Al Gore haiku

Wonkette has published two pages of Al Gore haiku. My favorite:

Tall and strong like oak,
Fought for the keys to the House.
Killed by butterflies.

Here's my attempt:

He thought he was robbed
But he's having more fun now
Saying what he thinks

ESP

You may be familiar with Clifford Pickover's wonderful ESP experiment page. (It's a variation on the famous "mysterious rabbit," if you've been exchanging web links long enough to remember that one.)

What I did not know is that he also has an explanations page, where he publishes email he receives from people who have attempted to explain how it works. Charmingly, he does not comment on these explanations, which are often very literally incredible.

Two things for politics junkies

If you're not hardcore, you can skip these two. But both are great if you like having resources for doing some digging.

First: A timeline of terror alerts and major news stories.

Biltud, from Salon.com's TableTalk, posted a few days ago a series of correlations between past terror alerts and political events unfavorable to the Bush administration. I compiled all these correlations and organized them chronologically into a timeline. I also added additional news items and other instances that I found out, detailing the terror alerts over the last few years, and located the original sources for many of these news articles. Soon, Biltud and I started to research together all these occurrences, and more interesting "coincidences" started to appear. We finally built this timeline of terror alerts and how they relate to the news headlines of the days immediately prior to that very alert. I think it's very easy to see a pattern recurring.

Second: Details about how a careful reading of the 9/11 commission report reveals that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence they had justifying the attack on Iraq.

In some cases, they were told their claims were wholly without merit, yet they went ahead and made them anyway. Even the Senate report admits that the White House "misrepresented" classified intelligence by eliminating references to contradictory assertions.

In short, they knew they were misleading America.

And they did not care.

They knew Iraq posed no nuclear threat .... They knew the aluminum tubes were not for nuclear weapons .... They knew the Iraq-uranium claims were not supported .... They knew Saddam and bin Laden were not collaborating .... They knew there was no Prague meeting .... They knew they were misleading America

We report; you decide.

A word from the boss

Today's New York Times has an editorial from someone who really doesn't want to speak in support of any particular politician.

Personally, for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.
...
Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

This particular commentator caught me by surprise. It's difficult to imagine another living American of equal fame, stature, non-partisan background, and cultural credibility who could step forward.

Meta-spam humor

I got this one from Bruce Sterling, if you believe it.

I am Vivien Grimhelm Wormtongue, The only daughter of late Counsellor Gríma Wormtongue of the Kingdom of Rohan.

My father was Chief Counsellor [equivalent to Prime Minister] to late lamented king Théoden of Rohan. In his position my father altogether legally and correctly acquired significant assets throughout Rohan in order to protect the Kingdom from enemy forces within and without.

In the course of lamentable events succeeding, my father was illegally deprived of office and expelled from the Kingdom.

Before this he had with foresight already entirely legally deposited gold worth S$42,000,000 with one of the Africa leading Banks in Cote d' Ivoire of which I will let you know if you identify your interest.

While in exile in the north he was assaulted and murdered by a band of northern Orcs.

There's more, if that made you laugh.

Today's quote

Like so many quotes I enjoy, it's the understated affirmation of the obvious at the end that makes this one sing.

On the surface layer of his personality the average man is reserved, polite, compassionate, responsible, conscientious. There would be no social tragedy of the human animal if this surface layer of the personality were in direct contact with the deep natural core. This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

For those who don't know, Reich's Fascism is one of the great crackpot books of all time. Which is not to say that it isn't right.

Hope

There's a pattern I noticed about fifteen years ago.

1789 George Washington
1861 Abraham Lincoln
1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt

1789 + 72 = 1861
1861 + 72 = 1933

Historians Neil Howe and William Strauss argue that this isn't just a concidence. They say that American culture moves in a four-generation cycle --- a cycle the Romans called the sæculum, corresponding to the human lifespan. With each turning of the cycle, there's a great national crisis: the Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression / WWII. Given that Howe & Strauss linked the cultural cycle to American crises about a decade ago in their book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, our current crisis makes that book's subtitle eerily, ah, prophetic.

Look again at that list of presidents. Three times, Americans have risen to the occasion.

1933 + 72 = 2005

Dare to hope.

Curvature

Two geeky witticisms for y'all today.

First, the answer to the question: if theories of physics were girlfriends, what would they be like? (The question if X were Y, what would they be like? is a fruitful field for humor.)

Second, a science fiction poem from the pages of the truly punk cyberpunk anthology Semiotext(e) SF.

