3D Illusion

Via Laughing Squid, I learn of a series of beautiful, unsettling animated GIFs by Jaime Martinez.

Electric Sheep

One of the very first things I ever blogged was Patrick Farley's web comics project Electric Sheep. It's still one of my very favourite things on the web. Check it out.

Mr Farley is raising money to go pro, and I just made a contribution:

Happy Pi Day

I remember seeing this trailer and thinking, “Thank God someone made this movie, so I wouldn't have to make it in order to get to see it.”

Olbermann

I'm on my way to a you have to watch this, but I need to take the long way around.

I have spoken in praise of MSNBC's commentator Keith Olbermann before.

Now for a span there during the Bush administration, there were some lefties who looked at him like he was the second coming of Edward R. Murrow ... or like he was the crafty, witty, relentless liberal voice we now have in the form of the amazing Rachel Maddow. Having watched a bit of his show, I have to admit that this is the internet being kind to Olbermann—not in the sense that the people of Left Blogistan were too generous in their praise, but rather that the medium of the net played up his virtues. Folks circulated clips of Olbermann's best Special Comments, but it turns out watching the actual show, that most of the time it's very TV-ish in a bad way: gimmicky, full of cheap shots, and Mr Olbermann sometimes speaks in the voice of outrage at times that are forced and artificial. He plays up the outrage because he's good at it, and I mean that not as a backhanded compliment but a sincere one because expressing outrage well, like expressing anything well, requires talent, skill, and discipline. And so the internet made Olbermann look good because folks could circulate clips of him expressing brilliant outrage when it was called for, unhappily true all too often during the Bush administration.

Given a worthy target, Olbermann's outrage is awesome to behold: right, and necessary, and ... here is where his greatness lies ... delivered with subtlety and profundity to match its vigour.

I have a clip for y’all where Olbermann expresses outrage where it is warranted. That outrage is really only punctuation at an appropriate point in telling a larger story, and mighty as that outrage is, it is not even close to being the heart of his comments. You have to watch this.

It's almost fifteen minutes long, serious, searing, and not work safe—not because it will show anything offensive or embarrassing on your screen, but because it demands a kind of attention that you're not going to be able to muster at your desk at the office. Don't let that deter you. Make a date with yourself to watch it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Good work, Mr Olbermann, and thank you.

(That I may keep it handy, here's a link to Crooks and Liars, where they have the clip, a partial transcript, and a link to Olbermann's dKos diary.)

Two of my favourite things

Who would have thought that you could have gotten David Bowie and the Tree of Life in the same picture?

For the win

Via Katherine Summer, I learn of how snowboarder Graham Watanabe describes his sport.

Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.

There's a joke about partying with him and Mr Michael Phelps in there somewhere.

Rights

Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald smacks down a canard about Constitutional rights.

This notion that the protections of the Bill of Rights specifically and the Constitution generally apply only to the Government's treatment of American citizens is blatantly, undeniably false — for multiple reasons — yet this myth is growing, as a result of being centrally featured in “War on Terror” propaganda.
....
It is indisputable, well-settled Constitutional law that the Constitution restricts the actions of the Government with respect to both American citizens and foreigners. It's not even within the realm of mainstream legal debate to deny that.

He has Constitutional language, early and recent Supreme Court decisions, and more to back it up.

Tablet

I've been remiss in my duties as an interaction designer to make predictions about the Apple iTablet which everyone presumes will be announced in a few hours. Fortunately, John Gruber has said exactly what I think in two posts. So: what he said.

I'm excited.

I have said for many years that there are only five fundamental form factors for personal computing, yet we have only colonized three of them, and one of them only recently: the Desk, the Clamshell, the Tablet, the Pocket Thing, and the Wrist Thing. Barring some kind of categorical VR breakthrough, the Desk is not going to go away in our lifetimes, though we can expect many of the details to change; even in a world that looks more like 10/GUI or Tog's Starfire demo or Apple's old Knowledge Navigator video, you need a place to sit comfortably, a big display, a way to input text, and a way to point to and act on virtual objects on your display. The Clamshell is basically the laptop we have now; it's a small portable Desk, its minimum size defined by the keyboard; barring the Singluarity, I expect that fifty years from now people will still have devices basically indistinguishable in form factor, much as the software running on them will likely change beyond recognition.

I had an epiphany about the Pocket Thing about a decade ago, when I read that in Southeast Asia cellphones had better market penetration than in the US but a majority of phone users there never used their phones for voice. Never! Instead, they used SMS, and games, and electronic calendars, and so forth. At that time I was an early adopter of both the cellphone and of the Palm Pilot, and I was already resenting having two electronic devices in my pocket. So I prophesied that a hundred years from now, everybody would have a powerful computer in their pocket which they would call a “phone” despite telephony being the least of its functions. Only ten years later, that has come true ... if you consider the knowledge workers of the industrialized world “everybody.”

My thinking about the need for a Tablet has always been informed by the one person I've ever met who used the old Apple Newton the way it was intended. He always had it with him, and he wrote everything in it. His secret: he was a paraplegic who always had a lap to set it on, and kept it in a case strapped to his wheelchair right next to his knee. Aside from arriving before silicon was powerful enough to make it work as well as you would want, the Newton was just a little too bulky; unless you were a paraplegic there was always the temptation to leave it behind. But it wouldn't have to be that much smaller to always go in your bag or your hand. Part of the magic of the Moleskine notebook is that it's precisely the right size for that, and what do you know ... that's the exact same size as the Apple iTablet is rumored to be.

