Mercury in retrograde

I don't believe in astrology, but astrology believes in me. My phone battery just went dead for two days, during which time I accumulated a dozen messages.

Mercury went retrograde in Leo on Independence Day.

I'm gonna pay some attention to astrologer Rob Tillet, who I keep at the bottom of my blogroll as “Mercury watch.”

Mercury retro in Leo gives confusion regarding high ideals and aspirations. People tend to be outspoken or quick-tempered, and their kind-hearted impulses can be misplaced, due to getting the facts wrong. Leaders and those in high places are subject to delusion and error, especially as nebulous Neptune is in opposition and lordly Jupiter is square. They tend to appear haughty, proud and passionate. Individuals find dramatic ways to communicate and are quick to refute ideas that disagree with their own. A love of children and a fondness for pleasure should not be allowed to get out of hand. Love affairs can be fickle and inconstant, due to egotistical presumptions. Avoid gambling and those who display a low and sensual nature. Attend immediately to back and chest pains.

When Mercury moves back to Cancer on July 11, the need to revisit emotional commitments will become more present. Family issues are likely to arise and you may need to review decisions regarding your residence and any career moves you have in mind ....

But that's not the end of it. Mercury doesn't go direct until the 29th, and won't return to station until August 12th.

Hang on.

Math and homelessness

Ezra Klein, writing at The American Prospect, finds Bush administration policy worthy of praise: some counterintuitive but very pragmatic policies for handling homelessness that appear to work. He points us at a fascinating New Yorker article which explains the logic of the policy, which we're trying here in San Francisco with our notoriously big homeless population.

The current philosophy of welfare holds that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But someone who blows .49 on a Breathalyzer and has cirrhosis of the liver at the age of twenty-seven doesn’t respond to incentives and sanctions in the usual way. “The most complicated people to work with are those who have been homeless for so long that going back to the streets just isn’t scary to them,” Post said. “The summer comes along and they say, ‘I don’t need to follow your rules.’ ” Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of those ten caseworkers in the basement of the Y.M.C.A.

What's this about “power law” vs “normal distribution” social policy? It's math, but easy to understand. Check out the New Yorker article for an explanation ... and an exploration of the tricky moral implications ... and a look at what the principle means for not only homelessness but smog testing, police oversight, and more.

Liberal media

I doubt that any of my readers believe the guff about a “liberal media bias,” but just in case, let me point out Jamison Fosers article that makes clear how actually, the river flows the other way.

Snakes on a plane

As part of our ongoing Snakes on a Plane coverage, I offer you an interview with Christa Faust, author of the Snakes novelization.

What was it like working with Samuel L. Jackson’s character? Does he swear a lot in your head when you’re envisioning his dialogue?

The big problem is that, now that he’s settled in up there, I can’t get him to leave and he keeps eating all the motherfucking Red Vines and leaving the goddamn toilet seat up. You try telling Sam Jackson to get the fuck out.

She really gets the spirit of the thing.

Ebert

As y'all have probably caught on, I have a fondness for Roger Ebert's film reviews. It seems that he had a scary medical emergency a few days ago; he's apparently in a bad way, but stable, and with a good prognosis.

His wife Chaz has a charming request for concerned folks.

I am asking you to pray for Roger during his period of recovery and to visualize him being enveloped in healing light.

Roger would also want you to go out to the movies. He gives you permission to see even those movies that don't have his personal “Thumbs Up.”

Looking for something good? If Brick is showing in your neighborhood, like Mr. Ebert, I give it a thumbs up.

Aquatic ape

Back in high school, I read Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman, which argues that there was a key recent period in human evolution in which humans lived in an environment where they did a lot of swimming, and thus became well adapted to it. It's a charming, well-written book, and the hypothesis accounts for a number of human morpological peculiarities—the very weird distribution of fur on our bodies, and the peculiar structure of the human nose, for instance. I was a casual aquatic ape booster for a long time; it's a seductive idea.