Delphic (Projection #5)

Lorraine Schein
The futurist's mistress
(in this alternate scenario)
Sleeps in his bed,
Beside his other curved concubines.
Space and Time.

She projects herself, once more,
Endlessly into the future.

The dreams crash and glisten;
Presaging a love
More fantastic than science —

The futures tighten around her
like his arms in the night.

If you can get your hands on Semiotext(e) SF, by the way, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's full of great stuff, including a Bruce Sterling story written in the first person by an Arab visitor to the US that is terrifyingly prescient for something published fifteen years ago.

Grand strategy

In the middle of a long post that you really oughta read, DeLong offers this gorgeous summation.

It seemed to me that it would be madness to proceed with an attack on Iraq without solid, hard, if necessarily secret intelligence of serious and advanced nuclear weapons programs. And it seemed to me that under such conditions there might well be a place for an attack on Iraq as part of an appropriate U.S. grand strategy: a deal with Sharon that we'll take out Saddam Hussein and neutralized the biggest threat to Israel if you'll drastically reduce settler populations on the West Bank; a deal with the Saudis that we'll take out Saddam Hussein if you get serious about having the Wahabis preach peace rather than jihad; a deal with Iran that we'll take out Saddam Hussein if you'll relax tensions; a deal with Egypt and others to provide the Arabic-speaking military police needed to stabilize a postwar Iraq; and a Marshall Plan-scale commitment to rebuilding postwar Iraq to create a more liberal and possibly a democratic regime there.

And, of course, none of this happened. There was no grand strategy at all, no plan to swing the Arab world over to our side in our struggle with Osama bin Laden and company.
...
The Bush administration has had nearly three years to construct a grand strategy for the war on terror, and has singularly failed to do so. Let's be clear on this: it's not that they have a grand strategy for the war against terror that I disagree with: it's that they have no grand strategy at all.

The first half of this quote is essentially a summation of Pollack's The Threatening Storm, a book which makes a strong case that military action against Iraq was, ultimately, necessary as part of a coherent mideast policy by the US. But the second half is the real point: the adminstration does not have a coherent mideast policy --- indeed, they don't even seem to know they don't have one.

Negative review

Ebert really didn't like The Village.

Eventually the secret ... is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

I have noticed that if Ebert merely dislikes a movie, his review is relatively brief and straightforward. But if the picture actually arouses his ire, the review becomes longer, more eloquent, and funnier. My quote is but a small sample of what he has to offer on this subject.

Shrodinger's Knight

Geekiness warning: follow this link only if you are interested in dice + bad acting, or narrative games in general. You know who you are.

Quadruple entendre

John Kerry opened his speech at the Democratic National Convention saying

I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty.

which, by my count, is meant to be read on about four different levels. Cool.

The start was the high point, but the speech did a number of smart things, as one of Clinton's speechwriters presciently described a few days ago.

He should explain what he learned about America from commanding a gunboat in the Mekong Delta. As he said in his announcement speech last September: "We were no longer the kid from Arkansas nor the kid from Illinois. We were Americans --- together --- under the same flag, giving ourselves to something bigger than each of us as individuals." Look for Kerry to explain that, now as then, Americans are "all in the same boat"--and that the nation's leadership ought therefore to do a better job inspiring unity and purpose.

For those of you at all inclined to do so, now is a good time to give money to the campaign. Under the campaign financing rules, the convention "resets the clock" for fundraising and makes the DNC the best place to give money for the Kerry campaign now. (And in the name of general lefty goodness, of course, MoveOn PAC gives money to good candidates in close races across the country.)

Comic book movies

All in all, the recent wave of comic book movies have treated us better than we had a right to hope for. The two X-Men pictures were smart and fun, playing well with the background of the comics and making the transition to film well. Hugh Jackman, bless him, nailed the impossible role of Wolverine. The two Spiderman pictures likewise came through with flying colors. Heck, I'd have been happy with the Spiderman "coming attractions" trailers alone.

I have the good, the bad, and the coming attractions in more detail...

Not that it hasn't been a mixed bag. Ang Lee's Hulk didn't quite work, but it was a noble failure that had its moments. Daredevil was a turkey --- Ben Affleck? --- but even it had charms: the inspired casting of Michael Clarke Duncan's Kingpin, the inspired performance of Colin Farrell's Bullseye, and the inspired motorcycle-leathers style of DD's costume. Apparently Catwoman is also a turkey, as the filmmakers felt that they didn't need anything beyond Halle Berry a bullwhip and torn leather. (Yeah, I know: they were almost right.) And okay, the less said about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the better, but at least it put money in Alan Moore's pocket, which is a good thing.