Do you doubt that Apple's designers are Moleskine maniacs?

Some skeptics have said that this in-between form will never survive when you can get “the same thing” from either a laptop or a phone. These people have obviously never been in an office full of people precariously running to meetings with a laptop in one hand and a cup of coffee in another, only to discover that they guessed wrong about whether they needed to lug their laptop to that meeting.

Tablet skeptics have also said that the phone is enough as the device that is always with you. You can already get the web from it, they say. But I think that smartphone web surfing is the gateway drug that will make people understand the desirability of a tablet. Having experienced the value of anywhere, any time access to internet resources, which literally changes your life, you come to be frustrated with accessing it through the tiny window of the phone. When I go out for a solo lunch, I have my iPhone in my pocket and a book in my bag, and because the book may not suit my mood while the web is a bottomless ocean of content, I wind up reading from my squinty little phone about as often as I do from the beautiful trade paperback I have at hand. After a year of that, damn straight I'm willing to pay several hundred dollars for an iTablet that's just a bigger version of the same thing.

Especially if it means I can leave that book at home, because my entire library is available to me in one little device. I commented a couple of years ago about the absurdity of shlepping around data in book form. My movers have informed me that I own over three tons of books; that's more than the mass of all of my other possessions put together, including my motorcycle. I now have vivid fantasies about the time, only a few years away, when I can reduce my book collection to a single shelf of beautiful ornamental relics and have my entire library ... and eventually, every book ever published ... with me anywhere, any time.

The question I wonder about with Apple's expected effort is text entry. Just as I want to stop carrying around books, I want to stop using paper notebooks: what I write on paper isn't backed up, isn't searchable, and isn't easily transcribed into other electronic forms like this blog post. The big surprise of the iPhone was its surprisingly effective soft keyboard and I'm expecting that the iTablet is going to have some equally cunning and surprising text input mechanism, linked to some kind of notetaking tool. I cannot believe that Apple has missed that OneNote is the interesting thing about Microsoft's efforts toward a Tablet.

We'll know soon.

Infographic

I want to have handy that infographic about health care spending between countries.

Impermanence

Caleb Larsen has created an artwork which has put itself on eBay. It comes with an end user license agreement.

1. Artist has created a work of art titled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)” (“the Artwork”) which consists of a black box that places itself for sale on the auction website “eBay” (the “Auction Venue”) every seven (7) days. The Artwork consists of the combination of the black box or cube, the electronics contained therein, and the concept that such a physical object “sells itself” every week.
2. Collector understands and agrees to the underlying concept and function of the Artwork and that the sale of the Artwork by Artist is dependent and conditioned upon Purchaser’s agreement and adherence to the below terms. Such terms are fundamental and crucial to the on-going viability and artistic integrity of the Artwork ....

Consider this: to keep it is to steal it.

For many reasons, not least that I am a fierce critic of most end user license agreements, I say: brilliant.

OK Go

OK Go, the band that gave us that awesome treadmill dance video for their song “Here It Goes Again,” explain that you cannot embed their latest video in your web pages because, well, the music industry cannot figure out their own business model.

four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re — unbelievably — stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.

Gee, what could it be?

Apple has finally officially announced an event on 27 January.

I guess Apple isn't being completely coy any more. (Recall that the iPhone was a total surprise announcement, after a long rap about AppleTV.)

I've not taken time to write up my predictions for the Apple Tablet (maybe I'll find time) but I can say that I think John Gruber at Daring Fireball is exactly right in his speculations.

Infrastructure matters

It turns out that Haiti's airport is a limiting factor in getting aid to the Haitians.

Col. Buck Elton, who was given the mission to open up airfield and assist with airlifts, says they have controlled 600+ takeoffs and landings in an airstrip that normally sees three takeoffs and landings a day.

Because the air traffic control tower has collapsed, all of this is being done by radio, on the ground - in a place that only has one runway/taxiway for planes, set directly in the middle of the airport and thus making it difficult for other planes to take off and arrive.

Whoa. If I ever find myself in the company of Col. Elton, I'm buying that man a drink.

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more than a decade, I've been spamming people with this note every year. Time marches on: this year the primary medium for that will be Facebook. If you were here this time last year, read it again anyway.

Really. Take a few minutes. I think it's important.

Most people have forgotten that at the civil rights march on Washington DC on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King was not the featured speaker. He was not the icon of the movement that we think of today. He was a major player, yes, but there were others more famous, respected, and important at that time. The speech he gave — the one you know — changed that.

The importance of the speech is distinctively American. The United States, unique among nations, is a frankly artificial creation. France is the place in Europe where people speak French, but the US has no ethnic definition — this place is full of immigrants who decided to be Americans, and their children. Japan is an island, but there's nothing natural about the borders of the US — this place wound up a nation through a chaotic combination of war, purchase, legislative decisions, and (oh yeah) genocide. The US is an idea. Something we just made up.

This is why we have the peculiar veneration of documents that we do. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the holiest of holies in our civic religion because they are made of words, made of ideas. Through acclamation over the years we have chosen a handful of other documents that tell us what the United States is, like Lincoln's Gettysburg address and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. In that speech, the power of King's rhetoric and ideas was so great that hearing it transformed our understanding of what the nation was about. I know, I know, that's a White guy thing to say: it's not like plenty of folks didn't know about American racial injustice. But on the level of shared understanding of shared destiny, King gave voice to ideas implicit in the American national promise that had too long been denied. And still are denied today.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

Go read it right now. It will only take five minutes of your time. With no exaggeration, I think it's your duty as an American. Yeah, this year we can celebrate it seeming almost unremarkable to have a Black President of the United States, but reading it you cannot help but realize that we have a lot of work left to do.

