What are games about?

I don't have answers, but I like the questions these games ask.

• Brenda Brathwaite's Train
• John Tynes' Power Kill
• FPS Mod on XKCD (as always, hover your cursor over the image to get the ALT text)
• Jason Rohrer's Passage
• Ken Levine on BioShock

Bradley Manning

President Obama says he accepts the Pentagon's assurances that Bradley Manning's treatment in custody is right and appropriate:

No it isn't. Manning, who has yet to stand trial, has been locked up in a cruel insanity machine. He has been accused of helping leak documents that compromised not the security of our people but the dignity of our leaders.

I'll say it again: I was ready for Obama to disappoint me. I was not ready for him to horrify me.

In reference to this clip of Senator Paul complaining about his toilet.

Men's reproductive rights

Preface: This post was an attempt to lay out my thinking about a difficult topic. I don’t think it works well. I leave it up for posterity, and need to revisit it properly.

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This morning I got into a Twitter discussion with feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte about her recent article mocking Men’s Rights Activists, and came smack up against the limits of what can be discussed in 140 character snippets, so this very long post is an attempt to outline my thinking on a touchy subject.

There was a lot to like about her article. I agree wholeheartedly that the way to address most MRAs’ concerns is more feminism. And MRAs are eminently mockable misogynists. But I confessed to her that I was disappointed that she didn't grapple with some of the more meaningful and tricky questions that MRAs raise, offering feminist alternatives to their horrific solutions.

The key example in my mind is that MRAs commonly propose that fathers be given strong legal rights to control a partner’s decision to have an abortion. “She shouldn’t be able to abort my baby without my consent,” and “I should be able to make her abort a fetus if I don't want that baby.”

This invasion of women making decisions about their own bodies is of a piece with countless patriarchal invasions of womens’ autonomy; it casts women as empty vessels for the exercise of men's wills. I take it as beyond debate that women’s right to control their own bodies and destinies requires that women have total autonomous discretion over abortion. A woman must not be compelled to take an unwanted pregnancy to term. A woman must not be compelled to have an abortion. That MRAs reach for these solutions reflects their misogynist contempt for women.

But I submit that MRAs are not speaking only from a desire to control women; they also have a motivating concern that I think deserves a thoughtful response. Thanks to women’s access to abortion, men have categorically less control over their reproductive parenting destiny and responsibility than women do. [Change added after the original post.]

Now it’s important to note that access to abortion isn’t all it should be. It’s a serious problem, and for the record, I’m someone who has contributed money to NARAL and Planned Parenthood, and I mailed my first coathanger to a politician during the Reagan administration. I understand that women's control over their reproductive destiny is really only true of some women. But let’s talk about those cases, which are reasonably common.

If Alice and Bob are unmarried lovers and Alice gets pregnant, she now can make a decision. If Alice does not want a child, she can abort the pregnancy without consulting Bob, however ardently he may want a child to care for. On the other hand, if she decides to bring the pregnancy to term, he is legally responsible for eighteen years of financial support, however unwilling he may be. This requirement is very strong, as demonstrated by extraordinary legal cases like a woman who fished the condom out of the wastebasket to impregnate herself.

Recall also that men have fewer birth control options than women do. There’s condoms, sterilization, and abstinence. The first has a host of disadvantages; for the purposes of this discussion, most important among them their imperfect reliability. The second is permanent, and young men often have difficulty getting access to it even if they choose it. And I’ll have a word about the last, beyond its obvious disadvantage, in a bit.

I have found that few women have given any real thought to the fact that men can be subject to a decision with such big consequences completely outside their control. But I assure you that most men have given this a great deal of thought. That feminists — who have a central preöccupation with reproductive rights — should ignore it is puzzling. I believe that having MRAs and creepy Cathy Young be the only folks who prepared to address this nudges otherwise reasonable men toward sympathy with MRAs and antipathy toward feminism; I really wish we had a feminist take that wasn't just dismissive.