But surprise, surprise: Hellboy delivered in spades. It was lively, fun, gorgeously shot, somehow managed to look like Mike Mignola's art, and was chock full of the amazing Ron Perlman, the only actor on Earth who becomes subtler and more expressive when when you put a few pounds of prosthetics on his face. Maybe someday I'll come back in a later post and sing the praises of Hellboy some more; in spite of a bit of limp screenwriting in the ending, the film is a gem.

So this just makes a comics lover want more, and it is more we shall have.

We have third installments coming for both X-Men and Spiderman, done by the same people. We have a director's cut of Hellboy coming on DVD, with a likely sequel there too.

Better still, we have a proper Batman movie being shot right now. Will wonders never cease?

Christopher "Memento" Nolan is directing Batman Begins. Looking at the trailer, it's obviously heavily inspired by Frank Miller's dark, gritty Batman: Year One comic. The cast boggles the mind. Michael Caine is playing Alfred! Even if you aren't Batman lover enough to know who Jim Gordon and Ra's Al Ghul are, you have to be impressed that Gary Oldman and Ken Watanabe will be playing them. (And as someone who thought the only way to cast Ra's was to get in a time machine and scoop up Omar Sharif when he was thirty years younger, I stand corrected.) Plus we get Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, and a bushel basket of good character actors, with Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne.

It gets better. Neil Gaiman has scripted a picture called MirrorMask that's in post-production now. Dave McKean, the mad genius artist who did all those Sandman covers, is directing. Jim Henson Pictures is producing it, and the budget is low --- down to neither of them getting paid --- which is good news, because they're keeping control. Neil says that when he previewed it to the Sony people responsible for distribution, an exec said "That was like Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast ... on acid ... for kids ... "

So I feel just a tiny bit of anticipation for that one.

Last up, for our sins, it seems that rumors of the death of Constantine were, alas, greatly exaggerated. Keanu Reeves plays shadowy un-super-heroic occultist John Constantine. It's a bit of an odd casting choice considering that in the comics he's a ragged, chain-smoking, working class Brit with blonde hair. Other than that, they haven't changed a thing. Except to give him a big gun. And take away his trenchcoat. And give him a love interest. And add a few explosions.

You can't have everything.

B. D.

I've been reading Doonesbury for almost 20 years now. But I've effectively been following the strip for the 34 years since its very beginning, as I discovered it by finding reprints of early strips at the library.

The virtues of Doonesbury are well known. The writing is witty, the commentary on politics barbed, the cast of characters rich and layered after so much time. But in the last several years, though I still read it every day, my enthusiasm for the strip has waned.

Last year, an article by Jesse Walker in Reason put its finger on why: it just has not been as good as it used to be.

Consider one issue where Trudeau's opinion hasn't changed but his tone has: gun control. First examine this 1981 exchange between the strip's resident outlaw and a flunky from the National Rifle Association, set in a Washington bar:

Springfield: Duke ... it's me, Springfield! From the N.R.A., remember?
Duke: Oh ... Springfield, what's the idea of sneaking up on me like that? I coulda blown you away!
Springfield: I'm sorry. That would have been your right.

Now jump to 1993, as a giant cigarette and a giant bullet prepare to lobby Congress.

Mr. Butts: Still on a tear, Mr. Dum-Dum?
Mr. Dum-Dum: Hey! The N.R.A. never rests! The gun-control nuts keep trying to slip the Brady Bill past us! But it ain't gonna happen! No way! We've been shooting our way out of tight squeezes since 1871! And look at the results! Over 70 million happy gun owners ready and able to defend our way of life!
Mr. Butts: Wow ... are we safe yet?
Mr. Dum-Dum: Not yet. Tragically, many children are still unarmed!

I disagree with Trudeau about gun control, but I still think the first strip is funny. The second one just hectors us. It isn't controversial so much as it's annoying.

He's right: the strip isn't as consistently witty as it used to be. Part of Walker's criticism is that Doonesbury has become self-referential:

In 1972 the strip was engaged with the world; in 2002 it is engaged with itself.