And while you're at it, take a little more time and read Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I know you did it back in school. It's worth doing again.

And if you really want extra credit, go read what he said on the last full day of his life.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you ...

Zelig

Roger Ebert's illness has been a tragedy for him but a blessing for the rest of us. Having lost the ability to speak he's started to put more energy into his not-always-related-to-film blog. (His twitter feed is pretty good, too, if you're into that sort of thing.)

A while back, he gave us a long reflection on the mystery of Jerry Berliant.

I was to see Jerry Berliant many times over the years. “This isn't an A-list party,” Marlene told me one night back in Chicago. “Jerry Berliant hasn't crashed it.”

The enigma of Jerry Berliant has fascinated Chicagoans for years. The Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, listing the stars at a premiere, would add: “...and Jerry Berliant, America's Guest.”

It's a strangely delightful tale of celebrity name-dropping, private security, and social engineering ... including an allusion to T. S. Elliot.

Christ love

A friend of mine whose brief love affair with Christianity ended recently has been disheartened by recent evidence that Pat Robertson is even more a hateful lunatic than you tend to think.

In service of being fair and balanced, I offer Mel White quoting Bishop John Shelby Spong being awesome.

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility.
....
It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people.
....
I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it.
....
Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia.

Yeah.

Gaze

Linda Holmes at NPR has an interesting observation about a sitcom.

I truly despised the pilot of CBS's The Big Bang Theory, which aired in the fall of 2007. I found it unfunny, obnoxious, stilted, and tired. But now, having been persuaded to try it again this fall -- and intrigued by the fact that its audience was steadily growing, which very rarely happened -- I've really come to love it

Funny, I caught an episode of the show early on (maybe it was the pilot) and was similarly unimpressed, and then found myself exposed to it again recently (I think on an airplane?) and had the same reaction. What happened?

She outlines in fascinating detail that the answer is: just a little bit of ... feminism.

When people say things like “male gaze,” it's easy for it to seem (1) extremely obscure and (2) absolutely no fun at all, in addition to (3) not really relevant if you aren't in film school. But the changes in this particular show make for a great example of the fact that you don't just avoid empty, cliched versions of women (or men, and I am looking at you, Sex And The City) because they're offensive or infuriating or anything like that. The best creative reason to avoid them is that they make your show bad.

Click through, if only to see the “Sheldon knocking” montage.

Exploitation movie

Looking at movie listings, I just discovered Bitch Slap playing today. Now I love exploitation movies, so it's not like I don't see what they're going for in the trailer for this picture. I can respect the honesty of pure exploitation that just is what it is, and I can respect good ironic pleasure-alloyed-with-critique, as exemplified by how the violence in Inglorous Basterds very deliberately offers us both pleasure and discomfort with your own enjoyment of it. But there's a school of dishonest exploitation—“it's not really offensive, it's okay because it's ironic”—and I smell it all over the trailer. Paying a visit to the website, I see that it promises ...

a mysterious Female Narrator who comments periodically on the folly of humanity, the plight of the human condition, and the vagaries of life and love through quoting the likes of Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Sun Tzu, and even Buddha

... which seems like Trying A Little Too Hard. Rotten Tomatoes seems to confirm my suspicion.

I write all of this not because I have a real opinion (having not seen the film) but to set up my disappointment that Roger Ebert hasn't reviewed the movie so he can say to the filmmakers, “I knew Russ Meyer, and you guys ... are no Russ Meyer.”

Parliament: About me

2009 Parliament of Religions

• About me
• First night
• Getting started with Pagans

I write from Melbourne, Australia: I have come to attend the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, an international conference held every few years, which starts tonight. I come in the company of friends, including Pagan author and teacher Thorn Coyle, whose Solar Cross project—a nascent effort to provide community resources to Pagans in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond—I have done some work to support. Thorn has her own mystery school, tons of spiritual mojo, and a small measure of fame in the Pagan universe, while I just have a blog with a few dozen readers and a few steps on my own slow road to enlightenment, so if I expect to pull my weight on this trip I had better get back to blogging daily, to report on my Parliament experiences. (Of course, Thorn has already started saying some interesting things about the Parliament on her online journal, so I really have to make an effort.)

In the hope that I will have a few readers coming by to read about the Parliament who don't already know me, and in recognition of the postmodern distrust of the disembodied authorial voice taught to me in school, before things get started I feel obligated to situate myself a bit.

I am, in increasing specificity: A Pagan, a magickian, a student and practitioner of Western Hermeticism, and a participant — if only an occasional one — in a Golden Dawn lodge. I hope that readers either will forgive a bit of rambling long-windedness as I dig into what that means, or will just jump ahead to my description of events at the Parliament.

It's a strange and surprising place to find myself. When I was young, I regarded myself as a skeptical atheist and an assimilated American Jew. Yet in truth that has only shifted a bit in the years; replace “skeptical atheist” with “skeptical Pagan” and that still describes me. My father was the scientistic-rationalist child of first-generation Russian Jewish immigrants, my mother a less vigorously skeptical lapsed Catholic. A lover of the natural sciences, who majored in physics in college, I long took after my father's cranky religion-is-bunk atheism. Who needed faith when you had the verifiable and no less wondrous natural world?