MRAs’ answer to addressing this imbalance — giving men control over the abortion decision — is unacceptable. But I submit that it is not the only possible response. I imagine a reform something like this:

• A pregnant woman has an absolute right to have an abortion or not. No one else may affect this decision.
• If a married woman gets pregnant, her husband is responsible for the support of the child if she brings it to term. That’s part of the package when you get married.
• If an unmarried man gets a woman pregnant, he has a short span of time — say, 48 hours — after he learns of the pregnancy in which to decide if he’s going to take responsibility for the child if she brings the pregnancy to term. If he decides he won’t, he can never make a claim of any parental rights afterward. If he decides he will, he cannot change his mind afterward either. If he doesn't make an explicit decision, it defaults to him having taken responsibility. [Bold text added after original post; see Update 3 below.]
• If an unmarried woman does not inform her partner that she has gotten pregnant, he is presumptively not financially responsible for a resulting child until she informs him. If he is informed about the pregnancy after it’s too late for abortion to be a meaningful option — including years after a child’s birth — he has the same choice about whether to accept the package of parental responsibilities and rights, with a longer window of time in which to make the decision.

I’m not necessarily attached to this particular solution, but it’s the best that I can come up with, and has a number of virtues that I do consider important. It’s not equal — given the material realities, it cannot be — but it’s more fairly unequal. It protects women’s right to control their bodies. It ensures that neither men nor women are compelled to childrearing responsibility they didn’t choose. The short decision-making window for men ensures that a woman in this situation makes a decision about what to do that's meaningfully informed. I think any serious response to this question needs to address those virtues, or justify why they’re not important.

There are several responses to this kind of proposal that I find particularly galling when they come from feminists:

He should have thought of that before he had sex; he has to take responsibility for a possible baby if he engages in sex

The penny drops about abstinence. That argument isn’t funny when antis say that to argue that women shouldn't be allowed to have abortions. I don’t see why it should be kosher when it's applied to men; in fact I think this drifts into sexist rhetorical territory that assumes that sex is something men take from women.

You're arguing for men having more ways to walk away from supporting their children

Point taken; we have a lot of men doing that without strong enough enforcement to stop it. I agree that we need to do a categorically better job there. My proposal presumes and supports that, and I think it might help make the case that men walking out on their children are breaking a commitment they made explicitly.

This argument also implies that a pregnant woman’s fetus is a “child,” and it should be obvious why that is a bad idea.

Patriarchy visits injustice against women, not men, so who cares?

Patriarchy certainly visits much more injustice against women. But I submit that this is an injustice against men. I don’t believe that the reality of male privilege means that anything unjust we do against men is therefore OK.

Maybe this is unfair, but men are going to have to wait in line; there are bigger injustices to correct first

Feminists are familiar with this argument. “Your issues will have to wait until we’ve corrected the greater injustices of racism first.” Or the class system. Or homophobia. Or whatever. It’s nonsense; we should be addressing all injustices; indeed, fighting any injustice helps address other injustices, rather than hurts.

Ms Marcotte, I hope you’re reading this, because I love a lot of your work. And I hope you have a serious response; if my thinking is screwy, here, I’d like to have it laid out for me.

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Update

Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has a long post largely concerned with this question and our dialogue a about it on Twitter. (I am @miniver, she is @AmandaMarcotte.) Unhappily, I believe that she has significantly misrepresented my comments in both places.

I'll try to resist the temptation to respond point-by-point to what she says there. I think I actually predicted much of it in my original post above, and responded briefly to some key points. But the centerpiece of her argument is a clarifying description of the legal argument for abortion rights, which she says is grounded in women’s bodily autonomy.

Reproductive rights are derived from the right to bodily autonomy. Becoming pregnant or impregnating another person is a big deal, so your right to exercise bodily autonomy over these aspects of your body is a fundamental right.
....
Abortion rights are about the right to terminate a pregnancy, not to say no to parenthood.
....
If abortion rights were actually about getting a “window” to say no to parenthood, then women who give birth without knowing they were pregnant would be offered this option, but they’re not.

Legally, abortion rights may not be “about” getting to say no to parenthood, but I think it’s very clear that the urgent importance of abortion rights is about this very question.