I mean that literally. In 1972 Doonesbury rewarded intelligence; in 2002 it rewards familiarity with its own mythology and conventions. In 1972 it trusted readers to know the politics and pop culture of the day; in 2002 it trusts us to understand that a floating waffle represents Bill Clinton, a floating bomb represents Newt Gingrich, and a floating asterisk represents George W. Bush. The strip has grown so self-referential that it makes jokes about its own self-referentiality, with Sunday strips devoted to charting the relationships among the characters.

He has a point. But lately, Trudeau seems to have gotten his mojo back in the recent sequence about B.D., and as we'll see, the self-referentiality makes possible what I think is the most powerful, poignant moment in the history of the strip — one of the greatest moments, indeed, ever managed in the painfully limited four-panel medium.

For those of you unfamiliar with Doonesbury, B.D. is a major cast member who has been with the strip from the very beginning.

He was originally a lunkheaded college football player ...

who provided a conservative foil for strip's lefty politics.

He dropped out to serve in Vietnam ... bringing his football helmet with him so we could recognize him.

As time went on, B.D. took other jobs.

As a cop:

A soldier again, in the first Gulf war:

As a football coach:

Back to Iraq again this year:

Things got interesting a few months ago: B.D. was shot in the line of duty. It was sad, and scary.

When I saw those strips, the suspense was powerful. Was B.D. going to be okay? Was he going to die? The next day, we learn what happened to him, with Trudeau cleverly using the language of the strip to underline the point. It's a brilliant move: in that last panel, his injury isn't the first thing you see, giving it more impact. The same device makes it clear that things will never be the same.

Interested in what happens next? You can read the Doonesbury archives starting that day. The B.D. storyline has been both wry and serious, often both at once.

If you start reading the strip now, you're not alone — this story thread is still alive a couple of months later, and it's the most interesting stuff to happen to Doonesbury in years. Perhaps ever. The story made the cover of Rolling Stone. And it has inspired the ire of folks like Bill O'Reilly, which I have to take as a good sign.

Shorter Bill O'Reilly
Dissent Stinks if it Exploits the Pain of G.I.s

Turning actual human beings into mincemeat while waging an unprovoked war is one thing, but maiming a beloved cartoon character to make a political point is way over the line.

Commentators on the right are responding to Doonesbury again! Keep it up, Mr. Trudeau.

Who's responsible?

Barbara Ehrenreich makes some pointed comments about the relationship between our principles and our new gulag archipelago.

Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.

By signing Jefferson's text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. England was then the world's greatest military power, against which a bunch of provincial farmers had little chance of prevailing. Benjamin Franklin wasn't kidding around with his quip about hanging together or hanging separately. If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors.

Katherine R, posting at Obsidian Wings, adds this observation ...

We do not need to take anywhere near that kind of risk, or any risk at all. Our leaders answer to us --- slowly, reluctantly, and only when they think it puts their re-election in danger, but in the end they do answer to us. We have a say in all this. We do not have to become this kind of country. We do not have to torture people or send them to torturers. We do not have to let Jefferson's eloquent phrases become empty slogans mouthed to justify anything. We do not have to put up with this shit.

... reminding us that, in a democracy, we all have moral responsibility for our nation's actions.

They just can't handle freedom

I have for you a long-for-the-web overview of the Iraq war. It ends in a question:

Imagine yourself an Iraqi. You've suffered terribly under a ruthless dictator. The Americans invade your country under false pretenses. They promise democracy but don't organize elections. They appoint exiles to rule you, exiles who spend most of their time out of the country and the rest in a few highly protected areas. The occupiers break into your homes in the middle of the night and arrest your men, who then disappear, with no accountability. They shoot Iraqis at roadblocks and from convoys. They declare war on the second most popular man in the country, announcing his death in advance. They open the economy to US corporations and give them sweetheart contracts, ignoring local business. Then they write hundreds of laws and establish commissions limiting any future government. They build permanent military bases on your soil. Then they turn your country over to a former associate of Saddam Hussein, also a former CIA agent, known for his ruthless brutality. Imagine that was your country.  What would you do?

Via Holden at Eschaton, who picked out the money quote above.

Today's quote

From the convention floor today:

You know the old saying: you win some, you lose some. And then there's that little-known third category.

Al Gore

He said some more funny things, and then a lot of serious things, too.

Ninjitsu

Whaddaya know! A serious history of both the myth and the reality of ninjas.

Of course, that's not what you want. You want things 9-year-olds think about ninjas. You want the little-known Star of David Ninja Shuriken (which comes with instructions that only the crafty can find.)