But a few years back, I had the hypothesis debunked to my satisfaction. Charming as the theory is, it's just wrong. Lindsey Beyerstein of Majikthise reports a similar recent disenchantment, as a result of a very impressive site which debunks the aquatic ape hypothesis very thoroughly.

Sigh. I don't believe in Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind any more either: an even lovelier idea, but utterly impossible to really demonstrate. And the neutrino turns out to be a disappointment, too. And Lovecraft had no connection to Crowley.

Next you're gonna tell me that Oswald really did act alone.

Independence Day

In honor of my nation's founding, a few things:

First, my annual rap on why I love the holiday.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite as an occasional lefty activist) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

Second, some more Independence Day goodies from me, including a little sentimentality about the American flag ... which you'll also get from this Jon Carroll story that I found via MKB's linkblog.

Today's quote

From Gavin M. of Sadly, No.

you can often learn more about a genre of music by studying the bad records than the good ones. The reason is that you can see mistakes of judgment and technique that lay bare the artist’s intentions. The artist can’t hide from you as successfully as a craftier, more practiced and opaque artist would be able to. Most good art is in a sense alike in that it’s able to speak to something more intrinsic than base culture, something cross-platform or common to the human condition. (Neil Young calls it ‘the spook’; a great song has the spook in it.) Most bad art is concerned with trying to be a successful example of itself, or of a genre or movement — with trying to operate its own cultural tools correctly. Bad art struggles to express its difference.

He goes on to apply this principle to the writing in Right Blogistan to good effect, but it's the principle itself that I felt compelled to share.

Dorothy

Yes, this photograph was taken in Kansas.

Two futures

What with gasoline on the high side of $3 a gallon, Al Gore doing his rap, the US embroiled in a horrific quagmire in the Middle East because of our oil interests, and the hockey stick graph, the buzz is finally on about what we're gonna do about our current oil dependency being totally unsustainable. James Howard Kunstler and Chairman Bruce Sterling are two folks who have been thinking about this for a good long time already. You'll find them both lurking in my blogroll.

This week, they both happen to be talking about the possibility of fueling cars with alcohol ....

The pitch for alcohol is that you can use it as a fuel to run internal combustions engines very similar to the kind you see in existing cars et cetera. You don't dig alcohol out of the ground like you do with petroleum, you make it from grains like corn. This is appealing because there isn't a fixed supply in the earth to run out, you just grow and brew more every year ... and the carbon in the fuel comes from carbon dioxide in the air metabolized by the plants, so it doesn't contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The trouble is that when you add up all of the energy costs of making alcohol—the fuel in the tractors in the cornfields, cooking up the corn mash to ferment, running the distilleries to turn it into fuel, and so forth—you actually come out behind. You have to put more energy in than you get out. That doesn't stop Big Agriculture from thinking that alcohol fuels are a great idea, of course.

You do the math.

James Howard Kunstler, the only man in America who who hates the suburbs more than I do, sees the fascination with alcohol as a refusal to accept that car culture is soon to be over.

Chevron and British Petroleum (or Beyond Petroleum, as BP wishfully styles itself) have both run ad campaigns acknowledging the oil-and-gas crunch, and the mainstream media has joined the campaign to pimp for bio-fuels. But all the talk is driven by the assumption that we will keep running WalMart, Disney World, and the interstate highway system just like we do now, only with other “alternative” liquid fuels.

The more naive members of the environmental sector have been suckered into this line of thinking, too -- especially the college kids, who imagine we can just divert x-amount of acreage from Cheez Doodle production and re-direct it to crops devoted to making liquid fuels for Honda Elements. They need to get some alt.brains.

Nobody is talking about the much more likely prospect that we'll have to reduce motoring drastically, and make other arrangements for virtually every aspect of daily life, from how we get food, to how we do business, to how we inhabit the landscape. The more we resist thinking about the larger agenda for comprehensively changing daily life, beyond our obsession with cars, the more likely we will veer into hardship, political trouble, and violence.

