Selling Livable Streets to Conservatives

Streetsblog links to an essay on why social conservatives should support public transportation and walkable communities. It's a good thought, though I personally tend to be fairly skeptical of the notion that the vast majority of conservatives are truly interested in things like "family values" or "free markets" beyond their rhetorical utility.

And even if you give them the benefit of the doubt on that score, they still have to weigh those benefits against the "piss off a hippie" potential of continuing to support car culture.

Honestly, a better tack might be to play up the value of walkable communities when Obama establishes the New World Order, Jesus returns, global race war erupts, and you're forced to use your arsenal of stockpiled firearms to defend your family from roving satanist cannibals. Under such conditions, riding a recumbent or hopping on the bus will be much easier than scavenging for gas.

We Like This Crime Rate Just Fine

MY previews a book that makes the claim "that if we use smarter law enforcement, and hand out smarter punishments, we can decrease the crime rate while also becoming considerably less brutal and punitive in how we treat offenders."

The obvious rejoinder: who says "we" want to decrease the crime rate (let alone become less brutal or punitive)? This is not new territory, and the ability to reform the criminal justice system has existed for long enough that at this point the assumption that there is a general good-faith desire for reform can only be considered naïve.

Biden His Time

Hey guys, what ever happened to Vice President Joe Biden? What's he up to?

Professor Emeritus Griff

Whoa, I had no idea Professor Griff still performed with Public Enemy. I think Bol is onto something in the sense that after letting Flav use PE shows to promote his reality TV career, Chuck D doesn't really have any grounds for denying Griff a platform.

And all that said, at least considering, or not dismissing out of hand, some of the left-field theories about Obama or 9/11 and so forth, if only for the sake of argument or as a jumping-off point for serious discussion, would have at one point been well within the Public Enemy mode.

Burn Hollywood Burn and One Million Bottle Bags, for example, both come to mind as songs that posit what most people would consider some fairly incredible wide-ranging conspiracies aimed at repressing African-Americans, and then develop themes around how the machinery of capitalism makes actual deliberate conspiracy redundant. Not to say those are the best examples, just that they immediately occurred to me as demonstrating Chuck D's approach to cultural analysis.

And also it is nice to see that sort of mentality now once again becoming part of PE's approach after (again, agreeing with Bol) Chuck's understandable but disappointing Obama cheerleading during the election.

Representation and Accountability

Matt E. Glesias bases his case for direct mayoral control of NYC schools on the argument that a larger number of democratically elected offices, most of them representing very small local regions, leads to less accountability, because the average voter doesn't have the time or means to stay up to date on the actions of all of their elected representatives.

This seems obviously mistaken to me. Having fewer races on the ballot doesn't magically make voters more informed on the issues, and it reduces the ability of those who are informed to, say, endorse current zoning policy while voting to change course on the city's approach to reducing street crime.

It's nothing more than the fetishization of turnout, and it's undemocratic.

More Opera Nonsense

Ezra Klein links to a Freakonomics blog post that links to Terry Teachout's Wall Street Journal piece wondering why more musical performances aren't booed.

The occasion prompting the article was the Met's premiere of La Sonnambula, which was booed, and though Teachout actually writes that the Met is one of the few places where booing is not unheard of and contrasts it with Broadway shows that always get standing ovations regardless of the quality of the performance, the comment thread in Klein's post somehow twists it all into a case of Met audiences standingly ovating everything.

And wouldn't you know it, the consensus seems to be that opera goers are a bunch of phonies who don't know the first thing about good music and sneakily cover it up by acting as though all opera performances are amazing even when they aren't. (Everyone knows that the best way to conceal one's insecurity and lack of discernment is via indiscriminate enthusiasm rather than with, say, baseless reflexive skepticism.)

Anyway, not much to add really. People are silly, and not least silly among them the Met audience who booed the La Sonnambula production, which could barely be called experimental by any standard rooted in the last half century, let alone "avant-garde"; I'm really reminded of the jerky guy in Farewell My Concubine who was outraged that one of the protagonists took the wrong number of steps between one specific set of lines or something.

Putting the "Erm..." in Sabermetrics

Particularly absurd post on Mets Geek charting each team's bullpen's average fastball speed against strikeouts. Don't even try to wrap your mind around what it might even mean to average the pitch speeds of an entire bullpen together, the results are random noise, not "a slight trend."

At Least He Has a Kickstand

Accident waiting to happen. Come on, put the grill on the ground before you light it. Jeez.

Interesting Church

I've walked by one of these little storefront churches that are so plentiful in my neighborhood that intrigued me with the slogan on their sign: "Where People are Equipped for Management and Productivity."

Today I looked up their website, where you can tithe online, email them a prayer request, or buy instructional CD's on topics such as Laziness and (on sale) My Lover Is My Friend ("Re-learn the magic of touching...Is there anything too hard for God?"¹).

Anyway, sort of crazy. It reminds me of those "prosperity" oriented megachurches, but even Amwayer.

¹ That's what He said.

Two-Way Bike Lane on Prospect Park West

A road diet and bike lane there is a great idea. CB6 knows what's up.

Aaaaand we're done here

Aforementioned C4SS blogger Thomas Knapp's credulity towards the "Tea Party movement" is the final straw.

"Little indication" it was an astroturf job? That's the whole point of the astroturfery, no? That it looks like the roots of real grass? Fortunately we don't have to rely on "indications," as the involvement of right-wing and business interests has been well documented.

Not likely to take on an "explicitly anarchist ideology"? I think you might be on to something there...the transformation of authoritarian right-wing populism into anarchism would be odd indeed.

So I'm done with them. It really gets me, as carrying water for proto-fascists who don't want to pay for public schools is exactly the kind of short-sighted tactical blunder for which Kevin Carson has so frequently excoriated libertarians. I had high hopes for C4SS but at this point they might as well be Reason.

FeedBurner Considered Dangerous

Robert's RFC for short URL auto-discovery reminded me the other day that FeedBurner could be responsible for the same potential mass link-rot problems as URL shorteners, depending on how aggregators interpret their feeds.

It doesn't seem like RSS has a concept of how to present an item's "real" (I guess canonical) URL, versus the URL of the item within the feed itself. Or if it does then FeedBurner doesn't use it.

For example, the link element in an item from Eschaton's feed contains "http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/WwfzaA_LDo8/thursday-is-new-jobless-day_16.html" rather than "http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009/04/thursday-is-new-jobless-day_16.html", and (at least in Bloglines and Google Reader, the two aggregators I've used) that first one is the URL that you get when you try to copy the item's address to link to it in a post of your own.

The real URL is there, but it's in the origLink element in the FeedBurner namespace, which apparently not even Google Reader knows to look at. If you're not anal retentive enough to actually follow the proxy URL and resolve the redirect then you'll most likely end up linking to the FeedBurner link that's subject to all the same risks as a shortened URL. FeedBurner, being owned by Google, admittedly looks like a pretty reliable bet at this point, but who knows what the future holds.

The Cats Know What's Up

There's a vacant apartment upstairs, and every time the landlords come in the building to show it Lucy starts growling and both cats scurry away to hide in the bedroom. I am chalking it up to class consciousness.

Citizen Kane 3D

Awesome. Not sure if he used successive frames from a dolly shot or cut out different elements and did it "by hand," but the results look really good.

Clowning the Discourse

Myglesias takes issue with Brendan Nyhan's approving link to Bob Somerby's criticism of Rachel Maddow. He has some worthwhile points, but there's a fundamental disconnect at play here in how these different media critics are coming at the show.