You want cool ninja t-shirts. There's plenty. I have for you ninja pirate, only a ninja can kill another ninja, skateboarding ninja, "got ninja?", fractal ninjas (have more points), and killer coding ninja monkeys do exist, plus instructions for how to wear a t-shirt the ninja way.

Bonus for latecomers: Ninja Massage Therapist!

Wince

Brad DeLong is maddened yet again by our press corps praising by faint damnation.

Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community .... Nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant --- except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source.
...
After reading Powell's speech, the analyst decided he had to speak up .... The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

The saga of Curve Ball is just one of many wince-inducing moments ....

Wince-Inducing Moment? Wince-Inducing Moment!? WINCE-INDUCING MOMENT!?!?

I wince when I hear George W. Bush try to pronounce "nuclear" or "Abu Ghraib." I wince when my daughter does a belly flop off the diving board. I wince when one of my students misses an easy question in class. One winces when Georgie seeks praise for his skeet shooting, or when Muffy misses her serve again.

When a Deputy to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency --- or somebody at that level --- refuses to do his job, saying that he is not going to provide intelligence to the Secretary of State because the Secretary of State is uninterested in whether what he is about to say to the United Nations is true or not, it is not appropriate to "wince." It is appropriate to be outraged.

Part of his excellent ongoing coverage of our need for a better press corps.

Aye, robot

Peter David managed to enjoy I Robot in spite of it doing violence to the spirit of Asimov.

Think of it not as I Robot, but Robots of the Caribbean, wherein the Three Laws of Robotics aren't so much laws as they are ... guidelines.

See, everything is improved by a reference to pirates.

Vroom!

I just bought myself a new motorbike.

The thing that struck me in the process of buying this new bike is what a strange sort of decision it is to pick a motorcycle. To me, the whole point of riding is that it's a full sensory experience. You're not sitting in a cage with a wheel in front of you watching the world go by on television, you're exposed to the world and tangled up with this powerful machine, so you need to find a machine with which you feel a personal affinitiy.

A bicycle has some of that physical immediacy: it's a lever that connects your body to movement through space. It's not as fast as a motorcycle, but the relationship between the movements your body makes and the movements of the fusion-of-body-and-machine is even more intimate. There are variables in choosing a bicycle, like what kind of gearing you want, but mainly you just ask yourself how you want to use the bike and find one that's as sturdy as you need and as light as you can afford. On a motorcycle, there's the way the suspension works and the way the weight is distributed and the engine's power curve and the gear ratios and so on. Every motorcycle feels different.

Sure, a car or a sailboat or a forklift have a lot of variables in how they feel, but the way they feel isn't as immediate and intense. When you drive a car, you don't shift your weight to do it. When you sail a boat, you don't have hurricane winds in your face. When you turn a forklift, it doesn't put whizzing asphalt within arm's reach. How a motorcycle feels matters a lot. How a motorcycle feels is the point.

So it's quite a decision.

My old bike, a red ’92 Honda Nighthawk 750 named Katherine Hepburn, has been sick for some time. She has 60,000 miles on her — a lot for a motorbike. Her rings have been going, so her power and fuel efficiency are fading. In recent months, she's started running hotter, burning a bit of oil, and stalling when she's cold.

I've been riding Kate for six years, and like the feel of her very much. I decided to bite the bullet and spend the money to rebuild her engine. But my mechanic, a deeply honorable man at Subterranean Cycles, told me, “I cannot in good conscience take your money. Knowing what that will cost, you should just go get a new bike.”

Behold the benefits of bringing a six-pack of Anchor Steam every time you pick up your bike.

Sad for Kate, sad for me. I really love Kate: she's served me well and taken me a lot of places. But also happy for me. I get to buy a new bike! Which one? Which one?

The fools at Honda discontinued the Nighthawk this year, so I can't just replace Kate with a shiny new version of herself, which I might have done.

A few considerations dramatically narrow the field. I favor an upright riding position, and these days, the market is dominated by zip-zip sportbikes which put the rider in a painful crouch and whoa-dude cruisers which lean you back too far. Plus, I have a philosophy that God intended motorcycles to have an air-cooled engines. Most bikes nowadays are water-cooled, with big radiators on the front: decadence and unnecessary complication, I say. I want shaft drive, as the chain has failed on me twice riding Kate and I never want to experience that particular adventure again. So not many options.

My presumptive choice was the BMW R1150R: simple and rock-solid, but a step up from the simple and rock-solid Nighthawk. Heated handgrips, anti-lock brakes, gratuitiously well-engineered suspension, and little touches like a clock on the dashboard.