Bruce Sterling, presumably hoping that we will find a way to make alcohol production more efficient, sees something else.

So okay, get this pitch: it's the American solution to climate change. It's all about giant, hybrid, boozy SUVs. These SUVs carry, not dainty little hippie batteries, but COLOSSAL REPUBLICAN batteries, batteries big enough to power your house. At night, you plug in the batteries and suck clean wind-power out off the grid. You drive around your neighborhood on Texan and Kansan wind-power. Wind is always a patchy resource, but GIANT AMERICAN CARS become the STORAGE UNITS for American wind. You run your HOUSE off your car battery when the wind isn't blowing. The huge American car fleet is America's un-interruptible power supply.

While away from home, you buy American booze, i.e., recycled Iowa corncobs, and even weeds off the side of the road, all enzymatically cracked and turned into white-lightning car fuel that you can DRINK AT TAILGATE PARTIES. And since these grasses fix carbon into the soil (through their roots), THE MORE YOU DRIVE, THE FASTER THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT GOES AWAY!

Furthermore, in order to cure the atmosphere quickly, you definitely want to drive a BIG car. A really big American WHALE of a car. You might want to consider dumping your house entirely and moving all your possessions into a giant, booze-fueled, wind-powered Recreational Vehicle.

Okay, this isn't a universal solution to climate change. But it's the first solution I've seen with *American national characteristics.*

Honestly, I want Kunstler to be right on the future, because I think he's right about the past; on balance, cars have been a terrible blight on our society. But reading the two of them, I think that the smart money is on Chairman Bruce.

ayo

I expect that most of my readers are familiar with artist damali ayo, or at least Rent-A-Negro.com, her famous art project. (If you aren't, follow the link. It's real, it's smart, it's good, and it's good for you.)

I recently learned that she has added TOKENS, a terrific site of Cafépress merchandise. While she didn't have folks like me in mind with the touch your own hair t-shirt, it did give me an extra laugh.

The right to arm bears

This blog salutes you, Troy Hurtubise.

In pursuit of his off-kilter dream — creating a suit of armor that can withstand the attack of a grizzly bear — Troy Hurtubise has endured much: Slugs in the chest from a 12-gauge shotgun at a range of 20 feet. Falling, on purpose, off the edge of the 150-foot-high Niagara Escarpment. Assaults from burly friends and relatives all too willing to cuff him repeatedly with road picks, knives, bows and arrows, two-by-fours. Eighteen times he has stood in the path of a three-ton pickup doing 30 miles per hour, and 18 times the truck has knocked him from here to next week. On several occasions, he has stood at attention while a 350-pound log, winched 30 feet up in a tree, swung down broadside to topple him like a human bowling pin.

In each of these encounters, Hurtubise explains over oil-slicked restaurant coffee, he was safe inside his invention: the Ursus Mark VI Bearproof Suit, 147 pounds of titanium alloy, rubber, plastic, and chain mail standing seven feet, two inches tall. “I sustained a headache one time coming down the mountain,” he says proudly. “And a bruise on my right arm. After all the tests, that's it.”

You cannot make this stuff up.

Rail

James Howard Kunstler sings the praises of rail travel.

After sitting on airplanes for two days, like a mummy in a casket, I took the Amtrak train from Bellingham, Washington, down to Seattle. It was an extravagant relief from harsh inanities of aviation. The train cars were new, clean and luxurious, very unlike the beat-up rolling stock on my usual Hudson River line (Albany to New York City). The seats were better than first-class airplane seats. There was a cafe car serving up hot beverages. The conductors were cheerful, as if they actually liked what they were doing.

Mmm. I am fond of quoting Ursula LeGuin, who said somewhere that trains are one of the few technologies that are at once perfectly romantic and perfectly efficient.

I myself will be getting on a plane tonight. At least it's headed home.

