The Continual Reinvention of the Wheel

I haven't really been watching TV for some time now. The few things I actually desire to watch have become quite available on a computer. But, today I was put in front of the “boob tube” because it was the only venue where I could observe my beloved St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff game, and this got me thinking. I was glad to be able to watch without having to go to a sports bar or buy the game on my satellite service and pay a veritable fortune; given the current state of my pocketbook, this just wouldn't be acceptable.

So I surrendered to the inevitable exposure to the device that for so long has given us only something to be told and see but not an ability to inquire. I watched my ball game, and - besides the loss I observed - I was glad for what I witnessed. But what kept hitting me was the continual advertisements for the release of old DVDs in new “Blue Ray” technology. What got in my head was how information - TV-wise - is being made “better” for our consumption through continuing advancements in visual technology. Now, I'm very cool with that, as long as it's on a device that lets you ask a question in response to the tripe of the light-lit screen that comes into your house every night.

I've been here for the advancement of this technology, and it is pretty awesome; but I'm thinking that it is advancing to some point that many folks might consider close to Woody Allen's Orgasmatron in his famous work Sleeper: having an advanced piece of technology - no matter how advanced - such as a high-definition television will never replace actual, physical experience of any event it may be designed to mimic, especially if there is no way to "talk back". Yet, sales must continue, money must be made.

When is it that we will come to the realization that the flat screen in front of us, and whatever color content is being played on it, will never be three-dimensional no matter what name that technology has hung on it? Maybe it's just me: I welcome the advent of technology when it enhances learning or makes learning easier, but I'm not sure I come away any different after experiencing the History Channel on a “Liquid Crystal” screen than I do after watching it on my nine-year-old RCA, cathode ray tube-powered television.

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Come on Irene

Sunday's hurricane proved to be rather uneventful around these parts. After watching news reports recommending people don't go outside, complete with reporters on location somewhere desperately experiencing sound problems while trying to prevent their loosely-fitted hats from being blown away, the power suddenly shut off all over town. We were bored, so I grabbed two of my children and decided to do the unthinkable and... go outside.

We found what could be described at its most extreme as a blustery day as featured in the classic Winnie the Pooh tale; this in contrast to what the Daily Beast proclaimed "Hurricane Fury". I headed down to the beach with my children to witness the power of nature and thereby cultivate a healthy, antitranscendentalist respect, newscasters be damned. 

Instead, we discovered a plethora of natives frolicking among medium-sized surf. Children darted in and out of rocks while dogs played fetch with the hands that feed them. Surfers graciously rode the whitecaps. After walking the beach for a while, we decided to head home. On the way, we ran into our next-door neighbors, who were coming from a "packed bar" down the street and a little tipsy. This reminded me that I could drink some wine if I wanted to, which I did. After that, I made Buffalo wings with my wife on our gas stove which we lit with a match. Then, we ate it by candlelight. The power came back on just in time to prevent our dairy products from spoiling and for me to catch the latest episode of Breaking Bad. 

A Friend Indeed

What a wonderful thing it is when you feel that things couldn’t seem worse a soul (or more) comes from out of nowhere and at the last minute and miraculously snatches you from the jaws of perceived doom.  Many will never know this salvation.  Plenty call this sensation “God”; but I’d like to focus on the flesh and give adoration to a human man and his spirit.

   

Today more than ever we are so acutely aware of all the tragedies that are enveloping the world - war, famine, poverty, personal loss - and the list is longer than I care to write about here.  We are force fed with a language of fear through the media because that’s what sells and we are always seduced by what is wrong.  But tragedy has always been with us, and it won’t be going away as long as we’re around (a human condition).  Maybe it’s me.  We see the bad in the world through the camera and computer eye, and many of us withdraw and just carry on surrendering to the "I can’t make a difference” feeling and even feeling like we might be in as bad a position as the other folks we feel bad for.

   

I’m carrying on about this because a recent interaction and external experience got me thinking about the microscopic aspects of pitching in. We are bombarded with trouble these days it seems en masse by the light-lit screens that are in our faces most of the time.  But I think the things underneath are what I would like to bring attention to and try and beat down the doom and gloom that can be so easy to fall into these days.  Our great country (and world for that matter) is in dire need of a positive jolt of who we really are.  Humans are such a wonderful creature when they care about their brothers and sisters: a truly unstoppable force of good.  But so many of us give in to the ethic of helplessness bequeathed by the all-seeing eye of modernity because that’s what comes easy.