I rented one last year, when Kate first took ill, and in an empty parking lot I got a taste of that suspension and braking system. I braked as hard as I dared and the BMW didn't even break a sweat: the brakes were smooth and the crazy German suspension meant the bike didn't rock on her springs a bit. I braked a little harder than I dared, and she still had plenty more. It was so good it was a little weird.

On the freeway, she hummed along at a cool 70 so smoothly that I dreaded to contemplate what her top end would feel like. On city streets, she gave me all the accelaration I wanted. My riding is spirited, but not all that fast by biker standards. So though the R is not a sportbike, she's significantly more than I am used to with Kate, and all the power I would realistically need. On city streets, she was a touch heavier than I was used to, but nimble enough, and I remember growing into a heavier bike when I first went from little Lazarus to Kate.

So I liked the R, and BMWs have one other special thing going for them: the odometer. An old car's odometer often rolls over to 00,000.0 at a hundred thousand miles, but any new car you buy today rolls over at a million. Motorcycles are like old cars, with 5.1 digit odometers — except for BMWs, which roll over at a million. Reliability. When you see a picture of some mud-spattered lunatic on a 4,000 mile ride through Africa, the lunatic tends to be sitting on a BMW.

On the other hand, I'm no longer so dependant on my bike for daily transportation, so I don't have to be quite so obsessive on this point. More poetic options are tempting. As with so many things, brains are the most important thing, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to beauty.

As I alluded to earlier, I've been fascinated by the sheer beauty of the Moto Guzzi V11. The Guzzi speaks not only to a sculptural aesthetic, but to an engineering aesthetic as well. The transverse V-twin engine is unique to the Guzzi marque and has a “yes it's weird but consider the advantages” charm, like the Wankel rotary engine, a kneeling chair, or my computer keyboard. I'm a sucker for that stuff.

So I dropped in to Munroe Motors to have a look. And the V11 is indeed gorgeous beyond words. And as expensive as the BMW. And racier than I really want or need. And bigger than I want or need. And doesn't have the little comforts of the BMW, like the hot grips or anti-lock brakes. So for that money, I'd go for the BMW.

But while I was there I got a look at the Guzzi Breva 750. I don't have a good photo of my own, so you'll have to settle for this photo of the same make and color I nabbed from the web.

Though I don't know how helpful that is. I didn't really take to photos of the Breva when I saw them on the Moto Guzzi website, but in the flesh — er, steel ... aluminum ... composite stuff — the bike is quite lovely, if not quite so stunning as the V11. To a biker's eye, at least, it's distinctive-looking in a good Moto Guzzi kind of way. More importantly, it is smaller and a third less expensive than the V11, if actually a bit less bike than I was imagining getting.

So I looked at some reviews on the web. They were positive, though hardly glowing. Reviewers for motorcycle magazines are people who ride obsessively and want to try a lot of different bikes, and so they like performance, performance, and performance. Most reviews said something about “a good, fun bike for first-time riders.” But at the risk of the other bikers calling me a sissy, they said that for what I saw as all the right reasons: comfort, versatility, and reliability.

I stopped back at Munroe and asked for a test ride.

She was light! At 420 pounds dry, the Guzzi is 40 pounds lighter than Kate, which doesn't sound like much but feels like a lot. I think having a lower center of gravity must also contribute to that, not only in the way the engine is mounted but also in being all-around lower and smaller. The BMW is higher and heavier than the Nighthawk; this was the opposite, and rolling down city streets I felt as though I could have weaved between the cars like an action movie hero. She didn't have quite so much power as I expected — in her prime, I think Kate had a few more horses than the Breva — but part of that is probably the relatively narrow powerband. Keeping her revs where they needed to be, I could move plenty well ... and paying attention to that stuff is fun.

MKB, with his shiny new zip-zip GSX-R, will probably laugh when he reads this stuff. His bike is 65 pounds lighter still, has its center of gravity about eight inches off the ground, and delivers a bit more than twice the horsepower. But because of the sportbike hunched-over riding position, his wrists hurt. Mine don't. While his bike's engine goes buzz-buzz-buzz, the Guzzi's sings.

It felt good sitting on her. I bought the bike. I'm a happy man.