A woman risking her life with a coathanger in 1955 (or 2005) isn’t doing so to protect some abstract concept of her bodily autonomy. She’s likely doing it out of an awareness that if she births a child she will not be able to care for it properly, and she takes that responsibility seriously enough that she’ll risk her life rather than take on a responsibility she cannot meet. As an aside, I have long found it profoundly offensive that so many anti-choicers frame this as “selfishess” when it is exactly the opposite.

My fundamental argument is that, given our level of medical technology, we should think of “reproductive rights” not simply as the right to control over your reproductive organs, but the right to control over your reproductive destiny. This is not some fanciful new idea I’ve invented to rationalize what I want; it's as old as Margaret Sanger.

But there is a fundamental limitation in the control over their reproductive destiny that men have, because women’s bodies are so much more profoundly involved in the process of reproduction that their right to bodily autonomy trumps any right men might claim. I don’t know how I could have been more clear that I take that with the gravest seriousness.

Marcotte’s post counters the claim by some unnamed MRAs to a right to “paper abortion,” allowing them to shirk responsibility for born children at will. She lays out the objections to this quite well, and I agree with her that this straw argument that I didn't make is awful. That’s why my proposal tries to tread carefully, and creates a very tight limitation on how and when men may declaim responsibility for their offspring. It’s an attempt to balance situation which is inherently imbalanced by the mechanics of reproduction. Maybe my proposal is still a lousy idea. But it isn’t the lousy idea she attributes to me.

One last thing: Marcotte refers to me as

a guy claiming to be sympathetic to feminism freaking out because men don’t have “reproductive rights”

I'm not freaking out. I’m raising the point. As she says, there are a lot of other things more urgent. But it's nonetheless a real issue, and I confess that I am frustrated that it's so difficult to get to the point where we’re actually talking about it.

And I confess that this “claiming” business gets right up my nose. I invite readers skeptical that I'm not at least sympathetic to feminism to check out the contents of the feminism label on this blog [since consolidated under kulturkamph] (which applies to more stuff than my blog is configured to show you at that link; disappointingly, my attempt at a definition of feminism doesn't make the cut) and the tweet I addressed to Ms Marcotte about Victoria Woodhull just yesterday.

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Update 2

The Twitter conversation between Marcotte and me remains lively, and at the time I write this it has evolved to a point that better addresses my proposal here ... including some interesting criticisms of the legal implications of what I've said. When time permits, I’ll find a way to transcribe the tweetstream into a relatively readable form here, and comment more thoughtfully than the Twitter medium permits.

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Update 3

I just added a snippet of text clarifying that a father who refuses responsibility for his offspring must do so when he learns of the pregnancy, rather than after the child is born. Evidently some MRAs advocate something like the latter meaning, calling that a “paper abortion,” an idea so stupid and mortifying that it simply hadn't occurred to me as a possible reading of what I'd described. It certainly explains why Marcotte seemed so intent on a seemingly willful misunderstanding of what I’d suggested.

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Update 4

Discussion here and elsewhere has made it clear to me that my original proposal was embarassingly irresponsible in failing to talk explicitly about how we should provide for children's needs. Taken in itself, giving unwilling fathers the legal power to evade responsibility for the costs of childrearing harms children. That’s an unacceptable bottom line.

But if we accept that the state has a compelling interest in ensuring that children’s needs are supported—and I believe that it does—then we should ask not only whether compelling unwilling fathers to provide that support is better than leaving those children unsupported; we should ask whether unwilling fathers are the best solution altogether. And framed that way, I find it impossible to claim that it is. Depending on unwilling fathers is, in fact, a sloppy and ineffective solution for ensuring children's welfare. Setting aside the questions of enforcement and father’s willingness, imagining that all unwilling fathers nonetheless provide what support they can, the vagaries of fathers’ fortunes will too often leave children wanting.

I was wrong to ignore the problem of children's material needs in my proposal, but to say “let fathers take care of it” and leave it at that is dismissive of the same fundamental problem. We need a better solution that provides for all children, and it's hard for me to imagine such a solution which doesn’t involve a categorically greater level of government investment than we have now. That is a necessary precondition for the kind of policy I proposed above.

Supporting reproductive freedom for men isn’t the most important reason to make a government commitment to ensuring that children's needs are provided for, but it is a nice side benefit.