I think Nyhan is somewhat of an idealist who believes in and tries to work towards a more elevated public political discourse. Spinsanity really used to drive me nuts (during the 2004 election cycle, I guess it would have been) with how painfully even-handed it could be in the face of all sorts of right-wing vileness. Matt Yglesias is basically himself a pundit, and of course he's going to be pretty cynical about the political media; from that perspective, the existence of Democratic talking points on cable news beats is preferable to its non-existence, end of story.

Somerby is sort of a hybrid, eminently jaded about the state of the discourse, but committed to improving it because he's a true believer who is certain that liberalism will carry the day if things are hashed out in good faith on an even playing field.

Personally, I enjoy Somerby's vitriol but am probably closer to Yglesias on the cynicism scale. Not that the triumph of either of their brands of moderate liberalism is worth propagandizing or discoursing for in the first place.

Who Is This Fellow?

I subscribed to the Center for a Stateless Society feed when they picked up Kevin Carson...I had already wished he'd post more to his personal blog, and didn't want to miss anything. But now they seem to have a new blogger, Thomas Knapp, whose ideology seems much more in line with the vulgar libertarianism Carson has dedicated so much effort railing against.

For example, take this recent litany of standard libertarian canards...Mussolini never made the trains run on time, public schools suck, USPS sucks, &c. It gets my dander up, though I'll refrain from offering a classic point-by-point rebuttal; if I wanted to spend my time rebutting libertarian cant then there are any number of intertubes I could read, but I don't so I don't.

In any case, Kevin Carson seems to be pretty consistent in linking to his C4SS posts from his personal blog, so maybe I'll just stay subscribed to that.

Ah Neat

I noticed this wall on the way to pick up pet food in Cobble Hill the other day. I had actually been wondering how long they took on it and whether it was approved by the property owner or construction crew.

Where'd I Put That Pitchfork Oil?

Digby posts, then follows up with the video, on a CNN segment that comes to the (counterintuitive!) conclusion that toiling away in poverty is actually a pretty good deal when the economy is collapsing, since your life can't possibly get much shittier than it's always been.

The Physics of Balls

I got a sort of demi-spam from some science organization who put on an event that Sarah and I attended last year. I would have ignored it, but it was Mets-related, so I clicked through to view a weird video about the physics of baseball. Science professors and professional athletes are pretty comparable in terms of awkward comedic timing.

The Cost of Efficiency

Kevin Carson has a good post at C4SS laying out how the supposed efficiencies of industrial capitalism actually end up costing consumers. It reminds me of a point Paul Roberts makes in The End of Food, where he cites a study suggesting that, even if you value your own labor at a pretty high wage rate, it's impossible to figure a cost for home canning vegetables that comes anywhere close to what you pay in a grocery store. The markup to cover packaging, advertising, distribution and all the other overhead is something like 400%.

Frustrations With Consumer Capitalism

It always annoys me when I can conceive of a product that I would gladly pay for, but I can't seem to find anyone who makes it.

For example, when my old cell phone died, I wanted to replace it with a similar "bar" (as opposed to flip) model, but with a few more up-to-date features like Bluetooth and support for mp3 ringtones (i.e., only two years out of date instead of six). But such a device did not appear to exist, at least not among the couple dozen of phone models offered by my provider.

Similarly, after I left my favorite winter hat at the opera, I embarked on a months-long, and ongoing, quest to find a replacement in a similar vein. This out-of-stock item is the closest I've found, though the one I lost was this completely non-stretchy wool felt that I really liked.

I've temporarily suspended my search for a basket and metal chainguard that will work on my blue bike.

The latest of these frustrations derives from the idea that I should get a table-top radio so I can listen to Mets games this summer. I had some idea in mind about the kind of radio I'd want, and what I read about this model sounded good at first. Some more investigation left me disappointed, though: the reception is apparently no good, the components are cheap and poorly assembled, and the advertised impressive sound quality is evidently reliant on the kinds of trickery used to make Bose products sound deceptively good.

The Tivoli Model One definitely seems like it's supposed to appeal to people who like the idea of a simple, elegant device that does a limited number of things well. But then instead of actually being such a product, it instead conveys those values through its visual aesthetic, and then relies on cognitive dissonance to convince consumers that they're satisfied with it.

Anyway, I've probably spent too much time on this topic (though not nearly as much time as I've wasted looking for felt caps on the internet), but I do think it's an interesting way that capitalism fails consumers on a pretty regular basis. The markets for many types of products are flooded with virtually indistinguishable offerings that change capriciously in response to fads and trends without ever responding to the needs and desires of sizable minorities of consumers. The result being that large numbers of people are constantly underwhelmed by many of the products in their lives for reasons that should have been easily corrected.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Heard this on the radio yesterday morning. The Takeaway's correspondent, Todd Zwillich, who reports for an organization called Capitol News Connection, is completely clueless on what card check even is...he's clearly heard the phrase "secret ballot" connected to the debate, so he tosses that out and then bullshits from there.

He seriously sounds like a student who got called on when he hadn't done the reading ("card check...it's all about who checks your card"), ending up getting the Republican and Democratic positions on the issue completely reversed. Hilarious. And nobody corrects him or explains what the debate actually is. Do they even know?

No transcript, but listen to the audio at the link and fast forward to around 7:20.

Puckish NY Times Headline Writer

Talking about Rush Limbaugh flapping over his rolls seems more like the Post's style.

Pssst

Hey guys. I have a super-secret technique that will guarantee you can pay ABSOLUTELY ZERO income taxes, whether at the federal or state level, 100% LEGALLY. There is no fraud or deception involved, all the paperwork is GUARANTEED LEGIT, and you will pay EXACTLY ZERO DOLLARS in income tax if you follow my instructions. I accept paypal, email me for details today.

Who Let the Dolls Out

I started catching my ass up on Dollhouse, because I'm a dork like that. I am not really up on the reviews, but the ones I've read have been fairly negative, non-committal at best. My impression is that reviewers were expecting a little more of a specific condemnation of the prostitution-like aspects of the Dollhouse business model. Not perceiving it, they conclude that the show condones prostitution, or exploits it for the audience's titillation.

The criticism is partially correct in that, at least so far, Dollhouse has refrained from a portrayal of the sexual exploitation of the "Actives" as uniquely immoral. Which is not to say that their situation is shown as anything other than horrific. But the horror stems from denying them their personalities and memories, with sexual exploitation being merely a facet of their dehumanization: brainwashing someone into a willing assassin is as violent an act as brainwashing her into a prostitute. Viewers and reviewers who want the sexual abuse identified as especially heinous violations are missing the point.

This is a theme that Joss had begun exploring in the final televised season of Buffy, where the expectations of the duties of the Slayer, imposed from without upon a young woman without her consent, echo the expectations society has for all women from the day they are born. Dollhouse extends the (uncontroversial) theme of women's ownership of their own bodies along the lines of feminism's broader critique of capitalism, with the idea that all humans should have a right to their own minds as well.

Flashbacks have hinted that Echo, at least, began working for Dollhouse willingly, though doubtless with the understanding that she had no other viable options given her circumstances (still unknown). The horror of her employment's reality makes clear that such a selling of one's soul is illegitimate in its essence, and does violence to the subject's humanity.