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Cash Rules Everything Around Me

I've written before that it's very important for America to learn to count past "one, two, many".  Case in point: BP's $25,000,000 fine for DPing Alaska's North Slope back in 2006.  From the New York Times:

BP will pay $25 million in civil fines to settle charges arising from two spills from its network of pipelines in Alaska in 2006 and from a willful failure to comply with a government order to properly maintain the pipelines to prevent corrosion, federal officials announced on Tuesday.

The fine is the largest per-barrel assessment ever levied against an oil company in a spill case and represents a new blow to BP’s corporate treasury and reputation.

The aggressive approach of federal prosecutors in this case could portend huge fines and penalties from BP’s much larger spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

I will eat my own arm if $25,000,000 dollars "represents a new blow to BP's corporate treasury and reputation".  BP's 2010 revenue was $309,000,000,000.  $25,000,000 represents 1/12360 (0.008%) of BP's 2010 revenue.

To put this figure in terms the average person can understand, the median annual household income in the United States in 2010 was just under $50,000.  0.008% of $50,000 is four dollars.  BP paying a $25,000,000 fine is like you or me paying four dollars.  (For comparison purposes, a typical bounced check fee represents a six to ten times greater economic burden on the individual than a $25,000,000 fine represents for BP.)  Surely a $25,000,000 fine is not "a new blow to BPs corporate treasury"; hence, I do not have to eat my own arm.

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9-11 Nine Years Later: America Finds Itself

photo from Reuters

"It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this.  If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists.  Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel.  At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader.  Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world." - Osama bin Laden

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The Last Taboo

I've come across the topic of vulgarity vis-a-vis HBO's new fantasy series, Game of Thrones, twice now.  The first time was in a thread at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen: I compared Game of Thrones to Deadwood:

I watched Game of Thrones a bit, and I was actually surprised you didn’t mention the foul language in Deadwood for comparison purposes. Both shows try so hard to beat the viewer over the head with the fact that they are for adults for adults for adults that even a small amount of reflection fosters the realization that they are quite oviously for men between 20 and 35. As a man between 20 and 35, I’d feel uncomfortable watching either show with someone not of that demographic.

The second was from this Daily Beast article, on the plethora of dick-shots in today's Hollywood films:    

No aspect of the minotaur’s penis was left to chance in the recently released Your Highness,

The fearsome appendage, which is revealed at a key moment in April’s medieval stoner comedy, came courtesy of extensive internal debates within and outside the film’s distributor Universal Pictures. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic member? How big the balls? The penis’ startling physical dimensions, the state of its, ahem, romantic rectitude—all were subject to boardroom discussions between filmmakers, concept artists and studio executives, resulting in a breakthrough for the R-rated action farce.

“When we filmed it, the creature’s manhood is swinging back and forth between his legs,” said Your Highness director David Gordon Green. “It was actually the head of the studio who had the idea to give him a boner.

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Recognizing Convenience

Like many I’m sure, I take for granted the ease with which I walk into my corner store and get the things I need without having to bother or hassle with traveling further to a large grocery store once every three weeks or so to restock.  More likely I bitch - like many - about how high the markup is on items (under my breath) and move along. Something happened to me yesterday as I was in my corner store chatting it up with the day-guy and the night-guy came in for his appropriate shift and while doing so he patted me on the shoulder and said “What’s up Chip?” This little effort made the day a little better and, I obviously remember it.

So I’ll cut to the quick here. Our good country has forgotten just how good we are, and you’ll take notice I didn’t say great; it currently seems impossible to utter the word with any truth where the U.S. is concerned.  It's time to stop whining and take (some kind of) action. I don’t buy in to the theories that technology and progress is the reason for our collective asses not getting off the couch. There has always been some kind of technology. Blowing smoke has apparently become the status quo. I don’t like having to apologize for wanting to save the world and I live in the country that used to be number one in that department in everyone’s eyes. Unlike Gordon Gekko I don’t think greed is good, it's more like Jonestown Kool-Aid.  And our whiney little attitudes and the preservation of politicians who only protect themselves and their campaign donor’s butts just won’t cut it anymore. Through fear, intimidation and some good-old-boy appeasing we have been force-fed that bitching is just how it is and there is no reparation. Hogwash.