Budget

TomDispatch offers an expansive accounting of the military budget that tallies it at $1.2 Trillion/year. I'm not sure if I buy those figures, as I've not looked at them closely yet, but I'm posting the link here so I don't lose it.

Coördinate systems

Cartesian bears can be found in temperate climates closer to the equator, where longitude lines can be treated as approximately parallel. Further north, as this approximation begins to introduce significant errors, polar bears have the significant advantage of using much simpler trigonometric terms.

The speech it's not too late for Obama to make

Good evening to the American people, the people of Egypt, and the people of the world.

Hosni Mubarak's government in Egypt has long been a valued ally of the United States. On the world stage, a nation must often respect and work with governments one does not always agree with. That is not just a callous pragmatism. It reflects a humble awareness that it is right and necessary for a people to chart their own course, without undue interference from their neighbors. And in the spirit of that respect, I have hesitated to speak against the Egyptian government.

But that was a grave mistake, and I will correct that mistake now. Because more important than loyalty to governments who have been our allies is loyalty to the principle of democracy which is the bedrock of our nation. And so I cannot ignore the dedication, the commitment, and most of all the courage which the Egyptian people have shown in demanding a government which truly represents them.

It was this commitment to the principle of democracy that led the American people to support the invasion of Iraq. We believed that we might liberate that country from a brutal despot, and birth a democracy. But it is not so simple, as we have seen vividly demonstrated the years since that invasion. Though I remain hopeful that the Iraqi people will build a vibrant, democratic nation, their future remains compromised by the scars of war. The United States remains committed by both our will and our duty to help bring Iraq to the future it deserves, but America should not try again to grant democracy to a people at the point of an American sword.

It is far better for a people to claim democracy for themselves than to try to build it in the wake of another nation's intervention. We should know that, having created our own nation in rebellion against the greatest colonial power of its time.

Better for a people to claim democracy for themselves, and best for them to do so without raising a gun at all. There are those who will say that to stand up against an oppressor without shedding their blood is too idealistic. Despots' grip on power is too great, they say. Only military force can break their grip.

But we have seen it happen in Eastern Europe in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Empire. We have seen it when India stood up for independence. And we have seen the power of nonviolence right here in these United States in our own Civil Rights Movement.

The United States simply cannot stand behind a tyrant who refuses when his nation's people call for him to step down. Nor can we oppose a nonviolent democratic movement like that we have seen in Egypt. To do so would be to break our covenant with the Founders of our own nation.

So tonight I say to the people of Egypt: the people of the United States stand with you. Tonight I say to Hosni Mubarak, who can hold no legitimacy with the free people of the world, the government of the United States is no longer your ally.

I say to the people of the world: the United States stands with every nonviolent movement for democracy in the world, today and tomorrow, wherever it may arise.

I say to the world's tyrants: the United States may meet with you in diplomacy and trade, but we will never stand with you against your people. Where democratic movements arise, we will remember what America stands for.

I urge the American people to join me in praying for an Egypt liberated without bloodshed. I urge the Egyptian people to accept an offered American hand of friendship. And I urge the people of the world who yearn for democracy to stand up with the courage of your Egyptian brothers and sisters.

Thank you, and good night.

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Update: What the President actually said later that day.

Via Ben Jervey at Good magazine.

Protest

Cairo yesterday:

Washington DC 1967:

True Hollywood story

I stumbled across an old interview with Gary Wolf, the author of the original novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? My favourite little bit.

I can say that Bugs has a tough agent. He and Mickey had to appear on screen for the exact same amount of time, they had to be in every scene together, and they had to have exactly the same number of words of dialog.

Why am I not surprised?

Bertie Wooster, Batman

Alfred Pennyworth has so much in common with Jeeves.

“Enough talk about that, Jeeves. I think I’ve made it quite clear that the cape represents my bat-wings, for I am a child of the night, and so forth.”

“Could not some other form of abstraction suffice, sir?”

“Well, without the wings, I’m hardly a bat, am I? I’m sort of a black badger.”

“I understand badgers can be quite nasty in a pinch.”

“Yes, but it’s not like a great roaring badger came smashing through my window at Brinkley, is it? It was a bat. That’s an omen, Jeeves. Can’t mess about with omens, that’s bad luck.”