Shaxberd

Shakespeare, Pericles Prince of Tyre II.4

Go search like nobles, like noble subjects,
And in your search spend your adventurous worth

Via Content Love Knowles, I learn that Google have been good enough to give us a big fat Shakespeare resource.

Art

Holy Georgia O'Keefe, Batman! Eros ex Mathematica is a series of pictures that are not safe to view at work. Yet the description on the website insists:

The images in this room are created entirely from mathematical algorithms. If you find them offensive in any way, all I can say is that beauty (or obscenity) is in this case most certainly in the eye of the beholder.

Indeed, most of the images don't look like actual people. But something in the brain must use an algorithm similar to the one that produced these images to recognize things as looking fleshy.

Economics

Brad DeLong quotes an article about politics and economics which offers an interesting explanation for the development of Europe's current mild socialism.

Mr Judt stresses the primacy of politics in human affairs and explains how postwar Europe created something novel in human history by transforming a tax-raising, military-spending state into a social state devoting huge amounts of money to health, education, pensions, housing, welfare and public facilities. Europe built these liberal welfare states, Mr Judt reminds his audience, not as a vision of a utopian socialist future but as a means of securing political stability and preventing a recurrence of its terrible past ....

There's also a good bit in which a Martian economist finds the economists of Earth confusing, if you like that sort of thing.

Better than Dora

Tom Disch reports that Paddington Bear is ready to take on a thrilling new adventure.

I have been talking with Paddington, who has just seen an exciting news story on CNN about the importance of establishing a human presence on Mars before the Earth turns into Venus, as Steven Hawkings predicts. This naturally alarmed Paddington, but also in an odd way reassured him. Scientists say that it might be possible to establish human habitations on Mars is twenty years, or half that time! If humans can do that, then surely teddy bears have an even better chance. They don't need oxygen, or water. They eat only imaginery food, chiefly cookies, ice cream, and other desserts, which are abundant on Mars. He is willing volunteer to undertake the perilous journey ....

He's seeking funding. I might kick in.

One Trillion Dollars

That's how much the world spent on militaries last year. One Trillion Dollars.

The United States was responsible for just shy of half it.

C2H6O

From time to time I dream of making my living as a bartender. Many folks say I have the right temperament for it, for some reason.

One deterrent is that it would mean that I would probably give up drinking liquor. That's not a big problem for me, as I'm a person who might go a month or more without a drink. But I do thoroughly enjoy a good cocktail, and once or twice a year I'll enjoy a very blurry evening. Moderation in all things, including moderation. But I don't think that would work for me so well if I were the bloke behind the bar.

The Rant Waiter—who knows his way around a cocktail—has a sharp little story explaining why.

Global warming

Lindsay “Majikthise” Beyerstein kicks off her review of An Inconvenient Truth with this little story.

My friend Ryan's dad is a famous polar zoologist. Several years ago, I asked Ryan what his dad thought about “the whole global warming thing.”

“Well, my dad's an optimist about global warming,” Ryan said.

I breathed an inward sigh of relief.

“He's not nearly as dark as a lot of his colleagues.”

I began to hope that the crisis had been exaggerated.

“My dad just thinks that global warming is going to kill off all the indigenous peoples and most of the wildlife in the arctic.”

She goes on to give a detailed review well worth your time.

Presents

For the record, I would be delighted if someone would buy this for me.

Fiscal responsibility

Via MKB, I learn that Garrison Keillor has a nice little rant worth suffering the ad at Salon. It largely concerns a defense of the virtues of my town, but this was my favourite bit:

You might not have always liked Republicans, but you could count on them to manage the bank. They might be lousy tippers, act snooty, talk through their noses, wear spats and splash mud on you as they race their Pierce-Arrows through the village, but you knew they could do the math. To see them produce a ninny and then follow him loyally into the swamp for five years is disconcerting, like seeing the Rolling Stones take up lite jazz.