But I also had a fascination with religion, counting it among my many dilettante interests. In college I baffled (and, it seemed, occasionally charmed) Baptists at my local dorm lounge Bible study by quoting John and Exodus, comparing Christianity to Islam, and explaining the Hindu conception of karma. That fascination, combined with a voracious reading appetite and a parallel interest in (for want of a better term) weird stuff meant that by the early '90s I had my head bubbling with a brew of things typical for a certain kind of geeky White American with a foot in both the bourgeois and countercultural worlds: the smart popular Buddhism of folks like Alan Watts, the attempted grand synthesis of Ken Wilbur, the not-entirely-crazy-after-all chaos magick of folks like Peter Carroll and Robert Anton Wilson, the surprisingly sober-minded Golden Dawn influenced magick of folks like Israel Regardie and Donald Michael Kraig. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area I met actual Buddhists and Witches and Thelemites and so forth, some of them obviously thoughtful people who had something real going on. I saw and experienced some uncanny stuff. All which gave me an itch.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, says that good police detectives in real life, unlike in TV and movies, aren't really motived by justice or catching bad guys; rather, their motivation comes from a kind of intellectual vanity. You thought that you could get away with this? That I wouldn't be smart enough to catch you? So too, from then until today my quest for enlightenment has reflected less a hunger for the numinous than a frustration with the mystery of the Mysteries. I see a truth lurking under here, and I insist that I can make sense of it. After a couple of decades of knocking around with that itch, I still have in no proper sense a faith, a religion, or a path, but I have things I like better: some operating assumptions, some practices, and a clear picture of my project.

I still love the special kind of understanding of the world which only the natural sciences provide. But the question of human experience does not respond to those tools. My own subjective experience is one long un-reproducible result. And what I see when I look at human experience is that we have strange encounters with subtle, non-human forces in the world: The Job Market, The Artistic Process, Morale At The Office, Murphy's Law. The ancients called these bodiless forces spirits, angels, gods, and so forth; they are names for the ways in which humans experience and process these encounters with the forces in the world. And just as the New York Stock Exchange is real — a non-human entity, a pattern in the world, with a certain character, with things we perceive as preferences, intentions, and even moods which a person can interact with — so too the gods of the ancients like Hermes, Thor, or Jesus are real. So too even “made up” entities like Santa Claus or Chtulhu are, in an important sense, real.

We can get clever about how, in our human experience, we interact with these entities: how we think and act to get the response from the world that we want. That process, after spooky old Aleister Crowley's usage, is convenient to call “magick,” because its methods are the things we associate with the word: rituals, symbols, and meditation. If that seems silly — and frankly, there are times when it still seems silly to me — I consider that in college I learned to predict the movements of cannonballs and invisible electrons by meditating on occult symbols drawn on a blackboard. That's magick.

Westerners who take seriously magick and engagement with a range of gods and other entities have a funny name: Pagan. And okay, that's me. I'm now at a point in my life where that funny name doesn't seem too awkward to apply to myself: sure, it's easily misunderstood, and puts me in a category together with some pretty embarrassing folks ... but doesn't any language in talking about spiritual experiences have that problem? Heck, most Christians feel that way, and they have a much bigger propaganda machine than Pagans do.

Also characteristic of Pagans—and of me—is an immanentist rather than transcendent understanding of divinity and the spiritual project. The transcendent school is more familiar to most folks: the divine is distinct from the mundane, and contact with the divine is an escape from the merely material world. The immanentist spiritual orientation regards the divine as inseparably manifest in the material world, and the worthy project is not escape from materiality but rather deeper engagement with and sacralization of the material.

Now most Pagans—most religious people of all schools — have what I would call a devotional project: they engage in practices to bring them into communion with the numinous as they understand it. I do a bit of that — f'rinstance, every day I make a little offering to Hermes, god of communication, transportation, commerce, fast talk, skilled crafts, magick, and (these days) the Internet — but for me that ultimately serves to support a developmental project, the attempt to transform myself in order to transform my relationship with the world. A Zen monk seeking enlightenment is engaged in a developmental spiritual project, transforming his or her self. My developmental spiritual project also centrally concerns seeking a certain kind of enlightenment.

In my understanding, gleaned from mystics I respect, it's useful to distinguish two different kinds of enlightenment. There's a “higher” enlightenment that I like to refer to as the experience of the non-dual: the realization of a profound cosmic unity ... “i am thee and you are me and we are she and they are all together” ... neti neti ... one taste. Less familiar to most folks is a “lesser” enlightenment that many folks in my sphere refer to by the somewhat goofy name “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel:” a fully integrated Self, liberated from psychological traps, buoyed with bliss, and empowered with clear purpose and fierce compassion. “Know your dharma, live your dharma.” The pursuit of this is often called the Great Work.

So far I have not achieved Knowledge and Conversation, but the Great Work is my spiritual project. Having concluded that it is possible, it seems to me to be an utterly compelling pursuit. There are of course many ways to pursue the Great Work. When I registered for the Parliament, the website asked me to identify my tradition, and I found it a bit of a tricky question. My central practice is in the Golden Dawn tradition, but I'm too syncretic for that to be an adequate description of where I'm coming from. The Golden Dawn practices are a particular manifestation of the Hermetic approach, which also includes things like Renaissance magick and alchemy, and arguably connects all the way back to ancient philosophers like Pythagoras. So I told the Parliament, “Western Hermeticism.”