Others participating in Echo's dehumanization are tainted and dehumanized as well, as demonstrated by the head of security's obvious contempt for the Actives. Even a sympathetic character, like Echo's Watcherhandler Langton, is faced with the impossible choice of either abandoning his charge to a potentially less caring successor or staying to lend legitimacy to the enterprise. In this way capitalism sorts everyone into those who are irrelevant and those who are complicit, the only other option being (going out on a limb here in a prediction for where the narrative's headed) to bring down the system itself.

Anyway, I expect that reviewers who find themselves turned off by the value system implied by Dollhouse are picking up on two quite real themes: an absence of any specific objection to sexual prostitution in the context of more general and horrifying violence, and tension resulting from trying to square feminist-humanist values with the inhuman excesses of capitalism. A reviewer operating from a worldview in which sexual violence is uniquely vile, not because of its denial of humanity, but because of its power to sully and impart shame on its victims; and in which capitalism is a force of individual freedom rather than its enemy; is going to be understandably disconcerted by a narrative that does not share or opposes those values.

Defending the USPS

Amanda has a good post in defense of the Post Office, in response to some typically banal lukewarm libertarian cant spewed up by Myglesias. Nothing gets my goat like USPS-bashing, which so often amounts to "nobody goes to the post office anymore, it's too crowded."

I'd only add that not only does the USPS make urban areas more walkable, it makes rural areas practical places to live at all: without the postal service as competition, it's doubtful private carriers would pick up from or deliver to remote parts of the country at any kind of affordable rate.

Meet the Mutts

Long before having a dog I would talk about how I would get him or her Mets gear. Specifically, I wanted them to have both home and away jerseys, though I was undecided on which player to get. But now I've discovered that the only dog jersey they sell is the black "alternate" design, and it comes only as number 00 with no player name. Boo.

Good to Know

I had noticed several months ago that the Bicycle Station storefront on Vanderbilt had "For Lease" signs up in the windows, and then it closed and was replaced by what looks like a higher end bike retail outfit (I haven't actually been inside to check it out). But according to the internet they have relocated to Park and Adelphi, up by the Navy Yard. Not very convenient to me, but I'm glad they're still around...their business always seemed to be booming, so I hadn't figured they'd have gone out of business and they must have just gotten priced out of the neighborhood.

Pinball Construction Kit

Gamasutra has a good post remembering Pinball Construction Kit for the Apple deuce, which was totally fun. I remember Nate built a table called "Mr Green Jeans," but I don't remember any of mine. I doubt any of them turned out any better than my abortive Democratic Presidents of the 20th Century table I was working on for Visual Pinball a couple years ago when I forgot to eat all day and passed out the next morning and busted my head.

Baby's First Poop "Al Fresco"

We didn't even have to put paper down for him. We're so proud!

Art and Life Imitate One Another in Lockstep

Gabe tires of the vampire fad. Which prompts me to notice that, spoiler alert, the last few issues of Buffy Season Eight have involved a growing vampire trend that is making the slayers' jobs difficult. I wonder if Joss just lucked into that or if he was paying attention enough to see the vampire thing coming. Probably the latter but it seemed like a crazy coincidence to me.

Hilarious

I can't really believe that John Ashcroft insisted on being called "general." Too perfect. Wikipedia confirms that, the "general" in "attorney general" being an adjective, this makes no sense. Maybe he was confused by the surgeon general's being a vice admiral.

Defense

A Revealer post linking to a review of Prayers for Bobby draws a parallel between that film's portrayal of homosexuality and Revolutionary Road's portrayal of women (spoilers alert):

In the film, women are...conniving but not too bright, sex for them is a form of vengeance or control, and they often talk too much. Star Kate Winslet does have sex -- once to control Leonardo DiCaprio, once to take vengeance on him, and then never again. And, of course, she dies tragically, the wages of sin -- the result of aborting a baby Leo wanted.

Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of course, but this one strikes me as fairly eccentric. Both main characters in Revolutionary Road are extremely flawed, and neither can be held free from blame for the events in the narrative, but the most obvious reading places the moral responsibility for April Wheeler's death squarely on Frank's shoulders: it is his haranguing and emotional manipulation—indeed, his "talk[ing] too much"—that pressures April into delaying the abortion until after it would have been (relatively) safe. If anything, Frank's culpability is so clear-cut that the story threatens to deny April's agency in her own demise, but to gloss this as April's earning "the wages of sin" seems badly wrong to me.

Also not sure about the implied slight to Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I mean, it is plainly the case that Lycans is no "feminist parable," and it doesn't come close to satisfying the Bechdel test (there is barely more than one speaking female role), but it's hardly a notably egregious offender along those lines, and the antagonist's autocratic enforcement of patriarchy is portrayed as nearly as serious a flaw as his devotion to racial purity (which is saying quite a lot for a film that is a slavery parable).

I Would Trust Them Over the Editorial Board of The New Republic

Via Narco News, a plea for President Obama to rescind the Cuba embargo by Cigar Aficionado. Sort of hard to take their recommendation as that of a dispassionate and rational observer interested only in the pursuit of justice.

(But who knows. I don't read Cigar Aficionado, and for all I know they were the sole cigar-focused periodical to speak out against the Bush regime in the months before the war in Iraq. If that's the case, then I stand happily corrected.)

But whether you suspect an ulterior motive or not, they're clearly on the right side of this issue. And given the what I imagine is considerable overlap of their subscriber base with the people who actually fill the smoke-filled rooms in which important foreign policy decisions are made at the highest levels of government with smoke, they might actually have a shot of being listened to.

Nowhere to play it, right?

So frustrating.

Update: Wrong! Could have hooked it on to make (OKE)H.

Weather 2.0?

Is there a clean, fast web site for checking weather forecasts?

It occurred to me a week or two ago that it's 2008, and there should be no reason to subject myself to the cluttered interface and animated banner ads of weather.com. I don't know of anything better, so I've switched to the government. It's actually not bad, functionality-wise, though it is still pretty unattractive. But at least they don't assault you with ads or distract you with golf conditions or whatnot.

Pro-Corporate Regulation

Ezra Klein has a good post on the USDA's official standards for the labeling of "naturally raised" chicken, and how the regulatory apparatus colludes with agribusiness in misleading consumers. He doesn't mention, though perhaps it is implied, the way that something like this hurts the smaller-scale operations raising chickens in a manner that does correlate strongly with a reasonable person's common-sense understanding of "natural."

Whoa

The indy media logo,

,

is rendered as "((( i )))" in the web page title when you go to the site.

I believe (i) was the emoticon we came up with as the counterpart to the ever-useful 8==D. Use it in a text message today!

:-P (i)

VidProp

Via tiltfactor, an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post about war propaganda video games. I think it's interesting that the medium of video games is still young enough that this kind of propagandizing doesn't necessarily seem out of place. I think a lot of US-made World War II games, for example, present a perspective so simplistic and blindly patriotic as would seem crass (if not flatly offensive) were it in a movie.

President Obama: Failure

The Dow Jones Industrial average was down 4% today. Nice job, Obama! We're screwed. Bring back that last guy!

Mix Tape Idea

The Beatles, "Lovely Rita"
Van Halen, "Hot for Teacher"
Lil Wayne, "Mrs. Officer"

I can't think of any others, but that's the gist.

As a side note, I did once have a smokin' lady mailman, though I rarely got to see her unless there was a blizzard or something keeping me home from work. Maybe I'll write a song about it.