As I've said before, how did it happen that the Democrats became the party of fiscal responsibility? What's wrong with the world?

The New York Times took a crack at explaining it back during the '04 Presidential campaign.

Democrats and Republicans are engaged in the economic equivalent of Nixon going to China: Republican presidents can get away with utterly irresponsible fiscal policies because there's no one to their right who will make too much trouble for them. Democratic presidents can get away with fiscal austerity because there's no one to their left who will make their life too difficult. But the irony should not be missed.

That's half right.

Republicans have a hazy idea that if they bankrupt the government, then it will compel us to do away with all of the expensive things it does which they don't like. Hence Grover Norquist's famous quote about getting government small enough that it could be drowned in a bathtub. All the way back during the Reagan adminstration, David Stockman admitted that bankrupting our way into a smaller government was the plan—he knew that cutting taxes wouldn't really increase revenue, the way that Reagan said it would.

Solstice

Happy midsummer!

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

Sumer is i-cumin in,
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!

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


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

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu

The Wild Hunt has a fun collection of links to pagan tales about the day. “When has astronomy ever done more for the lifting of the spirit?” Indeed—Astronomy Picture of the Day delivers the goods again.

Principles for American foreign policy

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has a terrific post worth reading in its entirety, which starts from pundit Peter Beinart’s failure to see that the Iraq war was a bad idea. Quoting Beinart, Hilzoy says:

If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them.

This is just one more piece of evidence that Peter Beinart and I do not hang out with the same kinds of people. He (and other opinion writers) seem to find it obvious that almost no one whose opinions were worth taking seriously was right on all three wars. Among the people I know, however, that’s not true: almost everyone I know whose opinions on policy I take at all seriously was right on all three; and so was I.

This is not because I and mine are right all the time. We aren’t — along with many people I know, I was very wrong on welfare reform, for instance. But we were right on these three wars. And I think, contra Beinart, that the reason for this is that being right on all three just wasn’t all that hard, given certain basic principles.

What are those basic principles? Hilzoy has prepared a list.

On epistemology

1. It is not true that being realistic always requires taking the toughest option.
2. Every war is itself, and not another war

On international relations

3. We have to be involved with the rest of the world
4. It is very important that other people trust us
5. It is very important to retain the good will of other peoples and nations
6. We should do whatever we can to foster the development of effective international institutions and norms of conduct

On war

7. War is not the worst thing in the world
8. While war is not the worst thing in the world, it's really, really, really, really bad

As Hilzoy says, this stuff just isn’t all that hard.

Juneteenth

I almost forgot: it's Juneteenth today, marking the end of slavery in the US. The history of the holiday is itself interesting.

Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

This year I discover that the mythology of the origins of the holiday is complicated. What's with that two-and-a-half year gap?

Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All or none of them could be true.

Hmmnn. I'd guess that none of those stories are factual, but I submit that all of them are, in an important sense, true.

Being a white guy, I figure it isn't really my holiday to celebrate. But being an American, the holiday and its story are part of my history, and so it's my responsibility to mark it. It's not exactly controversial to stand up in opposition to slavery ... but not everyone is comfortable being reminded that it is, unhappily, a central part of American history, and in fact history that is still alive in the society of the nation.

The reminder is important. If we don't have the will or wisdom to fully address the crimes of our history, in the very least we should make the effort on the level of symbolism.

So in honour of the holiday, let me offer Cobb's beautiful idea for symbolic reparations, which I've been meaning to blog for some time.

As a matter of apology and reparation, I propose the minting of a coin. This coin, preferably gold in color, would be distributed directly to [African] Americans through the US Post Office. What is important is that a sufficient number of these coins be minted such that their circulation through this country and the world such that their very presence indicate the breadth of the impact of any market orignially directed at the labor of African Americans.