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Computers are Tools for Humans

Watson competes on Jeopardy.I'd like to introduce a new theme that I will explore over the coming weeks: personificationism.  This first post will relate to personificationism in discussions of artifical intelligence; future posts will discuss notions of personificationism in theology, ecology, economics, and astrobiology.  

This idea grows from the Shinto wedding I attended two weekends ago.  I divided my discussion of the wedding into three posts: the first part was a brief analysis of Shinto; the second was a description of the procedural details of the traditional wedding ceremony; and the third discussed the very different procedure of the reception.  

As a rule, I try to avoid constructing meta-narratives of my own arguments as this can only limit what I hope is a broad and personally diverse set of interpretations, but the general theme of the first part is the nature and history of the received practices that we call Shinto.  The second part follows from this by describing a ritual that readers of this magazine should find utterly foreign and inexplicable but with which Japanese are intimately familiar (increasingly less so, but, as Kevin pointed out in the comments to the part one, Shinto being the wide base of Japanese culture explains a lot of what the outside observer might find uncanny about Japan).  The third part compares this foreign and inexplicable ritual to a more familiar one.  

When read in this light, the overall effect of the series should be to make the reader deeply self-conscious of elements of his own culture that he takes as true and objective properties of the world: these "true and objective" properties may seem just as uncanny to a Japanese person as a Shinto wedding would to a Westerner.

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Book Reviews Aren't Dying; They've Just Moved Online.

<This guest post was contributed by Kitty Holman, who specializes in writing about nursing colleges.  Questions and comments can be sent to kitty dot holman20 at gmail dot com.>

In recent years, much has been said of newspapers's budget cuts and subscription troubles, but no one industry has had as much to worry about regarding the unhealthy state of print journalism today than the book publishing industry. In the past decade, we have seen a remarkable drop in our newspapers's literature coverage: the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major print venues have cut books sections. (The Wall Street Journal's recent launching of a book review section - which has been well-received - is an exception to that trend; we'll have to wait and see how well this section does in the coming years.)

Nevertheless, where newspapers's books coverage has suddenly faltered, there is a new opportunity for other forms of media to take its place, namely the quickly rising in-depth literary coverage and discussion common to online magazines.
 
John Palattella, literary editor of The Nation, disagrees.  In his essay "The Death and Life of the Book Review," Palatella explains the history of journalism and how the many forms of media and coverage have shifted over time with and against readership and audience trends.  From an economic perspective, Palatella argues against the commonly held belief that books and literary coverage in print newspapers is dying because such coverage doesn’t "turn a profit." Instead, he suggests that "cultural forces" - such as what he calls "the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers" - have harmed book coverage, while other, less intellectual sections remain despite losing money.
 
Palatella hypothesizes that the rise of the Internet and other forms of new media has greatly affected how we consume text, words, language, and other kinds of information.  He suggests that free content has made internet browsers more inclined to bounce around the web.  He also points at our reliance on search engines and hyperlinks as characteristics that hurt forms like book reviews which encourage in-depth and patient critical thinking.

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It's, Like, From the Earth, Man

"Graduation" by Peter BlinmanThere is a pervasive yet erroneous idea circulating these days that things are "good" because they are "natural".  Advertisers for foods or beauty products often engage in label-slapping to that effect; moneyed hippies and bobos buy up "natural" products like nature is going out of style; obesity and cancer are explained away as cosmic justice for our civilization of plastic's forsaking of the earth goddess.

Nowhere can this idea be heard more stupidly (or more harmlessly) than in a circle of close friends and random acquaintances passin da righteous civil disobedience on the left-hand side whilst listening to music about that with which goats love to play and/or watching marijuana-related comedy:

“Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit . . . unnatural?”

Which one might naturally (no pun intended) counter with this pithy dialogue: 

Nick: Come on, what's the big deal? It's from the earth, it's natural. Why would it be there if we weren't supposed to smoke it?