Scrabolex

The good old scrabolous game has come back to life in the form of "Lexulous (renamed)" (sic). Andrew and I picked up one of our old games where we had left off, and we've been discussing some of the changes they had to make to comply with Hasbro's absurd intellectual property claims. The differences include:

• a different board layout (it was even more different, including quad word scores, but they changed it to something closer to the original);
• fewer tiles, some of which score higher; and
• eight-tile racks, with a 40-point medium bonus for playing seven tiles and the regular 50-point bingo bonus for playing all eight.

So far, the bigger racks (what? Why are you looking at me like that?) seem to have had the most noticeable impact. As Andrew pointed out, the opportunities for hitting a double-triple are vastly increased because you have enough tiles on your own to reach from one TWS to another without building around an existing tile. But in general just having that extra letter to play with means you are going to be able play seven tiles a lot more often, for almost as many points as a full bingo.

I was looking around the internets to see if anyone had taken a crack at adapting computer programs to play the lexolous rules (Quackle allows different boards at runtime, but the tile sets and rack sizes are hardcoded), and I found the site of this crackpot whose stuff I've looked at before. He invented Octo Scrabble (scrabble with eight-tile racks, including a scaled bingo scoring system) a year ago, and swears by it.

(The reason I call him a "crackpot," though he is possibly more accurately merely an especially creative curmudgeon, is because he also has suggestions for how to reform basketball, the justice system, piano notation, units of measure, parade viewing, and ice water consumption. Among many, many other things. Also, it seems that 55 years ago one could buy leg padding not two blocks from my house.)

Back to the topic at hand, the other differences in the game don't seem as major as the rack enlengthening...you can sort of see some of Andrew's and my plays sticking to the new lines of multiplier squares in our first game the way they stick to their counterparts in regular corporate scrabble, but that stands to reason, and since the layout is pretty similar in qualitative (better multipliers as you get further from the center) and almost identical in quantitative terms (the official game has one more TLS per quadrant and they otherwise match), it doesn't seem to affect how the game plays very much.

What I'd really like to do is to run an AI against itself (nullus) for a couple tens of thousands of games under each rule set, and see how the size and variability of scores compare. Until then I did take the time to chart the differences in tile scores and frequencies:

Really, they seem to have mostly just scaled back the number of tiles (resulting in more games played, which translates to more "x started a new game of Lexulous" messages on Facebook), upping the tile values to keep scores up (Lexulous has 11 fewer tiles, but they average 2.3 points to Scrabble's 1.9).

So that's all I've got on that score. Realistically, I am unlikely to try to hack Quackle myself to get an idea about how the lexolous rules change the familiar game (it builds on Windows, but with MinGW, which I don't have installed, and Qt, which just kill me now).

Oh Man

So last night I went to the library to pick up a book I had placed on hold, one that Henry at Crooked Timber had described as "a brooding, post-Mievillian fantasy set in a decaying city of uncertain extent and boundaries, with a keen ear for politics, character and language." Sounds like just my type of thing, and since it was Crooked Timber (by way of Andrew) that introduced me to China Miéville in the first place, I took the recommendation to heart.

The point of his post was musing on how the "cover...suggest[ed] a generic quest fantasy of the more or less inept and badly plotted variety" and didn't do the book justice, but that in no way prepared me for what said cover would actually look like.

Bear in mind that I had to retrieve this from the hold shelf and then take it up and hand it to a real-life librarian to check it out. There were little kids there. I'm lucky they didn't call the police:

Robot Composer

Robert linked to this Microsoft program that generates chord changes to accompany vocal recordings. It's, on the one hand, extremely hokey and ridiculous (there are two sliders, "Happiness" and "Jazziness," that the user can adjust to change the mood; hopefully the Pro version will provide controls for "Boogieosity" and "Pizazz"). But on the other hand, it's sort of like the music version of MS Chat, which gave us Jerk City.

Basically, it's stupid, but the stupidness means that someone could do something with it that is stupid but also pretty awesome, I rest my case.

I am way behind on my blog reading

So this is a couple days old, but this idea for creating economic stimulus by raising Social Security benefits and cutting payroll taxes is too elegant not to link.

For Chrissake

I don't even know what to say about this FBI snitch who outed himself after testifying against activists protesting the RNC. The idea that he might not have been acting as a provocateur is absolutely risible. If anything, the disillusioned civilian who believes his moral code compelled him to betray his compatriots is even more likely to provoke extreme tactics than is a salaried government agent working undercover: the agent is just doing a job, but the traitor has already sold his soul and now must assure himself it was for a good price. God knows under what statute "attempted tossing of Molotov cocktails" is supposed to be prosecuted, but it's a load of shit however they try it.

Me and My Best Friend

Thanks to BSNYC.

lolnazi

I have had it with Far Side style captioned lolcats making it to the front page of ICHC. This one is almost as bad. Another contender. The earliest one before that was almost a moth ago, which I fear means they're becoming more frequent.

Do not want, kthx.

401(ghey)

Atrios quotes someone on the problems with expecting untrained individuals to manage their own retirement investments. I totally agree. I recently encountered a related annoying pattern when it comes to trying to find general financial advice, which is that the assumption made by people who are trained in finance is always that more control over your investments is better.

This came up because since my employer was just sold, at some point I'm going to have to do something with my old 401(k). One option is I think to sort of transfer it to my new one, basically cashing out of everything and then using the money to buy funds in the new plan. But everyone advises that it's much better to roll it over into a Roth IRA, because then I can invest in whatever individual stocks or funds you want, rather than have to pick from the dozen or so I can choose from under the new plan. But I don't really want to invest in individual stocks because I find finance confusing and tedious...I would much prefer to be able to treat my retirement investments as a black box that somebody who is actually qualified manages for me.

Of course, it's all moot at this point. With the failure of global capitalism it's become clear that nobody is qualified to manage any sort of investment, and every dollar I put in my 401(k) is surely never to be seen again.

Finally

For some reason, my library eschews the standard login/password method of authentication when you access your account online. Since that's I guess what my web browser expects to deal with when it saves passwords and stuff, my browser won't remember any of the form data, and thus logging in has always meant I have to dig out my library card and copy down the like 10-digit barcode just to renew a book.

I finally took the time to mess around and figure out how to make a bookmark that would fill in my info for me. Here it is:

javascript: filldata = function() { document.getElementsByName("name")[0].value = "..."; document.getElementsByName("code")[0].value = "..."; document.getElementsByName("pin")[0].value = "..."; }; filldata()

It's actually pretty damn simple, and now I'm upset at all the years (years!) I've wasted typing in my barcode over and over.

In The Future We Will Play Hoverpinball

GameSetWatch has an interesting interview with pinball designer Pat Lawlor. I didn't know, or I had forgotten, that he now designs for Stern, though he seems pretty unenthused by what they're doing there ("so CSI is going to have a skull?" "Uh, yeah, it has lots of things. Including a skull").

The part I found surprising was his defense of the Pinball 2000 platform. I mean, I see what he's saying about how pinball would need to adapt to a younger arcade-going audience to be viable, but Pinball 2000 strikes me as having been such an obviously flawed attempt in that direction. It sacrificed the most viscerally satisfying part of pinball (especially in Pat Lawlor's tables), the physicality of the balls interacting with the different features, in order to make it more video game-y in the most superficial way (add a video screen!). It's like if your hot dog stand were losing business to the new sushi place across the street and you tried to compete by not cooking your hot dogs.

In conclusion, someone please give Pat Lawlor the resources to make more games like No Good Gofers, but do not under any circumstances let him run your business.