Now I just have to figure out what her name is. My original plan was that my next bike would be named after Lauren Bacall, Betty for short. (Ms. Bacall's birth name was Betty, and she still used the name with friends after she took “Lauren” for the screen.) When I realized I was buying an Italian bike, I thought maybe she needed to be Sophia Loren. I know, Katherine Hepburn wasn't Japanese, but my Nighthawk is red, so don't argue my logic. But “Sophia” doesn't sound right either, so now I don't know.

Another ride, and I'm sure she'll tell me.

---

Update: “Betty” it is. Sexy.

CEO shortage strikes nation

Kevin Drum expresses puzzlement over why real wages for the working class have dipped this year in spite of strong productivity growth.

The labor market is a slave to supply and demand just like any other market, right?

Odd, then, that CEO pay rose 27% in 2003, isn't it? Did the supply of CEOs shrink last year? Did demand skyrocket?

Via Conner.

Arabian candidate

Krugman strikes again.

In the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, Senator John Iselin, whom Chinese agents are plotting to put in the White House, is a right-wing demagogue modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy.
...
So let's imagine an update .... the enemies would be Islamic fanatics
...
Who knows? The Arabian candidate might even be able to deprive America of the moral high ground, no mean trick when our enemies are mass murderers, by creating a climate in which U.S. guards torture, humiliate and starve prisoners, most of them innocent or guilty of only petty crimes.

At home, the Arabian candidate would leave the nation vulnerable, doing almost nothing to secure ports, chemical plants and other potential targets. He would stonewall investigations into why the initial terrorist attack succeeded.
...
President Bush isn't actually an Al Qaeda mole, with Dick Cheney his controller. Mr. Bush's "war on terror" has, however, played with eerie perfection into Osama bin Laden's hands.

Not to say I told you so, but this is very much what a lot of antiwar lefties like me feared and predicted.

(Illustration by the amazing Paul Conrad.)

Today's quote

Via poorheather:

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version, in which I will play everybody.

David Bowie

Get well soon, David.

Politics, epistemology, rhetoric

I recently stumbled across an article in the Village Voice in which the reporter recounts some surreal conversations with conservatives.

I open the floor to the question of why they personally revere George Bush.

Ponytailed Larry, who wears the stripes of a former marine gunnery sergeant on his floppy hat, bursts into laughter; it's too obvious to take seriously. “Honesty. Truth. Integrity,” he says upon recovering.
...
"One of the reasons I respect this president is that he is honest. I believe that after eight years, the dark years of the Clinton administration, we finally have a man in the White House who respects that office and who speaks honestly."
....

I ask why so many liberals believe the administration lies, if there might be anything to the suspicions. What about the report of the Los Angeles Times that morning, that the State Department dismissed 28 of the claims the White House demanded Colin Powell bring before the U.N. as without foundation in fact?

Delores: “You make mention of a paper in Los Angeles that made such and such a report; well, that doesn't mean it's accurate or complete or unbiased.”

Why do these folks feel that way?

To a reader like me, that stuff is just stupefying. To my eyes, the three characteristics of Bush and his administration are the Iraq invasion catastrophe, the terrifying disregard for civil liberties, and the unremitting, reflexive lies. As a fair-minded person, I find myself experiencing epistemological vertigo. How could someone interpert things in a way that so contradicts my own understanding? Either they are deluded or I am. And a thoughtful person knows how many opportunities there are for self-deception and must guard against them.

But Bush's pattern of lies is not debatable. Consider this stunning example: Bush explained his decision to invade Iraq, in a joint press conference with Kofi Annan, saying, "We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." Hans Blix's UN team entered Iraq to begin a series of weapons inspections on 18 November 2002; Bush made this statement 14 July 2003. “Honesty” and “integrity” are not the words that I would choose to describe anyone who could say that.

So how is this possible? I submit that Bush does something with successfully signifies honesty and integrity to conservatives.

Linguist George Lakoff talks about this. He talks about it at length.

Over the last 30 years [conservative] think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]

And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.

Bush, like the entire Republican rhetoric machine, is speaking using a sophisticated vocabulary that conservatives recognize as reflecting their values. The Republican party is very deliberate about this stuff.

More specifically, for evangelical Christians, Bush is visibly one of them. I don't think that this is simply deliberate; Bush is clearly a genuine evangelical, and speaks that language. PBS' Frontline did a sophisticated documentary on this, "The Jesus Factor," with interviews with major evangelical leaders, footage of Bush, and commentary by some very smart people. Check out the terrific website for the documentary: it has the whole program available online, plus interview transcripts and lots of other goodies.