Lindsey: Dog crap is here and we don't smoke that.

The clear and obvious truth is that marijuana is harmless enough without having to appeal to its being natural.  People high on marijuana don't commit crimes.  They don't die.  They mostly just sit around watching stuff on TV and figuring out how to order pizza.

But this post is not about marijuana.  It's about "natural" not entailing "good".  After all, arsenic is natural.  The black plague is natural.  Even rape is natural.  In fact, the entirety of human society - from our legal code to our hallowed institutions of medicine - exists as a Hobbesian bulwark against the evils of the natural world.

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Welcome to Hard Times

“Every time someone puts a little capital into this Territory I’m called in by the Govenor and sent on my way. It doesn’t matter I suffer from the rheumatism, nor that I’m past the age of riding a horse’s back. If a man files a claim that yields, there’s a town. If he finds some grass, there’s a town. Does he dig a well? Another town. Does he stop somewhere to ease his bladder, there’s a town. Over this land a thousand times each year towns spring up and it appears I have to charter them all. But to what purpose? The claim pinches out, the grass dies, the well dries up, and everyone will ride off to form up again somewhere else for me to travel. Nothing fixes in this damned country, people blow around at the whiff of the wind. You can’t bring the law to a bunch of rocks, you can’t settle the coyotes, you can’t make a society out of sand. I sometimes think we’re worse than the Indians... What is the name of this place, Hard Times? You are a well-meaning man Mr. Blue, I come across your likes occasionally. I noticed Blackstone on your desk, and Chitty’s Pleadings. Well you can read the law as much as you like but it will be no weapon for the spring when the town swells with people coming to work your road. You need a peace officer but I don’t even see you wearing a gun. I look out of this window and I see cabins, loghouse, cribs, tent, shanty, but I don’t see a jail. You’d better build a jail. You’d better find a shootist and build a jail.” - Brown from E.L. Doctorow's novel, Welcome to Hard Times

Welcome to Hard Times is the first novel of writer E.L. Doctorow.  When it was published in 1960, it was heralded as a beautiful and thought-provoking blend of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the generic themes of the American Western.  The novel is an account of how the human soul reacts to tragedy.  At the beginning, a "Bad Man from Bodie" comes into the makeshift town of Hard Times situated in the bleakness of the Dakota Territory.  In a drunken yet pleasure-filled rampage, the Bad Man kills several residents of the town, including the only man who stands up to him, Fee, rapes a local prostitute, and burns what remains before riding off into the proverbial sunset.

After the Bad Man from Bodie departs, most of the remaining townspeople do as well.  Blue, the mayor, too cowardly to have stood up to the Bad Man, takes personal responsibility for rebuilding Hard Times and convinces a few others to stay, among them a ravaged barmaid, Molly, and the orphaned son of Fee.  Blue takes Molly as his common-law bride and adopts Jimmy Fee, but Molly despises him for not stopping the Bad Man, and her paranoia infects Jimmy.  The remaining townspeople succumb to rage and madness.  From the 1960 New York Times review from Wirt Williams:

Perhaps the primary theme of the novel is that evil can only be resisted psychically: when the rational controls that order man's existence slacken, destruction comes.

Indeed, the ripple effect of tragedy on the human psyche is something with which we should be more familiar.  From the events of September 11, 2001 to the recent fatal shooting of six people at a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, we as a technological civilization have reapeatedly responded to tragedy in a fashion characteristic of a different, tribal human nature, divorced from present time and circumstance: descent into direction-less madness, paranoia and finger-pointing.

David Hume once said that reason ought to be the slave of the passions.  It's okay to be angry when a tragedy happens, but we must be conscious of our anger, and we must employ it judiciously.  Any scientist or philosopher of science will tell you that anecdotal evidence should never be taken without a proverbial grain of salt.  Indeed, anecdotal evidence was the basis for phrenology and we all know where that kind of sloppy thinking eventually led: to techno music.  (Incidentally that previous contention rests on anecdotal evidence, but you see where I'm going with this.)