Proportional Response

I don't disagree that it's monstrous, but I'm surprised Digby's surprised by the defense of disproportionate response. Disproportionate response to aggression has always been the foundational doctrine of Israel's foreign policy, and her partisans in the US have been similarly vocal about it. The rationale behind this strategy actually relies on the disproportion being widely recognized and expected, the idea being that if you know that any hostility towards Israel will be met with overwhelming violence, then you have only yourself to blame for the results when you go ahead and launch rockets anyway. It doesn't make much sense, but it's certainly not a big secret.

Advertising Against Your Own Product

Via Myglesias, the Times has this story on how colleges contract with credit card issuers, who pay for access to the student body. This passage amused me:

Jennifer Holsman, executive director of the alumni association at Arizona State, said the association tried to teach students about responsible uses of credit. "We work closely with Bank of America to provide educational seminars to students in terms of being able to get information about how to pay off credit cards, how not to keep balances," she said.

I don't know what you're supposed to think when you see some corporate entity like this that is by all appearances engaging in behavior that is antithetical to its own interests. If Bank of America really is trying to persuade its cardholders not to carry balances then they are being played for suckers, since they can only make money from their credit card business when their customers carry balances.

It reminds me of Philip Morris's anti-tobacco TV spots in the years following the tobacco settlement. It was sort of an interesting problem, wanting for PR purposes to run ads nominally discouraging use of their product, but that didn't actually have any negative impact on sales. Fortunately for them, they had a perfect model to follow in the government's anti-drug advertising of the 80's, which had been convincingly demonstrated ineffective. I imagine Bank of America drew from the same well in designing a campaign to discourage students from taking on credit card debt.

Mr. Fish Continues to Kill It

I would also have included a scrotum, with hair. But this is pretty good.

Your Grandfather's Pez Dispenser

I had an idea a while ago that it would be cool to make an all-metal Pez dispenser, maybe with a nice oiled leather grip around the outside. Some dork made one with a metal body, but the "action" is still plastic, and I bet it still makes that cheap plastic-y spring sound when you reload. I envision a precision steel mechanism with ball bearings that would require occasional lubrication to stay in peak performance. It would also not be Boba Fett. Maybe FDR.

Look Ma

The big LCD traffic advisory signs over the Long Island Expressway have lately been advertising the DOT's "511" service for accessing travel information from your cell phone. The display alternates between advising you to "DIAL 511 FOR TRAVEL INFO" and reminding you to "USE HANDS-FREE CELL PHONE WHILE DRIVING" (those might not be exactly the wording they use, but that's the gist).

That second message is the end result of 2001 legislation that prohibits cell phone use on the road in New York unless you use a hands-free device. It is now common knowledge that talking on a hands-free phone while driving is just as dangerous as talking on a handset. Even the DOT website acknowledges as much, and yet there's the LCD sign up there, telling you how to comply with the letter of the law while continuing to place yourself and your fellow road users at unnecessary risk.

The legislation in question was originally drafted as a ban on all non-emergency cell phone usage while driving, which makes sense: you can't force drivers to pay attention to the road, but you can remove some of the most obvious distractions. But the cell phone service industry lobbied hard against it, since they "sell" a lot of "minutes"¹ to drivers who are (quite openly) trying to distract themselves from a monotonous commute.²

The resulting "compromise" is that you can still talk on your phone in the car, but you have to use a "hands-free microphone" accessory. It's a double victory for the phone companies, since they keep their bored commuter market and also sell more licensed hands-free accessories.

It sucks that this kind of lobbying can be successful. You can see that even though most people (even if they consider themselves an exception) can understand that talking on any kind of phone distracts people from driving, there's no way that that kind of broadly-held awareness can coalesce into any kind of organized lobbying interest that can compete with the phone industry. But I guess you'd hope that enough legislators would take their jobs as representatives of the people seriously enough that they would take up the public's side and recognize that yeah, even though cell providers make money off of it and would hate to lose that lost revenue, really everyone else would be better off if we got phones out of drivers' hands, so too bad, suck it up.

And maybe the compromise law is better than nothing, because now that it's on the books it can be amended to ban all cell use, or maybe challenged in court as not fulfilling its stated purpose (is that a thing?). Who knows. But it sure seems as though, with the DOT is basically running publicly funded ads encouraging drivers to use their (hands-free!) phones, the legislation as passed is worse than none at all.

¹ How this can even sound like a plausible basis for an industry in the first place is a mystery in itself.

² Note also that this whole situation arises as people attempt to lessen the burden of tedious automobile commuting. A much better response would be to figure out how to alter our world so that so many people don't need to drive so far to work every day.

Anti-Semitic?

I almost linked to this cartoon yesterday, because I approved of the over-the-top tone:

Anyway, I guess Harper's is now doing a sort of letters to the editor feature for their web-only content, and the third comment in this "Replies" post calls the cartoon anti-Semitic. I don't see it, but I did have trouble figuring out exactly what Mr. Fish was trying to say, so who knows.

Why Conservatives Don't Still Advocate Monarchy, Mostly

Matt Yglesias jokes about how Bill O'Reilly's 17th century analogue would have fought against the War on Christmas by "shouting monarchist slogans." It's just a joke, but there is an interesting element there that I've been thinking about recently, which is that "conservatism" is a pretty old idea that you can observe through history, despite the fact that what conservatives of any given era have taken their conservatism to stand for has varied considerably.

Basically (and I don't think this is a novel observation), there has always been an identifiably conservative faction in society, but it has never been tied to any specific ideology. Conservatism, in any era, has argued that society's hierarchical structures should always resemble those of the current day, or possibly of one generation (but no more) previous. In the 17th century that might have meant supporting the divine right of kings, while by the 19th century it was enough to defend the institution of slavery.

It follows that there is no common principle uniting the conservative mindset of one era to another: one can recognize the constancy of the conservative attitude over time, the goal of preserving contemporary hierarchies; but an apology for landed aristocracy as a matter of principle would be as valid today as it ever was. Which doesn't mean there's no valid argument to be made in support of conservatism at all, just that it will be a practical rather than a principled one.

My best formulation of such an argument in defense of existing hierarchies starts from the counterfactual conditional that, if all the "stuff" in the world (money, food, natural resources, talent...anything and everything that contributes to a better quality of life) were to be divided evenly among the entire world population, then the amount of said stuff accruing to each individual would be insufficient to lift that individual out of abject poverty and its associated misery. That is, a purely democratic allocation of the world's wealth would leave everyone in miserable destitution.

Wouldn't a situation wherein a minority of the world population lives in relative comfort, at the expense of everyone else, be preferable? The majority are miserable, sure, but they would be miserable under the egalitarian alternative anyway: at least this way, somebody gets to be happy. The implication, then, is not that divine monarchy or primogeniture or limited suffrage are, in each of themselves, the linchpin holding this state of inequality together; but that any capitulation to democracy might trigger the collapse into the general democratic allocation of stuff that has already been judged unacceptable.

A leftist response to such reasoning would not so much dispute this argument as dismiss it as unjust: if indeed comfort for any can only be achieved on the backs of some others, then achieving comfort (even broad comfort) cannot be the animating goal of a just society. And I think this leads to a corollary regarding the conservative attitude, which is that justice is not a component of the conservative vision for society. (Or to put it another way, the conservative notion of justice relies on context: that which supports existing social hierarchies is just. So at one time it is just that the monarch own everything, while at another time it is just that each individual's private ownership of property is sacrosanct.)