Notable in that program was the story of the Iowa caucuses during the 2000 primaries. In the Republican debate, the moderator asked the candidates a viewer's question about which political philosopher or thinker the candidate identified with. Steve Forbes picked my own favorites: John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. John McCain went for the Founding Fathers and Teddy Roosevelt. Alan Keyes was also down with the Founding Fathers, using it as an opportunity to wink toward strict constructioninsm. Bush's answer?

Christ, because he changed my heart.

... long pause ...

I think that the viewer would like to know more on how he has changed your heart.

Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me.

Doug Wead, an evangelical leader who advised the elder Bush's campaign, describes that moment as powerful for evangelical viewers.

I think that was instinctive, and genuine ... It may have helped him, because of the fact that it was so obviously uncalculated to evangelicals. I mean, the media elite and non-evangelicals see that statement, and they think it's calculated. The evangelicals know it's not calculated. They know it didn't help him, so they tend to believe it's true.

With that kind of resonance, Bush projects honesty and trustworthiness and virtue to his base, and that's what his base will see no matter what he actually does.

Superlegitimacy

Antoun points me at the fascinating essay Superlegitimacy: passion and ecstasy of a Tokyo train driver, which talks about Japanese culture from an alienated Western perspective.

Westerners in Japan often find the things they see spectral, uncanny, plastic. This is because there's a constant sense that, despite similarities to (or simulacra of) western forms, the social organization of Japan is radically different from what we know in the west. On a superficial level, Japanese cities look like western cities, their parks like our parks, their trains like our trains, and so on. Nevertheless, this 'likeness' is an illusion. 'A train' is a western invention adopted by the Japanese in the 19th century. But when we look at, board, and ride a train in Japan it would be foolish to see it as anything like a western train. It's a set of Japanese etiquettes and assumptions travelling through space. It only looks like a train. Soon, explaining the deep otherness of the superficially familiar things he sees around him, the visitor finds himself saying things like this:

That x only looks like an x, something I know well. In fact it is a manifestation of y, something I don't.

I have no idea how wise the essay really is about Japanese culture; I only know that it's consistent with what I saw in just a few short days there. And it's a good read.

Geek humor

"Who's on first?" for gamers. Very geeky. You've been warned.

The title does not lie

Useless Pages

Diplomacy

Whenever I think of culture shock, I think of this disconcerting passage from Samuel R. Delaney's science fiction masterpiece Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, in which the narrator tells a story about being an interstellar diplomat.

I never go into a butcher outlet anywhere on Velm, or anywhere else for that matter, no matter the geosector, without recalling the first time, during my fifth trip offworld, that I was dining with my employer₁ and her spouses for my third job₁. (The feathers on everything; the very unsubtle music.) I was charmed when they served the meal on narrow plates, about three inches wide, curved around in a circle. You worked your way along from portion to portion — cunning I thought — eating with your fingers; though getting the tastes and smells so confused with one another would never go at home. There was the meat; and I began to tell them about the butcher outlets on Velm, and just what the cloned longpig I'd been raised on was, realizing as I spoke they were a little shocked. I picked up my own bit of roast, bit down — something hard was in it ...

Then I realized: Bone!

This had once been walking around with a skeleton inside. Although I didn't, many times when I've told the story, I've said I left the table.

Different things shock different people.

Fantasy and moral clarity

Ursula K. LeGuin rocks the house. I just stumbled across "a few grunts" from her about fantasy literature.

Some assumptions are commonly made about fantasy that bother me. These assumptions may be made by the author, or by the packagers of the book, or both, and they bother me both as a writer and as a reader of fantasy. They involve who the characters are, when and where they are, and what they do. Put crudely, it's like this: in fantasy, 1) the characters are white, 2) they live sort of in the Middle Ages, and 3) they're fighting in a Battle Between Good and Evil.

She goes on to unpack these three points, most notably observing that contrary to popular belief, The Lord of the Rings is not really about a Battle Between Good and Evil. Speaking to that third point, she has this timely thing to say ...

Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world ...

... which serves as a jumping-off point for ever-pointed Yezida's ruminations on the danger that "moral clarity" brings.

---

In comments, Kira alludes to LeGuin's famous Bryn Mawr Commencement Address. It's long and good and full of zingers like this ...

You came here to college to learn the language of power --- to be empowered. If you want to succeed in business, government, law, engineering, science, education, the media, if you want to succeed, you have to be fluent in the language in which "success" is a meaningful word.

... and is very much the sort of thing you'll like if you ever like that sort of thing.