This school seeks to order the practitioner's consciousness through rituals and meditations that give him or her a vivid set of symbols for understanding their experience. In this way, the relationship between the mind, perception, and action can be clarified, and refined, inviting in the change in consciousness of Knowledge & Conversation, and making the transition to that different consciousness as smoothly and effectively as possible. All the sigils and symbols involved appeal to my mind and temperament: it simultaneously makes me feel like I'm doing Real Spooky Magick ... and yet also feels to me of a piece with when I studied physics.

Plus, on top of that: still Jewish. I don't go to shul, but every year I co-host a seder for Passover: wine, food, ritual, prayer, storytelling, theological debate, and more wine. If that ain't magick, I don't know what is.

Okay, that's more than enough about me. Next up: The Parliament begins.

Parliament: First night

2009 Parliament of Religions

• About me
• First night
• Getting started with Pagans

I write to you after lunch on the first full day of the Parliament. There are so many fascinating talks and events that it's hard to find time to write.

Last night we had the first plenary session: greetings from various local dignitaries, and invocations from many different traditions that included prayers, chants, music, and dance. I was particularly impressed by the Sikh invocation; with their booming voices and great beards and swords, they were physically imposing, but more importantly the brought a tremendous measure of that thing that we lamely call “energy.” The Sikhs have got it going on. There was also a Shinto sign language dance performance that really struck me: the music was a bit schmaltzy, but the dozen women dancing were so graceful together they could have made an Eminem track seem appropriate to the occasion.

No Pagan invocation; we're small potatoes. But we had a rabbi singing in Hebrew. Comfort food!

The plenary started with a quick history of the Parliament. The first round was done in Chicago in 1893, and a century later the current organization picked up the mantle for a second session. The rhetoric and imagery is stirring to a cosmopolite American like myself: better understanding through dialogue, leading to a better world. Vibrancy through diversity. Harmony arising from the values we all share. I remind myself that the world also contains sharp religious divisions — theocrats turning the power of the state to intolerance, terrorists claiming justification in religion, wars between and among states over religious differences — but here, the Enlightenment dream of fraternity (“siblingity”?) between all peoples seems almost within reach.

Seeing pictures from the first Parliament, and the people walking the convention center halls, there is the vivid imagery of people in colourful costumes: robes and turbans and collars and pendants and coats and hats. There are a lot of monks in saffron, and a surprisingly big contingent of New Thought / Unity folks around wearing white scarves as a way to find one another in the crowd. At first I felt a twinge of cynicism, thinking that perhaps this was only a kind of Diversity Theater, but it's hard to stay cynical. I myself have been wearing, in addition to my usual suit-and-tie, an ornate beaded Tree of Life necklace that I constructed for myself last year. It has already been a real conversation-starter, which is part of the point of so many people dressing up: we are all, in a sense, acting as ambassadors, and dressing the part is an act of respect both toward each other and toward ourselves.

Many of the speakers at the plenary made much of honouring the indigenous peoples of Australia, and a striking digiridoo performance was part of the beginning of the ceremonies. To hear White Australians talk, they are committed to justice and respect for the nation's indigenous people; I cannot claim to be sophisticated about Australian politics and culture, but I'm attentive enough to know that the reality doesn't match the rhetoric. Perhaps in truth, justice for indigenous people is as anemic as in the US, but it certainly seems to have a lot more rhetorical juice, which is refreshing.

The other striking rhetorical theme of the evening was the global environment. Speakers mentioned it again and again; at one point, someone alluded to us striving for a “just, peaceful, and sustainable world.” There are numerous events on the program devoted to global warming and the environment, as well. I later heard a few Pagans grumbling about these Johnny-come-latelies to lovin' the Earth. But discussing it with Thorn, we found ourselves saying that when it's uncontroversial to put sustainability on the short list with peace and justice, it's time to declare victory. Would that all this attention didn't reflect the depth of the crisis.

I left the plenary utterly exhausted. But even so, it was hard not to be exhilarated by the extraordinary circumstances of an event like this.

Next up: Kicking things off with Pagans.

Parliament: Getting started with Pagans

2009 Parliament of Religions

• About me
• First night
• Getting started with Pagans

I'm planning on spending most of the Parliament trying to get a taste of a broad range of things, involving as many different religious traditions as I can, but I got started with several Pagan events.

Before the opening plenary, there was a hospitality suite for Pagans attending the Parliament; the hotel room was filled beyond capacity with about two dozen people, roughly evenly split between folks from the US and Australia. I was charmed by how alike both contingents were: cheerful, glamorously sloppy, and a bit boisterous appears to be universally Pagan. (Fortunately Patrick McCollum was also there to represent for the Pagans With Neckties brigade.) I learned that the legal situation for Pagans in Australia is quite different; since Australia has, after the British example, an official state church, there are complicated issues around legal recognition of legitimacy. But on the other hand, Australian Pagans have made a serious effort to reach out to the press, who have learned to turn to reliable Pagan voices for comment on relevant news stories; I was told of a recent newspaper article which made a point of confessing that they had not been able to reach Pagan representatives, promising to follow up.

The following morning, Thorn had a workshop on the Parliament event calendar in the very first morning time slot, “Dancing the Seven Directions.” She was terrific as usual, of course, and it was good to get the blood flowing with the movements. We migrated from the room she had been assigned, to just outside the convention hall. A quiet little klatch of protesters bearing a “No Religions, Only Jesus” banner scowled, a passing forklift driver waved his free arm to match our movements, and passerby kept stopping to join in. I spoke to dishy, silver-haired woman from a Midwestern school for metaphysics who dropped in; we had a couple of Jews with kippas as well, and I overheard Thorn talking to a man from India who turned out to be a Lutheran minister. (Over on her journal, I see that the Indian minister made an impression on her as well.) An auspicious beginning to the interfaith project.