One final note is that despite the long time spans used to illustrate the historical incoherency of supposed conservative principles, this is not a semantic quibble that can be sidestepped with anything along the lines of "well I wouldn't have been a conservative back then." A large number of today's mainstream conservative leaders, after all, are on the record having supported South Africa's apartheid government in the 80's, though none today endorse apartheid as a reasonable solution to ethnic conflict (e.g., none of the considerably heated opposition to Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid proposed anything along the lines of "peace by way of apartheid").

I think this is the cause of much disconnect between conservatives and non-conservatives. It's compounded by conservative rhetoric, which does make nominal appeals to principle; but in practice, conservative principles are fluid, adapting to fit the present circumstances in service of the real conservative project, the resistance of democratization.

Metal Birds Near My House

I have always enjoyed these metal silhouettes in a bricked-over window a block away from my house on Franklin:

(There is also a newer Swoon piece on the other end of the same block:

Not related, just thought it was cool.)

On Monday I noticed some more birds and a cat in the bricked-up windows of the building down my street in the other direction, between Bedford and Rogers:

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I couldn't find it on Flickr, but it looks like it's from the same patterns as these birds and cat in Brooklyn Heights (embed disabled), and these golden birds in Dumbo:

They're pretty cool looking...you can see the eyes on the golden ones, but the silvery ones have eyes as well, and it's a neat effect. And I like how they're always put in old windows. I tried asking Jeeves about who makes these, but didn't come up with anything. I did find a blog post about how the building on Franklin was sold and might be developed, but who knows if that's still on.

I am the Tony! Toni! Toné! of abalone boney.

Open thread.

I am the Kris Kringle of dingo dingles.

Discuss.

I am the Alan Rickman of chicken dickings.

The dickings are well-hung by the chimney with care.

I am the Andy Rooney of baboony poony.

Truth.

I am the Pee-wee Herman of kiwi weewee.

Discuss.

Check, Please...CARD CHECK, THAT IS

I love the open admission that IT workers are mistreated. This is analogous to the "it would be a boon for trial lawyers" argument against the Lily Ledbetter fair pay act: the opposition grants that people would be helped by the proposed legislation; they just don't want them helped and prefer the status quo.

Winning the Non-Vote

Daniel Millstone thinks Democrats "need to connect to the non-voters more," if only to secure greater margins of victory in races already being won by turning out, you know, voters. I don't know where this thinking comes from...they don't vote! That's what makes them non-voters!

It may be true, in some abstract, academic sense, that non-voters are "Democratic in tendencies," but who cares: they are also non-voting in tendencies, which means they are of zero importance electorally. It might well be the case that 9 out of 10 anorexic people prefer Skippy peanut butter to Jif...Skippy would still be insane to base their marketing strategy on appealing to anorexics, because anorexics don't eat.

By all means, "connect" away to whomever you wish. But please let it stop at the point where one thin dime or volunteer hour, which could be otherwise spent persuading voters or turning out supporters, is dedicated instead to trying to appeal to people who by definition have no impact on elections.

PANZAIIIIIII

I agree with what Atrios says, the real estate bubble and a lot of the stock market in general have always sort of been pyramid schemes. This dude seems to have gotten in trouble for giving the game away as much as anything else.

I mean, there was a period of several years during which people were quite publicly encouraged to buy more real estate than they could pay for, not just despite their prices being very high by historical standards, but because of it: the logic being that the continuation of recent pricing trends would mean they could sell in a couple years at even astronomic-er prices and recoup their investment and then some. And because everyone knows that home ownership is a great way to build wealth, and because brokers make money as long as stuff changes hands, it's win-win-win.

In the basic model of how stock investments are supposed to work, as I understand it, the shareholders buy their stocks from a company to help give the company a bunch of money to work with; the company uses that money to run their business and turn a profit; and the profit is then distributed to the shareholders as dividends. But then some stocks don't work that way at all, and actually the entire value of purchasing a share derives not from any predicted dividend, but from the expectation that at some point in the future someone else will pay you more for it than you did (because of their expectation that at some point further someone else will pay them even more...).

And it seems to me that when you're in a position where actually quite a lot of stocks are traded based on those kinds of predictions, and when a lot of real estate is trading hands due to the widespread possession of a similar set of expectations (rather than because a given area is getting more or less popular as people move around and figure out where they want to live their lives), then it's a situation that is inherently unsustainable in basically exactly the same way a Ponzi scheme is: you need a greater number of people to pay into the system for each successive generation of investors to come out ahead, and at the end of the day there are only so many people and it collapses.

Fuzzy Logic on Facebook

I just clicked yet another "Maybe" button in response to a Facebook event invitation:

The event shows 60 definite yeses and 57 maybes. For someone planning an event, that's a pretty big amount of uncertainty to take into account. You don't know how many of those maybes are "it's a weeknight, so probably not, but you never know" versus "I'll totally be there but can't commit in case someone offers me Elton John tickets at the last second."

The interface should have a slider input representing the user's best guess as to the probability of attendance. It would still show up as "Maybe Attending" to the event creator and any fellow invitees, but the actual likelihood of your attendance would be stored. Then that could be used to predict the number of attendees with a little more accuracy (three people 40% likely to attend plus one person 80% likely to attend equals two expected guests).

In addition, the software could recognize events that overlap. So if you give a definite "Attending" to one event and it sees that you've already said "Maybe" to another event at the same time, then it could prompt you to change the "Maybe" to a definite "Not Attending" (and if you demurred, the software could quietly downgrade your probability of attendance, so you could be on the record as "Maybe Attending," with all the social courtesy that implies, without distorting the expected guest count).

Actually, what would really be the most helpful would be to randomly send out surveys to people who create or are invited to events. Netflix does a similar thing when it asks you when a certain movie arrived, or when a return was mailed back. So every now and then you would get an email, "you said you would Maybe Attend event x; did you end up going?" or, "we predicted 73 attendees; was that too high, too low, or about right?" And then they could revise their attendance predictions, even taking into account things like whether an event is on a weekend or is really late, and how many conflicting events each invitee has.

Of course, maybe empirically people who are "Maybe Attending" just show up 40% of the time or something, and you can just use a heuristic and get just as accurate a result. But in principle, you know.

Blackwash

And the revisionist history continues, as Pam Spaulding reports.

Yes

Block of Castles

When I hit up the Key Food's over on Nostrand, I usually end up on the South side of St Marks by the time I get to the block between Rogers and Nostrand. So I usually check out some of these crazy houses across the street:


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The detached home in the middle is unique in the neighborhood, as far as I can tell...there are lots of big mansions, but they're all regular brownstones. That two-family home on the right is half boarded-up and half under renovation. So they're basically the castles of the neighborhood and I check them out when I go to grab groceries.

For some reason, on the way to Key Food's last night, I wasn't able to cross over from the North side of the street by the time I was on that block. And so I noticed this awesome apartment building on the South side of it:


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I love the six stories and then the teensy pitched roof all the way on one side. So crazy.

Anyway, the whole block is cool. There are some neat weird homes with storefronts as you get to Nostrand. Also, this blog post was inspired by just popping out to the grocery store, but I have to say that I'm loving the hi-res Jeeves maps. The future is now, APDTO (all praise due to Obama).

On the topic of people remodeling old castles of Crown Heights, in February This American Life did an episode that touches on gentrification. It's about the Plan to repopulate black neighborhoods across the US with white people, and it starts around 32:00.

Self-Sabotage

Each of the last two times I've gone to the gym, I've lost something on my way back.

The first time, by the time I'd gotten to the bodega I was buying tortillas at, I realized that I'd lost a glove out of my pocket (I was warm enough coming out of the gym that I didn't need gloves right away and put them in my pocket).