PasswordCard

Via @acrylicist, I learn about PasswordCard, a cunning little web utility that helps with the problem of remembering lots of strong unique passwords. Frustratingly, I find it almost useful. But I have some ideas for how to make it so that it would be a great solution for me, and I think a lot of other people.

PasswordCard generates a unique batch of random alphanumeric characters for you, arranged in a grid:

The idea is that you keep your PasswordCard with you, and then any time you need a password you use this proceedure, described on the PasswordCard website:

• Pick a direction. You don't have to go from left to right to read your passwords, you can go from right to left, up or down, or even diagonally. It's probably a good idea to pick one direction though, even if you use your PasswordCard for multiple passwords.
• Pick a password length. Eight is pretty secure and usually acceptable. Again, it's a good idea to pick one length.
• Pick a colour and a symbol for each password. You can use one password for all your sites, but that still wouldn't be very safe. It's a good idea to at least have different passwords for very important sites, such as Internet banking sites.

So if you use 8-character passwords and read to right-to-left, and you remember that your Facebook password is “green diamond”, then you know that your Facebook password is r8tzkE5H.

It's a very clever idea, but I have a problem with it. You need to remember the color and symbol for each password you have. If you're like me, you have a lot of passwords; I would not feel confident that I will remember the mnemonic for every password I create.

But with a slight change to the design of the card, that's easy to fix:

With the grid organized this way, you can have the name of the thing for which you need a password act as the mnemonic that tells you where on the card to start. So let's say you do the first letter of the name of the site from the top list of columns, and the second letter of the name of the site from the side list of rows; that makes your Facebook password jdFQqeea. This makes your passwords a bit more exposed if someone gets hold of your card, since the key mnemonic isn't in your brain, but you could be clever about where you start: instead of the first and second letters of the site name, you could use the third and fourth ... and shift over by two from there ... and so forth.

For folks who still want to use the card the old way, I've left the colored rows.

The weird extra set of characters at the bottom of both formats of card is a seed number which will produce the PasswordCard again at the website. That way, if you write down just that seed number somewhere secure, if you lose your PasswordCard you can reproduce it exactly. But it would be nice if you could use any arbitrary key you want, that you already have memorized, and then have the option to leave that off of the card.

Slices of film

The New York Times Magazine offers us a beautiful piece: Fourteen Actors Acting: A Video Gallery of Screen Types, a series of little vignettes. They offer about the minimum of what you need to qualify as “cinema:” each features a single actor shot in black-and-white in a single take that lasts about a minute, with a simple music score. Each repeats a cinematic trope you'll undoubtedly recognize.

I have a soft spot for this sort of thing in part because it provokes a confrontation with the nature of the medium. How little can a scene contain and still tell us something? What comes from story, and what from pure action? Why do we love these iconic scenes so much that we create them again and again in films? What makes them work? And what makes them work again and again, in countless movies, without becoming stale?

And, apropos of the collection's title: What do actors do, really? I started asking that after I read Stephanie Zacharek's review of Monster, which she opens with that haunting question. All of the performances in these micro-cinematic efforts impressed me with the magic of acting, and they act as meditations on what makes film actors interesting. Robert Duvall's clip gave me a chuckle because he reminded me of showrunner Ron Moore talking about how Edward James Olmos shaving constituted one of the major themes of Battlestar Galactica. Vincent Cassel reminded me of my theory that God gave us movies so we could watch people dancing beautifully, which explains why we make so many action movies these days — they provide a substitute for the musicals which have gone out of style. James Franco manages to make a two-character scene work through the use of a mirror. Matt Damon revealed a series of thoughts and emotions without benefit of either his voice or much time on screen. (I've sung the praises of Damon's gifts as a physical actor since I saw the scene in The Bourne Identity in which, early in the film, his amnesiac character gets awakened on a park bench by a cop's nightstick, and Damon communicates with a little shrug hey, I just realized that I know how to take this cop's nightstick away from him and beat him up with it, which I find both astonishing and disturbing. How did he do that?)

And Michael Douglass provides an utterly compelling performance by pretty much just sitting there.