After that, I went to a panel talk entitled, “People Call Us Pagan — The European Indigenous Traditions” given by the three pagans who have succeeded in getting a voice on the Parliament's organizing committees: Angie Buchanan, Andras Arthen, and Phyllis Curott. I went provoked by the title. Defining contemporary paganism in terms of being “indigenous tradition” seemed odd to me. Shouldn't we reserve the term “indigenous” for the people and things that reflect a continuity with something different from the West? And what of Pagans, like me, who frankly admit that their practices are recently invented rather than the survival of much older lost and secret traditions?

Though the panelists did make numerous references to defining Paganism in terms of “indigenous tradition” (and more on that in a moment) the discussion was more a loose and lively exploration of the slippery question of what Pagan practice involves. Can you engage with nature in your living room? What is our relationship with the Pagan religions of the ancients? There are no easy answers. The discussion was perhaps a bit more Paganism 101 than I might have been drawn to, but it was gratifying to see that so many non-Pagans in attendance were impressed with the vigor and richness of the discussion, and the description of Pagan practice.

Mr Arthen told a funny story about an encounter he had a previous Parliament, when numerous Native American spiritual teachers had vigorously criticized Western appropriation of their traditions and symbols. At the end of his talk, during which he had expressed his solidarity with the sentiments of the Native Americans concerned with appropriation, three burly young Native American men insisted that Arthen come with them to meet with an elder. “Tell him what you just told that room,” they insisted. When Arthen had finished an abbreviated version of his talk, the elder said, “Thank you. I have learned two things today. First, obviously there were Indians in Europe long ago. Second, I thought that White people were drawn to our teachings because they didn't have them at all; now I see that they are drawn to them because they have lost them.”

Given this attention to the problems of appropriation of indigenous cultures, I remained uncomfortable with the rhetoric of indigenous-ness, so I buttonholed Ms Buchanan afterward. I asked about whether that was really a wise way to frame Paganism ... but between our conversation getting cut short, and some crankiness on my part from an empty stomach, we didn't get far. I ran into her later and we resolved to find time to finish the conversation; as I write this, I'm still looking forward to that.

The afternoon was devoted to other things, but that evening there were community nights hosted by local congregations of various traditions. Though I was tempted to go mark shabbos with the Reconstructionist Jews, I wanted to get connected with Pagans at the event early on, so I went to the event hosted by the local Reclaiming group. I'm glad I did.

The circle, singing, and storytelling were nourishing to the soul, and I met some lovely people. I was relieved to discover that I was not alone in being a Hermeticist among Witches; I had a lively chat with an woman with tales of the mystery schools of England. A fella made a wonderful comment that won my Quote of the Day: “Everyone overestimates what they can do in a year ... but they underestimate what they can do in a decade.” The unreasonably dishy Wendy Rule sang a song about Hekate. I returned to my bed happily exhausted.

Next up: Art, politics, and awesome Muslims.

Disinformation

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog has gone silent because they're busy reading Going Rogue.

When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it — and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided — is a bewildering task.

[...]

Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin's unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning — specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy — we feel it's vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else.

I know the feeling.

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Fun as this is, I have a long follow-up post about how thoroughly terrible Andrew Sullivan is.

Armistice Day

Ninety years ago today, the US first celebrated Armistice Day, the first anniversary of the day when the Great War ended. People said they'd celebrate it every year as a reminder to never fight a war again. Two decades later the US Congress still called it “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.”

Fifty five years ago, the United States renamed it to Veteran's Day, to honor the service and dedication of our veterans from the wars we're still fighting.

I would like to honour both our warriors and our peacemakers in the same breath, or to offer two breaths if that's what it takes.

Zombie

I need help with zombie research.

Not the monster, the cocktail.

A few months back Mr Martin Cate, world famous bartender, initiated me into the mystery of creating the legendary Zombie cocktail from its original, secret Don the Beachcomber recipe. As this drink turns out to be unspeakably delicious, I have been labouring to secure all of the rare ingredients involved, and at last have the final variety of rum required to complete my kit.

But many questions remain. Which falernum is best? What about grenadine? Are homemade versions of these ingredients superior? There are dozens of subtle variations of the recipe which need to be tested. And lacking the fortitude to survive drinking and comparing dozens of zombies myself, I am recruiting assistance.

Mr John Gill has volunteered an apartment which includes a Tiki bar (really!), but I need your help to taste and rate the zombie variations.

Please, I implore you to help me in this vital project. This Friday, in beautiful San Francisco.

The Creature

The Thick House's production of The Creature in San Francisco isn't quite the best Frankenstein ever — Mel Brooks' film may actually qualify for that honor — but it's certainly the best adaptation of Mary Shelly's novel you could hope to see. Originally conceived as radio play, the production has the characters speak almost entirely in quotations from the book, successfully conveying the original's uncanny mix of gothic horror, gothic romance, religious-philosophical allegory, and foundational proto-science-fiction. In a break from the novel's structure of a memoir within a memoir within a memoir, the play interleaves Victor's telling of the tale with the monster's, revealing numerous clever juxtapositions which cast both tellings as unreliable.