The interconnectedness of our media-saturated society makes us particularly prone to wild displays of misdirected anger sprung from obscure and isolated phenomena, like the shooting in Tucson.  For this reason, it is especially important in emotionally tense times like these to postpone action.  There is a reason the ancients prescribed long periods of mourning.  We must learn from the mistakes of the USAPATRIOT Act and the War in Iraq that hastily conceived legislation passed in an emotionally heightened political climate seldom achieves its stated ends without enormous repercussions.

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They Were Never Planning on Televising the Revolution

art by Jack Jerz. Click on photo for link.Fake Steve Jobs and blogosphere hater Dan Lyons speculates that the latest FCC net neutrality ruling ushers in the age of consolidation for the Internet:

No matter what you think about the new rules, however, they signal an important turning point in the development of the Internet. We are going from Phase One, where everything is free and open and untamed, into Phase Two, which is all about centralization, consolidation, control—and money.

Because don’t kid yourself. Money is driving all of this. As in: Hey, we’ve created this marvelous new platform for communicating with each other. We’ve demonstrated that very large sums of money can be generated by sending stuff over these wires. Now let’s figure out who gets what.

Tuesday’s new FCC rules grant two big concessions to carriers. First, the rules will apply to wired broadband connections, but they will pretty much leave wireless alone. Second, carriers remain free to create “fast lanes” on the Internet. They can charge Internet companies to ride on the faster pipes, and perhaps also charge consumers more money to get access to those speedy services.

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Introducing the Green Tea Party

One tea to rule them allA reader mentions that media coverage of the Food Safety and Modernization Act has been conflicting.  On the one hand, it seems like the uneducated hicks of the Tea Party are behind the opposition, but on the other hand, the loudest denouncers of the bill seem to be dirty hippies.  Perplexing indeed.  

I imagine the Tea Party would be against the food bill because it increases central government control over food production, which - let's face it - is about as Soviet as you can get. We might as well rename Nebraska "Украина", set quotas, and send Grandma to the Gulag for violating provision 6655321 with her latest batch of steak-fried steak.

Hippies and their black sheep cousins, Whole Foods shoppers, would be against the food bill because it requires "safety standards" which would probably just entrench corporate food by making it prohibitively expensive to produce locally and organically and perhaps jeopardize hippie access to the crunchier and more bizarre varieties of honey, cheese, hummus, and dried fruit. (America has already suffered so much for so many years without unpasteurized cheese. If only we could be more like France.)

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The Grass Is Always Greener

I've written in defense of Facebook before, and Alexis Madrigal does it better than me:

...The real struggle is with ourselves to use Facebook well … You get to determine your level of investment in the digital world around you. You get to choose the people you listen and talk to. You have control over your data. You get to define who you are, no matter what your Facebook profile says. All that is not lost unless we choose to lose it.

I think this is obvious, and if you don't get it, may nature select against your genes.  The one concern I do have with Facebook is that it is so much better than anything else at allowing users to use their own local knowledge to coordinate and manage information that it will soon come to monopolize much of the activity on the Internet (just like Microsoft with the operating system market in the 1990s) - future blogging will be solely on Facebook, email will be taken over by Facebook (perhaps as soon as tomorrow), games developed will be all for Facebook platforms a la Farmville; essentially, we could be seeing the genesis of something far more of a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word than Microsoft ever was

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On Valiantly Rejecting Monocausal Explanations for a Bad Economy

CNBC's John Carney suggests Timothy Geithner will be fired soon because "the economy is bad":

We're starting a Tim Geithner death watch.

That sounds a bit morbid. So let's be clear. We do not think President Barack Obama will murder Tim Geithner following the devastation of his party in the midterm elections. He'll just toss the guy out of the Treasury Department

There will be heavy pressure from within the Democratic party for the Obama administration to make changes that will both publicly mark a change of direction for the administration and privately send a message to party insiders that the White House is accepting its share of the blame for the loss of the House of Representatives. 

Geithner is a clear candidate to play the fall-guy. In exit polls, six in 10 voters said the economy is the nation's No.1 problem. Around four in 10 believe their family's financial condition got worse since Obama took office. Geithner is the nation's chief economic official. A large share of the blame for last night's results will likely fall on him.

Frankly, these kind of stories make me wish the MSM would be blamed for something and collectively murdered.

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