Slumbering metro dreams conflicting dreams: Bad girl and big hair versus good shoes and great loft space. .... Meaning: Aesthetic lifestyle conflicts.

Five of Clubs
The evening's pleasures turn quickly enough to pain in the hard morning light. In this case, the dirty martinis' trailing hangover brings a sidecar of green-gilled nausea to boot. Oh, for some aspirin, coffee and an old-school bloody mary. Has the sun really always been this bright? Shudder. Meaning: Regret, remorse, new resolutions. Reversed: Amnesia, blissful ignorance, penance, dry-cleaning.

The Barista
The fool who makes your coffee languishes at the bottom of the metrosexual heap—shaggy hair, shabby chic, non-existent manicure. So why does he seem so serene and self-actualized?

Tax men

Alberto Alesina and Andrea Ichino, in the pages of the Financial Times, make a surprising but sensible social-democrat-ish recommendation: tax men more than women. Really.

It would achieve similar goals to affirmative action policies, quotas or subsidised childcare and could substitute for those policies. It would also make gender discrimination more costly for employers and would be fair because it would compensate women for bearing the brunt of maternity and for the fact that the possibility of having children can negatively affect their career prospects.

There's some crunchy economics thinking about the elasticity of the labour supply et cetera in there, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

I'm inclined to like ideas that create new government-defined market incentives, rather than direct regulation, so this is a seductive idea for me. And if it will create affirmative action type effects for women, why not for other groups? How about lower taxes for American Blacks?

Of course, who decides who is Black?

Update: Bloody hell, since I first saw this item, it went behind a subscription wall. Sorry, folks.

Pop culture is strange

Are zombie comedies now a genre?

Alice vs The Society of the Spectacle

I cannot explain why I find this so very entertaining.

Are you Mr Guy Dubord?

Bicycle thief

Bruce Wallace of the Los Angeles Times describes having his bicycle stolen in Japan.

My bicycle was available [to be stolen] because I never lock it. Not even when I'm leaving it outside a busy train station overnight.

This is Japan. Nobody steals your stuff here. Safest place in the developed world. You can look it up in the guidebooks.

It's a silly stereotype, of course. Tokyo's crime rate may be much lower than that of Los Angeles, but that doesn't mean it's free of petty thieves (or robbers, killers and gangsters). But live here awhile and enough anecdotal experience piles up to feed complacency. I've been chased by people who want to return a dropped coin. I've left my cellphone in a park, come back the next morning, and found it on the bench where I'd set it down.

Not to worry. As it turns out, the Japanese cops are on the case.

O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly accidentally tells too much truth in an interview with Sen. John McCain.

But do you understand ... what The New York Times wants and the far-left want? They want to break down the white Christian male power structure of which you are a part, and so am I.

Yeah. Bill O'Reilly, part of the white Christian male power structure, and its vigorous defender. You're not supposed to just say it, Bill.

Deities

I've had Tarot on the brain lately for some reason, and so stumbled across the Sol Invictus Tarot, which features portraits of male deities and culture heroes on each card.

Frankly, I didn't take to the deck, but there were a handful of cards that impressed me enough to be worth sharing. The Divine Brothers is spiffy, Isis and Osiris is very witty, and Thoth is spectacular.

Cartography

Like a lot of people, I've been charmed by Google Maps Street View, which allows you to dive into a map to see panoramic photographs taken at street level. Google drove trucks around cities like my own San Francisco, took a bunch of photographs, and linked them to their existing map data. Beautiful, clever, useful, and exactly the kind of enriching-the-world-of-available-data thing Google is there for.

It got me thinking of that NASA composite image of the Earth without cloud cover which was made by digitally combining many, many images of the Earth from space. Gee, I thought, wouldn't it be great if Google were to drive those trucks around several times, and then do a digital composite that hid all of the cars and pedestrians?

It turns out that Google doesn't need to send the truck around again to do this. The technology already exists to scan a big image archive—say, flickr—and then see where the pictures overlap and develop a 3D model of the space that has been photographed.

Follow that link if you have any love of these kinds of things; the demo is amazing.

So before long, having linked some reference photos to maps, Google should be able to produce a much more detailed version of Street View based on the collective photographic knowledge of the entire web.

This idea had me believing in the Singularity for a good fifteen minutes.

Holes in Mars

There are big holes in Mars. They're dark, and round, and nobody knows what's in 'em.

Really.

We send cute robots to Mars. We find water on the Martian surface. We photograph huge mysterious Morloch holes on the surface.

Are we in a science fiction novel, or what?

Despair

In case you missed it, Joss Whedon is upset.

Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken—by more than one phone—from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.

Mr Whedon goes on to talk about the poison of misogyny and a bunch of other things worth reading.

Digby is also on the case.

A gang of violent bullies, often at the behest of some authority figure, “sends a message” by publicly humiliating, maiming or killing one of their own who had the temerity to fail to properly conform. Whether for God or country or tribe, it's always some poor victim, lying on the ground, covering his or her head, surrounded by people who have turned into animals.

There are a lot of manifestations of this particular human organizational style, some much more sophisticated and stylized. The violence becomes more ritualized and the humiliation takes other forms but underneath it all, the same impulse to dominate drives a fair number of people of all cultures. It's just a matter of degree.

If you want to spoil your day, you can see video on Digby's page, in the CNN report, or (most painfully) on a post by the Chicago Tribune.

I'd like to connect the dots about mob rule and about the repugnant camera phone aspect. This intersection between recording technology and barbarism is neither new nor some phenomenon of the Middle East. People proudly capturing honour killings for posterity was pioneered here in the USA. David Neiwert of Orcinus observes:

I was struck, however, by how similar these images were to those from the lynching era, when black men were routinely killed by mass mobs in the most horrifying ways imaginable—including torturing them by flaying and dismembering them while still alive, setting them aflame, and then finally raising them aloft, often with a chain. The image above of the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in particular was reminiscent—not merely for the horror of the corpse itself, but the horror of the smug satisfaction on the faces of his lynchers.

(The link to the photo on Orcinus is broken, but if you want to further spoil your day with the image, Wikimedia has it.)

I'm cheating a little; Mr Neiwert was making not a comparison to Dua Khalil but to something else. Still, the comparison applies. The lynching photo in question was taken on the periphery of living memory, with other examples still more recent.

And of course we have not outgrown cruelty mixed with cameras; consider the example of Abu Ghraib.