The amount minted might be, instead of reflecting an interest bearing debt on 40 acres and a mule, representative of some fraction of todays economy as expressed in proportion to that of the slave economy in its day. For practical reasons, it is not likely to be a 1:1 ratio. But if the slave economy was estimated to be 1/3 of that time, it might be reasonable to mint 1/3 of all dollar coins as the “slave dollar”.

There are other practical considerations, such as the success of the coin itself, but I have little doubt that it would circulate widely among African Americans. There are currently many popular theories of ‘recycling black dollars’.

The presence of these coins in the national circulation would show, over time, how pervasive the effects of money generated by the slave economy would be. One of the great excuses often given in resistance to reparation and apology is that no one living was directly responsible or directly victimized. But a coin minted and circulated specifically as the currency of apology ultimately reaches everyone, just as the money generated specifically by the institution of slavery.

Symbolic justice alone is not enough, but it's still worth doing. Happy Juneteenth.

Drinking game

As part of ongoing drinking game coverage here at Miniver Cheevy, I have a new offering from Stephen Colbert, via Monkeyboy's Linkblog.

We played a drinking game called Lincoln-Douglas. Great game. What you do is, you act out the Lincoln-Douglas debate and any time one of the guys mentions the Dred Scott decision you have to chug a beer. Well, technically 3/5 of a beer.

It's from a college commencement address, and worth checking out if you enjoy Mr Colbert. ”The best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. “

Which reminds me to plug co-conspirator Jon Stewart's commencement address, which I blogged a while back. There's actually more than a bit of good advice in that one.

Ad

Microsoft's choices in advertising are notoriously hapless, but this is a little masterpiece.

Via Monkeyboy's linkblog.

Is this torture?

I don't think that this is quite a story about torture. But it's definitely a story of the US being in the evil business. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings outlines a story about five ethnic Uigurs swept up as suspected “terrorists” immediately after 9/11 and held at Guantanamo.

We keep innocent men in prison for over four years. They have children they've never seen; their family thinks they are dead; they have no idea when or if they'll be allowed to leave. We keep them locked up for over a year after they have been found innocent. Right before their case is to be heard on appeal, we ship them off to Albania, of all places, which then decides to expel them. Did we somehow fail to ask the Albanians whether they would actually allow the Uighurs to stay in Albania?

For a while there, it looked like they were going to get shipped off to China—where they would likely get killed by the Chinese government for being ethnic separatists. But the Albanians finally decided that they didn't have the heart to do that.

Protest song

In honour of net neutrality, I offer the cute little song “God Save the Internet.”

I am guessing that some of my readers will want to click on it if I mention that the lead vocals are by the magnificent Jill Sobule.

Remember, the House just opposed net neutrality, so it's headed to the Sentate. Call your senators.

Spiderman

Alter S. Reiss makes some observations about Spiderman's rogues gallery.

... just about everyone who had any sort of contact with Peter Parker turns out to be a villain of some sort — his friends, his classmates, his co-workers, his friends' families, his coworkers families, and, perhaps most memorably, his pants.

It's worth noting that Spiderman didn't face merely one pair of evil pants. The first set of evil spandex that Spiderman battled later produced a ... child of some sort, I think? It was called Carnage, if I recall correctly, and Spiderman has been forced to team up with the first evil pants, against the second, even more evil pants.

Hard as it might be to imagine, the legion of evil outerwear are not necessarily Spiderman's least comprehensible foes. In addition to the special effects guy mentioned earlier, there's the Vulture, whose power, as best as I can recall, is that he's pretty tough for an old guy, John Jameson, who is (and I'm pretty sure I couldn't make this up) an astronaut werewolf, The Walrus, who has the proportional agility of a Walrus (and who is good at crossword puzzles), and, of course, the various Goblins.

The Goblins are people in sort of “evil Santa's elves” costumes, who ride around on sort of floating skateboards, and who throw bombs at people. You might think that this isn't a job position that people would be anxious to fill ....

He goes on to talk about Batman, if you can take it.