Which brings me to If We Don't, Remember Me. When I started writing this post, I had meant to call it a different take on the same project, but I realize that in truth it has a profoundly different project.

Remember offers a series of animated GIFs made from great movies. I ordinarily think of animated GIFs — a technology for showing brief looping animations — as the scourge of the web, but Remember does something marvelous with them. Stills taken from movies generally seem surprisingly sterile; movement plays such an essential part in what makes well-composed film shots work that taking a single frame out, even if we choose carefully, loses much of the magic. Remember gives us not stills but what we want from stills: a single, atomic moment, including the essential movement. And by essential movement, I do mean essential: often the faceless author of Remember has included only the movement in one part of the frame, or has the image hold perfectly still for a second or two before showing something small move in a flicker, or includes just a tiny sway or flick of an actor's eyes.

The moments captured by Remember don't really show us acting at all, I think. Acting means revealing a character through action. (There it is, lurking in the word itself!) The moments of Remember don't do that, they show no progression, else they would not work as endless loops the way they do.

But they often do show a thing that film actors do — the thing that Michael Douglas did in his Fourteen Actors clip — which has only a loose connection with acting: exhibiting screen presence, that subtle and mysterious quality by which some actors can hold our attention. Some actors, indeed, have very modest acting abilities but an extraordinary screen presence: think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ruth Gordon, Keanu Reeves, or countless classic-era stars like Bogart, Hepburn, John Wayne, Rita Hayworth, Jimmy Stewart. I suspect that skilled actors can cultivate this, but some actors just have it.

How the heck does that work?

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Update: I cannot resist adding a little video essay of closeups, plus these animated movie posters.

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Update: Tech Noir is another collection of almost-stills like If We Don't, Remember Me, and Scènes Cultes de Films en GIFs Animés is similar, with little GIFs.

Airport groping

Furry Girl at Feminisnt gives us what may be the blog post of the year: My experience mocking TSA security theater at Seatac as a nearly-naked enfant terrible. Like Dancing Matt, it's delightful in part because it is at the intersection of so many things of our particular historical moment: security theatre gone haywire, sexual politics, the democratization of video, feminism, situationist social criticism ...

The TSA wanted to feel me up or see what I look like without clothes. I get it. I'm a sex worker. My main porn site gets about 3 million unique visitors a year, and clients pay ^$4 a minute to see me naked on my web cam, so the TSA's interest in me came as no surprise. Normally, I would charge for such a service, but this one was on the house. Duty, country, sacrifice, patriotism, all that.

So that link is, as the saying goes, Not Safe For Work.

(And Furry Girl, if you're reading? It breaks my heart that you feel like you can't fit into a “silly feminist framework.”)

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Update: The wittiness of her blog post is not matched by the video she took of the incident, in which her enthusiasm for stripping down for the search seems forced on her part, rather than an organic absurdist response to security theatre.

Deficit spending

Brad DeLong explains why deficit spending is a very good idea right now.

The principle to which Interfluidity refers is that when times are bad--when your present and expected future resources fall--you should cut back on your commitments. The fact is that these are bad times for private economic actors: their current incomes have fallen, and the high interest rates charged them means that their future resources are worth a lot less than they used to be when translated into claims on today.

But things are completely different for the government.

The terms on which the U.S. government today can borrow are extraordinarily, unbelievably good. The government's current resources have declined with the decline in tax revenue, but the taxes the government will receive in the future are--according to a bunch of calculations John Cochrane made when he came to Berkeley to give a seminar--worth roughly four times as much when translated into claims on goods, services, and labor today as they were worth three years ago. The resource constraints binding private economic actors have become much tighter. But the resource constraints binding the government have--because of the extraordinary falls in interest rates--become much looser. And high unemployment and slack capacity mean that the terms on which the government can get goods, services, and labor are significantly more advantageous than they were three years ago.

Every single particle of logic is crying out that now is the time for the government to pull its spending forward from the future into the present and push its taxes from the present back into the future.

The argument that “governments should be prudent in the same way as households” is not a moral argument: it is a stupid argument. It blindly closes its eyes to the reality that times feel very different for credit-worthy governments than for potentially insolvent private economic actors, and that what is prudence for the second is sheer idiocy for the first.