The second time, I unlocked my bike, but had lost the key for the lock by the time I got to the wine store just up the street. I was close enough to the gym to circle back and look for the key, but I didn't see it anywhere. At least that one is replaceable for free, whereas the gloves I don't think are even sold anymore (they were my lobster claw style water-resistant shells).

Anyway, I think I'm subconsciously sabotaging my gym trips. I either need to put idiot strings on every single item I have with me or get my ass hypnotisted.

Detroit Possessive S

My brothers and I thought we were so hilarious when we talked about shopping at "Target's" and whatnot. It's a thing people say in Detroit, apparently. I wonder if we picked it up from our mom.

Fish!

The Dallas on military-themed kids' toys. His addendum links to a story about Chinese workers rioting at a Nerf factory. You could do a pretty bleak satirical piece about a toy plant manager mystified by how surrounding employees with tens of thousands of toy weapons failed to produce a light-hearted work environment. Close with an allusion to similar problems at a Malaysian bean bag chair fabricator and boom, I just wrote an Onion story from 1999.

Solving the Homeless Problem

M. LeBlanc at Bitch. Ph.D. reports on the Chicago Transit Authority's crackdown on yoyo-ing, or "continuous riding." I read last week about a project inspired in opposition to similar anti-homeless measures. Preventing people from sleeping on bus shelter benches in LA is abhorrent enough, but kicking people out into the cold in Chicago is borderline sadism.

Anti-Lemon Law

This weekend I finally took a deep breath and took my car in for an oil change and general check-up, after having taken it to a shop for years that I eventually found out had a reputation for not actually doing what they said they were doing. Amazingly, the new place, which came highly recommended by the internets, found the car to be in great shape.

When I used to play golf in P.E. high school, I used to argue that my friends shouldn't take mulligans (I was sort of a dick in high school), because if they didn't think they should have to play an uncharacteristically bad drive then they should also not be allowed to play an uncharacteristically good drive; and nobody ever said "whoa, that was wayyyyy too long and straight for me (nullus), I should do that over."

By the same token, I seem to have been saddled with an anti-lemon. With 90-something,000 miles on it, and despite years of probable abuse at the hands of the mechanics in my old neighborhood, my car is still doing great (knock on wood (nullus)). By my own standards, I should make the inverse of a "lemon law" claim and pay the manufacturer a sum of money to compensate for its unexpected reliability.

Actually Awesome

Atrios links to Sarah Palin talking in front of a bunch of turkeys being slaughtered after she pardoned one of them. That is pretty funny, actually. It didn't occur to me before, but the whole turkey pardoning ritual has got to be as insensitive and mildly irritating towards hunters and farmers who raise animals for their meat as it is towards animal rights groups.

MSNBC blurring out the blood and warning parents to shield their children's eyes is just offensive if they're not going to take a stand arguing for a meatless Thanksgiving.

Anaglyph Games

The entries from Gamma 3D have been posted. I had only really read anything about a couple of them but I look forward to giving myself a headache playing them all.

John Ziegler

The other day Bol posted a video demonstrating how uninformed "Obama voters" are. (Of course he did. That's what he does.) And then I saw that Amanda at Pandagon linked to Nate Silver's interview with the guy who did the video and commissioned the Zogby poll on which it was based.

The guy is a talk radio host called John Ziegler, and he was the subject of David Foster Wallace's 2005 piece for the Atlantic, "The Host." Instant classic, natch, but so much of Ziegler's maniacal, outrage-fueled personality comes across in his uncut interview with Silver that you almost feel like DFW couldn't have gone wrong.

The Business Case Against National Health Care

Atrios thinks private corporations' opposition to government-provided health insurance is purely ideological. But there is actually a logic to it, I think: employer-based health insurance means it is more difficult for people to switch jobs, which drives wages down. It doesn't make CEO's not-assholes, but it does make sense in economic terms.

Political Cartoon

Just Thought of This

For some reason yesterday I was like "hey, is Ron Paul still a congressman?" I looked it up today, and he is! That seems weird for some reason. Dennis Kucinich is still in the non-proverbial House as well.

I guess one strange thing about it is that some people's representatives in Congress have national profiles. Maybe I am just speaking for myself, but I feel like for most people, when they decide there oughta be some law or another and sit down to write their congressman, the first thing they have to do is look up who their congressman even is. And then not only are they national figures, but they are national figures with public reputations for being sort of crazy. I have no idea whether Rep. Letitia James would take a letter from me seriously, but I think I would sort of question whether a letter to Paul or Kucinich would make much of an impact if I weren't writing about the gold standard or peace crystals, or whatever.

Anyway, Congress is crazy, that's all.

Burden of Proof

Dave Neiwert has a post on Obama dictatorship conspiracy theories and how much they resemble the far-right paranoid fantasies around Bill Clinton.

You'd think this stuff would cease to have any fascination, the hysterical delusions of years past having failed to materialize. Not only was NAFTA emphatically not the first step in the creation of a socialist North American Union to rival the EU, but this year the majority of the Democratic primary contenders, including the eventual nominee, ran against the trade agreement.

Federal agents did not only round up nobody's guns, but when the Assault Weapons Ban expired without much fanfare (except among gun nuts), it did not become part of anyone's agenda to bring it back. "Y2K" was not used as an excuse to restrict any civil liberties at all, let alone establish martial law under UN peacekeeping forces.

Not only did the paranoia surrounding Clinton end up being unfounded, but liberals' fears of the wickedness of Bush proved to underestimate his administration's potential to cause harm almost across the board. As has been noted more than once, a straightforward account of the events of the last eight years (9/11, Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) would have been seen as the most outrageous hyperbole, had it been presented in 2000 as a prediction of the consequences of electing Bush. "Had it been" being the key phrase, since nobody could have dreamed of such disastrous mismanagement: it was literally beyond the imagination of even the most rabid lefties that Bush could have been as bad as he turned out to be.

The lessons here seem obvious. First, that whatever horrific misdeeds are predicted of Obama by the right-wing can be safely dismissed as fever dreams. And second, that any fears harbored—by moderates, liberals, and far-left hard-liners with giant puppets—regarding the dangerous possibilities of future Republican rule should not be taken at face value, but rather amplified by an order of magnitude or two. This will make some attempt to bridge the "believability gap," between how bad anyone can imagine GOP governance could possibly get and how bad it ends up being in practice, and get you in the ballpark as far as making real predictions.

That there is any market at all for the black helicopter crowd after the last sixteen years, after having failed to meet any burden of proof whatsoever, is absolutely astounding.

Finally

Obama's new Office of Urban Policy is long overdue. Finally an administration that will meet the problem of teenagers wearing their pants too low head-on.

I Do Not Know What Color My President Is Because I Do Not See Presidents That Way

Jesse wastes his time (as he acknowledges) attempting to explain a rap song to the execrable Michelle Malkin.

Personally, I want to know how this "Young Jersey" fellow can harbor such horribly racist sentiments in favor of blue lambos. Many fine patriotic lambos that have given their rims for our American ideals happened to have been yellow.

Anaglyph Game

I had been playing around with making a little video game that makes use of 3D glasses, and I sort of ran out of steam on it so I thought I'd post up what I had. It's more of a proof of concept than a full game.

It's just a regular side-scrolling platformer, but in addition you can use the up and down keys to move back and forth along the z-axis. With red/cyan anaglyph glasses on, you should be able to distinguish between solid blocks, spikes, and enemies that are at different depths, and plot your course appropriately.