That may sound too heady to be entertaining, but the play is thoroughly gripping, due largely to James Carpenter's performance as the monster and smart direction that gets a lot of life out of simple staging. Standing atop the table where he was born whenever he confronts his creator, you see a monster eight feet tall. And the next time I read the novel, I am sure that I will hear the monster speak with Carpenter's voice.

Playing this weekend and next. Joe Bob says check it out.

McIlheran's Making Someone Else Pay

There are a million other things I should be doing with my time, but duty calls. An old acquaintance asks, “What's the response to this?” He then provides a link to a Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinal article by Patrick McIlheran, “Making someone else pay.”

My response, in brief, is that it's mendacious, incoherent nonsense. It's a jumble of weird little arguments that to discuss I'll need to tackle in painful detail.

Suppose that, besides being the Enemies of All Mankind, health insurers are actually right.

Some companies noted last week that Congress' plans to mandate that everyone buy health insurance include only weak penalties. The plans also make insurers take on customers who are already sick. If you're young and daring, you pay the low penalty and go insurance-free until your doctor says you've got cancer. You then apply and pay $800-a-month premiums for $10,000-a-month care. Sweet, until the industry inevitably collapses, say insurers.

OK, this is an important point, so important that it has a name: adverse selection. The healthiest are tempted to go without insurance, driving up the cost of insurance for everyone else. Currently, this is screwy on both ends: healthy people gamble on going uninsured, and insurers try to avoid covering the sick. The proposals on the table try to fix both ends, requiring that everyone buy insurance, and requiring insurers to sell the same insurance to anyone who asks. If the mandate doesn't work right, that two-edged solution breaks down.

Is this really a problem? Most states require drivers to have automobile insurance, and while some people cheat on the requirement enough people obey that the system works. The mandate doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough. If the mandate policy we enact isn't good enough, we can tweak just that part of the policy to fix it without having to call the whole thing into question.

Is there a reason to think this problem cannot be solved? McIlheran is supposing that the concerns that insurance companies have raised are correct. Is anyone else worried about this, beyond McIlheran and the insurers? Not that I've heard, and I'd think McIlheran would bring it up if they did. But okay, he's asked us to suppose it's true. Let's see what he hangs on this thread ....

Suppose they're right. Insofar as Assurant, one of the nation's bigger writers of individual policies, employs 1,900 in its Milwaukee hometown, that's a lot of Milwaukeeans out of a job. The company also leads in high-deductible plans of the kind Obamacare would ban. I know we're supposed to hate insurers, but must we also want their staff unemployed?

McIlheran is supposing that as a result of the new policy which mandates that everyone buy insurance the result is actually that less people buy insurance.

Note also that McIlheran is saying that reform advocates want to stoke our hatred for insurers, which will make it OK if Assurant fails ... because the reform won't work. This is like saying I want car drivers to drown — because I say I want to build a bridge, but the ferryboat drivers say the bridge will collapse.

If we're toting up the cost of Obamacare, there's surely a ledger line for the demolition of an industry, even an unpopular one. Insurers' power will be transferred to federal agencies, their earnings to a public option, their workers to the dole. Ah, well: Villains defeated.

OK, we've gone from Assurant going out of business because we've screwed up the mandate policy to the entire health insurance industry dying and ... how did the public option get into this conversation?

Recall that McIlheran has hung this scenario on the flawed-mandate-policy hook. This is a little odd, since the scenario he's talking about has been much discussed from another angle.

Health care policy folks who favor the combination of mandates and stronger insurer regulation often argue that regulation isn't enough, because insurers get good at finding loopholes. You also need insurers competing with one another to offer better service. But in many markets there aren't enough insurers competing with one another, so we should provide an extra insurer available to everyone: the Federal government. This competing government-administered insurance — the public option — wouldn't be free, you'd have to pay premiums just like any other insurance.

Some proponents of this policy argue that the public option would compete so well with the private insurers that it would drive many of them out of business, maybe even all of them. The public option would have an edge over private insurance because it wouldn't need to turn a profit and would be big enough to be able to negotiate good prices with suppliers like drug companies. With Federally-run Medicare demonstrating by many measures that it can deliver lower administrative costs, better health outcomes, and better patient satisfaction than private insurance, this is at least a plausible argument.

Proponents say this is a good thing because the public option wins by virtue of actually being better than private insurance. McIlheran says this is a bad thing because ...

Ah, well: Villains defeated.

This is exactly the spirit of Obamacare. The animating drive is to transfer: mainly money, from those who pay to those who need. The strongest appeal of Democrats' plans is that you needn't worry about coverage because someone, presumably a villain, will pay for it.

“Obamacare” is a plot to destroy the insurance companies, which no one will notice because Democrats have cast the insurers as villains. As part of their plan, the Democrats will pass laws requiring that you buy insurance from these villains. But those laws won't be good enough, so the insurers will go out of business.

Why are Democrats doing this? Because they want to obscure their plan to transfer money by falsely implying that insurance companies will pay for it. Who will pay for this dastardly plan?

Who, exactly?

Ask first who won't pay. Doctors? Maybe not. One reason the Senate's latest plan didn't worsen the deficit by the $1 trillion that congressional accountants earlier reckoned was that its writers hid huge sums in Medicare payments off the books. They did this to buy the support of the American Medical Association. Doctors are right not to want to be shafted. Trust that they'll lobby to make sure of it.