Tea Party

A terrific, sharp-tongued summary of the Tea Party's principles Digby:

• hatred of government
• a loathing for liberals (and other assorted unreal Americans)
• the Bible
• a cartoon constitution
• a fantasy America in which everyone agrees with them and does exactly what they want

Passion

Michael Been
1950-2010
Singer and songwriter

I just discovered that Michael Been, songwriter for The Call, died a few months back. I’m saddened, and selfishly disappointed that this means he won’t be gifting me with any more songs.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a Christian — though I’m syncreticist enough to refer to תפארת, अनाहत, Buddha Compassion, or Christ Love as occasion demands — but that surely isn’t Mr Been’s fault.

I have never heard a better love song than “I Still Believe”.

Just as Johnny Cash sang about the severe American Christ the Judge so that even if you didn’t believe in Him you could see how it felt if you did, Been sang about a universal Christ of Glory and Mystery. And like Cash, he didn't do it so it was a chore, taking your medicine — The Call was a rock ’n’ roll band, and they rocked.

I’m badly outvoted on how the cosmos works. If they’re right and I’m wrong, I expect that Been is now standing at God’s right hand now and singing His praises. And someday Peter will ask me in life, did you accept Jesus Christ into your heart? If that does happen, I think I might be able to get away with answering Peter that no, I did not … except during the time I spent listening to Micheal Been sing.

Update

A little magic in the handwriting of Been’s co-songwriter Jim Goodwin:

Prufhop

As part of my ongoing coverage of allusions to my favourite poem, I give you T. S. Elliot's Lost Hip Hop Poem:

Via @tristissima who knows from slam poetry.

Inconceivable!

I've been meaning to create a web image for this for a while. It should have a number of applications.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means:

Plus, fractal wrongness:

Huh?

Ezra Klein offers us this puzzling graph:

Digby explains:

Americans worship winners and they don't really care about unfair process. This is the nation that reveres the quote “winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.”
....
Similarly, the party in power is expected to do what's necessary to pass its agenda. If it can't, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it.
....
And there is another dimension to this which especially applies to the Obama administration. Since he ran explicitly on the promise to end the bickering, change Washington and create a post-partisan consensus, people see the failure of those things to materialize as a measure of his failure to deliver on his promise.

We can expect more Republican obstructionism to come.

Good recommendations

Well, I should think so.

Amor vincit omnia

A friend pointed me at this picture from a remarkable photo essay about the protests at the G20 summit.

It reminded me of an old favourite.

Reading on the iPad

I'm finding that the two most useful applications on my iPad are Instapaper and GoodReader.

Instapaper is a service for reading long articles published on the web. There's a little javascript link that you can bookmark in your browser that tells the Instapaper service that you want to read the article. The service then intelligently extracts the article content out from the navigation, advertisements, and other cruft, and makes that content available in a standard, readable format at InstaPaper.com and on your iPhone and iPad.

Over the past several years I've read more and more long-form stuff on the web, and it's always been a pain: often the articles are published in poorly readable formats, and more significantly if you find something you really want to read, you have to either read it right when you find it or keep track of the link to find it later. With Instapaper, I can find something interesting, hit the link to tuck it away for later, and know that I will read it eventually.

GoodReader is a PDF reader, and it has completely changed my relationship to PDFs. It used to be if there was something I wanted to read that was published as a PDF, I resented it: it meant either reading from a computer screen or printing it out and schlepping around the printout. This has deterred me from reading a lot of stuff. Now, I'm delighted when something is published as a PDF, because it means that I can get it immediately and I'll have it with me to read at my convenience.

Since I bring my iPad with me almost everywhere, with these two apps I know that even if I cannot connect to the internet, I always have a wide variety of interesting things to read: long and short, light and serious, improving and entertaining. Since I'm about to transition into a more public-transit-intensive lifestyle, this is a godsend.

Both applications include a simple foldering system for organizing your stuff, and after a little experimentation I've converged on a satisfying set of folders that I use for both:

• Art
• Big ideas
• Design
• Games
• Kulturkampf
• Occult
• Popkultur
• Public interest
• Technoscience
• Weirdness

I'm almost embarrassed by how much I enjoy looking at that list.