I made it in the free version of Game Maker, which was super easy and fun. The full version might allow you to alter the low-level rendering routines to do the anaglyph offset at runtime, but I just made different versions of each sprite for the different depth levels and switched between them.

I was already playing with this stuff when I read about Kokoromi's Gamma 3D contest. Really interested to see what people come up with.

Anyway, here's the download link for Welder Wait 3D. The archive includes the Windows executable (Game Maker is Windows-only) and the Game Maker "source" file.

Stupid Opera Reviews

My lover and I saw the Met's new production of Doctor Atomic on Wednesday. We weren't familiar with it at all, but the timing was pretty perfect. It's an account of the days leading up to the first test of the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos, but penned during the beginning of the Iraq war, so there are all sorts of thematic references to more recent issues surrounding American hegemony, military dominance, truth, and ethics.

I appreciated being able to take in the performance with the knowledge that all of that is soon to be behind us. Watching the first production, in San Francisco in 2005, must have been a markedly different experience.

Anyway, I've been poking around different reviews since then. Most critics have loved it, declared it John Adams' masterpiece, &c., but there are some hilarious dissenting opinions.

One was Henry Stewart's L Magazine blog review: he found the score "academically impenetrable," saying that "Adams’ refusal to resolve any of his lines makes me crazy." This was actually a concern of mine going in, since I'm not a sophisticated music listener in general, and if I'd ever listened to an opera younger than 100 years old then it hadn't been by much. But I needn't have worried: the music was "modern," but at this point modernism is hell of old, and whatever radical musical ideas that can be found in Doctor Atomic have long since permeated popular music and film scores, to the extent that the kinds of people who would complain about Atomic's inaccessibility are the ones who still bemoan jazz's descent from Dixieland into bebop. "Call me a musical conservative," Stewart invites, but I'll demur: he's a straight-up curmudgeon.

He also has a beef with Peter Sellars' libretto being written in English: "Our bumbling tongue might sound mellifluous coming out of John Gielgud’s mouth, but it lacks the vowel-heavy singsonginess of French or Italian that gives the greatest classical operas their ethereal flow." I don't know what John Gielgud has to do with anything (Wikipedia says he's an actor), but someone should tell Stewart about this dude Wagner, who I hear tried to write operas in a language even bumblier than English. Seriously, I'm not going to bother mounting a full defense of the English language as a poetic medium here, but this is Europhilism at its most absurd: the transition of Oppenheimer's language, from harsh Anglo-Saxon gutturals as he muses on science and military power (the test bomb's nickname, "the Gadget," did not go unnoticed), to drawn-out Latinate roots when he interacts with his wife, is a feat simply not possible in other languages.

Ron Rosenbaum takes a different tack in his review (of the opera's first half) in Slate: he makes the bold, courageous argument that opera-goers are self-impressed snobs who don't know the first thing about real art. Indeed, he claims to be shocked with the discovery that his fellow audience members' "sophisticated taste" did not live up to his expectations, though not a moment earlier humbly confiding that he generally avoids opera because he "prefer[s] poetry and drama without orchestral distractions." Truly a man of the people, Rosenbaum.

Yes, he finds the libretto "pedestrian, speechifying, and painfully simplistic (when not embarrassingly schlocky as in the 'love scenes')." Welcome to the opera! And herein lies his real complaint, I think, not with Atomic but with opera and opera fans as a whole: but if there is anything more pretentious than bitching about the phoniness of opera fans than I can't think of it. Oh, and one more thought on the libretto:

Do words not matter in opera? It's not something I'd thought about, because opera is so often in a foreign language, which discourages close reading.

I don't even know what to make of this. Apparently La Traviata, for example, is in foreign-ese as some sort of a ruse? So people like Rosenbaum won't notice how banal it is? And Rosenbaum approves? Your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, I thought it was great. I just ordered the DVD of the original production, performed in the Netherlands. I don't think there's a CD of just the music yet, but it'll be neat to see the other choices in staging anyway.

Oh Awesome

Sadly, No! finds some of the best wingnut hyperventilating I've seen. Especially loved this bit from Misha:

And here is the good news: At the top of that hierarchy, they have a neophyte empty suit now. A clown who...has absolutely zero experience in how to run a country. Or a hot dog stand, for that matter...He’ll fuck up so bad every day that it’ll almost be too easy to skewer his ignorant ass. That dumbass fuckhead is in so far over his head that it’s not even funny.

Trust me, not nearly as fun as it sounds.

Fakeout?

Goddamn it, Obama, you didn't make me give up two whole Saturdays with this for no reason, did you?

Although actually, out of state Democrats converging on PA could only help sell it, so maybe I should consider it time well spent. It was fun, in any case!

Elactabiliteez Nutz

Atrios has a post on how, whatever happens today, Obama's campaign has clearly put the lie to arguments made against his electability and demonstrated at least the capacity for victory. I completely agree, and electability considerations were never part of my calculus in supporting Clinton for the nomination.

For one thing, my instincts about who is and isn't electable are far, far off base from reality: my model of how the voting public thinks led me to believe that Bush was un-re-electable in 2004, and that Rudy was a lock for the GOP nomination in 2008. My perception was that the electability argument cut against Clinton: she was a well-known bogeyman of the right and the press actively despised her (an especially critical dynamic going up against St. Barbecue). It was only my awareness of my own faint grasp on true electability that allowed me to put aside those worries and support Clinton.

So I think this makes me some sort of genious.

Doing Work in Video Games

Via a link post, an interesting Steven Poole essay criticizing the way a lot of games set players up in an "employment paradigm." Favorite parts:

Today, the most common paradigm for progress in games, for example, is the idea of “earning”. Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency — credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orbs — which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas...It is, you might say, a malignly perfect style of capitalist brainwashing.

I had some thoughts along these lines working on a reimagining of Paperboy that I sort of lost steam on. It's an interesting idea, though.

Remarkably, the WipEout games, for example, even count points for your “loyalty” to a particular team, be it Auricom or Feisar. The idea of inculcating loyalty to an entirely fictional organization is fascinating. In the modern “flexible” labour market, where people may be fired on a whim and companies rename themselves or merge from one day to the next, it might be thought useful to train the population in an idea of “loyalty” that is instant, portable — and, of course, unrequited.

I don't know about other games quantifying loyalty like this, but it is bizarre how many games take the player's devotion to some arbitrary cause for granted, despite taskmasters who are not merely oblivious to the hero's efforts, but in many cases outright hostile. (Getting back to Paperboy, you'd think any possibility of loyalty to the newspaper would evaporate when the editor demonstrates a willingness use the front page to publicly shame former employees following their termination.)

One thought I had is that this kind of blind loyalty, which requires one to deliberately overlook the contempt in which an employer figure holds the player, might have a distinctly Japanese character to it. What values have a generation of Americans absorbed growing up in an environment in which the vast majority of games share assumptions about deference to authority rather than, for example, class solidarity?

Nothing could be a more perfect advert for what is sometimes called the “American way” than The Sims. Buy a Sim a large mirror and she will be happier, by virtue of being able to gaze at her reflection. Buy him a new oven, and he’ll become more popular after giving dinner parties. Help your Sim climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. This is a game in which the brutal rules of free-market capitalism are everything.

Apparently this paragraph is from an earlier essay of Poole's, linked to by a commenter, on implicit political messages in video games. Good stuff. I think I'll start reading his blog.