This aside about doctors is a little strange. I presume that McIlheran is just using it as a platform for his unsubstantiated little dig hinting at Medicare corruption. But while we're here, I may as well observe that the lobbying power of the AMA is a problem for health care reform that I'm disappointed to see no one taking seriously.

Insurance companies won't. Their pleas will be heard, bailouts granted. The industry, in fact, seemed to be going along with Obamacare in hopes of finding a utility-like role in a government-dominated system.

Now I have whiplash. Obamacare's mandate that we buy health insurance is a plot to destroy insurers, which insurers are going along with because the government is sure to prop them up. Huh?

So all that blather about the death of the insurance companies was just to set up the casting of insurance companies as villains to hide something. What?

You, however, may have an ATM-like role. The plan assembled by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) dictates premiums on a sliding scale — 12% of income, about $8,700 a year, for the median Waukesha County family, for instance. We'll all be paying extra to cover people who earn less.

This liberal notices that when McIlheran talks about what we all will do, all of us does not include the people who earn less than the median income. That is to say, half the population. Helping poor people get insurance is stealing from anyone who counts.

Those figures assume, by the way, massive, improbable cuts in costs.

This unsupported assertion is a cheap throwaway to suggest that health insurance reform will cost you money. But the cost of health care is a problem independent of how we provide insurance for it. And as we'll see, now that the supposition that the mandate system will break down has enabled McIlheran to make reform sound scary, he's going to switch to scaring us with the rising costs that don't have anything to do with any reforms that have been proposed.

First, though, he wants to argue that the problem with health insurance reform will be people paying into it too equally.

Who else pays? The healthy: Patsies who obey the law and buy insurance before they're sick. Their premiums will cover those who don't bother until they've incurred huge bills.

Mainly, the young will pay. They tend to use less care. Obamacare depends on this: Young workers' premiums are needed to fill the pool as aging workers drain it. That's how insurance works, they say. They mistake insurance, which pools similar risks, with the pooling of known dissimilar costs, which is called a raw deal.

The arrangement is like another “compact between generations,” Medicare, in which young workers pay with the expectation of collecting later. But Medicare, which works fine for now, will be insolvent by 2017, say its trustees. The young will pay for that now and later.

The real winners in Obamacare aren't the elderly. They're already covered, though Baucus' plan cuts Medicare massively. It is, rather, the pre-retirement demographic, not old enough for Medicare, insured but worried, and costly to cover.

Such people usually are in their peak earning years. They've had time to save up, pay off the mortgage. They are typically far better off than the young who will subsidize them. Yet Congress would transfer huge sums from low-wealth twentysomethings to higher-wealth boomers.

McIlheran is saying outright that old and sick people should pay more for insurance. By his reasoning that insurance is about pooling “similar risks,” then people who are diagnosed with cancer that costs an average of ^$50,000 to treat should pay ^$50,000/year in insurance premiums, protecting them from the risk that their treatment will end up costing ^$75,000 in their particular case. This is obviously not what we want from our health insurance.

He also wants it both ways with Medicare. He just presumes that Medicare is working away when he sets aside the needs of the elderly to characterize the middle-aged as “big winners.” But he also wants to argue that having the young support the needs of the old is bad, because Medicare is bad, because Medicare is insolvent. This is false logic: Medicare's financial woes aren't because it's insurance for the old paid for by the young, they're because of rising medical costs which, as I mentioned earlier, are going to be a problem we have to solve however we structure paying for it.

This whole trope about poor twentysomethings paying for wealthier boomers' health care being screwy does point toward what I think most of us do want—health insurance premiums commensurate with what people can actually afford to pay. But criticizing the Bauchus bill, he suggested that it was wrong that the wealthy should pay more than the poor. He doesn't provide a clear answer for how he thinks it would be fair for people to pay for health care, just multiple contradictory reasons why he thinks that reform will be unfair.

And the young will pay still more. Congress' plans portend huge deficits, even before the evaporation of reformers' fantasies about cutting costs. This will be funded by unprecedented debt. The costs will be paid later, by citizens now so young as to not yet be born.

They'll pay in much higher taxes. They'll pay in withered job opportunities when payroll levies and value added taxes are heaped on as costs spiral. They'll pay as Congress looks for more villains to blame for this debacle and picks some other industry to demolish.

Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria! Again, McIlheran is blaming reform for rising health care costs. That problem doesn't go away if we reject the health insurance reform under discussion this year.

Fortunately, cutting costs is not a fantasy. The rest of the industrialized world successfully gives health insurance to all citizens without going broke, and they do it with less government spending per capita than we already do in the US! So it can be done, and probably can be done better still ... while reducing the risk that ordinary people experience in our current, broken health insurance system.

Art

Remember the time-traveling mechanical elephant I wrote about a while back? There haven't been any sightings lately, but some of his friends have made an appearance in Berlin.

Happy Birthday, Mr Wilde

I offer you Dorothy Parker:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram
I never seek to take the credit
We all assume that Oscar said it

Testing

DrinkSafeTech.com offers a useful product.

The Drink Safe Personal Test kit contains two tests. About the size of a credit card, they incorporate our patented 'Drink Safe' technology to react with a visible color change when they come in contact with a drink spiked with one of the major 'Date Rape' drugs.

They also offer cunning drink coasters with the testing chemistry built in. I'm not sure if I'm more impressed by this clever idea, or more horrified that it's necessary.

Mashup

For lovers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Austen's Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, and especailly Philip José Farmer's story “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” written as if Tarzan had been written by William S Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I offer Bridget Jones' Naked Lunch.

Via Charlie Jane Anders.