California election day

What, again?

Vote early. Vote often. Vote no.

Except for 15 and (though I resent having to vote on something that passed the legislature with a supermajority already) 13.

Mengele

Physicians for Human Rights has a new report:

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

They were researching ways to torture better.

How I wish I were surprised.

Tricks for Entourage on the Mac

I just learned one of these tricks from a colleague, and circulated the other two to my coworkers in return, and it occurred to me that I might have readers who might find these tricks useful as well. So if you're doing email in Entourage, read on ...

Grouping conversations

If you don’t like the way Entourage’s default “Arrange By: Conversation” sorts messages within a conversation from oldest to newest instead of newest to oldest, you can create your own custom sort.

1. From the menu: View > Arrange By > Edit Custom Arrangements... > New
2. Do the following settings:

   Custom arrangement name: Conversation (Newest to Oldest)

   Group items by: Conversation

   Sort groups by: Received | Newest on top

   Sort items within groups by: Conversation Index | Newest on top

   Default display for groups: Expanded

Instead of deleting

Since Entourage’s Trash buffer doesn’t work the right way, I simulate the correct behavior by dragging unwanted emails into a folder named ZZZ. I periodically purge ZZZ, but always leave the last few days’ worth of emails in place. I also do an actual delete of emails I’m sure about not needing again, but having some recoverability in ZZZ means that I’m much more willing to z-delete items of only transient interest.

Managing my work queue

I fell off the wagon with my personal email, but I maintain Inbox Zero with my work email. Every message I receive I file into a folder as soon as I’ve read it. If I need to keep an email “on my desk” (usually because it’s something I need to do), before I file it into its topical folder (Design, Reference, Administridia, et cetera) I click the red flag. When I want to survey what I need to do, first I purge my Inbox of anything new, then I look in my saved search for flagged items. Then when I’ve dealt with the flagged item, I click the red flag again; it disappears from my saved search, but is still retained in the topical folder.

Here’s how to create the saved search:

1. Go into the menu bar: File > New > Saved Search
2. At the top of the workspace, click on All Messages
3. Leave “Match if all criteria are met” dropdown in place
4. Click “Item contains” dropdown to switch to “To Do Flag” then switch the secondary dropdown to “Not Completed”
5. Click [Save] in the upper right of the workspace
6. Name it “Flagged”
7. (If you don’t have the favorites folder bar shown below the icon toolbar at the top) Go into the menu bar: View > Show Favorites Bar
8. (If you don’t have the folder list shown on the left) Go into the men bar: View > Show Folder List
9. In the folder list, find Mail Views at the bottom. You should see your Flagged search listed among the default views
10. Drag the Flagged search you created into the favorites folder bar below the icon toolbar, so you can find it again

Escalation

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking about Israel’s attack on the ship bringing aid to Gaza.

It’s also a little hard to write about since I don’t have anything original to say. A million people have already said it. Fanatics on both sides have been in control of the region for years — the hardline Orthodox population relentlessly gaining influence in Israel and Hamas terrorists among the Palestinians — both convinced that they can win if they can only provoke enough insane overreactions from the other side. Which they do with depressing regularity. Hamas’s rocket attacks are indefensible, the Gaza embargo in return is indefensible, the blockade runners in their turn were plainly hoping to provoke an overreaction that would force Israel’s hand, and the Israelis then went insanely beyond anyone’s expectations by landing commandos on one of the ships and killing more than a dozen people while it was still far off in international waters. And now, there are rumors that the Turkish navy might escort the next ship that tries to run the blockade.

In David Petraeus’s famous phrase, How does this end?

Not well, obviously. I despair.

Mine too

The Big Caption says:

Image from the Boston Globe's amazing collection.

A word about the Lost finale

I was reminded of Roger Ebert's review of The Village:

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.

Jimmy Kimmel's gag alternate endings were better than what we got.

Movie landscapes

Paramount Studio map of California's geographical facsimiles, fron The Motion Picture Industry as a Basis for Bond Financing, 1927

Via Warren Ellis, originally uploaded by Ambrosia Voyeur

You know, it's amazing how the English countryside looks in no way like Southern California.

—Austin Powers